Radcliffe Sermon - The Temple Church

PD James Sermon - Sermon Preached at The Temple Church
Sunday 1st October 2006

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.

My text is taken from the second lesson which we have heard this morning, Verse 24 of the 9th Chapter of St Mark’s Gospel. ‘And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.’ The father’s response to the words of Jesus, ‘If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth’, in its honesty and humility speaks across the centuries and touches our hearts today as it touched the heart of Jesus. The man’s faith was imperfect but the compassion of Christ was infinite and the child was healed.

This historic and beautiful church, consecrated in 1185, was built on the rock of an assured belief and no one can speak from this pulpit, nor indeed worship here, without a strong awareness of being surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. We may reach back in thought to the men who built here, but we cannot enter fully into their hearts and minds. If their world is alien to us, so would ours be today if they could return and sit among us. If we were to tell them that man can now set foot on the moon, can lift a small object and speak clearly to people at the other end of the world, can take the stilled heart from a corpse and set it beating again in a living body, surely they would feel that such talk was blasphemy, that man was usurping the power of God Himself. And if they asked us, ‘What of the faith of Christ crucified in this distant unimaginable world’, what would we be able to answer? We might say that Christianity in all its manifold manifestations had spread worldwide, was one of the great religions of mankind and had drawn up behind it the glittering and richly adorned pavilion of Western civilization. But how should we respond when they asked, ‘What of belief in this land?’ How could we answer, we who have moved into the second millennium of Christ’s birth? For me the words of Matthew Arnold in Dover Beach have never seemed more appropriate.

There are, of course, still many people who remain securely rooted all their lives, seemingly undisturbed by doubt, not prone to question the grounds of their belief or the intricacies of dogma or doctrine, but who find in their Christian faith, imbibed from earliest childhood, a guide to moral conduct, a sure hope for a reality beyond this brief existence and a shield against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, of disappointment, anguish, pain, bereavement and death. Like little children they have entered into the Kingdom.

And then there are those who have experienced conversion, that single illuminating moment in which they are possessed by the certainty of God’s presence and respond unconditionally to His call. My lord and my God. There are still those who find salvation on their personal road to Damascus. And then there are Christians for whom belief is an intellectual assent to what they see as a coherent religious philosophy based on valid historical claims, an assent distanced, it would appear, from emotion, even from the joy of certainty achieved. In just such a way did Evelyn Waugh embrace the Roman Catholicism which was so profoundly to influence both his life and his writing. In his words, ‘On firm intellectual conviction, but with little emotion, I was admitted to the Church.’ Like his character, Pinfold, he calmly accepted the propositions of his faith, knowing that, for him, life was unintelligible and unendurable without God.

For others, and they include many devout Christians, the spiritual life is a continual wrestling with God in which the glorious glimpses of certainty and salvation are interposed with the chastening aridity of St John’s dark night of the soul, a blackness which sometimes eclipses even the memory of the light. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins knew the depths of this despair:

And which ends with the cry:

Then there are those – and I think they are an increasing number – to whom religion is meaningless in the sense that they would deny that such words as God, grace, salvation, can provide even the grounds for rational discussion. To talk to them of the yearning of the soul for a reality beyond the things that we can touch, see and measure is to talk of music to the tone-deaf. For them individual human existence must be accepted for what it is: the chance fusion of sperm with ovum and birth into a universe in which it is futile for men to look for meaning or for a purpose beyond the living of each day. For many such their creed of decent humanism laced with stoicism is far from ignoble. They seek to minimise pain for others as well as for themselves without asking why such pain should exist, and at the end they face death in the certainty of personal annihilation without resentment and without dread. There are less admirable ways for a man or woman to live – or to die.

But for many, perhaps for most of us, the journey to a personal faith is best described in the familiar terms of a pilgrimage, a pilgrimage which may last for the whole of our lives and which is unlike any other since we cannot even be sure of our destination. And why do we embark on this journey? For some it is the longing to make sense of this existence, transitory and meaningless as it may seem. For others it is a search for a personal morality, which makes greater demands than mere conformity with the criminal law, the promptings of general beneficence or a liberal conscience. Others find in art, in music, in great painting and sculpture or in literature not only a satisfaction of sense and intellect, but intimations of that reality of which the greatest art is only a pale imitation. Others find those intimations in nature, a belief which goes beyond Wordsworth’s eccentric pantheism but which no other poet has so well expressed:

Sometimes the yearning for the rock of a personal faith is born in the face of death, particularly the death of the young, the good, the beautiful, the talented. We need to believe that the person we knew in his or her grace, humour, warmth, humanity, has not been utterly and eternally wiped out.

And we begin our pilgrimage in the only place and time where we can begin it, as 21st century men and women, and we carry as we journey the burden not only of our individual heritage, culture, education, prejudices and desires, and the inexorable genes which dominate our physical and mental health and even, we are told, our propensity to good or evil, but the weight of centuries of scientific discovery about the physical world and man’s place in it. We no longer believe, as did medieval man, that our planet is at the centre of the universe and man, made in the image of God, strides it like a colossus. Even as some of us struggle with concepts of chaos theory and the Big Bang, many of the scientific and technological discoveries which are part of our everyday living may add to our sense of impotence and alienation. We are like children provided with ever more wonderful and expensive toys, which we can use and play with but seldom completely understand, and like children we are thwarted and outraged when they break down and we are powerless to mend them. Increasingly materialism and the science which has fuelled it are seen as inimical, not only to the religious life, but to man’s essential humanity, his imaginative spirit, his aspirations to find a purpose that is more than getting and spending – seen indeed as destructive even to the physical world in which increasingly he feels outlawed and alien. But it is surely wrong to take too destructive a view of science which, even in my lifetime, has so greatly increased the physical standard of life for millions all over the world, has saved lives, prevented suffering and assuaged pain. And there is no forbidden knowledge. We do not find things out behind God’s back. Intelligence, including scientific intelligence, is surely both the will and the gift of God and, like all our talents, meant to be used, not buried in the ground.

And we make our pilgrimage to faith in an age when all the old certainties have been shaken. The great pillars of society – the Church, the Law, the Monarchy – stand less securely as bastions of our nationhood. Those who are called to exercise authority in State, in Church, in universities, in local government, do so in an age when authority has almost become a pejorative word. We are told now that respect has to be earned but, even when it has been earned, it is rarely given. We do, indeed, walk on shifting sand.

And for those who seek their path to God by way of the manger, the cross and the empty tomb, 21st century man’s journey to faith is taken in the light of Old and New Testament scholarship over the centuries and the perennial search for the historical Jesus. We see in the differing accounts in the New Testament how carefully the writers explain the fulfilment of old prophesies, how many of man’s oldest myths are here echoed or enshrined: the virgin birth, the slain king, the mystic meal. Was Jesus of Nazareth merely the greatest of the many Jewish prophets and miracle workers, and Christianity one – albeit the most magnificent – of man’s many myths about God? Or was that tortured and broken body hanging on the cross not merely one more victim of a Roman judicial execution but the great reconciliation of man with God, the fulfilment of all the age-old myths in one final redeeming reality?

Just as the novelist cannot compel inspiration by hard thought but can only in quietness and patience open her heart and imagination to receive that fugitive visitation, so with the religious life. We cannot compel belief but we can hold fast to what we can believe and show it forth in our lives. We may be able to bring to God only the imperfect faith of that distraught father, but if we bring it in humility we too can be healed. We learn about prayer by praying and continuing to pray, even in those moments when we are least certain that anyone is listening, and even if at first we can do no more than echo the words, ‘Lord I believe; help thou my unbelief.’ And perhaps we may take comfort from the words of Pascal about our longing for God: ‘You would not be seeking me if you had not already found me.’ Intelligence and reason, high talents of mind and imagination need not hinder us unless we put all our faith in them and substitute the gifts for the giver. In the words of St Anselm: ‘We do not understand in order to believe, we believe in order to understand.’ And we should not despise our myths. Myths should not be confused with facts but they are not untruths; they are ways of expressing a different reality.

It is for men and women whose spiritual journey in our materialistic and scientific age is hampered by success, by reliance on high intelligence, talent and the power of reason, that Evelyn Waugh, in his novel Helena, put into the saint’s mouth her petition to the three wise men. It is a prayer, too, for our sceptical generation as we journey across our own deserts following what seems an uncertain star.
Like me you were late in coming. The shepherds were here long before; even the cattle. How laboriously you came taking sights and calculating, where the shepherds had run barefoot! How odd you looked on the road, attended by what outlandish liveries, laden with such preposterous gifts!

Yet you came, and were not turned away. You too found room before the manger. Your gifts were not needed, but they were accepted and put carefully by, for they were brought with love.

You are my especial patrons and patrons of all latecomers, of all who have a tedious journey to make to the truth, of all who stand in danger by reason of their talents.

For His sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the Throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.