The weird and the wonderful

Just occasionally I like to start one of these sermons by insulting you. So if you didn’t do it before you set off this morning, now is the time to gird your loins and brace yourself to be bad mouthed.

Here goes.

You lot are weird.

I’ll just pause if anyone wants to huff out? No? You’re going to own it then…

You lot are weird.

When I say weird, I don’t mean the way you look, most of you anyway, and I can hardly talk, but it’s not your appearance that’s weird and kooky  but what’s going on in your head (don’t think I don’t know). Specifically that part of your head you engage for this hour or so of a Sunday. Oh no, he can read my mind… start thinking holy thoughts, quick. Obviously I’m not a psychic: I’m optimistic, deluded perhaps but I reckon that when you are here of a Sunday you are sat in the pew and your faith neurones are sparking; you are thinking Christian thoughts. And that my sisters and brothers is weird.

We have spent all our lives living in a culture and indeed if England is where you have been, a nation so shaped by Christianity that we really don’t realise how strange, odd,  downright weird Christian belief is. I don’t mean that we believe at all: yes that strikes the ignorant and arrogant as odd but what I mean is not that we believe but what we believe. I’m not talking about Christian morality— the universal respect for human life or the social imperative

— schools, hospitals, care homes—  or looking after the vulnerable; all of which seem so obvious, so normal but in a wider historical perspective are utterly bizarre. Not the ethics of our faith today,  but instead the, for want of a better word, supernatural content of our faith. Angels and demons, miracles and manifestations, incarnation and transubstantiation, saints and crucified saviours.

Let’s think about the virgin birth. The virgin birth is nowhere near the weirdest thing we believe. It’s rather vanilla really. No word more than two syllables. But it’s sufficiently strange, incredible enough that for many in Christian cultures it’s something they say they struggle to really believe. It’s often brought up as something ridiculous we believe. Possibly some of you agree. Granted, it’s odd. Though not exactly unheard of. Parthenogenesis— that is, a female giving birth without any input from the fella— does happen in nature. Whole species of  reptiles and innumerable invertebrate genera exist without any of them ever getting drunk on a Saturday night. Unusual but not unbelievable. But The Virgin Birth capital ‘VB’ isn’t quite the same thing: it’s not a complex mix of genetics and cell division it’s  conception by the Holy Spirit. Now if you can’t accept that, fair enough. But you don’t really have the sceptical option if you are a Christian, at least one coherent in her beliefs. Because if you are a Christian you believe in a God- The only capital ‘G’ God for us- and if you believe in a God at all, then the virgin birth or any other miracle is not a challenge. How can it be? If a supreme being can bring creation into existence by edict of his will, he can certainly create a baby without the hanky panky. But if you struggle with that, how will you cope when the weirdness goes surround sound 3D HD technicolor?

God irrupting into our world— Christmas, in a word— is going to do some pretty weird stuff and I’m not talking inflatable animatronic Santas. It’s not going to be just some nice guy telling us all to be kind to each other and nothing to really stretch our credulity. That’s not what Jesus or his message was about. There’s no point, as some try to suggest might be a good idea, junking the odder stuff and just keep the being nice to each other.  That’s a sort of kindergarten Christianity. 

There’s no point as some tried to do to explain all the miraculous stuff away as being perfectly explicable according to the rules of nature. You  know the sort of thing: the plagues of Egypt were caused by a volcanic eruption which pumped ash into the air which made the sky turn dark and then turned the Nile red which made all the frogs come out— of the river— and die on land which meant flies and so on. There was a lot of that sort of  well meaning explanation in the 20th century trying to rationalise Christian claims to make it easier to believe. Pointless. This is faith. It’s religion. It’s supposed to be almost beyond belief: if it wasn’t it wouldn’t be religion. It’s supposed to be a challenge to believe it. 

And so to St Michael and all the angels, whose feast we celebrate today. Winged spiritual creatures we can only rarely see but busy doing God’s work; among many other tasks, relaying our prayers to him and occasionally his messages to humanity, singing in the heavenly choirs and dancing on pin heads.  It’s quite a paradox that, though angels are seriously weird, yet they are one of the parts of popular culture where Christian imagery still gets a thumbs up— that and Santa, inflatable or not. I believe in Angels… I’m loving angels instead. Showing my age I know. I could go on for another 20 minutes and not run out of angel pop tunes. Belted out at karaoke the world over without anyone asking ‘why are you singing such a weird song?’ But whatever ABBA and Robbie Williams are singing about it’s not actual angels: more a sort of grown up cousin of Tinkerbell the fairy or a saccharine Dickensian heart of gold ideal. 

When people in the Bible meet actual angels they don’t start singing sloppy anthems, they’re scared out of their wits, real change of underwear incoming territory. They don’t always deliver nice messages either. Sometimes they’re out there slaughtering the enemies of God’s chosen people on the battlefield, sometimes they’re slaying the first born of the Egyptians. Sometime they’re fighting among themselves and casting the losers into the eternal pit of fiery sulphur. According to the Bible angels only infrequently look like pretty young men in white dresses and wings of a dove; more often their appearance is like something latex left on the floor of the Doctor Who costume department. But that’s another sermon which those of you who’ve been here a few years now have already heard. 

Only rarely in the history of our species have angels impinged upon our awareness, and that’s because they are creatures of the spirit operating mostly in the spiritual realm. Reality occurs on several different levels– it’s multidimensional if you like, or perhaps a layer cake for the less scientific–  the material and the spiritual; the earthly and heavenly, simultaneous and coterminous; it’s all going on right now in this world and the next. This is the key to understanding the book of Revelation: someone has dropped that layer cake on the floor and now it’s impossible to prize apart the sponge, the jam and the cream and St John has scraped it all up and put it in his book. Revelation is the earthly and heavenly, the material and the spiritual, the temporal and the eternal  all shoved into the mixing bowl. A sort of Eton Mess of eternity.

And  odd though it sounds, so this is the reality for us. We are  material and spiritual creatures right now existing in different realities though mostly aware only of the one and only  occasionally of the other– in worship, perhaps touched by the wonders of life or in awe as God’s hand paints on nature’s canvas.

It’s weird to believe in angels, it’s weird to believe in the virgin birth, an incarnate God, the saving power of the Cross, baptismal regeneration, sacramental communion; passion, resurrection and ascension:  in a word Christianity; illogical and irrational, but how glorious.  So please continue being weird, thinking weird thoughts.  

Despite what I said at the beginning of this sermon, believing what you believe, to call you weird is no insult. Exactly the opposite.

You believe in angels. How weird. How wonderful.