Agnostics and Believers

Agnostics and Believers

15th Sunday after Trinity
Jeremiah 15.15-21; Romans 12.9-end; Matt 16.21-end

“Truly, you are to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail.” Jeremiah 15.18

The weary traveller in the hot desert makes his way towards the wadi, the stream, with its promise of water and refreshment. Imagine his disappointment and despair when he finds it is dried up and barren.

This is the great prophet Jeremiah’s description of his experience of God. It is a heartfelt accusation against God. It is frighteningly honest prayer.

“Truly, you are to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail.”

I want to talk this morning about honesty and integrity, about agnostics and believers, and about Ralph Vaughan Williams who died fifty years ago last week – you may notice that all our hymn tunes today are arranged by him.

In Woody Allens’s autobiographical movie, Stardust Memories, someone calls Woody Allen's character an atheist. He responds "To you, I'm an atheist. To God, I'm the loyal opposition."

Like many in our present western culture, he regards himself as unable to believe, and like many, he sometimes wishes he could believe. He says this in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine:

"I do occasionally envy the person who is religious naturally, without being brainwashed into it or suckered into it by all the organized hustles; just like having an ear for music or something. It would just never occur to such a person for a second that the world isn't about something." [Rolling Stone 1987]

Or here is the great guru of the postmodern novel, author of Generation X, Douglas Coupland in, Life After God:

“My secret is that I need God - that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.” [Douglas Coupland, Life After God (London: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p.359]

And so we could go on, there are so many like them, in our own families, probably some of you sitting here this morning.

And yet, thank God, there are others who seem quietly confident in their faith. Who seem to find the Christian faith a perfectly natural thing to believe and to live their lives by.

Most of us would probably admit that we move, at different times in our life, along the spectrum between 'Devout Sceptics' and 'Ardent Believers'.

The term ‘Devout Sceptics’, by the way, was coined by Sir Leslie Stephen in his book An Agnostic’s Apology of 1931.

Bel Mooney took it up for that fascinating Radio Four series in which she interviewed numerous ‘Devout Sceptics’ such as Clare Short, John Humphrys, Melvyn Bragg, Philip Pullman...

And all this brings us to Vaughan Williams – and we might add Gerald Finzi who died two years before Vaughan Williams; and Herbert Howells and the vaguely mystical Holst…

There have always been men and women who have agonized over the Christian faith, and especially in the twentieth century.

Vaughan Williams and millions more were deeply affected by the two World Wars. And to return to those two ends of the belief spectrum again - as they came to terms with the full horror of man’s inhumanity to man - some people were driven to more fervent devotion and deeper security in their faith in Christ.

And others, like my father and his brothers, were driven to abandon the tenets of their childhood faith. Their experience of God mirrored that of Jeremiah’s in his darkest hours: “Truly, you are to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail.”

Yesterday in the church calendar we remembered John Bunyan, spiritual writer. Bunyan was a tormented man in so many ways, and like Jeremiah, pondered in prison what his life of faithfulness to God had gained for him.

During the First World War, Vaughan Williams, at 41, joined up as a private in the Medical Corp – his socialist principals prevented him from using his public school privilege to become an officer – instead he became a stretcher-bearer on the Western Front.

He carried with him at all times a copy of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. (You’ll remember that he arranged the Sussex folk tune Monks Gate to 'He who would valiant be'.)

We can guess that Vaughan Williams and many of his contemporaries who survived the great slaughters of the first half of the twentieth century, wrestled with the idea of faith: longing for it while intellectually rejecting it.

For over forty years from 1906 until 1949, Vaughan Williams also wrestled with the score of his last opera, The Pilgrim’s Progress. And in between he wrote some of the most moving spiritual music of the century, with a mixture of the simple tenets of the faith shot through with mystery and longing. Think of the Christmas carol 'This is the truth from above'; or his setting of Psalm 42, 'Like as the hart desireth the waterbrooks'.

The irony is that for many of us, the music of Vaughan Williams has inspired our faith and deepened our devotion to God. It has helped us through those times when we have cried ‘Lord I believe. Help thou my unbelief’; times when God seems like a deceitful waterbrook.

Archbishop Robert Runcie was a godly man, and in his retirement address to the General Synod in November 1990 he reminded the Synod that the Church of England has always been a church without hard edges.

He could have been speaking of Vaughan Williams when he said:

“Confronted by the wistful, the half-believing and the seeking, we know what it is to minister to those who relate to the faith of Christ in unexpected ways. We do not write off hesitant and inadequate responses to the Gospel. Ours is a church of the smoking flax, of the mixture of wheat and tares. Critics may say that we blunt the edge of the Gospel and become Laodicean. We reply that we do not despise the hesitant and half-believing, because the deeper we look into human lives the more often we discern the glowing embers of faith.”

It is not for us to decide who is and who isn’t a Christian. It is for us to be welcoming, and beckoning; to fan the flames of faith. It is for us to be ‘honest to God’, in our earthly pilgrimage; to live out our lives with integrity.

We rejoice with some of the saints who have gone before, and with many of our brothers and sisters today, who firmly believe and give us an example of joyful devotion to Christ.

Indeed, we must preach for conversion and invite men and women to take up their cross and follow Christ. It is a Gospel imperative. There are many whose lives will be revolutionised by an encounter with our risen Lord.

Yet we must always acknowledge that God is bigger than all of our dogma and human institutions, and that sometimes we can see God more clearly in the lives of others than they can see him in themselves. They dare not believe what is to us, at least much of the time, so obvious.

We are grateful to God for the gifts he endowed on men like Ralph Vaughan Williams, or women like Iris Murdoch; who struggled with any conventional Christian faith, yet continue to nurture the faith of so many of us.

Walking with honesty and integrity was a difficult path for them, as it was for Jeremiah and for John Bunyan, and as it is for all of us as we take up our cross and follow Christ.

The collect we said yesterday for John Bunyan reminds us that, whatever our particular path through life, we will one day, with Jeremiah and Bunyan, and Vaughan Williams reach our true home:

God of peace,
who called your servant John Bunyan
to be valiant for truth:
grant that as strangers and pilgrims
we may at the last rejoice with all Christian people
in your heavenly city; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.

Hymns:
All creatures of our God and King
Words: after Francis of Assisi (1182-1226)
Music: ‘Lasst uns erfreuen’, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
Take up thy cross, the Saviour said
Words: Charles William Everest (1814-1877)
Music: ‘Deo Gracias’, English 15th C, arr. Ralph Vaughan Williams
Father, hear the prayer we offer
Words: Love Maria Willis (1924-1908)
Music: ‘Sussex’, trad English melody adapted by Ralph Vaughan Williams
I heard the voice of Jesus say
Words: Horatius Bonar(1808-89)
Music: ‘Kingsfold’, adapted from Eng folk song by Ralph Vaughan Williams

This is the truth sent from above 
The truth of God, the God of love
Therefore don't turn me from your door 
But hearken will both rich and poor

The first thing that I do relate 
Is that God did man create
The next thing which to you I'll tell 
Woman was made with man to dwell


And after that, 'twas God's own choice 
To place them both in Paradise,
There to remain of evil free 
Except they ate of such a tree.

But they did eat, which was a sin, 
And so their ruin did begin,
Ruined themselves, both you and me, 
And all of their posterity.

Thus we were heirs to endless woes 
Till God and Lord did interpose
And so a promise soon did run 
That He would redeem us by His Son.

And at that season of the year 
Our blessed redeemer did appear
He here did live and here did preach 
And many thousands he did teach

Thus He in love to us behaved 
To show us how we must be saved
And if you want to know the way 
Be pleased to hear what He did say.