Eternity intersects time.
When Walter Morrison built Chapel he planned a reminder of such an intersection, placing the dome, symbol of eternity, on the Craven landscape, with seasons governed by the changes and chances of time. Over my lifetime the dome itself has seen such changes and chances, losing its green coat of verdigris, growing less striking but no less majestic. Within the dome, the interlaced angels are better lit up than when they first appeared, and shine, as they’ve shone upon five generations of Giggleswickians, a reminder of the eternal God above who is our refuge.
Eternity intersects time.
We’ve had a reminder of that truth as time stopped for two minutes and eyes and hearts lifted to the Dome and beyond it. The ritual of Remembrance Sunday is slightly younger than Chapel. Year by year it brings people across our nation to look up from time to eternity and engage thankfully with the selflessness of service. Reflection upon those who gave their lives in warfare is focussed for Christians upon the verse in John’s Gospel, subject of our anthem, capturing the moral significance of eternity’s intersection with time: ‘No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends’ (John 15:13).
Recognising that love found in Jesus Christ, true God and true man, I knelt years back under the Dome to be confirmed. I set my passion for Chemistry in an eternal context thanks to the inspiration of masters like Bill Brocklebank, John Dean and The Reverend Philip Curtis. Off I went to Oxford and the nuclear reactor at Harwell down the road to continue experiments I’d begun at Giggleswick, and in our garden shed, to search out the forces that bind polymers.
As scientist I see faith as a form of wisdom that goes beyond but not against knowledge accessible to our minds. How can I believe in a God I cannot see? I’ve made a well weighed decision. That is what faith is – a careful decision to act as if God were there and be energised by a power beyond oneself. Some things in life can’t be tied down rationally. God is one such thing, and so is much of chemistry. Contrary to popular perception the revelation of truth in chemistry relies on the subjective imagination of the scientist as well as the objective truth awaiting discovery. Similarly, theological pursuit of truth, especially in Christianity, relies on stubborn historical research as well as philosophical speculation. Science by definition excludes the supernatural but does not deny it or the associated realm of metaphysics we are invited into by Christ’s resurrection. Both faith and reason lead us up to God, so Christian revelation is partner with and not rival to scientific knowledge, as the witness of so many believing scientists makes clear. To have faith is to go beyond not against reason. As John Donne wrote ‘Reason is our soul’s left hand, faith his right, by these we reach divinity’. Faith and reason lift us to God and in Jesus God himself reaches down to us revealing himself to both our reason and our faith.
Eternity intersects time.
A few years after I left Giggleswick the angels in the Dome came real for me. I was heading on my Lambretta from Harwell up the A34 to my Oxford College when the front tyre burst and I went across the road to slide under a lorry. I was heading to keep the feast of St Michael & All Angels at my church of St Mary Magdalene in Oxford. The good news is I passed under the lorry though I missed that service and ended up in the Radcliffe Infirmary. I remain convinced St Michael and his angels were sent by God to protect my life for a purpose. A few years later that purpose was revealed. I left my work at Oxford University and the nuclear power station at Harwell to train as a priest. The angels who shifted the lorry, or my scooter, helped shift my career their way. I say ‘their way’ because angels and priests have the same mission: to bring God’s love to people and people to God’s love. I am here to preach this morning because of a direct experience of eternity intersecting time on the A34.
‘No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends’.
This Remembrance Sunday we have recalled the self sacrifice of many in an eternal context, that of the death of Jesus on the Cross. As evangelist Oswald Chambers (1874-1917), who died during World War One, wrote: ‘The Cross is the point where God and sinful man merge with a crash and the way to life is opened - but the crash is on the heart of God’. The overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God chases us down through our years with the provision attained by his sacrifice, his crash with wickedness on the Cross and the gift of the Spirit that burst out of Christ’s tomb on Easter Day.
Eternity intersects time.
Your troubles, my troubles, seem slight compared to those on a battlefield. As we take time to put troubles before God in prayer, as did many of those we remember today, eternity intersects time, our time, to strengthen the important things in our life and shake off what is peripheral.
For many of us the silence we kept was a reaching out towards the eternal God to care for those gone before us and help us gain peace of heart to bless our circle. Keeping silence regularly before the Lord, the silence we call prayer, is a means of becoming a channel for eternal love and peace passing understanding to intersect with time and flow into our troubled world including the environment. It affirms another world we are now to sing of, the eternal country whose ways are ways of gentleness and paths are peace. God’s kingdom come - his will be done, on earth as it is in heaven!
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