Capacity, Soggy Peas and The Bill - Sermon 16th September 2007

 

Exodus 32: 7-14, Luke 15: 1-10

 

Two very different readings in our focus today.  One, gentle and beautiful, from the parables of Jesus, of the lost sheep and the love that searches for it, and rejoices when it is found. One scary and unsettling, of a wrathful God, about to destroy his people for creating and worshipping an idol, until Moses intercedes for them. How can we hold two such different pictures of God together? Let's start some distance away...

 

So, you ask, here we are, five months after we all got our crisp new purple hymnbooks, CH4, and suddenly we have two hymns from that old and well thumbed little pamphlet Songs of God's People - or as ministers, organists and choirs have affectionately come to call it, Soggy Peas. Why? Well...

 

A week on Tuesday is my brother and sister-in-law's silver wedding. They were married by me, in my first charge, in the little mid-Wales seaside town of Tywyn, where there was then only one large hotel. They had carefully got the guest-list down to 140, and off they went to the Corbett Arms to sort the reception. "How many can you hold?" they asked. and were told "Eighty for comfort."

 

Back they went, and, with much soul-searching and pain, whittled the list down to 120. "How many for discomfort?" they asked the hotel. "Eighty-eight" came the answer. I believe they tried asking the same question in several creatively different ways, involving people standing, and some who knew each other sitting in each others' laps, but still the answer was the same. Eighty eight. So off they went, and began the real diplomatic stuff, the wedding-thinking that, if it works, puts Henry Kissinger and Kofi Annan in the shade. Who would understand? Who could be represented? And they got the list down to eighty-eight. And they showed it to me; had they forgotten anyone?

 

And I felt I had to point out that in our culture it's conventional to invite the Bride and Groom....

 

So it was ninety for discomfort, and I can't remember who sat in whose lap. But we had a great, if slightly claustrophobic, time. And the hotel now had a precedent for upping - very slightly - its estimate of its capacity.

 

Capacity...

 

We human beings are limited by many things, but so often it's only our capacity that is the limit. But we think that the limit is there, somehow inscribed in the fabric of the universe, in a condition imposed on us, not in conditions we impose on ourselves.

 

Just as, so often, we presume that the smallness of our pictures of God is down to some real "smallness" in God, and not to our capacity to understand him.

 

And the sad thing is that, while our capacity is limited, it isn't limited to what it is now. We are finite beings, beings with limits to what we can do and be. But the limits aren't fixed. We can grow. Above all, we can grow in our understanding of God.

 

Let's get back to the question we started with - why two hymnbooks today? Why are we bringing back Soggy Peas for a guest appearance?  Well, our crisp, whiter-than-white paged CH4 is a smashing book, and we're just starting to explore its riches. We're working to build up our knowledge of what's in it so that we can use it creatively along with all the other elements of our worship. Along with hymns we've known for years, it has new and challenging items, containing new and challenging pictures of God and our relationship to him. But a hymnbook, like a hotel, and like a human being, has limitations. It has a limited capacity. It can only hold so much. I would guess that there were lots of debates about capacity as they were putting CH4 together: "750 hymns for comfort? OK - how many for discomfort? Eight hundred? But what about these? We can't leave this one out... What about that one?" 

 

And like a hotel - but not like a human being - you can't really push those limits. You can paste in a few new hymns at the front and back - but that's it. You're basically stuck with a new hymnbook for maybe forty years, when it's long since become old, and the bright new depictions and understandings of God it contained  have become familiar - and, more to the point, everyone has become aware of what isn't in it!

 

But that starts early. The answer to the question "Why Soggy Peas as well, today?" is simply and obviously that the two SGP hymns say something that needs to be said that simply isn't said by anything in CH4. There isn't really anything that quite matches up to the shattering simplicity of "God forgave my sin in Jesus' name..." And there's nothing that quite fills the bill instead of the hymn we started with. It's a hymn, you see, about capacity. About how much understanding, how many pictures, of God we can fit in before we become full and can take no more. It isn't the greatest poetry ever to come ourt of the Iona Community - bits of it are quite bathetic - but what it says is extremely important for faith, and at two or three points, the way it manages to say it is striking and memorable. It's a hymn to make pennies drop, and to make us think.

 

God who is everywhere present on earth

no-one can picture completely...

 

We've been talking very glibly about "pictures of God" - and there it is again. And we remember, uneasily, that the Ten Commandments forbid depictions of God. Or rather, they forbid the creation of an image of God that we could worship. An image of God that somehow became the image of God for us. But that's not what we've been talking about. We're talking about the sorts of pictures that flit through our minds "when Scripture is read and preached", the sort of play of images, the sort of "slide-show in the head" that goes on when the stories of God's dealings are put before us and responded to, here in Church - and the sorts of memories (or half-memories) that we have of these things when we go out into the world of everyday life, and suddenly need to ask questions about where God is, and who God is...

 

And these pictures of God aren't "graven images". They aren't, in themselves,  what the Ten Commandments and the rest of the Old Testament tradition come down so hard on. But they can be...

 

They can become forbidden images when one of them becomes, for me, the Image of God. When I can only see God in one way, or in a few limited ways that all add up to the same thing. A picture of God that's smaller than God, but that I worship as though it were the whole of God.  The Old Testament is full of pictures of God. But the point is that there are so many of them, and they come in such profusion, such a rich tumble of images, that we can't stay with any one of them. And it isn't that they all complement each other either. They are astonishingly contradictory, pointing in all sorts of different directions, never letting us settle on one image so that we can say "This is it!" "This is God!"

 

And when you factor in the New Testament, it all gets much more so! Just think of the pictures of God we get in Jesus' parables! The father of the prodigal son. The shepherd who seeks the lost sheep. Aspects of God are projected onto the screens of our minds by pictures - a bridegroom who finds half the bridesmaids with no oil for their lamps, a businessman who finds that only two of his three servants have done anything with the talents he put them in charge of, the owner of a vineyard who sends his son to see if he can be reconciled that way with his rebellious tenants. And then you get the parables of the Kingdom - the Kingdom is like a mustard seed, that grows huge to shelter all the birds; the Kingdom is like a man who found a huge pearl and sold everything to get it. These are pictures - clear pictures, there in our heads - of the way things are with God. But they aren't "pictures of God." And yet, in a way, they kind of are...

 

In the imageless faith of the Bible, it isn't that there is no picture of God for us. It's that there are so many pictures, and that they fit together in so many different ways, that it's impossible for us to grab hold of one, and say "This is God!" "This is my picture of God, and it's the right one. It's the picture you must all have, or you are wrong about God. I have the right picture, so you must all agree with me..."

 

And that's where we need to have, in at least one of the hymnbooks we use, a verse that says something like this:

 

Can we be certain of how the Lord looks

deep though our faith and conviction,

when in the face of our Savour we see

the smile of divine contradiction?

 

I don't watch The Bill much, or any police drama, but a recurring image comes to mind for me when I think of us shuffling through all these pictures to try to make sense of them. To get a "Big Picture". It's of that pinboard that the CID seem to work with in police stations, where all the bits and pieces of evidence are brought together and pinned up. And a pattern begins to emerge. Out of all the photos and notes and scraps of evidence, out of all the wee individual images and pictures, a sort of "super-picture" begins to appear.

 

Or think of those television adverts in which you see two or three pictures of faces, each in its own frame; and the camera pulls back until you're looking at ten, then twenty, then you lose count as the camera zooms out - and you're looking at a "Big Picture", maybe a map, or maybe another face,  but made up out of hundreds upon hundreds of the little pictures. On one level, the big picture is made up of the smaller pictures. On another level, it's obviously there on its own, in its own right, bigger than the small pictures, and pulling them together, integrating them, into a bigger whole, a bigger understanding.

 

This is the way that Scripture works. The bits and pieces of stories and pictures out of which the Bible is made reflect glimpses, insights, encounters with God - and also questions, sometimes very difficult ones. And they have been worked and reworked, over generations, as people brought them into new relationships with each other, made new patterns out of them, and sometimes brought old bits, old pictures, old stories, together with brand new ones, to make new sense of them both. Like the CID on The Bill, pinning bits of evidence to a board to see how they belong together, or like children in school, taking pictures from a magazine to make a collage, the Scriptures show us God's people trying to make sense of what they have. Glimpses into the vast reality of God, which allow us to build pictures.

 

And they do it over and over again. Why do you think that, as well as two Books of Samuel and two Books of Kings, we also have two Books of Chronicles telling what's obviously the same story in a totally different way? Why do we have four Gospels, not one? Why is the story of Abraham and his family, and Moses and the Red Sea, told over again in the Psalms, with all sorts of subtly different emphases? Why does the story of Deborah and Barak battling the Canaanites get told in an ancient poetic version in Judges chapter 5, and in a much later prose version in chapter 4? Why does the whole story of Israel get told in Stephen's long speech, before they stoned him, in Acts chapter 7, and again in a totally different way, and from a totally different perspective, in Hebrews chapter 11?

 

Because this is how Scripture works.

 

And because this is how people actually do try to make sense of God.  They tell it from where they are. They tell it according to the sense they can make of it where they are. Because it isn't just Scripture that we try to make sense of in this way. It's also our own lives, our existence. We do it together, as the Church, where we are. That's how Scripture speaks to us, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, differently to how it spoke to people in the mid-nineteenth. We aren't where they were.

 

But there's more to be said than just that. Because what makes our faith the Christian Faith is that we do actually have a picture of God - an  image of God, if you like. And that is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the master pattern that organizes the other bits. His picture emerges from Scripture - we don't have it without Scripture - but it's somehow bigger than Scripture. It insists on controlling, shaping, the picture we have of God. After Jesus, certain ways of understanding God are closed to us.

 

We can't hear the story of God's wrath against his people because of the Golden Calf the way an Israelite would. It comes out of a harsh, tribal experience of life in which it was only the discipline of the Covenant they had with God that kept the Israelites together, and gave them their identity. But more even than that - we're on the other side of the Christ-event. We can only see and read the Old Testament by looking through Jesus Christ. Like a polarizing lens, He excludes certain things, and transmits others to us. The story of tribal defection from the imageless God is still clearly that! But when we look at it through Jesus Christ, what we still see are human folly, God's grace, human helplessness, God's willingness to change his mind and forgive. We have to acknowledge the whole of the story - including the bits that never get read in Church! (Read on to the end of Exodus 32.) But this scrap of experience of God, in a context utterly alien to ours, gets taken up and transformed. As also does the parable of the Lost Sheep. And they interact with each other in the tradition. We work with one, then the other, to try to get a sense of the Big Picture.

 

But the Big Picture which emerges is God as shown to us in Jesus Christ.