When Moses met with God at the burning bush he hid his face because he was afraid to look at God and he took off his sandals because he knew he was standing on holy ground.
When Ezekiel saw a vision of the Almighty by the river Chebar in Chaldea he fell on his face in worship and holy fear. When, in the vison he was transported to Tel- abib where exiles from Judah lived he sat amongst them for seven days in silence so stunned was he by the experience.
When Daniel received visions in the night he fell to the ground as if in a trance, his strength left him and he felt as if his breath had been taken from him.
When Isaiah saw the Lord his whole world was shaken to its core. The pillars of the temple seemed to shake, he knew himself to be unworthy of the vision and he feared for his life.
When Simon Peter, wet through from hauling in a net full of fish from the miraculous catch by the lakeside in Galilee, turned to Jesus he knew he had met with God. His response is of a piece with so many others who had preceded him. Coming face to face with holiness is ‘earth-shattering’. It changes everything in a person’s life.
I want to talk about ‘holiness’ but it is incredibly hard to do so. Holiness, by definition, is ‘ineffable’: that is, it is too great a thing to be put into words. Which leaves us struggling somewhat. Michael Mayne, who was Dean of Westminster (I mentioned a successor of his last week!) gives us a lovely analogy: Attempting to say something about the nature of God is a bit like asking a book worm that has chewed its way through War and Peace and landed contentedly on a letter ‘e’ to tell us what it thinks of Tolstoy. But the lessons this morning are what they are and we have to give it a go, so…
Where to start? I’m not someone who observes the night sky that much…I value my sleep too much. I can point out ‘the Plough’, find the Pole star, possibly feel proud at spotting Orion’s belt – that’s my limit. But this week has been a special week for stargazers. Indeed, the whole of this month has particular treats in store because six of the planets can be viewed in the night sky across this month, three of them with the naked eye. It’s a planetary parade. The skies this week have been clear so I managed to see both Venus and Mars, Saturn was too low in the sky. The experience of looking at the stars can lead you in a number of ways. For some, the wonder of the extent of the universe (its order, the great unknown that it holds) brings a sense of awe. But this is sometimes balanced by a crushing sense of meaninglessness, of smallness. ‘What is man that thou art mindful of him?’ said the Psalmist. Indeed. At the back of our minds we might have the question ‘Who am I before all this? Who am I in this great universe? A tiny creature: alive for just a flash of time and then gone, occupying my life with seemingly trivial things on a tiny planet in a galaxy in an expanding universe?’ The ‘wonder’ we feel at existence, at Being is undercut by a sense of anxiety. You’ll have heard me quote my Dad’s talk entitled ‘It all turns to dross!’ For all its humour, this is an existential problem.
Into this human experience and reflection comes the intuition of something ‘Other’. Here we are going to struggle, because we can only speak of ‘things’ that ‘exist’, that we can point to or name. But this ‘Other’ is of a different category. When we use the word ‘God’ to describe this ‘Otherness’ it is not like using other words. This ‘Being’ exists in a wholly different way. That difference is what we call ‘holiness’. Now you may or may not have experienced this Presence of Being itself. People down the ages and in most world religions seem to have sensed it: and all have difficulty describing it. Our normal ways of understanding or describing ‘things’ aren’t capable of encapsulating the encounter. But here are a couple of quotes:
Albert Einstein wrote: ‘It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms – it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude: in this sense, and in this sense alone, I am a deeply religious man.’ (Something understood p 135)
And then Walt Whitman, in the poem ‘On the beach at night alone’.
On the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future.
A vast similitude interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,
All distances of place however wide,
All distances of time, all inanimate forms,
All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,
All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,
And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.
Notice how Whitmans’ thought’ in this poem leads him to sense an interlocking purpose and meaning through existence and that, in this realisation, he has a sense of everything being ‘held’, not unlike Julian of Norwich’s ‘All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.’
Where we, like Isaiah in his vision or Peter on the beach might feel our inadequacy, might have an awareness of our sin that echoes Isaiah’s ‘Woe is me’ or Peter’s ‘Depart from me Lord’; where we might carry our sense that all is broken and fractured, the experience of this Presence is one of grace and of goodness. CS Lewis wrote a book to describe the experience: he called it ‘Surprised by joy’.
We cannot conjure up the experience or command the Holy to appear. But appear it does. For Gerard Manley Hopkins ‘the grandeur of God, will flame out like shining from shook foil.’ God’s grandeur is not confined to our notions of holiness, not trapped or restricted to rites and rituals, to buildings and places. Bishop John Taylor says that ‘it is numinous’ – a word that holds within it a sense of ‘nodding’ . It is as if, unbidden, God appears and nods to us, inviting our attention. This is both disconcerting and attractive. This is a ‘burning’ goodness, a light that penetrates and sees us, a light that might cause us to hide from it…or perhaps lighten a path that enables us to enter into a deeper relationship with God.
What seems to be a common thread through all the descriptions of these meetings with the God who is ‘Being’ itself is a sense of invitation, we might use the word ‘call’ or vocation. Moses, Daniel, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Elizabeth, Mary, Peter, Alec, Jane, Eunice, Sandra, Judith, John, Abi, David, Matthew, Cassie, Kim, Dorothy…..add your own name to this list: Through the grace of God the Holy One has made himself known to us. He has called us by name, given purpose and meaning to our lives. He has turned us around, embraced our brokenness and He has said ‘Follow me’.
All discipleship begins with the work of God: is an invitation. Why would we refuse him?
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