Why is it so hard to share faith?

St Mary's, Second Sunday in Lent: 04.03.07 – Genesis 15.1-12, 17-18; Philippians 3.17-4.1; Luke 13.31-35.: Revd. Dr. Alan Winton

On the back page of the Church Times each week there’s a regular feature: it’s called, you’ll never guess, the Back Page Interview. About half the page is given over to someone moderately famous or distinguished talking about themselves, about their life and faith. Now I haven’t studied this in any scientific way, I haven’t been counting up column inches, but my impression is that certain themes seem to recur quite frequently. Two that particularly strike me are the issue of fair-trade and the environment. Whether this emphasis comes from the interviewee or the person interviewing I’m not sure and it maybe doesn’t matter too much. What strikes me as interesting is the way that people seem quite relaxed about talking on these subjects, often with quite an evangelistic zeal and fervour, but they rarely seem to talk explicitly about their faith.

Now I mention this by way of warming you up for the theme of the Lent Groups this week. As most of you will know, groups are meeting across the churches of the team on different days and at different times, and all are looking at a book that encourages us to think about the difference faith makes to our daily lives. Week one, I gather, saw the groups getting off to a good start. I have to say that the group in Datchworth seems to hold the record at the moment with an attendance of 32 at their first meeting: does that have anything to do with the fact that they share a meal together before they begin? In any case, if you weren’t able to make a meeting last week, I am sure any of the groups would welcome you with open arms this week, and you would soon pick up on what is being discussed.

And the theme this week is focused in this question, if Jesus calls us to be his witnesses, making known the gospel to all, then how far and in what ways do our lives testify to him?  The course goes on to ask the very challenging and simple question: why is it we find it so hard to share our faith? As Christians I imagine that many of us would be like the interviewees in the Church Times, happy to talk about issues like fair-trade and the environment, clearly issues of immense importance and ones on which our convictions may well be linked to our faith, but we would struggle to talk directly about the impact faith has on our lives or the content of that faith itself.

In part, I think, this is because we can talk about issues to some degree at arms length, in a detached way, even if in the end we choose to make changes to our own lifestyle, but to talk of faith itself is to become deeply personal right from the start, it is to wander into an area in which we have so much more personal investment. And in comparison to faith itself, issues like fair-trade and the environment are actually relatively circumscribed – by that I mean that we can learn some of the facts and the more compelling arguments and feel able to hold our own in conversation. But the boundaries of faith and all that it concerns are much broader, and unless we subscribe to seeing faith as a very neat package then we find it much harder to speak about it with confidence.

It seems to me that our lack of confidence in speaking about matters of faith in this generation is getting worse; and it is getting worse in the light of particular pressures coming at us on several fronts. From one side we have the very vocal people of a more fundamentalist persuasion who seem to want ever more closer and in their minds accurate definition of what is correct belief and ever more detailed prescription of what is right behaviour for Christians – the notion of faith as a simple response to the love of God gets lost in all the footnotes. On the other side we have certain high-profile atheists, frequently scientists, stressing their view about the impossibility of proving or finding any evidence for God’s existence. What they do is shift the argument on to terms that are difficult to engage with. Talk of proof and evidence seem somewhat alien to the way in which most of us engage with the reality of God when we pray or meditate or worship. Few people come to faith because they have stumbled upon an absolutely compelling proof or have uncovered a piece of incontrovertible and unanswerable evidence. And yet the climate created by the fundamentalists on the one hand and the atheists on the other leaves us nervously unsure that we can compete on their terms.

And perhaps that is the key, we shouldn’t always feel that we need to compete on their terms. Sharing our faith is not about having all the answers to every matter of belief and practice, or of having knock down arguments guaranteed to convert the atheist and have Richard Dawkins running for the nearest Alpha course. We are called to speak of what we know in the terms that are true to our experience of God. It would be good to spend some time this week in a Lent group or on your own thinking of what those terms might be. Perhaps it might be talking about the peace we have found amidst the challenges and difficulties we encounter; or the direction that has been given to our lives; how we have been able to forgive or to experience the forgiveness we needed; or it might be a matter of talking about what happens to us when we worship or receive the sacrament; or what it means to us to know that we are loved and accepted by God; or talking about those times and places when God is most real to us; or how our faith has helped us through a crisis or trial.

Of course, there will be some people whose particular calling is to engage with the articulate atheists and the seekers after evermore definition, but the fact that these people often shout loudest in the media shouldn’t lead us to lack the confidence to speak of what we know and of the difference that faith makes in our lives in the way that is true to our experience. We mustn’t be bullied into thinking that the only way to speak of faith is in the stark terms given us by the loudest voices at the moment: we all have something to offer on our own terms, and the authenticity and integrity of our own experience can have a huge impact on someone with whom we have the confidence to share our faith.  But when should we speak about such things?

It may be instructive to think, just for a moment or two, about the way that Jesus went about the task of sharing faith. There were people who Jesus encountered in need, and he was able to help them and share faith with them. From time to time we read about how he taught with great charisma and shared his faith with large numbers of people in this way. And there were the occasions on which he confronted the powers that be, with a faith that challenged the status quo, and ultimately led to his suffering and death.

But at a more basic and fundamental level, what Jesus did was that he lived with a group of people, the disciples, and seems to have had others who followed him from time to time, as well as the people he encountered as he travelled through Galilee. Faith was shared as different life experiences occurred: fishing or eating a meal, observing someone at work, or some feature of the natural world, or simply going on a journey together. To some extent the issue of faith arose because of the way that Jesus shared his daily life with other people, in an open and accessible way.

If we take, as an example, that final observation of Jesus sharing his daily life with the people around him and look at how faith was a part of that, this leads us to think about how we go about our daily work, whether that is through paid employment or simply the things we do in our community. What stops us sharing our faith in these contexts? Why is it that we don’t see reflected in our own lives the openness and accessibility that Jesus seemed to show to those around him?

In part, I think, it has to do with the way that we often seem to live very separate and private lives today. At work, there is often a culture of intense professionalism – a desire to keep separate the professional and the private. We are made to be so focused on the task that we don’t have the time or the freedom to really get to know the people we work with, there is little space for sharing of our lives. Whilst this will not ring true for everyone’s experience at work, I am sure it is true for many people. And in the communities where we live and get involved, there are many people who seem to favour a very private and separate existence. I’ve talked before in sermons about the loss of community, and this stress on privacy is a distinct feature of this.

In these contexts we have to work at creating the conditions where any form of openness is possible. If we jump straight in and starting speaking about our faith, many will close us off. We need to build bridges and break down barriers, and we do that by gently showing an interest in people; by gently seeking to get to know them better; by inviting them to be just a little bit more open with us; by trying to overcome the crippling privacy and separateness of our lives today. In one sense we are showing that we are interested, that we care, and that is the first step to showing people the kind of love that Christians are called upon to practice, a love that begins with genuine interest in the other person. Perhaps this starts with saying hello to someone we see often but have never spoken to, or inviting an acquaintance or neighbour for a drink or a meal. In today’s world we have to work to have any significant contact with other people, making the first steps to overcome the crippling privacy and separateness of life, so that friendship and some shared experience can follow.

Now sometimes the response will be suspicion and rejection – as Jesus described so graphically in our Gospel reading. But sometimes our openness, our interest in the other person will lead to such interest and openness being returned. And people may want to know about our lives, about what motivates and interests us, and then we are getting closer to the time when faith might naturally be shared.

Why is it we find it so hard to share our faith?  For many of us faith is the most precious thing in our lives, but the truth is that the value of faith is not best preserved by nervously locking it away, its value is enhanced and increased when we have the courage and the wit to begin to share it. Amen.