Si comprehendis, non est Deus

(Eccles 11,12)

As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother's womb,
so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things.

That reading from Ecclesiastes wasn’t intended to be a test of your attention span, honestly. I am quite sorry that this is a sermon and not a discussion, as it would be so interesting to know which verse or verses jumped out at each one of you. A friend used to say to me that whenever you read a Bible passage with attention, God underlines something in red for you. Or, as Kierkegaard said, the way to read the Bible is to remember at all times “It is of me this is spoken, to me this is said”. The Bible isn’t a book like any other. Well, of course it isn’t, it isn’t a single book at all but a library. But I mean more than that.

It’s obvious that the epistles of Paul are letters, from Paul to a specific group of Christians and, with the proviso that some things will not apply in different circumstances and to different people, to all people. But the whole Bible is a letter, or a collection of letters, from God to God’s people; and “God’s people” means every human being. We can read some parts of the Bible out of interest – historical interest, sometimes; cultural interest; literary interest. That’s fine, of course it is. When I look at old letters from my late friend Jo-Jo in South Carolina I am interested in what he tells me about his own life, what his grandmother says about the race laws in America in the last century, and what his wife experienced when on active service in Iraq. But if I just wanted to know about life on Death Row, segregation, and the US military, I‘d read a book. I read those letters because they are from Jo-Jo to me. And if the Bible is a collection of letters from God to me, from God to you, then that is the primary reason why we read it – if we do.

Life is difficult. If we have any sense we do not try to go it alone. In my opinion trying to go it alone, refusing to take wisdom from wherever it may be found, is the characteristic not of the adult but of the child, not of the strong person but of the person who is afraid that their weakness will be discovered. I once shocked a boss (I should say that I knew I was going to be resigning in a couple of days!) by saying “Yes, you know, I’m fallible, like most of the human race. Do you have a problem with that?”

I think it was Augustine who said “Si comprehendis, non est Deus”: “If you understand it, it isn’t God”. I’d go further. I’d say that since everything is charged with the grandeur of God, everything has God as its ground, then “Life, the Universe and Everything” is beyond our comprehension. The answer may as well be 42 as anything else. Which is why I am completely unfazed by Ecclesiastes and his cry of “vanity of vanities, all is vanity”.

I come back again and again to Kierkegaard’s comparison of the Christian life to floating over seventy fathoms of water (that’s 140 yards or 420 feet…a lot of water). I can never understand how people can consider faith to be a crutch. Real faith spends most of its time staring things straight in the eyes. Our moments of faith are when we say, with Job, “Though God slay me, yet will I trust in Him”. Real faith means living in reality, facing the apparent vanity, meaninglessness, keeping death ever before our eyes (that recommendation has a good pedigree – it comes from St Benedict, not me). Because death is the moment when everything but reality is stripped away.

Some of you may recognise this sentence: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face, with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind” Yes, it’s Karl Marx, Das Kapital, and it’s the description of life when the bourgeoisie are in power. It’s a bad situation, but it has its plus side, because it is the situation that leads to the proletarian revolution. Now I’m not talking politics here. I am quoting that sentence because I can see such a clear parallel with that terribly uncomfortable moment when the ground of certainty is no longer there, and we are floating above seventy fathoms, relying on faith alone, on unfelt faith alone, on the unseen and unknown God. “Si comprehendis, non est Deus”. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

That is probably the most precious and significant moment in the life of any human being. If you asked me to name the important moments in my life I wouldn’t mention any of the outward events. I would name those moments when all that was solid melted into air. When I took apart my faith (or it collapsed around me) and rebuilt it stone by stone. I can stand up here and talk like this because what I say comes from experience. I don’t do theory now, though undoubtedly you do need theory first to underpin and to some extent explain experience.

Just as it takes nerve sometimes to say “I don’t know”, so it takes nerve to know, to face, that ultimately it is between me – you – and God, and nothing else on earth has any real reality. We have constructed amazing cities, amazing machinery, we have domesticated the world and all that is in it. We have even had a good shot at domesticating cats. But we are alone with God as surely as was the first human being who discovered God’s presence in his cave.

Frightening? No, not really. Not when you face that realisation and its implications rather than turning away and distracting yourself. Esther prayed to God in a terrifying situation and said “For there is none other that fighteth for us, but only Thou, O God”. Indeed – but why would she need anyone else? We are alone with God – indeed we are, but who better to be alone with?

Theorising will tell us a certain amount about God. Definitions may help, as long as we don’t push analogies too far. But “si comprehendis, non est Deus”. We don’t theorise about our friends and the people we love, we get to know them.
And so I come back to the Bible. In my opinion there are two ways of getting to know God: God in his word and God in his creation. The book of the Bible and the book of my life. We are made, as I insist ad nauseam, in God’s image and likeness. We will discover an immense amount about God by looking at ourselves and all the other images and likenesses around us. As the Quakers say, by seeing “that of God” in each person. And we go to the Bible partly to see more images and likenesses, but above all to read God’s letter to me, to you.

You do not need to be a biblical scholar – trust me on this: I used to be one. The way to read the Bible is to read it knowing that God is saying something to you, personally, and you will hear it if you give it time. Read it slowly. And as soon as you spot the red underlining, stop and sit with it. Let it sink in and then have a talk with God about it, not forgetting to listen when God answers. It’s known as lectio divina and as prayer – and both are very much easier than you were ever told. Why don’t you start with that huge Ecclesiastes passage that we heard earlier? I bet you won’t get halfway through the first chapter before you see something that speaks to your own life. And the God with whom you are alone will suddenly seem a whole lot more real, more close and more reliable. And you will know that you are not alone at all.

And so let us pray: O you who are the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets, Christ our God, you have carried out the Father’s will in its entirety. Fill our hearts with love and our souls with light each time we take your holy scriptures in our hands, you who live and reign with the Father and the Spirit, one God for ever and ever. Amen.