Sunday 7th February 2010, Giles Charrington

1.      In the beginning was the big bang.
Now I hope not to cause too big a disturbance by using a distinctly non-scriptural text for a sermon.  I do promise you, if it would otherwise cause anxiety, that this talk will be only very slightly heretical.  I have in any case found lately that more people than you might imagine have an appetite for a little heresy: it’s like putting the right amount of pepper or mustard or vinegar in your cooking.  Of course if the dish were all mustard or pepper or vinegar it would be rather disgusting, but just a little is absolutely necessary. 

The title of my talk is Science, faith and love: those three things.  Nothing too ambitious then.  One gets stability from looking at an issue from three different angles.  This is rather like a three legged milking stool.  If a stool only had two legs it would not really be a stool at all.  If it had four or more it might wobble, if either the ground were uneven or if the legs differed ever so slightly in length.  But three legs are always stable, as long as the legs are of roughly the same length.

Today the first of my three legs looks at the scientific story of life.  The second will be to move on from the scientific story to look at the central moment of the Christian story.  The third is about the story of you and me. And running through these three approaches we need to try to understand all of this in the here and now and how these three stories come together.  This is not a fourth leg: it is a constant concern.  None of the three aspects are of any value if they are not brought into the here and now.  Just this place this morning.  Perhaps this is the seat which rests on top of the three legs of the stool.

So then, the big bang.  We are told that it took place about 13.5 billion years ago.  When you point your telescope into distant space and examine a star which is two million light years away, you are seeing it as it was two billion years ago.  So you will learn something about the universe as it was two billion years ago. 

And you can deduce from the movements of these distant objects that everything is expanding, each galaxy is moving apart from its neighbours.  But if things are moving apart, it stands to reason that last year or last century they were closer together than they are now. Working backwards from this you can work out that 13.5 billion years ago the whole observed universe was concentrated into the size of a pinhead – actually a lot smaller than a pinhead.  Everything in the abbey now, these massive columns, all the people here today, everything in this country, everything in this world, all the material that makes up every star and galaxy, as it were squashed together into this point of impossible density.  Indeed impossible is the word.  The laws of physics effectually break down, when one tries to analyse what was going on in this point of infinite density.  The point is so infinitely small that it does not exist.  Yet it is of infinite density.  They call this a singularity. 

Where did the big bang happen?  Was it here or over there in some far distant corner of the universe?  It happened right here.  Because there was no space then, no distance or height or depth or even time, it could only be said to have happened right here in Dorchester Abbey – well, not in the abbey because the abbey had not yet got itself built: but right here anyway.

2.       A singularity is a state in which there is not two but one.  With this in mind, let us move on to the second leg of the stool: our Christian faith. 

There is one central moment in the story of Christ.  It is about suffering and love, self abandonment, self giving, death, and rebirth in a new life.  This moment is when Christ calls out from the Cross in despair: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?  At this moment he becomes most fully human. If he is divine, he has surrendered his divinity in a moment of human failure.  And yet, it is also the moment of complete godlike oneness, the moment of complete divinity.  The veil of the temple is rent in two, so that the Holy of Holies is now no longer kept hidden for priests and a pious few: it is accessible to the marginal, the apparently separated, to you and me.  It is a moment of no distance, of oneness.  Somehow in this ultimate breakdown, there is no longer two, but One.  It is a singularity.

I suggested that the Big Bang occurred not in a far corner of the Universe, but right here. That’s one singularity.  What about the singularity of faith?  Yes, the death of Christ, and his resurrection, equally impossible, equally a point at which the laws of nature and science seem to break down: that happens right here in this Abbey.  And just as it happened right here, so it happens right now.  No distance in either space or in time.  That is the true point of the Eucharist.  Each time we celebrate the Eucharist, we are, ourselves, in the Upper Room seeing Christ break the bread and share it with us.  We are at the foot of the Cross.  We hear the cry of despair, and the answering quiet cry of triumph, it is finished.  We may, if we can only open our hearts wide enough, experience somehow in this moment Christ’s humanity and divinity, and, because there is no distance and no time in this singularity, it is right here, we are right at the centre of it.  So much at the centre of it that it is us that calls out in despair, us that answers in quiet triumph.

And in this singularity too, as in the big bang, the laws of nature seem to break down.  In the singularity there is an impossibility. The more you think about it the more impossible it seems to become.  A singularity is an impossibility that nevertheless happens.

And there can really be only one singularity.  If there were two it would not be a singularity, it would be a duality.  So this big bang, this moment of triumph and despair on the Cross, are the same singularity.  This is why Teilhard de Chardin was so emphatic that Christ is central to the act of creation.  He calls him the cosmic Christ.  Christ is in the Big Bang.  A perfect expression of this truth is the text, In the beginning was the Word.

But, more importantly, Christ is right here, because this singularity is right here now.  The implications f this are huge.  We are in God, God is in us.  There is no separation, not God and us, but One.  John in his Gospel puts it like this:

On that day you will realise that I am in the Father and you are in me and I am in you.  John ch. 14 v20

3.      Now let us try the third leg of the milking stool, which is about us in the modern world: not 13.5 billion years ago as in the big bang, and not two thousand years ago as in the passion of Jesus, but here now in 2010.  The mystery of the big bang really stretches the thinking mind almost to breaking point: the story of the passion stretches both hearts and minds to breaking point and to tears of wonder.  But here now we live our ordinary lives with our ordinary almost petty concerns: our anxieties about money or about a difficult job or a tiresome problem; our pain at the loss of a dying friend or at the suffering of a loved one, or our anguish over our own failings and our inner turmoil and self-doubt; our doubts about God; our faith or lack of it.  To us, these everyday loves, doubts - and joys - seem a million miles or years from the big themes of the earlier singularity of the big bang or the singularity of the passion of Jesus. But I believe there is no distance (in time or in space), and no real difference in type either, between the ordinary little concerns that occupy each of us here, and those infinite concerns which seem so far above our heads. 

How can this be?  Can I try to suggest where to look to understand this “no-distance”, this “no difference”?

Well, my guess is that it has something to do with prayer, and with letting go of ourselves: what really drove Jesus when he went the whole way and gave himself up, was his love of the whole world of creatures.  In the singularity, he forgot himself in this infinite moment of love.  So in our ordinary everyday world, when we go about our daily business, we can try in our faltering way to live our prayers, and to forget ourselves by being completely absorbed in what we are doing right now: just to be with the person we are with, or with the problem we are struggling to solve, or the meal we are cooking.  The secret is no secret: we just put all our love into this moment right now.  Because, in reality, this moment here now is no different from the moment of the Big Bang, the moment of the passion of Christ, and the moment of his resurrection into new, all-present life.  We may set aside thinking and just love - love, too, in a way which is not a clinging or a self need, but a giving, free and forgetful of self.

At the time of the Boxing Day Tsunami five years ago, a woman was standing on the beach in Sri Lanka when she realised something was very wrong.  She saw the wave approaching in the distance and also that her children were down on the shore, on the edge of the sea.  What did she do?  She did not think.  She totally forgot herself.  She simply ran towards her children, scooped them up in her arms and ran with every ounce of her strength up the beach.  Her motivation was total love, the mother’s love for her children.  She did not think, she put love into action.

So although we may often be helped by the thinking process, when it really comes to understanding these simple but deep mysteries, only love can penetrate them.

As the anonymous writer of a mediaeval book called the Cloud of Unknowing put it:

Of all other creatures and their works—yea, and of the works of God himself—may a man through grace have fullness of knowing, and well can he think of them; but of God himself can no man think.  For why, he may be loved, but not thought.  By love may he be gotten and holden; but by thought never.  And therefore in this work it shall be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting.

And thou shalt step above it stalwartly, but listily, with a devout and pleasing stirring of love, and try to pierce that darkness above thee.  And smite upon that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love; and go not thence for aught that befalleth.

And the end of this story is that for us, too, the veil of the temple , the veil of our own egos, our delusions and fantasies, is torn apart, and we realise that we also are not two, but one, in the singularity of love, right here, now.

 

Sunday 1st November 2009, Reverend Dr Margaret Whipp

We who are left

‘We who are left...’ begins a poem by the war-time poet Wilfred Gibson.

          We who are left, how shall we look again
          Happily on the sun or feel the rain,
          Without remembering how they who went
          Ungrudgingly, and spent
          Their all for us, loved too the sun and rain?

          A bird among the rain-wet lilac sings –
          But we, how shall we turn to little things,
          And listen to the birds and winds and streams
          Made holy by their dreams,
          Nor feel the heart-break in the heart of things?

Wilfred Gibson writes from personal experience.  We who are left...  He recognises what many of us feel after the experience of bereavement – left – left to cope with the overwhelming realities of human grief, left to hear so differently the birds and winds and streams, left to feel the heart-break in the heart of things.

It is to that deep experience of heart-break that I want to speak this evening: the brokenness that many of us have encountered through a recent loss, that some of us perhaps know as an old friend.  It’s a wound that strikes right down to the heart of things.  Rarely does grief simply ruffle the surface.  More often it pierces to the very core of who we are, and how we go on living.  The wounds of love are as fierce as its joys.

And they are not lightly healed.  We who are left know that there are no easy analgesics for our heart-break, no smooth words that do not sound hollow in the face of emptiness and death.  And for all the many kind and soothing things that people do say, it’s not so much the words as the gentle voice, or the familiar handwriting, or the press of a hand, which tells us that there is still some hope and trust left in the world, and God’s Sun will still dare to rise on the earth in the morning.

Real comfort can never be cheaply bought.  Our griefs, like our loves, are too costly to be lightly dismissed.  As Christian people, we do not belittle the heart-break of grief with trite words and superficial reassurances.  Our comfort, the comfort which has strengthened Christian people in every generation, is nothing less than the comfort of Christ himself.  Jesus Christ crucified; Jesus Christ buried and risen; Jesus Christ the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; Jesus Christ the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, who has finally triumphed over death through the power of unquenchable love.

The comfort of Christ was one of the earliest experiences recalled in the writing of the Christian scriptures.  This strange new faith, forged in the fire of a cruel young man’s death, found a fierce comfort on the other side of Calvary which all the stories of resurrection struggled to make sense of.  Luke, one of the earliest gospel writers, tells a particularly poignant story, which many of us can identify with.  After the horrors of Good Friday, on the day that we now call Easter Sunday, Luke tells us that two of Jesus’ disciples, two who were left, set off to go for a long walk to get out of Jerusalem to go to a village called Emmaus.

We can only imagine how they were feeling.  No one knows the bitter cocktail of grief that another must endure: the emptiness, the anger, the hurt, the crushing sense of disappointment. They had hoped for so much as they followed Jesus their Messiah.  But all those hopes came to a crushing end as they saw their Master nailed to a cross.

There was no sense to make of it all.  Over and over in their minds they remembered the whole desperate, ghastly experience.  It should never have happened.  And with all the energy that bursts out of grief, they strode down the road from the city of heart-break as if by putting a few miles between themselves and Jerusalem they could put the pain behind them.  Walking it off and talking it out.  Struggling to make some sort of meaningful pattern out of the broken pieces, to find some light in the valley of deep darkness.

Well, we too are familiar with that landscape; we recognise many of the twists and turns of shock and sadness on the road of grief.  The valley of the shadow is a very well-trodden road, but not one that any Christian person walks alone.

There are many surprises in the life of faith.  But few of them so beautiful as the surprise that Luke describes in the story as these two unknown disciples, heart-broken, with precious little faith or hope left to keep them going, find themselves met on the road by the risen Jesus himself.  Out of the shadows Jesus himself came alongside to walk with them.  And slowly, the great miracle of his comfort began to unfold!

COMFORT is almost the wrong word.  What Jesus brings is not the easy thing that we might expect in the way of human “comfort”.  He doesn’t rush in with false reassurances that everything will be fine; he doesn’t return to them unmarked, as if the appalling experience of torture and death had never happened.  Instead of smooth words and slick answers, he takes the tough line of facing them with the truth.  Tracking right back through the words of the prophets and the story of salvation, he showed them how it was necessary for the Messiah to suffer these things and then to enter his glory.

Comfort?  The comfort Jesus brought to these heart-broken disciples was the comfort of the truth.  Nothing less could really help. Their false dreams of a trouble-free trip to salvation had come to nothing.  But the truth of a suffering Messiah, who showed them the signs of his own scars, brought strength and comfort for the road ahead.

For Christian believers, this Jesus is our Alpha and the Omega.  That was how St John described his revelation of Christ in glory, the beginning and the end, who embraces all that is given and all that is left of the joys and griefs of life, and enfolds it in the redeeming love of God.  Nothing is lost; nothing is wasted; nothing is forgotten.  The comfort of Christ is to know the truth that our whole life’s journey, from beginning to end, is held in the loving grasp of those nail-pierced hands.

I had a dear friend and colleague who died some years ago.  His hobby and passion was collecting leather-bound books, some antiques, some modern volumes; novels, poems, natural history, biography.  He loved the feel of each volume, and he used to enjoy visiting a bookbinder’s workshop to see each section was brought together and carefully placed, and stitched, and glued and pressed into a complete whole.  When he died, I visited Sue his wife, and we looked together over some of those volumes which she cherished for their memories of Jonathan.  Handling something that he had held was poignant, but comforting in all the memories that it triggered.

But as we talked together about memories, and hobbies and books, it was the work of the bookbinder that continued to fascinate.  The craftsman who held in his hands not just endless loose leaves, but a richly sequenced story, binding the whole together in the two boards that would demarcate for ever the beginning and the ending.  One of books we talked about was David Copperfield.  It’s a long story that follows the emerging character of the young boy David running away to his aunt Betsy Trotwood, David the adolescent falling in love with Dora, and the adult David growing into maturity and family life with his Agnes.  As the story is read, chapter by chapter, there is only the reality of David’s life now, at this stage, in this moment.  But when the story comes to an end, and the whole book is drawn together and bound fast in the firm boards that hold it together, then what we hold in our hands is no longer a part but the whole David, seen, remembered, understood in his entirety.

It’s a rather moving analogy for the strange kind of wholeness that death brings to human life.

I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord, the beginning and the end.

Christian comfort rests in God’s hands.  We who are left cherish our memories, and rightly.  But as those memories begin to fragment and fade, we can know in faith that all things are unfailingly gathered up in the strong hands of Christ.  From birth to death, from beginning to end, he has shared our humanity, suffered our death, and through his love brought hope and healing for time and all eternity.

We who are left do not deny the reality of our heart-break.  But as we cherish our memories, and step forward in hope, we discover day by day the strong comfort of the Son of God, the Alpha and Omega, Jesus crucified and risen.

The apostle Paul wrote to his fellow Christians, I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.  Amen.

 

Sunday 7th December 2008, Canon Sue Booys
A voice cries out

A voice cries out: 'In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God!'

Wilderness is a significant part of Christian experience. Liturgically - that is to say in the life and worship of the Church we are more acutely aware of this in Lent, when we go with Jesus into the wilderness to prepare for death and resurrection and Advent when we go with John the Baptist into the wilderness to prepare the welcome THE ONE the light and hope of the world.

During Advent we go with John into the wilderness to prepare the way to welcome Christ into our hearts and lives anew at Christmas. We have the opportunity to explore the inner geography of our lives for areas of dead wood, thorns or tangled knots. Twisted relationships, the dead wood of old hurts or habits, the confusion that sometimes comes when we can't see the wood for the trees - all these are wilderness areas and need to be cleared away before growth and new life is possible. .... Kathy Galloway

Day by day in our lives and week by week in the prayers we recognize that God is calling us to engage in faith and hope for the future not only at a personal level but also within God's family the Church and within the whole creation - everything and everyone around us - our environment.

In personal terms a keeping of Advent, then, might mean taking steps to identify those parts of our relationships within ourselves, with God, our neighbours an our world that need attention. Perhaps these relationships are entangled knots because of lack of communication. or over communication or simply because too much has happened with too little time to assimilate it properly. Perhaps there is dead wood in the form of old habits that have become poor ones because we have not had the time to ask ourselves whether they still meet the need for which they were formed. In lour personal relationships whether with God, family or friends taking the time to recognize how and where these tangled knots have arisen and taking the further step of resolving them is part of the way in which we can prepare for the coming of THE ONE ..it is also part of the way in which we work at the coming of light and hope in our own lives.

At present it is true to say that the relationships in the Anglican church are a tangle of confusion, misunderstanding and lack of direction particular over the issues of homosexuality and women bishops. In might be described as having trussed itself up like a Christmas turkey! Of course closer to home these issues affect our thinking and being but often the issues that confuse us are smaller, though they can lead to equally difficult misunderstandings. This is why your comments on the new order of service booklet are so important. Tanking time to look at this as an Advent project makes sense. Our relationships with God and his family, as well as those who come here searching are partly met and made in the language and action of the liturgy - getting it right is important. It's a good Advent project! Getting the biog Church issues right is more difficult but requires the same things identifying where the knots are tangled and taking time in our communication with one another and with God about ways forward. This too may mean looking at habits we have taken for granted. It is meaning for our leaders a serious consideration about what is needed for the future of God's mission - not what is need for our continued comfort.

In a way that is exactly where an Advent consideration of our relationships with the world needs to start. These relationships are out of kilter - both in human terns with an increasing division between rich and poor rather than the leveling out of which the prophet speaks. Together with a growing realization that our human relationship with the creation in which God has set us needs some serious re - thinking. We are so lucky here to live in a community where people take this seriously.

This Sunday in Advent is the Sunday for listening to the prophets - not just to John the Baptist but to the prophets of our own time

But how on earth do we know who they are.

The first sign of a prophet is often that they say the outrageous and ridiculous. That's hard for us - because, as children of the enlightenment we have grown up to expect that anyone who ahs a good point will have a clear case. We know (as those who listened to hi in his own time didn't) how and why John the Baptist was important.

So who are the prophets?

Within ourselves we shall never hear the prophetic voice until we are still. It is the voice that calls through the stillness for us to do something quite uncharacteristic and unexpected?

In the Church perhaps we should look for the unusual solution? The one that will never work. In the Church I would hope and pray that if all attended to stillness the rest would follow.

But where will we find the prophets in and for the world? In recent years there have been those who have called more loudly than we have for a setting right of the problems that our thirst for power have created.

There is one key thing that helps us to identify the prophetic. The prophets whether young or old, whether called from within the community of the faithful or outside it will always call us to repentance. To turn away from bad habits and form new ones that hold out the hope of a new heaven and a new earth. And we had better watch out - because it is not always the most obvious person nor the most pressing and clever idea that holds the key to God's future.