Sermon for the 9th of February - 4th Sunday Before Lent

You may be wondering why there is a picture from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and what Alice found there on the front cover of your Order of Service. As you can see it features a large egg, Humpty Dumpty, but surely it’s too early for Easter so… in order to shed some light on theI will read you the part of the book that Tenniel is illustrating here:

…There's glory for you!' [exclaimed Humpty Dumpty]

'I don't know what you mean by "glory",' Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course, you don't — till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'

'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.'

I remember reading this exchange between the curious young girl and the arrogant, pedantic egg-head when I was a child and it left me with an unanswered question – ‘what on earth is glory?’
Now the word ‘glory’ is ubiquitous in our church services, prayers and hymns, but do we ever stop to consider what it really means?

The glory of the Lord.
Glory to God in the highest.

Heaven and earth are full of your glory

Glory shone around
Looking for his coming in glory

For yours is the kingdom the power and the glory….

Look up synonyms for ‘glory’ and you will find the following:·brightness, effulgence, fineness, magnificence, pageantry, pomp, preciousness, radiance, resplendence, richness, sublimity, sumptuousness… all these adjectives can be applied to our perception of the nature of God but is that the whole picture?

But, let’s just go back to Alice for a moment. The expression ‘down the rabbit-hole’ seems to be a popular one with the media at the moment – not surprising when our world seems completely topsy-turvy and, like Alice, we are in a kind of Wonderland where nothing is what it seems. And, when she goes through the Looking-Glass, absolutely everything is reversed and back to front, right is left and up is down. Does this sound familiar?

Now, Lewis Carroll was the pen-name of the Reverend Charles Dodgson, a don who spent his life ensconced at Christ Church, Oxford, where he taught logic and mathematics. He was also a pioneer photographer, an inventor of all kinds of puzzles and word-games as well as, of course, being author of the Alice books and several others for children. Although Dodgson remained a deacon and was never ordained, he was a deeply pious man who pondered on many religious, philosophical and metaphysical subjects, as his diaries and letters show. So, I can imagine that he might well have been baffled by the meaning of words, such as ‘glory’…

Professor Thomas A Rohm (of Barrabas Road Church, San Diego) has posted that ‘glory’ is one of the most used words in the Bible, appearing over 600 times in the Old and New Testaments combined, and 42 times in St John’s Gospel alone. The roots of the word suggest dazzling light, considerable weight and great visibility. The Hebrew word for ‘glory’ is kah-vode meaning ‘heaviness’ or even ‘burden’; whereas the Greek do,xa means ‘brightness’, ‘shining’, ‘radiance’; ‘magnificence’, ‘greatness’, ‘splendour’; ‘honour’, ‘fame’, ‘renown’.

But, even so, the glory of God can never be truly defined…

God’s glory is partly revealed to Moses in the Burning Bush, but he wants more; he wants to see God in all his majesty. In Exodus, God spoke to Moses out of the cloud but, when Moses asked to see God’s glory, he was told: ‘You cannot see my face, for no man shall see my face and live.’ So, God hid Moses in a cleft in the rock, covered him with his hand and Moses saw only his back as he passed by. If he had seen his face, he would not have survived to tell the tale. God’s glory has also been partly seen by shepherds watching their flocks on the night of Jesus’ birth and by the three disciples who witness the Transfiguration and who were temporarily blinded by the Light. In John’s Gospel Jesus asks: ‘Father, the hour is come, glorify thy Son that thy son may also glorify thee.’

So, glory is clearly highly visible, overwhelmingly powerful and unbearably beautiful. The light of Divinity is too bright for mortal eyes – just as ‘glory’ cannot be defined by Professor Dumpty, whose dry as dust logic and left-hemisphere learning can never see it. But Alice, the ‘child of pure unclouded brow’, as Lewis Carroll calls her, is open, questioning and receptive to something beyond logic. Then, it seems that it is only when we become innocent and open, ‘as little children’, that we can really begin to catch a glimpse of ‘the glory of the Lord’, until then the face of God is hidden by the Cloud of Unknowing…