Sermon Archive
Taking the Hump
Sermon preached by John Armes at Holy Communion on 13 August 2006
St John's has never seen its like before. Last Sunday evening, as part of the service launching our Festival of Spirituality and Peace, a young Muslim man chanted a call to prayer - the same call to prayer you might hear coming from a Mosque five times a day.
'God is greater, God is greater', he sang in Arabic, ‘I testify that there is none worthy of worship except God. I testify that there is none worthy of worship except God. I testify that Muhammad is the Messenger of God. Come to prayer! Come to success! There is none worthy of worship except God.’
It made me wish that Christians had something as starkly beautiful to remind us of our need for regular prayer. We could almost use the same words. There is none worthy of worship except God - to place God in that pre-eminent position is to orientate our lives towards success as people of faith. And whilst I, as a Christian, esteem Jesus Christ as the voice of God upon earth, for myself I find no problem in respecting Muhammad as a prophet, someone powerfully in touch with the spirit of God, just as Muslims respect Jesus as a prophet.
And it seems all the more powerful now after a week of disruption and fear, in which yet again Western leaders have chosen to link the name Islam with terror and fascism. You may disagree with me on this, and I make no claims here to speak for anyone but myself, but I simply do not believe that the deepest well-springs of Islamic faith come from anywhere other than the same deep wells from which we draw.
I’m not saying that Christianity and Islam are one and the same. History, experience and culture have shaped them differently, and there are crucial insights on which we differ - although hardly to the extent of wishing each other anything other than peace and joy.
But deep down in our souls, deep down where we are fired by the energy that we call spiritual, we are resonating (to my mind) with the same transcendent mystery whom we uphold and worship today. When we meet holiness in other faiths there can only be one source of that holiness. There is none worthy of worship except God.
And it seemed to me, as I listened to that stirring, powerful chant, that one thing we can learn from our Muslim sisters and brothers is regularity of daily prayer. This pattern of praying is, of course, not new to Christian experience. The fifth century Benedictine rule required monks to pray seven times a day, and in the seventeenth century George Herbert had the slightly fond thought that, though the parson might pray alone, the sound of the church bell would remind the lonely ploughman out in the fields to say his prayers too.
The psalms suggest that the ideal for Jew and Christian would be life as constant prayer - that is life lived with a continuous sense of God and reference to God - but to achieve this, whilst not requiring that everyone become a monk, does mean that we practise, as Brother Lawrence put it, the presence of God in the to and fro of our lives. Every time you pass through a doorway, or sit down to eat, or switch on the computer, or start the car or lie down to sleep, cultivating the habit of a glance towards God, so that eventually we become aware of the constant companionship of God.
This diet of simple and regular feeding may not seem much but eventually it helps us to understand what Jesus means when he says, 'I am the living bread... whoever comes to me will never be hungry'.
I can't help feeling, however, that many Christians nowadays, incline more to the camel than the Jesus diet. I don’t mean in any sense to denigrate camel spirituality. And if you are a camel expert, please don’t take the hump. What I’m getting at is that when it comes to spiritual feeding too many human beings think they are camels. A camel can binge drink to excess - 21 gallons of water in 10 minutes; it can survive for 2 weeks without another drink, it can go a month without food. We cannot. We can’t do it physically and we can’t do it spiritually either.
And yet plenty of us can fall into the trap of thinking we can stock up on our supplies of spiritual food by praying once a week, or once a month. Others get by with twice a year. And I often meet people who, because they were so oppressed by incessant churchgoing as children, feel they stored up so much fat in their hump that they can survive from the age of 18 to 80 without taking another meal.
That’s not how it works. As people of God, spiritual people, we are offered sufficient food for the day - enough, not more than enough. To me, that’s really what underlies the gospel reading today, which is really an explanation of the story of the feeding of the 5,000 that we read two weeks ago. Five loaves and two fish didn’t seem very much yet they proved sufficient - not more than enough, but enough, even for the disciples who gathered a basket of fragments each to feed themselves. 'Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.'
This is a story re-enacted every time we receive Holy Communion. A fragment of bread, a sip of wine - there is no need to gorge ourselves, it is sufficient. And it’s there in the Lord's Prayer too: give us our daily bread, bread enough for today. In part, of course, this bread is Jesus himself and we ask for this spiritual food each day. But in the prayer this is where body meets spirit - we pray for material sufficiency too. Strength enough to take up our cross anew each day, recognising, as Jesus says, that each day has sufficient troubles of its own.
It’s a wonderful word, sufficiency. Scottish hosts when they want to sound quaint might still ask their guests at the end of the meal, 'Have you had a sufficiency?' They’re not asking have you filled your hump to bursting point so that you don’t need to eat for a month, or have you swallowed 21 gallons of wine, but have you had sufficient for the day, enough for now? When many of us, in material terms, enjoy too much of everything, to seek enough but not more than enough from life, to tread lightly on the earth, is not a bad rule to live by.
Seen in this way, the fragment of bread in the Eucharist becomes both the sign of something eternal and a reminder of how we should treat our planet. And the call to prayer from church tower or minaret, becomes also an invitation to sustainable living. And my prayer for sufficient bread for each day, becomes not an occasional option but a rule of life, not a banal necessity but the promise of eternity.
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