Eternity In The Heart

If you were to rifle through my DVD collection at home, every third or fourth disc would be some kind of stand-up comedian.

So I was really excited a week past on Friday when Bill Bailey came to the Exhibition Centre. Not only is he a good comic, he’s a really good musician as well. and in fairness to the man, we weren’t disappointed. It was a good show.

But there were a couple of sections that I found pretty uncomfortable, especially one where he was looking at different paintings of the encounter between the resurrected Jesus and doubting Thomas.

If you know that story, you’ll remember that Thomas refused to believe until he saw Christ with his own eyes and put his fingers into the wounds from his crucifixion.

And although the humour was pretty gentle, it’s part of a growing trend among many of the comedians I like to listen to – God bashing is in.

Eddie Izzard, Stephen Fry and many others are all at it.

It feels a bit like the school bullies Dawkins, Hitchens and Pullman have done their bit, and now some of the smaller boys are emerging from their shadow to offer a few well-placed kicks in the direction of the Almighty.

Who can take it, of course. No Fatwas in Christianity, though some might welcome that.

But it’s just another instance of where our culture seems to be heading.

I had to switch off radio 5 last week because the comedian Richard Herring was on talking about his new book called Christ on a Bike in which he hopes to earn a few bob by holding the Ten Commandments up for ridicule. I couldn’t listen to more than 5 minutes of it because it was so badly informed and so darned smug!

Of course, he can ridicule all he likes – but I’m pretty sure if Richard came out of the BBC studios to find his car nicked, or came home to find his girlfriend murdered or in bed with his best friend, the relevance of the Ten Commandments might strike him with new force.

But God-bashing sells just now, and so the bandwagon continues to rumble on.

And what gets me about it is that the comedians, and even some of the intellectual heavyweights, speak of Christianity and Christians as though we were some monolithic group of mono-browed Luddites who cling to superstition, while at the same time they fall over themselves to adore the discoveries of science.

Religious belief is nonsense for the gullible; science is the light of the world, it seems.

Now as someone with a foot in both camps, that really gets my goat. Perhaps you’ve noticed!

The claims of religion, and it seems to be particularly the Christian religion, are held to be beyond belief. All that miraculous stuff has to be nonsense, they say. It’s just too weird to have any basis in reality.

Ok. Let’s stop and think about that for a moment.

Here are some of the things that science is telling us just now:

Science is telling us that it’s possible for a single particle to be in several places at once.

It’s telling us that space and time aren’t linear, they’re curved.

That the vast majority of matter in the Universe – 83% - is stuff that we know virtually nothing about, called ‘dark matter’. We can’t see it, we’ve never obtained a sample of it. We only know it’s there because of the effect it has on things we can see and measure.

Although we’re used to thinking in terms of four dimensions, the latest physics - string theory - is suggesting that in order to understand reality we may need to think in anything up to 11 dimensions.

It’s telling us that it may be possible to travel faster than the speed of light and go back in time – contrary to what Einstein taught.

And in an astounding paragraph I read in Professor Brian Cox’s new book, Cox states that every electron in the Universe knows about the state of every other electron. There is an intimacy between the particles that make up our universe that extends across the entire Universe.

If I could tweak the energy of an electron in this molecule of oxygen I’m holding (!) an electron on the other side of the universe would know about it and maybe even change its energy level accordingly.

And you’re telling me that the claims of my faith are weird!

If science is teaching us anything just now - and it is - it’s teaching us how little we really know, and how much more there is to learn.

The best scientists, and the best believers recognise that, and cultivate humility and an open mind.

As the apostle Paul once said – “The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know!”

If we can’t get our head around what’s going on in this staggering universe, what chance have we of understanding the maker of the universe?

“He has set eternity in the hearts of men” says the writer of Ecclesiastes, “yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

We can look, and measure, and theorise, and wonder and learn, but we will never fathom. In the end, our study of the universe won’t answer the God question conclusively either way.

So perhaps it’s more constructive if we begin by looking at ourselves.

“He has set eternity in the hearts of men” says the writer, meaning of course, all humankind.

And what he’s saying is that there’s something within us that harbours an echo of eternity. And every now again we pick up the strains of that sound in our experience of living.

I was present at the births of two of my three children. 66.6% That’s a good pass in anyone’s book!

And being there was an immense privilege. Somehow in the middle of the incredible physicality of what was going on, there was something deeply spiritual going on too. This was a new wee life coming into the world. It was utterly amazing.

And I remember a few weeks after Ross was born, going in to the bedroom to check that he was ok, and he and I just stared at one another for ages, and ages without making a sound. And it was almost like I was looking through a window into that wee man’s soul. Another profoundly spiritual moment.

And you have your equivalents of those stories. You’ve had moments like that too; moments when the distance between heaven and earth feels paper thin and you’re caught up into wonderment.

Maybe you’ve been out for a day’s walking, or in some special place that you love, and the stillness and vastness of the landscape’s brought a deep sense of calm to your heart and mind.

Maybe you’ve negotiated an hour or two to yourself, and as you do what you love doing in those times, you feel like you’re coming back to yourself in the middle of all the different tensions that bear down upon your life.

Maybe you’ve sat under the stars, or turned the tractor home as the sun sets, and as you drink in the glory of creation you feel a pull on some inner part of you that you know is there, but you’re hardly aware of most of the time.

Maybe you’ve sat with someone as they’ve passed away, and you’ve been keenly aware of another reality beyond the dimensions of this earthly life.

“God has placed eternity in the hearts of men” says the writer of Ecclesiastes.

I believe that these moments, these little cameos, are us sensing eternity within our hearts. We’re not made solely for this world. We were made for something more. And within each of us there’s a yearning for that “something” that we can’t even begin to name.

So when we look at ourselves under the microscope, what do we find? Well, we find a shared experience of moments of wonder that make us feel that there’s more to life than we yet know.

But what do we do with those experiences? Where do they lead us?

Well for some, they lead nowhere. They come and they go and we return to everyday life without pausing to think about what they mean.

And I guess that’s where many people in our parish are at. Some are too busy to stop and think about life for very long. Others just don’t want to, because they’re scared of what they might find. And so they welcome any distraction that stops them taking a deep look inside themselves.

CS Lewis describes that sort of person beautifully in his book “The Screwtape Letters”. If you’re not familiar with the book, it’s in the form of a series of letters from a senior devil, Screwtape, to a junior devil, advising him how to go about the business of tempting and leading astray his ‘patient’ – the human being he’s responsible for. This is Screwtape describing an incident where he made distraction work in his favour:

I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment. Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years' work beginning to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defence by argument I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool.

I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch. The Enemy presumably made the counter-suggestion (you know how one can never quite overhear What He says to them?) that this was more important than lunch. At least I think that must have been His line for when I said "Quite. In fact much too important to tackle it the end of a morning", the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added "Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind", he was already half way to the door.

Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man's head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of "real life" (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all "that sort of thing" just couldn't be true. He knew he'd had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about "that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere logic". He is now safe in Our Father's house.

We’re so easily distracted away from the things that really matter. Who knows? It might even be happening today at this very moment!

So some folk drown out the inklings of eternity in their hearts with other things.

But others follow those inklings, but to the wrong destination. They feel the impulse to worship and to wonder, but they end up worshipping the wrong things.

As the apostle Paul wandered round Athens he saw an altar with the inscription “To an Unknown God”. And there’s a real pathos in those words that speaks into our times.

We were made to worship, but we’ve forgotten who it is we’re supposed to be worshipping!

And so people end up worshipping themselves, or money, or celebrity, or a god of their own construction (the old word for that, of course, is idolatry).

We can’t evade that sense of ‘eternity’ that God has placed in our hearts, but we don’t know how on earth to find the God who put it there.

And the answer I’m going to leave you with this morning, is the same one Paul gave to the Athenians 2000 years ago. The same one we celebrate each year in the Season of Advent.

You don’t have to go searching for God. He’s already come looking for you.

In Jesus - who was more than a good man or a prophet or a teacher, but God in human form

The unnameable God has been named.

The invisible God has been seen.

The unknowable God, high over all, has come among us in flesh and blood.

You want to see God, to know what he’s like? Then take a look at the life and person of Jesus Christ. He’s the closest we get to seeing God this side of eternity.

“God has placed eternity in the hearts of men”.

An echo of eternity still resonates within your heart and within mine.

How are you going to respond to it today?

Amen and thanks be to God for the4 promise and the challenge of his word.