Sermon: Sunday next before Lent 2016
Canon Professor Graham Ward
Levels of Invisibility
There’s so much we cannot see. The invisible presses upon us
continually, and we can only perceive what we have evolved to
perceive. There is no colour in the world. We create the colour
through the way we take in waves of the electro-magnetic spectrum
of different length. There is no sound in the world. We create its
sound through pressure waves penetrating the inner workings of our
ears. It is not so much that we see and hear what we want to see and
hear; but we see and hear only what our brains enable us to see. In
the first part of a remarkable series broadcast on BBC4 called The
Brain and first airing late in January, we are informed that the
spectrum from red to violet light waves that we can detect and out of
which we assemble our perceptions and experiences of the world
handles only 1/10th trillionth of the electromagnetic waves available
out there. Furthermore, we live in the past; and we always have done
because it takes almost half a second for what actually occurs for us
to be processed mentally, though it is processed emotionally and
somatically far quicker. Our bodies and guts know sooner than our
minds what is happening to us and around us. This doesn’t mean the
world is a just a fabrication, a simulation of the Matrix, as some have
suggested. For we who confess that we believe in God the Father
Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, accept that this is how we
were made and that it is good. But it does mean that we can’t take
what we see of the world as all there is to see, because there’s so
much that we don’t see. As I said, the invisible presses upon us
continually.
Both our readings from the Book of Exodus about Moses and
the burning bush and our Gospel reading about God declaring His
name will be glorified as it has always been glorified concern the
human perception of things and God revealing Himself as Almighty
Creator. “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of
Isaac, and the God of Jacob,” he tells Moses, and in Matthew, Mark
and Luke Jesus glosses that text by telling the Sadducees that He is
the God of the living not the dead. The first and last ‘I am’. There is
then a living and a life we do not see but which God Himself affirms,
for with God there is no death. And in our Gospel passage there is a
light that cannot be reduced to the tiny spectrum of light waves we
see. The darkness we’re all too aware of whether we understand that
darkness as the vast extension of the invisible unavailable to our
perception (and the ignorance we live with), or the moral darkness
that human sin thickens, such that God’s goodness is hidden from us,
or the divine darkness that cannot apprehend or even approach the
glory of God. Moses, we are told, “hid his face” before the burning
bush.
It is well known that one of the major themes in John’s Gospel
concerns believing and its relationship to seeing and hearing the
gospel preached. The theme culminates in the penultimate chapter of
the Gospel with the scene between Christ and doubting Thomas and
the statement: “blessed are they that have not seen and have
believed.” But what is interesting in the passage we had read to us
this morning is the way the same event can constitute different forms
of believing and seeing with respect to the invisible and the visible.
One group perceives thunder and believes the phenomenon to
be a natural one. Another group perceives something (perhaps the
same thunder), but believes it is an angel speaking to Jesus alone (for
presumably they themselves hear only a noise). and finally, Jesus and
the author of John’s Gospel hear the voice of God; the ever-present
and Almighty I am. This is a voice which, on Jesus’ statement, was
available for all to hear, since it was a voice for others, not for
himself. In the Gospel account it is not a difference in interpretation
which separates the three understandings of what had occurred;
rather, it is a difference in perception: a difference in the quality of
perception. There is a hierarchy in this quality, with Jesus and
whoever heard the voice of God perceiving more truly than those
who believed an angel had spoken, or that it had merely thundered.
So, on the one hand, a group have heard a rumbling in the sky before
and this has signified thunder; on the other, a group who believe in
angels speaking (have even, perhaps, experienced angels speaking),
and their perception of this event evokes an imagined
reconstruction: “an angel spoke to him”; and a third group who
believe God speaks (even, perhaps, have heard God speak) and so are
able to perceive and imagine the invisible become visible, the eternal
temporal, and the ineffable one condescend to use a human tongue.
Each response to what has been received is an act of perception,
belief and imagination – though only one is theologically sound,
because it perceives aright; it discerns the operations of God in the
world.
This is a host. It’s the priest’s host that I will consecrate and
break later in the service at the high altar. The question is: what do
you see? On the surface of things, the visible surface of things, the
chef knows this is composed of water and unleavened flour, the
chemist knows it is composed of various organic compounds, and the
biologist and physicist knows that these compounds are built up of
numerous molecules of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and so forth. And
those descriptions are right. But what do you see? Later, when it is
consecrated the liturgy speaks of it becoming the body of Christ. We
consume this host or others like it. It is food, at a very basic level –
though I can’t imagine its calorific value is particularly high. A dear
friend of mine and his wife, when they were married as students,
were lent a remote cottage in Devon for a week, owned by a priest.
After the wedding feast, at which they ate very little, they were send
off in a borrowed car and arrived late at the cottage only to find no
one had thought of packing anything for them to eat. They scoured
the kitchen and found nothing but a tin of sardines and then, in a
cupboard, a box of unconsecrated hosts. I don’t need to tell you what
their first married meal together consisted of. This host is food on a
basic, perceptual level. But consecrated and consumed as the body of
Christ it feeds and nourishes those invisibilities within and around us
not available to our perception. It brings the light of Christ into all
those darknesses I spoke of earlier; the darknesses we confess to
being within us before we approach the high altar. It’s not magic, just
God with us. But like Moses, we approach holy things and go deeper
into all those realities we cannot see, realities that seem to run
contrary to the darknesses we are all too aware of. Receiving in this
way we acknowledge God’s goodness, God’s glory and, in words from
John’s Gospel, we have the light that we may become children of the
true light.