Sermon by Mark Wakefield on May 18 2008
Isaiah 40:12-17, 27-end/2 Corinthians 13:11-end/Matthew 28:16-20 

I suppose you might see it as a sign of the times that if you go into almost any bookshop in search of a religious book these days you’ll find pretty thin pickings. When I was browsing in my local bookshop the other day – which, by any standards, is a pretty good one – there was remarkably little to look at. There could have been no more than five or six narrow shelves in all and what was on offer covered not just Christianity but all the major religions.

Sad as this may seem, I don’t think that it should in any way be taken to mean that there is any lessening of the human need for wholeness, peace and integration that religion tries to meet. Quite the contrary, because while the shelf space devoted to religion may have shrunk, that devoted to books on psychology, personal development and the vague, rather new agey category of “mind, body and spirit” have all expanded, often dramatically so.

This shouldn’t surprise us. Are people any happier than they were 20,30 or 40 years ago? I don’t think so. If anything, the gathering pace of life in rich societies such as ours is causing distress and dysfunction on a massive scale. It’s precisely this sense of unease and dislocation that many of these books promise to put right, whether you choose “The Self- Esteem Bible” or the promising “How to Change Your Life in 7 Days” or, my favourite, “Awaken the Giant Within - How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Physical and Emotional Self”.

Are these just quick fixes for desperate people? I think we should beware of being snooty here because there are some really useful insights in some of these books, particularly those that draw on recent advances in psychology.

Take, for instance, the marshmallow test which features in a great book called “Emotional Intelligence”. During the 1960s a team of researchers carried out a test on a group of 4 year olds. The children were told that if they could wait 15 or 20 minutes or so they could have two marshmallows but that if they couldn’t wait that long they could have only one but they could have it right away.

This is a challenge to try the soul of a 53 year old Assistant Curate, let alone a poor little 4 year old. And yet, remarkably, quite a number of these four year olds hung on for what must have seemed like an eternity and duly got their reward.

But the end of the story is much more remarkable. Some fourteen years later the researchers tracked down this same set of children. And what did they find? They found that the children who’d been able to resist temptation were, as adolescents, better adjusted, more socially competent, and much better able to cope with life’s frustrations, whereas the children who simply couldn’t exercise restraint were much less happy individuals – more withdrawn, easily upset and more inclined to be distrustful and resentful when things didn’t go their way.

To those of us with religious faith this offers fascinating confirmation of something that we know intuitively to be true: namely that self-restraint, patience and perseverance are priceless human virtues. For what is our faith but, in some senses, an exercise in delayed gratification – a belief that we must live our lives in the light of eternity and that the pain and injustice of this world will one day be explained and put right?

Gratifying as it is to have science confirm such a basic insight, the truth remains that for most of us, holding on to our faith when the going gets tough can seem the most impossible – even unreasonable – challenge.

A few weeks ago Will preached a marvellous sermon that was all the better for his remarkable honesty about the difficulty he has with prayer, a theme that Robert echoed in his valedictory sermon last week. In a spirit of entirely brotherly rivalry I’m going to make my own confession today about my spiritual life and it’s this: I HAVE DOUBTS. Not just small doubts but big doubts. When I’m confronted with dreadful events like the Burmese cyclone that was soon followed by the earthquake in China and ponder the unimagineable suffering experienced by the injured and the dying, the families who have lost their homes and livelihoods, the little children who have lost their parents – I doubt, I really do. And some times, admittedly only rarely, I doubt to the extent that I wonder whether I should set foot inside church at all.

And yet, the remarkable thing is that in saying all this I know that I am in very good company. Today’s gospel reading is one of the best known of all gospel readings: the great commission in Matthew in which the risen Jesus, just before his ascension, charges his disciples with making disciples of all the nations. There he is standing in front of them on a mountain side and Matthew tell us this:

“When they saw him they worshipped him; but some doubted.”

Quite extraordinary. So it wasn’t just doubting Thomas in John’s gospel who couldn’t believe his eyes – there were others as well. And yet did they go on to do as Jesus commanded them? You bet they did.

What this means, of course, is that we can dispense with the idea that doubt is anything other than an inevitable and – I would say – necessary part of a life of faith. And if that’s the case then the really important question is what we can do about it. It’s here, I think, that the importance of having some kind of discipline in our spiritual lives comes into play.

Now I know that the word “discipline” is not a particularly popular word. For we children of the 1960s, the generation that now – for good or ill – runs the world, it smacks of the oppressiveness of the Victorian era that still dominated the lives of our parents and seems the enemy of life and spontaneity. And yet, having the commitment to stick at something come what may can and does bring real benefits.

Your coming to church on a regular basis is a real discipline. I am sure there are some weeks when you probably wish you hadn’t, just as there’ll be others when you’re really glad you did. But the benefits of the worship, the nurture and support of other people, the time taken out of busy life to focus on the eternal - can only be known over time and that takes commitment.

But a life of faith can’t just be lived on Sundays. And this is where we come back to the really difficult subject of prayer where the truth is, we all struggle. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t important. Far from it.

One of the problems with prayer is that we too often tend to think that it’s only about talking to God about our needs and those of the world. While there’s definitely a place for this, prayer is, in reality, a much richer experience that encompasses praise and thanksgiving as well as silence and attentive listening to what the Spirit is trying tell us in our own hearts.

But perhaps the biggest problem with prayer is that people think that they’re on their own with it, and very quickly give up because it all seems so futile. But we really don’t need to feel this because there are some wonderful resources to help us. I must admit to you that despite being a Christian for more than 30 years I only really began to understand this a couple of years ago when I went on retreat for the first time in my life.

To begin with I was rather apprehensive about joining a small community of Augustinian monks and nuns for three days and feared that the regular prayer times of morning, lunchtime, early evening and bedtime would prove too much for me. As it happened, I loved it. At each, short service they used the Catholic prayer book or missal and there was something about the beauty of the words and the relaxed but reverent way in which they went about prayer and being quiet together that provided a structure and rhythm to the day that somehow lent life a different, peaceful and better perspective.

I’ve tried, ever since – not always successfully - to introduce more of this discipline into my life using the resources that we’ve got here in the Church of England. There’s the prayer book which can seem a bit daunting before you get to know your way around it but there are also lots of other sources of help, including the much shortened version of the prayer book especially designed for busy people that Robert bought me when I first came here and that I’ve found invaluable.

But I think the key point is that whatever works for you, if you want to grow in faith and hold firm in the face of inevitable doubts, you need to build some regular, fixed points into your day which, however short, help you to step aside from the busy-ness of life. And while you will have some of those wonderful mountain-top experiences, there’ll be other, bleaker times when all you’ll be able to do is muster the energy to say the words in front of you or sit in silence. And yet, whatever your feelings, that simple, steady discipline of regular observance will be an act of faith in itself.

We can draw some encouragement from modern psychology here which shows that making positive choices about the habits we adopt can change us for the better and that those that pray and meditate enjoy the real, personal benefits of a greater sense of peace and contentment.

But this isn’t just about us. What marks a religious approach to life apart from what we find in the countless secular self-help books on offer is that while they are focused solely on the individual and his or her needs, religion calls us into relationship with God. And in so doing, it places obligations on us.

We don’t simply pray because it’s good for us but because it is expected of us. This can sound off-putting but actually it’s the most glorious liberation. Because where otherwise we might be left to moulder in our own concerns and self-obsessions, instead we are called out of ourselves to acknowledge a broader and richer reality that lies in relationship with God.

So next time you feel the temptation to chuck it all in and grab as many of life’s marshmallows as you can by way of consolation for your lack of faith, remember these words from Matthew’s gospel:

“When they saw Jesus, they worshipped him; but some doubted.”

Amen