Have you ever come across Simon Hoggart with his grumpy line of humour which he peddles in the Guardian and the Spectator and formerly in the News Quiz? I do like him and I was reading his column a couple of weeks ago on the subject of Salisbury Cathedral and he was saying how his love of Choral Evensong there was enhanced still further by the fact that you didn’t have to suffer a sermon.
I did wonder whether we should follow Salisbury’s lead and forego the irritating interruption of wonderful life enhancing music by something as prosaic as one of my sermons, but that is not our way here I’m afraid.. I shall, however, take the hint and keep the interruption brief.
Interruptions – don’t you just hate them? Although sometimes when I’m driving along listening yet again to one of the tiny handful of CD’s that has inhabited my car for the years since I last cleared it out, I do welcome the interruption of a distant radio station putting my mind at rest about the free flow of traffic on the South Wales motorways. And of course it can be quite cheering in a schadenfreude sort of way to be told that you’re nowhere near the monster traffic jam currently developing where the M5 meets the M6. But maybe that’s just me.
It will be 40 years in April since the American civil rights leader was Martin Luther King was assassinated. One of the most poignant things to be recovered from his effects were some notes for a sermon he was preparing, which was called interruptions. He’d written, “The major problem of life is learning how to handle the costly interruptions — the door that slams shut, the plan that got sidetracked, the marriage that failed, or that lovely poem that didn’t get written because someone knocked on the door.” Sadly, brutally, he never got the chance to expand on that thought as his death soon after was rather more than just an interruption.
But it’s interesting that a man with such force and charisma was reflecting on this – and I’m sure it is true – we are all faced with interruptions big and small to our plans, our hopes and our schedules and agonise over how to handle them. For how we deal with them says a lot about the value we place on other people and about our own priorities.
Our readings this afternoon were, as we said, consecutive, and provide plenty of scope for reflection on the way people interrupt one another or sometimes don’t when perhaps they should – Jairus interrupting Jesus’ teaching to ask about his daughter, Jesus accepting the interruption of the woman when he was on a life and death mission – who’d have blamed him if he told her to come back later? – the folk from the leader’s house telling Jairus not to bother. I suspect they had thought that Jairus should never have gone in the first place – ought not he to be with his family and sick daughter at such a time rather than desperately chasing off after some random folk healer?.. I can imagine them thinking. Interruptions everywhere.
And of course the thing is, there are no answers here, just a report on which we can reflect. As they are written, these stories of Jairus and the widow end happily enough, but the gospel acknowledges that it isn’t always so, and Jesus’ self giving life ended in death on a cross. The man for others was rejected by men. Here is no guaranteed blueprint for dealing with life’s challenges.
But what Jairus and the widow shared perhaps was a fragment of hope and a willingness to search. I wonder whether that is what MLK would have put into his sermon had he ever written it? In his “I have a dream” speech, he repeated that phrase, “I have a dream” eight times then rounded it off with the words, “this is our hope.” Call it a trick of oratory if you like, but there’s something in that. Our dreams may be interrupted by life’s unpleasant facts and surprises, as were those of many of King’s listeners, doors may close and plans may be thwarted, but when such things happen, we can continue to live in hope and search for the way ahead.
A lot of the time though, things aren’t nearly so dramatic, are they? We keep busy, we’re doing OK, such interruptions as we get are nothing we can’t handle and the sun is shining, metaphorically if not in fact. Perhaps then, a time for reflection and perhaps a bit of searching, giving God a chance to interrupt our thoughts, if you want to put it that way, is just as important. Even when it’s going well, we need to give ourselves time to review and renew our hopes and priorities.
I’ve interrupted the music for long enough … let’s sing again