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If you'll forgive me, I'm not going to go into detail about our Old Testament reading this evening. If you want to reflect on this passage perhaps I could offer one idea for your consideration. This is not just the end of the book of Genesis: it's the start of the book of Exodus. Joseph and his brothers, from whom descend the twelve tribes of Israel, are now established in Egypt. At the start of the next book in the Bible, Exodus, we have moved forward three hundred years, and a new and very important character now appears on the stage: the people of Israel. And we can think of the rest of the Old Testament, if we want to boil it down to the bones, as the story of God's relationship with the People of Israel. One interesting thing about this last chapter of Genesis is that this is the moment their shadow first falls onto the narrative.
Let me, however, leave our Old Testament reading for your private consideration and pass on to our Epistle. Like almost everything St Paul writes this is a meaty and complex passage, replete with wisdom and awkward questions, and it would be irresponsible not to scrutinise it. There are parts of the Bible in which God speaks simple words of comfort. But where he speaks through St Paul, most of the time he speaks to challenge us and wake us up and oblige us to reflect. The passage we just read seemed to me to raise two awkward points for us here, which I'd like to deal with now, taking the more general first and then the more specific.
The first and most obvious awkward question comes in verse 17. "You may be giving thanks well enough, but the other man is not edified". Throughout our passage St Paul is writing to the Church in Corinth about what they are and should be doing in church. And he says, broadly, there are two different kinds of things each of us has to do in church: we worship God in our own hearts; and we contribute to making the church a place where everybody else can do this too. And his point is, if we're just doing the first of these, perhaps that's not enough.
We here are indeed, as Paul says "praising God with our spirit". But that's not enough he goes on. If someone comes into the church from outside with an inquiring mind, that person should also be able to say "Amen" to our thanksgiving. "Amen", as you scarcely need me to remind you, is a Hebrew word meaning roughly "may it be so". One can only say "may it be so" after a prayer if one has some idea what the prayer was for. One question St Paul puts to us is, how many people in Fulbourn today would be able to say "Amen to our thanksgiving"?
This is particularly challenging to us here because we are the Church of England. This is not an optional extra. It's not an alternative. It is not a minority interest hobby. We are the State Church,.the church for everyone in Fulbourn. It's perfectly alright for people to worship in other churches or none, but the Church of England is still their church whether they know it or not. It should be possible for anyone in the parish to come to church with us and find God here.
But how can we accomplish this in a country where so few people now are taught to respect the tradition of worship in which we stand? Well, if I knew the answer to that question I'd be the Archbishop of Canterbury. One thing I do know though, is that it doesn't mean changing everything we do to suit other people. The church is often told to make itself relevant to the modern world. But it must be true to some extent that the modern world should make itself relevant to the church. What we do here is uplifting, comforting and, I firmly believe, pleasing to God. Our tradition is a good one, hallowed by time, proven serviceable by use both here and in every corner of the globe, and rooted in scripture.
Yet even our tradition challenges us. If we turn to the Thirty Nine Articles we find at Article XXIV "It is a thing plainly repugnant to the Word of God, and the custom of the Primitive Church, to have publick Prayer in the Church, or to minister the Sacraments in a tongue not understanded of the people." And I think we would have to admit that, given the sad condition of twenty-first century culture, the beautiful and enlivening cadences of Archbishop Cranmer's prayer book are on the verge of being "a tongue not understanded of the people". What can we do about this problem? I don't know. Perhaps we could look for different ways to make people welcome before and after the services. Perhaps something as simple as a service booklet with more detailed instructions would help. Perhaps even some classes for people who might obtain great benefits from chanting the psalms with us but who simply don't know how.
What I find impossible to baulk is St Paul's challenge: "try to excel in gifts that build up the church". In the year 2004 when we see godlessness on every hand, St Paul's words should challenge us with some urgency. I'm sorry if I seem to be avoiding saying anything specific about how to respond to that challenge. This is because I don't know how. I think about it a lot. I'm sure you do to. I am confident that if God wants us to do this thing, of making it possible for more people to join in our thanksgiving and prayers, then he will answer these questions in due season. Our part is to be faithful in seeking his will. St Paul, characteristically, can be relied on not to let us forget our duty.
Thus one challenge from our passage in St Paul: how to make it possible for the four or five thousand people in Fulbourn who don't go to church to come into the church and say Amen to our thanksgiving.
But of course - and here I pass to the second aspect of the passage that commended itself to me as I was considering it in preparing this sermon - of course St Paul, as well as challenging us to ensure in general terms that our private devotions don't impede our public worship, is also talking in specific way about a particular spiritual practice. It is not a practice we are very familiar with here, but it has been part of the experience of the church down the ages, and here it is coming back to us now in St Paul, and it would be an error not to examine it a little, alien though it may be. It is the practice of speaking in tongues.
If you were to go to a Pentecostalist church you would hear a lot of this. At different points in the service - not a service with quite the same orderly structure as our own - you would hear the congregation singing or praying out loud in what might sound to you like a foreign language, or might sound to you like incoherent babbling. Now, I don't set up as an authority on the spiritual experience of other people. I am certain that in some Pentecostalist churches there are some people who are just babbling. But I am equally certain that many pentecostalists, as they call out in what sounds like a foreign language, but not one written in any dictionary, are touched by the Holy Ghost and are praising God in truth. This is a form of worship that works. It's not quite clear how it works. After all if God the Holy Ghost is moving them to speak in tongues, is it they who are worshipping? Well I think the answer is yes. St Paul says "anyone who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men" - fair enough - "but to God".
And I must say, speaking from my own experience, I have sometimes found myself, in my own private devotions, half intentionally, half unwittingly, uttering words that I don't understand. It's an odd thing to talk about because, in the nature of private devotions, it's private. But what I can tell you is that I find sometimes if I'm struggling to express myself to God, for example if I am praying about some difficult argument I might have had where I'm not sure of the rights and wrongs of the situation, and where my sense of disquiet and need for God's help outstrips my power of expression - in such a situation I may find myself uttering speech not found in the dictionary. It's odd and mysterious but it does seem to be beneficial. As a personal spiritual practice I commend it to anybody to whom it recommends itself.
The difference is, that as St Paul advises, I keep it to myself. I remember when I was an atheist, going to churches because I was interested in this God business, at the time of what they called the "Toronto Blessing". This was a supposed outpouring of the Holy Spirit during which, in churches of a charismatic temper, services involved a lot of speaking in tongues and even screaming, shouting and falling over. In fact I know many people touched by this movement who attest to its having been at least in part, a true manifestation of the divine. I should also say I have worshipped with pentecostalists and formed a positive impression of their faithfullness and their desire to worship God. But whether or not some parts of the Toronto Blessing (and charismatic worship in general) are of human origin, one thing I do know is that as an outsider I was left bemused and sometimes horrified. They may have been speaking to God but they weren't speaking to me. I was, as St Paul says, "a foreigner to the speaker and he a foreigner to me".
In this respect it's important to note that nobody who wandered in off the streets to one of our services would think we had taken leave of our senses. They might not grasp the orotund Elizabethan prose of our prayer book - just as they might have trouble following a performance of Hamlet. But they could not get the idea we were a cult. They would know that whatever we were doing was directed upwards and outwards to God, and was not merely personal and emotional. To that extent we are following St Paul's rule. As he says in verses 18 and 19 "I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you. But in the church I would rather speak five intelligible words to instruct others than ten thousand words in a tongue." My prayer for us is that, as the Church of England has generally tried to do, and as St Paul exhorts us to do, we would find out the middle way: that without departing from the sound sense and beautiful diction of our traditional manner of worship we would be able live up to the whole of our tradition by having public prayer in the church in a tongue understanded of the people.