Struggling with faith - Dr Brutus Green

Lamorna Ash, who is a voice of her generation, tapping the zeitgeist, in her last book uses the story of Jacob wrestling the angel as a metaphor for her explorations within Christianity – a wrestling with faith – ‘my personal match with Christianity’, as she puts it. Sometimes it made life better, sometimes harder; It changed everything, it changed nothing. “All that wrestling, though” she says, “it was exhausting.”

She takes faith seriously; It’s what I’ve heard young people call a “deep dive”. And she articulates the angst of this moment: “the roar of our communal wanting for our lives not to be meaningless, for our future and the Earth’s future not to be wholly doomed… to survive our lives, to make it through without our pain and malaise overcoming us conclusively.’

And yet, I struggle with her. She’s looking for a religion that suits her, conforms to her prejudices (many of which I agree with). She writes: ‘the less our institutions acknowledge and permit each person’s unique and infinite dignity, the more followers they will lose as this century goes on.’

A sentiment, which at a time of the rise of the far right seems untrue. And in her manifesto she reflects on how the Bible should not have been cut off where it ends; The stories of God should expand ‘like a divine Wikipedia’ She writes: ‘we would be required to struggle with every single individual’s writing about God as we came upon it. No one would finish reading this bible in their lifetime. It would be a total mess.’

There’s an over-wrought-individualism in her writing and expectation. An entitlement that there should be a specific Christianity for her, but also, by extension, for every person. And it’s strikes me that her idea of faith is exhausting. She has to work it out, reconcile it, build it, live it and defend it for herself. She is whirling around in the snowstorm for the unique snowflake that is hers, when what really matters is the snow on the ground.

This story of Jacob exposes a difficult juxta-position at the heart of the Old Testament. Psalm 27 tells us: My heart tells of your word, ‘Seek my face.’ Your face, Lord, will I seek. And yet in the book of Exodus we read: The Lord said: “you cannot see my face, for no one shall see me and live.” So Moses on Mount Sinai only sees the back of God. His great honour is to have the divine bottom sweep past him. This plays out in our story of Jacob’s all-night wrestling with God with his naming of the place, Peniel: For I have seen God face to face and yet my life is preserved.’ 

The Christian tradition took this tension seriously. What we find throughout the history of our faith is men and women earnestly seeking God; Seeking to understand God, to be able to speak and think and write about God; To know God intimately, to find union with God: Seeking his face – means loving God. But in that experience discovering a death of the self, an unselfing which practically results in service, which morally results in humility, which historically might mean martyrdom, which spiritually we call mysticism or union with God.

I point this out in contrast to a postion where a person seeks God to find their justification, a protection from ill, the reassurance that I matter. We should not be seeking God out of a conviction of our own self-worth, or to steady our insecurity, but out of a love for God or neighbour that is ready to give itself away. Perhaps entirely.

This is complicated. Because this difficulty; of the command to seek God’s face, with the prohibition that one cannot see the face of God and live; is met by the equally strange dichotomy that we are made in the image of God, that in faith we might become one with God, but in our mortal nature live such brief, flickering lives inevitable met with arbitrary disaster. Immortal soul vs quintessence of dust.

It’s somehow part of what it means to be human that we feel at once the huge significance of our actions and lives – how can we not – to us they are everything; And the historical knowledge of our contingency – That we are ‘dust in the wind’, as Kansas put it.

What makes this so acute for present generations is our removal from community, which is the natural source of meaning, as a foreshadow, if you like, of eternity. So consider the building of a cathedral, like say Wells Cathedral. It began in 1175 and finished around 1490. About 300 years. Now remember that in the medieval period trades, crafts and skills were passed through families. A man who started working on that cathedral would have brought his children to work on it, who would have brought their children to work on it, and on and on. That stonemason finishing up in 1490, may well have known that their great-great-great-great- (fifteen times over) grandfather had started work on it; The life’s work not of a person, or even a family but a people over centuries.

No wonder a person, leaving behind family and community, striving to make something of themselves in a couple of short decades in London struggles with a sense of meaning. Embeddedness, solidarity, connection make you a part of the change the world needs. Part of something bigger. Something that might reach up toward heaven. A person can get rich in one lifetime, but they cannot possess richness unless they’re embedded in something bigger than themselves. It’s here where we begin to seek the face of God, but with it our end; Looking to generations, to a community, to a church – a faith tradition, to the bigger story in which we take part, which will continue after us, to discover our meaning and place; Finding in our mortality, the image of God; Discovering eternity in humility and service.

Today’s readings are really all about persistence. Jacob fights all night to earn the name Israel. Our epistle is about perseverance: Continue in the faith, be persistent whatever the times, Have patience and carry out your ministry fully. Then the Gospel tells of a widow and we have no idea the details of her case and the justice of it; All we know is that her doggedness over time is what wins her the victory.

There are always struggles in keeping the faith. Some of us will be struggling with God. Some of us with people. It’s no coincidence that the angel tells Jacob: “you shall no longer be called Jacob but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” It helps me to remember in the struggles of the church, it’s present turbulence and self-doubt, that I belong to an institution that’s thousands of years old. The injustices of the moment are put a little in perspective when you see time in such broad stripes. The passions and pettiness of a lifetime are put in place when we think in centuries.

But what a thing to be a part of? the kingdom of God in Putney. Over generations, like the building of a cathedral; Something that has roots and an end in eternity. This is why we don’t need to catch that snowflake that matches our perfect idea of what Christianity should be. We can take joy instead that all these snowflakes give the ground depth beneath our feet and adorn creation with their midwinter brilliance. It’s a struggle. But in losing ourselves we may find our place, as Jacob becomes Israel, the trickster, who begins by conning his brother, but emerges limping as the father of the people of God. Amen.