Readings – Hebrews 11: 1–3, 8–16; Luke 12:32–40
“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen”
“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen” – so writes the author of the Letter to the Hebrews. Faith and hope are intimately connected – they are the twin foundations for imagining a future that is better than the present.
We live in a society where faith is routinely derided as an unscientific delusion without evidence. Yet doing anything transformative requires us to dream dreams that go well beyond what the evidence will sustain; without faith we can only ever be anchored in a permanent present, unable to take risks because we’re afraid of going into uncharted territory, where there isn’t yet any evidence and we must rely on insight and inspiration.
Perhaps this is part of the reason why our culture seems to be so stagnant, trapped in an endless cycle of movie repeats and music that sounds like it could have been made thirty years ago. Our artists and musicians and writers and journalists are overwhelmed with data about what sells or what generates the clicks. Why take risks when you know what works? Even when the creatives themselves want to try something new out, the executives and editors have all the same data and seem to opt for profits over vision every time.
It seems that the more we know about the present, the less we are able to imagine an alternative to it. Drowning in numbers, we lack the sort of visions that can renew us into the future.
In practice, humanism has displaced Christianity as the official religion of this country. Of course, the Church of England still provides Christian liturgies for all the formal state occasions; but listen to the language of politicians of all parties, or our leading cultural figures, and it is almost always couched in the terms of humanism.
One of our cultural leading lights, Sandi Toksvig, gave the Archbishop of Canterbury a public ticking off this week about the Lambeth Conference. She was herself a humanist, she said, but she was sure that “the sort of message” Jesus wanted to send people was for them to “just be a good person”.
Just be a good person. That’s a charming sentiment – coming from a nursery school teacher, perhaps, or an eight year-old. It is genuinely startling to hear an intelligent person come to mature years and not observe that even good people sometimes do bad things – even when it is obvious what is good and what is not, which is not always the case.
I think that is another part of our present malaise – we tell ourselves that we’re good people, and indeed the official narrative seems to be that people are basically good unless they’ve been subject to some sort of horrific early childhood emotional trauma, or something like that. But we all know that we aren’t always good, indeed that we often hurt the ones we love the most, while that the people whom we love the most are often those who wound us most.