Holy Trinity, Cowes, Sunday 2^nd August, 2009 

Readings: Wisdom 13:1-9/Ps 65/Job 26/Mt 14: 22-33 

About ten years ago, I went to a meeting in Portsmouth where I came across someone who seemed to spend the whole time staring at me. After a while, I began to wonder if I had a tree growing out of the top of my head, or my nose had become grotesquely long, and I kept trying to avoid her gaze. At the tea-break, I went up to her to say hello, and she immediately said to me, ‘I am an archaeologist, and you have a Viking skull, and I want to know why.’ Not being used to that sort of conversation-starter,  I quickly gave her enough of a thumb-nail sketch of the family DNA by way of explanation, after which the staring stopped. 

Of course, DNA doesn’t just tell me where I came from – or, to use the title of the television programme, ‘who do you think you are?’ It can save lives, or at least restore them for a good while, as happened to me through a bone-marrow donor. Gathering data about ourselves can extend into the most unlikely places, hence, for example, the need to protect all this material from abuse.  So we can get bothered about ID cards, or embarrassing revelations in the press. 

That is the world we live in, and it’s likely to increase in complexity as time goes on. We can’t stop the natural curiosity that pushes knowledge of all kinds beyond their present limits, to conquer our ignorance. But it all seems a very far cry indeed from tonight’s first reading, from the Wisdom of Solomon, a book written around the time of Christ, to encourage Jews facing persecution in Egypt. As far as the author is concerned, not to believe in God is the mark of ignorance. ‘The fool hath said in his heart, ‘there is no God’, as Psalm 16 puts it more directly.  

That is not how we think today. We are understandably more interested in the implications of DNA, and other sources of knowledge, such as climate change, than in where God may or may not be fitted in to a picture where we are more and more in control, and from which he is increasingly forced out. If there are fools around, perhaps they are more likely to be those who do believe in God than those who do not. 

Yet our knowledge of the world is not that precise. 1 and 1 may make 2, but who knows what the weather is going to be like, or how tomorrow’s sailing is going to turn out? We may know a bit more about these things than we did, but greater knowledge only increases the mysteries of life, with its surprises, its challenges, its uncertainties. And for most people, life is a bit of a mess, and we spend most of our time trying to pick up the pieces, trying to make sense of it all. To look at nature and enjoy its beauty mustn’t prevent us from facing up to its mysteries, surprises, challenges, uncertainties.  Sailing in Cowes Week, after all is another way of taking the risk of being part of the unpredictabilities. 

And that is where God is to be found. He is not a scientifically-based, human construct, who is always under our control, or at our beck and call. Whatever the shape of our skulls, the language we speak, or the strange hobbies some of us have, there is no escape from these questions. When I heard for the very first time the strange story of Jesus walking on the water towards his storm tossed followers – tonight’s final reading - my reaction was to think with a simplistic faith – just how miraculous and wonderful it was, and no more. Later, I began – with an enquiring faith - to ask myself what was the point of it if there was one; scepticism, after all, can be a useful (some would say essential) companion to faith. Then, much later still, with a bit more experience I began to see that it is about something far deeper. It is a way of saying that God himself enters our storms and tussles and unpredictabilities, by no means solving all the problems, but somehow making them bearable, even attractive, and transforming them in the process.  And if he doesn’t enter all of that, then he’s not really worth believing in, and the struggle of faith becomes pointless.  

+ Kenneth Portsmouth