Where is your faith?

Angela Tilby | Second Sunday before Lent | Genesis 2.4b-9; 15-end, Revelation 4. Luke 8.22-25

‘Jesus said to them, “Where is your faith”’? Challenging words to the disciples caught out by a sudden storm on the sea of Galilee – think what it was like here on Friday - violent wind, torrents of water sloshing in - and you are not even watching from the shore – you are in a fragile fishing boat. And Jesus, who had slept through it all, simply rebuked the storm, turned to the disciples are said: “Where is your faith?”. Thinking of the little boats tossing about while moored or anchored nearby in Friday’s storm I couldn’t help thinking of Priscilla Anne Jones’ revivalist hymn of 1882:

Will your anchor hold in the storms of life, When the clouds unfold their wings of strife? When the strong tides lift, and the cables strain, Will your anchor drift or firm remain?

And then the chorus: the first five syllables sung out boldly on the same note: We have an anchor that keeps the soul, Steadfast and sure while the billows roll, Fastened to the Rock which

(slow down) cannot move, Grounded firm and deep in the Savior's love. I remember in my early days as a television producer for the BBC editing an edition of Songs of Praise. Will your anchor hold had been the hymn choice of a Cornish lifeboatman, who spoke of the comfort it brought him when out on rescue missions. Between the recording and the transmission of the programme he had unexpectedly died, so I edited the interview as a tribute to him and his faith. And then the gathered choirs sang his hymn:

We have an anchor that keeps the soul….

Well do we? What is our faith, where is our faith? I knew the answer to all this when I was fifteen, but by the time I was eighteen it had all become more complicated. Over the years my faith has often been more a flickering candle than a steady flame; and my connection to the rock has at times been more of a thread than an anchor, a thread that could easily snap. Yet when I have been thrown by grief or fear, when I have been beset by the spiritual vertigo that suggests that nothing is real and nothing makes sense I have actually found that the anchor does still hold. And it holds in spite of the things that actually erode my faith like the smiley confidence of those who are so absolutely sure Jesus loves them that they have to tell you all about it, all the time.

What keeps me in the boat, as it were, is something to do with the poetry of faith and in particular of scripture. I say it keeps me ‘in the boat’ because I am one of those Christians who find in the end that there is nowhere else to go. So I am with the disciples terrified at sea. But I also look for that open door in heaven where the sea of glass is like crystal (or mingled with fire, as an earlier version had it). And to foundational stories like the creation of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden.

This is so obviously not history and not biology, and yet it is so obviously true, true to experience, true to the inner life. This is the story of humanity as a living soul, animated by the breath of God. This is what happens when billions of years of cosmic and planetary and earthly evolution are compressed by human imagination, shaken up by divine inspiration and written down. Here is the lonely moulded man in the empty garden, with only the trees to care for. Here is God bringing the creatures to be named, and finding that none could be his counterpart. The poet R.S. Thomas, imagines a pen appearing before him and a voice saying, ‘write what it is to be man’…and then, ‘And I spelt out the word ‘lonely’.

Then God creates the other human, the help-meet, out of his rib.

All this is terrible of course to contemporary sensibilities: hierarchical, patriarchal, sexist, not to say animalist - and yet there is in this account a breath of divine mystery which simply arrests and holds me. It says: We do not create ourselves. ‘It is he that hath made us and not we ourselves’ (Psalm 100). In other words, we are born into relationships which we did not choose: the man to the animals, the woman and the man to one another, and both to God.

Francis of Assisi was once observed in prayer saying to God, over and over, ‘Who are you, my Lord and who am I?’ And he is often depicted close to nature, close to the elements, including the storm. Perhaps the ultimate issue of faith is to ask those questions of God, ‘Who are you, my Lord, and who am I?’ Which could be expressed as, ‘Whose am I’, who do I truly belong to? The fact that we are evolved through nature and created by God are two sides of one reality, and make together the most convincing and challenging and consoling of answers: So yes, I am a bag of bones, and skin and flesh, even my brain is just cells and blood and water. But the dust that I am is intended, intimately known, brought into being and named by God. To take scripture from another tradition, as the Quran says, God is nearer to us than our jugular vein. Life before life, Life within life, Life beyond life. Scripture tells us what science cannot, that to live fully is to believe, to trust, to belong, and by belonging to participate, to give, to offer who I am as – our liturgy puts it – as a living sacrifice.

The storms of life that engulf us today are all too real. Not just Storm Eunice, but the threat of climate catastrophe. The threat of greed consuming the planet. Pandemics. Wars. The pride, violence and lust that destroy nations, communities, families and persons. The relentless anxiety that saps our joy, the nihilism that empties the heart.

Go back to Genesis and you find God portrayed as a gardener, slowly cultivating an environment for human creatures to live alongside other living beings in delight and peace.

It is poetry standing in for what is unseen, unprovable, and is at the same totally unshakeable.

Everything is gift, everything is grace. The anchor that holds us in the storm of life is our dependence minute by minute, on God the creator, the source of all being, of all that is seen and unseen. This is a God who can’t keep away from the world in which he delights, but visits us in the boat on the sea, in the call of wilderness, in the way of the cross, and yes, in that new garden of the resurrection where he names us and calls us back to life, and in the words of the Westminster Confession of faith invites us ‘to glorify God and enjoy him for ever’. This is the anchor that holds, this is the confidence that stills the storm.