Sermon preached by the Revd Stephen Fielding on 25th May at St Peter’s Tewin and St Mary’s Welwyn

‘Be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might.’ (Ephesians 6:10)

My daughter Lizzie has just given me a fantastic new book called ‘How to talk about books you haven’t read’. Have any of you read it? Of course it hardly matters, if you believe the title! As Oscar Wilde said – ‘I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so’.

Now you might think, with its catchy and amusing title, that it’s about a short cut to knowledge, about enabling me to seem cleverer or better informed than I really am, about keeping up in a busy world, about having the appropriate sound bite. The sort of thing that helps me to avoid embarrassment. And maybe those of you who belong to a book group are just thinking whether it could help you at those times when you haven’t had the time to read the book you are discussing.

Well let me reassure you. It’s none of these things. It’s not a bluffers’ guide. It’s not the equivalent of how to pretend to Sir Alan Sugar that you know more about business than you actually do, though I guess if there were such a book some of the apprentices would benefit from reading it. And by the way, for Alan Sugar himself, a useful book if it existed would be called, ‘How to give the impression you rate someone highly’, even as you’re telling them ‘You’re fired’.

No this is not a bluffers’ guide. It is in fact a very subtle and profound book on how we read and how we hear and interpret stories. About that whole puzzling process of what a book or part of a book actually means. And what the author – who is a French professor of literature in Paris - says among many really interesting things is, that over the years you and I assemble an inner library. What we read and hear builds up inside us. What we see and hear and read is influenced by what we have accumulated in our inner library; and we bring that inner library to our reading.

Now what relevance has all this? Am I being the equivalent of someone who wants to bore you with his holiday snaps? Well it’s always possible I suppose. But week-by-week in our services we read, and hear read, the biblical stories – the narratives which shape us, and build us up, and go into our inner library, and which are themselves shaped by the inner library we have accumulated. So we may hear the scriptures, as I do, as part of a great overarching story of God’s goodness in creation, his promise of rescue in Jesus, and his promise of there one day being a heaven on earth which we are called to help bring in.

Or we may hear specific bits on their own – this morning, the bit about the holiness of God and our duty to be holy; or we hear a prophet like Amos this evening denouncing the people of Israel and calling them to mend their ways, but hearing behind and beneath it all the greater promise of God that ‘the time is coming when I will restore you’. And you may hear that as a promise to the whole world that there will be a new creation, the restoration of God’s world and God’s earth. Or a promise that the turmoil you are going through now - that redundancy, that divorce, that loss of a child or a parent - will through some mystery of God’s loving purpose be transformed. There is in short a giving and a taking in this act of hearing the scriptures – a story reaching us and being received and heard through our own perceptions and experiences.

Last Wednesday Julia took her last pram service. It was just fantastic to see a record number of Mums and Dads, and grandparents there. Julia had chosen to talk about the centurion, the Roman soldier, who asks Jesus to heal his servant. Julia had cut out a model of a soldier with tunic and helmet and so on, and she brought alive this story from the gospel. In his letter to the Ephesians, heard this evening, St Paul uses military imagery to tell us of the power of the Holy Spirit. No doubt he did it because he knew that the community at Ephesus would routinely see soldiers on the streets. He is wanting them to think that when they see a soldier they will say to themselves: ‘Put on the whole armour of God’. Not in a way that is warlike but in a way which uses the spirit of God to defend them – as a helmet would defend a soldier – and to equip them in the Lord’s work. Being ‘strong in the Lord’ can be difficult if you’ve only known trouble and hardship. You may find it literally incredible and absolutely impossible. And yet you may hear again the stories of the coming of the Holy Spirit and ask – is it credible that what the spirit did for those timid and dispirited disciples at Pentecost, he might do for me?

As a Christian community, our identity is shaped by the narratives we read together, and our own narrative includes the specific stories we tell and experience ourselves. Our narrative here today loses one of its elements as Julia departs. Our narrative as a community, and her narrative as a priest, takes a new turn. And she and we will recall what shared experiences, what narratives and stories have shaped us for good, even as we move on. So God’s story and our own story intertwine. And through it all, there is the encouragement of God and the encouragement of each other, when we say ‘Be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power’.