SERMON given by The Rev’d Ross Collins on 5
March
at the baptism of
Thomas Scott
What will Thomas be? A great musician? A world-class Sportsman? A revered religious leader? Would we wish any of these on him? From Mozart to Maradona to Martin Luther King - they were all tortured souls and flawed despite their achievements.
My father has a very specific take on sport. As befits a man who might have been created to personify the Scottish establishment, with its values of restraint, intellectual rigour and integrity; for him, sport is dismissed as “entertainment”. Not believing myself to be part of the Scottish establishment, I would respond,
“Well, yes, exactly, that’s why I love it”.
But believe you me, there is little more profound denigration he could have made. Except perhaps that of extravagance (but then enough of my besmirching the family name).
My father does actually follow one sport - wrestling.
“But”, you may say “of all sports, that’s the one most ridden with entertainment!”
“Precisely” says my father, “but at least it’s honest about
it. It has the virtue of
integrity”. And so on, one of my
formative experiences as a ten year old was being taken by my father in his 3
piece tweed suit and brown brogues to
I’ve always viewed my father’s approach to sport as a sort of affliction. It’s a bit like the person to whom you can play the most sublime Mozart, immerse (to please Sunny, our organist) in the divine richness of Bach, or (to indulge me) the quasi-philosophical late quartets of Beethoven for them to respond to you: ”well thank you very much, I’ll stick with Britney Spears”. That too is a sort of affliction.
I felt the same way being interviewed in
“Why should we waste money employing someone to peddle divisive ignorance to our students?” Quite what Richard Dawkins was doing on a panel to appoint a theology fellow, I don’t know, but there has always been something in his thought that strikes me less a product of rigorous dispassionate, intellectual critique and more of a personal affliction.
So far, I’ve suggested there is a parallel between the worlds of sport, music and religion - and that in missing what each of them can convey less a choice and more an affliction.
There is a deeper point I would now like to introduce. It is that they are similar in their relation to us as human beings; that there is something in each that gives us our humanity.
To hear a master playing Bach sonatas and partitas for solo violin; to relish the delight of Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro” is not just to enjoy beauty or admire skill. It is not even merely to have some key human truth expressed to you; is it to experience as purely as one can this side of heaven what is to be fully human, to come closer to our identity as God’s children. To discover that we who are created are yet called to partake in His work of creation, to find that we are almost free from the shackles of imperfection and united with the harmony and order of the divine universe. There is something at the heart of this that is truly spiritual.
I would also say the same about sport - the highest moments in it reach, to my soul, the same spiritual peaks.
My first example probably owes its origin to my nationality -
Maradona’s 2nd goal against
Or take Gareth Edwards’ try for the Barbarians against
Or remember Botham at Headingley in 1981….
In each of these, something clicked and the mere striving for perfection that is part of all sport (or music - or worship) slipped behind as we, as spectators, found ourselves thrilled, ecstatically towards the heart of what it is to be human.
In religion this can of course happen too:
The extraordinary oratory and spiritual
power of Martin Luther King “I have a dream” speech in
The time when I witnessed John Paul II in Paraguay berate in halting Spanish the dictator of 34 years sitting feet away from him in front of a million (a quarter) of his cowed and abused countrymen.
It must have been there when the spoilt and pampered Francis stripped naked in front of the nobles and peoples of Assisi and said “I will renounce wealth - this is not the way of Christ.’’
You will know this from much smaller, personal moments, in worship, where somehow all came together. It might be in a time of private prayer, or in the most profound moments in a relationship. “God was there” you say. How do you know? It was in the moment, it was in the sense of liberation, of feeling true, of experiencing fullness of humanity, of touching the divine.
In theological terms, this is caught most beautifully in today’s gospel in its talk of the Divine Word. This is the moment when for some of you I might slip from the ridiculous to the sublime - or lose you altogether - but it is the key to the aspirations of music and sport and to the mystery of human existence.
The world has not been created as an anarchic accident. It is moved with order, harmony, balance, perfection, albeit marred by the presence of evil and discord however that entered into it.
It is this that St John refers to as the Logos - the Word - the divine blueprint for Creation - the sense that the whole order of the universe sprung out of divine love and is shot through with goodness. But, it is not just that. This Word, this divine harmony, this power that produced creation and us has not left us alone - it seeks to burst through our individual and communal existence as the pinnacle of our human identity and our impelling calling - indeed, our ultimate destiny. Most profoundly, this is seen not just as inextricably involucrated in our human essence, but actually and beautifully incarnate in one human being: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have beheld his glory, that of the only Son of the Father”. That Word has never left us. It is always looking for ways in which the divine will erupt again in our lives. May Thomas know that thrill - that anticipation of heaven in his life - and may God’s glory shine through him and all of us.