John 14.1-14

Just over a month ago, many of us watched the enthronement of Dame Sarah Mullally as the 106^th Archbishop of Canterbury. Set against the backdrop of the inspiring stained glass and soaring arches of Canterbury Cathedral – a familiar and glorious building – the historic occasion served to inspire hope and optimism for the future of the worldwide Anglican church.

We have many beautiful religious buildings all across our nation – from the abbey buildings on Iona to the many other cathedrals in our great cities – these buildings can inspire our thoughts and lift our hearts to heaven and are great places to visit and explore.

One of the more unusual religious buildings that I have visited in the past was the Mormon Temple near Chorley in Lancashire – a very American looking building with a tall spire, on top of which stood a magnificent angel blowing a superb golden trumpet, built in the late 1990s. During the short time between the completion of the building and its dedication, the public were invited to have a look around. So, when the new temple in Chorley was finished, Peter and I paid our money and went to see it, to learn more about the Mormon faith.

Inside, the temple was like a deluxe Hilton hotel—room after room of deep blue carpet and hand carved solid oak furniture – gold and white wallpaper and crystal chandeliers. When we asked our guide about this luxury, she quoted the King James’ version of a verse from today’s Gospel – ‘In my father’s house there are many mansions’. Of course, for Mormons, this was the Father’s house. Each room was a mansion. The whole interior design of this building was based on one word from the King James Version of today’s Gospel. Yet, in 1611 the word ‘mansion’ did not mean ‘mansion’, like the luxurious mansions of the rich and famous – a mansion was simply a house, a dwelling place. Many ministers live in a ‘manse’ – and these are often far from luxurious!

We sometimes have to treat words of scripture with great care and there are three words in today’s Gospel which not only need to be treated carefully, but also need to be taken very seriously: KNOW – BELIEVE – DO.

We need to KNOW.

Today’s Gospel has the disciples asking some big questions:

What is heaven like?

What is God like?

What is the way to God?

How can we know the way?

Sunday by Sunday, we are presented with answers to these questions, in the ministry of word and sacrament. These are answers drawn from God’s revelation in Scripture, from the tradition of our Church, from human reason and from human experience.

In our journeys of faith, the more involved we become, the more we know,  but there are always people who demand to know all the answers before they will commit to any path of faith.

In the first centuries after the resurrection, the Roman empire included many communities of Christians called ‘Gnostics’, from the Greek word gnosis, meaning ‘seeking to know’. The Gnostics believed that salvation was the reward of increasing what you knew, of struggling to reach ever-higher levels of knowledge. They rejected the core Christian teaching that salvation comes from faith in Jesus, truly God and truly human. They focused on themselves, not on Jesus; they spent their time speculating about the faith.

The Gnostics produced their own gospels of the life and teaching of Jesus along with many other writings. In the third and fourth century the church suppressed the Gnostics and banned their writings. They disappeared for centuries, until copies of many of them were rediscovered in 1946, buried in the desert at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. The writings tell us what some early Christian communities believed, but they don’t tell us anything more about the life of Jesus, in spite of some sensational claims in academic papers and books, and in popular novels like The Da Vinci Code.

Many of the academics I have encountered and whose works I have read during my journey of faith know far more about the historical Jesus, and about theology and church history and hermeneutics, than I can ever hope to know. But to know about Jesus is not enough. To know everything about Jesus, even if that were possible, is not enough.

We must also BELIEVE – believe in the saving power of Jesus. He said, ‘Believe in God, believe also in me … whoever has seen me has seen the Father. Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me. I am the Way, and the Truth and the Life’.

This was the faith of the Psalmist who knew that God was his refuge, a very present help in trouble This was the faith Stephen was prepared to witness to and to die for. This was the faith Peter calls us to live for and to glorify God by, that Jesus himself bore our sins in his body on the cross.

What exactly does this mean? As difficult for many of us as it is, it means that we are called to live without knowing all the answers. We are called to live in faith and hope and love. To live in the faith that overcomes the world. To live in the hope that, when our time comes, we shall know God fully, just as God fully knows us, and to live in the love which conquers death, in the strength of the love Jesus revealed as he travelled the road before us …to live in love for God and for all humanity. If we truly do this, we won’t have time to keep asking questions, but we will already know the answers to the questions that really matter.

Salvation comes from faith in the resurrected Christ; greater knowledge helps, but it is not enough. But, my friends faith too, is not enough. We need to know, and to believe, but as well, we need to DO.

Jesus’ answer to the disciples’ questions is simple: ‘Believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me. But if you do not, believe me because of the works themselves … The one who believes in me will also do the works that I do, and do greater works’.

The history of the church is filled with stories of individuals who realise that knowledge and faith are just not enough. The Lutheran theologian Albert Schweitzer discovered this truth after his famous work The Quest for the Historical Jesus was published. Schweitzer had strived to pull together all the knowledge about Jesus that he could in order to make the case for salvation. He realised knowledge was not enough. He stopped asking questions—he believed, and he went to the more remote areas of Africa to do the work of God – to live the faith.

Other religious traditions share this same insight. The Buddha, like Jesus, is said to have told many parables. One of them is the parable of the poisoned arrow:

It is as if a man had been wounded by an arrow thickly smeared with poison, and his friends and kinsmen were to fetch a surgeon to heal him, and he were to say, ‘I will not have this arrow pulled out until I know by what man I was wounded, whether he is of the warrior caste, or a brahmin, or of the agricultural caste’. Or if he were to say, ‘I will not have this arrow pulled out until I know of what name of family the man is; or whether he is tall, or short, or of middle height, or whether he is black, or dark, or yellowish; or whether he comes from such and such a village, or town, or city; ‘or until I know whether the bow with which I was wounded was a chapa or a kodanda, or until I know whether the bow-string was of swallow-wort, or bamboo fibre, or sinew, or hemp, or of milk-sap tree, or until I know whether the shaft was from a wild or cultivated plant; or whether it was feathered from a vulture’s wing or a heron’s or a hawk’s, or a peacock’s; or whether it was wrapped round with the sinew of an ox, or of a buffalo, or of a ruru-deer, or of a monkey; ‘or until I know whether it was an ordinary arrow, or a razor-arrow, or an iron arrow, or of a calf-tooth arrow’. Before knowing all this, that man would die.

My friends, knowledge is important, but it is not enough. We are called to believe and do, to act in faith.

Whether we like it or not, or even admit it or not, we Christians have become a small minority in our society, just as Christians were in the first centuries after the first Easter. We are called, as they were called, to be the light of the world. We are called to believe in God, to belong to his community of faith, to behave in accordance with Jesus’ teachings and to become new people, transformed through the power of the Spirit.

There is a time for asking questions, but there is also a day for decision. There is a time to discuss who Jesus is, but there is also a time to take up your cross and follow him. There is a time to weigh the issues carefully, but there are issues which will not wait until tomorrow. If we wait until we understand everything, we will wait for ever.

Know – Believe – Do Act in the faith that Jesus died and was resurrected that we all might be saved through Him.