Maundy Thursday 2024

May I speak in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Please do take a seat.

Yuri Gagarin was the first man who ever went into space.

He spent an hour and forty-eight minutes up there.

And during that time, he completed one whole orbit of the Earth.

This took place on the 12th of April 1961.

It was uh he was a member of Soviet Russia, and that state at the time was an avowed atheist state.

Now he's reported on landing back to Earth to have been asked if he saw God while he was up there, and he said, apparently, I didn't see any God up there.

This is almost certainly Soviet propaganda.

The small amount of research I did this week, I looked him up on Wikipedia, said that uh he was probably a devout uh Orthodox Christian.

Uh so this he may not well have said this, but it became iconic in the Cold War, Russia declaring that they had been to space and found no God up there.

I really like that story because it highlights, particularly on an evening like this for us, some of the tendencies and dangers in the human heart.

The tendency to reach to the top.

Humanity has been going as high as it can to find God since the days of the Tower of Babel.

Let us build a tower to God.

Let us go to the top of the mountain, and that is where we will find God.

And this continues in our own lives to this day.

Let us get to the peak of our careers.

Let us become the absolute best in our chosen field of expertise.

Let's be the coolest person in our friendship group.

Completely impossible if you're an Anglican priest, by the way.

Similarly, the tendency to be the biggest or the loudest, the most charismatic, the life and soul of the party, the person who everyone knows when they're in the room.

Of course, these comments from Yui Gagarin come in the height of the Cold War, where East and West were racing to find out who was going to be the biggest and the strongest, who was going to win.

The tendency of the human heart to win.

As Miss Trunchbill says in the Roll Dahl books, I'm going to punish you because I'm big and you're small.

I'm right and you're wrong, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Or as the businessmen of Silicon Valley say, the big eat the small, the fast eat the slow, the powerful eat the weak.

Now, of course, I'm not particularly interested in history lessons about astronauts or what businessmen in Silicon Valley say, but these people paint in vivid technicolor tendencies that live inside each one of us and tempt us in the quiet moments of every day.

They change the way we speak to our spouses.

Who won that last argument?

And shall I just keep going until I'm the person who wins it?

They change our attitudes towards the people who don't look like us.

Are they going to come to our town?

How's our town going to change?

They change the way you talked to the sales assistant yesterday afternoon when you were in a bad mood.

It impacts the sort of jobs you're willing to do or the ways you're willing to volunteer in your community.

And it changes the way we talk about ourselves in public.

See, the truth is where your God is, is where your heart will be.

And so if your God's on the mountaintop and he's the biggest and he's the best, you might well find yourself living a life addicted to that tendency.

Now, it just so happens that C.S.

Lewis was alive at the time when Yui Gagarin first said that.

And in response, Lewis wrote an article called The Seeing Eye, in which he said that Yuri Gagarin going up to space to find God is like Hamlet going into the attic of his castle looking for Shakespeare.

It's like Hamlet going into the attic of his castle looking for Shakespeare.

You don't relate to God in the way that one person on the first floor relates to another person on the second floor.

Just going higher up into space is not the way to find God.

C.S.

Lewis goes on to say that if God is our creator, then he would relate to us the way that Hamlet relates to Shakespeare.

And the only way for Hamlet to relate to Shakespeare is if Shakespeare was to write himself into the story.

The only way for Hamlet to ever get to know Shakespeare, he's not going to find him in the story unless Shakespeare were to write himself into the play.

This is the good news that we celebrate at Christmas.

That God in Jesus has written himself into the story of history and into the story of our lives.

Now the question for us tonight is how does he act when he gets there?

If it's true that where your God is, there your heart will be, then our question for this evening is: where is Jesus once he's been written into the story of our lives?

He servants himself for us.

He makes himself small.

He gets on the floor in front of us.

He invites us to join him in the love of the other.

So, if you, like Yuri Gagarin, are looking for God tonight, then maybe that is where we'll find him.

In a meal with one another, in our commitment to serve, on the floor, cleaning the grime off someone else's feet.