Where the limits of reality do not hold

Preacher: The Revd Alan Ramsey

10.30am

Sung Eucharist

Luke 17:5-10

What is faith? And how does faith work? Like the biblical character Abraham who set out in faith for the promised land we also have our own promised lands that we want to get to. A longing fulfilled, a broken relationship restored, or an impossible problem solved. But how do we get there? What does it mean to have faith?

On Wednesday I visited Pace Gallery in Mayfair to see the new exhibition of Brazilian artist Marina Perez Simão. Simão’s work is an investigation of the metaphysical and hovers in the liminal space between abstraction and figuration.

Her paintings are a riot of colour – big swathes of jewel-toned oranges, yellows, and greens. Their undulating gestures creates the impression of fabric, almost like the texture of fine velvet. You feel like you are being immersed into the artist’s dream like world. The works evoke the wild and dramatic landscapes of Simão’s childhood just outside Rio de Janeiro.

For the first half of my visit, I was alone in the gallery. Then a very happy vibrant couple came in and they were marvelling at the paintings in a refreshingly loud and un-gallery kind of way. The woman in the couple exclaimed to one of the gallery curators “wow, these pack a punch, you feel like you’re falling into them!” And she was right.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the artworks are the continuous horizon lines that go across a series of seven-metre-wide panels. You have the feeling of gazing through archways and apertures into a new open country. Curator Diana Campbell says, “Marina’s work attempts to open up portals of wonder in the viewer, making them imagine other universes where the limits of reality don’t hold.”

What a magnificent phrase, and actually a powerful description of faith: “other universes where the limits of reality don’t hold.”

I think this is why great visual art, or literature or movie making has such appeal because we get to escape the bleakness and challenges of some of our present realities and for a moment we are taken across a new landscape into a new world where anything can happen and where the story has the freedom to go anywhere it wants.

The brilliant philosopher and theologian Herbert McCabe1 expands this line of thinking. He says this about faith:

“Faith is about what is beyond the horizon of the humanly possible. Faith is exploring into what people could never achieve by themselves. Faith is the mysterious need in us to get to where we could surely never go. Faith, in fact, is about what we call God. Faith is the inkling that we are meant to be divine, that our journey will go beyond any horizon at all into the limitlessness of the Godhead.

Faith is not our power to set out on this journey into the future. It is our future laying hold on us. It is the crucified and risen Christ gathering us toward himself. Faith is not something we possess. It is something by which we are possessed. It is the Spirit of Christ bringing us to what we are meant for: the eternal love which is the Father.”

This is a very different way of thinking about faith. Because it presents faith, not as an activity (something we do) or a substance (something we try to muster up from somewhere). It presents faith as the initiating presence of Christ himself.

This is the lesson Jesus tries to teach his disciples in our Gospel reading today.

The disciples say to him ‘increase our faith.’ Jesus has just asked them to practice exceptional forgiveness. To forgive, again and again and again. But they know that to get a human to forgive is often a bigger task than swimming across an ocean. To forgive on the level that Jesus asks will be impossible, they feel, without a great deal more faith. But Jesus shockingly refuses their request. He won’t give them more faith.

Instead, he says to them “if you had faith the size of a mustard seed you could say to this mulberry tree, be uprooted and planted in the sea, and it would obey you.”

Jesus agrees they need faith. But he doesn’t support their assumption that a larger quantity will help them. They don’t need more faith. Instead, they need to be reminded about what faith is and assured that they already have everything they need. They don’t need anything more than just Jesus himself. He IS the universe where the limits of reality do not hold.

I used to think of this image of the replanting of the mulberry tree like a magic trick that Jesus was teaching. I never really understood it. It was like the realm of the miraculous only available to super- powered, prayerful, religious people who were better at faith than the rest of us.

But what Jesus is implying here is, ‘this is what I do! All the time. Since the beginning of time.’ The extensive roots of the mulberry tree are embedded in the earth, and it grows in that soil.

But where Jesus lives the mulberry tree can be uprooted from where it has always been planted and replanted in a place where it has never been, a place where no one would ever suspect it could grow. The impossible has suddenly become possible because, as we read in the first chapter of Luke nothing will be impossible with God.

But this is just half the story about faith. Because we’re still left with the question, where do we come into this? What role do we play in turning our impossible problems into solutions? How do the disciples actually manage to forgive?

There is a scene in the Gospel of Mark that parallels the psychological dynamics of this exchange between Jesus and his disciples. When the crowds around Jesus become hungry the disciples say to him “the hour is now very late, send them away so they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat.” Jesus replies “YOU give them something to eat.”

The disciple’s immediate response is to focus on their lack. If they are to feed people, they need more than they have. They perceive the situation as impossible unless they bring in something from the outside. Jesus instead directs them inside, to their interior world and asks them to reappraise what they might bring to the situation2.

Jesus sees more in his followers than they see in themselves. He is continually urging them to reconceive who they are and what they can do.

And this is the very core of faith. It is the realisation that as followers of Christ we also live in that universe where there are no limits to what is possible. Because Christ is not separate from us. We often think of Jesus like a magician or security guard that we call on when we’re in trouble. The interventionist God that we dial up in a time of crisis. Because he’s over there, up there doing something else.

Throughout his ministry Jesus was at pains to communicate his proximity. He says, “the kingdom of God is within you.” “I am in them, and you are in me.” St Paul concurs: In him we live and move and have our being.” Perhaps the most radical statement of all is where Jesus uses very graphic and quite grotesque imagery to really drive home this point: In John chapter 6 he says, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”

When we take communion, it is a reminder of the closeness of Jesus. It’s precisely what Herbert McCabe is saying in his statement about faith. ‘Faith is not something we possess. It is something by which we are possessed.’ It is where Christ’s words and our words, Christ’s character and our character, Christ’s vision of the world and our vision of the world all become indistinguishable.

When we allow ourselves to be consumed by Christ, or when we consume him (whatever way we look at it) then we realise that we are not separate or separated from him. His universe is our universe. He gives us the power within us to speak to the dry bones and tell them to live, to be merciful and forgiving when our human instinct is the exact opposite, to invoke the name of Christ over every problem and call out the possible from the impossible.

To have faith the size of a mustard seed is not about doing anything other than just stopping for a tiny moment and remembering who we are and what (or who) we have within.

I love what the woman at Pace Gallery said about Simão’s paintings ‘you feel like you’re falling into them!’ This is the perhaps the best posture of faith. To let go, to look beyond that horizon line, beyond our separateness, and just fall right in. Into that universe called Jesus where the limits of reality do not hold.

Amen