It all comes as a bit of a shock to 21st-century Western human beings that we don’t actually, totally control all the levers of nature. It has made our society feel really rather vulnerable. It has made me feel vulnerable. I must confess to occasionally becoming quite unnerved by the bombardment of 24-hour news items relentlessly telling me about how dreadful this is all going to be. And no amount of rational assessment that you might make concerning a virus that is much less dangerous than the many other things that we face daily can help stop the sense of unease.
21st century, Western, industrialised, technological, scientifically sophisticated society, this great leviathan that is able to turn over and over, it seems, without anything normally being able to stop it from producing huge quantities of stuff, has been cowed within a matter of weeks by nature. And I know that there are many people out there at the moment who are feeling very frightened about it all. Sometimes I am one of them. So I just wanted to say a few words concerning things that encourage me.
At times like this clergy people resort back to the fundamental ground of their faith. They do this unashamedly. What I am about to say has very little in the way of philosophical sophistication, it has little in the way of being able to make any clever, arguable points about political authority and their strategy in organising the defence against this crisis. It only has something to say about what we, as Christians, believe.
There is a tendency for us moderns to believe, deep with in ourselves, that the universe is just one giant, impersonal mechanism, that turns and turns without any sympathy, empathy, or concern for our little lives and what goes on in them. It doesn’t care about our loves, the things that we hold dear, the people that we treasure and live for. It doesn’t care about our dreams and fantasies and the secret places of our soul, the places that, no one knows about except us and God. No, this machine just turns and turns without any sense that it is going in any particular direction, it is crass and blundering like a great juggernaut with nobody in the control cabin.
I say that this is what modern Western, secular peoples believe (which includes me, because we all live in a Western secular society), but I don’t mean by this that we hold this idea as an abstract, or reflective notion. It is not in the forefront of our minds, rather it is in the background. It is an implicit, intuition about how things are. It is an automatic sense of how reality is. And what it means is that when threats approach us we have very little sense that we are of any importance to the cosmic powers, that there is nothing beyond tte human to protect us (and if they are a bit useless we are done fir), and certainly that we will not be saved. There is also a terrible, lonely sadness in the thought that if we die we will be extinct; in a couple of generations nobody will even know we once were here and were like them; nobody will care when we are gone, least of all the great apparatus of the cosmos. What I think every human being longs for in a crisis – and it is said that there are no atheists in foxholes – is that the universe is underpinned by a personality and that personality is in love with us, with humanity and with the individual, little human beings that we are.
I think you could detect where I am going with this. The God that was presented to us through the gospel of Jesus Christ was the God who loves us even unto death. Which is to say that this God goes into death and hell for us, ahead of us, and abolishes death as extinction for us. It means that though there are perils and hazards in this world, that there are things that threaten our very existence, God is on our side and will, in the end, rescue us. Any outcome will be for our good and the good of all. And even if we are taken into death God is there with us. Whether we go into heaven or stay on the earth, God is with us. He knows of what we are made and remembers that we are but dust. We are little and fragile like the flower of the field. But he knew us in our mother’s womb, he knew us as we emerged into the world and was in the loving arms that received us. And as he was there for us as we came into the world, he will be there for us with loving arms again when we go out of it.
You may find it difficult to believe in this God from time to time, because things crop up and they are often frightening and threatening. That is where faith comes in. But what the generations of Christians through thousands of years have discovered is that once you take on faith, the credibility and rationality of this faith becomes more and more apparent along the way. We rest in faith but we also have good reasons for saying what we say. Christians are not irrationalists. There are very powerful reasons for saying that the God of Jesus Christ both exists and is Love. And the great minds of the church have, over the generations, certainly started with faith, but have never eschewed the search for understanding to enrich that faith thereafter.
So where are you all now? Are you at home? Some of you will still be in work as the country hasn’t quite closed down yet, but the threat of it seems to be looming on the horizon. Some of you, possibly who are elderly and with underlying medical problem, are possibly really quite frightened. If you are please remember that there is an anglican vicar every parish in this country, they will be in the phone book, or on their dioceses website; I am on the diocese of Ely website. My own phone number, if you wish to use it, is (07777) 607999. Phone that number if you wish and maybe we can worry together, but we can also remind ourselves that the God of Jesus Christ is a God who saves and he will not leave us in the midst of all this fearful noise without support.
Try to remember, everyone, that the scientists tell us that the vast majority of us will barely even know that we have this thing. We take the care that we take – hand washing et cetera – in order not to endanger the lives of those who are vulnerable – but the disease itself will hardly bother the vast majority of us. The God of love which I have been banging on about is one working through the scientists all of the time, illuminating their minds to employ their knowledge and skills in the creation of vaccines and antiviral drugs. The cavalry might be a little way off, but it is on its way.
It will be interesting to see how we all are after this is over in a couple of months. I hope at the very least we will learn something from it. There are more important things to get angry and belligerent about than relatively small points of political difference. We fundamentally depend upon one another, the good quality of our life depends upon the good quality of many other peoples lives. And it is worth looking after others, not just for the altruistic reasons, but because we ourselves depend upon them. I hope we are a more sober society after this, one that has a greater sense of what’s important in life. Maybe we will listen more – whether we are religious or not – to our ancient inheritance of wisdom gifted and deposed in the bible and right through our culture: ‘God is Love’. Jesus Christ says: we are to ‘love the Lord our God (which is to say we are to love, Love in itself, for God is Love), with all our mind, spirit, soul and strength. And we are to love our neighbour as ourselves’ (Luke . 10:27).