Big Ben and the Birds

Every Remembrance Sunday at the cenotaph Big Ben is heard.  The remembrancers fall silent as a representation that the guns fell silent on the original Armistice day in 1918.

At the same moment a set of guns are fired by the Royal Horse Artillery and after two minutes the guns fire again to mark its ending.

We do our imitation of this silence (without the guns) in church.  

Silence is quite empty on the face of it.  In church we often imply the value of perhaps praying.  we do not mind that young children can't stay quiet.

There are no children at the cenotaph.  But neither is there quiet (even though David Dimbleby usually says that silence has fallen).

Big Ben is not silent.  After striking the arrival of eleven it faithfully ploughs on eleven times.  Time does not stop for our quietness.  Whether the guns fire on or not time continues to march.  In war human beings seem so big (if they're winning), so small (when they lose).  But time makes every human being small.  For me it is impossible to imagine the cenotaph ceremony without the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh: what I cannot imagine, Time requires me to accept as inevitable.  Even our bloodiest wars are doomed to be dwarfed by the relentless march of Time.

Then there's the birds.  As the artillery gun is fired every year there is the sound of scuttling birds.  Whether anyone notices I do not know.  It reminds us that whatever the immensities of human war, nature in some form, marches on.  Of course war ruins the natural world for a time, but all of us who have stood in normal looking fields or valleys or on normal looking hillsides and tried vainly to imagine that this was once where the battle happened know that Nature, like Time, dwarfs the greatest human conflicts.

How much more true this is of Nature and Time's Creator.

Just a minute

Sermons don't come much shorter than this.

I would be a rich man if I had been given a donation every time someone made a comment about long sermons in my hearing or reading with the implication that a shorter sermon would obviously be better (see previous blog regarding a disappearing newspaper's editorial, for example). 

As I did not attend the service I cannot confirm directly the success of this attractive advertisement for brevity but I was outside not long before the service was due to commence and there was no queue!  I did some further investigation on the Church's website however.  Websites, for all their techno wonder, are often more out of date than a good old fashioned notice and thus I read an earlier version of the service there:

1.10 pm Holy Communion (said) (lasts twenty-five minutes), with two minute sermon.

Aha!  I have, then, discovered that if I get my sermons down to two minutes I will find that is way too much to bring them in - exactly 100% too much in fact.  Thoughts race round my head - what if the new one minute version is also unsuccessful?  Half a minute - would that work?

The good news is that, given restraining circumstances, a preacher can make a decent fist of it in about five seconds, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved" (Acts 16:31).

Except that we are told that the apostles then spent time telling the family the Word of the Lord.

And if Jesus had not taught all afternoon long there would never have been the feeding of the five thousand who had listened and learned hour after hour.  Indeed, they would have never been fed at all - which is rather the point.

Time

The British (though strangely no individual Briton I have met) are quite keen on ancient peculiarities.  We had a dose of them at the Royal Wedding recently when the Archbishop, dressed in finery that threatened to outshine the bride but bespeaking some other century, led the couple in thees and thous, past a betwixt and a wedlock and generally reminded us of the glories, if such they be, of ancient Church of England liturgy. 

You can get an ancient peculiarity daily in Oxford Cathedral (which, were I an Anglican, would be my diocesan mother church).  For Oxford cathedral keeps Oxford time, not Greenwich Mean Time or British Summer Time like the rest of the nation.  So the 11:00am service starts at 11:00am Oxford time, which was five minutes later than London.  So, unless you've adjusted your watch, it will be 11:05 to you.

It's all a bit of odd fun, isn't it?

Mmm.  Yet in the field of human life there are few things more important than than marriage, the public commitment of a man and a woman to stay together faithfully until parted by death.  If there is something more important it might be a service of worship at which humans gather to address, and be addressed by, their God and Saviour.  So why, I wonder, are these things the ones that are anachronistic?  Why make these the museum pieces?

Although, of all the things that happen in Oxford, only the worship of almighty God is stuck in this time warp the real peculiarity is this - that worship of almighty God is the only thing happening in Oxford that will also happen in a New Order of things when time itself is history . . .