I am writing this on holiday near the Great Barrier Reef. On 3 June 1770 James Cook came this way in the Endeavour. The tourist guide says Cook named the nearby channel the Whitsunday Passage because, and I quote, "it was the seventh Sunday after Easter - White Sunday... He named one island, Pentecost, in honour of the feast of the Passover."
This brought home to me how unfamiliar people are nowadays with the simple facts about the Christian faith and about the Bible. For Pentecost, also called Whit Sunday, or Whitsun, does not recall the Passover, but the Feast of Weeks, the Jewish festival of the wheat harvest, seven weeks later.
This is not quite as depressing as the tale of the students who were unable to say whether Cain killed Abel or Abel slew Cain - it is said that a fifth of them asked who Cain and Abel were. But it gives a hint as to why the things Christians do and believe are so inaccessible to many people.
Ignorance is nothing new, of course. Naaman, when he was cured by Elisha of his leprosy, asked if he could take a couple of mule-loads of earth with him so that he could worship at home in Syria - a rather naïve idea that God could only be worshipped in the Holy Land (land and earth are the same word in Hebrew), but one echoed in Psalm 137 ("how can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?") and by the Zionist political movement at the end of the 19th century.
Ignorance as such is not wrong. Paul tells the Romans that their pagan fellow-citizens do not need the full details of the law in order to lead good lives (Rom. 2:13-15) - though he suggests it may well be hard work. But it does open the door to wrong ideas. And some of these wrong ideas, whether the strange alternative worlds of New Age-ism or the permissive world where anything goes, safe and harmful alike, are both attractive and dangerous.
With ignorance around us, we Christians are failing in our duty. The apostles were called to preach the good news about Jesus to the ends of the earth - part of the church's work is to tell people, to inform them, to give them the opportunity to know God and to experience God's care.
Even if preaching is not for us, we are all called to love our neighbours, and how can we love someone without opening their eyes when we find them ignorant? People will not turn if they do not realize what way they are going, and they will not turn to Christ if they do not understand who Jesus is or what Jesus did.
To do this, we need to know Christ more deeply, to be aware of God in our lives, and of God's dealings with the world. We need to read our Bibles, we need to learn more about God through reading, discussion, prayer and in our daily lives. Love without knowledge is often weak.
As an institution, St Ursula's can offer enquirers' courses, beginners' courses, teaching about the basic facts of faith. But the duty lies on us all, too, to tell our neighbours about God, about God's love for the world, about God's offer of salvation. For it is God's will for us to share in that salvation and to know that love. Not just us, but all the world.
HD