Sermon Archive
In the Atmos
Sermon preached by John Armes at Evensong on 27 August 2006
We recently recorded a morning service here for broadcast on Radio 4. I'm sure I should have learned many things from the experience but the thing that particularly caught my attention was the mysterious world of atmos.
Every building, even when empty, and every group of people, even when silent, have their own atmos. So, if I were to stop speaking now and someone recorded this congregation sitting quietly, the result would be a mixture of sounds unique to us. That is atmos.
So, you would hear the traffic sounds, perhaps a car music system blasting out somewhere in the distance, but there would also be a collection of slight sounds; the rustle of clothing, the laboured breathing of someone struggling to stay awake, the crackle of a mint being unwrapped, the scratch of a pencil as someone in the choir filled in their crossword puzzle.
We could try recording our morning service in my study at home and pretend that it comes from St John's, but it would sound wrong because the atmos would be missing. But atmos is even more wonderful than that. We had to re-record a part of our service once the congregation had gone – so, to overcome the lack of atmos the engineer simply pasted it in from a recording made during the silent parts of our actual service.
Atmos, the sounds of collective humanity when it's trying to be silent. It’s ironic that the very effect Radio wants for a bit of realism in a church service, is precisely what so many concert organizers don’t want.
I’ve been to two events over the last few weeks that enjoyed disturbances of this sort. The opening concert of the Edinburgh Festival, Elektra, was disrupted by an errant fire alarm. The Arcanto String Quartet performance at the Queen’s Hall was accompanied by a mysterious creaking. I gave my ticket for Troilus and Cressida to someone else and it was enlivened by the happy sound of moving scenery.
In other words, and I apologise for taking so long to get to this, a sound so tiny that you don’t bother to hear it can, in certain circumstances, be a real nuisance, whilst in others it’s atmos – part of the necessary background of life. I don’t offer this as an especially original thought. We’re all familiar with the rhyme about the lack of the nail in the horse’s shoe that eventually leads to the loss of a battle - we all know that it’s the little piece of grit in the oyster that makes the pearl. It’s just that in a way this also describes how God works - most of the time part of the atmos, the background, always there but unnoticed, yet occasionally interrupting, not in a glamorous and high profile way, but merely offering a slightly discordant note, something that grabs our attention, whether we like it or not.
Naaman, as a hardened soldier, must have washed in many rivers – perhaps he had washed in the Jordan itself on some previous campaign – rivers are merely background to life. But it’s when the river is drawn to his attention, when it demands significance that he finds a problem with it. He is important, his illness is important and therefore it should be treated in an important, high profile and even heroic way. What a slight to his ego that the prophet doesn’t even come out to meet him!
Of course, Naaman has to make the breakthrough himself, he has to be prepared to look for surprising grace in something so small and trivial. And he’s helped to do so by people who are themselves part of the background, the atmos of his grand life – servants. Firstly the Israelite slave girl, then the servants who point out that it will hardly do him any harm at least to try the cure. All of which suggests that Naaman had not lost entirely his ability to pay attention to the background.
There’s another servant too, Gehazi, Elisha’s assistant. He fails to see what Naaman eventually understands – that small actions, tiny events can have huge implications. Naaman was a fabulously wealthy man – he would not have missed two talents of silver and few clothes. It probably made him feel better that he was paying something for his healing – after all, that’s how life works for rich people, everything has a price and if they pay it then it is rightfully theirs. Gehazi, for his part, probably thought he was doing Elisha a favour – his master was simply too unworldly for his own good.
But Gehazi fatally misses the point. God’s grace is freely given. Naaman hasn’t earned it, deserved it, paid for it - but he has asked and he has received. His healing should be a lifetime’s lesson - this is something he received from the God of a forgotten, subject people - and this fact turns upside down his previous assumptions about where power and right and meaning lie. Gehazi has undermined Naaman’s ability to learn this lesson – he corrupts the purity of the gift and so reveals himself to be a corrupted and spoiled human being.
It’s a sin that clings to his descendants too, so the story goes. Unfair! And yet, whole cultures can be polluted by a faulty idea - don’t we see that as we look at competing ideologies that ravage the world, ideologies that move from one generation to another?
And might not the powerful benefit from bathing in the rivers of those they have defeated and forgotten, accepting the gifts that no amount of money can buy – if they had the humility? And the greatest of these gifts do not occupy the foreground, they are not definable by economic measurements or democratic targets, but they are there, in the atmos. They are there in the deep spiritual wisdom that is not the monopoly of one people or culture and are often crowded out by the self-interested rush to success of those who have crowned themselves with power.
The second reading reminds us that Jesus was a great one for the quiet, the secret and the unnoticed. The Kingdom of God, is sown like a seed that must be given time to grow, a fragile plant, often intertwined with other plants - 'Let them grow together and then, when they are ripe we’ll see what fruit they bear.' It’s like a tiny mustard seed, so small you can hardly see it and yet it grows up to fill the background of your life with greenery and shade.
We know that Jesus was a man who made an immense impact on the world, but he was no king, no general, no man of wealth and breeding. He was a wandering preacher in a backwoods country who died a criminal’s death deserted by his friends. Hardly noticed at the time, he was the uneasy creak disturbing the concert, the grit that spawned the pearl and he has become that invisible unheard atmosphere against which we live our lives.
This is why the Christian faith encourages us never to despise the small and weak - and to live expectantly, ready to be surprised by grace. And this is why the basic prayer of Christians is the prayer of silence that cultivates the ability to put aside the insistent, strident voices that lure and threaten, and to listen instead but to the almost unheard voice of God, so familiar, so much a part of the atmos that we learn not to pay attention, and yet without which our lives sound false and empty.
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