A sermon about simple things
Sermon on the Ninth Sunday after Trinity at the Church of the Holy Trinity, Llandudno and St Tudno’s Church on the Great Orme, in the Ministry Area of Bro Tudno
The Ministry Area’s order of service with the lections, including a poem in addition to the First Reading and the Holy Gospel, can be found here.
“Do not work for the food that perishes,” Jesus tells the crowd, “but for the food that endures for eternal life.”
One of my last memories of my grandfather is of him trying to fix his hearing aid with a blow torch.
His hearing aid had been playing up, and my grandmother had been trying to persuade him that it was time for him to get a new one — an even smaller, more sensitive up-to-date model.
But I can hear my grandfather now, saying that he had paid for this hearing aid, only a few years ago, and couldn’t see why it couldn’t be fixed, and, indeed, why it couldn’t be fixed by him. He had grown up fixing everything. He had built his own house. He could get under the bonnet of a car and sort things out. He grew his own tomatoes, and apples, and potatoes. My grandmother darned his socks. He made his own wine (it was disgusting, and very strong, and I can see now the elderly Bishop who confirmed me drinking slightly too much of it at the party afterwards, and having to be helped to his seat). My grandfather could understand things, and make things, and fix things.
And now, there he was, in his blue overalls at his workbench in the garage, trying to fix this tiny hearing aid (this thing he hated, because it was one of those things that told him that he, himself, couldn’t really be fixed any more, that he needed some help) — there he was trying to fix a connection inside this tiny hearing aid, with a blowtorch.
During the second half of my grandfather’s lifetime, life — things — changed very quickly and got increasingly complicated. People who study society call this the black box phenomenon. Whereas, in the past, things changed slowly, and the underlying mechanics of things were relatively simple — you could take things apart, and understand them, and you could be taught this at school, and the skills would last you a lifetime — now things change all the time, and they are progressively more complicated — and so most of the things we engage with — objects, systems, processes — live in a black box whose insides we never see and couldn’t understand. My grandparents had the same telephone on their hall table for decades — big and beige; a long, curly cable; the numbers on a wheel. I’ve had four different mobile phones in just the last five years — each one able to do more extraordinary things than the last. And whereas my grandfather could have a go at fixing that big, beige phone if something went wrong, my mobile phones are thrown away, and I have no idea about the myriad connections locked deep inside the casing that make that thing work, that make it come alive.
“Do not work for the food that perishes,” Jesus tells the crowd, “but for the food that endures for eternal life.”
In a moment, at the altar table, we will do something of absolute simplicity — a thing that people life us have done around altar tables for centuries on end, unchanging. We will take bread and wine, and bless it, and offer it up, and eat. We will take bread, which earth has given and human hands have made; we will take wine, fruit of the vine.
And, in doing so, we will do that simple thing which we know the apostles did when they gathered for worship in Jerusalem two millennia ago; we will do what St Tudno must have done fourteen centuries ago, with his companions, on the Orme; we will do what our forebears in this church have done, year by year, decade by decade.
As everything around us changes quickly, and becomes ever more complicated, we will, today, do as they did, and take bread, which earth has given and human hands have made; we will take wine, fruit of the vine; and these simple things will be for us, as for all of them, the Bread of Life and the Lifeblood of the World.
“Do not work for the food that perishes,” Jesus tells the crowd, “but for the food that endures for eternal life.”
One of the core elements of theology, of our understanding of God, is that God is simple. God is not a thing amid other things — not even the most complex, complicated thing among other, lesser things. God is not made up of parts, because God’s essence and existence are one and the same. God is not good, like a grandchild who behaves, but God is goodness; God is not true, like a secret I’d tell you or something we hear on the news, but God is truth; God is not loving, for God is Love.
In John Masefield’s poem, God in Christ is everything — he stands like the farmer at the gate, he is the plough cutting through the soil, he is the cry of the gulls gathering round. He is the corn, and the footsteps through the fresh, fair field. He is the holy bread, he feeds the soul. In an act of overwhelming, unchanging simplicity, we will take bread, which earth has given and human hands have made; we will take wine, fruit of the vine; and, simply, all of the everlasting mercy of creation will be in your hands.
“Do not work for the food that perishes,” Jesus tells the crowd, “but for the food that endures for eternal life.”
My sister is nine months pregnant, about, we hope, to give birth to her first child. Being the clever, hard-working one of us, she’s an oncologist, researching yet more sophisticated treatments at the cellular level to heal haematological cancers — complicated science, that’s changing quicky. And now, here she is, this simple, new life alive within her. — a new life that will, ultimately, demand and need (like all of us) not sophistication and complexity, but simple everlasting mercy, simply Love.
“Do not work for the food that perishes,” Jesus tells the crowd, “but for the food that endures for eternal life.”
