Evensong, Christchurch Priory, 24th June 2007
Mark 5:21-end, Psalm 57, Genesis 24
I wonder if these words are familiar. If you’ve heard them over the last few weeks. If you’ve read them in the newspaper. Or whether you’ve said them yourselves. What words? “Oh, I don’t believe in God.” Those words. Now what do you do when someone says that to you and you do believe in God? Or what do you do when you sort of believe but you’re not quite sure. Or what do you do if you’re the one saying those words. They were words that I said for much of my life into my late-twenties. What do you do? What do you say? Well, I wish someone back then had asked me to describe the God I didn’t believe in. You see, by doing that, by asking the person who is professing not to have any belief in God, to describe that God, you do something very important, I think. Rather than jump in straight off and tell them your understanding of God, which if you’re a Christian may by and large coincide with the understandings of other Christians down the ages and those living now, rather than that, you let them tell you their understanding of God. And in doing so, in my limited experience, they soon move on to telling you their story, the story of their lives or those near and dear to them, and as they tell their story they open up a little and start to reveal how their understanding of God clashes with their own lived experience. Most times you end up agreeing that you don’t believe in that kind of God either.
For example, oftentimes it’s in periods of intense transition that they’ve come to the conclusion that God isn’t there. For example, someone close to them has died. That was certainly the case for me. In my early twenties a close friend committed suicide leaving a husband and two small children. Curiously, not believing in God at the time, my first reaction was to go into Portsmouth Cathedral. And I walked up to the lectionary and read of the ways of God being beyond our understanding and walked straight out again. Those words simply didn’t cut it for me. What made more sense for me were the lines given by Shakespeare to the blinded Gloucester in King Lear, “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.” God seemed to me at that time, at best dead. Think of Nietzsche’s madman running through the town at midday with a lantern crying, “God is dead and it is we that have killed him.” At best dead. At worst sadistic. For what kind of God would allow such suffering.
Now, several years later, there are many things from a more Christian perspective that I could say to my old self. But to pretend that it’s all wrapped up both emotionally and intellectually would be far from the truth. For it’s one of the hardest things to understand: how is God present in our lives, our everyday lives and especially at times of upheaval and transition. And this is what the stories we’ve heard from the Bible this evening speak of. Old Abraham’s servant goes in search for a bride for his master’s son Isaac. The faith is about to be handed on from one generation to the next. It’s a precarious moment. Where is God in that handing on? And in the New Testament stories, we have these stories of transition that are of transformation as the sick encounter Jesus. Mark depicts a tryptich of healings: before the two we heard this evening of the haemorrhaging woman and Jairus’ daughter, Jesus crosses the lake, stilling the storm on the way, to Gentile country and heals the Gadarene demoniac, and deals a fatal blow to the local pig industry in the process.
So what can I say to someone whose understanding of God is that He or She or They is or are absent, dead, or oblivious to our suffering or even sadistically engineering our suffering for his or their entertainment, “As flies to wanton boys”? Well, one thing I can tell them, and maybe this rings true for you, is that amidst such times of intense transition, when you’re moving from one state of being to another, be it a parent dying, or a friend, or illness or suffering, or even the movement from sickness to wholeness which in its own way presents its own challenges, that there are moments, albeit fleeting, of stillness and peace. There are three such moments in our readings this evening. The first is when Abraham’s servant stops and gazes at Rebekah to see if God had fulfilled his journey. The narrative pauses. There’s a moment of stillness. And the second moment helps us to see that it doesn’t have to be in silence that we experience stillness. The woman with the unstoppable bleeding, having touched Jesus’ clothes, immediately feels in her body that she has been healed of her disease. In spite of all the crowd, the noise, the dust, the kerfuffle of it all, there is a moment of stillness as she becomes aware of her healing. And then the third is as Jesus takes Jairus’ daughter by the hand. When I imagine this, I see a big, strong carpenter’s hand, weatherbeaten, nicked and scarred from many years work, enfolding the young girl’s enfeebled hand. And there’s a moment of stillness before he then says, Talitha cum, Get up.
In those moments of stillness, both in these stories and in the stories of our own lives, what is it that we’re experiencing? We’re not experiencing our own faith. That’s far too subjective and open to manipulation both by ourselves and others. Rather we experience in these moments that we cannot produce at will, we can’t turn them on like a tap for they are not ours to produce, we are experiencing not our faith in God, but instead I believe they are encounters of God’s steadfast love and faith towards us, no matter what our circumstances are and that there is nothing, no situation that He cannot enter and bring his transforming presence to. And this is the invitation to the person who says that they don’t believe in God. To reimagine their lives. What do I mean by this? I mean don’t expect constant reassurance of God’s presence but be open to those fleeting moments of stillness. See if it makes more sense at the deepest level of your being to understand these moments of stillness not as moments of absence but as moments in which we encounter the superabundance of God’s presence such that our own being can scarcely acknowledge for it extends beyond our comprehension. And these moments can and do occur as well when we receive the Sacrament of Holy Communion encountering Jesus the Sacrament, when we pray and when we read the Bible. Daring to believe, just as Jairus did, just as the haemorrhaging woman did, that there is no situation which is beyond his transforming presence. Which is what the disciples realised to be the case supremely when recalling Jesus’ crucifixion in the light of his resurrection.
All of which brings us back to this evening’s psalm, number 57: “in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge, until the destroying storms pass by…. For your steadfast love is as high as the heavens; your faithfulness extends to the clouds.” Amen.