Rector's Message

Saturday, April 27, 2024

Dear friends,

Does God exist? Some years ago, a wind turbine in Devon, England, fell over and crashed to the ground. The cause of this disaster? Believe it or not, it was the wind - apparently, when it it is too strong the machinery cannot cope. The same thing happened a few days later. Both wind turbines had been built to last twenty-five years, but after only three years they had collapsed and were now mangled heaps in the landscape. The double calamity inspired one well known opponent of wind farms to claim that the failure of the turbines was irrefutable evidence of God’s existence. 

I guess it all depends on your point of view. If you want proof of God’s existence, there might be other ways. The comedian Woody Allen once said: “If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.” I went to a church service that was a variation on this theme. The minister arrived in a red Ferrari sports car which he parked on the stage inside the church. The message he preached was simple: this car could be yours too. All you need is to have faith, and because God is generous and rewards the righteous, he wants us all to own Ferraris. It’s what’s known as the “Prosperity Gospel”.

Much as it appeals to the boy in me, faith and Ferraris aren’t really linked in this way. (Besides which, I don’t see how a Ferrari would fit in Messiah).I like churches and preachers which are humble and don’t brag about themselves. I hope that if someone is seeking proof of God’s existence, they would come to church and find some evidence of it there in the people, rather than in the carpark. In theory, it is within the community of the faithful that God is most fully present. 

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams once said, in a discussion with the atheist Richard Dawkins, that “Religion has always been a matter of community building, a matter of building relations of compassion, fellow-feeling and, dare I say it, inclusion. The notion that religious commitment can be purely a private matter is one that runs against the grain of religious history.”

That’s all true, but we still have the unanswered question of whether or not we believe in God. Perhaps we should ask instead, “well, how do you believe in God? Especially one that seems to permit so much suffering, or who is silent before our ever-pressing questions?” The author C.S. Lewis wrote in 1942:

“There are certain things in Christianity that can be understood from the outside, before you have become a Christian. But there are a great many things that cannot be understood until you have gone a certain distance along the Christian road...Whenever you find any statement in Christian writings which you can make nothing of, do not worry. Leave it alone. There will come a day, perhaps years later, when you suddenly see what it meant.”

Believing in God is not easy because God is a hidden God. He is also a God of revelation: not fully in one moment, but over the course of a lifetime. Even St. Paul, who heard the Lord speaking to him on the road to Damascus, did not acquire a fully developed belief simply because of that one encounter, It took time and, more importantly, required the assistance of fellow travelers. Paul could not have made Damascus on his own - he couldn’t, because he was blinded. He needed someone to lead him there. And then, when he arrived, someone had to take him in (reluctantly) and look after him. 

If you are looking for proof of God’s existence, then look no further than the lives of the saints around you - that was the name given to believers in the early Church. The Damascene Christian who took Paul in was taking a risk, since Paul was a persecutor of Christians. But out of faithfulness and kindness he did what God required.

Those early Christians possessed the light of faith. Belief in God starts with recognizing that there is a light in people which expresses something more than what an individual can achieve for itself. It is seeing what one can achieve for others. It is to notice that there is a human potential for something beyond ourselves: the God gene, if you like, wired into our DNA, like an antennae picking up faint signals from afar. At first the signals are faint but which, over time, grow louder and louder until they can’t be ignored any longer.

Am I talking about you, or about someone you know? A God believer is a God bearer. If you are a believer, your calling is to carry God into the world and let him be seen in you. Our greatness, which is to express the greatness of God, lies not in large acts of self-aggrandizement, but in small acts of love. For example, in visiting the lonely; in offering to do the shopping of someone who is housebound; in comforting the bereaved. Be one of the saints, and let God be alive through you.

And who knows, your witness to the faith may also be the signal to another, that there is in the world a power beyond ourselves, a power of love, compassion and goodness, whom we call “God”. 

May you carry the light of faith to another,

Father David