Sunday 29 June 2008 1 Kings 19, Luke 23 Melanie

I don’t know what you think about abstract art. Some people love it, others hate it, but children sometimes have the clearest perspective.

A grandmother once told me that her grandson best summed up her feelings about abstract art. They were looking at a painting with a wild mish-mash of colours and he asked, "What's that?" She said, "It's supposed to be a cowboy on his horse." "Well," he continued, "Why isn't it?"

The passages we heard today are like a piece of abstract art; a man praying as he nears the end of his life; a cup. Another man on a mountain surrounded by earthquake, wind and fire.

And the title of the painting is freedom.

Our human minds struggle to understand, to make links between the images, to discern, to penetrate what the artist means, to make some sense of seemingly random pictures.

First there is the cup. What does it hold? Does it contain all the emotions and events in life?
Does it contain wine? The wine of the Passover meal?

Then there is the silence of the mountain. Silence in which God speaks. Silence that comes deeply into the human spirit, that gives the meaning to speech, and yet creates richer silences.

Then there is the word 'freedom' boldly proclaimed at the top of the picture. What do we mean by freedom?

Abandonment, letting go, loss of control?

Always though to be free means to start from somewhere where we are not free. How can we be free unless we are first attached? Attached to something, by even the slenderest of threads, yet by that one thread still held, still fixed, until we find a way to cut the thread and be free.

And so the man in the garden prays. He prays to be released from this cup, the cup that holds so much. The cup that is full of joy, sorrow, blessing, praise, death, life, sickness, health. The cup that holds all things together.

The cup that is so full that we can scarcely begin to understand its contents. The cup that takes every ounce of energy to speak about.

The man on the mountain continues to wait. He listens to the howling wind, splitting and shattering rocks, breaking and destroying mountains.

He watches the earthquake tear into the landscape, ripping apart centuries of geology, bringing man made structures crashing around him.

He smells the fire, smoke reaching into every inch of earth, flames spreading talons near and far.

Yet still he waits. He waits in the silence, the silence where sorrows and joy emerge from their hidden place, the silence where the overflowing cup looks him in the face.

Then the voice of God in the silence, searching, probing, seeing to the depths of the soul and the cup of life - once safely hidden, now frighteningly displayed - vulnerable raw and exposed.

No wonder the man in the garden pleaded that the cup be taken away. Which of us could face the intensity of the cup?

The temptation is to run, to run from the silence, to run from self confrontation, to run from speaking about our inner life; to find a place of safety, away from the fire, the earthquake, the wind, a sacred place where we are not exposed. Not in a garden, or on a mountain - little to protect us from the cup of life there.

But here was God, in a place that was exposed, raw, vulnerable.

The still small voice of God

A still small voice offering what?
Perhaps a way to cut the thread
To cut the thread that attaches us to human fears
of exposure, vulnerability.

God's still small voice, that offers us the chance to abandon our deepest selves
to cut the thread that ties us to the cup of life
to experience the very deepest joy
that we will never experience in our life on earth

To come close to true freedom, abandonment, freedom to rejoice beyond the cup of life.

But without the cup, would we have reached freedom? Probably not.

Without experiencing the vulnerability of being human, would we have heard the voice of God?

The cup and the silence, these are two key shapes that have been with me through the last 5 years

Drinking from the cup has been hard, painful. This chalice that I was given five years ago
as I began this final stage of the journey to ordination has often challenged me, frequently hurt me, many times seemed an obstacle to me. I often echoed Christ's words “Father, take this cup from me.”

Then there has been the silence. All that has been left when words seemed shabby, helpless; when sentences seemed impossible.

And yet, out of this has emerged freedom, abandonment, joy, (or as I interpret it, trampolining, juggling, unicycling), all from the cup of the Passover and the silence and the voice of God.


And so the picture takes shape, the kaleidoscope of images - at first random - now begin to have a pattern.

The garden, the mountain, the earthquake, the wind, the fire, the silence, the cup.

Abandonment and freedom in Christ - freedom to rejoice.