After the service last week we hosted a meeting in the Priestley hall –  which I thought it might be worth saying a little about; it had been my intention that the speaker from the Palestine Animals League could address the service and just speak in this spot usually reserved for my sermon, unfortunately there was a delay and the train from Manchester was held up so the speaker couldn’t get here in time – Ah well best laid plans…
The idea though is going to continue – each month on the third Sunday I‘m going to invite a speaker from a charity or cause to speak to us and explain why we should support them, we ‘ll be under no obligation but we can then discuss what we might want to do to support them. To give an example – next months speaker is a representative of a Leeds based Charity called Latch, Latch arrange for people who are homeless and do not fit the current criteria for help to help themselves back into secure accommodation, they encourage people to be self reliant and live responsibly. But I’ll leave it to the representative from Latch to say more about that, and of course if you have a suggestion of a group we should invite to talk to us that will be welcomed.
Its a pity that the speaker from the Palestinian Animals League could n’t have spoken to us because there was something that struck me immediately about his approach to protecting animals which chimed very well to the approach to faith that we’ve been discussing here. Ahmad said that he initially experienced some criticism when he announced his intention to set about protecting animals in the occupied territories from people who said it was more important to prioritise children, the old, and vulnerable. Ahmad said that to him there could be no priorities, and protecting the bees and the lavender is just as important as the schools and hospitals, without streams and fruit trees there would be no mosques and without birds and wild animals there could be no culture worth speaking of, no country worth living in. He described a very persuasive world view in which all things are interdependent and no thing can be abstracted or exist with out reference to the others. Its a world view which is also well described by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naes who coined the term ‘Deep Ecology’ for a holistic awareness which is initially about ecological concern but quickly acquires spiritual overtones.
I know that talk of the ‘interdependent web of life’ may be familiar in Unitarian circles even overfamiliar perhaps, its an idea which naturally develops from the transcendental philosophy of Emerson and others who recognised that it is sometimes easier to discern the truth of God in the natural world than in Churches and scriptures. But it relates directly to what I ve been trying to articulate here over the month of January on the subject of faith. In fact it develops a theme that I hope was emerging when I asked on Epiphany Sunday – What is it that our faith makes us do?
Epiphany is the celebration of the appearance of God, the intervention of God, the moment when God’s nature intervenes in the natural order.
A different way of asking this question arises when we follow the advice of transcendentalism to read the word of God in all creation and see the natural world as the first scripture. This vision of God is infinite and intimate, revealed in everything we experience, this epiphany is not a moment of revelation but an eternity. It shares a common link with the spirituality of Celtic Christianity which used the motif of interlocking patterns of intricate knot-work to symbolise its understanding of God woven throughout the fabric of existence and I ve even heard it said that this understanding shares a common language with the most recent discoveries of theoretical physics which postulate such apparent impossibilities as electrons which co-exist in two places at once. This vision of God does not depend on belief in a supernatural entity, rather the opposite, the infinite entity is ultra-natural, boundary less and not confined in objects, concepts, definitions or traditions.

Faith is then not a belief we hold but a relationship which we maintain, an attitude to creation that is participatory and creative. this Faith is not an abstraction, but a way of living, as Palfrey Perkins said.

Earlier this month I mentioned the point of view articulated by Pope Francis that religion is meaningless unless it changes our behaviour. This holistic vision of our faith as a kind of relationship to God and or creation is a different way of perceiving that same reality, but it seems to imply that its not that faith make us do something differently, it makes us  do everything differently – because Faith is something we are, faith is a way of being, not a sanctified position on something or a very magnified  opinion on a theological question of whether or not God exists.

Ahmad Safi lives out his faith by refusing to accept that priorities can be made between orders of living things. He lives by the faith that understands that everything that lives is holy. This is not a faith which expects an apparition or charismatic moment, but a faith which dwells within an enveloping and always present God. Its faith as a verb, faith as a doing word.

I hope we can reconnect our congregation to the verb of faith, faith as it is lived – in action…
If faith is a way of being then this chapel might be
“like a watered garden,
like a spring of water,
whose waters never fail.
prophesied by Isaiah, who goes on;
“Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in.”
Let that  be the aspiration of our congregation  – and no less than that.

That this place can be a way-station, a place of encouragement and nourishment, an active and busy hub of faith. I pray that it may be so, and that we may take faith as a verb – a doing Word.