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None is forgotten before God
Sermon preached by Kenneth Boyd at Holy Communion on 8 February 2004
Isaiah 6.1-8 ; 1 Corinthians 15.1-11 ; Luke 5.1-11
On our kitchen wall there's a photograph, fading a little now because it's nearly fourteen years old, of our first dog, Meg, taken shortly before she died. It is high summer, and Meg, mostly Alsatian, is lying in our garden on the sun-dappled grass, with roses rioting in the background. But there's also another figure in the photograph, so small you might easily miss it. Making his way carefully along the garden wall, is a little grey, brown and white cat with, could you see them, china-blue eyes. We eventually inherited him when our neighbours who owned him moved away. His name was Mista, a Danish word which means something like 'misty' in English. He had already made a friend of Meg, and was later a particular friend of old Tess, our first black Labrador. If you came into the room quietly enough, you might sometimes find Tess and Mista asleep, snuggled up to one another.
When he came permanently to live with us, Mista also made a friend of our own cat Prudentius. This must have been more difficult than befriending our dogs, because Prudentius was a portly and patrician cat, and most definitely in charge. Mista succeeded, however, by recognising this, and by being unfailingly courteous to Prudentius - and indeed to us. When the other animals rushed forward to be fed, Mista waited patiently until you were ready for him. Although he came from a Stockbridge pet shop, he was a perfect gentleman. And so it was, when 'his bones were full of an old disease', and his frame terribly wasted, and we agonised what to do, then, last Friday morning, sometime between five and seven o'clock, at the dawning of the day, he climbed into his box, composed his limbs as for sleep, and died peacefully. It seemed only appropriate to hear on the radio later that morning:
It's a gift to be humble, it's a gift to be free,
It's a gift to come down where you ought to be;
And when you come to the place that's just right,
You will be in the vale of love and delight.
Were Meg and old Tess and Prudentius waiting for Mista, on the other side of the vale? Well, many people, no doubt, would dismiss that question, and indeed most of what I have been saying so far, as mere sentimentality. The only realistic way to see life and death, they might say, is in terms of a scientific world view, which has no room for such wishful speculation, and has the courage to live and die in the light of common day, which is all we have. And up to a point, those who say that are right. We have no demonstrable, let alone incontestable, evidence of what lies beyond the horizon of human sense-based and scientific understanding. And the quest for greater scientific understanding, from which humanity has gained so much practical benefit in recent centuries, surely is more than enough to absorb our attention.
Now the quest for greater scientific understanding certainly should absorb our attention. But is that enough? From the earliest stirring of consciousness in our remotest ancestors, we humans have been, above all, questioning animals. What is this world, to consciousness of which each of us has awoken? Who are we who have awoken to consciousness? Where did we come from and where are we going? What can we do about it? Science is one way of asking these questions and of answering some of them. But science is only possible if the reality it investigates itself is intelligible, itself makes sense. And the affirmation that reality itself is intelligible, itself does make sense, is not a scientific certainty. It is, rather, a leap of faith, an act of trust - trust in reality as hospitable to the questions humans ask, and trust, ultimately, in reality as responsive to humanity.
The ground on which science stands, in other words, is that which religion and philosophy, myth and mysticism, have gained for humanity over millennia, by asking and answering questions beyond those of science. And they have asked and answered those questions not impersonally, as science properly does, but in the most deeply personal way, as Isaiah did in his vision of God's glory in the temple. Religion is able to affirm that reality is intelligible, that is, because of its human experience of being addressed by an ultimate reality, 'to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid'. That experience is not something that can be tested or proved by the outward senses or by science. God is known rather, in the experience itself, in the epiphanies and transfigurations of our common days, in the sublimity of nature, in the tenderness of love, in the intimate presence of birth and death, in the depths of prayer and sacrament. Religion has bound those experiences together into the ground of intelligible reality on which science stands. But that ground disappears beneath humanity's feet, if it no longer hears the inner voice that told Isaiah not to be afraid. If reality is not responsive to humanity, human existence really is all sound and fury, signifying nothing.
But what I've just being saying perhaps is rather abstract. So let me make a personal confession. The night before he died, I picked Mista up and held him in my arms: he was light as a feather, almost nothing to him, the smallest scrap of life. And the words that came to my lips were 'Fear not, little flock, it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.' What earthly reason had I to say that? No earthly reason, except perhaps that I was saying it to comfort myself for not being able to help him. Sentimentality again - or was there something other than an earthly reason? Perhaps. The words of Jesus I said to Mista come from the same chapter of Luke's gospel in which Jesus says: 'Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God.' And there also is that other vision of Isaiah's, of the peaceable kingdom, where the wolf and the lamb shall lie down together, and a little child shall lead them. Where did that sustaining vision come from? Whence did Jesus gain the assurance to say that we, like the sparrows, are 'not forgotten before God' ?
Here and now, in the in-between world of space and time, we cannot answer such questions with the certainty that science properly demands. Nor can the deepest questions about life and death, about time and eternity, be settled by public debates or by opinion polls. Like scientific questions, rather, such questions call for patient investigation. But unlike scientific questions, the patient investigation they call for is not theoretical and experimental, but meditative and experiential. Our understanding of these questions is deepened, that is, when like Mary, we keep all these things, pondering them in our hearts; and it is deepened also as life itself tests us, through action or suffering.
But then, of course, what deepening understanding teaches us, is how little we really do understand, and how inadequate are our fitful responses to life's moments and years of testing us. Then, like Isaiah, and Peter in today's gospel, we may be tempted to lose heart. But it is only then, perhaps, that we do understand - that questioning in the end must give place to prayer, the place where attentive hearts hear the still, small voice of God telling them, 'Fear not, you are of more value than many sparrows.'
None, even the smallest sparrow, 'is forgotten before God.' And none of us either. And this, as St Paul says, is 'the gospel, which you received, in which you stand, by which you are saved, if you hold it fast'.
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