Sermon for the 17th of September - Fiftenth Sunday after Trinity

I would like to do something about bit different this morning instead of engaging with the set biblical texts. Starting confirmation preparation last week and speaking with the candidates, I have been thinking about the nature of faith, and how certain types of faith can be very damaging.

As many of you will know, I grew up with a faith that was 100 per cent certain. I knew what I believed and there was no room for doubt. I remember one preacher using the analogy of a television set, one of those old television sets with a coat hanger as an aerial, which you had to position just right to get a hazy reception. And becoming Christian was like a full colour crystal clear television picture. The speaker affirmed that there is a clarity in all that we do as Christians.

However, having an inquisitive mind, I couldn’t help asking questions. And my journey took a very different direction when I did my first degree in theology. By the end of my studies, my ‘full colour television’ sort of faith crumbled and I ended up agnostic for quite some time.

Questions about existence and faith didn’t disappear however. But I felt cut adrift and at sea… a bit lonely in my intellectual quest and still full of questions. Over the next few years, I slowly discovered others who inhabited a different Christian path. I was not alone!

There were others, many others, who had rejected religious certainties, and the idea that clarity in faith was vital. I met those who had a faith that was comfortable with not knowing, and with mystery. I also discovered the extraordinary poetry of the Welsh priest RS Thomas.

R. S. Thomas wouldn’t have made a very good dinner party guest. He wasn’t much of a conversationalist, he was grumpy, and unwelcoming. His son said that, at home, he would go for weeks without hardly talking. If he was out in the parish and saw a parishioner, he would often dive behind a bush to avoid talking to them.

 

But his poetry was dynamic, for me at least. Through his poetry, he revealed a richness and depth and passion to our life of faith which went beyond the straightforward, the black and white, and allowed the mysterious to be just that. He allowed that the human experience of faith is often ambivalent, and may be all the richer for it. His gift was poetry which could hold faith, doubt, tension, darkness, pain, acceptance, uncertainty and expectancy (Carys Walsh).

His search for God was through his poetry, what he described as being ‘the conduit between God and man’. It expresses someone never satisfied with easy answers, constantly questioning God’s way with humankind. His poetry grabbled with our struggle to know a God at once loving, intimate, but also apparently unknowable and distant. Here’s one poem that expresses this:

Moorland - R. S. Thomas

It is beautiful and still,
The air rarefied
as the interior of a cathedral.
expecting a presence…
here a moment, then
not here, like my belief in God.

First all of, and stating the obvious, we are in the terrain not of fact and reason, and certainly not of a crystal clear faith.

This is the sort of grown up faith I didn’t know existed when my fundamentalist faith crumbled. A faith that isn’t satisfied with simple slick answers. One that is able to cope with complexity and of paradox.

It’s a faith which is about living the questions, rather than having definitive answers, and being comfortable with that. Or more than being simply comfortable, being excited about this mysterious journey of faith. Here’s the second poem I’d like to read called, Via Negativa.

Why no! I never thought other than
That God is that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within, the place where we go
Seeking, not in hope to
Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices
In our knowledge, the darkness
Between stars. His are the echoes
We follow, the footprints he has just
Left. We put our hands in
His side hoping to find
It warm. We look at people
And places as though he had looked
At them, too; but miss the reflection.

God is a tangible absence in this poem. It expresses that the Divine in this world is not a ‘thing’, like an object that can be conceptualised by human intellect. God is perceived as a sort of absence, yet a sort of haunting presence, the ache we universally feel. The restlessness in our heart for the divine which Augustine spoke about.

It’s the mystics who encourage us to enter this path, to look deeper, to sit with that ache, the discomfort of not knowing. That’s the invitation today. Not to run away from this sense of absence, this void, of stillness and silence, and fill our lives with attention-shouting social media apps. The invitation of the mystics is to embrace it. Because we eventually discover that terrible void – that ‘empty silence’ – is in truth filled with immense life and bliss.

At here in the UB – may we inhabit a faith that is humble rather than preachy; inquisitive rather than dogmatic; and open to living the questions rather than having all of the answers.