Tenth Sunday after Trinity

You have only one more week to go and see Anthony Gormley’s exhibition Blind Light at the Hayward Gallery. It closes next Sunday, and if you haven’t already bought a ticket then I urge you to do so.

The feature that’s caught the public imagination is a rectangular glass box filled with cloud-like mist. Into this the visitor walks. It’s a remarkable experience. The fog immediately swirls around; visibility drops to a matter of inches; and sound becomes disoriented and dislocated. Twenty-five are allowed in at any one time, but once you are in you wouldn’t know if two Premier League football teams were in there with you. Engulfed in the mist, sense is rendered useless and the visitor wanders alone.

Outside the Hayward is a rather different box, comprising water jets springing up from the floor to a height of eight feet. These are arranged so as to make up walls of water around the four sides of the box, with internal walls to make up four rooms. The walls spring up and then subside at random, so the visitor can enter when an external wall is down, and suddenly find himself a prisoner within. Then an internal wall subsides and he can move quickly to the next room. There’s a skill in choosing the right move, and in moving sufficiently quickly to avoid a soaking (a skill which may visitors plainly did not possess).

Abram’s exchange with God, heard as our Old Testament reading this morning, marks a paradigm shift in the history of ancient Israel. At such moments things change: the collective narrative or self-consciousness of a community turns a page. I suppose that the Berlin Wall provides us with two such moments in our own times, in its creation and in its demolition. In this exchange Abram hears God’s promise that he will be the father of many, and he believes it. His readiness to believe becomes the cornerstone of the covenant between Israel and Yahweh and also the crux of the European Reformations. Abram’s faith is credited to him as righteousness. So our faith is credited to us as righteousness. We are justified by faith, and by faith alone.

Which, of course, leaves us with the ticklish question of what faith really is. To some, it’s a word that represents a visit to Anthony Gormley’s box. Faith means flailing around in a world of misty uncertainty. For others it represents the ducking and diving of the water installation. Faith means the calculated (and rather cynical) judgement of how best to avoid a drenching. And for others it does not represent anything that can be illustrated by a sculpture. Faith means acknowledging, perhaps from the comfort of one’s own armchair, the irrefutable truth that Anthony Gormley does have an exhibition in London at present. Faith is the assent of the human intellect to a proposition put before it.

Yet for the author of the letter to the Hebrews faith represents none of these. The letter looks back to that paradigm shift in the nation’s life, the moment of Abram’s exchange with Yahweh. Faith for the letter’s author means Abram leaving his father’s land and venturing into the unknown. It means Abram sojourning under canvas in the land he has been promised. It means Abram eventually receiving the gift of a child despite his old age. In other words, faith is what happens when God’s promise invites and invokes a response. Faith involves movement from God, and movement from us.

So the third caricature, of faith as intellectual assent, must bite the dust immediately. We can believe in all sorts of things, in the sense of admitting their existence or allowing their efficacy: flying saucers, perhaps, or the superiority of a 1984 vintage, or world peace. But our lives are changed by none of these; they cost us nothing if they remain at the level of dispassionate mental activity. In no sense are they are they a matter of faith. Had Abram simply believed in God in the sense that you or I believe that the chemical formula for water is H2O then I don’t suppose he would ever have left Ur of the Chaldeans.

Nor will the second caricature - faith as a game of risk, of dodging from room to room and evading the water jets - detain us for long. The second sentence of today’s Gospel dispels any notion of faith as insurance, as a self-serving exercise in threat management. The words of Jesus are stark: in response to God’s promise, he urges, ‘sell your possessions and give alms’. That is faith. There is little room for the tactically faithful.

And as for the first caricature: well, there’s not much fog about what Jesus teaches. He’s quite clear. Those who follow him are to live lives of expectant watchfulness, lives lived in the knowledge not simply that God is, but that he is likely to tap us on the shoulder as he did our ancestor Abram. Coming as suddenly as a thief in the night, he will ask of us that we too make hard choices and real sacrifices.

But perhaps I have misread the symbolism of those two works of art. Perhaps they have something to teach us about the life of faith after all. Perhaps through the water box we could learn the attentiveness of which Jesus speaks. We watch for the moment when we can move. A wall of water subsides, and we cross quickly to the next room. Thus are we called to keep a constant look-out and to follow where God leads, his children moving perpetually forwards, just as did Abraham and Moses. Perhaps through the mist box we could learn the faithfulness of the one in whom we have faith. As we plunge into the fog of Blind Light we see not as a stumbling journey into the unknown, but a reception into the mystery of the divine. The cloud is not hostile; it is a welcoming companion. It is, in fact, the presence of God, surrounding us on every side and accompanying us as we discern our path, set our feet upon it, and walk the path of faith. Amen.


Sunday 12 August 2007
Genesis 15: 1-6;
Hebrews 11: 1-3, 8-16;
Luke 12: 32-40