Last week I asked that we should consider faith, what is is and what our faith makes us do; I asked that we should carefully challenge ourselves as to what it might be that impels our attendance here at Mill Hill Chapel.

In the intervening week there has been plenty of opportunity for reflection on the question of faith and what religious faith can do (or be blamed for).

In the aftermath of the appalling murders in Paris in the last week I think it is of paramount importance to distinguish between the ultra-violence of terrorist bigots and any kind of religion.

Our liberal religious faith has always defended religious toleration, we have always understood the dangers of religious extremism as our spiritual ancestors felt the effects of savage repression; Early proto-Unitarians and anabaptists were attacked and burned at he stake by both sides in the riotous civil terrors of the Christian reformation. Now our denomination, whether liberal Christian or embracing a broader agnosticism defends liberty of personal conscience and talks of ortho-praxis  (right practice) instead of orthodoxy (right doctrine)  In my first ever service at Mill Hill I find that I said:

We talk about the practice of faith and I believe that is what practice means, slowly beginning to tune into the presence of God in our lives and refuse to be put off by failing to keep up our practice, but returning to it and keeping it going and contributing to it, whether that means regularly praying, or meditating for ten minutes twice a day – or coming to chapel – so that we can become aware that we are within God and God is within in us – as surely as the air that we breathe and which sustains us and surrounds us.

The practice of faith may show us the divine in the everyday world; teach us to recognise God in the stranger, be aware that any situation any action is within God, even recognise God in the discarded packaging, or the bandaged hand, see that all is within God and that every action of ours should be a prayer, a sacrament in the world.

And thats a fair summary of a certain kind of modern mainstream gentle spirituality; a rational and frankly quite undemanding faith.

But what of Epiphany that we celebrated on Tuesday last week? Can that be said to be rational and undemanding?

Epiphany means revelation or manifestation of God. We take the passage from Matthew to refer to this revelation; The Magi are from the wider world from the east they were representatives of the non-Jewish world and so indicated to Matthews readers that this incarnation of God, this messiah was a revelation to the whole (gentile) world not just the tribes of Israel.

The passage describes two further revelations too, other apparitions of God; God appears to the Magi in a dream and tells them to go home by another route, and God then appears in a dream to Joseph and tells him to take his family to safety.

Epiphany also means enlightenment, giving light to, and there are hints of this meaning figuratively too as the Magi are lead by a star.

Faith in our time is more complex it seems; epiphany has taken on a smaller meaning than this one of divine enlightenment or appearance of the divine, it has come to mean a realisation of any truth; what we call ‘a lightbulb moment’; our modern westernised minds have become insulated from any kind of experience so rich and demanding as the awesome and fearful apparition of the Divine.

A friend of mine told me a true story about a conversation he’d had with an atheist friend when his friend had been staying overnight. They talked about religion and the atheist admitted that he’d love nothing more than to believe in God but it was simply impossible for any rational adult to do so. Well, my friend persisted, if you really wanted to believe you could pray for God’s help. To my friends amazement the atheist did just this; he knelt and clasped his hands in prayer and said ‘God I pray give me one proof of your existence and I swear I ‘ll believe in You’. In the morning my friend asked how he’d slept. ‘Ok’, said the atheist, ‘but I woke up at one point because the room was suddenly flooded with brilliant white light that seemed to simultaneously be a ringing sound’. My friend was amazed and said to him ‘so your prayer was answered God did reveal his existence to you’ and the atheist said ‘No, it must have been a dream’.

Our pervasive rationalism has become so all consuming that no real epiphany, no revelation of God would penetrate our self imposed darkness.

And perhaps the fear of fanaticism also plays its part in making this so; no one wants to be driven beyond the pale into religious behaviour that might be judged extreme, no one wants to admit that they believe that God is actively present in their lives.

And yet I find it is so myself. I really do, it seems to me that God is present here active in the life of this chapel.

People are called here, appear here, offering to help, or needing help themselves at just such a particular moment.

I can rationalise this if you prefer, be like the atheist friend of a friend and say, well its a dream, a  coincidence, there is always a reasonable explanation, but I think that is a coward’s solution and I ve asked for faith to be shown here – so I must show some faith myself.

I ve said before that faith is in the waiting; its true I feel that this is so, I think there is a great danger in religious faith that depends on displays of miracles and wonders, I know that some faith healers have to fake miracles to retain devotees and some charismatics fake glossolalia and some evangelicals spend whole lives of disappointent when an experience of revelation is followed by – nothing.

So the epiphany I’m describing is somewhat different to that, its the epiphany of a gentle motivation, the epiphany of love between us as fellow seekers, the epiphany of a heart suddenly flooded by a light that is also a kind of ringing, the epiphany described in UA Fanthorpe’s poem BC/AD

“…the moment when nothing
Happened.

And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect
Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.”

129 – “Brightest and best….”

Benediction

May the light which is within this light,

and the being which is becoming,

and the truth which is emerging

and the love which is all in all