A Conclusion of Placement Service was held for Jessica Morthorpe, First Third Specialist for the Metro West Region, on Thursday 10 December at All Saints Floreat Uniting Church. Ashley MacMillan delivered the following sermon.
So, I’m going to talk about faith… and Jess. But given that faith manages to make it onto the list of most mis-used words in the English language, I thought I should do some clarifying before I began.
Faith is often considered to be ‘belief without proof’, making faith just a subset of belief. Yet not only is this mistaken, it also makes faith just as boring as belief is. Belief refers to what you think is true. We have beliefs about thousands of things, some of these beliefs we hold no doubt about, such as my belief that that that the Earth revolves around the sun. Other beliefs are things that we acknowledge we may never be certain about, or that there cannot be an objective truth about, such as my belief that summer is the best season. In short, belief is a broad thing, and whilst it might be a significant thing, it’s also a bit of a boring thing. It is just a form of intellectual assent to an idea. Belief is passive.
The word ‘faith’ though stems from Latin, via old French through Anglo-french, and then into middle English, before finally landing in modern English, and it means ‘to trust’. Trusting is a step in the dark. There’s this game that I used to play as a kid, where you close your eyes, hold your arms straight at your side and let yourself fall backwards. The person behind you will catch you, but the trick is to not try and save yourself. The game is to trust them.
