WIDER STILL AND WIDER...........................................
WIDER STILL AND WIDER………….
(a sermon preached at St.LUKE’S QUEEN’S PARK BRIGHTON on 5th September 2021)
Do you remember the film A NIGHT TO REMEMBER starring Kenneth More? I think it was by far the best film made about the sinking of the famous “unsinkable” passenger liner Titanic.
I first saw it in the cinema when I was 12 and the story held a morbid fascination for me. I sat round to see it again and again at the cinema, dodging the usherettes’ torches.
In one scene, shortly after the ship collided with the iceberg, Mr.Andrews, the ship’s designer (I even remember his name!), who was on board for the maiden voyage, was explaining to the horrified captain that the “unsinkable” claim had been based on an assumption that not more than 3 of the 4 forward compartments would ever be flooded.
But now he calculated that the length of the gash in her side and the force of the water pouring in would cause not only the 1st, the 2nd and the 3rd but also the 4th bulkhead to give way. And by then, the weight of the inflow would send the ship down.
That picture of one bulkhead or defence after another giving way to an invading force has come back to me in later life, not literally with a ship being flooded, but translated into a spiritual vision of the soul giving way, compartment by compartment, to the influx of God.
As we gradually respond to God’s loving call, as we feel the waters of the holy spirit pouring into us, one bulkhead after another creaks and cracks and finally gives way- the bulkheads of pride, ego, independence, insecurity ————--until we sink into the waves of God’s mercy and compassion and let HIM carry US rather than try to keep afloat by ourselves.
And one of the lessons we learn in this process of surrender is how great God is and how little we are. We begin to realise to our shame how much more generous and forgiving his love is than we could ever have credited and how petty and pathetic our own pretensions are to know all the answers and to pass judgment on others.
Fr. FREDERICK FABER., a hero of mine, summed all this up better than I ever could in a hymn he wrote.
Now of course some hymns make you cringe, don’t they, with their questionable theology and (even worse) their ghastly poetry! But this one is the most beautiful and spiritually truthful one I have ever heard.
Here’s the 1st verse:
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea.
There’s a kindness in his justice which is more than liberty.
In Mark’s gospel, there’s the story of a cheeky, feisty foreign woman with the little daughter who was mentally ill. Let’s start with that.
Because, you see, it’s the story of the dawning realisation of the wideness of God’s mercy. Even Jesus Himself seems, if the gospel is to be believed, to have undergone a bulkhead-collapsing experience in the early days of His ministry. This famous dogs-and-the-crumbs-under-the-table anecdote gives us the lead-in.
You see, Jesus started by assuming that His mission was only to the Jews, the “chosen people” and at first He instructed His apostles to go only to the lost sheep of Israel rather than to any gentiles ( which means foreigners).
And yet, only a few months into His ministry, here He is one moment insulting this Syro-Phoenician women with what we would today call out as racial abuse and the next moment being shamed and melted by her persistent trust in His healing power.
And it’s not long before He preaches the parable of the GOOD SAMARITAN, praises the faith of a ROMAN CENTURION and finally gives the “great commission” at the end of Matthew’s gospel that disciples are to be made of all nations.
In other words, God didn’t after all love only Israel and did care about the rest of creation.
Listen to a bit more of Fr.Faber’s hymn:
There is grace enough for thousands of new worlds as great as this.
There is room for fresh creations in that upper home of bliss.
For the love of God is broader than the measure of man’s mind.
And the heart of the eternal is most wonderfully kind.
The ancient Israelites were not always open to that vision. They tried to shrink God into a one-sided military supremo, frequently asking him (as you will know if you read the Psalms) to put the boot in to their neighbours. But are we Christians any better? Are we not sometimes mean and blinkered, quick to pigeon-hole, to criticize, to condemn? To settle for our own convenient little image of God and idolize it?
Pin your ears back for the next verse from Fr.Faber:
But we make his love too narrow by false limits of our own.
And we magnify his strictness with a zeal HE will not own.
Those lines should be burnt into our consciences and tattooed on our foreheads.
We make his love too narrow by false limits of our own.
And we magnify his strictness with a zeal HE will not own.
Jesus prayed to His father that His disciples should all be one. BUT JUST LOOK AT US!
· The Eastern and Western churches have been sulking in opposite corners since 1054ad - that’s before the Battle of Hastings!
· The struggle over the future of the north of Ireland is fought across a sectarian divide with Christian labels
· The Roman Catholic church insists that it alone is the “real thing” and excludes others from communion
· Protestants begrudge the full joy of the incarnation by refusing to hail Mary as the mother of God
· Evangelicals pronounce judgment on those they believe are not “saved”.
Hang on a moment. Did we not just hear
But the love of God is broader than the measure of man’s mind.
How much broader might that be? I don’t honestly think we can begin to tell until we stop worrying about how many bulkheads in the ship of our soul have been burst; until we’ve let the torrent of the Holy Spirit crash through all the fears and suspicions of denominational differences, and then even let that torrent pound against one of the thickest bulkheads of all: the mutual hostility of competing religions.
What would the wideness of God’s mercy have us Christians make of Bhuddists or Hindus or Moslems?
How readily we scurry off to hide behind that well-worn verse of scripture “Nobody comes to the Father except through me.” But what does the me refer to?
Nobody comes to the Father except through the 2nd person of the trinity who, before he took human form as the man called Jesus, was already the word of God from the beginning of creation.
Who are we to decide that this Divine Word, that we read about in the preface to S.John’s gospel, has not spoken of God in a meaningful way to those of other faiths, just as Christ - his human manifestation - has spoken to us?
We make his love too narrow by false limits of our own.
God is always greater. We can’t cut him down to size and keep him as a mascot for our own team. We can only thank him for revealing himself in different places and cultures through the process of history to men and women of good will by his WORD; Thank him and rejoice in our own special Christian belief that this WORD BECAME FLESH AND DWELT AMONG US FULL OF GRACE AND TRUTH.
What truth? That’s easy. The simple truth that GOD IS LOVE. Which brings us to, and explains the sense of, the last verse of Fr.Faber’s magnificent hymn:
If our love were but more simple
we should take him at his word
and our lives would all be sunshine
in the sweetness of our Lord.