The Redemption of Moses/Faith
1992 (Year C) 8 November / Pentecost 22
St Peter de Beauvoir Town
Last week, the young people preparing for confirmation, were encouraged to see what the impact of their beliefs might have on their lives. They were, in effect, being asked to see that if they stood up and said that they believed something here in church that it meant that they should behave in a particular way when they left. They were beginning to think about what implications the gospel might have for them. One said that it would mean that she would pray every night, another that she would not let her friend’s sister upset her and another that he wasn’t going to swear all week. They were making a start.
It’s very hard for us let alone these young people to make these connections. Tiredness, lack of imagination, insufficient understanding, all conspire to persuade us that in fact connections don’t exist. And we already live in a fragmented world, where it’s often difficult to see the consequences of our actions.
In creation it’s made worse because we are divorced from basic means of production so much so that when we shop it’s hard even to think where the food we are buying comes from. Connections there are hard to see. It’s been going on for so long now that the fragmentation and disjointedness we experience feels almost as if it’s how it should be.
The ability to make connections, see the patterns and links between God and creation seems to me to be a gift of the spirit. Some seem to be able to do it without any effort at all and some traditions are more skilled at it than others. We appear to have it at best partially. We are blinkered. Our lives fragmented, we can’t see beyond ourselves and our own concerns. Often even those are not all that clear.
Let me tell you a story. One of the first acts of Civil Disobedience in the Civil Rights Movement in America was a strike by black people in Montgomery, Alabama. They boycotted the buses because the buses were segregated. During the boycott which lasted eleven months, a taxi service was organised by black people to make their lives easier, because often they had further to travel for they lived on the edges of the town. An old woman was seen walking along the road. The taxi stopped and she was offered a lift. She refused gently but firmly and when asked why said clearly, ‘I’m not walking for myself. I’m walking for my children and my grandchildren.’
This gift of the spirit – the ability to make connections needs to be encouraged, particularly in the face of experience. The ability to make these links begins to fade dramatically in the face of hardship, yet it is at precisely this point that the ability becomes most necessary. Walking back and forwards to the town centre would soon wear any connections I could see away. And the gift, if it’s not fed and fostered it will die.
Faith enables the ability to see connections to continue. Faith persuades us that things might not always remain as they are. Faith kept the old woman walking. She might not have seen the changes but she was going to ensure, as far as she could, that her children and grandchildren would.
Faith enables us to see that even in the face of what might seem a great fragmented mess that there are patterns, there are connections and that there are links between God and creation. Faith for Moses’ parents, in the end overcomes fear, it trusted in Abraham in the face of uncertainty, it believed in the Israelites, that God has the power to act and change things now and in the future.
Moreover faith brings excitement to our lives and it’s not just confined to those who are presently undergoing suffering and persecution. I find it incredibly exciting trying to work out these connections in my own life, now that I’ve realised that the things of God are not just to do with my head, like they told me in the wretched college I went to, but involve every bit of me. Seeing others do it for themselves in their lives and discovering that they are often way ahead of me is an amazing inspiration. For me it means that to be a Christian is not the dull boring pastime that many would say it is. It is dynamic. It gives life. It hopes for the future from what is sees and knows of the present.
May God bless our journey of faith and in the end may it lead us to that kingdom where he lives and reigns for ever. AMEN