| The Foundation of Lady Katherine Leveson at Temple Balsall | ||
 |
||
|
St
Mary's Church
|
   
|
|
|
Faith & Fear Mark 4: 35 - 41 Sermon preached on Sunday 22nd June 2003 by The early Christian adopted a simple drawing of a boat with a Cross for a mast as the symbol of the Church. In an age of persecutions from the outside and controversy and conflict on the inside, in their experience, the emerging Church must have seemed like a boat on a storm tossed sea. When I look at the indifference towards religion and the on-going controversy and conflict amongst Christians, I feel like joining with those early Christians in a desperate prayer "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?" The winds of change and the waters of chaos continue to beat hard on
the Church and people of faith. Christians are still being martyred
and religious wars abound. At home, the Church is fiercely divided around
issues of authority, liturgy, sexuality and cultural diversity, all
of this being particularly played out for us in the appointment a It doesn't stop there, our private lives are not spared stress and storm as our individual little boats are tossed about by the waves of economic uncertainty and change, war, divorce, sickness and death. There are troublesome images of events across the world that intrude into our homes. "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?" In today's Gospel our lord claims the wind and the waves and says to the tense disciples "Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?" he surely intended the link between faith and fear. The opposite of faith is not doubt or unbelief: those tend to be doctrinal differences. No, the opposite of faith is more often than not, fear. We fear the unknown. Fear is like waves, ever seeking to nock us off our footing - our faith footing. Faith is stance towards life. According to the psychologist Erik Erikson, it is a confidence that is typically acquired very early in life when a child learns to expect his or her environment and the people in it to be reliable and trustworthy. The attitudes of parents often infect the emotional and intellectual stance of their children. We all have a responsibility to involvement and citizenship, of working together as a community to maintain faith, and working together, often with people we disagree with, towards resolving problems and situations. I remember a man in my first parish who within a period of six months, lost his last surviving parent and grand parent as well as a favourite aunt. It dawned on him at the time, that all the people in his life who loved him unconditionally were dead, and that he was alone. In those painful and challenging months, he wrote down his own definition of faith. I share it with you: "faith is the simple trust that life can still be good despite that fact that it is painful and difficult". Out of the worst experiences that this person could have imagined, he found many little bubbles of love, joy and hope in the form of friends, family and church, lifting him upward like the fingers of God, and the worst year of his life was followed by what he declares to have been one of the best years of his life. "Why are you afraid?" Have you still no faith?" In these rather patient words directed to his disciples, Jesus brings into focus the polarities of faith and fear. Faith is a stance and how we stand up to those things that would threaten us, and how we manage our fears, makes all the difference. In the midst of troubles, let us reach up our hearts and hands to God and ask for help, trusting that the embrace and love of God will never fail to touch us and lift us into new and reassuring experiences of God's grace. The Reverend Dr James Woodward |
||