On Tuesday March 3rd a group from this parish, led by Mother Sarah will be going on pilgrimage to the Holy Land for ten days. They will be visiting sites associated with stories both from the Old and New Testament: they will also be going to a modern hospital and children=s home in the Palestinian sector. I have made this journey twice though before >the wall= was built and so in very different political circumstances to those described recently in this magazine. My memories are very mixed, ranging from a Roman pavement in Jerusalem which may date from Jesus= lifetime, the amazing acoustic of the austere Crusader church of St Ann, the evening light on the sea of Galilee, a boy fishing in the Mediterranean from a promontory at Acre, the door into the Church of the Nativity, a narrow backstreet in Nazareth, drinks in the American cocktail bar in Jerusalem.
There can be sentimentality about Holy Land pilgrimage B the sheer buzz of standing where Jesus stood B more or less. There is also a great beauty to be found alongside the harshness and violence and bloody mindedness.BAnd there are the confusions of history which aren=t just Biblical, though these are the ones that can most preoccupy the mind of a pilgrim B what is the real connection between the book and the land?
Perhaps we could approach this question by thinking of Scripture as a record, a narrative, a conversation and the basis of prayer.
First of all Scripture is a record of a particular way of seeing the world and the history of certain peoples within that world. It is a record of events, beliefs, attitudes, hopes and fears and the particularities of everyday life. Much Biblical study over the past two centuries has concerned itself with what really happened, or what was really said. The issues so raised can never be fully resolved, but it will always be important that we try to find out as much as we can about the lives of the people who thought those ideas and told those stories. Such information prevents us from reading our own concerns into the text and thus distorting its meaning. In the same way pilgrims to the Holy Land must not read the place through the lens of their biblical preoccupations but through the particularities of the people who live there now, taking the complexities of modern history as seriously as we take biblical history.
However, reading the Bible as a narrative or story is just as important as seeing it as a record. If we look at the story of Moses, Sarah or Jeremiah, Jesus, Mary or Paul, if we look carefully at the details of the >plot= – the way it went with these people – and then lay this story alongside the narrative of our own lives we can begin to learn a great deal about the ways of God with human beings. Patterns of enslavement and liberation, failure and recovery, cowardice and courage, power and weakness begin to help us make more sense of our lives and how we might, under God=s grace, change them or find strength to persevere. Learning how the different faiths in the Holy Land of today use these biblical stories to shape their own lives is also an important part of pilgrimage.
Reading the Bible as a conversation is also immensely important. As soon as we begin to look more closely at the Old Testament we begin to discover that something that is said with great authority in one place is sometimes contradicted with equal authority somewhere else. This is why learning to be a Rabbi involves learning how to argue! Such Biblical conversation is carried on not just between texts; characters argue with one another, they argue with God and they invite us to enter the argument We may stand under Scripture as the revelation of God yet at the same time Scripture encourages us to say >Yes, butY.= just as Scripture will say >Yes, butY= to us, when we are most sure of our own rightness. If a pilgrimage returns without having had some good Biblical arguments it has missed something important!
And finally Scripture is the basis of prayer. Argument can be exhausting and may in the end become rather unproductive, as though the Bible is simply something we have to make up our minds about. If we don=t also see the Bible as the introduction to a relationship it will have very little consequence for our lives where it matters. Of course the relationship it can lead us into is not straightforward B it is not, for example, about making friends with Jesus except under a somewhat unusual definition of friendship. As we begin to think about the Bible and prayer we need to reflect upon how we are really to hear the key words, phrases and statements of Scripture. There is so much going on in our minds, so many >videos= being played out for our inner ear and eye, that God=s words stand very little chance of being properly heard. That is why silence becomes so important for prayer, the silence which switches off the >videos=. And the best way to do that, is to find our favourite scriptural words or phrases which can help s to go down into silence. Every time the >video= of our internal distractions threatens to turn itself on again we quietly repeat the word or phrase to re-establish the silence in which >the Word= may truly come to us.
One such phrase might come from a hymn that is often sung by pilgrims on the Sea of Galilee B >Dear Lord and Father of mankind= B which ends with a reference to the famous phrase from Elijah=s encounter with God on Mount Horeb (Sinai); >Speak through the earth quake, wind and fire, O still small voice of calm.= It all seems so gentle and reassuring, so that modern translators can substitute for the more familiar version, >a gentle whisper= or > a low murmuring sound= or >the sound of a gentle breeze=. The original Hebrew says something much more unsettling. The words mean literally >a voice of thin silence=. How can silence have a voice? How can a sound be thin? What is the sound of silence? There is something very paradoxical here. How can Elijah have heard such a voice? What is going on here? It is as though God speaks in a way that contradicts all our expectations of speech. We think we know what Scripture means, just as pilgrims may on the basis of Scripture have expectations of what the Holy Land will be like. Elijah expected God to speak as he had done to Moses through earthquake wind and fire. But what in fact he hears is wholly unexpected, untranslatable for him as for us, >a voice of thin silence=. In the same way pilgrims may find that the reality of the Holy Land is not at all what they had imagined and that the mismatch will be deeply troubling.
One of the difficulties we may have with Scripture is that God seems so often to speak to people as we might hear one another speak, and the result of such stories is to leave us in a different world B our world where God never seems to speak like this. And yet scripture tells a more complex story. God can also speak with >a voice of thin silence= that we do not understand which sounds through the grammar and vocabulary that we do understand.
And out of this ambiguity and confusion there comes for Elijah and for the pilgrim and also for us at home in church the question >What are you doing here?= What is your relationship with Jerusalem or Galilee or Hampstead Parish Church and the people there? How does God speak to you in these places and if you have no sense of his voice why might that be so? Is it because of something in you or something in your circumstances that needs to be changed? And where are you to find the help to make such change? The >voice of thin silence= turns out to be challenging and deeply mysterious, penetrating and unsettling, before it can bring us to the calmness of a courageous yet still mysterious certainty. It is a voice to listen for in Lent wherever we find ourselves.
With my love and prayers
Father Stephen
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker