Revd Leila

  Sermon for the 18 th Sunday after Trinity (readings at end) If you had to choose one overused Christian catchphrase to sum up your relationship with God, I wonder what you would choose. Mine might be ‘honest to God’? Or the altogether more dangerous ‘I walk by faith and not by sight’. I want to offer one piece of disillusionment for you to ponder as we explore the passages we’ve just heard, and that is this: The word ‘faith’ does not exist in the original languages of the bible. In fact the English word ‘faith’ simply appeared in the C13th, when we nicked it from the Latin, ‘fidere’. The words we usually translate as faith, and certainly have in the Gospel reading today, are the word ‘pistis’, in Greek, or Aman, in Hebrew, from which we get the word ‘Amen’, both of which mean ‘trust’. And these words are not about an internal feeling, they are active, energetic, engaged, two-party interactions. A fun exercise you might want to engage in, if you need to nod off for the rest...