Believe and live!: Romans 10: 5-17: St Mary’s Evensong 28/10/07: Usha Hull

Since the beginning of recorded time, human beings have been drawn to the so called thin places of the world, places where two worlds meet, where heaven is close to earth, where we catch a glimpse or have a fleeting experience of that other, greater reality that is ever near us, which we hunger for in our hearts and that ever beckons us on.

Mindie Burgoyne in ‘Walking Through Thin Places’ says, ‘Thin places are ports in the storm of life, where the pilgrims can move closer to the God they seek, where one leaves that which is familiar and journeys into the Divine Presence. They are stopping places where men and women are given pause to wonder about what lies beyond the mundane rituals, the grief, trials and boredom of our day-to-day life. They probe to the core of the human heart and open the pathway that leads to satisfying the familiar hungers and yearnings common to all people on earth, the hunger to be connected, to be a part of something greater, to be loved, to find peace.’

Someone once said to me that those who visit the thin places of this earth, that is the holy places, the places where countless people have prayed and continue to pray, where the veil between Heaven and earth is thin, carry with them afterwards the responsibility to take back to the world the grace they have received, the strength they have been given and the knowledge of the love of God.

If that is true, then Colin and I have quite responsibility, since this past summer we visited at least two of the known thin places of this world, namely Iona and Holy Island. There were other places too on this holiday, including a deserted little Kirk on the isle of Ulva where a woman like myself in the pulpit would be considered heretical, and there were the great cathedrals of the north, Durham and York Minster. If it were true that holiness is conferred by visiting a holy place, we really ought to be polishing our haloes by now. And wherever we wandered, it seemed to me that even though we were greatly privileged to be visiting these places, to really encounter Heaven, the thinnest place to God we can ever visit is in the depths of our own hearts.

‘The Word is near you, on your lips and in your heart (that is the Word of faith that we proclaim)’ says St Paul in today’s reading from Romans. And he goes on to say that ‘if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.’

The way I understand this, St Paul is saying here that salvation for you, salvation for me, is intimately intertwined with our daily lives and comes from what we know in our hearts through our personal experience. That our own hearts are the thin places of our lives. That to be saved we must recognise the working of God in our own hearts and lives through our personal experience, and confess it with our lips. That we must live lives that are testimony to this knowledge that God has worked for you and for me, and we must be able to witness to this in faith and thankfulness.

To look at the background a little bit, the whole purpose of Romans was to try to help Jewish Christians realise that although they had been given the laws of Moses this did not really make them better than others, because although the laws could tell them what to do or not to do, there was still the tendency to ignore and disobey the laws. The laws therefore could condemn them by showing up their sins. The Gentile Christians who had not experienced the laws were no better off either. Although they had a conscience given and guided by God, as we all have, they still failed to live the lives God had intended them to live.

What was needed, said St Paul, was an internal change of mind, a conversion of the innermost parts of us. A conversion that begins in the heart and is brought about by the Holy Spirit.

At this point I’d like to tell you a little story about another thin place of the world that I hope illustrates how important it is that we constantly seek to recognise how God ever speaks to us in the depths of our hearts.

On the shores of St Brelade's Bay in Jersey is an ancient chapel known as the Fisherman’s Chapel. It is a tiny structure, ever within the sound of the sea and often the only lighting inside, as dusk falls, is that of a myriad little tealights. Leading down from the chapel to the sea is what was known in ancient days as a Sanctuary path. These paths were set up during the Middle Ages to allow those who had fallen out with the law safe access from the sanctuary of God’s house to the sea, where a waiting boat would take them to permanent exile from the island.

I believe this chapel to be a thin place of the world. Undoubtedly it is holy, as countless people have prayed here.And it was also here that someone encountered God in her heart in a way that was to change her life. She had visited the island, at a time of great bereavement, when she was seeking peace and healing. Every evening after supper she would walk along the bay when the tide was out and walk up the sanctuary path into the little chapel – for her there was great significance in that as she was seeking sanctuary in God’s own house.

And there every evening she would simply sit, while the dusk fell around her. Looking at the tealights and listening to the sea, she
found great peace in that holy place, even though in her bereavement she was going through a time of great darkness, a time when there were lots of questions unanswered, lots of things that didn’t make sense, lots of bewilderment and hurt.

One evening, what seemed by chance, she decided to go over to the lectern and look at the Bible reading for the day, and it was then that her life was to change, as simply and as suddenly as that. The reading was from St Paul, Romans, though not the passage we heard this evening. It was an earlier passage, Romans 8 31-39 and the words leapt out at her as though they had been written personally for her.

They told her that all things work for the good for those who love God. That if God was for her, who could be against her. And that nothing could separate her from the love of our Lord Jesus Christ.

These were words of love, words of hope, words of encouragement, words that told her that God loved her personally, and in the end that was the most important thing. They were words that were to give her strength and courage in the months to follow and for which she would be grateful the rest of her life.Those words had been there all her life but it was not until she felt them in her heart that she realised their true significance.

Today one of the options in the liturgical readings is to celebrate Bible Sunday. The reading from St Paul that we heard earlier was chosen for Bible Sunday by the powers that be because St Paul talks of the inward conversion that takes place in our hearts through faith in Jesus and his death and resurrection. Believe in your hearts and live, says St Paul. Our Lord is at the centre of the Bible and through him God shows his love for us.

Psalm 119 says: ‘Your word, oh Lord, is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.’ And it is true that the Bible has inspired millions of people to works of service in the world, been a source of inspiration, comfort and encouragement throughout human history. But more importantly, it is a book that teaches us how to have life and to have it abundantly. As Christians we believe that the Bible is inspired and conveys an essential message – that of God’s love for us, of His love for a fallen world and His will to redeem this world through His only Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

Down the ages, many have been given the grace to have a particular passage of the Bible speak to them personally. Perhaps you too have a passage of the Bible that has come alive for you in your own heart, that has created for you a thin place where you have met God personally. But even if not, you may find that if you read and study the Bible, it sometimes speaks to you in ways you did not expect.

In the world in which we live we tend to draw clear distinctions between head and heart, between intellect and emotion. There is a 21st century tendency to assume that intellect is always better than emotion, that the matters of the heart are always inferior to what our mind and intellect tells us, that what is provable is always better than what we believe in our hearts. The Bible makes no such assumptions and as Christians we ignore the inner life of our hearts at our peril.

With this emphasis on intellect, it also follows that the 21st century assumption as Christians is that the way to salvation is terribly difficult. Not so says St Paul. It’s really very simple as the best things often are. The Bible tells us our God is near us, nearer than we are to ourselves. Our God is accessible, as our Lord taught us, and we have only to pray and ask. And our God speaks to us in language that we each understand in the depths of our own hearts. To be saved, we only have to listen and believe in our hearts, and have the will to do this.

I end with a little quotation from the poet William Cowper that tells
of this:

‘O! how unlike the complex works of man,
Heaven’s easy, artless and unencumber’d plan!
No meretricious graces to beguile,
No clustering ornaments to clog the pile:
From ostentation as from weakness free,
It stands like the cerulean arch we see,
Majestic in its simplicity.
Inscrib’d above the portal, from afar
Conspicuous as the brightness of a star,
Legible only by the light they give,
Stand the soul-quickening words – “Believe and live.”’

So may we believe and live.

Amen.