“But among you there are some who do not believe.”   John 6:64

“I believe in the sun,

Even when it is not shining.

I believe in love,

Even when I do not feel it.

I believe in God,

Even when He is silent.”

Anon. Scrawled on a wall in Cologne Cathedral crypt which was bombed in WWII

‘I believe in God, even when he is silent.’

Could you imagine writing those words during that dark chapter of our history? Whoever did so had great faith and an even greater hope. Their words imply that their faith was not based on despair  but on a hope of something greater than the pettiness of humanity.  Three short sentences that suggest God is there even when it is impossible to discern him; by comparing God to the sun and to love, things we know to exist by experience. We all know how the sun feels on our skin and we all know what love feels like but we cannot see love or even the sun on a cloudy day or at night; yet we know them to be true experiences because of the ways in which we have encountered them in the past. Past experience is important because when you cannot sense God you have to ask yourself the question is it worth continuing to believe?

Belief in God is always going to be  problematic, even for those of us who claim to do so. What do you or I or any believer mean by the word ‘God’? If all of us here today wrote down what we mean by God we would probably all give different answers for there are as many different interpretations of the word ‘God’ as there are individual human beings. This is nothing to be worried about, far from it.

I think it is wonderful that God can be experienced by each of us in our own unique and very personal way. It just helps to show us how multifaceted God is and how much God is beyond our total conception. We all express God through the way or ways in which we personally experience God. If we had all of eternity to compare every individual’s experience of God we might just be able to make a beginning of a definition of God.

All the crumbs and minute particles of our individual belief or faith are what together we found our belief in God upon. We do not believe alone, and it is this realisation, that gives us hope in God, in Jesus and in each other. Because faith, no matter how shaky our own might be, is a corporate act as well as individual belief. It is together we believe and not alone.