Epiphany 4 - 1 February 2004

9:30am  at St Peter's  Revd Prof. Luke Geoghegan

8am at All Saints' 

Revd Mark Bonney

I have just started a couple of confirmation groups - they're both very small groups, one has two adults and the other is one to one with a youngster. As usual I started talking about God - nearly all courses do that in one way or another - it seems pretty obvious really - but in some ways it's the most difficult part of the course, and I wonder whether next time I might try starting somewhere else.

Opinion polls suggest that a very high percentage of people believe in God - but it seems to make very little difference to the way they live. God is a shadowy background figure. In his book Why God? the late Jim Thompson, who was Bishop of Bath and Wells writes:

"I was charmed by some research in Islington.
Question: "Do you believe in God?"
Answer; "yes"
Question: "Do you believe in a God who can intervene in people's lives and change them?"
The overwhelming answer was "No, just the ordinary one."

I suspect that for many the hiddenness, or even the absence of God is a very real experience today. It was Holocaust Memorial Day last week - that particular crime against humanity focuses in a very obvious way the fact that millions and millions and millions of people will have cried out to God for help and apparently heard nothing back - I sometimes hear Christians glibly say "God intervenes and performs miracles" - you even hear some say things like, yes, I prayed and he found me a parking place at Waitrose on Friday …. Really?? - I struggle with a God who finds parking places but confines millions to a gas chamber - talking of God is perhaps not always easy.

The experience of God being hidden and even absent has an important place in the Bible. When the people of Israel went into Exile their understanding of what kind of God they believed in was exploded by the experience. In their defeat they felt forsaken by God. The great prophet of the Exile who wrote chapters 40-55 of Isaiah refused to accept that God had forsaken them, or that the gods of Babylon had overcome God - instead they must find a God big enough to encompass the experience of loss. Paradoxical as it may seem, it is precisely in hiddenness and apparent absence that God is found.

Divine hiddenness has always been a problem. It was felt with peculiar intensity in the Exile. It's there too in many of the psalms - not least in the words of ps22 that some of he evangelists have Jesus speak on the cross "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Many of the psalms express a sense of being really let down by God. It's there in the book of Job. It's even there in the gospels when perplexed people ask for signs and are refused.

The hiddenness of God remains a problem - but it seems to be part of God's nature, and it's perhaps therefore also an opportunity - as all good management speak would say today. There are no problems, only opportunities.

A god who can be seen and comprehended cannot be God. That's why the prophets rant on about not making images of God - to do so is to try and control and limit God. I would dare to say that much the same is probably true of the creeds and dogmas - they are helpful forms of words that help make sense of experience - but they will always be provisional - and may not be fixed for all time - and they are certainly not literally true for all time. 

In a kind of way God must always be elusive - and even though hidden and seemingly absent, yet also active - and we need to press on and reflect on our experience as we search for greater understanding. 

Job came through the puzzle of his suffering not with an understanding of suffering but with a more magnificent conception of God. The prophet brought the people through the Exile by leading them from belief in the God of Israel to belief in the only God, the creator of the ends of the earth.

This morning's gospel had Jesus say the words "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing" - the scripture in question were the words from Isaiah 61 "the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour" (we would have heard them last Sunday had not it been the feast of the conversion of St Paul) The writer of those words would have been somewhat surprised to hear Jesus say that, since they were written for his own day, concerned with no one but himself and his hearers. Centuries later Jesus appropriates it and applies it to himself - it is, he claims, as true for him as it was for the prophet. And the message is "This is God's moment, this is the year of his grace, recognize it and seize it."

In that synagogue 2000 years ago Jesus was saying some very provocative things about God. Here was someone they knew, his father had fixed their roofs and doors - but he electrified them with the claim that in him, this word of prophecy was being realized again. Most were deeply offended and tried to throw him off a cliff. Eventually a few saw that this is how God acts - in outrageous particularity - I have to confess that I struggle with language about God intervening because it suggests a God out there coming in - what I see in the outrageous particularity of Jesus is a God who is radically part of the world, gracious and generous yet mysteriously hidden - but definitely not absent.

The Eucharist is part of the outrageous particularity - but the greatest thing of all is that which we heard in the second reading - the particularity of love. The previous chapter saw Paul going on about extraordinary gifts like healing and speaking in tongues - and there are many who get very excited by these things - but ch 12 ends with him saying - "and I'll show you a still more excellent way" - and we have the words we heard this morning. Read at nearly every wedding they may be - but they remain so powerful.

God is love - this is what love is says St Paul - and if you want to see what that kind of loving really means then look at Jesus - it is something that will never end - it is that which permeates all that is - it is that which made us and for which our hearts yearn and it is that which we glimpse in the breaking of bread and the loving of our day to day lives. And it's that God of love which I'm excited about proclaiming as the one and only living God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

9:30am  at St Peter's 

Revd Prof. Luke Geoghegan

 Everyone needs a little chillie in their lives. 

Let me explain. We took a group of some 10 ten years olds to one of the local curry houses for my youngest son’s birthday. It was perhaps inevitable that someone would have the idea of a chillie dare; to see who could eat a chillie whole. Fortunately, there were no long-lasting side effects.   

Conrad Noel, a vicar in the Church of England, who died in 1942, was a chillie within the Church:  

‘If the appointment of their Father in God had been left the other day to the whole Christian people of God in Newcastle instead of to the Prime Minister, I wonder if they would have chosen the bigoted but gentlemanly nonentity who is now to adorn that unfortunate see.’ 

As one of his biographers notes. This was not an effective way to ecclesiastical preferment. 

During the Boer War Noel condemned the war so violently that the local munitions workers at threatened to blow up the church. Noel reported this to his parish priest who responded: 

‘My dear Noel, by all means let the preaching go on as it is the truth and if we lose our church, which is the ugliest structure in Newcastle; we can build a new one with the insurance money!’ 

Conrad Noel’s political and economic views were outrageous. And yet he invested the celebration of the mass with a dignity and truth that people still talked about fifty years later. Alice is now in her early nineties. Born and bred in the East End she was a strong evangelical. During the war she was evacuated out of London and went to live in Thaxted, Essex where Noel was the parish priest. She went to Church and described to me how wonderful the services were.  

Lord Hutton has been an unexpected chillie. All parties were expecting a rather bland selection of dishes. One party got the chillie.   

Today Jesus preaches in the synagogue. He senses their suspicion of him. Luke shows him choosing two stories fresh and unglossed from the Old Testament Scripture. The widow who is not one of the chosen people. She is from the wrong side of the tracks: Sidon. And Naaman the Syrian. An army general who wages war on Israel but is in the early stages of leprosy. A modern day equivalent might be Rowan Williams going to President Arafat - but not bothering with the Israeli’s. No wonder they were angry.  

This is chillie that is so hot and searing it is almost unbearable. But like chillie can enhance the flavour of the food around it Jesus’s choice of OT scriptures throw the God’s relationship with his people into sharp relief. It is not a cosy time-honoured accumulation of tradition. It is decision time. This is classic Luke. The people who were ‘in’ and people who were ‘out’. As Luke seems to show throughout the gospel the people who are ‘out’ do the right thing; and the people who are ‘in’ do not.  

We can be quite staid. Occasionally, God sends us chillies to jerk us back to consciousness. Perhaps that will be an unexpected side-effect of Hutton. Quite often God frequently uses the impetuosity of youth and the absence of acquired wisdom to send us people to make us think. And as RH Tawney said: ‘The Church that fails to think is dead’. 

There is much in society that is sensationalist. Much that is oppositional for the sake of being oppositional. But we have to remain open to eating that chillie.