Barking mad and loving it, my dear St Dawkins

Tommy has just got back from the beach.

“Were there any other children there?” asked his Mum?

“Yes.” said Tommy.

“Boys or Girls?”

“How should I know? They didn’t have any clothes on!”

Tommy sees only what he is trained to see.

The television-watching children of a man who wanted to foster the love of music in them were bought a piano. When he got home, he found them looking for the plug. People see what they want to see.

Herod was no different. A client king of the Roman Empire, he knew John the Baptist was a righteous and holy-man with an unusual message, but he saw only a threat.

The Jewish historian Josephus corroborates this in his Antiquities. Josephus describes how Herod knew people were massing around John the Baptist, greatly moved by John’s words, exhorting them to virtue, to justice, and to reverence for God.

He feared that such a strong influence over the people might lead to a revolt, and had John killed.

Mark’s Gospel puts John’s execution down to a bizarre request by Herod’s scheming wife Herodias at a family banquet. Bur both authors agree, John communicated an authentic experience of God.

Herod killed him but he couldn’t kill him off. Later on, according to Mark 6:14, when Herod heard what Jesus was doing, he was unsettled, haunted by the thought that John had been resurrected.

The God experience was living on.

For a King with a guilty conscience, here was a greater presence. Unable to risk the insecurity this experience entailed, Herod had beheaded John, and what he was intrigued by was now returning.

And how different are we? Do we want someone else to do our questing and questioning and struggling and thinking and praying and faith sharing, while we look on from a safe distance like the husband, who, after 30 years of watching television, says to his wife:

“Let’s do something really exciting tonight.”

Instantly this conjures up visions for her of an all night trip into the heart of the unexplored city, maybe galleries and nightclubs, and maybe a river trip, a hotel, or even a flight. Who knows?

“Great, she says!” “What shall we do?”, and eagerly awaits his response.

“Well……. we could swap chairs.”

This presence we don’t control, we try to tame or ignore.

Herod couldn’t be sure that his attempt to kill off the experience of God in John the Baptist would work, because trust in God is never final or certain, neat, safe or controllable. It seeks and moves and asks and explores. It opens itself and finds itself beyond its comfort zone, entering the uncertainty of a living faith outside the security of a dead religion.

In other words, we can’t put God into our box.

It’s worth remembering this when we want to tame God and make God understandable for our own purposes, treating God like our ideology, or our errand boy, or even an old lady who needs helping across the road.

God transcends us, banking up on all sides.

I wonder how often we trust God?

I was re-accquainted with an old friend recently. I found myself discussing faith with her. She said to me: “OK, so I’m prepared to accept there was someone called Jesus, and he was good to people.

“And let’s just imagine,” she added, “just for the sake of the discussion, that I am also prepared to accept that Jesus came back from the dead - because I won’t say anything is impossible.”

Modern physics suggests matter is energy, so why should it be? But that wasn’t her point anyway, so I waited for her to get to it.

“Even if Jesus did come back from the dead,” she finished off: “then, so what? What does it mean?”

Like anything else in life, in order to ring true, faith has to have a bearing on our experience. If it doesn’t, it is irrelevant.

I take seriously the perception of religion given out on television, because it reaches hearts and minds and it’s the only theology some people ever get, if you can call it theology.

So inevitably I end up watching people like Richard Dawkins, who was recently theologizing on Channel 4. In his own words then, he says this:

“According to scientific views of pre-history, Adam, the supposed perpetrator of the original sin, never existed in the first place … An awkward fact, which undermines the premise of St Paul’s whole sado-masochistic theory. Oh but of course the story of Adam and Eve was only ever symbolic wasn’t it? Symbolic? So Jesus had himself tortured and executed for a symbolic sin by a non-existent individual. Nobody not brought up in the faith could reach any verdict other than barking mad.”

Powerful stuff, but what St Richard doesn’t appreciate, if you’ll forgive me canonizing him, is that Jesus doesn’t have to mean to Saints you and I what Jesus meant to St Paul or St Augustine.

Because a living faith has never been a pinned down set of time bound ancient propositions received on authority, it is a personal encounter with a timeless God, here and now.

In the spiritual life, letting someone else do our thinking and questing and sharing for us is like being thirsty and asking someone to drink for us.

Anglican Bishop Hugh Montefiore, who died four years ago, was brought up in a Jewish family, but when he was 16, he was sitting in his study when he saw an apparition of Jesus saying: "Follow me." He converted. Experience is a basic truth. It can’t be disputed, and it should be shared.

I remember reading the entire New Testament for the first time whilst recovering on a train. Christ seemed to leap off the page and join me in the carriage.

I remember driving home from a hospital visit where someone was dying, and feeling shot through with God’s beyondness connecting people.

I remember sitting against a gatepost in Herefordshire, and suddenly had an awareness at a sub-atomic level. The narrative of 'I' had gone, and with it all sense of separateness. It was an experience of the dissolution of the whole ego construct and the body, which St Paul may have described as: ‘Not I, but Christ in me’.

The point is not me here, but that narratives and experiences are basic truths we should be sharing by letting our trust in God gently enter the ebb and flow of our everyday lives and conversations.

It’s not easy I know, and I can understand and sympathise with Richard Dawkins. “The Old Testament,” he says, “is the root of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The God of the Old Testament has got to be the most unpleasant character in all fiction,” he says. “Jealous and proud of it, petty, vindictive, unjust, unforgiving, racist, an ethnic-cleanser, urging his people on to acts of genocide.” But there were no Richard Dawkins figures when the Old Testament was written. The question in those days wasn’t: “How can you believe in God?” but: “How can you believe in that God?” The ancient world had so many Gods that tribalistic primitive images of God were inevitable. But when he reveals himself to people, God has got to work with what is there, and progress to something truer.

God has to be allowed to purify our ideas about God.

In an unstable world with freedom to evolve and grow, things are unpredictable enough to go belly up. So a God who enters this suffering and goes beyond it and redeems it is a God worth keeping.

This is the God in the man Jesus, which Pilate’s authority tried to kill off, just as Herod’s authority tried to kill off God in John the Baptist, so we need to be careful where we place authority today.

Take for example the view that there is nothing to life but solid mechanical physical matter, and our consciousness is accidentally dependent upon it. This popular science is unsupported by evidence. It is untested dogma, and the belief that mind is solid physical matter leads to another dogma that we are born for no reason and extinguished for no reason.

That is mindless science, while mindless religion, on the other hand can lead to idolatry. Our word idolatry comes from the Greek word eidolo-latria, which means image-worship, and the images in our minds are far more powerful than any statue or graven image, so I suggest we stop worshipping ideas about God, and start worshipping God.

There is a well-worn joke about God being a builder. God is a builder, the joke goes, because God is coming back, but no-one ever knows when.

The joke is on us until we stop waiting for God to show up in the future. Let us let God be God and be here and now.