The Wager: Religion is Worth It!

Tonight we read from the story of Joseph. Let me leap forward to the end where Genesis sums it all up. After all the twists and turns, Joseph speaks to the brothers who had done him so much wrong: ‘even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good’.  Until now, even though Joseph has been reconciled to them, the outcome is not yet clear. Will he, the powerful Egyptian officer of state, treat them as family or as vassals?  What will forgiveness mean for him and for them?  Joseph reaches a true ‘my Lord and my God’ moment. “You intended evil…. God intended good”. In conspiracy and catastrophe, God has done all tings well.  

When is it a true act of faith to say ‘it was for the best, and good has come out of it’, and when is it just a thoughtless cliché to make us feel better about the bad things that happen?  We don’t say it, and shouldn’t say it, when we hear of a child who has been abused, or bystanders blown to pieces by a suicide bomber, or a pensioner murdered in her own home.  We condemn wickedness, and we do what we can to help its victims, but we try not to theorise because we know that words can make things worse as well as better. In the face of what is wrong or just bewildering, we won’t try to guess what God intends in the perplexing, inscrutable events of human life.  

Yet the instinct to find meanings is also part of being human. And this is where Joseph helps us with an insight of faith into life’s meaning.  Faith tells a story of how God has been moving within the ordinary processes of cause and effect to work his wise and loving purposes in the world.  It is not always apparent from the evidence: it’s faith that makes the connections. It takes the long view where we can only see the foreground. That brings strength and hope. It’s possible to pick up the pieces and carry on. 

I was talking once with a distinguished astronomer. ‘Where is the ground for your beliefs?’ he asked.  I said it was as much a matter of the heart as the head, for the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.  I went on to say that I had a strong instinct what my life would have become if I had not been a Christian. I would have been only half alive, and served the wrong gods.  Now I have been a Christian for fifty three years and a priest for more than forty, I have staked my whole adult life on Christianity being true.  As my retrospect lengthens, I echo Joseph’s words. God did indeed intend it for good.  But they are still said in faith.  Suppose Christianity turned out to be a fantasy?  Would my life have been wasted?  I have only this one life to live. I can’t go back and start again, choose a different ladder to climb up on. We stake our lives on the beliefs and values that matter to us.  Pascal’s Wager taught us how much of an act of trust faith is.

You may recall, a few years ago, the slogan on London buses: ‘There is probably no God.  Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’.  The word ‘probably’ is the clue.  It tells us that atheism is not so much a cool decision of unbiased reason as a true act of faith. It’s a wager: weigh up the evidence, then stake your life on it. Worry is only for religious people. But what if it said: ‘God may exist, so stop being frivolous and start living well’? I can only speak for myself. I concluded years ago that I would rather have lived as a Christian and tried to make a difference in the world than serve the gods of money, power, ambition and self.  The wager is that Christianity is true.  Even if it turned out not to be, the Christian life would still be worthwhile. It would still add to the sum of human happiness including my own. 

Faith doesn’t mean knowing for certain. If only we could!  It’s trusting that this is good news worth investing the whole of life in, a wager that makes sense because of the man who calls to us to follow.  Two thousand years of Christian experience tell us about the life-changing power of goodness.  My scientist conversation partner had a lot to say about how religion divides and demeans people.  He is right: debased religion is mad, bad and dangerous to know.  But, I said, why not judge religion as you judge science, not at its worst but at its best?  For me, it is the goodness and integrity of so many Christians I have known that makes Christianity not only attractive but believable.  

On this first day of the week we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus.  He is God’s pledge that our hope in this good news is well placed. If ever it was true of an event that ‘you meant harm but God meant it for good’, it is the crucifixion. Who’d have thought it on Good Friday? Yet Easter makes it both possible and believable.  It is not the certainty we crave. Faith still has to be faith. “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.” There is still a wager  in entrusting ourselves to Jesus and his kingdom. How can we know where it will lead? But to construct our life on this rock gives us stability amid shifting sands.  With the years the conviction grows that it was a wise decision. It was worth believing that “God intended it for good”, that ‘love is his meaning’. In that faith we can both live and die. 

Haydon Old Church, 28 July 2019

Genesis 42.1-25

The Charter of our Liberties: a Sermon for the Courts of Justice

I don’t need to remind you of all people about the significance of 2015 for English-speaking people. Last month I sat in the sunny meadow at Runnymede with Her Majesty, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Prime Minister and thousands of others from many parts of the world to celebrate the eight hundredth anniversary of the sealing of Magna Carta.

We in this Cathedral have an interest in this centenary. We own the only known exemplar from 1216, together with two others, the definitive 1225 issue, and that of 1300. We also have the three Charters of the Forest to go with them. The 1300 set is currently on tour in Canada, the only Commonwealth country to be receiving one from anywhere in England this year. Our 1216 exemplar is on display in Palace Green Library as the centrepiece of an exhibition to mark this year. When our new exhibitions open, you will be able to see all six precious documents on show for the first time. It will be unmissable. Some of you were here or at Middlesbrough Cathedral to enjoy the performance of our specially commissioned Magna Carta community opera.

You may think that the moment for preaching about Magna Carta has passed. You would be wrong. As one American speaker at Runnymede said, 1215 was only the beginning of a long journey. Our Durham copies tell the vital story of how it gradually became embedded in the law and life of our people. Bad King John’s 1215 original had been annulled by Pope Innocent III, a misjudgement that fuelled a disastrous civil war of the Barons. John’s young son Henry III reissued it in 1216. At first its hold was precarious, but it began to be established during Henry’s reign. The next issue of 1225 broke new ground because unlike his father who had sealed under duress, Henry attached the royal seal under his own ‘spontaneous and free will’, and this gave it both authority and acceptance in the land.

The legal profession doesn’t need persuading to endorse Lord Denning’s judgment that Magna Carta is ‘the greatest constitutional document of all times – the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot’.  We come to this service each year to celebrate our equality under the law, the gift to our society that justice cannot be bought or sold, that we are subject to lawful judgment by our peers, that we are free within a constitutional framework from the whims of the tyrant, that we value due process as safeguarding transparency and fairness. All this owes an incalculable debt to the Great Charter. Then there are later developments in our common life and institutions that we rightly prize today such as the universal democratic franchise, equality and human rights. No-one claims that the legal shape of a modern body politic can be deduced from a thirteenth century text, but their seeds were sown then.

But let me ask a question. We are sitting in this Cathedral where, like other cathedrals, copies of the Great Charter were deposited.  Why in cathedrals? It’s true that in the middle ages cathedrals and monasteries (and Durham was both) were centres of learning where legal documents were guarded because apart from monks and clerks, few could read, let alone write. In the Durham Palatinate that protected the border marches, the King’s writ did not run. So it was especially important that the Counts Palatine, as we should call the Prince Bishops, themselves stood by the provisions of the Charter as those accountable to the Sovereign, and did not run away with the idea that they possessed absolute powers. What is more, unlike the sheriffs of those days, the church was trusted to honour the Charter and play its part in making sure that it informed the common life of the nation.

But there is another aspect of this, and it is all but forgotten. This is the role of Christianity in creating Magna Carta in the first place and seeing that it was properly implemented. At Runnymede last month, only the Archbishop of Canterbury had anything to say about this when he spoke about the role of his predecessor Stephen Langton as a crucial player in this thirteenth century drama. In all the speech-making and ceremonial surrounding this great anniversary, very few seem to have understood this all-important religious context of Magna Carta or even mentioned it. Let me explain.

Langton, a fine Christian and one of the greatest scholars of his era, was deeply influenced both by classical jurisprudence and by the medieval canon law of the church. The freedom of the church from interference by oppressive kings had become the most contentious political issue of that time. This is why Magna Carta begins and ends on this note. It sounds odd to our own secular age but it spoke directly into a crucial dilemma of the century and is, incidentally, one of the three remaining unrepealed clauses in the Charter. You could put it like this: a right relationship between the Sovereign and the Church was a prerequisite for a right relationship between the Sovereign and his people. So the next question must be: if the king’s powers are not absolute, what then are the liberties the just ruler enjoys, and what limitations are to be imposed on him?

Langton went back to the Book of Deuteronomy where, twenty centuries before the Charter, the author was already insisting that even a king was bound to Israel’s covenant with God and had a duty like every other Israelite to be subject to the divine law (a provision that undoubtedly reflects Israel’s bitter memory of vicious, abusing kings). This was the passage we heard read as the first lesson. It is already to hint at a move away from a hierarchical view of authority to one in which king and people enter into a contract. This lies at the heart of a constitutional monarchy. On 9 September the Queen becomes the longest-reigning monarch in English history. I wondered at Runnymede if she was thinking about how Magna Carta requires royal authority to be legitimated, and by implication, every other power and authority, a strikingly modern insight for its age.

This may have seemed a radical, and dangerous, new idea in an age that deferred to those with divinely given authority, but it was already embedded in the scriptures. The New Testament follows the Old in acknowledging that all human authority is subject to God’s kingship. ‘My kingdom is not of this world’ says Jesus to Pontius Pilate in St John’s Gospel. It is wholly different from the empire you are subservient to. No human power is absolute or lasts for ever. One of the psalms memorably puts oppressive leaders in their place: ‘I said you are gods; nevertheless, you shall die like mortals’, a verse Jesus quotes in St John. As a preacher, my job is to remind us all of the limits placed on the powers we possess. Those boundaries are set so that we accurately identify where ultimate authority belongs – with the Almighty who is the King to whom we are ultimately accountable.

It is the same whether you are in politics or the law, education, commerce or health. It is the same in the church. It is right that it should be. You could see this Legal Service as its annual celebration not only among those charged publicly to maintain The Queen’s Peace but among all of us to whom the ideals of good citizenship matter. By honouring Magna Carta and its profound influence on our nation’s life in the centuries since, we acknowledge not only its political, legal and societal content but also its essentially theological and religious character. Good governance and divine rule are of a piece. The Charter’s recognition of the spheres of divine and human authority, how the City of God and the city of mortals are woven into a single piece in our human life is what makes it truly life-changing and makes it a powerful symbol of our quest to seek the common good in our society.

Magna Carta ends with the aspiration that all shall keep ‘these liberties, rights and concessions, well and peaceably in their fullness and entirety for them and their heirs in all things and all places for ever’. Well and peaceably. That is to draw our gaze beyond a medieval parchment to the faith of those who created it, and beyond those great lawyers and theologians, to the One who spoke about God’s promised reign of justice, goodness and peace and taught us to pray, ‘Thy kingdom come!’. The best we are capable of in this fallen world already points forward to that reality. Thank you for your part in this work that is both God’s and ours.