Alice
laughed: “There's no use trying,” she said; “one can't believe impossible
things.”
“I
daresay you haven't had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always
did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible
things before breakfast.”
Today
we are looking at faith, and we might wonder, is that what faith is? Believing
six impossible things before breakfast?
For
a surer guide to faith than “Alice in Wonderland”, we can turn to the sacred
scriptures. Today we read about Abraham, Sarah and Peter, people who are held
up to us as examples of faith, and yet their journey of faith involved struggle,
getting things wrong, learning to let go and trust God.
God
made a promise to Abraham that he would be the ancestor of many nations. And,
as the letter to the Romans says today, he believed, and this was reckoned to
him as righteousness. He believed in spite of the fact that Sarah could not
have children and he was very old.
But
what Romans passes over is that Abraham and Sarah didn’t know how God was going
to fulfil his promise of children, and set about doing things their own way. They
hit upon the idea that Abraham would have a child with Sarah’s slave Hagar, who
would give birth on Sarah’s lap, so that the child would count as her own.
Leaving
aside the extraordinary things that were considered acceptable in some Biblical
marriages, this wasn’t what God had in mind. A child, Ishmael, was born. God
came to Abraham again and said, yes, I know you’ve had this child, and I’ll
bless him for your sake, but that wasn’t what I meant. And then Sarah herself conceived.
Isaac was born, the child of God’s promise, the father of Jacob, who became
Israel.
Abraham
and Sarah believed God, but acted on their own mistaken ideas of how God’s
purposes would come about. Nevertheless, God kept his word and did things the
way he intended, anyway. Faith is a journey. We can make false starts and go the
wrong way, but God guides those who believe to the end he intends for them. Faith
means trusting God, not trying to secure everything for ourselves.
It
was the same for Peter, in today’s gospel reading. Just before today’s extract
Peter has made the great confession of faith to Jesus, “you are the Messiah,
the Son of the Living God”. And Jesus says that this faith has come to him as a
gift from the Father. Peter has not worked this out on his own, God has
revealed it to him. Peter’s faith is authentic and true.
Now
the Messiah is the person who will save God’s people. But Peter, in common with
most faithful Jewish people of the time, had his own idea of how God’s purposes
would be fulfilled. They thought the Messiah would be a military leader who
would drive the occupying Romans out of their land, a political liberator. The
Messiah was certainly not someone who would be defeated and killed.
And
yet, Jesus says to Peter, this is how it has to be. “The Son of Man must
undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and
the scribes, and be killed.”
To
Peter this seems like madness. Perhaps he thought it was a test. Perhaps he
thought Jesus was saying, “when this happens to me, are you going to be there
for me? Will you fight for me?” So Peter says to Jesus, no, don’t worry, we
won’t let that happen to you.
Peter
has real faith, but he has his own idea about how God’s purposes will be
fulfilled. He wants to organise God’s programme for him. But his ideas are not
God’s ideas.
This
earns for Peter a really harsh rebuke, “get behind me, Satan!”. And yet Peter
needs to hear that. Peter must learn that the way of violent opposition, the
way he wants to organise things, that he thinks is God’s way, is actually the
way of Satan. If you oppose the Romans with their own methods, you will just
end up perpetuating the oppressive world system of Satan. The mission of Jesus
is to save us from that.
So,
Peter, the would-be warrior against Rome, has to learn to take up his cross,
the Roman instrument of oppression and death, he has to learn to lose his life
for the sake of Jesus and the gospel.
Part
of the journey of faith, for Peter, Abraham and Sarah, for us, is about
discovering that God is in charge and we are not. About discovering all the ways
in which we are wrong about God. Letting go of our ambitious ego that wants to
organise everything. The Kingdom of God is God’s project, not ours.
For
Peter the way of the cross was no metaphor. John chapter 21 tells us that he would
die for his faith. According to tradition he crucified upside down in Rome, the
hunted leader of a small group of Christians. And yet his witness and death, in
weakness and failure, laid the foundations for the Roman church of centuries to
come.
Five
centuries after Peter that same Roman church sent a small group of anxious and
fearful monks to evangelise a distant, cold, wet and savage country they had
vaguely heard of, called Britain. Their mission wasn’t terribly effective in
their own day. One of them, Mellitus, became the first bishop of a small Saxon
fishing port called London. His cathedral was probably a wooden hut. He wasn’t
there long, as the pagan sons of the local king drove him into exile.
Yet,
on the site of Mellitus’ wooden hut, today there stands St Paul’s Cathedral.
And we are here, brothers and sisters, in one of hundreds of parishes in
London, because of Mellitus’ mission that began in weakness and apparent
failure. The Saxon fishing port of London has grown to a great global city. But
it is a city of many faiths and worldviews. In such a context the Church can
seem small, ineffective, weak. But our task is not to compete with the
prevailing worldviews. Our task is not to use the methods of the empire against
the empire. The task of the church is not even to save itself. Our task is to
bear faithful witness to Jesus, and leave the rest to him.
In
our own lives, too, we try to organise God’s purposes for us. We might have a
particular skill and liking for, say, golf course management. Obviously, then,
that’s what God wants me to do with my life. Well, wait and see what God wants
to do with your life. There is no promise in the Gospel that we will do what we
want, or have success, or fame, or wealth, or family life, or good reputation.
There is simply an invitation to follow Jesus in the way of the cross. At every
moment of our lives, faith leads us on a path that we do not know, but God
does.
So
do not be afraid. For us, as for Abraham, Sarah and Peter, following in God’s
way, however contradictory it seems, is the way of salvation, life and peace.
Let go of the ego and its ambitions, all the ways we want to organise God’s
Kingdom, and follow Jesus. Faith tells us that we can trust God, even when we
get things wrong, even when the path we follow is dark and difficult, the way
of the cross. God knows what he is doing, and will do it.
