Sermon Sunday 12 th February, 2012 Lessons Genesis 28: 10 22 1 Corinthians 12: 1 11 St John 14: 15 21 Prayer of Illumination Let us pray. Make us, O Lord, attentive to Your Word that we may learn truly to know You; and knowing You, to love You; and loving You, to become like You; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Our conception of God, however we think of God, has a bearing on our prayers, our faith and even our self-understanding, of what it means to be human. Our conception of God, insofar as we can have any conception of God, is vital. One of the more well-known names within the Church of Scotland in the twentieth century was Leonard Small who, among other things, was minister at St Cuthbert s in Edinburgh. Leonard Small was a Chaplain to the Queen and in his book, The Holy Goalie, he tells the story of attending a service with the Queen and her young family in the Abbey on Iona. After the service, the Royal party returned to Britannia and the yacht sailed round and anchored in Loch na Keal in Mull so that the Queen and her family could visit friends on Mull. Once ashore, the Queen said to Philip to take the children on ahead while she sat in the sunshine for a while, intending to catch up with them later. Small wrote, So there she sat, just a young woman in a tweed coat and skirt, brogue shoes and a head square. In a few moments along came a couple of hikers, shook her excitedly by the shoulder and exclaimed, You ll never guess who 1
we ve seen just up the road there Philip and Charles and Anne. If you hurry up you can see them yourself! And off they went. 1 Leonard Small also published a book of sermons in 1963. One of those sermons is entitled, Your God is too small. The sermon closes with a very personal, pastoral story. I have a degree of discomfort with it because it sounds very harsh and yet the core message is the message of the gospel. Small wrote: You have to visit a woman suffering from cancer in the neck and throat. Any conversation is hopelessly one-sided, for her vocal chords are gone, and her side of the conversation must be carried out by writing painfully on a paper pad. You know perfectly well, from long experience, that in spite of all pain-killing drugs, that woman will slowly disintegrate, until she is, in all probability a travesty of the lovely, laughing, vital person you have known. You realise that when death comes it will come not, in a case like this, as the last enemy, but as the servant of God s purpose, bringing release.where pain shall be no more. Yet, realising this, one is left with the inescapable impression that the purpose of God s love must have been defeated. Crucially, Small says: The only answer to this human situation.is to get back to the Cross of Christ, and see there amid the tragedy, the suffering, and the utter defeat, a God so great that He cannot in the end be defeated. The darkness and light are both alike to His love and saving power, and though any of us be called upon to make our bed in hell, even there His hand shall lead us. Anything less than this, and your God is too small. 2 I have never forgotten the words of another cleric, this time the Anglican theologian, Austin Farrer. Farrer asked: 1 R Leonard Small The Holy Goalie 126f 2 R Leonard Small No Uncertain Sound 173 2
Are you brave enough to believe in God at all?...he can and does give an entire, an adequate and undivided attention to every single creature and every single circumstance..it is not silly, childish or superstitious to suppose that God attends to your prayer or your conduct like a parent watching an infant when the parent has nothing else to do. It is merely to credit God with being God. 3 What is our conception of God? Let us think for a moment about the cosmos, about the universe in all its diversity and complexity. We say that God made heaven and earth; our Scriptures say that, but what do we mean when we say God made heaven and earth? Do we mean that God made the universe or that God is making the universe? Galileo said that the book of nature is written in mathematics and the twentieth century mathematician, James Jeans, said, God is a mathematician. In part, they were referring to the rational mathematics which underpin the universe and since the nineteenth century mathematicians have spoken not of infinity but of infinities. The universe is 13.7 billion years old. Scientists ask us to think in terms of millions of millennia or millionths of seconds. In the Big Bang theory, we are told that once, suddenly, there was an event which expanded with enormous energy generating enormous heat and enormous velocity. But the words once, suddenly, event, heat and velocity are all conditioned by time and space; they have their meaning within time and space. Time and space are themselves the product of the Big Bang. One writer says, So total and fast and 3 A Farrer Saving Belief 44 3
complete and hot and energetic was this moment that within millionths of seconds the laws of maths and physics had kicked in and the whole thing was working to such a degree of precision that it has continued to do so for 13.7 billion years. 4 Stephen Hawking has said that: If the density of the universe one second after the Big Bang had been greater by one part in a thousand billion, the universe would have recollapsed after ten years. The spiritual writer, Sara Maitland, says that the greatest threat to theology, faith and the Church comes not from science but from fundamentalism and the loss of our ability to think mythically, poetically, allegorically, creatively, theologically, and artfully.. 5 Looking at the cosmos, Maitland says we see a God of enormous intelligence and subtlety.whatever else the universe is, she says, simple it is not. Maitland speaks of God s respect for creation; in a sense, allowing creation to create itself, and that God is a patient God. Maitland puts it this way: The God who made this universe is, rather obviously, a God who thinks on a large scale, a God who can, unlike us, think not just in millions, but in complex infinites. This God is surely a profoundly patient God, prepared to see galaxies form and die, chemical ooze hang around hopefully for a millennia, information take millions of light years to arrive at a place where it can be useful, and so on. This is a God who is prepared to wait and see what will happen next. 6 4 S Maitland A Joyful Theology 48 5 Ibid., 26 6 Maitland, 52 4
In part, Maitland is referring to our non-deterministic universe, our universe of randomness, chance and probabilities. She says: Any God who consents to the number of different forms of insect life that we have on this tiny planet clearly prefers variety to smooth administration. Any God who is a unity, and chooses to be that unity in three persons, is a God who likes difference. But the God who can cope with random chance as the bottom line, and delight in whatever it throws up, obviously puts a very high, and perhaps unexpected, value on variation, innovation and the changes that time creates. 7 This is the God we worship. Finally, after billions of years a creature emerges, evolves, which has consciousness of the universe, consciousness of itself and a consciousness of God. After billions of years, in and through human beings, the cosmos has become conscious of itself. The sciences are a good friend to theology, to the Church, because they help inform us just how great and awesome our God is. To go back to the wisdom of Austin Farrer, in light of what we know of the universe, in all its mind-blowing complexity, it is no great ask to claim that God is able to give each one of us in every single circumstance His entire, adequate and undivided attention. It is no great ask to claim that God is able to bring life out of death, hope out of the most hopeless situations and peace and wholeness out of pain and brokenness. The nineteenth century writer, George MacDonald, wrote short stories and novels within the ancient stream of Celtic spirituality. His book, The Princess 7 Ibid., 59 5
and the Goblin, had a profound influence upon such writers as G K Chesterton and C S Lewis. In The Princess and the Goblin, the story is of a young princess who lives in a great country house. She discovers that in one of its remote attic rooms, is a beautiful woman, in whom the freshness of youth is combined with the wisdom of the ages.[the woman] sits spinning a thread of light that is woven through all things, and which she instructs the young princess to hold wherever she is in order to feel her presence and be led to her. Others in the house see neither the beautiful woman nor her thread of light 8 The woman, the eternal mother, is present to nurture and to guide, but present too are terrible forces of darkness plotting destruction. 9 In the end, the princess, having followed the beautiful woman s thread, escapes the destructiveness of the dark forces and though she is shaken by evil she is not destroyed. MacDonald said that the grandmother figure represents the presence of God, is within our house, always near, whether we are aware of her or not, whether we know her or not. 10 MacDonald, like others within the Celtic tradition of Christianity, said that the Spirit of God impregnates the whole of creation. For me, God creates and co-creates the universe and that, far from being separate from His world, His Spirit runs like an unseen thread of light through the ever-expanding cosmos. If we are open to His presence, we 8 J Philip Newell Listening to the Heartbeat of God 61 9 Ibid., 61f 10 Ibid., 62 6
too, spiritually, can touch that thread. Leonard Small said that if you believe that God and love and all that is good in the world is defeated by death and by the darkest forces in the universe, your God is too small. Our three readings today bring into focus the nearness of God. In a mystical encounter or through imaginative writing, Jacob in a dream sees a ladder between heaven and earth. The LORD stood above it and said to Jacob, Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go. Jacob woke from the dream and said, How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven! He called the placed Bethel, which means House of God. Jacob encountered the Holy, took hold of the thread of light, felt the Presence, and had his life transfigured and transformed. In Corinthians, St Paul wrote about the Holy Spirit and the diverse gifts, of our unity in diversity. Crucially, he spoke of the Holy Spirit, of the Spirit which works in one and all. Jesus spoke of the Spirit of truth: He said, He dwells with you and will be in you.i am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you. Amidst the weakness and distortions of our lives, we can glimpse the thread of light. It is not a great ask to claim that the God of this universe is mysteriously and mystically present, can re-create after death, be more loving, patient, respectful and forgiving than we can ever understand and, finally, is more, far more interesting and attractive than even our best doctrines would have us believe. Amen. 7