Few people I know love their families more than my friend and colleague Matt Canlis, so why on earth would he be describing them as the enemy?
Well he was saying it tongue in cheek; but the comment came out of the tension that all clergy with family experience. The tension between the demands of work life and the demands of home life, because in our vocation those two are pushed together more than they are for many people.
You work from home much of the time, and there are aspects of your work that need extended periods of concentration and peace. It takes most of a day to nail a sermon. There are complex problems and strategies to think through. There are pastoral situations needing attention. There’s time you need to spend in reading and prayer so your work doesn’t degenerate into soulless ecclesiastical management.
Now imagine it’s the summer holidays. Everyone’s in a holiday mood - except you. You’re still working. Working at home, where your four lovely but very noisy children, all under the age of 10, are all wanting a piece of you. Your darling wife keeps gently, or not-so-gently, reminding you about all those wee jobs you’d promised to do when you had the time, and adding a few more to the list every time you pass her in the kitchen.
Is it any wonder that most clergy with family wonder every now and again if it’s too late to sign up for the monastic life?
How on earth are we expected to be about the kind of work we’re called to, when there are days when we can’t seem to get two minutes peace without some kind of interruption?
Too often, it can feel like our families are the enemies of our vocation.
And that’s why Matt’s comment was a breakthrough. “Paul, I’m finally beginning to understand that my family are not the enemy”.
I’ll tell you later what it was that brought about that change. But I begin with that little introduction because today is Trinity Sunday and though the doctrine of the Trinity is an immense mystery, some very important and easily grasped truths follow from it – not least, that if community is at the very heart of God’s being, it’s also at the heart of God’s plans for creation.
As human beings, we were made to live in community.
Remember Adam, brought into a world already teeming with life and beauty and wonder. Lacking nothing and yet still ultimately lonely?
Remember God’s words? “It is not good for the man to be alone.” And lo and behold, there was Eve.
“It is not good for the man to be alone.” Before those words are about marriage or procreation or any of that stuff, they’re about community.
It’s in community that we grow and mature and discover who we are and become – that is how God has ordained things.
And the whole sweep of Scripture can be read as one long endeavour by God to draw us out of ourselves and into communion with himself, and with one another. And I want to look at both of those aspects this morning.
“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord” writes Isaiah.
Scholars reckon that would have been about 758 BC, and it’s interesting that Isaiah chooses to place this experience in time. In all likelihood that’s his way of saying “I know this sounds strange, but this really happened. And this is when it happened.”
And how did the Lord appear in this vision? “He was sitting on his throne, high and exalted, and his Robe filled the whole temple. Round him flaming creatures were standing, each of which had six wings. Each creature covered its face with two wings and its body with two and used the other two for flying. They were calling out to each other: Holy, Holy, Holy! The Lord Almighty is Holy! His glory fills the world”
So it’s a vision of God as King that Isaiah’s granted – a King so glorious that even the creatures around the throne have to shield their eyes from his radiance.
And as is the way, when we find ourselves in the presence of someone or something of such staggering, immense glory, we become painfully conscious of our own inadequacy.
“I said, “there’s no hope for me! I am doomed because every word that passes my lips is sinful and I live among a people whose every word is sinful. And yet, with my own eyes, I have seen the King, the Lord Almighty”.
In the presence of God, Isaiah is rightly humbled.
A few months ago a friend of mine from University was invited to go and preach at Crathie Kirk and there’s a tradition that when you’re invited to do that you dine with the Royal Family the night before and stay at Balmoral.
And that got me thinking - how do you make small talk with the Queen over dinner without appearing like a complete tube!? Here’s this woman who’s been the matriarch of the nation for 60 years; who’s image is the most reproduced image in human history; a woman who regularly dines with world leaders and statesmen and has them in awe. What would a wee nyaff like me have to say to someone like her!?
And yet, the testimony of those who have met her and spent time in her company is that she goes out of her way to make her visitors feel at home and at ease in her presence.
In a similar vein, I was told a story a while back by a lady in this congregation who used to work at Balmoral. It was the Gillies’ Ball and she found herself dancing a set dance with Prince Charles and though she reached out her arm to swing her first partner, she didn’t think that was appropriate when it was Charles’s turn, so she respectfully kept her hands down at her side; at which point he promptly grabbed her by the arm and said “Oh no! If you’re swinging him, you can swing me as well!”
It’s a mark of grace when someone who could easily overawe us, reaches out and chooses to engage in a way that brings us comfort.
And that’s what God does for Isaiah. There he is, the prophet, trembling in awe before the Lord. Knowing the unbridgeable gap that’s between them. And God reaches out to him. “Then one of the creatures flew down to me, carrying a burning coal that he had taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. He touched my lips with the burning coal and said “This has touched your lips, and now your guilt is gone, and your sins are forgiven”.
God takes the initiative; deals with the awkwardness; and draws Isaiah into communion with himself. Why? Because more than anything, he wants to be in communion with us.
And if we needed proof of that, we need only consider the lengths that God was prepared to go to to draw us back to himself. How far would he go? All the way to the cross.
All the way to the incarnate Son of God standing before a baying crowd, a bloody ruin - dressed in mockery as a King. Ready to submit to death, so he could become the burning coal held to the lips of the whole world, to take away our guilt and forgive our sins.
That is how far the God of Isaiah’s vision is prepared to go, to draw you and me into fellowship with him.
Community is at the heart of God’s being; and that means it’s also at the heart of his plans for creation. We were made for him.
But we were also made for one another. It is not good for the man to be alone.
Community is integral to life.
The community of the family is one which none of us choose, but which has a huge influence on how we develop. It’s no accident that farming families tend to produce farmers, musical families, musicians, sporty families sporty kids, delinquent families, delinquent kids. We learn what we grow up with.
There are other communities we find ourselves in by default rather than choice – the community of school, college, or university; the community of the workplace.
We have choice over where we live, but we don’t choose our neighbours. They’re a community we belong to but can’t legislate for. And it’s the same with church we attend.
Perhaps the only truly free community is the circle of folk we choose to keep as friends. That circle is as tight or as expansive as we choose to make it.
But here’s the thing. All of these communities bring blessings, but all of them bring their own stresses too.
Families protect and provide and love, but they also squabble and hurt one another and fall out.
Our time in education broadens our mind and abilities, but it can also expose us to cruelty and peer pressure.
Our friends and colleagues can become trusted companions, but they can also be a disappointment to us, or even become enemies.
Our neighbours can be a blessing or they can be a thorn in the side, and that’s true whether we’re talking about the place where we live, or the place where we worship.
There is no perfect community. Anywhere! And yet God never allows us to go solo. In a hundred different ways, God urges us to stay in community and keep working at it. The communities of marriage, and family, and neighbourhood and church.
Why? Why?
Because community is the only place where we unlearn the tyranny of the self.
Left to my own devices, I can do as I like, unchecked. In community I have to learn to accommodate and be accountable to others. I have to learn that my way is not the only way; that there are other voices that have to be heard.
Left to my own devices I can avoid people who disagree with me or annoy me. In community, I open myself to the possibility that they might have something to say that’s worth hearing.
Left to my own devices, I’m oblivious to my own rough edges. In community, not only do I become aware of them, some of them might even get knocked off, helping me become a more rounded and generous person.
Community is our best chance for unlearning the tyranny of the self. That’s why, since the very beginnings of the church, the followers of Jesus have met in community. We cannot do this alone. Like it or not, we need one another. It can get ugly and it can get messy. But community, not solitude, is the environment in which we grow up into Christ.
Look at the men Jesus chose for disciples. Four big, argumentative, ‘my way or the highway ‘fishermen. Two disgruntled revolutionaries who were just itching to slit some Roman throats. A former tax collector that most folk wouldn’t have touched with a barge pole. It’s not exactly a recipe for harmony! And if you read the New Testament letters, you’ll discover that all the early churches were exactly the same!
But those very communities were the fertile soil in which people grew into mature disciples of Jesus Christ; and they grew not by evading the other but by engaging with them.
Even the early monastics who took themselves off to the desert to live in caves, knew that they needed one another. Very few lived an entirely solitary life. Most struck a balance between seclusion and companionship by living in dispersed communities. They recognised that we need each other.
“Paul” my friend said . “I’m finally beginning to understand that my family are not the enemy”.
I wish Matt could tell you the story himself, but to put you in the picture, he and his wife Julie are quite different characters. She’s got this can-do attitude which doesn’t always worry about the detail, while Matt’s more cautious and likes to have it all figured out. His favourite T-shirt sums up their relationship really well. It’s a picture of a cactus trying to hug a red balloon and the caption just says “Impossible Love”.
A few years back they were going to France on holiday and at the last minute Julie decided it would be a great idea to take their bikes and she ordered a towbar bike carrier which Matt eventually got fitted the day before they were due to leave. The only problem was that once the bikes were on you couldn’t open the boot anymore, which, with four kids, wasn't ideal.
So they headed off to France. All the way down from Aberdeenshire to the south coast of England, across the channel, and then half-way across France 'til they reached the Atlantic. They were there for two weeks. And they didn’t ride the bikes once. Then on their way back to catch the ferry home, Julie suggested that they really ought to use the bikes before they went back to the
And as Matt stood at the quayside watching the ferry disappear into the distance, a little part of him wished he could have been like one of the pioneer monks who crossed that same channel some 15 centuries earlier. Men who were following the call to go and preach the gospel, happily unencumbered by wife, children and under-used bicycles.
But as he watched the kids play, he knew that that wasn’t the answer. The answer was to see this little community God had blessed him with for the gift that it was. The gift of a people who, through all the ups and downs and complications and interruptions, were helping him become more of the man God wanted him to be. A community who in their own wonderful, maddening way, were helping rescue him from the tyranny of the self.
It’s in community that we come to maturity.
So may God – Father, Son and Spirit – keep drawing us into communion with himself, and with one another, for the sake of his Kingdom, and the good of our souls.
Amen
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