Sermon Archive
Who can you trust?
Sermon preached by Kenneth Boyd at Holy Communion on 1 June 2003
Acts 1.15-17, 1-26 ; 1 John 5.13 ; John 17.6-19
Who can you trust? Reading last week's newspapers, that question was hard to avoid. Were those who reluctantly supported the invasion of Iraq because of the threat of weapons of mass destruction deceived by the American and British Governments? The cacophony of conflicting claims and counterclaims made it very difficult for an unprejudiced reader to know who to trust. For not just the politicians, but also the commentators on these issues have agendas and ambitions of their own. But then too, the idea that any of us is an unprejudiced reader itself may be an illusion. Most of us have our own prejudices; and the most dangerous of these, perhaps, is the prejudice that we are not prejudiced.
But if we are all prejudiced, what hope have we of ever knowing the truth about anything? Well there is, of course, science. 'What is known scientifically', someone has said, 'can be demonstrated and proven in such a way that any reasonable person at all capable of understanding the matter cannot evade the compelling truth of it.' True enough. But science isn't much help when it comes to some of the questions we are most interested in. Even if you got a politician to submit to a scientific lie detector test, the chances are that he would claim he was being asked the wrong question, or that the question was being framed in the wrong way. And in many cases the politician might be right. There often are no straight or simple, let alone scientific, answers to many of the complex questions that politicians have to deal with. Much depends on how these questions are interpreted, and on many of the most important issues in politics, it is, as someone has said, 'interpretation all the way down'. In the end we all may have to await the judgement of history. But then, can we trust the historians? As Churchill once remarked about a controversial policy he was engaged in: 'I prefer to leave the judgement on that to history - especially as I propose to write that history myself.'
One reason then, why it can be difficult to know who to trust about such questions, is that few of the politicians or commentators to whom we might turn for trustworthy advice, are impartial or disinterested. 'They are just in it for themselves', cynics may say. From the point of view of the politicians and commentators, of course, that may seem unfair. Everyone, they may reply, has to make a living, but that doesn't mean they can't do good at the same time as doing well. Yet as long as some people and some countries do better than others, and especially as long as some do much better, those who are poorer and less advantaged probably will always be wary of trusting the wealthy and powerful.
Religion too, often is not trusted. Many people are wary of the Church, partly because as a human organisation it has often been part of the secular power structure; but nowadays perhaps more often because it seems to be making claims about matters of fact for which there is no scientific evidence. In the modern world, for example, last week's celebration of the Ascension may seem a supreme example of that. How on earth can anyone believe in anything so physically impossible?
Yet countless Christians, even while agreeing that representations of the Ascension show something physically impossible, nevertheless trust in the reality of the Ascension; and this trust has often been strongest not among the wealthy and powerful, but among the poor and disadvantaged. To understand how this can be, perhaps we need to ask what it actually is that engenders trust.
Very young children, unless they are unfortunate, trust their parents as a matter of unreflective experience. But in adult life we often have no such experience on which to decide whether or not to trust another person as a potential friend or life partner; and if we wait for the other person to prove that they are trustworthy before we begin to trust them, we may have to wait forever. For trust to grow, it is necessary first to begin to trust another person who in the end may turn out not to be trustworthy. For trust to develop, in other words, you must first run the risk of being deceived, rejected and hurt.
The relevance of this to religious faith perhaps is obvious. Faith depends on how we understand the ultimate questions about human existence. On the one hand, we may decide that the most all-encompassing answers to all questions must be objective ones, matters of fact that can be determined in scientific terms. In that case we will require evidence for any answers offered, before we decide whether or not to trust them. But precisely because scientific answers to ultimate questions are not yet and may never be available, that means that we will have to remain forever agnostic about them.
On the other hand, we may reasonably doubt whether the most all-encompassing answers to our ultimate questions can be determined objectively by human understanding - which after all is itself part of what it seeks to understand and thus cannot stand outside it, as it were, to get an objective view. In that case, we may equally reasonably suspect that the ultimate questions are less like scientific ones, than like questions to us about trusting others; and hence that the way to discover the truth is to be willing to go beyond the evidence, just as we have to do when we begin to trust another person. Thereby, of course, we run the risk of being deceived, rejected or hurt, by ending up disillusioned in an impersonal universe. But if, from fear of that, we do not run the risk, we also lose the opportunity of discovering the kind of truth that can only be discovered through trust.
That certainly is the experience of the community to which we belong. The Church originated in events long ago about which we have little or no objective knowledge. All we have is the testimony of people who were not wealthy or powerful, people who probably had not much reason to trust anyone. In the scriptures, they tell us how they began to trust that they were being trusted by a living reality above and beyond their understanding. Their trust was engendered by their experience of a particular man; and their trust in him was confirmed by their experience of his Spirit with and within them. At the heart of their good news was that the reality they experienced in Christ, in trusting them, had run the risk of being deceived, rejected and hurt, and had indeed suffered the worst consequences of that - and yet he trusted them still. And such we know also to be the history of the Church and humanity - a long, apparently endless history of the vision of Christ being deadened by dogma and betrayed by man's inhumanity to man - and yet, in the midst of that, of trust in God's love and forgiveness being repeatedly rekindled and growing in the hearts and minds of men and women who were prepared to make that first motion of trust, towards God and towards one another, and whose trust was confirmed by their experience of Christ's Spirit with and within them, encouraging them to go on in faith and mutual forgiveness and love.
Today, we have no facts we can prove about Christ's Ascension, only faith in it, sustained by the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit - faith ascending into the mystery from whom we come, to whom we shall return. Who can you trust? In the political arena we may not know how to answer, and Christians may give conflicting answers. But where the ultimate issues are concerned, the question is not a theoretical but a personal one, the answer glimpsed in time, but known fully only in eternity. In his 'Ascension Hymn' the 17th century poet Henry Vaughan gives wings to that mysterious, trust-rekindling hope in Christ:
He alone
And none else can
Bring bone to bone
And rebuild man,
And by his all subduing might
Make clay ascend more quick than light.
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