Tag: hearing

The miracle of hearing at Pentecost

David HerbertLeave a comment

This is a sermon prepared for a small congregation in a small Warwickshire village. The reading for the day is Acts 2:1-21.

We’ve been watching the ITV drama Code of Silence. It is a vivid demonstration  that all of us hear differently.
Rose Ayling-Ellis plays the part of a deaf catering worker who has the gift of being able to read lips.
So, she can hear what others can’t.
She can hear what people are saying even though there may be a screen between them.
She can hear what people are saying in a crowded bar, or the other side of the room.
So long as she can see them she can make out what they are saying.

We all hear differently. 

All of us are listening for different things.
We listen for nuance, tone of voice.
There are things we are wanting to hear.
Each of you will hear this sermon differently.
You may hear a word that sets you off on a train of thought and you lose the track of the rest of the sermon.
You may listen to every word because there is a word you are desperate to hear.
And the word you’re desperate to hear may well be different to the word the person next to you is desperate to hear.

Some will hear nothing.
Either, I the preacher have been so poor that I have failed to engage,
or we are so frazzled and preoccupied that nothing gets through.

Some may be so physically deaf that all they have to read is body language.
What is the bearing of the preacher?
Is there encouragement? Do I count? Is this good news?

Different generations will hear differently.
Young children will get it differently to those who have grown old and tired.
Men and women may listen for different things.

Those who are first have always heard the gospel differently to those who are usually last and weakened by the ways of society.
Those who usually come first and feel entitled, will be offended by the gospel.
Those who are the least and last, the humble and the humiliated, will feel encouraged, strengthened and empowered.
Those who are prosperous will hear the gospel differently to those who are poor.
Those who suffer pain or grief,
Those who have been wronged will hear differently to their wrongdoer.

And here we are – a few of us in this little place, joining the gathering of Christians across the world, of all ages, races, languages and walks of life, each of us having heard the apostles’ teaching in our own way – and all of us drawn, in some form or fashion, to the way of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

Here we all are, across continents and centuries, hearing so differently from each other, yet all of us hearing God speak the language of our hearts – and all of us drawing closer together as a result, in spite of the many barriers we’ve built between us down the ages.

That is a miracle!
The one who tells the story of Pentecost in our reading from Acts describes the bewilderment of the crowd “because each heard their language being spoken”.
It’s a miracle of communication,
a miracle of hearing,
a miracle of understanding.

The author tells us that the disciples were all together in one place.
These are the same people whose failings have been highlighted throughout the gospels. Again and again we hear of their misunderstandings, their lack of faith, their betrayals. Even after the resurrection, they still don’t understand.
Jesus tells them to wait.
Not to act, not to preach, not to fix it all.
Just wait.

Their wait ends at the festival of Pentecost, 50 days after Passover, just when Jews have flocked into Jerusalem for the ancient harvest festival of Shavuot.
Originally it was the celebration of the grain harvest – a time of thanksgiving, but by Jesus’ time it had become something more. It had become a celebration of the giving of the Law and the harvest of God’s word.

And on that day, the disciples finally discover what they’ve been waiting for.
They were waiting for understanding.
They hear in their heart, deep in their bones, that all those moments of doubt and failure hadn’t disqualified them, but actually prepared them to be vessels of grace.

It turns out that they were waiting to become the Church,
a people breathed on by the Spirit
and set on fire with a purpose of God’s own making.

And the crowds heard them – not just with their ears, but with their hearts.
They heard in their own languages – not the language of religion or power, but the language of their deepest selves.

It was a miracle.

Not that the disciples spoke, but that the people truly heard.
They didn’t hear a lecture.
They didn’t hear a scolding.
They heard the wonder of amazing grace poured out in all flesh –
sons and daughters, old and young,
rich and poor, insiders and outsiders.

That is still the miracle of Pentecost.
The same Spirit who moved in Jerusalem moves here too –
in our waiting, in our words, in our worship, in our hearing.

Even in our misunderstandings and failures, the Spirit can breathe life and make meaning.
Whether we hear clearly or faintly<

Whether we are full of faith or full of doubt,
the Spirit comes to stir us to love, courage and hope.

We may not speak many languages, but the Spirit speaks ours:
the language of fields and farms,
the language of family and loss,
of longing and gratitude.

If we wait, if we are willing and listening,
the Spirit still comes even here, even now.
Thanks be to God.

Notes heard above The Noise of Time

David HerbertLeave a comment

The Noise of TimeI don’t read that much but every now and then I come across something that takes my breath away. Julian Barnes, through his book The Noise of Time, has me intrigued with the noise of time. This is a poetic book that is well crafted and beautifully composed. It tells us the time and the time is telling. It is a short book in which a lot of time is told in a short time. It is a time of terror.

I read this book for the first time at the end of Holy Week, through the three days known as the TriDuum, Maundy Thursday through till Holy Saturday – the short time it took to tell so much of time. I was attentive to the noises of that other time told through three days: the crushing noise of religious and political authority almost overpowering a more faithful and resilient strain.

There are three main characters in The Noise of Time. There’s the “author” who is the one who remembers. There’s Shostakovich, who is the one who hears. And there is the one less than human, Power deformed. Arguably there is a cast of three in the Triduum. There’s the one who remembers (the witnesses), the one who hears (on the cross) and the ones Power deformed (who know not what they do).

Running through my mind while I read this book were lines from a poem by Anna Lightart called The Second Music:

Now I understand that there are two melodies playing,
one below the other, one easier to hear, the other

lower, steady, perhaps more faithful for being less heard
yet always present.

The Noise of Time is a book full of threes – if you like, there are three hands: an hour hand, minute hand and second hand. The three chapters measure three movements: On the Landing, On the Plane and In the Car. 

There are three brands of cigarettes (Kazbeks, Belamors, Herzegovinas). There are three vodka glasses for three vodka drinkers (the perfect number for vodka drinking). There are three wives (Nina, Margarita and Irina). There are three ways to destroy your soul: “by what others did to you, by what others made you do to yourself, and by what you voluntarily chose to do to yourself”. (p.181)

There are three Conversations with Power and there are three leap years twelve years apart from each other (1936, 1948 and 1960). This is the time frame of a crushing history. It is a history which crushes the human spirit and twists arts and artists to the ends of empire, turning them into cowards – which threatened to be a life’s work (being a coward, just to survive).

“It was not easy being a coward. Being a hero was much easier than being a coward. To be a hero, you only had to be brave for a moment – when you took out the gun, threw the bomb, pressed the detonator, did away with the tyrant, and with yourself as well. To be a coward was to embark on a career that lasted a lifetime. You couldn’t ever relax. You had to anticipate the next occasion when you would have to make excuses for yourself, dither, cringe, reacquaint yourself with the taste of rubber boots and the state of your fallen, abject character. Being a coward required pertinacity, persistence, a refusal to change – which made it, in a way, a kind of courage. He smiled to himself and lit another cigarette. The pleasures of irony had not yet deserted him.” (p.171)

Dimitiri Shostakovich was one of the major composers of the twentieth century. I’m no musician but I do know that there are usually four movements to a symphony. That is music’s shape. In his threes, is Barnes describing the way in which totalitarianism deforms truth and beauty? There is the hint of a fourth movement in the opening and closing of the book in epigraph and coda. In these there are the three characters on stage (it’s a station platform). There’s one who remembers, there’s one who hears and there’s one who is a vulgar “half man” (reduced by the noise of time to being less than himself, a mere “technique of survival”. The one who remembered, remembers the vodka and remembers how the one who heard pricked up his ears as he heard the notes of the clinking vodka glasses.

This is what was remembered:

“They were in the middle of Russia, in the middle of a war, in the middle of all kinds of suffering within that war. There was a long station platform, on which the sun had just come up. There was a man, half a man really, wheeling himself along on a trolley, attached to it by a rope threaded through the top of his trousers. The two passengers had a bottle of vodka. They descended from the train. The beggar stopped singing his filthy song. Dimitri Dmitrievich held the bottle, he the glasses. Dimitri Dmitrievich poured vodka into each glass …

He was no barman, and the level of vodka in each glass was slightly different …

But Dimitri Dmitrievich was listening , and hearing as he always did. So when the three glasses with their different levels came together in a single chink, he had smiled, and put his head on one side so that the sunlight flashed briefly off his spectacles, and murmured, “A triad”.

And that was what the one who remembered had remembered. War, fear, poverty, typhus and filth, yet in the middle of it, above it and beneath it and through it all, Dimitri Dmitrievich had heard a perfect triad… a triad put together by three not very clean vodka glasses and their contents was a sound that rang clear of the noise of time, and would outlive everyone and everything. And perhaps, finally, this was all that mattered.” (p.196)

So the tragedy is told in The Noise of Time. There is a lot of time told in a short time. In one moment there is a note of beauty, a sound of music ringing above the noise of time, testimony to the human spirit, crushed, humiliated for so much of the time. There is the sounding of hope.

“Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it. Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once belonged to the aristocracy and the patron. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.” (p.97)

How far are we from Rotherham?

David HerbertLeave a comment

Gaby Hinsliff has suggested that the newly appointed chair of the inquiry into historic child abuse looks at Louise Casey’s inspection report on the Rotherham child abuse scandal. Louise Casey points out the failings of council, police, childrens’ services suggesting that people and agencies were far more concerned about their reputations than about the victims. For Hinsliff the tragedy in Rotherham was made possible by the most ordinary of things. By this, she means that it is ordinary organisation that makes for such tragedies: “Ordinary people, doing ordinary jobs, ordinarily badly”. She writes, “what leaps out from the report isn’t the influence of politics with a big P so much as office politics; all the surprisingly humdrum, niggling things about status and hierarchy and process that determine who counts in an organisation and who is heard.”

The Rotherham Council who presided over the whole very sorry affair have been accused of being over-sensitive in a politically correct sort of way. They were, in fact, not sensitive enough. They were dismissive of uncomfortable truth and bullied disagreeable voices into silence and hundreds of girls and families have suffered as result of these ordinary people doing ordinary jobs ordinarily badly.

But how far are we from Rotherham? Uncomfortable truth and disagreeable voices are hard to hear and easy to ignore. We like the sound of our own voice, and we like the ones who are like us and form them into our company. So, how far removed is our ordinary organising (intrapersonal and interpersonal) from the folly of Rotherham?

Louise Carey’s report focusses on Rotherham, but is more than Rotherham. It’s about all ordinary organisation that doesn’t listen to the “wrong” people and that is insensitive to the plight of the wronged people. It’s about government, institutional life, the office, family and my own self-ish ways. It’s about intentional and unintentional victims and how we listen to them and how we listen to each other.

The church also, and perhaps particularly, is not a million miles from Rotherham in doing an ordinarily bad job of not listening to uncomfortable truth and allowing abuse to flourish unchecked. Pope Francis, in his exhortation The Joy of the Gospel (just reading) is conscious of this background. He encourages a better sort of organisation in which the right and wronged people are heard, in which the poor are the evangelisers and in which the church and pastoral workers continue to be evangelised and changed. He yearns for a a church which is poor (not so bothered by its own reputation?) and for the poor (198) and he begs the Lord “to grant us more politicians who are genuinely disturbed by the state of society, the people, the lives of the poor”. Hinsliff’s appeal rings the same bells: “all institutions need faintly oddball, stubborn, counter-cultural people who may well be irritating to work with but ask the questions others don’t.”

Rotherham is our own backyard. Rotherham is in our mind. Rotherham is only extraordinary in the scale of its terrible consequences. A lot of our organisation is ordinarily bad, lacking sensitivity, intelligence and curiosity.