Believing in God is like catching a plane or falling in love – it require trust, risk and a leap of faith, Dr Barry Morgan said in his sermon at Llandaff Cathedral on Easter Sunday.
He said, “Without a degree of faith and trust, no one would fall in love, neither would any of us catch a plane or go for an operation or allow our children to walk to school. All these are undertaken in trust and contain an element of risk. Belief in God, faith, is very similar.”
But faith, he said, can transform lives and if we want proof of God we should look for “resurrection moments” – signs that show transformation and a confidence in a better world – rather than hard facts or knockdown arguments.
“There are Resurrection moments when parents find it in their hearts to forgive their children’s murderers; where church communities cease to look after their own interests and defend the rights of others; where people stand up for truth, justice and integrity at great personal cost across the globe; and where attitudes that limit and frustrate, imprison, degrade and dehumanise people are overcome. Believing in resurrection is refusing to accept the world as it is but knowing it can be changed, it can be transfigured.”
Just as the transformed lives of Christ’s disciples after the Resurrection brought people to God, so people will be drawn to God if they see faith at work in Christians today.
Dr Morgan said, “If people see in us the seeds of resurrection life, they too have a model for its living reality and might similarly be transformed. If people see in our lives hope overcoming despair, light replacing darkness, love conquering hate, and lives being transformed, they too might begin to believe that Jesus is truly risen from the dead and that His kingdom has begun to be inaugurated.”
We reproduce the full text of the sermon below:
Sermon – The Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan
For many people believing in God, having a faith, is impossibly difficult. They want proof or tangible signs of his existence. Yet when you think about it most things we do in life have an element of trust, of faith. Crossing the road, catching a plane, being in love, assume faith and trust. Love cannot be proved but we each know what it is, how it makes us feel. Scientists affirm that the greatest leaps forward in scientific breakthroughs have relied in the end on an element of faith and risk, and they’ve happened almost by accident.
So when John Humphries, Radio 4’s ‘Today’ presenter, in a recent book entitled ‘In God We Doubt’, he says that he has spent his life trying to believe in God but has come to the conclusion that, for him, such a belief is impossible because it is unprovable, I felt he was missing the point. Humphries wants provable certainty – a knockdown argument that can persuade him without a shadow of a doubt of God’s existence.
“The trouble is”, Humphries writes, “that if you say that there is order, beauty and love in the universe pointing to a creator, there are such as things as hatred, destruction and violence which mitigate against a belief in God. That means” he says “that you have to decide on whether to believe on the balance of probabilities. You can’t have absolute certainty” .
It reminded me of a play by the atheist philosopher, A. C. Grayling, called ‘On Religion’. In that play one character says that the night before he got married his brother sat him down in an Indian Restaurant and after too many beers got him to make a list on a table napkin of why this girl was the right person for him to marry. One side of the napkin had all the pros and the other side the cons. The playwright goes on, “what was fascinating about the list was that nothing I could write down – kind, beautiful, warm, sexy, could ever add up to ‘I love her’”.
Why? Because this character realised that you could never rationally and provably move from a list of strong attributes, without a leap of faith, to saying that you loved somebody.
And that’s because there would always be negative things to be said about the person but an argument could also be advanced for love being a fiction, a function of human need, a function of biology and selfish genes – a kind of chemistry of the brain. There is no hard evidence you can produce to prove that you love another person. It is, in the end, a matter of the heart as well as the head.
Love entails an element of risk. That does not make it irrational or unreasonable, but it is an act of faith that is at the same time more profound than reason and simpler than reason. It is about the engagement of the heart. Without a degree of faith and trust, no one would fall in love, neither would any of us catch a plane or go for an operation or allow their children to walk to school. All these are undertaken in trust and contain an element of risk. Belief in God, faith, is very similar.
The writer and novelist A. N. Wilson once trained for the ordained ministry of the Anglican Church. He then lost his faith completely, so much so that he wrote articles railing against Christianity and a book on Jesus attempting to show that he was no more than a failed prophet. And yet, Wilson says that gradually over the last few years, he has moved from being a knocker of the faith and totally anti-religious to being a believer again. “His reconversion”, he says, “has surprised no-one more than himself” and he goes on to say that he ought not to have been surprised because, as he puts it, “we, as human beings, are more than the sum of our parts – we are spiritual beings”.
So he says “every inner prompting of conscience, every glimmering sense of beauty, every response we make to music, every experience we have of love, be it physical, sexual, family or love of friends, reminds us of this fact. We are not just a collection of chemicals. How are we capable of love, heroism or poetry if we are simply animated pieces of meat? There is more to life than we can see or prove. Faith, like love, is to make more of a commitment than one can rationally explain”.
What is true of faith in general, is particularly true when it comes to belief in the resurrection of Jesus. There is no way of proving it. It is faith exemplified. For a start, He only appeared to those who already believed and trusted in Him. He did not appear to Herod or Pilate or the Pharisees or the High Priest who saw him only as a human troublemaker. The witnesses to his resurrection, the friends to whom he appeared, were, therefore, hardly unbiased.
You will recall the story of Lazarus and the rich man in the Gospel of Luke. Lazarus had spent his whole time at the gates of the rich man begging. And then suddenly the tables are reversed were they both die. Lazarus was carried off to Abraham’s bosom and the rich man was in Hades in torment. He saw Abraham and Lazarus and he asked Abraham for Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water to cool his tongue. But Abraham said, “well, you’ve had your good times, now Lazarus is having his”. And then the rich man begged him to send Lazarus to his five brothers to warn them of the place of torment to come if they don’t change their selfish ways. The rich man insisted that only if someone appeared to them from beyond the grave would they repent. Abraham’s response was “if they won’t heed Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead”.
And what happens? When Jesus is raised from the dead not everyone IS convinced. If people had not acknowledged Jesus in life, why should resurrection make a difference, because there would always be an alternative explanation of it – mistaken identity, hallucination, wish fulfilment, even fabrication, for after all no-one had actually been present when Jesus was raised from the dead. There was no proof that a trick had not been played on those who saw him afterwards.
Now of course there are good rational reasons for believing in the resurrection of Jesus, there is evidence that it really happened. Jesus appeared to many people, among them the disciples who at his crucifixion were so frightened that they ran away. They had been crushed by Jesus’ death. After his appearances to them, they were however willing to die for Him. They preached his Gospel fervently. They were totally changed people and preached fearlessly throughout the known world. Something happened to them to make that possible.
The New Testament says it was the resurrection of Jesus. You might say – they were hallucinating – they saw what they were expecting to see. In fact, the disciples were not expecting the resurrection at all. They were preparing to go back to their former ways of earning a living. They’d given up all hope when Jesus was crucified.
The resurrection changed the disciples, not just in their willingness to go and preach the Gospel, but it changed them as people. They didn’t just proclaim it but lived out a resurrection kind of life. They realised that in being raised from death to eternal life by God, Jesus had heralded in a new world order. Whereas some of the Jews of Jesus’ day believed that resurrection would happen at the end of time, a new world of prosperity and peace, the disciples said that with the resurrection of Jesus that end time had already begun. In Him, a new age had dawned and therefore a new way of living had been inaugurated by Him in which He invited His followers to join. Their faith not only changed them as individuals but enabled them to act in a new way.
So the disciples of Jesus began to live out His resurrection life. Steven forgave his enemies as Jesus had done. Many of the Apostles were martyred for their faith whereas before they had just run away. Like Jesus, they refused to hit back at their persecutors. They shared things with one another and gave to the poor and needy. They cared for the marginalised, less privileged, the ignored in their community. And seeing this new kind of life in action brought others to the faith.
As with them, so with us. If people see in us the seeds of resurrection life, they too have a model for its living reality and might similarly be transformed. If people see in our lives hope overcoming despair, light replacing darkness, love conquering hate, and lives being transformed, they too might begin to believe that Jesus is truly risen from the dead and that His kingdom has begun to be inaugurated.
Yes, I know that in one sense nothing much in the world seems to have changed over the millennia. There are still conflicts and war, greed, selfishness and poverty. But there are also resurrection moments when parents find it in their hearts to forgive their children’s murderers; where church communities cease to look after just their own interests and defend the rights of others; where people stand up for truth, justice and integrity at great personal cost across the globe; and where attitudes that limit and frustrate, imprison, degrade and dehumanise people are overcome. I recently dedicated a new building in Aberdare called “Valley of Hope”. Run by the Church Army it tries to help those who are homeless, ex offenders, substance abusers, and others who have come to believe that their lives are of no value. ‘Valley of Hope’ is one powerful example of the church meeting people in desperate straits and renewing them, offering them skills and hope, a chance of resurrection. Believing in resurrection is refusing to accept the world as it is but that it can be changed, it can be transfigured.
I think that leap of faith is a risk worth taking for I believe that Christ is risen from the dead and He makes all things new.
