Month: August 2016

… Now poor old church minister Lee Banfield was the first to leave The Great British Bake Off last week after Paul Hollywood said one of his cakes was too dry. He’s been judged and found wanting, he’s been expelled before the first soufflé has had the chance to rise. He’s been told he doesn’t belong in The Great British Bake Off any more and I wonder how he now feels coming back down to earth and – like me – finding that this week’s set bible readings, which we are given to preach on, are all about food preparation and hospitality. …

– from my cheeky little talk today, It Cannot Stop at Soggy Bottoms: Values Beyond Bake Off in an Inhospitable World. Warning: contains innuendoes.

Hebrews 13.1-8,15,16, Luke 14.1,7-14

Sunday 28 August 2016: The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity

Weston Bampfylde ‘Together at Ten’

(Ad lib) Confessional: Are you a fan of The Great British Bake Off?

If so, you’re not alone. The first episode of the new series last week was watched by 47.5% of all television viewers; at its peak the audience was 11.2 million – which was more than at the most-watched moments of the Rio Olympics, which peaked at 11.1 million viewers. [1]

So what’s so appealing about Bake Off? Well, I’ve heard people say it’s because the show is sweet – it makes you feel good. The two judges are like a twinkly-eyed uncle and a generous grandma, who treat the contestants well, the contestants all nice down-to-earth people themselves. It’s a show that seems to celebrate the best – rather than bring out the worst – in people. 

Maybe we like it because it feels very ‘British’. It takes Victoria Sponges very seriously indeed, but the hosts are generally kind to the contestants, who are a varied and interesting cross-section of what we could call Middle England, respectable everyday professional types whose interest in baking is often inspired by their mother or grandmother. The Bake Off action takes place in a giant tent like we’re all spectators at one of those country fairs we all know and love. And it’s just a little bit seaside-postcard salty, thanks to the cheeky commentary provided by Mel and Sue the presenters, with their innuendos about ‘soggy bottoms’ and ‘nice buns’. [2]

So you can comfortably watch Bake Off and feel cosily affirmed in your Britishness, which, through cake, celebrates the best of our values like fairness, kindness and tolerance. Through appreciating a good pastry we gently reaffirm our patriotism, our sense of belonging to good old Blighty consolidates around a luscious lemon drizzle.

Now poor old church minister Lee Banfield was the first to leave the show last week after Paul Hollywood said one of his cakes was too dry. He’s been judged and found wanting, he’s been expelled before the first soufflé has had the chance to rise. He’s been told he doesn’t belong in The Great British Bake Off any more and I wonder how he now feels coming back down to earth and – like me – finding that this week’s set bible readings, which we are given to preach on, are all about food preparation and hospitality.

Now, have you noticed that on those cooking shows there are usually guests lingering in the background; while Nigella licks her fingers in the kitchen people hover in a reception room over wine and nibbles, and when she emerges with a sizzling platter her guests politely gather to ‘oooh’ and ‘aaah’ at the culinary creation she is offering them. As they take their seats you see that they are exactly the sorts of people you’d expect to be gathered in Nigella’s house, well-dressed, well-heeled, youthful metropolitan types. They clearly belong together and their shared meal affirms their belonging. 

This is how it is with meals, usually. You invite the people you know and like and who are more often than not very like you yourself. Or who are aspiring to be like you. Or who you are aspiring to be like. I’m not saying this judgementally – I’m saying that it’s human nature to entertain that way. 

Which is what makes Jesus such a terrible guest. Luke’s gospel especially might be called the ‘foody’ gospel because it’s full of Jesus eating around tables with others. But it’s surprising he got invited in the first place – and would be even more surprising if he ever got invited back – because he broke the rules of etiquette in every single direction.

Look at him misbehaving, in Luke 14. First he tells the guests off for competing for the best seats at the table. And then he harangues his host for only inviting his friends, family and well-off neighbours. The guests, Jesus says, should take the least desirable seats first so that they can enjoy the experience of being invited higher up the table later on; the hosts, he says, should be out inviting the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind, anyone who can’t repay them, anyone who they definitely aren’t aspiring to be like.

Sometimes, of course, Jesus would turn up at the homes of people who had invited him for a meal, respectable citizens, bringing with him a rag-tag collection of street people, tax collectors and other sinners, to eat alongside the respectable hosts, the religious leaders and their peers. Other times Jesus would go and eat with the downtrodden, outcast ones, cast out but no longer downcast because they had a guest of honour sharing their modest but genuinely-presented fare; so what if their lemon drizzle may have been a bit dry, it didn’t matter to Jesus, it was his being there that counted, to his hosts, and to him. [3]

What is interesting about all this is that rather than being forcibly expelled by the hosts and guests whose hospitality and table manners he’d challenged, Jesus seems to pull it off. Why? Perhaps because those he targeted were open enough to the idea that if you do dinner differently the  surprise you get might be a good one. If you sit with people who can’t repay you, you’re into a different set of obligations – ones which might just take you somewhere valuable; if you take time out with people who you aren’t aspiring to be like, you’re into a positively challenging new set of social desires.

Most meals I’ve ever shared, I’ve shared with people I know well, like and / or would like to be like. And they’ve been enjoyable in a soggy-bottomed sort of way, they’ve each time reasserted who I am and set me on my way belonging.

But I’m now recalling those odd occasions where I’ve eaten outside my comfort zone. And realised how formative those rare times have been. 

I can remember as a teenager for a few years volunteering to take part in hosting a Christmas Day meal in our church hall for people who would otherwise be on their own. Thinking back now I’m not sure how good company we spotty, giggly teens were to those predominantly elderly, bereaved folks we sat with, but they seemed to enjoy our company, and that affirmed us.

Whilst working one summer at a Christian conference centre I ate each day with the guests, and I will never forget the week when we catered for the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement on their annual retreat; never forget the mealtime when I found myself, deeply embarrassedly, having to sort-of inversely ‘come out’ to them as straight – the only non-gay at the table. Doing that gave me an intense insight as to what it must feel like for them having to ‘come out’ as gay to their often hostile church fellowships, and equally having to ‘come out’ as Christian to their LGBT friends, hostile, as they can be, to Christianity. These people I ate with shared how they feared explusion from both these fellowships, how they felt doubly marginalised by the two communities which meant the most to them. What an education in empathy that was, for me.

For three years in inner-city Liverpool I was one who took part most days in an open table, hosted by two church friends who had decided to stay in the city after graduating, and simply to try to live out the Christian life as faithfully as possible where they were. So their house became a hostel for random students, occasional travellers, people out-of-favour at home; and their meal table each night was open to all comers, with stews and pasta bakes expanded to accommodate the numbers gathered, with a brief bible reading to start us off and with lots of rich conversation along the way. Their hospitality brought together young professionals with addicted teens, school dropouts with university lecturers, happy-clappy church musicians with manic depressives (thinking about it, sometimes those last two categories applied to one and the same person). It was a keenly formative time.

Oh, and the international evening I once organised in a parish which was generally regarded as being predominantly white British, and where the BNP were at the time heavily promoting their hostile doctrines, but which actually contained many people whose family histories connected them throughout the world – and so we invited people to bring to the church hall some nice hot grub from their home culture, their family favourite – and not only did we have a great time going from table to table sampling everything from West African Fufu through Hungarian goulash to Scots haggis, tatties and neeps, we had the pleasure of listening and learning and growing closer to each other as we shared food stories, made connections around family tales.

I’m reminded of the Hairy Bikers’ series Mums Know Best where they travelled the UK unearthing so-called ‘family classics’ – and around a table at the end of each programme they would bring together, for instance, an Italian mum with a meatball dish, an East Anglian farmer with her grandma’s chocolate mousse; and a mum from southern India remembering her dad in cooking, and sharing his vadas with sambhar and his chicken curry. And I’m minded also of the wonderful International Evenings we enjoy here in Weston Bampfylde, connecting us so wonderfully well to the wider world beyond. [4] 

Now for those who like a bit of hard theology, here’s today’s portion, from Benjamin Myers’ Christ the Stranger: The Theology of Rowan Williams. It relates to what happens to us when, rather than engaging with those we easily identify with, we engage with a social ‘other’:

Authentic social exchange occurs wherever different persons mediate meaning to one another. Just think of the way understanding emerges from conversation: in a good conversation, something new appears which is not reducible to any of the individual speakers. Truth is that new thing that springs into being when different selves engage in the hard work of sustaining their differences. Openness to truth, therefore, is an experience of dispossession. We must give up our desire to possess the truth, in order to receive it and share it freely with others. [5]

Well, that’s brilliant stuff if you like that sort of thing, as I do, but it takes us a long way from Mary Berry and her drop scones. Let’s go back a bit to say simply this: that the Christian faith is not a complicated thing to perform; the writer of Hebrews 13 puts it very plainly and it’s as simple to follow as a kids’ cupcake recipe. 

When it comes to hospitality and the way we live towards the ‘other’ Jesus is presenting us with what Bake Off would describe as The Technical Challenge. Now in Bake Off The Technical Challenge is the toughest task. Paul or Mary give the bakers a very basic recipe, but often with important details missing, and the bakers have to innovate and improvise to create something positive out of something unusual they may find themselves uncomfortable with.

This is a challenge because most of the time our ideas about hospitality are based around our Signature Bake, our tried and tested recipe we share with family and friends, but Jesus demands we cultivate a culture of catering for the ‘other’. Which is easy to say but a real challenge to achieve.

Now our Culture Wars are often fought around food. Think of how we Brits have traditionally talked down the French in terms of their cuisine, the cruel cliche of garlic and frog’s legs. Today in France culture wars are being fought on the beaches, around the wearing of certain kinds of beachwear; and in light of this, and our topic today, it is interesting to reflect on how in the UK the best-remembered Bake Off winner by far was Nadiya Hussain, the British-Bangladeshi who famously wore her hijab throughout the series and whose popularity with audiences has undoubtedly shifted stereotypes about the Muslim community and promoted acceptance about cultural diversity. [6]

So, in light of Jesus’ teachings about hospitality Hebrews tells us, ‘Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. … Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God’.

What can we do in response to that? 

Well, there’s Church Action on Poverty’s Partner Churches programme, wherein some churches in better-off areas are partnering with churches in poor parts of dioceses to arrange exchange visits where parishioners meet, eat together, and learn about each other’s lives. Churches in poor neighbourhoods listen to their communities and work together for change. Churches in more affluent areas listen and provide support, and everyone learns from one another. The aim is to work to close the gap between rich and poor. [7]

There’s Frome’s Community Fridge, a simple response to the issue of food waste – that the average UK household throws away £470 worth of food every year, while at the same time 4 million people in the UK are living in food poverty. At Frome’s Community Fridge you can drop off good but unwanted food, and anyone can help themselves to what is on the shelf. [8] 

There’s the simple act of inviting around neighbours who are new to the area, at the same time as also those who are usually alone and those who come from the streets we usually avoid, to eat together with us – in our church, or hall, or home.

There’s … whatever you can think of – and whatever you do think of, you must think of it as something we can do creatively together, not struggle at alone.

All of this begins here – at this table, where Jesus modelled hospitality and left that model with us to use in perpetuity. As religions are sadly prone to do, over the years we have taken Jesus’ open offer of unrestricted access to his table and fenced it off in rules and regulations and doctrinal schisms and cultural attitudes and tongue-tying liturgies which keep people away. We’ve tended to ignore Luke 14 and Hebrews 13 as models for our social behaviour, disbelieving the blessings which they bring. 

We’ve silenced old St John Chrysostom who once said, ‘If you do not find Christ in the beggar at the church door, neither will you find him in the chalice’. And we’ve diminished the sharing of the peace to a reluctant gesture intruding into our individual piety, where what it should be is a deeply-felt acknowledgement of the ‘other’, a way of saying, you and I are here by the grace of God, I value you as a fellow-human in the love of God, I may differ from you in some ways but I will not use that difference to harm you, if there is any trouble between us I will do all I can to heal it, I celebrate our fellowship here in this place and will carry it outdoors.

The one sad thing about Bake Off is that it is a competition, based on judgment and expulsion. There is a diminishing number each week of those deemed suitable to belong. 

The joyous thing about communion is that it is a table open to all, a tangible sign in food and wine of a slowly-growing kingdom of unconditional welcome and inclusion.

Notes

[1] Great British Bake Off: More than 10 million tune in to first episode, BBC News, 25 August 2016.

[2] Ffion Lindsay, The winning recipe: Why is The Great British Bake Off so popular?, 7 October 2015; The 28 best British Bake Off innuendoes, Telegraph, 30 July 2015.

[3] Jeremy Sweets, Meals in Luke’s Gospel, blog, July 24, 2011.

[4] The Hairy Bikers: Mums Know Best. Family Classics. Series 2 Episode 8 of 8. BBC, 28 May 2011.

[5] Benjamin Myers, Christ the Stranger: The Theology of Rowan Williams (Critical Introduction). Thanks to Robert Gallagher for that reference.

[6] Gabriel Samuels, Muslim woman told to remove hijab by police on French beach before being racially abused. Independent, 24 August 2016; Wikipedia: Nadiya Hussain.

[7] Church Action on Poverty Partner Church programme.

[8] EdventureFrome: Community Fridge Frome.

… At eighteen you are deep into the process of creating yourself, defining your personality, shaping your future direction. You may not be aware of it but it is a time where the Creator is close to you, close to the heart of that wonderful creative work you are engaged in.

At eighteen you are vulnerable to the spirits which oppresses you, bow you down, stop you becoming the person you were formed to be. You may not be aware of him in the Sunday shopping crowds, or while clicking social media in your room, but Jesus sees you, longs to call you over and say, ‘Woman, you are set free from your ailment’, to stand you up straight, to complete your creation, to include you in the life of God, life without end.

For the Sunday Girl it can be about so much more than recreation – it can be a day of re-creation. …

Cue Blondie! My talk today, The Re-Creation of the Sunday Girl.

Isaiah 58.9b-14, Luke 13.10-17 

The Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity, Sunday 21 August 2016

West Camel, Sutton Montis w Corton Denham 

The eighteen-year-old girl makes her way through the Sunday shopping crowds, laden with designer carrier bags, looking somewhat bent and bowed-down beyond her years. The bags are weighing her down, for sure, full of new clothes, new shoes, new cosmetics. But what weighs heavier on her is her spirit. For she is caught in that familiar feeling of dissatisfaction, having spent a great deal of her time and most of her credit on goods which she knows won’t satisfy her for long. 

Since she bought her new dress she has seen someone her age wearing something far nicer; she knows that once she gets home and puts on her new make-up she will look in the mirror and still feel inferior to the magazine models on her bedside table. 

Self-conscious in the Sunday shopping crowds she feels that everyone else is looking at her, discussing her shortcomings, judging her inferior. She yearns to be perfect, like they are. It breaks her spirit and cripples her. She is eighteen, and it has always felt like this.

In a bedsit just around the corner from the main shopping street, another eighteen-year-old girl sits alone, starving. Deliberately starving, for she has decided that the way to deal with her sense of being judged on her body image, the way to make sure that she fits into a society obsessed with thinness, is to avoid food altogether. 

She is hungrier than anyone passing by outside, but is frightened of taking even a single bite, in case she should not be able to stop eating. Her bones are weak through not eating, her body is slowly bending out of shape. Possessed by the spirit of addiction to weight reduction which she has acquired from society at large, a spirit in thrall to unnatural thinness, the girl in the bedsit has triumphed over her normal instincts in her pursuit of slenderness – and she is very ill.

Showing off a slim physique is not enough for this girl – her real aim is to be skinnier than the girls she sees passing by, and the Hollywood stars and Olympic goddesses on her screen. She is in a race to lose the most weight, a race where the winners are bound to become thinner and thinner. She is eighteen, and this Sunday, as every day, she starves herself to achieve success. [1]

These two Sunday Girls are not unusual, although the spirit which oppresses them might make them feel isolated and alone. In a society where individualism is everything, where body image is crucial, we all feel ourselves judged by others; we sense fingers pointing our way, our ears are open to criticisms which come to us directly or which we soak up through the signals we get all the time from the culture around us. 

It is this spirit which drives our food obsessions, our fashion obsessions, our health obsessions. We might either become ascetic or over-consume; we might buy ostentatious designer clothes or by contrast, choose to conspicuously ‘dress-down’ in what are called ‘pre-stressed’ items; we might be up early jogging or at the gym or we might be reactionary couch potatoes – but it is the same spirit at work, the spirit which causes us to always be looking at others and desiring what they have, always acting out in rivalry with others. As René Girard puts it,

In the modern world, we compete as individuals, against all other individuals. The community is nothing and the individual is everything. We have identified the enemy and he is us. [2]

Possibly the young may be more deeply affected by this competitive spirit, but it touches us all at some level – otherwise there’d be no market for hair dye or anti-ageing cream.

Now you may have observed that in my portraits of the two eighteen-year-old girls I used some words and phrases which link symbolically to our readings today, from the prophet Isaiah and from Jesus in Luke’s gospel.

My two eighteen-year-old women are, like the one Jesus spotted in the crowd, crippled by a spirit which bends them out of shape.  And I chose to concentrate their activity on a Sunday because this gospel story is one of the many  where Jesus faces-off the religious leaders on the question of working on the Sabbath – and always it is he who is doing, they who are prohibiting. Let’s stay with that for a few moments.

There are, in creation, many gifts freely and graciously given by God to liberate us and to complete us, but which over time have been hijacked by organised religion and turned into rules and regulations which oppress. The Sabbath is a prime example. In Genesis, ‘God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation’. [3] 

Over the years rabbis developed their own interpretations of the Sabbath, interpretations which were called that rabbi’s ‘yoke’. When you followed a certain rabbi, you were taking up that rabbi’s yoke. One rabbi even said his yoke was easy. [4] And his clashes recorded in the gospels, showed how difficult Sabbath observation had been made by the yoke of some other religious leaders. 

The difference between Jesus and his critics over the Sabbath was the difference between emphasising the law and celebrating the creation. 

Jesus’ critics viewed the Sabbath through the eyes of the law, and their finger-pointing accusations based on the long lists of rules and regulations which they had developed around Moses’ commands to labour for six days and keep the seventh day as a Sabbath’ on which even the most modest form of work was regarded as unlawful. [5] You can imagine the effect of their heavy yoke on the people: causing a kind of nervous numbness, turning the Sabbath into a day for doing nothing, achieving nothing.

Jesus, on the other hand, seemed to leapfrog Moses and go right back to Genesis in his interpretation of the Sabbath. He viewed the Sabbath through the lens of creation. For him it was a day – like every day – for continuing God’s creative work in the world, for completing the incomplete. So he healed the sick, cast out the spirits which oppressed the bowed-down, shared food with his hungry followers. The effect of Jesus’ easy yoke on the people was to heal, enable, and empower them. 

Now, Sabbath observance remains an issue in our day and time. Society has largely lost the sense of its purpose as a day to ‘keep holy to God’, but our society has made something of an idol of recreation – hence the rise of Sunday sport (on playing-fields and on TV) and of Sunday shopping as a leisure pursuit of choice. Interesting to note that this recreational activity indulges our food obsessions, our fashion obsessions, our health obsessions.

When grappling with this thorny issue Christians have often relied on a legal understanding of the Sabbath, harking back to the commands of Moses, not unlike the yoke of Jesus’ critics.

So it might shock us to read in John’s gospel Jesus justifying a Sabbath healing by telling his critics, ‘My Father is working up until the present, and I also work.’ [6] As James Alison writes, 

[Jesus is making] a formal denial that God is resting on the Sabbath, as well as an affirmation that Creation has yet to be completed, and that for this reason Jesus carries on with his work of bringing Creation to fulfilment on the Sabbath. [7] 

When, on another Sabbath, Jesus makes a blind man see, in John chapter 9, he does it by spitting on the earth and from the clay, making a paste to anoint the man’s eyes. 

The Hebrew word for ‘clay’ is adamah, from which God originally made “Adam,” humankind. So, here, what Jesus is doing is the act of finishing creation. The man born blind had palpably not been brought to the fullness of creation, and Jesus finishes off the process by adding the missing clay. [8]

When the blind man speaks, he testifies,  ‘Not since the dawn of time has it been heard that anybody has opened the eyes of the blind’. He is suggesting that the one who healed him – who completed him – is the one who was there at the dawn of time – the Creator himself. [9]

So, by acting on the Sabbath is Jesus teaching us that we ‘keep the Sabbath holy to God’ not by doing nothing, but by continuing the work of Creation? This sounds like good news for farmers, gardeners, birds, bees, and the trees and fields which clap their hands in praise of their Creator, all the time.

And, by healing people on the Sabbath is Jesus teaching us that the work of Creation is completed when people are made whole? Now the blind man can see, now the bowed-down woman has had her spirit lifted, they have become the complete human. Created by God initially, completed by God through Jesus. 

The Christian is one who recognises that it is through Jesus that she is brought to the completion of her creation, who is being progressively inducted, which means included, into the life of God, which is life without end. [10]

Our society’s Sabbath is a day of recreation, but Jesus’ Sabbath is a day of re-creation, a day for the transformation of Creation and humankind into wholeness.

So – back to our two Sunday Girls, taking their recreation but bowed down with a spirit which oppresses them, a yoke based in food obsessions, fashion obsessions, health obsessions. As René Girard observes, this yoke does not originate from our religion, but from the neopaganism of our time, in the cult of the body. [11]

Our two Sunday Girls may not be burdened by any obligations to religious authorities or other institutions like the family – in a society where anything goes, they shop alone, eat alone. But there is still a yoke which burdens them. It is a yoke carried by society at large, which the prophet Isaiah described as ‘the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil’ [12]

The spirit which bows down the woman in Jesus’ crowd is the same spirit which oppresses our two Sunday Girls. Feeling themselves judged by others; sensing fingers pointing their way, vulnerable to criticisms coming at them all the time from the culture around them.  So when the prophet speaks, he speaks to their condition:

‘When you call, the Lord will answer;

    when you cry for help, he will say, Here I am.

If you remove the yoke from among you,

    the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, …

then your light shall rise in the darkness

    and your gloom be like the noonday.’ [13]

At eighteen you are deep into the process of creating yourself, defining your personality, shaping your future direction. You may not be aware of it but it is a time where the Creator is close to you, close to the heart of that wonderful creative work you are engaged in.

At eighteen you are vulnerable to the spirits which oppresses you, bow you down, stop you becoming the person you were formed to be. You may not be aware of him in the crowds, or while clicking social media in your room, but Jesus sees you, longs to call you over and say, ‘Woman, you are set free from your ailment’, to stand you up straight, to complete your creation, to include you in the life of God, life without end.

For the Sunday Girl it can be about so much more than recreation – it can be a day of re-creation.

Notes

Credit to Paul Neuchterlein for the fruitful directions he sent me in, in preparation of this sermon, from his Girardian Lectionary Reflections on Proper 16c.

[1] René Girard, Anorexia and Mimetic Desire (Breakthroughs in Mimetic Theory), p.8-9, and sleeve notes. 

[2] René Girard, Anorexia and Mimetic Desire (Breakthroughs in Mimetic Theory), p.25.

[3] Genesis 2.3.

[4] Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith, p.34. The last line references Matthew 11.30.

[5] Exodus 20.8-10. See also Wikipedia: Activities prohibited on Shabbat for the contemporary ‘yoke’.

[6] John 5.17. Quoted in James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay, p.9. [This is from Chapter One, ‘the man blind from birth and the Creator’s subversion of sin’, which Paul Neuchterlein describes as ‘one of the groundbreaking essays in all of contemporary theology’.  He has made the text available online in its entirety, here.]

[7] James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay, p.9.

[8] James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay, p.6, referencing Genesis 2.7.

[9] James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay, p.8.

[10] James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay, p.8-9.

[11] René Girard, Anorexia and Mimetic Desire (Breakthroughs in Mimetic Theory), p.19.

[12] Isaiah 58.9.

[12] Isaiah 58.9-10.

"Why did the two old crocks laugh? They laughed because they knew only a fool would believe that a woman with one foot in the grave was soon going to have her other foot in the maternity ward. They laughed because God expected them to believe it anyway. They laughed because God seemed to believe it. They laughed because they half-believed it themselves. They laughed because laughing felt better than crying. They laughed because if by some crazy chance it just happened to come true, they would really have something to laugh about, and in the meanwhile it helped keep them going."

… Fred Buechner quoted in today's tattyfilarious sermon also featuring Ken Dod and Mike Yaconelli, Faith is not knowing whether to laugh or cry.

Hebrews 11.1-3,8-16, Luke 12.32-40

The Eleventh Sunday after Trinity, 7 August 2016

Corton Denham w. Sutton Montis

Here’s a throwaway line from the epic comedian Ken Dodd about becoming old: ‘Time is a great healer,’ he says, ‘but a terrible beautician.’ [1]

When God told Abraham, who was a hundred at the time, that at the age of ninety his wife Sarah was finally going to have a baby, Abraham came close to knocking himself out. He ‘fell on his face and laughed,’ as Genesis 17 puts it. In another version of the story (in Genesis 18), Sarah is hiding behind the door eavesdropping, and here it’s Sarah herself who nearly splits her sides – although when God asks her about it afterwards, she denies it. ‘No, but you did laugh,’ God says, thus having the last word as well as the first.

God doesn’t seem to hold their outbursts against them, however. On the contrary, he tells them the baby’s going to be a boy and that he wants them to name him Isaac. Isaac in Hebrew means ‘laughter’. [2]

Now that, my friends, is tattyfilarious.

Why did the two old crocks laugh? They laughed because they knew only a fool would believe that a woman with one foot in the grave was soon going to have her other foot in the maternity ward. They laughed because God expected them to believe it anyway. They laughed because God seemed to believe it. They laughed because they half-believed it themselves. They laughed because laughing felt better than crying. They laughed because if by some crazy chance it just happened to come true, they would really have something to laugh about, and in the meanwhile it helped keep them going. [3] 

As it happened, as we know, it did come true: and as the writer of Hebrews said, 

By faith Abraham received the power of procreation, even though he was too old – and Sarah herself was barren – because he considered him faithful who had promised. Therefore from one person, and this one as good as dead, descendants were born, ‘as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.’ [4]

Faith is ‘the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,’ says the Epistle to the Hebrews (11:1). Faith is considering faithful the God who makes promises. Faith is laughter at the promise of a child called ‘laughter’. 

If someone had come up to Jesus when he was on the cross and asked him if it hurt, he might have answered, like the man in the old joke, ‘Only when I laugh.’ But he wouldn’t have been joking. Faith dies, as it lives, laughing. 

Faith is better understood as a verb than as a noun, as a process than as a possession. It is on-again-off-again rather than once-and-for-all. Faith is not knowing whether to laugh or cry. Faith is not being sure where you’re going, but going anyway. A journey without maps. Tillich said that doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. [5] 

This is really important because sometimes we think that to be a genuine Christian we have to be certain about what we believe in. This is not true. ‘Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith’: our doubts raise honest questions about life and God and faith – and God is happy to hear our questions, to help us find the answers, and in that way we grow in confidence in the God who makes us promises.

Think of it this way:

I have faith that my friend is my friend. It is possible that all his motives are ulterior. It is possible that what he is secretly drawn to is not me, but my wife or my money. But there’s something about the way I feel when he’s around, about the way he looks me in the eye, about the way we can talk to each other without pretence and be silent together without embarrassment, that makes me willing to put my life in his hands as I do each time I call him friend. 

I can’t prove the friendship of my friend. When I experience it, I don’t need to prove it. When I don’t experience it, no proof will do. If I tried to put his friendship to the test somehow, that could threaten or compromise the friendship I was testing: I wouldn’t want to do that. So it is with the God-ness of God. [6]

St. Thomas Aquinas coined what he called ‘Five Proofs for the Existence of God’, and they’re worth looking up if you’re keen to explore this further. They are philosophical arguments to do with the cause of creation: because we are in motion and the world is in motion then there must be a prime mover. Popular unbelievers like Richard Dawkins sell lots of books which argue with Thomas Aquinas, and other people have been selling other books which argue with Richard Dawkins. 

But the five so-called proofs for the existence of God will never prove to unbelievers that God exists. They are merely five ways of describing the existence of the God you have faith in already.

Ultimately the believers and the unbelievers all have to put their faith in one conviction or another. You can spend all your time saying ‘There must be a God because…’ but at the end of the day almost nothing that makes any real difference can be proved. I can prove the law of gravity by dropping a shoe out of the window. I can prove that the world is round if I’m clever at that sort of thing; that the radio works, that light travels faster than sound. I can’t prove that life is better than death or love better than hate. I can’t prove the greatness of the great or the beauty of the beautiful. I can’t even prove my own free will.

As the writer Frederick Buechner puts it, 

‘Faith can’t prove a damned thing. Or a blessed thing either.’ [7]

But proof isn’t the point of faith. Life is the point. The important thing about faith is how it makes us live. That’s why the writer of Hebrews wrote a list of people whose faith made their lives remarkable – Abraham and Sarah who laughed with God at the way he’d decided to make a barren old couple the father and mother of a great nation; Abel who offered the work of his hands to God, Enoch whose life was pleasing to God, Noah who listened to God’s warnings and saved himself and others… 

‘God is not ashamed to be called their God’, Hebrews tells us. What a lovely tribute to people of faith, something we would love to have people saying about ourselves. ‘God is not ashamed to be called our God’ – because we chose to live life, to the full, in response to a God who loves and laughs and cries along with us, in equal measure. A God we consider faithful in the promises he makes to us.

The comedy legend Ken Dodd once answered a question about God’s sense of humour by saying, 

‘The best kind of laughter is when you make somebody else happy and make somebody else’s life a bit better. And surely that is God’s work. God doesn’t want us to be miserable.’ [8]

Preparing this sermon got me thinking about one of my favourite-ever men of faith, perhaps the most side-splittingly funny preacher I’ve ever heard – and also, correspondingly, one of the profoundest and inspirational, Mike Yaconelli. Yaconelli was the pastor of a small church in Yreka, California – ‘the slowest growing church in America’ as he called it. He trained Christian youth leaders, edited a satirical magazine called The Wittenburg Door, and was an international Christian conference speaker. [9]

He said some interesting things about faith. He once said, 

We’d like to have it all neat and orderly. We want to be able to measure it and control it, but the reality is that Jesus is a mystery. The Christian faith is a mystery. The disciples spent their entire time following him going, ‘Uhh, what the heck are you doing? We don’t understand what you’re doing and we don’t know why you’re doing it.’ And when he would explain why he was doing it, they still didn’t get it. [10]

And another time Yaconelli said, 

I am beginning to understand that faith is not the way around pain, it is the way through pain. Faith doesn’t get rid of the opposition, it invites it over for dinner. Faith doesn’t give you the winning point at the last second, it ties the game and sends you into overtime. Faith doesn’t give you the solution, it forces you to find it. [11]

In one of Yaconelli’s books, characteristically titled, ‘Dangerous Wonder: The Adventure of Childlike Faith’, he wrote,

‘I want a lifetime of holy moments. Every day I want to be in dangerous proximity to Jesus. I long for a life that explodes with meaning and is filled with adventure, wonder, risk, and danger. I long for a faith that is gloriously treacherous. I want to be with Jesus, not knowing whether to cry or laugh.’ [12]

That’s what all these great people of faith did. They lived life to the full because their companion in everything they did was God. Mike Yaconelli died in 2003, tragically, in a road accident at the age of 61. A couple of years before that he had addressed a conference audience with these words which were widely quoted after his death:

‘If I were to have a heart attack right at this moment, I hope I would have just enough air in my lungs and just enough strength in me to utter one last sentence as I fell to the floor: ‘What a ride!’ My life has been up and down, careening left then right, full of mistakes and bad decisions, and if I died right now, even though I would love to live longer, I could say from the depths of my soul, ‘What a ride!’’ [13]

Back to supreme comedian Ken Dodd. He has been called ‘a crusader in search of the secret of the gag’, the owner of about 10,000 books on the subject of laughter, humour and jokes, a student of the psychology of humour who has looked for answers in the writings of Sigmund Freud and the philosophers Bergson and Schopenhauer.

He once told an interviewer, ‘I think I’ve found the answer to the secret of comedy. I won’t go into too much detail for you but it’s about seeing things from a different point of view. It is the perception of the incongruity.’ [14]

The perception of the incongruity. That’s what made Abraham fall over laughing, that’s what was behind Sarah’s secret splitting-of-her sides. 

The perception of the incongruity. It’s a way of talking about laughter. It’s a way of talking about faith. It’s a way of enlightenment for those who decide to let faith determine the journey they will take.

Notes 

This sermon owes an enormous amount to Frederick Buechner’s section on Faith, in Wishful Thinking, a Seeker’s ABC. An earlier version of it was preached at the Good Shepherd, Liverpool, 8/8/2010 with the title, Luke 12 – On faith and overcoming unbelief. 

[1] Brian Beacom, Ken Dodd on comedy heroes, Glasgow and the philosophy of humour, Glasgow Herald, 11 Jun 2016.

[2] Buechner, Wishful Thinking, Faith, p.29.

[3] Buechner, Wishful Thinking, Faith, p.29.

[4] Hebrews 11.11-12

[5] Buechner, Wishful Thinking, Faith, p.29-30.

[6] Buechner, Wishful Thinking, Faith, p.30.

[7] Buechner, Wishful Thinking, Faith, p.30-31.

[8] Quoted in Frankie Mulgrew, Does God LOL?

[9] Wikipedia: Mike Yaconelli.

[10] Mike Yaconelli, Words from Mike, mikeyaconelli.org.

[11] Mike Yaconelli in The Door (Sept./Oct. 1994). Quoted in Words from Mike, mikeyaconelli.org.

[12] Mike Yaconelli, Dangerous Wonder: The Adventure of Childlike Faith, p.23.

[13] Mike Yaconelli, Words from Mike, mikeyaconelli.org.

[14] Brian Beacom, Ken Dodd on comedy heroes, Glasgow and the philosophy of humour, Glasgow Herald, 11 Jun 2016.