Sermon Archive
Love that moves the Sun
Sermon preached by Ken Boyd at Evensong on 25 August 2002
Romans 12 1-8; Matthew 16 13-20
It was early in July and we were at a wedding in Warwickshire: the service and the meal were over and the guests were strolling in the field around the marquee. I saw a familiar face. I hadn't met him since the bride's baptism, but twenty-five years later he was immediately recognisable - tall, wiry and laconic, filling his pipe as he answered my enquiry about what he had been up to. He had just returned from sailing across the Pacific in a small boat with one companion. Not so extraordinary nowadays, he assured me: lots of other people were doing it, and if you chose the right time of year, it was quite safe. The main thing was get on with the other crewman and take your regular turn on watch. The best watch to be on was around dawn, which begins in pitch blackness: then suddenly the sun arises from the sea, flooding everything with the most amazing colours, until the whole seascape is illuminated. 'I hope,' he said - in the way people sometimes address those unwise enough to be wearing a clerical collar - 'I hope you won't think what I'm going to say is sacrilegious, but seeing all that, you could almost believe in God.'
When, according to the Acts of the Apostles, King Agrippa told St Paul that he 'almost' persuaded him to be a Christian, the saint replied that he would to God that he had, for he knew that Agrippa believed the prophets. But after two thousand years of Christianity, it is less safe to make such assumptions about the beliefs of your fellow wedding guests. For while the views of even the most secular are coloured by a morality derived from Jesus' teaching, many now have a fairly clear idea of the God they do not believe in. Whether my fellow wedding guest had such a clear idea, I did not discover. He was not, despite the temptation to see him as such, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, but a canny English lawyer, who having made his case was prepared to let it rest; and any attempt to explore his views further was forestalled by other guests drifting up, and by his decision that, as it was getting late, he had better get on the road to Gloucestershire, where friends were putting him up for the night.
What assumptions about the meaning of the word 'God', lay behind my fellow wedding guest's 'almost'? If they were about an omnipotent supernatural being, whose existence can be inferred from the evidence of design in nature, and whose laws for living have been exclusively revealed to religions, then his reluctance to believe in such a God may have been justified. His reluctance simply would have reflected what many of the best European minds of the last four centuries had already concluded. The evidence of design in nature is just too ambiguous, and what religions teach is often too contradictory, to convince anyone, who does not already believe, that such a God exists.
Such a God however, is what Pascal called 'the God of the philosophers', an austere intellectual construct created by those Enlightenment Deists whom Diderot characterised as people who had not lived long enough to become atheists. The problem with the 'God of the philosophers' is that it implies that the existence of God is a theoretical question, and so misses what makes the word 'God' meaningful. The word 'God' is not a word we use to describe someone or something we do, or can, know enough about in order to decide whether or not he, she, or it exists. It is, rather, a word that becomes meaningful only when it is used as another word for 'Thou'. The real question raised by the sun arising on the Pacific thus is not a theoretical one about whether or not God exists, but a deeply intuitive one of whether or not to respond with a silent or sung song of prayer and praise. It is not ideas about God that make the word 'God' meaningful. It becomes meaningful only as it arises from the hearts and lips of men and women when they respond to life with prayer and praise.
And also with grief. A further and much more sombre question was put to me more recently when we finally heard on the radio that the two young girls, Holly and Jessica, had been murdered. 'Why, when we have all been praying so hard for them to be alive, did God let this happen?' Who can answer that question? There is no theoretical answer to it, and if all we have of God are ideas like those of the Deists, then the logical conclusion indeed is to become atheists. The only alternative, if we are not to become indifferent, is not to ask the question of one another, but to do what men and women have repeatedly done when they called out from the deepest darkness of affliction, and let the word 'God' arise from their hearts and lips.
To do that, it has been argued, is a much more naturally human response to affliction than to persuade oneself, or allow oneself to be persuaded by received opinion, that there is no God to call on. But having called, will there be an answer? Not a theoretical one certainly. But in time and with patience, a deeper understanding of life's contradictions may come; and one aspect of that may be the insight that when Jesus said 'Inasmuch as you did it to the least of these my brethren, you did it to me', he really meant it.
We are touching here perhaps, on something we need to be reticent about, something deeper than we can clearly understand. Could it be, that what Jesus says in those familar words of his about losing your life in order to find it, is true not just for us, but also for God? God's 'act of Creation', Simone Weil writes,
is not an act of power. It is an abdication. Through this act a kingdom was established other than the kingdom of God. The reality of the world is constituted by the mechanism of matter and the autonomy of rational creatures. It is a kingdom from which God has withdrawn. God, having renounced being its king, can enter it only as a beggar.
God can enter this world only as a beggar; and so, Simone Weil went on to say, 'The only power God has is that of love'. If we can rid ourselves of literal-mindedness and contemplate the mystery Christians call the Incarnation, that also is the clear implication of the Word becoming flesh. Life's contradictions can only begin to be understood as love enables us to see God in one another, and particularly in those who suffer most - and so as love recruits us to enlarging love's frontiers even here on earth.
'The only power God has is that of love'. In all worldly terms, clearly, God is powerless. But what is love? If this power-abdicating love, which can enter this world only as a beggar, truly is, as Dante claimed, that which moves the sun and the other stars, may it not also be, beyond time, what all other forms of power must ultimately bow to? Only by loving and being loved, in spirit and in truth, and in deed, have we any hope of ever answering that.
Let me end by quoting from someone who had much longer to reflect on these matters than any of us here. We learnt, a week or so ago, of the death of a member of St John's, Professor Mary Pickford, on her 100th birthday. She was a distinguished physiologist, a much-loved teacher, and also in her later years an amateur painter and poet. Three years ago, the church magazine published a short poem in which she reflects on whether our bodies are a home or a prison, and on 'How strange' it is, 'and what a mystery/ That blessings are not equally shared' since 'For some there are green surrounding fields' but 'For others all is dark and without beauty.' The poem ends with the line 'After death maybe we'll know the reason.' I like that 'maybe': in her ninetieth decade, the critical scientist was still alive and active. But so was her faith, in the love that moves the sun and the other stars.
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