Faith Can Be Hard Work: Sermon Preached on 10th May 2026 (Sixth Sunday of Easter)

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Acts 17.22–31, John 14.15–21

“That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him…” 

Mother Teresa was probably the world’s most famous Christian in the late 20^th Century. The ‘Missionaries of Charity’ she founded sought to be an expression of God’s love for the whole human race, beginning by serving the sickest and poorest in the slums of Kolkata, a city where fewer than one in a hundred people are Christian. Initially she was little known outside India, but in 1969 the BBC sent Malcolm Muggeridge and a camera crew to make a documentary about her, and she became world famous. She attracted both admirers and detractors in abundance. Indeed, many people both admired her works and disagreed with some of her attitudes at the same time – I know that, because I was one of them. But there was no doubting her commitment to giving her life to serving people who many would prefer to ignore.

You might think that such works were inspired by an unshakable faith. So it might surprise you that Mother Teresa experienced a profound sense of God’s absence for half a century.

“Even deep down”, she wrote, “there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. … When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul.”

From 1948 until her death in 1997, Mother Teresa experienced this spiritual emptiness with only a five-week respite in 1958. Nonetheless, she pressed on with a life that could have been simpler and more comfortable, clinging to faith through habit and endurance even when her soul had run dry.

In our first reading today, St Paul tells his audience of clever intellectuals in Athens that God made us so we could seek Him, feeling our way towards finding Him; and even though we often experience ourselves as groping towards God like this, Paul says that he is never far from any of us.

There are times in my life when I feel far from God – but not many. Sometimes I’ve been angry with God and told Him so. There was a period when I asked Him to take my faith away from me because I was so disgusted with the Church. But rarely have I felt God to be absent. In the times when I don’t sense God’s presence, it is because I’m distracted and not paying attention – and once I start paying attention, He is there.

But this is a gift, something that God has given me. I have done nothing to earn it, still less to deserve it. I would hate to lose it – as Mother Teresa lost her sense of God’s presence in her late thirties – so please pray that I might keep it.

But does it make me a better Christian than someone who struggles with their faith? Does it make me better than someone who sticks with Church and sticks with trying to live according to Christ’s teachings, even though they may rarely sense God’s presence or may struggle with some of the supernatural teachings of the Church? No, I would say probably the opposite. Does it make me a better person than someone of another faith, or an atheist, who lives a life dedicated to the service of others? Not at all. We Christians have neither a monopoly on goodness nor an inoculation against wickedness – and Jesus Christ never told us we would.

The reason I brought up something that might sound dangerously like bragging is that, as my faith matured in my late teens and early twenties, it felt like the Church – at least the liberal and rather intellectual parts of it that I felt comfortable in – celebrated doubt as somehow being particularly virtuous. With hindsight, I even suppressed the natural faith I possessed because I wanted to be an intellectually serious and broad-minded Christian too. That was a mistake. A transparent and trusting faith is a precious gift from God: if you have such a faith, treasure it, don’t spurn it.

But it doesn’t make you a better person or better Christian. In fact, it may be in the hard work of struggling to keep faith kindled when God seems remote and rightly dismissed by the world that spiritual muscles are built up.

That spiritual muscle will be needed – because the faith worth having does not run away from its harder doctrines. Paul says to those same Athenian intellectuals that God “hath appointed a day, in which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained”. The Father has set a day when Jesus Christ will judge the world.

In our culture, we’re mortally afraid of the idea of judgement. Certainly judgementalism is only permitted in two circumstances: if a right-wing newspaper is judging a celebrity or someone on benefits; or if a left-wing person is judging people who read right-wing newspapers. And, in my experience as a priest, the merest mention of the possibility of divine judgement, still horrifies and slightly frightens most people, even those who think they consider the very idea of God to be ridiculous.

But without divine judgement, there can be no justice for all those billions whose lives in this world were marked by pitiless injustice. There are plenty of people whom I find it hard to imagine in heaven. Currently before the courts are two men charged with murdering Ian Watkins, the Welsh rock musician imprisoned for the rape of babies; the accused were also serving sentences for grotesque violence against the entirely innocent.

Rabbi Lionel Blue once said that after we die, God will sit us on His knee and tell us what our life was really about – and that will be our heaven and our hell. Then the party starts. Hmmmm. Well, I’m not sure that works too well for Ian Watkins, or Hitler. It’s a rather twee costume for a deeply unjust understanding of the universe – a universe where the wicked get away with it and their victims are expected to party. I should hardly need to tell a rabbi that a view of divine justice that can’t survive Auschwitz hasn’t resolved the problem of evil, but put it in a party frock.

Of course, there is a little bit of wickedness in all of us. Perhaps that’s why the idea of judgement scares us. But it shouldn’t. While it is not for us to know whether, in the end, all souls will be redeemed, we do know that He who will judge us is the same Jesus Christ who died on the Cross to save us. Remember that if you truly and sincerely confess your sins to God at the start of any service of Holy Communion, privately between you and God, and genuinely intend to lead a new life, the priest will pronounce God’s absolution of them. If you feel you need some more formal process of personal confession, you can always ask to see me or another priest.

And if you struggle to feel God’s presence, remember that one thing you won’t be judged on is whether or not you have an instinctive sense of God’s presence. In our Gospel reading, which comes from the last things Christ taught His disciples on the night before He died, he says it is those who keep His commandments, not those who get good feelings from Him, who are those who love and are loved by Him. What are those commandments? He Himself summarised them in words we used a few minutes ago: love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength – sticking at it even when it doesn’t come easily – and love your neighbour as yourself.

You don’t need to be Mother Teresa. The Christ who loved Peter and Paul knew that we weren’t perfect and would often fail. You just need to keep getting up when you stumble, keep turning from the darkness within you towards the light, and keep trusting that the God who made you in love wishes to love you forever.

Now thanks be to God the Father, who has given us the victory through Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.