Christ Church Cathedral

I want to begin by mentioning a couple of media reports of the past week. The first concerned a Léger and Léger poll, which had asked the question of Quebeckers, “Are you very religious, somewhat religious, not very religious, or not religious at all?” 70% had replied with the last two categories, “not very religious”, or “not religious at all.” That does not particularly surprise me, other than that the figure is not higher. The trouble with such polls is that meaning of the question is so vague. One would need a much more complex cultural values questionnaire to define what people really meant by “religious”. But let me say for the moment that had I been polled I would certainly have answered “not very religious”. I will come back to that.

This poll was published as part of a series of articles giving background to the work of the Bouchard-Taylor commission. For those of you who are visitors, let me briefly explain that this government appointed commission is dealing with the question of reasonable accommodation, or how people of different cultures can live together in Quebec¹. The second media report I wish to highlight was a about the work of the commission. The commission is in its young days, and the radio report I heard was of just one session in the Gatineau, but what those who had made submissions seemed to be saying was that we can welcome immigrants with their different cultures and especially religions, providing they do not interfere with ours. Our what? Our non-religion? There seems to be a contradiction here with the results of the poll.

Let me move from the media to a recently published book, “The God Delusion”, by Richard Dawkins². Richard Dawkins has publishes a number of books, of which to me the most familiar is “The Selfish Gene.”³ He is biologist and an atheist, and in the recent work he attacks both God and religion with missionary zeal. His target is intended to be all religion, but he concentrates largely on Christianity, perhaps through lack of knowledge and experience of other faiths. After all, he writes from the ivory towers of academia. I find that most of the arguments he uses against God have been around for a very long time, the same arguments being used in both the for and against camps. His attacks against religion are also well worn. I would liked to have heard more about the relationship of religion and his own scientific field in the discipline of biology.

In short, I have to say that in most of what he writes, I find little to disagree with. The God that Dawkins does not believe in I do not believe in either, and the religion he rejects, I find disturbing too. It is always worth remembering that in the persecution of the early church, one of the charges brought against Christians was that they were atheists. What that meant was that they refused to accept, not only the state sanctioned Emperor is God theology of the Roman Empire, but also the cultural religion of their time. The religion with which Dawkins is dealing is also probably the religion that 30% of Quebeckers accept, and 70% reject, and as I said, I am among the 70%. The Christian scriptures were transmitted and written from within a counter-cultural community. Instead of being freaked out by Dawkins and other current atheist writers, I suggest we take them seriously as offering a critique of a religion which has arisen more out of popular culture than out of serious thinking and critical reading of our scriptures and the scriptures of others faiths.

I think one verse from our second reading this morning could be an epigraph for an exposition of what I think about Christianity, and why I find it important and valuable.

…the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus ⁴

For me Christianity is fundamentally about faith and not about religion. Religion, both in the derivation of the word and in its common meaning, is about what binds us, binds us together in a society, binds us to the past and binds us to a common understanding. Faith, on the other hand is about what sets us free, free to be ourselves, free to be in a relationship with God, free to face the future. ⁵

Faith has many different meanings. It can mean believing in the unlikely and improbable, and in this sense, I do not think it is either a particularly helpful idea. On the other hand it is a shot step from there to the idea of persisting in a conviction even when much of the evidence points in a different direction. It is in this sense of faith that I believe that at the heart of the universe is grace, love and compassion, and to this I am prepared to give the name God. Experience forces us to accept that love and compassion do not tell the whole story. We know that dislocation, suffering and distortion also have to be explained, and so I believe that this love and compassion at the heart of the universe is a suffering love. This I believe we see in the life of Jesus.

This is the ultimate reality I can call God. It is a belief that is very different from that in a God who is some old man in the sky rewarding his favorites and punishing the others, reaching down and helping our friends when we ask him, but ignoring all the other suffering in the world.

Faith is also about trust and commitment. We can both trust ourselves to this love, but the act of trusting calls us into a reciprocal act of commitment. We are to love God as he loves us, and also we are to bring that love to others. Our practice of faith is a route to receiving the overflowing grace and love, of which the ancient letter spoke, even in the midst of a suffering world. Having received this gift of grace, we are to dedicate our lives to sharing the gift with others.

In a short while we shall be baptizing Evelyn Elisabeth. Baptism is, with the Eucharist, the most ancient rite of the church, coming from the very earliest days of the Christian community gathered around the risen Lord. Because of the antiquity of the rite of Baptism, you may, like me, find some of the language we use difficult to understand, and in need of interpretation. But at its heart it is an acting out of the challenge to leave the old ways of religion, and to strike out in the new way of faith, faith in love and compassion as the heart of reality in a suffering world. But faith and commitment always belong together, and baptism is a commitment for Evelyn, for her parents and sponsors and for all of us to commit our selves to God known in Jesus the Christ, and to commit ourselves both to bringing our faith to others, and to relating to others with the love respect and compassion which God has shown to us.

I have spent most of my time on the letter to Timothy, but I would also like to end with some comments on the Hebrew Scripture reading and the Gospel. Jeremiah was speaking at a time when political and military destruction threatened his people. That may also be true for many people of our world today. But what is more threatening, it seems to many in our society, is the destruction of their religion either by the likes of Richard Dawkins or by the religions of immigrant groups. We may do well to heed the overall message of Jeremiah, that although things seem dark, it is through and by the will of God that these things happen. Our vocation is to try to discern Gods way in out time and history.

The Gospel, with its story of the lost sheep and the lost coin seems to me to be about two things. The first is perseverance. We may feel to have lost our hold on religion in the intellectual and social climate of today’s world. But if we search diligently, we may find that there is a possibility for faith, and we may find that that faith is something quite different from that understood by both the 30% and the 70% of our fellow citizens. Secondly the gospel is about finding the lost other. The Léger and Léger poll suggests that there is neither 90% nor 99% of the population in the found camp. We are not searching for one lost sheep or one last coin, but for a whole society and a whole generation for whom not only religion, but also faith is largely unknown. The church, and that means all of us, has a tremendous task to face. The decline in membership of the church is not the problem of those outside. It is the problem of us within, who have not only failed move beyond our comfortable pew, but have failed to think through our faith and express it in a way that can be meaningful in our world and society.

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