10^th August 2014

“Do not be afraid”

Revd Andrew Bain

Readings:

1 Kings 19: 9-18 – after the whirlwind, a still small voice

Matthew 14: 22-33 – do not be afraid, it is I

Just this week, on the evening of the 4^th of August, I went to see a special commemorative play called Forgotten Voices. Put together by the Imperial War Museum from memories of ordinary men and women who experienced the First World War and set against a changing backdrop of mages of all that horror of the trenches, these were the real voices of people like us.

It strikes me that Elijah’s experience on the mountain had something of that horror about it. The chaos of the world, the wickedness of Queen Jezebel from whom he’s fleeing in fear for his life, the evil of the religion of Baal with a whole culture of abuse of people through prostitution and possibly even human sacrifice – all these are symbolised in the crashing of the world around him as the mountain almost breaks apart, the rocks split, the wind howls and an earthquake shakes even the mountain itself. And where, in any of it, is God?

As shells churned the fields of northern France and Belgium into a sea of mud and men could drown just in the shell-holes, never mind by enemy fire, this sense of the world falling apart and terror all around must have shaken the men who went through it to the very core. No wonder so few could speak about it when they came home. How could anyone understand if they hadn’t been through it? They say that for many men, faith died in the trenches. Certainly Victorian optimism, that sense that everything was just one relentlessly positive march into the future, that just as we’d made such strides in medicine and science and engineering, and in exploring previously uncharted parts of the world, so we would make endless moral progress too. The future looked bright. Nothing seemed beyond our grasp.

But then Ypres and Paschendale and the Somme, and that bright optimism didn’t stand up to the reality of death in the mud, and gas, and men reduced to living in the most dehumanising conditions imaginable.  And yet men prayed. One survivor remembered hearing a wounded man dying out in no-man’s land singing with his dying breath: O for the winds of a dove – echoes of a psalm of trust and hope, words and music of beauty choked out in the face of darkness. Chaplains crawled through barbed wire to reach wounded men to offer the comforts of faith to the dying. From Old St Paul’s in Edinburgh, the famous Canon Albert Laurie was almost worshipped by the men he served as chaplain for just that kind of courage. But why would anyone do that, why crawl through hell just to hold a dying man’s hand and speak empty words?

But empty words they weren’t. Amidst the crash of guns and the falling apart of worlds, this is the still small voice of God, calling his children beyond darkness and death into deathless love and stillness and peace. It’s Isaiah’s vision that one day all the instruments of war will be rolled up and burned, spears be turned into ploughshares, and a little child will lead us into God’s future. We won’t study war any more.

I always remember how, in the Cathedral, we would sit daily in the Resurrection Chapel  for morning prayer. Each wall of that chapel is just covered in the names of men who died. Young men from Haymarket and Dalry and the New Town, shopkeepers and lawyers, factory workers and footballers – notably a whole team from Heart of Midlothian and hundreds of their supporters too, name upon name, and many of them from the same family. Where could God possibly be in that, for all those families who got that fateful, world-ending telegram or letter – we regret to inform you...

Well, high above us, hanging from the chancel arch, the first thing you see when you walk into the Cathedral was the great hanging rood, designed by Robert Lorimer (who designed some of the features of our own chancel). It’s a great, enormous, hanging crucifix and on it lies the broken body of a beautiful young man, the young man, the poor man, of Nazareth. In my time, we had this great crucifix taken down for cleaning, and when it was cleaned and the grime of years removed, we discovered that this body of Jesus lay on a field of Flanders poppies, blood-red for sacrifice. Where is God? Well this is, I think, a still small voice of an answer. He lies with the dead. Whether it’s the dead of Ypres or the dead of Gaza, the suffering of God in Jesus is united with the suffering of men and women and children today. The Babe of Bethlehem and the young man of Nazareth, he represents them all.

And he calls to us over the tumult of our life’s wild restless sea and says follow me into a world better than this. Blessed are the peacemakers, he says, for they shall be called the children of God. God is not in the crash of falling worlds, in the horrors unleashed by the Jezebels and the Caesars of the ancient world or the power-mongers of our twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He’s in the still small voice of God crying out in the victim: O for the winds of a dove. He’s in the courage of the peacemaker Jesus calls blessed, the prisoner of conscience, the doctor who hasn’t slept for a week struggling to mend bodies torn apart by shelling in Gaza, he’s in our own struggles to make peace in our churches, our families, and in our own hearts.

The same Jesus who will take all this to the Cross and beyond the Cross to a risen future for all of us, God’s “something better”, he reaches out his hand to us right now, across the tumultuous sea of the world as it is, and you and me as we are, with all our storms within and without and he says: Come. Don’t look down at the waves. Do not be afraid: I have conquered the world – and he has. Don’t be afraid. Take courage. It is I. When the world’s sorrows seem almost too much to bear and you can’t bring yourself to watch any more, when your own struggles seem overwhelming and you feel like you’re sinking, this is the voice to hear. Our world is not without hope. Beauty and truth and love are not absent because God is never absent. In the middle of everything: Do not be afraid. It is I. Take my hand. Come to me.