20 Sept 2020
Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus GreenReadings: Genesis 2:18-25, Psalm 8, Revelation 5:11-14, Matthew 18:15-20
We can approach God in three ways: In worship and prayer. n the intimate connections found between people. In creation.
I’ve spoken before about the twentieth-century Jewish theologian Martin Buber, but the simplicity of his argument is a very helpful way into thinking about God, and in such a way that can make sense to anyone, and breaks down some of the more opaque dogmas and contingencies of religion.
SO the divine is found in three ways: in worship, in relationships, in the created world. But his central point, again helpful in its simplicity, is that in order to connect with the divine, we must approach each of these in a specific way:
as a ‘Thou’ and not an ‘it’.
I hope you already grasp this. It’s not specifically about traditional language; though I think the reason many people prefer the old words is that sense of reverence, holiness, that we ought to speak to and of God in a special way; that by connecting with language that’s hundreds of years old, we might be better prepared for a reality that’s older than time. I’m reminded of the old lady who on being asked what she thought of the modern translation of the Lord’s prayer, remarked that it was all well and good, but it wasn’t the words OUR LORD used. Not quite accurate but there is something about resonance and the historical weight of words and phrases that builds over centuries.
But Thou has a respect, a seriousness, a humility in the speaker, it is a word of awe, a word for queens and angels, of a child for a parent. But more simply it’s personal. When we talk about an it, or even a he or a she, especially a ‘them’, there’s a distance. Whether it’s ‘the cat’s mother’, or a group of people we don’t belong with, there’s an abstraction that goes with the third person. To speak of Northerners, the Welsh, Europeans is impersonal. ‘You’ is personal – I’m not reducing you to a label, a stereotype. You is specific. ‘Thou’ is specific, personal and honoured.
If we’re looking for God as a thing, an ‘It’ far above or beyond us, through a cloud of incense; if God has become abstract; an idea; we won’t find God. If we address God as Thou, seeking God within, around, present to us, we will find God. Seek and ye shall find.
In worship through music, through prayer, through the intensity of being alongside one another with a common goal, through words spoken over centuries across oceans, words to comfort, to heal, to praise, to sanctify, to cry out. Worship brings us into the presence of God. We may not always feel it, but we are promised that where two or three are gathered in his name, God is there.
But even without this context in the connection that can be found between two people, this divine spark, this energy can be found: not when we’re learning the facts about a life; the biography; the job; the income; when we’re hoping to meet someone useful, or entertaining; when we’re trying to impress or charm. But at the moment we are vulnerable, when we reach out in love or in pain or grief; when heart speaks to heart.
Many of us will have felt a deeper loneliness in the last 6 months, the absence of touch; the meaning that comes with our social role, the relationships that bring us alive; it’s not obvious why quarantine or isolation should be so destructive to some of us, so damaging to mental health, but humans are not machines, and in the connection between two people is a divine force of recognition and energy that is more precious and missing now than ever.
Today, though we’re concerned with the most basic point of connection. Our createdness. People will often say nice things like – ‘I find God in a beautiful sunset’. Or in the vastness of the ocean, the unforgiving desert, the perfect golden curls of a child’s hair. William Paley famously made this an argument for the existence of God. That if he on a walk stumbled upon a mechanical watch he would rightly assume that this clever machine had a maker with a purpose. So much more, he argued, with the complexity and interconnectedness of nature do we see intelligent design. But God is not just found in the complexity and miracle of things and of life; it’s that within our shared createdness, whether it’s a grain of sand, the pleading eyes of a greyhound, the beating heart on a sonogram, we find a connection by the hand of God that has fashioned these things. It’s in empathy, in love, in the knowledge that this is not simply a cold thing before us, in the hallowed givenness of the world before us; that we may experience the divine. ‘O Lord our governor, how glorious is your name in all the world.’
We have to treat all manner of thing as ‘its’. We have to be detached. The government will be judging acceptable losses of human life and economic cost, treating people as statistics, in its coming decisions. Science will be doing what it can do eradicate the peculiar form of life that is COVID-19, regardless of its claim to have a place within creation. Mice must be trapped; cats must be chased. But the greatest evils of history have occurred when people are reduced to ‘its’, to statistics and we know the damage done to creation by centuries of treating creation simply as a resource to be used.
Our Genesis reading reminded us that the animals are all created as companions – for relationship, while Revelation spoke of how all creatures are involved in divine worship; worship is not the provenance of man alone; and in our Gospel, not only does Jesus share his triumphant entry with a colt, we are told that ‘the stones themselves are ready to proclaim the triumph of Christ’.
Since I arrived, the tagline of St Margaret’s has been ‘Reflect, Connect, Grow’. This organic trilogy, points to how we may find God in worship, in our humanity, and our natural world. But this morning is a chance for us to speak that ‘Thou’ to nature; to recognise that before we built churches, God built this temple; to find eternity in a grain of sand; in the rushing wind, the burning sun, the flowers and fruits; the unbreakable bond between a dog and his owner; even the lowly cat; in the baffling knowledge of a new life growing within you; and look again for that glimpse of a united creation praising its creator with one voice. Amen.
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