All things are yours.. the world, life, death the present and the future, all belong to you, and you belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God. (1Cor 3)

Old Dan was a Warwickshire farmer, as his father and grandfather had been before him. He was retired now, but keeping a watchful eye on Young Dan who was running the farm with his  wife Helen. They had a four-year old little girl, Annie, who was the darling of her granddad's heart. Old Dan sat in the same pew as his father had,  towards the back of the church for Evensong every Sunday of the year. He was one of the most courteous, kindly and generous men I have have known. One Sunday evening in June he wasn't in church.. I had been away on holiday for a fortnight, so I called round to see if he was all right. He opened the door and looked at me for a long minute without a smile or a word. Then he closed the door in my face and I heard the bolt being shot inside. I asked our church warden what was up. On a windless June afternoon Annie had been killed by a falling branch from an elm tree and the old man was broken hearted.  He would speak to no one.
Some days later I met Old Dan  in the local town. I think he would have walked past me but I stood in his way. “Come on, Dan. I think there's something you want to say to me.” He looked at me with that same unseeing gaze. “I shan't be coming to your place any more Vicar. Either there's no God, or if there is one, I don't want to have anything to do with him.”

Of all the reasons that men and women lose their faith or are atheist the one constant , over-riding cause is the cruelty of the world, the awful, horrific suffering men and women and children have to endure or have to watch others suffer. Charles Darwin lost his faith not just as a result of his scientific studies but also because of his overwhelming grief at the loss of his little daughter, also called Ann.

If the loss of one child can destroy a man's faith, how can any one's faith survive the deaths of not just thousands but of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children through natural disasters like the sunami in the Indian Ocean, the Typhoon in Burma or the Earthquake in China? Or Aberfan? We can set on one side (for the moment)  genocidal atrocities like the Holocaust or Rwanda. They might be accounted for as the result of our our human wickedness, the brutal monster of evil which lurks only just under the skin of all of us.

But these other appalling natural disasters,  with hundreds and thousands of children screaming in agony as they are slowly crushed to death or drowned – how can a supposedly benign Creator allow, or tolerate such horrors in his world? How could he make a world like this, knowing – as he must have known – what cruelties it would spawn?

Christians, and the Jewish people before us, have struggled with this problem from the earliest years. It is not just a problem. It is a dark abyss which sucks all meaning out of the world, a black wind which blows out all our candles. The Book of Job from the 3rd Century BC is the first human text to face the darkness head on and issue a challenge to it. But even Job's great poem still leaves us floundering.  What kind of answer is it to say, Well can you make a hippopotamus?”
 Oddly enough we seldom hear a frank acknowledgment in Church that we are all hanging over this abyss. It's like the famous elephant in the living room that no one mentions.

What can we say in reply to rebut the daunting charge that we are all kidding ourselves, whistling in the dark to keep our spirits up. The truthful answer is – nothing. I think the charge is irrefutable. The charge against the universe is not just one of murder, but of genocide. The darkness of the world pulls the plug on all our feeble efforts to shine a light of hope which will disperse that night. For truthful minds belief in a loving Creator seems impossible.

And yet. And yet. There is another story to be told. We have not told the whole truth if we do not tell this story too. There is light. The darkness seems total and all engulfing. But there is light. In the abyss of night God says, “Let there be light.”  In that mysterious prologue to his Gospel St John  wrote, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot quench it.”
I look around the world and I find it shot through with miraculous beauty, the kind of beauty Wordsworth wrote of when he wrote:

I have felt a Presence which disturbs me,
and  have had a sense sublime
of something far more deeply interfused,
whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
and the round ocean and the living air
and the blue sky and in the mind of man......

I see it in the mathematical beauty of  astrophysics and and the subatomic world. I hear it in passages of music like the last movement of Bach's  St Matthew Passion which speak to me of a realm of the Spirit which transcends our dark world. I see it in great paintings like Rembrandt's Return of the Prodigal which shows me  a  human compassion which is also divine. I see it in the astonishing heroism of men and women in the Nazi concentration camps; in the compassion of those who give their whole lives to caring for grossly handicapped children or violent teen-agers or the destitute beggars dying on the streets of Calcutta.

I see it in the eyes of lovers and in our outraged crying out against a world which destroys our loves and I see it in the love which holds us by the hand on our last journey into death assuring us that we will not be lost. There is light.

Above all I see it in Jesus. There is something about this heart rending story of a man who gave himself with total, unconditional love, a love which he believed was not just his love but the love of the invisible Creator of this vast universe, whom he called “Father”.      It is God's love we see in Jesus  wrestling with the flawed, wounded, corrupted human race he has made. God's unconditional love drove Jesus to a hideous death.  But this one death exploded – so the Gospel tells me – into a great outpouring of love which has begun to change the world. 
For the saints this love is a constant joy. They reassure me that it is true. And, if a moment of personal testimony is allowed, I have known myself loved by this mysterious God and felt fleeting moments of his joy.
 For me and millions of others who share this way of seeing, believing in God is not just blind faith – it is a soul-response to glimpses of beauty, truth and goodness in the world and in God's saints.. There really is an absolute, transcendent joy at the heart of things. Of that I am convinced.

So what am I to do? I can't believe in God because the world really is so dark and cruel. I can't deny God because I know there really  is a Divine Love.
How can we  weigh light and darkness, such pain and  such beauty  in any human scales? Both are infinite. It is  impossible to believe in God. It is  impossible to deny him. Any human scales must break under such a load.

What tips the balance.?
Well, for me it is the Cross. This is God's love. This is the Crucified God, hideously wounded by his world. This is our God saying to us, “Look, I accept responsibility for the world I have made. Yes, for the children dying in China and Burma and Darfur. I carry all that pain in my own heart. I weep with a mother watching her child die slowly in extreme agony and know what it is like to be that child.. I know it in my own bones, not once but a million times. But I, your crucified God, have a question to put to you. Would you rather the world had never been made? With all its agonies and beauties would you unwish it.?” Some of those who have perished might say with Job, “it would have been better if I had not been born!” But would they unwish the world?

Would it have been better if St Francis, and Socrates and Leonardo, Mozart, Mother Teresa and Shakespeare had never existed? And your children and my children? Those who perished might say, Yes, our agony cannot be balanced against your happiness. Unless, unless God can do for them some final miracle of healing and restoration which really does wipe away all tears.

That is the extraordinary vision of the final chapter of the Bible.. It is the affirmation that because God's love is infinite and his creative power beyond all our dreams,. He is able to do for all of us something so glorious, so far beyond our wildest dreams, such that every human being who has ever lived, whatever they have suffered ,will be able to look God in the face and see the tears on his cheeks and say, YES Father – it was worth it for this. Yes, Old Dan, no longer old, and little Anna, no longer a child,  will hold each other again , and we too all our own lost loves,  in the embrace of the Divine Love.

This chalice is the symbol of all that. A silver chalice filled with blood.  It holds the blood which is the pain and suffering of all human kind, this earthquake and this typhoon and many many more.. And God says over this chalice, “This is my blood”. He takes it, with all its agonies, into his own heart. And then he gives it back to us transformed into the wine of his new creation, his own unconquerable love and joy.
So here on this May morning we drink the wine of Heaven in the middle of a dark, agonised  world and we hear the promise which Lady Julian heard in her little cell  in Norwich  700 years ago:   
  
ALL SHALL BE WELL, AND ALL MANNER OF THING SHALL BE WELL

All things are yours.. the world, life, death the present and the future, all belong to you, and you belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God. (1Cor 3)