Ash Wednesday 2008: We believe in God the Father Almighty

‘We believe in God the Father Almighty’.

Tonight we begin our series of Lenten addresses exploring the doctrines of the Christian creeds, and doing so through the prism of Rowan Williams’s book, Tokens of Trust.

In the story of the bugging of a confidential conversation between a Member of Parliament and his imprisoned constituent there could be no more poignant illustration of the disintegration of our ability to trust one another. The disintegration of trust has many layers and the bugging story offers many layers for our suspicion to work at: terrorists, Muslims, politicians, the security services and the media.

Our suspicion is not simply that these individuals, groups and agencies are not quite on our side, that they are less than transparent or less than honest. It is, as Rowan Williams observes, that they are in fact likely to be working against us, serving their own interests and ignoring ours. This leaves us with an increasing sense of our isolation, adrift on a hostile ocean, where we can afford to trust only what we see and know for ourselves, directly.

This trend is of colossal significance for the Church, which opens its ancient statement of faith with the words with which I began: ‘We believe in God the Father Almighty’. When the Church invites us to declare our belief in God she is in fact asking us to declare our trust in God. We need to be very clear about this. Religion’s modern detractors may ridicule ‘the God hypothesis’, and too often religion’s defenders get drawn into a debate as intractable as it is interminable. But belief in God is not the same as belief in flying saucers. It is not intellectual assent to a proposition that there is something big ‘out there’. Belief in God is willingness to trust God or the possibility of God; willingness to give space to God and to the possibility of God; willingness to leave oneself open to God and to the possibility of God.

Nor, as an aside, is belief in God the same as belief in the existence of God. I rather enjoy agreeing with people who tell me that they don’t believe God exists. Existence is surely the condition of created things within the spatio-temporal universe. Existence is the condition of pews and books and kettles and cats. God is the source of existence, the one who brings existence out of nothing, the one through who all other things exist. We are getting God wrong if we line God up alongside other things, a thing existing, a thing amongst things.

But if trust is what the Church invites us to have in this God then why should we listen? We don’t trust our bishops. What is trustworthy about God?

Rowan Williams takes us first to Saint Paul’s convictions about Jesus Christ, which are that in his Son God has done what neither MI5, nor the Cabinet, nor the Daily Mail ever seem capable of doing. In Jesus God has revealed his purposes for the world and made them clear. His purposes are the peaceful unity of all created things, joined in one unending song of praise. If Jesus sets out a pattern of faithful self-giving to God then he thereby sets out a pattern for all God’s creatures. God does not have ulterior motives or hidden schemes. From eternity he has willed our unity in praise. We have nothing to fear; nothing to be suspicious of, nothing to hide from.

Indeed, argues Williams, God as the Creed conceives of God would be incapable of such ulterior motives or hidden schemes. For God is complete; God is perfect. He acts to create the world not because he needs to, not because he is lonely or somehow unfinished, but because of the overflowing abundance of his love. God’s creation is pure, unlimited gift. It cannot be a Trojan horse for dark schemes.

That is worth remembering, because ‘Almighty’ sounds dangerous. Our suspicious age mistrusts any power at all, and power that is advertised as unlimited is even less likely to command our attention and respect. Again, religion’s detractors ridicule the notion of an omnipotent power in the sky, arbitrary, unpredictable and unreliable, needing to be alternately praised and appeased by quavering subjects on earth below. The Creed’s presentation of a complete and perfect God tends against that caricature, of course, but so too does the very word ‘almighty’. The Greek word means ‘ruler of everything’ or ‘holder of everything’, and the implication, as Rowan Williams puts it is that: ‘there is nowhere God is powerless, absent or irrelevant; no situation in the universe in the face of which God is at a loss’. God’s almightiness means that God has unlimited power to be there, to be faithful to and for the world.

All of that is pretty convincing. This God – this sort of God – is worth trusting. But is this God – this sort of God – true? Rowan Williams’s answer poses us a challenge for Lent. He points to human individuals who have been ready, in his words, to take responsibility for God, people whose lives have spoken to others of the reality of God. They aren’t his examples, but I’m never able to get out of my head Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, the Anglican priest who took cigarettes to the men in the trenches of the Western Front; and Maximilian Kolbe, the Franciscan who went cheerfully into the gas chambers in place of someone who was too frightened. This age of suspicion and mistrust craves the authenticity of personal witness, and loves nothing more than the dramas of reality television. What might persuade this age that God is true is seeing the lives of other people and the worlds they inhabit and wanting our lives and our worlds to be a little more like theirs.

Lent invites us on a journey into the wilderness, a stepping-out in trust. Are we prepared to take responsibility for God the Father Almighty in these forty days? Amen.