The Ordinary and the Extraordinary
A sermon preached by the Revd Canon Dr Alison Joyce
on the Sunday Next Before Lent
22nd February 2009
I am always fascinated to hear the stories that people tell about what first drew them to explore the Christian faith. Such tales are, of course, as diverse as the people who tell them. And yet, even those who have grown up within the church can usually speak of particular experiences, or particular people, who suddenly brought faith to life for them in new ways. Moments of revelation; sometimes brought about by something completely new and unexpected; but at other times, occasions when the familiar suddenly becomes replete with new meaning.
There was a student at my college in Cambridge, who was a very street-wise, rather hard-drinking individual – quite a tough cookie all round, who hung out with a group of friends who had no apparent interest in religion at all. So he was hardly the kind of individual you would normally expect to find being a stalwart of the College Chapel. But, nevertheless, he was precisely that: he took his Christian faith profoundly seriously, and in a very thoughtful and engaged kind of way. And one day, out of interest, I asked him about his own religious journey. It turned out that he had very little Christian background to speak of; he had come from a home in which religion had played little part in his childhood or upbringing. And strangely enough (because our conversation took place years before I had any association with our fine city), he was a native of Birmingham, and had in fact been a pupil at KES, just down the road from here.
Anyway, the story that he told me was this: one summer, when he was still a teenager, he went out to the Lickey Hills at night with a group of friends. At one point he became separated from his companions, and found himself completely alone for a few moments. He was very struck by the silence that suddenly enveloped him, and by the beauty and the stillness of the night air. And then he looked up, and saw above him the most breathtaking, most heart-stopping, most glorious starlit sky. A sky that seemed to go on for ever and ever, into infinity and beyond.
And in that instant he was suddenly overwhelmed by a profound sense of the sheer insignificance of his own life when compared with the wonders of Creation, and the glorious majesty of God. It was a glimpse of utter transcendence; a moment when he realised without any shadow of doubt that there was far, far more to life than the trivial selfish concerns of his own existence. And he also knew that what he had glimpsed that night was so important that his life would never, ever be the same again. And it was this experience that set him off on his own particular journey of exploration. He began by looking to the tradition that was closest and most accessible to him: the Christian faith, and, more specifically, the Church of England. And suddenly he discovered that it all made sense to him; church services that had previously seemed rather dull and dessicated, suddenly came to life for him, because now he understood what they were for. And, having recognised that, he realised that he needed to look no further – he simply needed to look more deeply.
It all happened because of a starlit sky. And yet the stars, of course, are always there: it’s just that we are not always able to see them. Other things have a habit of getting in the way.
A second story. About twenty five years ago I was privileged to get to know a very remarkable, but rather complex woman called Monica Furlong. She died of cancer in 2003 at the age of 72, and her name may be familiar to some of you. She was by background a journalist: at various stages in her professional career she was the religious correspondent for the Spectator, on the staff of the Daily Mail, and a columnist for both the Guardian and the Roman Catholic periodical, the Tablet, amongst other things; and she also published a number of biographies, including one of the Puritan John Bunyan, and the Trappist Monk, Thomas Merton, as well as various other books, including some children’s stories.
She was a woman with a profound spiritual faith, but also a profoundly ambivalent relationship with organised religion: she was deeply involved in the life of the Church, yet she struggled greatly when it seemed to her that its hierarchical structures, and the way in which it conducted itself, seemed to get in the way of the integrity of the gospel message. And although she herself never felt called to ministry, she was a passionate supporter of women’s ordination, and was in fact the Moderator of the Movement for the Ordination of Women for a number of years, which was where I first encountered her.
But the reason why I am mentioning her is this: in a book that she published in 1971, entitled Travelling In, she described two life changing experiences that she had on her journey of faith, which are remarkable for the astonishing ordinariness of the contexts in which they took place. I shall read you her description of what it was that happened, quite unexpectedly. She wrote this:
I was waiting at a bus stop on a wet afternoon. It was opposite the Odeon cinema, outside the station, and I was surrounded by people, shops, cars. A friend was with me. All of a sudden, for no apparent reason, everything looked different. Everything I could see shone, vibrated, throbbed with joy and with meaning. I knew that it had done this all along, and would go on doing it, but that usually I couldn’t see it. It was all over in a minute or two. I climbed on to the bus, saying nothing to my friend – it seemed impossible to explain – and sat stunned with astonishment and happiness.
The second experience occurred some months later. I left my office at lunch-time, stopped at a small Greek café in Fleet Street to buy some rolls and fruit, and walked up Chancery Lane. It was an August day, quite warm but cloudy, with the sun glaringly, painfully bright behind the clouds. I had a strong sense that something was about to happen. I sat on a seat in the garden of Lincoln’s Inn waiting for whatever it was to occur. The sun behind the clouds grew brighter and brighter, the clouds assumed a shape which fascinated me, and between one moment and the next, although no word had been uttered, I felt myself spoken to. I was aware of being regarded by love, of being wholly accepted, accused, forgiven, all at once. The joy of it was the greatest I had ever known in my life. I felt I had been born for this moment and had marked time till it occurred.
A life-changing moment. A moment when, as happened to my Cambridge student friend, she knew that things would never be the same again. She had glimpsed something utterly extraordinary, in the midst of absolute ordinariness.
And it is precisely this that we encounter in our gospel reading today: the story of the Transfiguration, as told by St Mark. As we heard, it describes how Jesus took three of his disciples, Peter, James and John, up a high mountain. And how suddenly, and dramatically, his appearance changed before their very eyes: he was transfigured: his clothes became dazzling white; Moses and Elijah appeared too, and were seen conversing with him. All of a sudden, the disciples were able to glimpse the fact that this strange, baffling, charismatic carpenter’s son from Nazareth, was in fact far, far more than a prophet; they are given a glimpse of the truth of who and what he really is. It is a breathtaking, heart-stopping moment; a moment when the ordinary is suddenly transformed, totally and utterly, into the completely extraordinary.
And Peter’s immediate reaction is perhaps entirely understandable: he is, we are told, terrified, and yet, nevertheless, he has an overwhelming desire to respond appropriately; to recognise the immensity of what it is that has just unfolded before his very eyes: ‘Let us make three booths’, he says to Jesus; ‘One for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.’ But interestingly, that is not, it appears, what Jesus wants. Indeed, Jesus does not even want them to speak of the event until after his death and resurrection. The disciples have been granted a glimpse of a truth that is far, far greater than anything they can imagine, or begin to comprehend. Their task now is to go back down the mountain; to return to the lives they have left; and yet, to do so, profoundly changed by an experience that gave them a momentary insight into the broader picture; the deeper truth.
And what of us, here today, all these many centuries later? When people ask me about what I do, and why I do it, I sometimes find myself telling them that, far from seeing my role as one of taking God out to other people, more often than not what I find myself doing is helping people to discover what God is already doing in their lives, and in the lives of those around them, often in the most unexpected of ways. Because God is almost always there first; sowing seeds that perhaps we have not yet seen; transforming lives in ways that are not yet visible, but are no less real for all that.
Amen.