Grandma’s sermon

Yesterday morning, Grandma and I took the slow walk down from her house to the village parish church for its 9.30am service. When we opened the doors, there was no one there at all! We were very surprised (since we were actually late) until we read an information sheet that told us that church service was at 3.30pm that afternoon.

We walked back along a different route that goes through the church cemetery, past the vicarage, along the river, snakes through a housing estate and then emerges right across grandma’s house. Along the way, we looked at the weathered, lichen covered stones that form so many of the walls and buildings in Suffolk. Grandma taught me what a fir tree was.

After a carol service in StAG, as usual Grandma and I sat back in her little kitchen with our dinner and started talking about everything under the sun. We covered everything from Seamus Heaney and the terrible treatment of Irish babies born out of wedlock, how she learnt about where babies come from, how parents should discipline their children or seek help when they can’t, Jane Austen’s ‘Sense and Sensibility’, and the story of a poor girl in her church.

What happened was that this girl (a very innocent, simple girl) had a child out of wedlock, and the Church Elders turned her out of the church. Grandma told me that it shocked her, and she felt so confused as to how these Elders who preached of God’s love and divine mercy could be so judgemental and unmerciful to a girl who committed one mistake, as we all do some time in our life. Many of the girls in church who knew the girl who had been turned away from the church kept in contact with her, Auntie Sheila knitted her baby little woolly clothes, and Grandma’s mother kept up her friendship with the girl’s mother (who was crushed by the whole thing) and treated her the same way as before, as if nothing had happened.

I felt so heartbroken by that story. It reminded me of the Irish mothers with their illegitimate children, often pressured by society to abort them or kill them after birth. It reminded me of George Eliot’s Silas Marner, turned away from all he knew and clung to in Lantern Yard, or Maggie in The Mill on the Floss, ostracised and cut off by her brother for giving into temptation and running off with Stephen though she later returned. 

So many people commit mistakes, and instead of loving them and acting as a shepherd, caring for them and steering them back onto the right path through encouragement and loving discipline, Christians often cast them out again into darkness, forgetting that we ourselves were called out of darkness by Christ, into his wonderful light. Often I think this is why Christianity gets such a bad reputation. Because, quite simply, Christians do not act in the way Christ called them to. But if we would judge Christianity through the reputation of Christ rather than Christians, these imperfect, always stumbling human beings, we would see a promise and a life more than worth living for. 

Grandma told me that the line from W. Faber’s Hymn often kept her remembering that there was a good God despite the cruelty she saw around her ‘For the love of God is broader than the measure of our mind; And the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.’ 

There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,
Like the wideness of the sea;
There’s a kindness in His justice,
Which is more than liberty.

There is no place where earth’s sorrows
Are more felt than up in Heaven;
There is no place where earth’s failings
Have such kindly judgment given.

There is welcome for the sinner,
And more graces for the good;
There is mercy with the Savior;
There is healing in His blood.

There is grace enough for thousands
Of new worlds as great as this;
There is room for fresh creations
In that upper home of bliss.

For the love of God is broader
Than the measure of our mind;
And the heart of the Eternal
Is most wonderfully kind.

There is plentiful redemption
In the blood that has been shed;
There is joy for all the members
In the sorrows of the Head.

’Tis not all we owe to Jesus;
It is something more than all;
Greater good because of evil,
Larger mercy through the fall.

If our love were but more simple,
We should take Him at His word;
And our lives would be all sunshine
In the sweetness of our Lord.

Souls of men! why will ye scatter
Like a crowd of frightened sheep?
Foolish hearts! why will ye wander
From a love so true and deep?

It is God: His love looks mighty,
But is mightier than it seems;
’Tis our Father: and His fondness
Goes far out beyond our dreams.

But we make His love too narrow
By false limits of our own;
And we magnify His strictness
With a zeal He will not own.

Was there ever kinder shepherd
Half so gentle, half so sweet,
As the Savior who would have us
Come and gather at His feet?

After dinner and dessert, Grandma and I prayed, asking God to help us be loving to other people, to never presume that we knew the whole situation and could judge them in our limited human capacity, but to always love, and be merciful, and look to God for direction on how to best love our fellow broken humans.