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Just occasionally a talk someone has delivered at St Luke's deserves a life
a little longer than a 12 minute slot in the Sunday service.

Sometimes it might provide some inspiration or food for thought
for people beyond our local community.

On this page we carry some of these talks, often by Dave our priest,
sometimes by other people from within our community.

A talk by Dave Tomlinson on Table Fellowship

A talk by Dave Tomlinson on Rumours of Glory in Ordinary Life

A talk by Dave Tomlinson on The Psalms as 'Gut Religion'

A talk for Trinity Sunday by Malcolm Doney

A talk by Martin Wroe on What God is like
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A talk by Dave Tomlinson on Table Fellowship

CORPUS CHRISTI SUNDAY
13th June 2004

1 Corinthians 11:23 - John 6:51-58


St. Juliana of Liège was born on 5th April 1258. At the age of five she lost her parents and was placed in the convent of Mont-Cornillon, near Liège. From the age of 16 she had a recurring dream of a brilliant full moon that had a black spot on its surface. Eventually the interpretation came to her: the moon represented the church calendar with all its wonderful feasts and festivals, but the black spot indicated that there was something missing: an occasion to celebrate the institution of the Eucharist or Holy Communion. When she shared the dream with the Bishop of Liège he believed it to be a genuine message from God and, as luck had it, he later became Pope
Urban IV (yes, a 13th century urban pope!) So Juliana’s dream came to pass: the feast of Corpus Christi (the body of Christ) was celebrated in 1264 with hymns and prayers written by Thomas Aquinas. And here we are, celebrating that same feast, once again fulfilling a young girl’s dream.

As most of you know, I grew up in a rather narrow-minded and exclusive branch of the church known as the Christian Brethren. The male designation is not inappropriate since the injunction of St Paul that women should be silent in church was taken literally. Women were not permitted to speak at all in public worship, whether to preach, pray – or even give the notices! What I never did understand was that they were allowed to sing, which is surely a form of speaking. The other thing about my Brethren upbringing is that it was fiercely anti-papist: priests, popes, and worst of all, the Mass were all seen as demonic manifestations.

And yet, despite their neurotic Protestant loathing for the Catholic Mass, the Brethren have always been surprisingly sacramental. Every Sunday morning they gather around the Lord’s Table to break bread, and the format is the same the world over. The seats are arranged in a square, and in the centre stands a small plain table upon which are placed the elements of bread and wine. People would have apoplexy at any suggestion that the table was an altar, and yet in it’s stark simplicity it is revered every bit as much as the high altar in any Anglo-Catholic shrine. And the atmosphere is deeply solemn and reverential – almost unbearably so, for a young boy. At a given point, the bread and wine are passed around, always followed by a small collection bag with two handles.

On one very memorable Sunday, we had a visiting missionary called G.K. Lowther, a celebrity figure – a kind of David Beckham of the Brethren churches. Just at the point when the collection was passed around, my pal who was sitting on the front row with his parents dropped the half-crown he’d been given to place in the collection. The coin rolled across the wooden parke floor, under the Lords table, coming to an alarmingly noisy end right at the feet of GK Lowther. No one dared breath. Lowther looked around, smiled broadly, picked up the coin and rolled it back through the legs of the Lord’s table (with perfect length) to the feet of the ten-year old boy, whose face shone with delight. Meanwhile, an awkward grin passed around the rest of the company.

I don’t remember anything GK Lowther said on any of his several visits to our church, but the great man taught me one thing I will never forget: that sacred ritual should never, never be so solemn that it excludes real, day-to-day humanity. And sometimes it is those little unplanned disruptions – a dropped coin – that mediate God’s presence more effectively than all the finest ritual.

Whilst the main focus of attention in Holy Communion is on the bread and wine, we should never overlook the table, which is absolutely integral to the whole event – whether it is the plain and unremarkable, sumptuously ornate, or strikingly imaginative.

Of course, the whole business began around a table in a hired room where Jesus met with his friends to celebrate the Jewish feast of the Passover. After supper was ended, as we were reminded in the reading, Jesus took a loaf of bread, gave thanks, broke it and said ‘This is my body – do this in remembrance of me.’ It is this same table, in whatever form it comes, that saints and sinners have gathered around week in, week out, for two thousand years. And here we are, gathered around it again today. This is a deeply historic event. But let’s not forget that it was originally a table of friends, and that is what it should always remain.

However, it’s also the table of creation. No one pretends that this is a real meal; it’s a symbolic meal. And the bread and wine upon it symbolise the whole of creation. Our belief that God penetrates these elements with his presence only makes sense against a background belief that the divine is always present in the material world, always a part of the ordinary events of everyday life. To share in this feast is to ‘catch a glimpse of the almost unbearable preciousness and mystery of life.’

When we consecrate the bread and wine we are holding up the whole of nature and the entirety of ordinary life, proclaiming that creation is precious because God deigns to inhabit it. The Eucharist is unimaginably life affirming. To receive communion is to affirm that we are a part of the vast web of life on earth and in heaven. And as we go back into our daily routine, we set out on a eucharistic journey – of humble gratitude for menial blessings, of attentiveness to the subtle complexities of daily existence, of wonder and imagination as we discover the divine in the ordinary.

This is a table of creation, It is also a table of inclusion. The archetype of Holy Communion found in the life of Jesus can be seen in what biblical scholars call his ‘table fellowship’. Throughout the gospels Jesus is found sharing meals with all kinds of people: friends, critics, prostitutes, the wealthy, social outcasts, tax collectors, publicans, religious intellectuals, social snobs and down to earth sinners. He was constantly accused of eating ‘with publicans and sinners’. The table of Christ, then and now, is a place of acceptance and inclusion.

There’s a story told by a missionary to the Massai people of East Africa. After evangelising six Massai communities he decided it was time to challenge them to be baptised. He gathered the people and explained what was involved. But he warned them that acceptance for baptism was not automatic. Knowing the group quite well, he looked around and said, ‘This old man sitting here has missed too many of our instruction meetings. He was always out herding cattle. He will not be baptized with the rest. These two on this side will be baptized because they always attended, and understood very well what we talked about. So did this young mother. She will be baptized. But that man there has obviously not understood the instructions. And that lady there has scarcely believed the gospel message. They cannot be baptized. And this warrior has not shown enough
effort. . . .’

The old man, Ndangoya, stopped him politely but firmly, ‘Padri, why are you trying to break us up and separate us. During this whole year that you have been teaching us, we have talked about these things endlessly when you were not here, at night around the fire. Yes, there have been lazy ones in this community. But those with much energy have helped them. There are stupid ones in the community, but they have been helped by those who are intelligent. Yes, there are ones with little faith in this village, but they have been helped by those with much faith. Would you turn away the lazy ones and drive off those with little faith and the stupid ones? From the first day you came I have spoken for these people. And I speak for them now. Now, on this day one year later, I can declare for them and for all this community, that we have reached the step in our lives where we can say, ‘We believe.’

Today, we gather around this table not on our own merits. It’s not about how good or virtuous we are, but about how generous God is. This is an open table; anyone who chooses can participate – old and young, black and white, straight or gay, those who are full of faith and those who are struggling with doubts, those who feel like dancing for joy and those whose tears could fill a river. All are welcome here. As we lift up the bread and wine we also hold up humanity for all that it is – imperfect, messy, corrupt, selfish, vulnerable, helpless. And we do so in then assurance that God accepts it, and in the expectation that he will be revealed in and through humanity, warts and all.

One more thing: I said earlier that the table of Christ is a table of friends; it is in fact a family table – the table of Christ’s family, the church. Sadly, the spirituality that has shaped so much of our thinking about Holy Communion is overly individualistic and this often takes us down the wrong track in terms of how we approach the ritual. The Eucharist is a corporate event through and through. To come looking for some profound ‘me and Jesus’ moment is to miss the whole point. Frederick Buechner says it’s a game that we play because Jesus asked us to play it. Play that makes a difference. Play that makes sense. If it seems a childish thing to do, do it in remembrance that you are a child.

I like that idea. The Eucharist is a divinely inspired game, a dance that we are invited to enter. We retell the story to re-member – to reconnect the past with the present, to reconnect our broken lives, to reconnect with the community. Don’t come looking for some moment of deep personal meaningfulness (though you might get that as a spin-off). The blessing isn’t in some self-contained piety, but in the whole communal thing; it’s in playing along, joining the dance. This is the spiritual family meal. The spiritual food is in the fellowship. Christ is in our fellowship. At St Luke’s we’re experimenting with sharing in it every Sunday. If it were practical I would celebrate it with you every day. For me, this is what Christian worship is all about.

To illustrate how regular participation in Holy Communion transforms us, Frederick Buechner draws on ‘The Happy Hypocrite’, Max Beerbohm’s famous fable. The wicked man in the fable wore the mask of a saint to woo and win the saintly girl he loved. Years later, when a castoff girlfriend discovered the ruse, she challenged him to remove the mask in front of his beloved and show her his face for the sorry thing it was. He did what he was told, only to discover that underneath the saint’s mask, his face had become the face of a saint.

Gathering around the table every week, eating a small piece of bread and sipping wine may not feel like life-changing stuff. And yet, even though we may not discern the changes taking place, by playing this ‘game’ as Jesus asked us to, we are indeed being transformed by his love. So keep coming. Keep eating bread and sipping wine. Keep the peace with each other. Keep befriending. Keep including. Keep welcoming. Keep the feast.

AMEN.

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A talk by Dave Tomlinson on Rumours of Glory in Ordinary Life

TRINITY SUNDAY

With the Baptism of Isabelle Francis

15th June, 2003

Isaiah 6:1-8

John 3:1-17

RUMOURS OF GLORY

There’s a story about a man who was confined to a prison cell. His only view of the outside world was through a small window high up on the wall. To begin with he hated his confinement, and despised the miserable view he had on the outside world, which was the only world he believed in; it was also the world for which he longed.

But time passed, and that little window became his friend. Yes, it only offered tiny morsels of life - a wisp of cloud, a free-flying bird, a passing plane, a falling leaf, a raindrop, a snowflake - but he gradually came to see that this was not such a bad thing. It forced him to concentrate on the particular, and to imagine a lot from a little. Indeed, he was amazed at discovering how much of life can be found in one small sample.

At times the view from the window was shallow and opaque. The world seemed to end at the window. But at other times the window opened onto a blue and empty sky. Then it gave access to infinity, and he felt awakening within him transcendent longings he never knew were there. The little window offered glimpses of heaven as well as of earth.

When, eventually, the man was released, he found himself seeing everything in general and nothing in particular. And to his dismay, the sense of ‘beyond’ that he’d caught sight of through the little window, the stirrings of a transcendent dimension to life, now began to diminish. Paradoxically, it seems that the sense of the transcendent is linked to an appreciation of the particular.

So how does this relate to our service today? Well, this is Trinity Sunday - the day when preachers around the world will be flinging themselves like lemmings into the task of explaining the mysteries of the Holy Trinity to bemused and semi-comatose congregations. And hey, I’m not averse to the odd fling myself - the notion of the trinity, a social God, is pretty important to me too. But perhaps we try too hard. Perhaps we’re straining to see the big picture when what we should do is simply gaze with greater expectation through our little windows.

I don’t suppose you could call Isaiah’s window little - he had something more like a multi-screen panoramic vision of God: ‘I saw the Lord sitting on a high and lofty throne, surrounded by angels’. He even overheard the relentless angelic conversation: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.’ Now I like that: the whole earth is full of God’s glory. What a massive, inclusive vision. Not the church full of God’s glory, not St Paul’s Cathedral, not St Peters in Rome, but the whole earth - the whole earth is full of God’s glory.

Sadly, few of us see it that way. We look out grey mornings and see drizzly rain; we sit in lines of traffic or stand, half asleep, on a jam-packed tube; we watch the news and see more burned out buses in Israel, more crying babies in the aftermath of an explosion; we drudge our way through yet another daily round, dispose of another dirty nappy, bag our rubbish, find ourselves caught up in yet another grouchy exchange with a loved one.

The whole earth is full of God’s glory - we wish!

And yet the little windows on the transcendent are still there, if only we can lift our eyes to see them. And I’m really taken with this idea that the way we encounter the transcendent is by concentrating on the particular. And that’s another way of saying that God is found most profoundly in the ordinary things in life, the things we most take for granted - one of my favourite themes as the folk here at St Lukes should have realised by now.

In a wonderful book called Mystical Passion: Spirituality for a Bored Society William McNamara says that it’s better to stay home and smell a flower, bake an apple pie, or sweep a floor than to have a spooky, spurious religious experience at a prayer meeting. It’s better to simply enjoy the sunshine or a good show than to meddle curiously and conceitedly with the occult. It’s better to romp with the dogs in the backyard than engage in haughty spiritual conversations at church, if the dogs in the yard help us to be less egoistical and more God-centred. I tell you, that’s my kind of spirituality. How can we relish the higher things of God if we can’t enjoy some simple little things like a glass of beer, a boat ride, a warm bath, a good kiss, a belly laugh, smelling the air after a shower of rain, lying in the sun, gazing into the soft brown eyes of a furry creature - all these things can be rumours of glory, tiny windows on the great beyond.

I hope you’ve all seen the film American Beauty. It’s a fascinating delve into the modern American psyche, based around the story of Lester, the archetypal Mr Suburbia who’s trying to regain his youth. In one beautifully shot scene Lester’s daughter is with Ricky, her boyfriend, who says he wants to show her the most beautiful thing he ever found. It’s a short film portraying a plastic bag being blown around by the wind just minutes before a snow storm. The image of the swirling bag is spell-binding. Ricky says, ‘This bag was just dancing with me, like a little kid begging me to play with it.’ He goes on to say that, sitting watching the bag, he realised that there is this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted him to know that there was no reason to be afraid....ever. The whole earth is full of God’s glory.....St Paul says, ‘In him we live and move and have our being.’

‘Sometimes’ Ricky says ‘I feel there’s so much beauty in the world I just can’t take it, and my heart is just going to cave in.’ I know what he means. But on the few occasions I’ve felt like that it has always been in response to something very particular - a tiny window on God....a rumour of glory. I felt it when I fell in love with Pat. And I felt it again when I watched my two children being born and then held them in my arms - minute, yet perfectly formed, scraps of humanity...windows on God...rumours of glory.

And that brings us very nicely to the little scrap we have before us today: little Isabel. In a few moments I’m going to hold her in my arms, and feel again the priceless vulnerability of a little child. It’s amazing how many people’s lives are transformed when they have a baby. Just this week I was listening to people calling 5-Live to talk about parenthood. It was particularly moving to hear guys who had worked in highly paid jobs in the City, who’d given it all up to stay at home and look after their small children. Their whole value system and priorities had been turned upside down by becoming a parent. The transcendent made visible through a tiny window.

The Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity springs out of a glorious affirmation that God is both beyond creation and revealed within it (transcendent and immanent). Jesus Christ is the ‘beyond’ come among us. In him we get the clearest glimpse of what God is like.

The tragedy is that we have all too often tried to contain Jesus within the church - in doctrines, in the structures of formal religion, in theological formulas; we’ve invoked his name to oppress those who don’t fit our mould, to exclude those we don’t like or who don’t believe the same things as us. But he won’t be tied down. You’ll find him in the most unlikely places: hiding in a barn in ancient Palestine, smiling from the face of a baby in a supermarket, suffering in the broken bodies of AIDS sufferers, twinkling in the eye of an elderly woman about to slip away with dementia, grinning in the midst of storm, serving us through the mundane acts of kindness by a loved one whom we take for granted. These and many more things could be your little windows on God...your rumours of glory.

It’s amazing how much of God can be found in one small sample of life.

AMEN.

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A talk by Dave Tomlinson on The Psalms as 'Gut Religion'

EASTER 4

11th May, 2003

John 10:

Psalm 23

THE PSALMS - GUT RELIGION

When police drivers are going through their training, one of the exercises they must perform is to give a running commentary as they are driving. This involves making verbal observations on everything that’s happening, on and around the road - commenting on the conditions, any other cars, pedestrians etc. They call it ‘talking your way through’ the situation.

When my brother was training to be a police driver in Liverpool he would come home with all kinds of horror stories, some of which were doubtless apocryphal, but entertaining all the same.

One time he told us about a trainee who was driving a fast car in the Lake District accompanied by three instructors. As the driver turned a bend he was faced with a very long and gradual hill. Half way up the hill was a slow-moving car. And at the brow of the hill a very large truck was just appearing, coming in the opposite direction. The police car was travelling at about 80mph at this point. Then to the trainee’s horror, one of the instructors calmly said, ‘Put your foot hard down and talk your way through it.’ Filled with terror and struggling to absorb the command, which he knew he must obey, the young trainee pulled out to face the oncoming truck and shoved his foot hard on the boards and in a loud voice said, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want...’

The reason this psalm sprang to mind was, I’m sure, because it is probably best known as the funeral psalm. Indeed, I can reliably inform you that Palm 23 set to the well-known tune Crimond, is in fact the enduring number one hit in the funeral charts. And no wonder: it’s a deeply calming, reassuring psalm - even though it does suffer from over-familiarity with most of us. ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you are with me; your rod and your staff they comfort me etc.’

Since Psalm 23 is one of our readings today, I’ve decided take the opportunity (long awaited) to pass on some thoughts about the book of Psalms as a whole - to offer a spirituality of the psalms, if you will. I’ve called the talk ‘Gut Religion’ because that’s what I think the Psalms are all about: they’re expressions of authentic gut-level religion.

When it’s set out in metrical form for singing, the book of Psalms is known as the Psalter. And of course this is how the book was originally intended to be used. Originally, the Psalter was the hymn book of the Hebrew people, and then later that of the Church. For centuries the Psalms have formed the very core of monastic spirituality: many religious orders recite or sing the entire one hundred and fifty psalms every week. And Anglican daily prayers, which are rooted in Benedictine tradition, also centre on the psalms. Here at St Lukes we pray the psalms day by day in Morning Prayers.

And anyone who does read the psalms systematically, rather than simply dipping into the old favourites, soon discovers that they aren’t all as calming, reassuring and comforting as Psalm 23. Some are dance numbers (literally), others are Blues songs, some are pretty disturbing in their tone, and a few are downright obnoxious - like, X certificate!

Psalm 137, for example, opens with the lines immortalised by Boney M: ‘By the rivers of Babylon...’ But don’t let the catchy tune and the dance rhythm deceive you: Psalm 137 is a moody lament penned by an angry soul who has been taken captive by the Babylonians and longs for home. But as he looks on his oppressors, it gets much worse: ‘Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!’ Hmmm. Not very Christian. You can see why Boney M chopped that bit.

But it wasn’t us who were kidnapped; it wasn’t our children who were slaughtered by an invading force; it wasn’t our homes and belongings that were burned or looted; it wasn’t our dreams that were shattered. Is this how the parents of the Moors murder victims feel? My liberal (and I hope Christian) sentiments left me feeling that Myra Hindley could have been released - but it wasn’t my precious kids who were snatched away and brutally murdered, their precious, fragile bodies buried in shallow graves somewhere on the cold, lonely moors of Saddleworth. Judgement is cheap; experience can be excruciating.

The Psalms do not simply offer happy-clappy, sanitised religion; they voice ecstatic joy, passion, disappointment, pain and grief. This is gut-level religion, a spirituality acquainted with the dark sides of life as well as the seasons of ‘sweetness and light’. The Book of Psalms expresses honest, gut-level, straight from the hip human experience passing through the varied seasons of life.

I marvel how the religious censors of the past managed to keep their scissors away from the psalms. Perhaps they recognised the necessity of powerful, unedited conversations with God in Holy Scripture if real honesty was to be preserved in the reader’s spirituality. Here we have authentic humanity - sometimes rapturously applauding the almighty, other times groping for him through darkness, pain and despair, and sometimes hounding heaven for justice, or even revenge - the full gamut of creaturely emotions. Oh yes, this is gut-level religion alright.

And if the Psalms tell us anything they tell us that life runs in seasons. You may be experiencing such warm sunshine that you despise the miserable bugger who drones on with endless soul-searching. But beware: you may soon be gazing into a Babylonian river yourself, longing for things to be different and ready to bash the blasted happy-clappy chorus-singer over the head with his own guitar!

Optimistic psalms born out of ‘up’ times abound: God is in the heavens, the world is a wonderful place, and all is well:

Happy are those who have the God of Jacob for their help, 

whose hope is in the Lord their God;

Who made heaven and earth,

the sea and all that is in them; 

who keeps his promise for ever;

Who gives justice to those that suffer wrong 

and bread to those who hunger.

The Lord looses those that are bound; 

the Lord opens the eyes of the blind;

The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down; 

the Lord loves the righteous;

The Lord watches over the stranger in the land;

he upholds the orphan and widow; 

but the way of the wicked he turns upside down.

The Lord shall reign for ever, 

your God, O Zion, throughout all generations.

Alleluia.

But the seasons change: life won’t always be so sunny; there will be occasions when you feel gutted with disappointment when things don’t work out: that job wasn’t for you, the car gave up the ghost on a cold wet night half way up the M1, a loved one is snatched away through cancer - and you want serious words with the ‘Manager’!

How long will you forget me, O Lord; for ever? 

How long will you hide your face from me?

How long shall I have anguish in my soul

and grief in my heart, day after day? 

How long shall my enemy triumph over me?

Look upon me and answer, O Lord my God; 

lighten my eyes, lest I sleep in death;

But it can get worse: some periods of life feel like the deep mid-winter. The mood is one of total despair. In extreme circumstances, the feelings may even become suicidal:

O Lord, God of my salvation, 

I have cried day and night before you.

For my soul is full of troubles; 

my life draws near to the land of death.

I am counted as one gone down to the Pit; 

I am like one that has no strength,

Lost among the dead, 

like the slain who lie in the grave,

Whom you remember no more, 

for they are cut off from your hand.

But it’s those bitter cries for revenge in the psalms that we find hardest to swallow. Psalm 109 is about as bad as it gets:

Appoint a wicked man over him, 

and let an accuser stand at his right hand.

When he is judged, let him be found guilty, 

and let his prayer be counted as sin.

Let his days be few 

and let another take his office.

Let his children be fatherless 

and his wife become a widow.

Let his children wander to beg their bread; 

let them seek it in desolate places.

Let the creditor seize all that he has; 

let strangers plunder the fruit of his toil.

Let there be no one to keep faith with him, 

or have compassion on his fatherless children.

Let his line soon come to an end 

and his name be blotted out in the next generation.

It’s a far cry from the teachings of Jesus, but hey, we’d better reserve judgment. What is it like to be crushed under a totalitarian regime - widows and mothers drinking endlessly from the well of grief for their missing men folk, children heartlessly robbed of their innocence, women raped and tossed aside by unassailable oppressors?

Walter Brueggeman offers three categories into which most of the psalms fit. The first category is what he calls psalms of orientation. These psalms reflect a state of settledness or normality - all is well, things are as they should be, peace prevails. Most of our favourite psalms, like psalm 23 fit into this category. Then Brueggemann talks about psalms of disorientation. These are the psalms that express a sense of disturbance - all is not well, things are going wrong, life feels disordered. These are the psalms of lament, pain and protest. And then, thirdly, there are psalms of new orientation, psalms that begin with a sense of disturbance and disorientation, but which then contain a surprise turn of events: God intervenes, hope enters the picture and there is a sense of resolve.

In the context of the New Testament, we can say that the disciples experience of being with Jesus throughout his ministry was their time of orientation or normality - which they desperately wanted to hang onto for ever. The crucifixion signalled a shift to disorientation - everything that could go wrong did go wrong. But the resurrection was a season of new orientation, of incredible surprise.

So within the entire spectrum of the psalms all aspects of human experience are represented. And what’s more important they are all placed in the context of a gut-level conversation with God. And yet, the fact is, you could spend your entire life in many churches and never know that it is normal to experience dry times in your spiritual life, sad times, downright fed-up times, and ready-to-strangle the next person who says ‘Praise the Lord’ times! And the thought that you might acceptably express anger or disappointment with the divine never enters the minds of lots of Christians. Yet it’s essential that we learn to do so.

Isn’t it amazing that the Christians who bang on the loudest about the authority of scripture and believing the Bible from cover to cover are generally in churches that read the Bible most selectively, and who love to sing and quote all the nice bits of the psalms with hardly a mention of the unpleasant bits.

So thank God for the Book of Psalms: the charter of gut-level religion, a spirituality for all seasons. We can’t identify with all of the sentiments all of the time, but seasons change. And if you can’t pray a particular psalm for yourself now, pray it for someone else. The psalms are the prayer of the mystical body of Christ par excellence, because when we pray them we are crying out not only in our own name but in the name of all humanity.

In summary: the psalms are about authentic humanity, and authentic religion. They call us to levels of honesty within ourselves and toward God that are not always comfortable to live with. But the only way I can truly meet God is, as the old hymn says ‘Just as I am’. That’s the Book of Psalms. That’s reality. That’s gut-level religion.

AMEN.

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A talk for Trinity Sunday by Malcolm Doney

On Wednesday I went for a job interview. And do you know what? There, waiting to be interviewed as well, for the very same job, was Peter Bone and Martin Wroe. We had to do an hour-and-a-half test and then be interviewed by a scary panel of four. We went home to await the verdict. The very next morning the phone rang and they told me they’d given the job to Martin… and to Peter… and to me!

What we’d done was applied for one full-time post as a three-way job-share. A bit like the Holy Trinity you might think. If you’ve got a complicated job like running the universe, maybe three heads are better than one. But it can be confusing. Anyone who uses public transport in London will appreciate the difficulty of dealing with the trinity – you wait upon God for ages and then three come along at once.

But there’s no point fretting about the nature of the Trinity. It’s slightly redundant trying to get all forensic about something which none of us can quite explain anyway. We don’t want to get caught up in technical description and lose sight of the reality of what we’re looking at.

It’s like Christianity. Who’s interested in Christianity? I’m certainly not. It’s not really Christianity that we’re here for is it? What we want is the truth. I think it was the poet Coleridge who said that it’s dangerous to love Christianity more than truth. Systems and models are helpful only if they bring us closer to what’s real.

As I said, as part of this job interview, each of us had to do a test. I was locked in a little room with a pc and a set of instructions. I panicked. I froze. I won’t bother you with the details, but I was asked to develop a creative plan - something I’ve done countless times. If I’d been asked the question in normal circumstances, I would have blathered on for hours. But under pressure, with an unfamiliar computer, and with a technical specification that befuddled me, I went in to a kind of toxic shock. I was overtaken by this intense fear of failure.

When Pete and Martin did the same test, they sort of ignored the rules and did what they thought made sense. I wish I could do that more. I still have a tendency to try to fit my experience of God into the technical or theological descriptions I’ve been given. And when it doesn’t work, I get worried, I fear that I’ve got it all wrong. If you feel that way, I want to tell you that God is bigger than all that.

I think that that very sense of God that made the early church fathers describe God as three in one can help us recognise the God who has more than one face, and to give God recognition when we see him. This it seems to me is the essence of the trinity – that God is various and can’t be contained by a single description.

Now, we could simply say, listen, we’re talking about God here – we’re talking about someone or something which is so completely other, that we can’t come close to grasping what he, or she or it is like. There’s an awesome description of the otherness of God in Isaiah. He who measured waters of the world in the hollow of his hand. ‘All the nations of the world are as nothing before him’, it reads, ‘they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness.’

How can we know a God like that? Yet, paradoxically, our struggle, maybe even our destiny is to search out this mystery. It tantalises us and will not let us go.

But you may be discovering, as I am, that God is not just other, and not just ungraspable. There are moments –rare and exasperatingly fleeting moments though they may be –when God is also close, closer than breathing. God is often discovered, peculiarly, not by looking heavenwards, but can be found on an inner journey.

And again, mysteriously, once we start to look for God within us we begin to notice his presence everywhere around us. Jesus, said, famously that whenever we help someone who is poor, hungry or oppressed, then we are doing the same to him. It’s one of the continuing challenges to relatively comfortable people like you and me that we recognise the face of Christ among those who are poor and outcast. We must never forget this.

But this is not the only place where we are to find God.

One of the things that blows me away is choral music, of all kinds and from all traditions – there’s something in the way that each individual, vocal thread has its own integrity, even its own rhythm and sometimes its own words. One vocal line has value and then there is another line and another line. The way they weave around one another and at the same time meld or coalesce into this… kind of sound landscape in which you inhabit. This experience stirs something in me which is profound and beyond reason. That kind of multi-stranded music is called polyphony. And something of the nature of God I believe is to be found there. David Ford, regius professor of theology at Cambridge, wrote about ‘the polyphonic abundance of God’. I respond to that as an image.

God speaks to us in a multitude of voices and appears in a million disguises. We can watch him in movies, we can uncover him in the Bible, in stories of all kinds. He blesses us in the kindness of strangers and shakes us in the questions of children. But you know all this – I don’t need to tell you. Faith for me and I guess for a lot of you is not a tidy system made up of precepts, but it’s a sprawl of serial encounters with God, not all of which we recognise. This for me is the daily essence of the trinity. God’s abundance and universal presence brokered in a million ways.

What I want to urge you today, is to be alive to as many moments as you can, and when you notice one of those glimpses of God, to recognise that it is he is that you have seen, and to be grateful for that moment of epiphany.

I live in the future most of the time and complete days can pass in a kind of fog. I take things and people for granted. I’m too busy worrying about the next thing to notice what’s in front of me. If you find enjoying the moment hard, I commend to you the example of Xavier de Maistre, the writer who lived at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries. He wrote a book called Journey round my bedroom in which, wearing pink and blue pyjamas, he would move from his bed to the sofa, and from his sofa to his desk as if he was embarking on a voyage of intrepid discovery. Travelling in this way he discovered all sorts of delights that he had previously overlooked because his surroundings were so familiar.

I think that there are ways even our less-than-startling daily lives can be transformed by our determination to recognise the myriad faces of God. Have you noticed the blackbird who sits in the tree outside in Penn Road who sings sacred and mellifluous music? Take a glass of wine with your lunch and sloosh it across your tongue. Take your children to the city farm and get them to smell the sweetness of a horse’s breath. Smile and make eye contact with a Big Issue seller and hear him wish you a pleasant evening. When you kneel for the bread and wine, grasp if you can that moment, sign and space. I’m beginning to discover that when we can hold a moment and recognise it, then we make room for God.

Jesus told his disciples when he left them, ‘Remember, I am with you always to the end of the age’. I used to think that meant he would appear to me and tell me what to do next. Now I’m beginning to realise that when I notice that an old yellow duster which is drying on the line is suddenly glowing golden with the lowering sun, God is reminding me that he is there and that it is my task is to recognise and respond.

And when we meet in the chancel for communion, you may not feel anything, but if we can live in that moment and look about us, we may just glimpse in the faces around us, and in the elements on the table and in the stateliness of ancient words, an evocation of the Holy Trinity. The Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.

AMEN.

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A talk by Martin Wroe on What God is like

How do you think of God ?

Take a second and think of a couple of words or a phrase you would use to describe God..

I asked a few people in the last few days, all ages, for a word they might use to describe God.

My survey said:

powerful

loving

wonderful

forgiving

almighty

creator

My survey included Christians, Moslems and a Hindu. I was struck by how often people use concepts to describe God - but concepts are not always as useful as they appear.

One of my favourite ways of describing God comes from Meister Eckhart, a German mystic who lived 800 years ago. He said ‘God is like a man who coughs while hiding …’

I love that.

He didn’t mean God is phobic, scared of people or open spaces,

he didn’t mean God is crouching behind the sofa, trying to swallow a tickle in his throat, hoping not to be found.

In fact I don’t believe he meant anyone to analyse the statement too far, all he meant to say was that

God is elusive,

Playful perhaps,

hard to pin down in words

a mystery of whom we catch sight now and again, but mostly can’t see and remain a little unsure of…

Eckhardt was trying to describe something true about God by using a picture, instead of a concept.

Christian tradition is chocabloc with concepts about God -

God is just

God is merciful

God is all powerful

God is creator

God is holy

Sometimes these concepts work - and sometimes they don’t.

But what we do less of is notice that the Bible is also full of images of God, pictures, strange comparisons, odd analogies.

Let me give you an example. In the book of Jeremiah, a big fat book by a prophet who lived hundreds of years before Jesus, God is said to be shedding tears day and night – crying for the Hebrew people who are always forgetting God, always going their own way.

When was the last time any of us thought of God crying ?

Try and imagine God weeping ? Perhaps a child might say that’s what a thunderstorm is.

The reason it’s hard to imagine is because it’s hard to imagine God anyway – and to imagine God crying we have to imagine eyes and cheeks and a face and……then when we do all this imagining, it’s hard not to imagine God as other than strong, solid, resolute, decisive, logical.

Bit of a man really.

In fact, because so much Christian history has been passed down by men, we often end up with a pre-set image of God as male.

And men don’t cry.

Women on the other hand. Well, women seem to cry more often and more quickly.

A friend of ours died the other day and at her funeral I was surrounded by women crying. There were men crying too, but, like me, most of them were trying not to.

Most of us think that crying is something to be embarrassed about, it is a sign of defeat.

We say we are trying to hold tears back.

Why ?

In case our tears will take us over, disturb our sense of being in control. But perhaps tears simply speak of our deepest feelings and we hold back our tears like we hold back our secrets, they give too much away about ourselves.

They leave us a little naked.

But according to the prophet Jeremiah, when people live lives of selfishness, greed and injustice God is reduced to tears.

At my friends funeral I looked through my own tears at the tears of my friends.

And many of you here have known times when you started crying and you couldn’t stop. Something scary happened, which shocked you to your core. You found out some sad news. Someone you loved died.

The tears began to reveal your inside story.

But still this will be more common to those of you who are women than men.

In general, in our culture, big boys don’t cry.

Which is why it is strange then that while we often imagine God as having male characteristics, God is found cracking up in the Bible, all weepy and pathetic.

So either we have a false picture of God as male or a false picture of males who don’t cry.

Or both.

Unfortunately theology – the study God and holy writings – has for many centuries decided that God is a big boy and God doesn’t cry. Theologians have come up with complex ideas to argue that God is beyond our pain, impregnable to our suffering.

He is aloof, a grown up, a real man.

When a war breaks out and mothers lose their sons, fathers lose their daughters, God’s plan may be thrown off course but his heart is untouched.

How could he weep at the loss of life, betray feelings – it would be a sign of weakness, vaccilation, unreliability ?

People developing such ideas had their reasons, they were trying to protect God from the notion of change because if God changed then we wouldn’t be able to rely on him.

But despite their best intentions, they are wrong.

God is not a man, nor does she hold back her tears.

There are thousands of pictures we might use of God, some grainy, some yellowed with age, some out of focus. When God wanted to give us a digital image, she sent Jesus Christ.

And Jesus is not a real man – in the modern sense.

In the Christmas carol we sing ‘no crying he makes’ – but perhaps he was a late developer. In one of our readings this morning we find him lamenting the fate of the people of Jerusalem.

Jerusalem, he says, his voice breaking, the city that kills the prophets …I wish I could have gathered all your people up together, like a mother hen gathers her brood under her wings, I wish I could have protected you, I wish I could have held you close.

.. but you wouldn’t have it.

This is Jesus describing himself as a mother hen who would love to round up the chicks in the farmyard, pull her brood under her ample wings and snuggle up close, reassure them, protect them… but the Jerusalem chicks are not interested.

This resonates with another Old Testament image of God as a mother bird hovering over and protecting her young.

You might expect to find Jesus angry at how people have forgotten the ways of God. But Jesus doesn’t turn over the nearest set of tables, doesn’t start ranting in the streets…according to the writer of Luke’s gospel, Jesus cried.

And it’s not the only time this happened. Several times we find Jesus weeping.

The shortest verse in the Bible ? Jesus wept.

This time he was standing at the tomb of Lazarus, having realised his friend was dead. Why wouldn’t he cry ? Why would he hold the tears back ?

Another Bible writer describes Jesus weeping in the hours before his crucifixion.

Can you imagine Russel Crowe in the Hollywood film Gladiator, about to face his death, weeping.?

No. He’s a strong man.

Or, perhaps, only half a man.

Some of you may have seen a recent Nelson Mandela documentary. There was a scene during which white people and black people described to each other how they had treated one another during apartheid. It is so moving that they start crying at what they have done to each other.

In this scene Archbishop Desmond Tutu is so moved that he starts to weep too.

Several people told me they wept as they watched it.

If you were saw it, perhaps you wept.

Perhaps God wept.

We can picture Jesus weeping, because he had a human face and will have cried tears as salty as any of ours.

But when the Bible talks about God crying, about her heart being grieved as her people take the wrong path, this is the language of analogy – we are describing what we understand about a mystery in the only language we have.

And while we do it with concepts – powerful, forgiving, loving, just etc – we also do it with pictures.

But if God is mysteriously tied up in the course of our unpredictable lives, then the words we have to describe this are extraordinarily limited. They almost can’t do the job.

We are like a baby gurgling in a mothers arms trying to respond to the smile and breath and touch… the baby’s expression about her mother is about as limited as our expression about our mother in heaven.

But this doesn’t mean it is not true.

God has no gender, but we know from the first book of the Bible that man and woman are made in a divine shape - God includes both female and male and is beyond both, in ways we can’t quite picture.

God is our mother just as much as our father.

God cries just as much as God laughs, weeps as much as she judges.

Religions, says the poet Les Murray, are like poems.

Poetry says something is like something else, that you had never imagined it could be compared to.. but in the comparison you understand something you never understood before

God is like a man who is strong enough to cry

God is like a woman who judges the whole of history.

God is like a terrifying thunderstorm, bringing water to parched throats.

God is like a mother feeding her new child.

God is like a search engine, intelligent software.

God is like your best friend having a fit of the giggles.

God is like a man who coughs while hiding.

Analogies break down under too much examination.

Zoom in on the detail of the picture and you lose its perspective.

In each image of God in the Bible , we glimpse something true about God, but not the whole truth - as our faith is sharpened by experience and being part of community, we develop new images of God, reflecting new ways we have known God.

There is an advertising campaign for Voluntary Service Overseas at the moment, They need 300 teachers to work in developing countries.

The advert reads

We don’t need your tears

We need Teachers

Jesus wept over Jerusalem but then dried his eyes, wished things were not the way they were… and decided that unless he did something, things would never stop being they way they were.

Our tears are a sign that like Jesus we have God within us – a signal of the compassion from which we are made,

And our tears, like God’s, are not enough.

If God cries when we forget her, then when we remember to live kindly in the world - she throws back her head and laughs.

‘Jesus is our true mother,’ said Julian of Norwich, 600 years ago. ‘God is the power and goodness of fatherhood; God is the wisdom and loving kindness of motherhood.

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