A really warm welcome to our parish eucharist service at St Barnabas. You have all you need for our service in the service sheets and pew sheet.
Some of you may have noticed a slight change in our seating this morning. Last Sunday I looked out upon individuals scattered across this big space and felt it was important for us to be physically closer together. Gathering together is our first act of worship, so we are seeking to make that a bit more intentional by inviting you to fill the first four rows, which I realise is very un-Anglican. If we can overcome our cultural resistance, I think we will benefit by coming together a bit more intentionally, hopefully, as we grow, we can expand into the other rows. The row we have taken out in the middle also gives a bit more space for people with children with the toy baskets, so please feel free to sit in that row if your children need a bit more room.
When we come to receive communion we are also going to gather around the carpeted area, on all three sides, so that again we are making a statement with our bodies that we are not just individuals, we are Christ’s body, his community in this place. There are a couple of chairs in place on both sides for those who may need to sit to receive communion, the rest of us can kneel or stand as we feel most comfortable.
I want to offer a few reflections on holiness this morning.
What do we mean by the word Holy? It is a uniquely religious word, and I wonder what image, picture or association comes to your mind when you think of that word Holy? Do we think of a mountain covered with clouds and ice, remote and austere and foreboding, a place that only the few might access? Do we think of a great cathedral full of incense, holding a great stillness and silence? Do we think of a monk or nun in robes praying or meditating? Do we think of ourselves? Could we call ourselves holy? Do we think of our family eating breakfast this morning as holy?
We struggle with these kinds of words because we are a society that has lost the language to speak to such things, the meaning of words like Holy that speak to us of the deeper dimensions of reality. It’s a bit like our language only works in two dimensions; we have lost our capacity to speak in three dimensions, and so we are lost when it comes to the unseen real, that which is not normally visible to the human eye. One of the missions of the church in our day is to help us recover that language, and with it the ability to grasp something of that greater spiritual dimension that underpins all of our lives.
I have been reading the first chapter of this wonderful book by William Countryman: Living on the Border of the Holy, in which he speaks about priesthood as being a fundamental and inescapable part of being human. All of us stand at the edge of that for which we don’t have words. We catch glimpses of it our everyday lives. We all have those moments when we sense something greater at work, the sense of the numinous, the holy, the divine in all things. Countryman uses another strange word when talking about the holy, he refers to arcana – because holy means hidden, secret, not on the surface but hidden deeper down within reality. Holy is that which is not immediately available, it requires that we attend, pay attention, develop a greater capacity to see and hear.
To quote from the book (p.2-3):
‘The deepest arcana are secret because they are hard to know, hard to reveal, hard to learn. They can be known only be experiencing them. Anything that can be fully conveyed in language, without remainder, is probably not of ultimate importance. The truly human knowledge is that which is obtained through living. If experience is passed on through language, the language is at most a map, a directional sign, a helpful guide to the experience itself. These arcana are secrete, then, because they concern dimensions of human experience where language fails (or, often, where language multiplies to the point of becoming useless). Some things are known only through our direct involvement. You cannot know what it is to be in love until it happens to you. You cannot know what it is to stand, unprotected, in God’s presence until you are there.’
We need the language of holiness to remind us that we cannot control God. God will always be beyond and greater than us. Awareness of holiness brings humility.
Both Isaiah and Simon Peter have an experience in which they encounter something – s some power, some presence – that is so much greater, so out of their everyday reality, that their first response is to pull back and consider themselves unworthy.
Isaiah says: ‘Woe is me, I am lost, speechless, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts.’ The vision he has of the Lord opens his eyes, he describes his vision as seeing the hem of God’s robe filling the temple, angelic beings calling out ‘Holy Holy Holy is the Lord of hosts’, the temple shakes and is filled with smoke. Isaiah is in the presence of an overwhelming reality and truth that is normally hidden from human eyes. Isaiah immediately understands how he and the society he is part of are self-deceived; they are not the great nation they think they are. They are a people whose ears and eyes are closed, who can no longer perceive the reality at the heart of existence. Their hearts and minds are darkened, they no longer know what is true, they are lost.
Simon Peter has a similar experience with the miraculously huge catch of fish. He senses a power at work in Christ: something greater, much greater is present in this man, this teacher speaking to the crowds in a new and compelling way. His response is ‘Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man.’
The first encounter with the Holiness of God is one of encountering the truth about the state we are in, the reality of our own lives and the society we are part of. But in both cases this is not where we are left. Isaiah is touched on the lips by a burning coal and told that his guilt has departed, and his sin blotted out. Jesus says to Peter, ‘Don’t be afraid, I have got bigger plans for you, you have a part to play in my purposes for salvation.’
It seems that God is willing to bridge the gulf between us, between the greatness, the unutterableness, the overwhelmingness of who God is and who we are. In Christ, God comes towards us, comes close, closes the gap, tells us not be afraid. We are being invited into the mystery, onto Holy Ground.
This mystery is not for specially ordained people, it is for all of us, to pay attention, to listen, to learn to live on the border of the holy in our everyday lives.
‘The encounter with the HIDDEN is a kind of fault line running through the middle of our lives; no one can escape its presence. The HIDDEN forms a border country that turns out to be, paradoxically, our native land. We all live with it, on it, in terms of it. We all have our unique experience of it. It is as near as breathing. The HIDDEN is inescapable. We can ignore it, with varying degrees of success, but it does not go away. It is part of who we as human beings are. This is where every priesthood begins’ (Countryman, p. 6).
Amen.
