A sermon at St John's Wood, before the re-ordering
The Epiphany - 8th January 2012
Fr Owen Dobson, Curate
When the French mathematician and inventor Blaise Paschal died in 1662, as they were going through his things, they opened the lining of his coat (perhaps they were looking for loose change!) and found a small slip of paper had been sewn into it,
bearing words in Pascal’s writing:
Fire
‘God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,’ not of philosophers and scholars.
Certainty, certainty, heartfelt, joy, peace.
God of Jesus Christ.
God of Jesus Christ.
‘My God and your God.’
They certainly did find change then, but not the small kind! The paper had been written some eight years previous to his death, on the 23rd November 1654, when Pascal experienced what’s become known as his ‘Night of Fire.’
Up until that point his life had been dedicated to scientific enquiry, and projective geometry (whatever that is) and the arithmetical triangle (ditto). He was interested in spiritual things, yes, and become involved with the Jansenists; a movement at that time within the Catholic church.
But this ‘Night of Fire’ dramatically altered Pascal, so much so he called it his ‘second conversion.’ After it he all but abandoned his former work, and devoted himself to theology.
On Christmas Eve, I preached about how the encounter with Jesus might have changed the wise men, making use of T. S. Eliot’s imagination, in his poem the Journey of the Magi. If you remember, or if you know the poem, he imagines the wise men old, tired, restless;
‘no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods’,
longing with curiosity about the child they met so long ago.
It’s a powerful psychological picture of the Magi, and one I hope you don’t mind me coming back to for this their feast day. Specifically, what keeps coming back to me are the contrasting figures of the old wise man, with all his education and knowledge and years: and the baby, a few hours old, not yet able to speak, not even able to lift his own head.
And yet it’s this baby that causes the wise man, back from his travels, sat among his books and instruments, to never quite be able to go back to how things were; back to his charts and telescopes; all the weighty tomes he’d lived out of just seeming now like straw in the wind.
An imaginary scene, but one that’s borne out in the experience of those who in their different ways have been powerfully met by God: an encounter that makes human insight suddenly seem like groping in the dark,and human wisdom like a lot of hot air.
Thomas Aquinas was one of the greatest and prolific medieval theologians. But his greatest work, his Summa Theologiae, was left unfinished. In 1273 on St Nicholas’ Day, Aquinas went to say Mass before beginning a day of teaching, studying and writing as usual. And something happened to him during mass—some profound experience of God—that made him put down his quill, never to take it up again.
“All that I’ve written,” he said, “seems to me like straw compared to what has now been revealed to me.”
And our friend Pascal, as we heard, left behind everything he thought he knew, and his attempts to understand through his own expertise and knowledge; left it behind for the God who makes himself known, who is not found but who finds.
‘God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,’ not of philosophers and scholars.
God of Jesus Christ.
I went on retreat once to Hilfield Friary, at a time when I just couldn’t find God: I’d lost any sense of his presence, and I was finding it all very difficult. And I talked to one of the brothers about this inability to find God. And he listened very kindly, and looked over his glasses and said, ‘maybe you need to stop trying to find God, and let God find you.’
It was the most annoying thing anyone could have said- ‘oh yes, how convenient! It’s not God’s fault it’s yours, you just need to let him find you. What does that even mean?!’ But he was right.
Jesus said, ‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.’
We will never know God by our own inquiry alone; we’ll never find God by our own intellectual (or spiritual) efforts. We might build up a fascinating bank of knowledge about God or doctrines or the scriptures –and all that has a place— but alone it will not lead us to find God, to know God.
God will lead us to God. We will only know God because of his self-revelation, his epiphany to us. We can traverse field and fountain, moor and mountain, but we won’t get anywhere unless we are led by the star that God provides. We must let God find us.
Of course, all this poses the question: why do some people have these spiritual experiences, and some don’t? Those who really want to believe, but can’t, why don’t they get a star to follow, or a life-changing profound experience with God?
I don’t know, but i’m convinced that it’s not just for a chosen few. Paul talks about ‘the mystery hidden for ages in God’ not as something that’s accidentally slipped out, like some celestial phone hacking has taken place; but a mystery that has been made known, revealed.
This is what Christ shows us—a God who wants to be known, who gives himself to us, that we might know him. It’s often our ‘wisdom’ and what we think we know about God that keeps us lost; and when we become like little children, that we’re
most receptive to God.
And yet, God’s will to reveal himself is so strong that it’s in the middle of his mathematical career, not after he’d left it, that God finds Pascal. It’s on an ordinary day in the academy, that Aquinas has his experience that makes him leave his work unfinished. It’s while the ‘wise’ men are half-way through an astronomical tour that they’re shown there is something more to live for.
I don’t know how God will do it, but I believe he wants to find each of us, where we are now, and to bring about all sorts of new beginnings in us. Make space this week not to find God, but for God to find you.
