Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Third Sunday after Trinity 2024

At the end of the Second World War, C S Lewis published a book called The Great Divorce. It is a curious thing and in places it is dated, you worry that, over the page, someone is about to use a word like ‘spiffing’. The book describes a dream. It is the story of man who visits hell and heaven. It is clever mind you and there is plenty to think about. Heaven turns out to be more real than anything you have met before—a strong place. The grass is ‘hard as diamonds’, Water is too solid for you to be able to paddle. Hell, meanwhile, is a town, but it is not a community. It is dismal and dingy, and it is full of disagreement. A man arrives…

Before the week is over, he’s quarrelled so badly that he decides to move. Very like he finds the next street empty because all the people there have quarrelled … and moved. So, he settles in. …It makes no odds. He’s sure to have another quarrel pretty soon and then he’ll move on again. Finally, he’ll move right out to the edge of the town and build a new house

The longer you are there, the further you move out. So, Napoleon is millions of miles away and millions of miles from anyone else. We get a glimpse of him, pacing up and down, alone in a palace, complaining it was everybody’s else’s fault, but his own. That is a description of hell, no company there, but your own, no story, just your own despair.

It is heaven and perhaps hell that we must think about this morning. We have heard St Mark’s gospel and Jesus using parables to tell us about the Kingdom of God. The parables are stories, some of them elaborate, like the Good Samaritan, some short, pithy like those we heard this morning. Parables are what Jesus uses to describe God’s future. This is the language, actually it is the only language that works for telling us about the Kingdom of God. So, the Kingdom of God is like landowners with tenants, it is like girls with oil lamps, it is like dividing sheep from goats, it is like a mustard seed. Over and over a parable starts: ‘The Kingdom of God is like’.

In Mark chapter four we begin with one of the big, famous parables, the Sower and seed falling on rocky ground, among thorns, and so on. Then, in that same farming register, what we got today, someone else scattering seed…

and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how

A lot of the parables are about harvests, or a sudden moment of decision, reckoning, or judgement. A bridegroom or a landlord arrives suddenly, a prodigal son has to face his father, God judges. That is happening here, the sickle is put to the grain. A decisive moment arrives and the future breaks in. This is the essential challenge of the gospel, while we take refuge in the past, or muddle along, eyes down, in the present, Jesus asks us what future we hope for. .That is the pressing question

Notice though, that something else is going on here, something mysterious. The man who scatters the seed does not know how the magic happens. He does not know how the seed becomes a stalk. It is the same sense of wonder, surprise that we get moments later in the parable of the mustard seed.

a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs

This is Jesus asking us if we have a sense of wonder, if we have noticed that we are surrounded by things that startle and surprise. The language he uses, the illustrations are familiar, even tame, seeds and sowing, birds on branches. But he is tugging at our sleeve urging us to glimpse mystery. World is crazier and more of it than we think’, says MacNeice.

This is Jesus asking us if we have a sense of wonder, if we have noticed that we are surrounded by things that startle and surprise. The language he uses, the illustrations are familiar, even tame, seeds and sowing, birds on branches. But he is tugging at our sleeve urging us to glimpse mystery. World is crazier and more of it than we think’, says MacNeice. ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God’ cries Gerard Manley Hopkins. Alastair Reid sees a guillemot ‘straking the harbour wall’ and plunging into the sea and wants us above all to notice the amazement of the thing.

The point is the seeing - the grace
beyond recognition, the ways
of the bird rising, unnamed, unknown,
beyond the range of language, beyond its noun

That is the key question, ‘Can we feel wonder?’ ‘The kingdom of God is like…’ Jesus says and then tells us it is like wonder, like a surprise. The Kingdom of God is like amazement. We should be groping for the words.

And that tells us something significant about parables. These stories are not just another way of getting the point across, a device, a means to an end. These parables are also the place that we are trying to get to, the truth we seek. To come to the Kingdom, to inhabit the Kingdom we have to live in a better story, one with different beginnings and better endings. We have to be in the place that leads to amazement. We have to see what we are missing.

The Kingdom of heaven is like hope and it is like glory, it is not so very far off, but you cannot get there by effort and you cannot get there by process. It is a place where reality has shifted, for the better. It is a place approached in story and in language reaching breaking point. To get there requires some prayer and some imagination. And, of course, a good deal of God’s grace. It is what R S Thomas describes

inside it
There are quite different things going on:
Festivals at which the poor man Is king

Or this from John Press after a performance of the Marriage of Figaro

It did not last. Before the year was out,
The Count was once again a slave to women,
The Countess had a child by Cherubino,
Susanna was untrue to Figaro,
Young gallants went to bed with Barbarina.
But for a moment, till the music faded,
They were all ravished by a glimpse of heaven,
Where everything is known and yet forgiven,
And all that is not music is pure silence.

That is what faith should do for us; that is where faith should take us. I worry, just a little – at the risk of sounding tetchy - that we have become a little too serious about our faith. We make it all so worthy and such an effort with our strategies and our mission statements and our five-year plans. Our services, this building, and our teaching are not an invitation to join a process, but a summons to worship and amazement. Yes, it is true that the Abbey has celebrated secular success and when this place was rebuilt the heraldry of those in power was all around. Yet, also here were, and are, images of angels swinging censers, saints in glory, the Virgin being crowned and Christ sitting in judgment. This is the gate of heave. The music that takes wings and simultaneously can break you heart, is not here to make us try harder. It is done to bring us to our knees and above all to see with eyes that have too long been blind. We are summoned to hear the harmonies we had not guessed at.

To be clear, to be really clear. I am not preaching something fantastical, fay or fairy. Heaven is not a castle in the air. This church is built of stone, the road to the Kingdom is by way of Calvary where a man died pinned, by iron nails, to a cross of wood. The hope we have is not vague, it is rooted in the world we know, in our own flesh healed, but we do have to believe that possible, we need the picture in our head, the hope in our heart. We need the parable tugging at out sleeve, ‘the Kingdom of heaven is like’. We need that hope, we need that conversation.

We need that conversation now as a General Election draws near because we must learn that hope can heal us. We need that conversation because it is our salvation and our proper home. High up above me, in the Galleries is the Westminster Retable the great painted wooden screen that once stood above our altar. It is a stunning piece of thirteenth century art. In the middle sits Christ one hand raised in blessing. In the other hand a globe, it is the world we live in – a boat, sheep, birds, clouds. This is the stuff we are made of, real and recognizable, but here every tear is wiped away and the Blessed Virgin smiles a little at a world made new.

The Kingdom of Heaven is like that, this world reimagined.

The Kingdom of Heaven is like that and it is nearer than we think.