The greatest reward lies not in 'religion' but in acceptance of faith

Genesis 32 : 22 - 31; Romans 9 : 1-5; Matthew 14 : 13 - 21

These are bad times for religion. Christians, especially Catholics, have learned of widespread sexual abuse and cover-ups. Muslims have seen their scholars condemned and their scriptures deconstructed for evidence that Islam encourages terrorism. Jews have suffered waves of anti-Semitic attacks as world opinion hardens towards Israel.

This is a rare moment: three world religions racked by crisis. Adherents of all three feel suddenly embattled and isolated. Atheists say "I told you so", and even some believers ask whether there may be something in the nature of religion itself that ends in corruption. After September 11, Catholic commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote "it seems almost as if there is something inherent in religious monotheism that lends itself to this kind of terrorist temptation - whether, that is, that it is religion itself that is responsible for recurrently convincing not just terrorists but established Churches and States that they have God's sanction to slaughter innocent unbelievers - that means, to ask whether terrorist attacks can be attributed not just to a perversion of religion, but to something in the logic of religion itself".

This commentator has not reckoned with the Trinitarian foundation of the monotheism of the Christian faith that might modify this judgement. But that is another story.

Others say that Islam in particular suffers because it has never been subjected to the fires of modernity, as have Judaism and Christianity. But Judaism and Christianity have paid a heavy price since modernity required God to fit within categories prescribed for 300 years by reigning philosophical agendas requiring that the human subject determine reality, replacing that which God was understood to provide. Consequently, God was made into an object under human control. It is these human religious constructions that have become unconvincing.

So, what are we going to do about religion? Who knows, but the omens are not good.

The word "religion" originally meant something positive as "that which binds". If it still means this, that bind seems now increasingly to be read as a negative.

Sixty years ago a European theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose whole intellectual life was spent wrestling with the ambiguities of religion, wrote from his Nazi prison cell how in Western societies the time of religion was coming to an end. What did he mean?

Well, he meant by religion those fundamentally human activities attempting to reach the beyond: the postulate of a deity, in order to get help and protection if so wanted. Bonhoeffer identified four characteristics of this religious activity.

First, religion as inwardness. This could take the form of ascetism, or it could be an abandoning of the world for the inward journey.

Second, metaphysics. The transcendence that is sought for the completion necessary for this world - God as the superstructure for being, which inescapably leads into thinking in two realms and the understanding that "reality" - the natural - must be completed by the supernatural.

Third, that thinking which regards religion as a province of life, a sector of the whole, that is interesting and socially and psychologically valuable. God as a problem solver, a gap filler, a fulfiller of human needs. Is this the Christian God, dwelling in a dark and ever-smaller province, driven out from one department after another in dreadful secularisation?

Fourth, the concept of the god of the machine at the end of the Greek tragedies. Wheeled in to provide answers, solutions, protection and help, religion might be likened to a spiritual chemist shop.

So much for the analysis, what of the alternative?

Bonhoeffer's response was a call to non-religious interpretation of the Bible, which fundamentally meant a call to follow Jesus in his way of discipleship, whereby the four distinguishing marks of religion become anachronistic.

In place of the lonely individual, intent on the inward journey, Jesus is revealed as the man for others. Gregarious from the start, the only time he is alone is in his death, the awfulness of which is an enforced loneliness and forsakenness without any way of a transcendent escape. Thus for Jesus, if we might adopt the marvellous imagery of Dennis Potter, God is not the bandage, God is the wound. But remember, the hand that inflicts the wound also holds the cure. So the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus is the establishing, now not of a localised but of a universal presence which opens up the whole of life as the sphere of human worship of God.

When I was considering how to speak of these things, my first thought was to find what I judged to be central Biblical passages that would unambiguously support Bonhoeffer's case about the Biblical critique of religion. My second thought was how wrong this would be. For if we cannot make the case with the lectionary readings for today, or for any Sunday, then the case cannot be made at all.

So just a brief word or two in reverse order as the gospel, epistle and the Old Testament subvert the religious paradigm as described by Bonhoeffer.

How many times have we heard the feeding of the 5000? Hunger in the midst of life: not an individualistic hunger, but a communal hunger. The harsh realities of life have to do with recurring hunger. It happens in the midst of life, and it comes unsought. Make no mistake; it will come to you if it has not already done so. Sooner or later, in some unanticipated way, no matter how hard you try to prevent it, you will be desperately hungry. Life will wound you. But it is in just this desolation that that other radical disturbance we call faith, not religion, will feed you. Religion tries to shore itself up against the ravages of hunger, like the rich man in the gospel who wanted to build bigger barns to hoard his food against uncertain times. And God says: "You fool! Faith knows that it cannot secure the future like this, but that - unlike the bargaining securities of religion - it must wait not only on the moment. Faith equally understands that famine is a shared problem alleviated by the promise of the unexpected and the unplanned - the only true miracle - a shared feast, not at the boundaries of the human predicament, but in the midst of life.

And the epistle? The reading above begins the extended treatment by Paul of the problem, given the logic of the gospel, of the relationship of the emerging Christian movement to the parent faith of Judaism, which, as a Jew himself, he had every right and authority to undertake. He sees his people's history with God stretching back to its creative past: "To them - he could equally have said to me - to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, the promises, the patriarchs, from whom comes the messiah." In another context, he was able to call all this in question: "circumcised on the 8th day, a member of the people of Israel of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, as to the law, a Pharisee, as to righteousness under the law, blameless."

Paul himself used coarse, disparaging language to describe religion and these inheritances in comparison to the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus his Lord. But here too, in this letter to the Romans, is a "radical disturbance", which is the best definition I know for the word faith. How will the future be in discontinuity with the rock-solid formation of his life as a Jew, of his hitherto whole existence? This new intervention in his life was something quite concrete, not at the boundaries, not in the gap, not as some spurious answer to a need, but as a radically new imposition making old things new.

But it is the Old Testament reading above that is so powerful. Arguably there is no more strange or perplexing narrative than this in the whole Bible, not least for the boldness of the language and the symbolism. It comes between the description of Jacob's preparation to meet his brother Esau and the subsequent account of that meeting. That meeting provoked in Jacob anxious fear, as well it might, for a brother's grudge had had the opportunity to fester for 20 years. A conciliatory message sent to Esau elicits the information that Esau is on the way to meet him with a threateningly large force. Jacob deals with the situation in three ways: he takes sensible military precautions, he prays, and he sends lavish presents in an attempt to appease Esau - God interposed, as it were, between two quite worldly self-regarding strategies. Was the existence of God a product of a private rational conclusion about the meaning of life? Quite the contrary. His calculated machinations against his brother, designed to win the favour of his father, had now come back to haunt him.

But it is the answer to his prayer that is so startling. Jacob is radically disturbed. This unsought encounter was of a concentrated and enduring struggle against a nameless opponent. His prayer for help is answered in the struggle, in the darkness of the eerie gorge of Jabbok with someone who turns out to be God. Jacob's greatest need, you see, is not how to come to terms with Esau but how to come to terms with God. God is not there to answer a selfish cry. This was to be a costly experience, the cost symbolised by the dislocating of Jacob's hip. Yet Jacob perseveres, struggles, refuses to let his unknown assailant go, until he finds that he has seen God face to face. And out of that struggle comes a new Jacob, symbolised by a new name. The name Jacob - in this case aptly - means "the deceiver", or "twister". The new name Israel means "one who has striven with God". It is this new Jacob - new not only in name but in character - who now goes to meet Esau.

But the point is that when one encounters God one is always afflicted - not just spiritually, as we like to say these days, but here physically too. Jacob limps forever because of this radical disturbance. Faith - acceptance of radical disturbance - rather than religion is always an option, but an option rarely taken. The most interesting people I think you will find are almost always those who walk with a limp: perhaps nothing as extreme as the father of modern existententialism, the great Danish theologian/philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, who knew more than anyone about this struggle, and who as his way of limping walked around the streets of Copenhagen with one trouser leg shorter than the other.

So may you too spend the rest of your life limping. The ambiguities of religion, not to speak of irreligion, could well make you sad. Faith on the other hand is always joyous, though it comes at a price - the limp. The joy of limping is that it is a sign both to you and to everyone else that - perhaps for the first time - now you have a name, a name that in due course will allow you to give God a name.

And then you will find that, no matter what befalls you, how much better it is to limp than to be hungry!