There was a Steven Seagal film on last Sunday night. Steven Seagal films tend to be about an ex-special forces guy who some how gets caught up in the antics of some terrorist or criminal group as an innocent bystander and then becomes a real headache to them. With his background he turns out to have some interesting tricks up his sleeve that they just don’t expect. This one called ‘Half Past Dead’ was set on the prison island Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay.

Perhaps not quite so innocent this time, he plays an undercover FBI agent. One of the inmates was involved in a gold robbery and has kept the location of where he has stashed the loot secret. So, many people are keen to get him to talk so that they can recover the treasure. Facing death in the electric chair he asks to spend his final moments with Steven Seagal’s character. It turns out that he has been through a near death experience in the past and the man on death row wants to ask him what happens when you die. After all he has been through in his life, as he is facing his final moments he wants to know what is in store for him. Will there be a bright light? Will he see his friends and loved ones again? Does anyone come to meet you?

The film doesn’t offer any answers, so it’s not much use for a theological debate, but what is interesting is that this man asks precisely the same questions everyone else asks. He decides that the best person to ask is someone who has been there, someone he can ask direct, someone he can look into their eyes and tell for himself if they are bluffing him or being honest.

There are so many competing voices telling us what we can expect. Some are reassuring, but as they are speaking to us we may hear the faint sound of a voice deep inside us wondering what their evidence is; how do they know any better than me? Have they been there? Campaigning atheists and unquestioning believers all talk with the same certainty that can leave the rest of us ticking the ‘don’t know’ box in the ultimate survey of life.

I was talking to someone recently who had been told something by one of these life-style gurus about how it is and she, flatteringly for me, wished I’d been there to tell this woman what rubbish she was speaking. That’s not how she put it, but you get the drift. I don’t tend to tell people they are talking rubbish, so it was an interesting window into how others see me - I suspect she thought I had a level of certain knowledge she didn’t have so would have had the tools to refute what was being said in a way she didn’t feel confident doing. What I did do, however, was to talk about the leap of faith.

The leap of faith is not a stab in the dark, a kind of light left on to comfort the small child inside us afraid of the prospect of ultimate darkness. We start from what we do know and we make a leap of the imagination to what we can believe is possible. This is the leap of faith and it is very similar to the leap that scientists make in pushing the boundaries of knowledge and exploration of the mysteries of the universe.

So we start with what we know and reach out to what we can therefore believe is possible, what is probable or likely. It is not a matter so much of telling people they are talking rubbish, but rather asking if what they say is credible, believable or not, and asking what it is based on.

There is an imaginative course that tackles questions like this, called the Start course. It has a clip in the accompanying video where the presenters go up to people in a shopping centre with a swingometer asking them if they believe in God and why. The pointer is pushed back and forwards as each person comes up with arguments for and against God. So much suffering, so much love, creativity of art and music, the enormous power of destruction and evil, cancer, Parkinson’s disease, healing touch and wonders of medicine, the joy and mystery of child-birth, starving millions and the compassion that leads to the Make Poverty History campaign, the list can go on.

Where does the swingometer rest for you? Like everyone else I have enormous questions, but I come down on the side of God and of there being something beyond our imagining in store for us. I base this on the creativity and incredible depths and heights to the human spirit, on the wonders of creation, on the love that we experience and capacity for things to work out in the end. But I have a story that I use to interpret all of this as well - my operating system if you like for the processor in my brain.

This story is the story of Jesus. He didn’t deal with the threat or fear that disturbs us all with guns and commando tactics. Instead he was crucified and died just like the rest of us would do. His friends were completely shattered and felt completely lost, just like the rest of us do when someone special to us dies. The difference comes on day three. Beyond all expectations he didn’t just come back to life as if death was nothing at all to him, he went beyond it and was raised to a new kind of life. And popped back to let his followers know this is what had happened. We have a faith in the one who has taken hold of death and shown that it is not the end but a passport to something beyond our imagining, to what we call new life.

There are signs of this in the natural cycle of things dying and rising that we see all around us. There are signs in how new life does follow on from a death, how things come to an end but something else takes its place. There are signs of it in how the first disciples changed from being locked up in fear and grief to literally going to the ends of the earth and telling everyone they met about the fantastic news of Jesus’ resurrection.

In the end it is a leap of faith, your leap of faith, but we don’t leap from no where. We start with what we know and have known and we trust in the God who made us and doesn’t let go of us. Likewise he doesn’t let go of those we come here this afternoon to remember.

© Ian Black 2005

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