Sermon for the Second Sunday after Epiphany

Sunday 15th January 2006

Preached by Rev Paul Hewitt

I did a thing the other evening which has become a rare event in our household, I videotaped a TV programme. it was while the Vestry meeting was on. So unless the vestry did what I did on Monday, the Vestry wouldn’t have seen it. It was called “Religion. The Root of all Evil?” It’s been advertised for ages and perhaps you saw it. I love programmes like that; I see them as challenges! The truth is that you can see where these programme-makers are coming from, and you can even have some sympathy for them, because

“Religion”, per se, has indeed a lot to answer for!

Now, there’s no point going on about this too much if you didn’t see the programme, but I just wanted to highlight the fact that there are some fundamental mistakes which are made when so-called ‘Religion’ (or Christianity) is put on the block!

First of all, from our own point of view, Christianity is not a religion anyway. You know that; we’ve done that before! Remember we have said, that we can suppose to define ‘Being Religious’ as the attempt to reach God, find God, please God through our own efforts

Religions try to reach up toward God. Christianity, however, is about God reaching down to man. It is really quite the reverse. Christianity claims that we have not found God, but that God has found us.

The other thing I often find in these debates is that, on the one hand, reason and logic and rationale, and even science, are held up as something pure, and are contradictory to what is perceived as a ‘blind faith’ on the other hand, which is seen as unreasonable, illogical and irrational, and unscientific. It is, in my opinion, a dichotomy, which doesn’t actually exist and is, by definition, unreasonable. It is, I think, the heart and the mind kind of argument. At the end of the day, we have to come to realise what Blaise Pascal knew a long time ago (the greatest mind in the last thousand years, according to Einstein) that, “The heart has reason which reason can never know”.

Do we really hear only the pure voice of reason from those opposed to the Christian Church? If I could come back to that programme for a moment, the Sunday Times said of the presenter, Professor Richard Dawkins, that “In revealing himself as a secular cleric with an irritating aesthetic disdain for alternative views (to his own, that is), Dawkins becomes lost in an intellectual cul-de-sac that projects a mirror image of the dogmas he claims to abhor.”

Christianity, by its very nature, is not comparable to any other world faith or ‘religion’, if I have to use that word; it is not a set of dogmas or simply a credal belief system, it is essentially about a person! And being a Christian is about having a relationship with that person. He is a person that asks certain questions about us, and our relationship to God. In many ways, trying to work out what his questions are saying about us, and our relationship to God, is the most important thing of all.

There were two students who were about to take organic chemistry exams at their university. Having done very well in their work and in the lab, they were both going into the final exam with solid A’s. Trouble was, they were so confident, that the night before the test, they decided to party, instead of study. It was a great night and it went on and on until they collapsed in to their beds. The morning arrived… and went; they had slept in and missed the exam!

Being inventive souls, however, they went to see their professor to explain that they had been visiting a sick friend the night before who was ‘out-of-town’. On the way home they had a flat tyre. With no spare tyre and no car jack, they were stranded. They could only manage to hitch a lift back to town mid morning, which is why they missed the exam. They were really sorry, they said, and wondered whether they might be able to sit the exam that afternoon.

The professor thought about it for a moment and decided that this would be permissible since they hadn’t time to discuss the paper with any of the other students. After a short break for lunch, the two students were ready. The professor placed them in separate rooms, handed them each an exam booklet, and told them to begin.

Page one, question one. A simple one for 5%. This will be easy! Having answered the first question each of the students turned the page for question two: It read, for 95%, “Which tyre?”

It’s all right thinking you know all the answers; we just have to make sure the right questions will come up!

‘When I was hungry, did you feed me? When I was naked, did you clothe me? When I was a stranger, did you take me in?’ Can we answer those questions honestly and truthfully?

It is only when we bother to find out who this Jesus really is; it’s only when we bother to make a space for him in our lives, only then will we realise that ‘God is now here’. (Not that ‘God is nowhere’). As Philip said to Nathanael in our reading this morning, “Come and see”…And what do we find…?

“He was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in still another village, where he worked in a carpenter’s shop until he was thirty. Then for three years he was an itinerant preacher. He never wrote a book. He never held an office.

He never had a family or owned a house. He did not go to college. He never visited a big city. He never travelled two hundred miles from the place where he was born.

He did none of the things one usually associates with greatness. He had no credentials but himself. He was only thirty-three when the tide of public opinion turned against him. His friends ran away. He was turned over to his enemies and went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed to a cross between two thieves. While he was dying, his executioners gambled for his clothing, the only property he had on earth. When he was dead, he was laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend.

Nineteen centuries have come and gone, and today he remains the central figure of the human race, and the leader of mankind’s progress. All the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the parliament’s that ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of man on this planet so much as that one solitary life.”