This afternoon Guildford Cathedral hosted the South East Region's Handbell Ringers of Great Britain service In Celebration marking their 50th anniversary. The readings were Psalm 150 and John 2:1-11; and the poem was A Melody of Stars by Carol O'Neil.
Living with the Gods has been lauded as among last week’s best radio and rightly so. Neil MacGregor, the man who chronicles history through objects, is exploring the themes of faith and belief, ritual and ceremony. It’s compelling, insightful, fascinating and humbling.
Beginning with a sculpture of the lion man, MacGregor looks at how different societies have sought to make sense of their place within the cosmos and in community through story and symbol.
The poem we’ve heard today talks about the way ‘a patch work of twinkling stars / fill the sky’. Provoking a sense of awe and wonder which is at work within us as we try to connect our place in the world with a sense of the eternal. MacGregor explores the place of fire and water, light and the seasons; he reflects on life and death, the intimacy and protection of mother and infant; the ways we mark adulthood; the power of song and the place of prayer.
There are 30 episodes in this series, and part of me wonders if a bell might be one of the objects used to explore and understand the daily practice of faith. Bells have long been a call to worship. From the first missionaries to this land who used small handbells to call people to prayer to the complexity and beauty of melodies we celebrate today.
The ringing of bells draws us into a pattern of praise which has resounded throughout the generations. Psalm 150 draws heaven and earth together as the sound of praise echoes in earthly sanctuaries and heavenly firmaments; trumpets, lutes, harps; tambourines, stings and pipes. And yes, cymbals too; or perhaps bells! The vibrant sounds of clapper striking metal in a co-ordinated, melodic peal of praise.
In our acts of praise, we are drawn into harmony with the ‘melody of love’ which is at the heart of God. That love was poured out in abundance in creation - which even now echoes the silent music of God’s praise. That gift of love includes the risk of creaturely freedom - and in our lives that music sometimes becomes the ‘skipped beat’ of an unkept promise or the ‘misplaced note’ of an unkind word.
But the love of God is not just a ‘perfect harmony’ which fills outer space. It is a love that is made perfect in human weakness; it is love revealed in Jesus Christ, the one who is God with us. It’s a love which ‘vibrates God’s grace’ reaching out to us in sorrow and despair; which brings hope and forgiveness.
Day by day in churches and cathedrals across our land, it’s a bell ringing out the Angelus which reminds us of the mystery of the incarnation. The angel of the Lord announced this good news to Mary: she conceived by the Holy Spirit; the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. It’s the bell which calls us to pray for God’s grace to be poured into our hearts; that through Christ’s passion and cross, we might be brought to the glory of resurrection.
The story of what flows from that angelic annunciation is retold in the melody of bells and the songs on our lips today. We lent our voices to Mary’s song of praise - counting unnumbered blessings and longing for justice to be done as the hungry are fed and the humble lifted high. In singing ‘Come down, O love divine’ our praise becomes a longing for the Holy Spirit to dwell within us, marking our craft and art and lives with ‘holy charity’.
Today our praises draw us more deeply into ‘love divine, all loves excelling’. In Jesus we see love that is compassionate and unbounded. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord: it reaches to the very heights of delight and inspiration and to the very depths of grief and bewilderment; it extends into the fragile intimacy of our human relationships and the most mundane aspects of our daily tasks.
Today we hear in particular of that love made present in the midst of a wedding feast. In the midst of joy and celebration there’s a creeping sense of anxiety. Unbeknownst to the couple and their guests, Mary and the servants are waiting; they’re concerned lest the wine runs out. What Jesus does is more than avoiding a moment of acute social embarrassment.
Marriage at Cana by Giotto, 14th century
He is the one who brings plenty when our own resources run out. He gives us hope in our waiting; in the face of lack and limitation, he invites us to abide in God’s love and restores us to fullness of life. When he transforms water into wine, he gives us a new symbol of what love looks like. He takes us from scarcity to abundance. God want to pour our to more and more life, love, joy, companionship. We are to live in that love which makes us more honest, patient, kind, forgiving and hopeful.
The glory that the disciples see in Cana is magnified on the cross, when Jesus’ love brings life out of death. This is salvation: when we are drawn so fully into the melody of God’s love that the whole world is vibrates with grace. We are to pray and praise God without ceasing in gestures of love and in tangible signs of hope.
Living with the Gods will conclude with a contemporary symbol of such love and hope: MacGregor will focus on the Lampedusa cross. It was made in 2013 by an Italian carpenter Fanncisco Tuccio out of pieces from a boat wrecked off the Italian coast. That boat carried refugees crossing from Libya to Europe, many of whom drowned. When he met a group of Eritrean Christians who’d survived, Tuccio was moved by their story yet felt frustrated at his helplessness. So he made them crosses out of the wreckage.
One such cross is now in the British Museum. It is a sign of salvation and hope for the ship wrecked. It is a sign of the kindness of a small community in the face of the refugee crisis. It is a sign of our capacity to go beyond self-interest and to offer solace. It is a sign of God’s love which moves us from scarcity to abundance, from fear to hope, from death to life.
In the power of the Spirit, may our handbells and our hands express the love of God revealed in Jesus.
For love in creation, for heaven restored, for grace of salvation, O praise ye the Lord!
© Julie Gittoes
