We are like eggs

Jeremiah 20:7-13, Romans 6:1-11, Matthew 10:24-39

We were in the country heading out for a summer drive in our people carrier along country roads with four children and a dog and the makings of lunch all crammed in when we heard the news of Lady Diana’s death on the radio. We were a bit late hearing it for the press conference had been much earlier at 6.00 in the morning; it was unbelievable and as we knew the road, the underpass at the Pont Alma it made it very graphic and real. Our appetite for the picnic was broken and we went home to telephone relatives in England to talk over the news. For it was bursting from us. There are moments when we have such news that we must tell: expecting a baby, becoming engaged to be married, getting a hoped for job, the death of a loved one.

Jeremiah had been prophesying as only he could prophesy and PASHUR, the priest had taken him and publicly placed him in the stocks where everyone could see him. When he was released Jjeremiah continued saying “you Pashur, and all who live in your house shall go into captivity, and to Babylon you shall go and there you shall die.” Maybe these were not the best words to address to a man who had put you in the stocks and who had the power and willingness to do so again but as we hear Jeremiah in our reading tell is he was compelled to speak:

“For whenever I speak I must cry out.”
“If I  say I will not mention him or speak any more in his name, then within me is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones. I am weary with holding it in and cannot.”

 Jeremiah has received the call, the word of the Lord and he must tell it, he cannot hold it in.

In Matthews’ Gospel we hear Jesus say “Have no fear of them for nothing is covered up, what I say to you in the dark tell in the light and what you hear whispered proclaim from the rooftops.” Here is the same idea as Jeremiah’s; what you have heard from me, and it is Jesus speaking, cannot be contained hidden or covered even from fear (of being put in the stocks say) but shout it from the very top of your house. I remember when I was installed as a curate in St. Mary’s Hitchin, the town centre church with a renowned set of heavy bells, a quarter peal was rung to announce my arrival. In this case the news was shouted from the church top.

Paul, writing in Romans, Paul the convert cannot keep it in. “What then are we to say? How can we go on living like we once did, like we used to, when we have been called when we have heard when we have been baptized? No, he says  we must walk in the newness of life.

All three of today’s readings have this motif of being unable to let our belief and understanding of God go unspoken or unseen. This is surely as vitally important now as it was when these three passages were written. This morning over my coffee I listened to the BBC World Service news summary, it was not an inspiring ten minutes. The number of refugees is at a record high, the number being repatriated at a record low, there have been Indian soldiers killed and captured on the border with China, there are violent demonstrations everywhere. All of which makes me ask have we been shouting loudly enough? Are the words like burning fire but are still shut up in our bones?

C S Lewis writing about Paul’s exhortation to us to walk in the newness of life says: we must go for it, for the full treatment (for the full implication of baptism.) It is not easy, he says, but we are just now with the word of God like eggs; “it might be hard for an egg to turn into a bird but it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg.” We must hatch.

And Jeremiah, Paul and Jesus all agree we should hatch and cannot and should not hold in the news.


Amen

Private Prayer

The Psalm which is set for today is Psalm 100:

O be joyful in the Lord, all the earth;
Serve the lord with gladness

Know that the Lord is God it is he that has made us we are his;
We are his people and the sheep of his pasture

Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise;
Give thanks to him and bless his name

For the Lord is gracious, his steadfast love is everlasting;
And his faithfulness endures from generation to generation.

From Monday we are at last allowed to enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise. That is to say that our churches shall be open for private prayer.  Actually this phrase is a bit of a puzzle; Archbishop Rowan Williams in a seminar, or I should say webinar the other day began by saying “There is no such thing as private prayer.” It is always good of course to grab attention at the start by a controversial line. As well as this the trade journal this week (I mean the Church of England Newspaper) has much ink devoted to telling us that we do not need church buildings at all and expounding on how many like to watch big services with bishops on line. Now both of these are right, I suppose, but at the same time I do hope that both of them are wrong.

Archbishop Rowan is talking in view of the Holy Spirit who in that Pentecost arrival revealed the permeating, unifying power of God’s presence and love. To this extent we never pray on our own but are joined in our current prayer with those who are praying everywhere now, to those who have prayed before and those wo will pray in the future. This is a big idea, distinctively Christian, that we are all in the body of Christ but which perfectly allows us to pray alone. Times have changed since Julian of Norwich was immured, but in medieval times every town of consequence wanted to have at least one solitary, anchorite or anchoress, for the town regarded this as part of its welfare services. They were worth maintaining for the spiritual good derived from their prayers and penances. Mother Julian may have prayed on her own but her prayers and revelations sere for us all. Nothing private about that even if in private.

So to the question, do we need churches, should we bother opening them at all particularly just now when we offer no collective worship? We might stay at home guided by prayers on Facebook or Twitter or simply sit quietly in our armchairs. Some or many of you no doubt will do this but for others including me the sacred space has meaning and purpose, the framing of prayer time a value. Firstly there is the going. I know it is not possible for everyone but I like to walk to the church; it is a wonderful aspect of parishes that you can see people on a usual Sunday morning walking up the church path, hopefully not rushing but mentally steadying themselves. Then through the door into a place where countless have come before to bring their hopes and fears a time set apart to talk with God, praying (in the words of the Prayerbook) as well for others as themselves. A church engages multiple senses, the acoustic, the visual, a sense of smell and touch all of which contribute to the way we feel. I am sure we need them.

From Monday then we will carefully open our churches for you to come and pray in them, to give thanks and to bless his name” to be both apart and yet together in the mystery that is now, has been, and shall be for ever.

Amen

Entanglement

Trinity Sunday 2020
Isaiah 40:12-17, 27 - end

The question I want to ponder this morning is “As our human knowledge increases does God become more or less mysterious?” Our reading from Isaiah this morning finds him full of wonder:

“Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand
and marked off the heavens with a span
enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure
And weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance?”

Although phrased as a question Isaiah is full of certainty. Faced with creation he is convinced not only of God’s existence but of God’s capability. Ever since Darwin’s dangerous idea1  there have been attempts to take God out of the picture by delving deeper and smaller. Contract this with Isaiah who steps back to look at the big things: the heavens, the seas, the whole earth of the earth, the mountains and the hills and who concludes that God is much bigger than all these. To help us, like a modern photographer who places a person in front of the Great Pyramid for scale he sets the creator against our sizes: a span, a measure, a scale or a balance.

Our science, however, seems more concerned with building blocks, the components of life, the genome, the DNA, the components of the universe, the particles, waves, quantum mechanics. The microscopes and telescopes were not there for Isaiah but if they had been I like to think he would have written in the same way.

Newton is of course now old hat superseded by Einstein who by now may be also partly old hat. Once I imagined I understood the atom, the proton, neutron and the electron, the orbitals and the excited states but that by now is very very old hat. My father- in- law a professional nuclear physicist in his day, wondered recently what he had missed and ordered a first year undergraduate textbook - the book was large, the print tiny and the changes considerable.

Considerable and for me often marvellous. There is a new thing, well new for me at any rate called “Quantum Entanglement.” This is a complex idea now demonstrated by more complex experiments that allows that something can be in two places at once. The technical definition is that entanglement occurs “when two (or more) particles are such that their quantum states cannot be described independently even though they are apart.”

Today is Trinity Sunday, where we reflect on the threeness and oneness of God and most especially the perfect loving, making sure we stress loving here, the perfect loving relationship between them. Or, even though God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit may be far apart they are indivisible and cannot be described independently.

The more we learn the bigger God becomes.

Amen.

1 Dennett Daniel C Penguin 1995

Pentecost Sunday : Language

Every Pentecost I speak about the miracle of language: “And how is it that we hear,each of us in our own native language?” Language is a textured complexity; the acting schools will remind you that the words themselves are only a minor part of any communication, with our facial expressions and tone of voice far and away dominating the story. During lock down I have been doing a couple of things which may have a bearing on this - listening to France Musique and also an audiobook edition of Oliver Twist. 

In the first case during a news bulletin there was a description of how the virus beginning in  bagts “S’est passé par un petit animal qui s’appelle un Pangolin.” In the measured and gentle tones of a (proper) French accent I developed a sympathy for the little animal which previously had been to our minds a hard scaly insect ridden malevolent creature responsible for devastation in unimaginable degrees.

And a single sentence from the beginning of chapter 27 of Oliver Twist:

“As it would be by no means seemly in a humble author to keep so mighty a personage as a beadle waiting, with his back to the fire, and the skirts of his coat gathered up under his arms until such time as it might suit his pleasure to relieve him; and as it would still less become his station, or his gallantry, to involve in the same neglect a lady on whom that beadle had looked with an eye of tenderness and affection, and in whose ear he had whispered sweet words, which coming from such a quarter might well thrill the bosom of maid or matron of whatsoever degree; the historian whose pen traces these words - trusting that he knows his place, and that he entertains a becoming reverence for those upon earth to whom high and important authority is delegated hastens to pay them that respect and to treat them with all that duteous ceremony which their exalted rank and (by consequences) great virtues imperatively claim at his hands.

Which when translated means “I will take up my story where I left off.” These words take us unerringly to the dark smog of Dickensian London and an age that was all its own and where we wait with held breath for the next issue of the magazine Bentley’s Miscellany.

All those people, the Parthians, Medes, Elamites, those from Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia ,Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt, parts of Libya, Cretans and Arabs heard not just the words, the consonants and vowels of their languages but the cadence, the tone, the whole message with their hearts. The miracle of the Holy Spirit is so much more than  a “Google Translate” for they each heard the words of Peter perfectly. Of course any miracle must be perfect, by definition, after all it is a gift from God. The Holy Spirit came and still comes  to speak to us on any wavelength, in whatsoever ways we find most easy to understand.in ways that we can take into our hearts and which can change our perceptions and our souls in ways we may not yet imagine.

Amen

With One Accord - The Sunday after Ascension Day

When the disciples arrived back in Jerusalem they went to the room upstairs where they were staying. It will help our reflections if we go with them and although it may not have been, though some say it was, let us in any case, imagine that it is the same upper room where they celebrated the Passover Supper on the eve of the crucifixion. Since then they have known despair, were likely angry with one another (surely in the immediate days they asked themselves couldn’t they have spoken out more and done something to prevent this somehow?) . Soon afterwards they retired in defeat to Galilee, back to their boats then joyfully there were days spent with Jesus again, and now they are in Jerusalem fearful that the authorities may try to root them out for association and they gather. What to do surrounded by the memories, the cushions they lay on that night, the torture they witnessed, the uncertaintly of an empty tomb? But with Jesus having appeared to them and with the promises he gave them - everything he told them that would happen did happen: They must believe him now.

They were constantly devoting themselves to prayer or as the King James Bible says more strongly “These continued with one accord in prayer and supplication.” I do not know why modern versions omit that phrase, with one accord, for it is an important component of the scene before us. They were together in fellowship and harmony, united in experience with no quarrel or discord between them. Their instinctive response to Jesus’ ascension is to pray together. Behind and informing these prayers is that fullness of trust in Jesus, his being the Son of God that they had seen and felt and been part of. This depth and completeness of trust may at times be elusive to us so many hundreds of years on. But our view of the upper room with followers praying is not a picture we are looking into but one we

are part of. As we stand or sit alongside the men and women on that room we feel that they are afraid for the future; we are afraid for the future. They are, with the vision of Jesus ascending in recent memory, hopeful for the future; we are hopeful for the future. They know they will need help for the future; we know we need help for the future.

Their intuitive response to these uncertainties is to pray, but let us ponder a  moment. before this day, before this afternoon in Jerusalem they would not have prayed to Jesus. Is this the first time? Of course they would have prayed with Jesus many times and they should have had the inestimable benefit of his teaching them how to pray to the Father and how to make this a way of being,  a constant part of their daily lives but now, gathered together with Jesus not physically with them, palpably so, no look,no touch no certain presence they pray with one accord. Not, to a distant impersonal God but to a God they know and trust. Let us remain in their room awhile, with all our anxieties sharing the tensions they feel and pray with them to the God we know, and who we know knows us, for the things we know he knows we need so that when we leave the room we do so with confidence and trust.

Amen

Ascension Day Reflection

Just before we spend a moment or so reflecting on the Ascension and what it may hold for our present understanding, the sharply observant may have noticed that I continued the usual reading in Acts by adding verse 12 which says: “Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a sabbath day’s journey away. As well as giving the location where the ascension happened it speaks to today’s situation. A sabbath day’s journey did not mean something you could accomplish in a single day but it was a specific distance that you were allowed to travel on the Sabbath. The Dead Sea scrolls restrict it to 1000 cubits or if you were pasturing animals then 2000. Despite the parallels with our modern day restrictions operating in France Spain and elsewhere it reminds us that 1st century Palestine was not our world.

The ancient’s understanding of what lay beyond the dome of the sky was limited; it was certainly where heaven was and in addition a cloud was frequently met in the Old Testament (Exodus, Daniel for example) as a sign of God’s presence. With all respect to my Walsingham friends whose chapel of the Ascension has feet poking down from a ceiling, I do not really find this imagery helpful. Even Luke, writing in Acts does not really dwell on it - he is more concerned it seems to me with what is being said.

The question uppermost in the disciples’ minds is “What next?” Having seen and fully understood that Jesus is raised from the dead they want to know if he would now go on to fulfill the expected purpose of the Messiah, to restore the kingdom to Israel. The answer they are given is “It is not for you to know when this might take place and your job rather than asking these questions is to be my witnesses in the world, in fact to all the ends of the earth.” And when he had said this as they were watching he was lifted up and a cloud took him out of their sight. The disciples witnessed a change from Jesus’ physical presence with them to a spiritual one. They certainly felt that, Luke and doubtless others sought to explain this transformation in terms of things they knew using language that their hearers and readers would understand.

I am comfortable with that. It is a very human thing to do. I was looking recently at an old Japanese print that was seeking to explain the existence of air. The print contained a picture of fish in a bowl. The artist and scientists of those times had no concept of the composition of air, which came very much later,  but they understood that fish inhabited a medium and were able to describe our place in an invisible emptiness as being something like this - something they could see and touch, like fish in water.

The transformation that happened there on Mount Olivet is quite beyond us and I am happy that it is: Paul writing in 1 Timothy  3:16 puts the untouchable ethereal nature of Jesus well:

He was revealed in flesh
Vindicated in Spirit
Seen by angels
Proclaimed among the Gentiles
Believed in throughout the world
And taken up in glory.

Amen

The Rainbow

Genesis 8:20 - 9:17

The bows appear as concentric arcs with the common centre on the line connecting the eye of the observer and the light source. Most frequently only one bow is visible. It appears on the opposite side from the source; its angular radius of the red border is about 42 degrees. Other colours of the spectrum can be seen inside of this border ending with the violet. Occasionally another secondary rainbow is observed above the primary rainbow. Its angular radius is about fifty-four degrees and the sequence of colours is reversed. The centre of the bows is angularly as far below the horizon as the source (sun) is above.

This entry from the 1964 edition of the encyclopaedia Britannica is less picturesque than Genesis:
“This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and every living creature that is with you for all generations. I have set my bow in the clouds and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the whole earth.”

People have marvelled at rainbows always and as an example of the beauty and mystery of God’s creation they do evoke wonder and questioning, awe and admiration. Yet the science that I have quoted dates only from 1611. The 1771 Encyclopaedia Britannica finding all this still quite modern devoted pages 435 to 441, so some six pages, and a set of exquisite diagrams to the entry. It i s a miracle that we ever came to understand it so minutely, another example of God’s gift to us of reason, deduction and creativity.

All creation is God’s way of revealing himself to us; the perfection that we see in nature, tiny leaves, buds, flowers, fruits always seeming to be the right shape, in the right place, looking as if they ought to be there. But the rainbow is a special sign: God said to Noah “I will remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.”

It is always thrilling to see a rainbow and remains so for most of us well  beyond childhood. Here is Wordsworth thinking about that:

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky
So it was when my life began
So it is now that I am a man
So be it when I grow old
     Or let me die
The child is father of the man
And I would wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

“My heart leaps up” and I wonder if the rainbow we see today, comprehensively explained though it is, strikes deep into a spiritual core that we all know we have and have had from the beginning or as Wordsworth says - “So it was when my life began.” So when we look up at a rainbow we are the ones who remember.

I was struck when exploring rainbows to discover Dame Laura Knight’s picture (in the Tate Gallery) called “Spring.” Painted in an impressionist style it shows a pastoral scene of a meadow, a fly fisherman, a country lady with a gathering basket, lambs in a distant field and overarching it all in the sky a rainbow. The picture is dated, 1916-1920 and is so clearly peaceful. I do not know the life story of Laura Knight but it seems to me to be a response to the joy springing from 1918, and the end of the Great War.

We have recently adopted the rainbow to be a sign for the NHS, it may have several meanings but it is I suggest among other things a sign of eternal hope and a reminder of God’s promises to us.

Amen

This sermon can be heard on the following podcast:

https://anchor.fm/vicarsteve/episodes/Service-from-the-Burnham-Benefice-for-May-17th-The-sixth-Sunday-of-Easter-ee1p5v

The painting that I refer to can be found at

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/dame-laura-knight-1424