The still, small voice of calm
Sermon preached in St Salvator's Chapel, St Andrews on 26th October 2008 by Rev Neil Gardner
Readings: 1 Kings 19: 1 - 12 and Luke 5: 12 - 20
Sermon
St Luke 5: 16 But the talk about Jesus spread ever wider, so that great crowds kept gathering to hear him and to be cured of their ailments. And from time to time he would withdraw to remote places for prayer.
A minister once caused confusion amongst his congregation by telling them that there were one or two things he wanted to say before he began, but I know exactly what he meant, and before I begin I would just like to say what a great pleasure and privilege it is to be back in St Andrews. I studied modern languages here from 1983 -1987, and for the duration of that time I was a member of the Chapel Choir, and helped to ring the tower bells. So it¿s great to be back and to be seeing and hearing things from a different angle.
Going even further back in time, it was not until I was inducted as minister of Canongate Kirk on Edinburgh's Royal Mile, that I discovered that the Revd Robert Walker, the famous skating minister of Henry Raeburn's iconic painting, had himself once been the minister of Canongate Kirk. He was presented to the charge by King George III in 1784 and much to my relief I discovered he could also be described as the golfing minister, a tradition in which I for one am both happier and slightly better qualified to follow. Since he is pictured skating on Duddingston Loch I had always assumed that he was minister of Duddingston, but it turns out that the picturesque stretch of water on the edge of Holyrood Park, which is also part of my parish, was just a place to which he would escape in wintertime along with his fellow members of the Edinburgh Skating Society. Around that time the village of Duddingston was still outside the city boundary, and its parish minister was the Revd John Thomson - the originator of the expression 'Jock Tamson's bairns' - and he was not so much the subject of an artist as an artist himself, a painter mainly of landscape scenes. Standing there to this day on the water's edge are the remains of the studio to which he would escape whenever possible to engage in his favoured pursuit. In order that he should be allowed to remain there undisturbed he famously named the studio 'Edinburgh' so that whenever anyone called at the Manse wishing to see him whoever answered the door could say with almost complete honesty 'I'm very sorry, the minister's not here, he's in Edinburgh!'
St Luke suggests in the fifth chapter of his Gospel that there were times when even Jesus of Nazareth felt that need to escape, to withdraw, to take a break, and sometimes out on the surface of the water, and sometimes at its edge. But the talk about Jesus spread ever wider, so that great crowds kept gathering to hear him and to be cured of their ailments. And from time to time he would withdraw to remote places for prayer. I don't know about you but I find that tremendously reassuring. The reminder of this very human side at the same time as the almost superhuman capacity to heal people like the man covered with leprosy or the paralysed man lowered by his friends on the roof down in front of Jesus. And from time to time he would withdraw to remote places for prayer. Just a few chapters later, St Luke the physician recalls how the hem of Jesus' robe was touched by a woman whose bleeding had not stopped for twelve years. 'Who touched me?' Jesus suddenly asks, and goes on to explain how even with people crowding all around him 'Someone touched me for I knew it when power went out of me'. If that was typical, if every act of healing and compassion took just a little more power out of him, then it's no wonder that from time to time Jesus would seek out those remote places far from the madding crowd, where undisturbed and in perfect peace he could pray and thus regain his power and renew his strength. The word that is here translated 'remote places' used to be called the wilderness and sometimes that's absolutely where he would go, as he did, you remember, at the very start of his ministry, for forty days and forty nights. Other times he would take to the water, not skating but drifting for a while, sometimes even just pushing the boat off a little from the shore and teaching the crowds from a relatively safe distance. Other times he would take to the hills.
O Sabbath rest by Galilee!
O calm of hills above,
Where Jesus knelt to share with thee
The silence of eternity,
Interpreted by love!
Sometimes it was enough to step back literally from all that was pressing in on him to give himself a bit of space, before coming back in from the wilderness or down from the hill or in from the lake, back with new strength and vigour and determination to face the next challenging round of teaching and healing and fulfilling God's purpose. But the talk about Jesus spread ever wider, so that great crowds kept gathering to hear him and to be cured of their ailments. And from time to time he would withdraw to remote places for prayer.
In our Old Testament reading the prophet Elijah withdrew to the remotest corner of the wilderness not out of choice but out of necessity. Fleeing for his life and praying for his death, he reached both the end of his tether and of his journey in a lonely cave on Mount Horeb. There the dramatic frenzy of earthquake, wind and fire brought no comfort or consolation. That only came, eventually and unexpectedly, in a faint, murmuring sound, the still small voice of calm which finally encouraged Elijah to come back to the entrance of the cave and face up to the challenges and responsibilities that still lay ahead for him. My memory of this chapel is that it could sometimes have the same effect as Elijah's cave. A place to retreat from the pressures and challenges of the world outside and a place from which to return to that same world outside, refreshed and renewed by the still, small voice of calm or the sheer silence of eternity. Not least at this point in the term or semester or season, as the clocks go back and winter looms on the horizon. The talk about Jesus spread ever wider, so that great crowds kept gathering to hear him and to be cured of their ailments. And from time to time he would withdraw to remote places for prayer.
Outside Canongate Kirk is an old sign indicating what it describes as the 'celebrities' who are interred in our Kirkyard. They include Adam Smith, the economist and author of The Wealth of Nations; Robert Fergusson, the poet and inspiration to Robert Burns; Dugald Stewart, the philosopher whose memorial on Calton Hill has become every bit as iconic as the skating minister; and Horatius Bonar, the hymn-writer who wrote amongst others 'I heard the voice of Jesus say'.
I heard the voice of Jesus say,
Come unto me and rest
Lay down, thou weary one, lay down
Thy head upon my breast.
I came to Jesus as I was
So weary, worn and sad;
I found in him a resting-place
And he has made me glad.
In a prayer card first compiled in 1942 and dedicated to the men of the Royal Scots and the Kings Own Scottish Borderers with whom he served, my more recent predecessor, Ronald Selby Wright, offered the following advice: Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men and women. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle. But you shall be a miracle. Every day you will wonder at the richness of life which has come to you through the grace of God.
' the talk about Jesus spread ever wider, so that great crowds kept gathering to hear him and to be cured of their ailments. And from time to time he would withdraw to remote places for prayer.'
And now may God bless to us this preaching of his most holy word, and to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, be all praise and glory now and forever.
Amen.