The hills are alive
Sermon on Sexagesima for the Zoom service of the Ministry Area of Bro Tudno
The Ministry Area’s Zoom order of service, including a poem in addition to the Old Testament Reading and the Holy Gospel. The order of service can be found here.
“The hills are alive, with the sound of music”
After a week that saw the death of Christopher Plummer, who played Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music, our short sermon this morning has the shape of that film’s extraordinary opening scene.
It begins, over a soundtrack of glorious orchestral music, with a vast panorama of the Alps, and over the minutes to come, it zooms in and in and in, until, eventually, you can see a figure walking, dancing through a high meadow — this vast landscape is inhabited. And then closer again and again, until eventually, suddenly, you’re there, alongside Maria, arms outstretched in a sea of yellow flowers, alive above the hills, and dancing, too, and singing along, because:
The hills are alive,
with the sound of music
with songs they have sung
for a thousand years.
The hills fill my heart
with the sound of music.
My heart wants to sing
every song it hears.
“With songs they have sung / for a thousand years.” That’s actually not bad theology. But what I want you to have in your mind’s eye is that move from the vast, distant scene, to the slowly recognisable, and ending with the joyful close up. That’s the shape of today’s sermon. And there are three words from our readings this morning that will mark that movement: Word, Wisdom, and World.
When John the Evangelist wants to talk about Jesus Christ, he begins (echoing Genesis) “in the beginning.” He doesn’t begin with Mary and an angel, or in the days of Caesar Augustus, or even with Old Testament prophecies. He begins “in the beginning.” For Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was “in the beginning with God” — before all that is was, Jesus Christ was. To understand anything about Jesus Christ means understanding that his story begins and ends not in Bethlehem and on Golgotha but in eternity and in all places.
John’s words at the beginning of his Gospel are our vast Alpine shot this morning. They give us the big picture, the vastest of vistas, the grand, sweeping scene in its totality. They’re a reminder to us never to make our God too small, too understandable, too controlled. God is, Jesus Christ is, vast as the mountains, and as mysterious and dangerous and endlessly to be explored.
Now the camera begins to sweep in, and we move from Word to Wisdom.
Our first reading, from the Book of Proverbs, speaks of holy things in another way. The author of the Book of Proverbs identified herself as Wisdom or Understanding. We might think of her as that voice which bridges the eternal and the temporal — a voice that bridges the “in the beginning” and the “hear and now.”
The Book of Proverbs forms part of the wisdom literature of the Bible. Here is a book that isn’t telling a story, or laying down rules, or explaining doctrine, or singing God’s praises, or speaking a prophetic word. Here’s a book that offers advice for living well, based on a deep and experienced understanding of what is just and beautiful and good. It’s the voice of a great-aunt, who has not only seen it all, but has cared about it, and can now listen to your story and see God’s ways wending through it.
The Book of Proverbs provide us this morning with our bridging shot. In them the camera sweeps in from the distant scene towards the particular, the specific; from the vastness of mountains, from the unchanging, from the eternal beginning of things, towards the life lived, the image of God alive in creation, towards you and me. It’s a reminder that into daily life, the light of eternity needs to break through, and that as we live, day to day, we should await those glimpses and see our cares and actions illuminated by them.
And now the camera is next to us. It’s time for our close-up. We move from Wisdom to World.
Our reading from the Book of Proverbs ended this morning with Wisdom describing herself “rejoicing in [God’s] inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”
John’s Gospel goes even further. This almighty Word, vast and eternal, there in the beginning with God, “became flesh and lived among us.”
Those are all ways of saying that God comes close — that God is closer to us than we are to ourselves — that God, the life of God, is deep within us and among us — that God is intimately involved in our minds and bodies, in our lives — that God does not leave us alone.
And, if that is true, it means that we shouldn’t just meet God, the Word of God, in our heads, but in all the world and especially in one another. If that is true, it means that what we do, how we live our lives, should not only be shaped by Wisdom, but should make us wise, that we might be wisdom to others, that we might be just and beautiful and good, even in Llandudno, even today.
Today is the first of two Sundays that fill that space between the end of Epiphanytide and the beginning of Lent. Next week, we’re on a biblical hilltop — on Mount Tabor, hearing the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus — that last act of revelation, of seeing before he walks down the mountain and straight on to Jerusalem and the fate that awaits him.
Before that journey begins, here on the mountain top, we make sure we understand him alongside whom we will walk through the days of Lent, and through our lives, through suffering and passion, to empty tomb and eternal light.
Before that journey begins, here on the mountain top, we make sure that we know the vastness of the Word, the beauty of Wisdom, and the World, this sea of yellow flowers that will bloom this spring, alive with the presence of the Body of Christ.
