14th after Pentecost Church of Scotland, Auditoire de Calvin, Geneva, Switzerland Praic Ramonn, August 25 2013

The whole of our faith is the belief that God loves us; I mean there isnt anything else God, for the Christian, is the lover who accepts us absolutely and unconditionally, quite regardless of whether we are nice or nasty God loves us anyway, so that we are liberated enough to risk being vulnerable to others liberated enough to risk loving and being loved by others, liberated enough to know that we belong to each other because we belong to God.

Herbert McCabe

Talk: Sometimes a hymn surprises Among the classic hymn-writers in our hymnary (CH4), my favourite is William Cowper. Heres why. Other classic writers John Newton (with whom Cowper co-authored the Olney Hymns), Isaac Watts, John and Charles Wesley ask us to sing the faith in which we believe. Their hymns, as Donald Davie puts it, are written from the pulpit. But Cowper sits in the pew, where most of us sit, and tells us honestly how it is for him.1 The poet of the 18th-century evangelical revival, Cowper writes his hymns deliberately in the plain style. He also writes with the disconcerting honesty of one who suffered from acute depression and every ten years or so was driven to the brink of suicide. Of the seven hymns by Cowper in the Revised Church Hymnary of 1928, only two survive into CH4; let me say a word about them and also about the hymn on our insert. Verses two to four of Sometimes a light surprises are a powerful assertion of evangelical assurance. God is constant and unchanging. Come what may, God will bear us through. While I trust in God, I cannot but rejoice. Newton, Watts or either of the Wesleys could easily write these verses. But not, I think, the verse that Cowper sticks in front of them. Sometimes a light surprises the Christian while he sings. One can sing this hymn many times without noticing that the important word is the first. Sometimes. Not always, perhaps not even very often. Sunday after Sunday, the consoling and uplifting words we are asked to sing may strike us dully and inertly. Its only sometimes that a light surprises, that they do what theyre supposed to do, that they transport us out of the realm of the ordinary and the everyday into the realm of the divine. No congregation in its right mind would make Cowper its publicity officer. But ask yourself if Cowpers experience of worship is not in some measure also yours. It is the same with hymn 552 in our hymnary: Oh, for a closer walk with God. This is not an easy piety but an earnest prayer. In theory, evangelicals were supposed never to lose the blissful assurance that God loved them personally and had chosen them from before the dawn of time. But it
Donald Davie, Introduction, The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse, Oxford: OUP, 1981. See also: William Cowper in John Barkley ed., Handbook to the Church Hymnary, Third Edition, Oxford: OUP, 1979; or at greater length in James Moffatt ed., Handbook to the Church Hymnary, Revised Edition, OUP, 1927; Online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cowper, http://www.desiringgod.org/resource-library/biographies/insanity-andspiritual-songs-in-the-soul-of-a-saint, http://www.studylight.org/enc/bri/view.cgi?n=34757.
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2 didnt work out like that for Cowper; and he wrestles with this tension between faith and experience. Where is the blessedness I knew when first I saw the Lord? Return, O holy Dove, return Cowper believed, with a sure and certain faith; but much of the time, he couldnt feel it. Only if God once again broke into his life, only if the Holy Spirit flooded his heart with grace, could his walk be close with God, calm and serene his frame. And then theres hymn 158: God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform. We sing these words cheerfully and even carelessly; they are dulled by familiarity, and besides, we usually dont know their context. But the same man who wrote: Judge not the Lord by feeble sense but trust him for his grace; behind a frowning providence he hides a smiling face. this man at the age of 32 bought laudanum to use as a poison, placed a penknife at his heart, took a cab to throw himself in the Thames only to find the water-level inconveniently low, and all but succeeded in hanging himself with a garter. That is why I love William Cowper. If this man, whose life was so tormented and troubled, can believe unhesitatingly in the love of God, then which of us cannot?
Sometimes a light surprises
Sometimes a light surprises The Christian while he sings; It is the Lord who rises With healing on His wings: When comforts are declining, He grants the soul again A season of clear shining To cheer it after rain. In holy contemplation We sweetly then pursue The theme of God's salvation, And find it ever new. Set free from present sorrow We cheerfully can say, Een let thunknown tomorrow Bring with it what it may! It can bring with it nothing But he will bear us thro; Who gives the lilies clothing Will clothe His people too; Beneath the spreading heavens No creature but is fed; And He who feeds the ravens Will give His children bread. Though vine nor fig-tree neither Their wonted fruit should bear, Tho all the fields should wither, Nor flocks nor herds be there, Yet God the same abiding, His praise shall tune my voice For while in him confiding, I cannot but rejoice.

William Cowper, 1731-1800

Readings Jeremiah 1.4-10 Moses said he wasnt a speaker. Isaiah said his lips were tainted. Ezekiel fell on his face. And Jeremiah says hes too young This isnt just appropriate humility Its a matter of the sheer size

3 of the task, like being asked to climb the north face of the Eiger in bare feet. It means standing trembling before the living God, in order to stand boldly before the world. Unless one has been overwhelmed by the size of this task, one hasnt been paying attention. Hebrews 12.18-29 Hebrews offers both context and hope: our life is conducted, whether we realize it or not, before the angels, archangels and all the company of heaven, and the one we serve has committed himself to shaking heaven and earth once more, in order to establish a kingdom that cannot be shaken. We go to our Christian tasks surrounded by invisible witnesses, assured that the work we do belongs to that future unshakable realm.2 Luke 13.10-17 The woman is bent over and quite unable to stand up straight. Its easy to put her in a box: shes a cripple. But Jesus thinks outside the box: she is a daughter of Abraham by implication (and just like us) a child of God. And just like us, she should be set free. Like a good Presbyterian, the president of the synagogue wants everything to be done decently and in good order. Jesus tells him not to be silly or rather, shows him how silly he is. The president puts God in a box; Jesus opens the box and sets the Spirit free. Sermon: Good news? In 1882, Richard Wagner, the bicentenary of whose birth we celebrate this year, staged his last and some say greatest opera, Parsifal, at the Bayreuth festival. The next year, Gustav Mahler went to see it. I can hardly describe my present state to you, he wrote to a friend. When I came out of the Festspielhaus, completely spellbound, I understood that the greatest and most painful revelation had just been made to me, and that I would carry it unspoiled for the rest of my life. Max Reger put it more simply: When I first heard Parsifal at Bayreuth I cried for two weeks and then became a musician.3 Why is it that we do not come out of church more often with that sort of feeling? That great 19th-century sceptic, Frederick Nietzsche, who hated Parsifal and wrote a whole book denouncing Wagner, said that Christians ought to look more redeemed.4 But do we? Try a simple test: look at your neighbour to your right or left. Better still, look in a mirror. Francis Thompson wrote a famous 19th-century poem, The Hound of Heaven, in which he wrote 182 lines about being chased by a relentless God, ruthlessly determined to save him in spite of himself:
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NT Wright, Twelve Months of Sunday: Reflections on Bible Readings, Year C, London: SPCK, 2000, 98f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsifal 4 Thus Spoke Zarathustra: They would have to sing better songs for me to believe in their Saviour: his disciples would have to look more redeemed!

4 I FLED Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter.5 But we are remarkably adept at not hearing the patter of canine feet behind us, not feeling the hot breath on our necks, not glimpsing Gods white incisors as we glance over our shoulders. Why is this? There can be as many reasons as we are individuals. But here are three: try them on for size. Metaphorically, we may be like the woman in our Gospel story. We may be bent over for eighteen years and quite unable to stand up straight. We may be so turned in on ourselves and our own preoccupations and trivial pursuits that we cannot lift up our eyes to the hills, or the stars that wheel in splendour through the midnight sky; nor can we lift up our eyes to Christ, to see in his face the beauty of Gods will.6 We have locked ourselves in a prison of our own making and thrown away the key; and only God can find it for us. But perhaps we havent done that. Then there may be a second reason: the gospel has been so dulled by familiarity for us that we cannot hear it as good news. Henri Nouwen says somewhere that it is almost impossible to preach on the parable of the good Samaritan, because we know the story so well it has lost all power to surprise us, let alone shock.7 Of course, the priest and the Levite pass by on the other side; thats what priests and Levites do. And of course, the Samaritan stops to help; why else would we call him good? But the Jews of first-century Palestine to whom Jesus told this story did not say, Of course. They were surprised, they were shocked, they may even have been offended. The lawyer who stood up to test him may well have stomped off in a huff. In contemporary terms, its like an MK telling a story in the Knesset about a Jewish settler who is picked up bleeding from the roadside and taken to hospital by a member of Hamas. Standing ovations are not to be expected. Dont hold your breath. A third and related reason may be that we have some growing up to do. The letter to the church in Ephesus sets before us a challenge to Christian maturity: We must grow up in every way into Christ, until we stand as tall as Christ stands. We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine. Jesus loves me! This I know, for the Bible tells me so is a fine hymn to sing when we are six; but not so fine when we are sixteen or sixty. Marcus Borg is a New Testament scholar who grew up Lutheran in North Dakota in the 1940s. In his teenage years, he drifted away from Christian faith, as many of us do. He wondered, How can
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Nicholson & Lee, eds, The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse, 1917: http://www.bartleby.com/236/239.html From the opening hymn (CH4 246): Great God of every shining constellation 7 Ive lost the reference. It may not even have been Henri Nouwen.

5 God be up in heaven and at the same time everywhere? He asked, How do we know theres a God anyway? His childhood understanding of Christianity collapsed, but nothing replaced it. He became a closet agnostic, someone who didnt know what to make of it all, and in that frame of mind went off to seminary.8 Go figure. In his thirties, from time to time Borg found himself seized by radical amazement, times in which he saw the earth as filled with the glory of God; and this brought him back to his childhood faith but also forward to a more mature understanding of what faith means. Allow me to stick in here a few lines from one of the greatest Victorian poets, Gerald Manley Hopkins: The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.9 These thirtysomething experiences were for Borg an aha! moment. He realized that God was larger than his childhood apprehension or his teenage puzzles; that God was the source and presence in which we live and move and have our being, that God was the ground of our being and of all being, that God is immanent in all things. And at the same time, that God transcends all this. To picture God as part of the furniture of the universe is to reduce God to an idol. God is not part of our universe. God is the author of all things, the reason why there is anything at all rather than nothing.10 When Borg was 50, he was asked by the United Church of Christ one of our sister churches to give a series of lectures in California on Jesus; and with the invitation came a readymade title Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. He grew to like it very much. As he explains in the book of the same name, we may all have met Jesus before, but meeting Jesus again and as adults can be like meeting someone new.11 Since then, Borg has written other books with similar titles: The God We Never Knew, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, Rediscovering a Life of Faith, Putting Away Childish Things. These arent the only books we can read, they arent even in my view the best books we can read, but they do capture nicely the challenge we all face: to move from second-hand faith to first-hand faith, to move from thinking that the Christian life is about believing what the Bible says, or what the church says, to a living relationship to what the Bible and the church point us towards, to finding a God, and a Jesus, and a faith suitable for people who in other respects are all grown up, or at any rate lets not get carried away here mostly grown up.12 To gloss Frederick Nietzsche again: If the glad message of our Bible were written in our faces, we would not need to demand belief in the authority of that book in such stiff-necked fashion.13
Marcus J Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Christian Faith, HarperSanFrancisco, 1995, 5-8. 9 Gods Grandeur: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173660 10 Meeeting Jesus Again, 14f. 11 Ibid., vii. 12 Ibid., 87f. 13 Miscellaneous Maxims and Opinions: If that glad message of your Bible were written in your faces, you would not need to demand belief in the authority of that book in such stiff-necked fashion.
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6 And this brings me to Pope Francis. The new pope is no radical, but he has shown that like Francis his namesake he understands something of the compassion of God.14 Last Holy Thursday, he washed and kissed the feet of two young women at the Casal del Marmo juvenile detention centre in Rome. A video from the Vatican shows the 76-year-old pope kneeling on a stone floor as he poured water over the feet of a dozen young people, aged 14 to 21: black, white, male, female, even feet with tattoos. Then, after drying each foot with a cotton towel, he bent over and kissed it. He told the young offenders, who included Muslims and Orthodox Christians, that on the eve of his crucifixion, in a gesture of love, Jesus washed the feet of his disciples. This is a symbol, he said. It is a sign. Washing your feet means I am at your service. That same day and here is the link to Nietzsche he said that Christians should go out from worship anointed with the oil of gladness and looking as if they have heard good news. So let me not take any chances. Hear then the good news: We are not alone. There is a power at work in our world that longs to set us free, a light shining in our darkness that longs to bring us home, a compassion beyond our wildest imaginings that accepts us just as we are, however hard we find it to accept that.15 We are not our own. We belong body and soul, in life and in death not to ourselves but to our faithful saviour Jesus Christ.16 And because of that, we belong to each other. God is at work in our broken world, righting all that is wrong, building community, replacing bullying by kindness, competition by friendship, hierarchy by partnership, domination by generosity, and security by freedom, casting out fear, and giving us fresh confidence in one another.17 God is at work in our broken lives, righting all that is wrong, straightening us out and helping us to see clearly, not denying for a moment that we are wayward daughters and prodigal sons, but running to reclaim us as Gods created and greatly loved children. Hear the good news. Go out into the world and cry for two weeks and then become a Christian.

See: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/pope-washes-feet-young-detainees-ritual; http://ncronline.org/blogs/all-things-catholic/one-word-describe-pope-francis-papacy-date; http://www.vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/libretti/2013/20130328-messa-crismale-libretto.pdf. 15 Meeting Jesus Again, 132. 16 These sentences, taken from Calvins Institutes and the Heidelberg Catechism, open the Declaration of Debrecen, adopted at the 23rd general council of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in 1997 in, well, Debrecen. 17 Herbert McCabe, Doubt is not Unbelief in Faith and Reason, London: Continuum, 2007, 34. The boxed sentences at the beginning of this pdf come from the same chapter, 33, 34f., 39.

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