Faith in uncertain times

Reflection at Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 14th January 2025

I don’t know about you, but I am fearful. We are living in a time of great uncertainty. More uncertain even than at the height of the Cold War, perhaps, when people of my age thought seriously about how we should respond to the threat of nuclear annihilation, which seemed all but inevitable at the time.

Today, we see narcissistic demagogues rise to power across the world. We see wars on our screens that bring obscene destruction to cities, and those who live in them. We see the benign climate we have enjoyed, the climate in which we humans and nature have flourished together for millennia, collapse into a nightmare before our eyes.

WB Yeats experienced something similar in his own time, when he wrote this in his poem, The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre  

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst  

Are full of passionate intensity.

St Paul speaks to fears like this in today’s reading (1 Corinthians 1:18-31). He calls us to consider our own call to follow Christ Jesus. ‘Not many of us are wise by human standards; not many are powerful, not many are of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. God is the source of our life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.’

Paul calls us, I suggest, to personal holiness, to the holiness modelled for us by Jesus Christ. The Beatitudes he gave us show us how we should respond, humbly but without fear, to sin and evil in the world. It is no accident, I think, that they were chosen as the Gospel reading at the state funeral last Thursday of that good and faithful Christian, President Jimmy Carter.

We spoke the Beatitudes earlier. They are easy to say, aren’t they? And so very difficult to live up to. But let us do our best to model them in our lives.

And let us, in John Wesley’s words, ‘do all the good we can, by all the means we can, in all the ways we can, in all the places we can, at all the times we can, to all the people we can, as long as ever we can.’