Ordinary and extraordinary

Short sermon preached at St Alphege 8am Eucharist on Sunday 5th July 2009
Trinity 4 – Proper 9 – Year B

Readings: [Ezekiel 2: 1-5] 2 Corinthians 12: 2-10 Mark 6: 1-13


Four times a year I go to Glasshampton Monastery in Worcestershire to make my confession and to receive spiritual direction from Br Anselm of the Society of St Francis. As well as being a priest of the Church of England, Br Anselm is a Franciscan friar and has spent the last 56 years living the simple life of community envisaged by St Francis, guided by vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.
I was very interested to see an interview with Br Anselm, which appears on the back page of this week’s Church Times. In the interview he is asked when he is most happy. He recalls a moment from last summer, when he was sitting on a stool in the garden at Glasshampton picking spinach in the sunshine. I was very struck by this answer. Firstly I was struck by what a very ordinary and simple thing that was. Happiness is something that we all search for and for many of us it seems very illusive; but sitting in the garden picking spinach; it would probably be very easy for most us to do something quite similar to that. Secondly I was struck because I know that Br Anselm takes his stool and does some work in the garden almost every day. OK, the sun doesn’t shine every day, but it does seem that he has a happy lifestyle.
And Anslem’s lifestyle is worth some reflection. In many ways his lifestyle is extremely simple, natural and ordinary. Most of his days are made up of domestic chores, welcoming visitors and gardening, as well as the moments for prayers and meals around which the monastery life is structured. But the simplicity and ordinariness of this lifestyle has to be compared with some aspects which are very radical and extreme. The monastery is in the middle of nowhere. It reflects a real poverty, with no central heating and a rather run down, in need of decoration, feel. Then there is the celibacy; few of us could cope with that. And obedience; for many of us that would feel like a denial of freedom. So Anselm has a lifestyle which is on the one hand extremely ordinary, and on the other is very radically different.
I think we get a sense of both this ordinariness and this radical difference in our gospel reading today. Jesus returned to his home town of Nazareth and teaches in the synagogue. The radical wisdom of his teaching and the great power of his miracles were on display, and people were amazed. But at the same people just could not grasp it because they knew it was Jesus, the very ordinary boy who had grown up among them, not in any way outstanding or remarkable, but the very normal son of Mary and the carpenter. People could not get their heads round it, and they took offence at Jesus.
And there is a hint of the same contrast in our reading from St Paul. On the one hand St Paul has received visions of the third heaven, of paradise, and he has received unspeakable revelations of an exception character. On the other hand he suffers from some thorn in the flesh. We don’t know what it is but the scholars speculate that it is some physical or physiological problem, from which Paul can never escape, but which gave him pain and made him weak as a human being. How normal and ordinary! How easily we can identify with that; some enduring problem which never goes away, but which frustrates us in so many ways.
And it seems to me that, as each of us walk the journey towards heaven we should expect to see some of this contrast in our own lives too. As we grow in holiness we should expect to become more radical in our choice of God and our love for other people. We should expect extraordinary and remarkable things to happen. But at the same time, if we live as God wants us to live, then the beauty and fulfilment of God’s creation in us should start to become apparent. There should be a simplicity and ordinariness about our lives; naturalness about everything we do. These are the characteristics of the saints. This is the way of heaven.