Jumping out of Planes
Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
This time 5 years ago, I spent a day-and-a-half at the US and NATO air base at Ramstein in Germany. It wasn’t supposed to be that long, but I was waiting to parachute into a large multi-national exercise in South Germany, and conditions, apparently, have to be just right in order to throw a couple of hundred men out of a plane. The waiting is excruciating. Obviously, jumping out of plane makes everyone nervous (I never met anyone in the army who liked doing it; Although there is someone on the PCC who does it as a hobby – what a parish we are); On this jump I was with a soldier who told me he liked to sing “Glory, glory what a helluva way to die” all the way down to the tune of the Battle hymn of the Republic, Which was good, I thought. At least, if anything happened, he was singing a hymn tune. But after the intolerable wait, we were loaded-on like cattle, bent double, as, between the weight of 2 parachutes and kit, we all carried more than our own body weight. Being a padre, my burden was fairly light, but I’d been hanging out with the mortar platoon and felt sorry for them because their weapons and ammunition are so heavy they didn’t have space for water and food. Here I made a definite mistake as I offered to help, and got loaded with 20kg of machine gun ammunition. Soldiers are nothing if not opportunists. I was carrying that ammunition for the next 3 days. My yoke wasn’t easy, or my burden light.
Anyway, at dusk, we took off and screamed along for a while as the pilots practised low flying drills and everyone was sick, before gratefully exiting the plane, with 45 seconds in the air hanging between God and earth; Just enough time to get organised in order to hit the ground without breaking your legs.
At that point, we gathered and then spent the next 9 hours marching in the dark. I assume someone knew where we were going but everyone else was just following the man in front of them. It felt like the blind leading the blind, but eventually we stopped and just lay down where we were to sleep. No sleeping bags. I didn’t get my sleeping bag until day 6. I can’t remember of what I dreamt, but I started recording my dreams this summer and realised, perhaps not surprisingly, that all my anxiety dreams now feature life in 2PARA.
Something similar’s happening to Jacob in today’s Old Testament reading. His family are the other side of the river, a figure has dropped from the sky, and Jacob suffers this night of endurance, struggling enough to dislocate his hip. That image gives us an iconic picture of the life of faith, a night-long wrestling with God. As today’s epistle tells us: ‘Be persistent whether the time is favourable or unfavourable’; have ‘the utmost patience’. At the end Jacob is renamed Israel – head of the great family that will take on new adventures as the people of God; that will resume this wrestling match as they fall in and out of faith and favour.
We hear of expressions like ‘the Dark Night of the Soul’ and we often think it is the night of agony, of grief, that is the greatest threat to our faith. Historically this is not true. Church attendance during the major European wars grew, as it did in the 1920s. National duress traditionally improves church-attendance. Covid may be the exception. But it’s the comfortable years of the Baby Boomers that have seen the church in decline. Faith’s greatest enemy isn’t suffering but leisure. For the Victorians, the bicycle was the enemy of faith, more recently, television. Today, I imagine it’s Pinterest or TicToc that tempts everyone to stay in bed on a Sunday morning.
The same is true for individuals. If you’re wrestling with ‘why’ questions – Why did this happen, why me, why is the world like this, why did I get fired when it was her idea? You’re in the business of faith – wrestling with an angel. It’s largely indifference that kills faith – The thought that nothing really matters. To not engage in the difficult questions of life, but just flick between Netflix and Amazon Prime.
And when you read the Bible it’s not about saints, the psalms are not respectable prayers – It’s about the struggle to stay true, to keep the faith; While the psalms contain all the anger, bitterness, fear and fervour of men and women trying desperately to work out how to hold on to that faith when everyone else is losing their heads and worse.
In today’s Gospel, we have this peculiar story. The characters are morally ambiguous. For the sake of the parable, Jesus does not define them as a just judge, or a widow with a deserving case; The justice of God does not always meet our understanding, and we are frequently far from deserving. The story is told simply to labour the point of persistence. It’s not always about being good. Doing the right thing. Sometimes faith is just about keeping on. Having the resilience to keep praying even when it seems the lights have gone off and no one is home; In dire circumstances, to not lose heart.
We will have to wait and see whether the children come back from Sunday School, having learned that Jesus is telling them to keep nagging and pestering until they get their way. But this is the message of the Gospel. Churchill’s KBO – Be persistent whether the time is favourable or unfavourable.
Rhiannon’s mother has been with us this weekend. She flew here from Lourdes, which is close to where they live, and, when we spoke about it, she remarked that the most moving thing at the famous shrine was where the step had been worn away, worn smooth by the number of feet that passed through a certain point. You see this on the steps of medieval churches where the stone, polish smooth, dips at the threshold by the everyday friction of generations. A True faith is something that is battled over, worn smooth with favourable times, unfavourable times and hard fought nights of wrestling. Patiently coming to church even if you’re not sure why.
It’s important to ask difficult questions, to wrestle with God. Human beings have been doing this for millenia and the basic structure of these questions hasn’t changed. It may not feel like we’re wrestling with an angel, but simply the darkness within our own minds; But that is exactly where we will confront the darkness of God; And whether it’s intolerable waiting, A sudden rush of air around our head, A difficult landing, Or most often hours of trudging through the night weighed down by useless ammunition, In our persistence we will ultimately know the justice of the Son of Man, and find in that struggle our formation as the people of God. Amen.