Date: 25^th April 2010 (Easter 4)

Preacher: Gordon Jeff

Churches: Draycott

Readings and psalm:

Acts 9, 36-43

Psalm 23

Revelation 7, 9-17

John 10, 22-30

One of the privileges of getting ancient is to feel more free to break some of the rules. So this morning I'm not going to address the readings at all, but to talk a bit on a topic which I've wanted to talk about for a long time. I only want to try to be helpful, but if I should upset or annoy anyone, that is not my intention.

Many years ago, I learned that the novelist Thomas Hardy, who was an atheist, used to bicycle faithfully every Sunday to Evensong in his parish church. It's an image which has haunted me for years. Despite being an atheist, he must have felt that somehow he still belonged in that Christian community.

So this question of belief… more recently, it is generally acknowledged that many Roman Catholics ignore their church's ban on contraception, while probably an equally large number question the alleged infallibility of the pope, which anyhow, in 2,000 years of Christianity, was only declared 140 years ago. Or indeed, one thinks of the number of Roman Catholics who question the celibacy of the clergy. In passing, one wonders about their future in this country, since in 2009 in the United Kingdom only seven men were ordained as RC priests. By contrast, in that same year the C of E ordained 574 people - 274 women and 300 men. Or again, many RCs campaign for women to be ordained. And yet, like Thomas Hardy, they still go on attending their churches. I have to say that for me, the sum total of all those negatives would be too much, when there are alternatives around!

Now, the heart of my work over the last 30 years or so has lain in talking one to one with clergy, with members of religious communities, and with lay people, about where they are in their journey with God and to God. And I find that again and again people have a real difficulty in feeling able to sign along the dotted line as to believing everything written in the creeds to be said every Sunday. I think the Quakers got it right long years ago in not requiring any credal affirmation from their members - you simply belong.

Part my task, as I see it, has been to try to help people not to feel badly or guilty about their doubts. Far more important, it seems to me, is for all of us to believe what we can, in the light of our deepest experience of life, and not to feel required to sign along that dotted line to ten in\possible things before breakfast, or to feel that we are somehow outcasts it we are unable to believe all of it. The important thing, surely, is to have integrity, rather than to grind our teeth and struggle to believe something there in the creeds or in church teaching which fails to accord with our hard-won experience of life. Hold on to that lovely line in Mark's gospel 9.24 - 'Lord, I believe ... help thou my unbelief... which Jesus accepted.

So there are two points I want to try to make if I can, without taking this address beyond its normal length.

Firstly: In the early church there was a tremendous, and to my mind, healthy, diversity of belief among Christians. The variety of the earliest texts, many of them out of sight until recent years, because censored by authority, prove this variety. But early on, the Church was hi-jacked by the Roman Emperor, and to maintain authority, uniformity of belief was demanded. Bishops who were likely to object to the formularies of the Creeds were hi-jacked on the way to Church Councils, and the bishop of Rome itself did not even attend the Councils where the Nicene Creed was formulated. Real skulduggery attended the formulation of those creeds which are still proclaimed to this day.

And it has suited the authorities of the church ever since to expect uniformity of belief. Sign along the dotted line or you don't belong... Even today, among extreme evangelicals, unless you proclaim Jesus as your Lord and Saviour they say you will burn in hell fire into all eternity. The church has all too frequently turned the Good News of Jesus into the Bad News of guilt, threat and condemnation.

So I would want us to feel free to return to the variety of the early Church, and to believe what speaks to our experience of life. And to remain open, but not guilty about the rest, and most importantly, still to feel that we belong in the family.

But secondly: and I think this is even more important. Jesus never said, 'Here is the Apostles' Creed, you must believe in it', nor did he say, 'Here is the Nicene Creed, you must believe in it', let alone the Athanasian Creed. When Jesus talked about belief, he did not mean belief in a set of propositions, let alone propositions set in the world of 4th century philosophy.

When Jesus talked about belief, it was not about propositions... it was about belief in a WAY OF LIFE. Jesus spoke about living a life of love, a life of caring, a life of service, a life of sacrifice in the service of others, and a life which offended the ways of the rich, the powerful and those in authority. . . yet in living that life of love, he promised that we should find for ourselves as well as for others, a new richness and fullness of life which would elude us as long as we lived a life of self-regarding selfishness and greed. A daily kind of resurrection life. And above all, it was a life to be lived in God's present moment NOW, not a life obsessed with whether we were 'saved' or not, after we died.

But it seems to me that we cannot live the kind of life Jesus called us to share with him without the help of others. And so that is why our spirituality needs to be lived alongside others, even if, at one extreme, like Thomas Hardy, someone is an atheist.

If we are committed, as far as we are able, to try to follow that kind of living which Jesus preached, then we belong, without guilt or condemnation, within the family he founded, however improbable we may find it to reconcile some of the doctrines, formulated in later centuries by academics and bishops, as somehow being essential if we want to belong.... Rather to pray 'Lord, I believe, as far as I can. . .. Help thou my unbelief’.

So, as I see it, spirituality is not only about the individual's search for God and with God, important though that is ... spirituality is also about something we do together.

But that does not mean that because we cannot with integrity sign along every dotted line that we do not belong. We go as far as we can, without any sense of guilt, but more with a sense of integrity, saying 'Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief’.