David E Jenkins is awesome!

Despite all the crazy wedding preparations and the last minute work things before we set off, I took the time to go and listen to David Jenkins preach and have a bit of a chat with him after the service.

That sermon, reflecting on his relationship with God after a life of ministry, was the most moving thing I've heard in yonks, I had to remind myself that I did not have a tissue and so could not bawl out without making a huge mess of myself. It was hard, especially since the guy himself fought back a few tears, wondering if this was one of the very last time he would address the people of God in this way.

If you haven't read any of his work, jump on the stuff at once. I'm just finishing "God, Miracle and the Church of England" and it oozes love, just like the guy himself does. If somebody in my neck of the woods has had a full on, lifelong love affair with God, it's that old Jenkins who lives a few miles away. I begged the sermon printout right off him (after all, he's got the original on his computer) and I got an autograph on it too. Which will now live right next to sister Helen Prejean's between the pages of my bible.

I'll leave you with a passage from his book that was exactly what I need to hear these days:

...the Greek actually says that the father [of an epileptic son] bursts out and cries, "I believe, help my unbelief!".

The father's faith was not falling short. He had faith because he had glimpsed something in Jesus which he longed for for his child. But he did not have faith because he did not dare. It was too much to hope for. "Lord I believe, help thou my unbelief". No falling short. Surely that is much more like what true faith is really. Risky commitment to a glimpsed possibility in the face of reasonable human hesitation about whether it is really possible [...].

Talk about falling short reminds me, I fear, of those somewhat alarming sects or individuals who seem to want, so to speak, to blackmail you into hyping up your faith on the grounds that, if you jack it up, the faith pressures will somehow compel God into a miracle. Here faith comes dangerously close to being an attempt at manipulating God.

But real faith surely is something very different, the sort of thing you have and do not have, and that is whay you go on having it. Afterwards the disciples asked him privately, "Why could we not cast it out", and he said, "There is not means of casting out this sort but prayer."