Cowes Week Regatta Service
Holy Trinity Cowes
Sunday 31st July 6.15 p.m.
Readings: Job 38:1, 28-37/Prayer of Manasseh 1-7/2 Cor 2:7-12/Jn 21:4-8
Last Sunday afternoon, I was standing on the upper deck of the Isle and Wight ferry. I was watching the roof of the upper saloon, and the way that, whenever the ship tilted back from its regular roll, water would pour down on the deck. Before I could propound some kind of ‘Stevenson’s law’ about the relationship between the tilt of ferries and water trapped inside roof girders, we had already turned towards Portsmouth harbour, the final leg of the journey, and the magic of the process had stopped. I had been on a parish visit to Newport, with a planned procession from St John’s Church to St Thomas’s well and truly rained off, and I suppose what had taken my fancy was some very simple – and rather fatuous – questions about where at least some of the rain-water of the showers that had soaked us all so lavishly earlier that day had got to.
All very simple and innocent – and as I tell you about it now, I can still remember when the movement of the ship back from its list was so jerky that the amount of rainwater nearly soaked an unsuspecting passenger. A bit reminiscent of the Morecombe and Wise ‘Just singing in the rain’ sketch, and I did manage to contain myself! But, as is often the case, it is in the simple and the innocent that we are able to see mirrors of the wider world, with its larger risks, and its tragedies. How many series of factors led that amount of rain to fall on that particular ferry, at the particular time in question; and how much was involved in the tilt of the ferry so that retained water was in a position to be able to cascade down onto the deck? It could so easily have been otherwise – like the Isle of Wight priest who missed an underground train that fateful Thursday morning, and with hindsight is thankful that he did, though full of remorse for those who made it ahead of him.
These are questions that we can’t really leave behind us this year. And I’m not going to indulge in pious platitudes, which were exactly the commodity cascaded on Job when he had the audacity (quite rightly) to ask questions about why his life had taken a dramatic turn for the worse: those ‘Job’s Comforters’, religious people and philosophers as well, arm-chair experts, like those well-intentioned (but actually sentimental) people who really think that the answer to today’s religious-political mess is to drive a nice, big, secularist wedge between religious belief and political involvement. Nor am I going to try to come in heavy with a Christian triumphalism, which says that ‘we have all the answers already.’ I am reminded of the Danish University Chaplaincy with the poster that says, ‘if you haven’t got any problems, come inside and we’ll give you some.’ I’m afraid to say that even bishops aren’t simple or innocent; we have seen too many heart-rending events and anguished faces for me to dare to suggest that faith is easy.
And tonight’s rag-bag of readings does not paper over the cracks of our faltering attempts at faith either. Nor do they produce a system that tries to answer every single one of life’s questions. Working backwards, they are not very impressive – if, that is, slick recipes for a pain-free, thought-free religion or philosophy of life is what we are after. The gospel-passage is about a group of dejected fishermen who have spent some apparently wasted time following a wandering preacher, who, having been very publicly executed for political and religious crimes, they think has gone for ever: only to find that he is there with them – somehow – in the very trade they only went back to as a last resort because the dreams he had taught them seemed finished. Then St Paul, writing to that troublesome, head-strong congregation of mercantile know-alls in Corinth gently exhorts them towards a consistently overlooked code of human conduct – mutual forgiveness – not solely as a way of being a good citizen, but because that is the uncomfortable truth taught and lived and died for by the wandering preacher himself. Then, in that strange ‘Prayer of Manasseh’, a late Jewish psalm, on the very edges of the bible, we find a confession of the glory and distance of God – which goes on, in the remaining verses, to make confession of something else, our weaknesses, and a plea for that forgiveness. And back at last with the first reading, we are treated to the start of God’s long address to Job, not cutting him down to size and humiliating him (that never does anyone any lasting good), but gently putting him in his place: in that passage there are no fewer than twelve questions to Job, and to us, like, ‘where were you when it all began?’ – and many more follow.
When I hear passages like these, and think of both the wonders and the tragedies of the world, from which nothing will insulate me, and when I take the opportunity of watching water pouring by sheer, sheer chance onto the upper deck of an Isle of Wight ferry, I have to ask myself, ‘why do I believe what I believe?’ And the same reply comes back, that I’ve looked at other explanations, but this is the best explanation I can find of why I am here – and in spite of lots of things, and because of many more, God is great and He is good!
+ Kenneth Portsmouth
