5 October 2014
Preacher: Leslie Griffiths
“Sing of a God in Majestic divinity”
“Come divine interpreter”
“Sing my tongue, he Saviour’s glory”
“Seek ye first the Kingdom of God”
Hymns:
13
154
268
254
Readings:
Psalm 19
Matthew 21:42-46
“ANGULAR”
The British Tourist Board gives an interesting picture of the way “normal” tourists to
Britain spend their time here. Usually, it seems, they spend two or three nights in
London during which they make sure that they see Buckingham Palace (with the
changing of the guard thrown in), Big Ben, The Tower of London (including a visit to the
Crown Jewels if possible), St Paul’s Cathedral and the London Eye.
They might just indulge themselves further with sideways visits to Stonehenge and/or
Canterbury Cathedral before leaving for Paris via…. Edinburgh!
I’d love to persuade them to take a little more time to see the Scottish Highlands, the
Cumbrian Lakes, the castles of Northumberland, the mountains and valleys of Wales,
the Cornish beaches, the flatlands and great wide skies of East Anglia, and so much
more.
I’d love even more to suggest that they enjoy some of our traditional culture – welldressing in Derbyshire, Morris dancing in the Cotswolds, fish and chips in Whitby,
oatcakes and bacon butties in Staffordshire, cockles and lava bread in South Wales.
And, with a head full of such nonsense, I would have loved to have had a few visitors in
tow a few weeks ago when, in the company of an old friend and colleague, we went for
a country walk in rural Oxfordshire. It was in the charming village of Charlbury hard by
the last resting place of Winston Churchill and the thing that struck me as we walked
was a phenomenon you can see across the length and breadth of England, Scotland
and Wales. It’s called a “dry-stone wall”. For centuries these walls have been built,
solid and secure, sometimes in remote places and at other times around ancient,
ancestral estates. It’s remarkable that the skill for building these walls has survived into
the modern age. A huge pile of what must have looked like ballast or rubble or multidimensional jigsaw pieced, are turned into perfect, erect, attractive walls. There’s no
mortar, no concrete, just a perfectly composed arrangement of irregular bits of roc till
them become alluring and useful artefacts. Building these wall begins as a craft. It
ends as an art.
On our walk we saw evidence of recent repairs to breaches of those walls. A pile of
stones had been deposed near the broken part of the wall. And not much was wasted
from that pile. Most chunks of limestone or lumps of granite could be chipped and
shaped for their own distinctive place in those simple yet majestic walls. But we did
chance upon a few rocks that had been discarded. They were clearly too awkward, too
unyielding, too challenging for the wall builder. So they lay unused, some distance from
the path we were following.
The stone that the builders rejected- a stone obviously too difficult to fit into their neat
schemes – turns out in the story Jesus tells to have another reason for its rejection. It
was cast aside because “the builder” disliked it and refused to work with it. In fact, it
seems as if this unused stone, a stumbling block it’s called at one point, was never
intended to be just another stone in the pile, one more piece waiting to be fitted into
somebody else’s design.
That was the problem Jesus posed to his contemporaries. As they heard him speak,
saw him act, witnessed the effect he was having on the people around him, they were
genuinely bemused at first, then they felt threatened, and finally they became angered
at his refusal to fit into their picture. They might have accommodated him if he’d played
ball with them. But he stood out against their authority and against their teaching.
There was no way they could break him, melt him, mould him to their programme or
purposes. He became like “a stone that the builders rejected”.
If Jesus was awkward, then he remains difficult now. Just look at the range of people
gathered here in this Chapel this morning. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all slot Jesus
nicely into our lifestyle, fit him neatly into our way of doing things? We could heed the
commands and follow the teaching we’re comfortable with whilst either politely ignoring
or downright rejecting those parts of his teaching we find it difficult to countenance. But
Jesus, now as then, simply cannot be domesticated in that way, turned to account for
those who would follow him. He is not a puppet on a string. He is a radical teacher who
leads by example. And that can be difficult. Too difficult sometimes. We might easily
find that we too, now and again, like those builders with their stones, end up rejecting
him when his teaching conflicts with what we perceive to be our interests.
I work in a beautiful office – many of you have seen it. It was designed over 20 years
ago and it still seems grand, spacious, and well thought out. One feature does see, odd
to me. A junction box for our telephone system has been screwed onto the floor
through the carpet. It looks so out of place but the amazing thing is that, though it’s only
too visible, everyone manages to stub their foot against it with great regularity. I’ve hear
interesting expletives leave the mouths of some very holy people as they stumble over
this stubbornly-placed piece of equipment.
The stone that the builders rejected can also get in our way. The French words for
“stumbling block” are “pierre angulaire” – an angular stone. You think you can get
round it but it keeps on getting in your way. It may be rejected but it is certainly not
eliminated from the picture. You stub your toe, you hit your shins, you run your life into
it again and again.
I’ve referred more than once in the past to my brother’s conversion experience. Thirty
years after leaving the Church and putting religion behind him, he was startled one day
when he ran into the rejected Jesus in a body-slamming way. First of all, he had a
vision. My brother never had visions. Yet here he was describing one in great detail.
He saw clearly swirling waters rushing around in a deep and dark hole into which he felt
he was in danger of falling. Also in the picture, however, was the representation of a
idyllic day in the South Wales village where we grew up. Our mother was calling us in
for dinner. We were kicking a rugby ball on the street. There was a blue sky. And
there was a chapel, the chapel we’d both attended when we were kids. As it that
weren’t enough, my brother related how he’d heard a voice. Not only did my brother
never have visions, he never heard voices either. He wasn’t delusional nor
hallucinatory. And yet, he said, he heard a voice which he identified as the voice of
Jesus, calling him back from the edge of the abyss and reminding him of the happiness
he’d once known. My brother changed his life from that moment on. The rejected
Jesus had become the cornerstone of his new and changed life.
The angular stone, the one you keep stumbling over, bumping into, is more than a piece
of awkwardness, a source of inconvenience. The words “pierre angulair” in French
suggest more than mere angularity. They happen also to translate the word
“cornerstone”. The stone is angular for a purpose. It was never intended to be par of a
wall (or whatever). It’s deliberately shaped in this way to play its part not as part of a
wall but where walls join together. Its purpose is to hold planes pulling apart, forces
heading in different directions, to hold them and, by so doing, give a shape to a
construction.
In the case of my brother, what began as a stumbling block, something that got n his
way, ended by being the vey cornerstone of his new life. The stone, far from being a
piece of cast-off masonry, turns out to be what gives shape to a building, or a life, or Life
itself.
The women in our family are very adept at doing jigsaw puzzles. It’s been fascinating
over the years to watch Margaret teach Ruth (our daughter), to master this art and, in
later times, to see the two of them induct our granddaughter Tammy into the skill. As I
watched, I’ve seen very clearly two guiding principles that are at the heart of all who
want to be master (or mistress) jigsaw geeks:
a) you must keep your eye on the whole picture, and not get lost in the details;
b) you must find the corner pieces and work from there.
I’ve watched those corner pieces going quickly into place hundreds of times over the
years. Recently, I’ve sat and watched our granddaughter and wanted desperately to
pull the corner pieces of her little puzzle out of the pile and lay them out for her. But I
resisted. She had to find them for herself. Now she’s a whizz-kid a jigsaws just like her
mum and grandma.
In the Christian life, nothing gives us a sight of the big picture better than a service of
Holy Communion. We gather round a table, brothers and sisters in Christ and “feed on
him in our hearts”. We remember his sacrifice and the triumph of love over hatred, light
over darkness, life over death. That’s the big picture of our salvation. And that’s what
gives us the corner pieces from which we can begin to build our picture of the kingdom
of God – a kingdom where justice and peace sweep together like a might river flowing
into the see.
“Draw near with faith” - come and see (and sense) the picture of salvation.
“Take bread and wine” – the corner pieces to help you put that picture together and give
it coherence in your own lives.
And the Lord bless you and bless you kindly.
Amen.