Countdown - Sermon 14th December 2008

 John 1:6-8, 19-28

I wonder if Countdown will be the same, now?  Maybe not, and maybe it’s not right that it should. It survived the death of Richard Whiteley, but changed quite a bit in so doing; his delight in puns, but also his capacity for generating them by accident, in the course of what should have been a normal sentence, connected with a silly love of language and its possibilities that drew a lot of us to watch whenever we could. In a sense, Carol Vorderman had been the custodian of that founding tradition – from the day Channel Four started, Richard Whiteley appeared, and as the camera panned back, my mother sat bolt upright and said “That’s Jean Vorderman’s daughter!” I never knew Carol, but apparently my mother had known hers, in Rhyl; I think she even baby-sat her once, briefly.

One of the things you can learn painlessly from Countdown is a lesson that twentieth-century philosophy has struggled to get the measure of – how just about everything we experience is to do with circulating language. Just language, going round and round. And how you can have ever so much language, but what it means is almost beside the point. Because the point is the language. Why does the whole audience cheer whenever the word “leotard” comes up in the selection of nine letters put up by Carol? Because it keeps on cropping up, far more regularly than you would think. And there are several other “Countdown” words that do the same. It doesn’t mean anything – and yet it does, within the game that is Countdown.

I suspect that a related reason that Countdown is so popular is that it appeals to people with a particular sense of humour – a sense of humour that’s to do with language. Jokes can be about lots of things, even though most of them rely on language, and its quirks, to be funny.  But some jokes are really only about language.

Like this one: “Excuse me, sir, can you hire this donkey?” “Yes, there’s a nut under the saddle...”

Or this one, that works best within thirty miles of Glasgow: “Excuse me, but is that in the window a cake, or a meringue?” “No, you’re right, it’s a cake...”

Or this one: Two skiers, at the end of a day on the slopes, and one of them says to the other “How about we zag-zig down the mountain one last time!”

The other says “It’s not zag-zig! It’s zig-zag!”

They argue about this for quite a while, and then the first one says “Look, we won’t settle this amongst ourselves – let’s go and ask that man there.

So they go over to this third chap, and say “Could you settle an argument, please? When you come down a mountain on skis, and go from side to side, is it zag-zig, or zig-zag?”

The third man says “I’m sorry, I don’t know. I’m a tobogganist.”

And the second man says  “In that case, can I have 20 Capstan full strength, please...”

Smoking, of course, can damage your health. And maybe you expected me to say that at this point – because that’s part of another language-game, another of the ways in which language circulates and operates among us.

This is very nearly language at play with itself. Language working without saying anything. There is no story to the first two jokes, and the story really isn’t anything to do with the third one, despite the memories of Aviemore it will conjure up for many! Jokes sometimes are to do with stories, but they aren’t the same thing.  Often a joke will work against its story, as if to destroy it, by smashing up the expectations that the story has raised. This kind of joke has a particular name; it’s called a “Shaggy Dog Story,”

A man buys a saloon in the Wild West. On his first day of trade, he is told something that, his interlocutor says, may save his life. “If ever you hear people shouting ‘Big John’s a’comin’!’ – git out of town. Jes’ run for your life. Don’t look back!”

Many months go by, but one day someone shouts the fateful words “Big John’s a’comin’!” and the bar erupts into such pandemonium as everyone jumps out through doors, windows and any other way that they can find, that the saloon owner is knocked to the ground, unconscious. He comes to some minutes later, to feel the ground rumbling and the air filled with a thunderous sound. He staggers to the door, and sees a gigantic figure, a huge hulk of a man, riding into town bareback on a gigantic buffalo, which he is whipping with a rattlesnake. The man heads straight for the saloon, and the saloonkeeper has no chance of escape. He flees behind the bar.

The huge man bursts through the doors, breaking them from their hinges and hurling them to the side. He walks up to the bar, and with one blow of his fist, splits it from side to side.  He demands a drink, and, alas for our setting in church, demands something stronger than sasparilla.  Bowled a bottle and glass down the bar, he ignores the glass, snaps the neck off the bottle with his hands, and gulps down the contents. Then he sighs.

The saloonkeeper suddenly wonders if maybe things aren’t so bad after all. Maybe he can survive this, if he’s careful. He smiles his best smile, and says “Another?”

The huge man pales. “Heck, no!” he says. I’ve gotta get out of town! Big John’s a’comin’!”

The point about that joke is that it destroys the story that it emerges from. Along with everything else that makes us laugh is that we also know that we’ll never know how this story ends. In fact the story, and how it ends, are beside the point, now.

Isn’t it strange how two of the most common ways in which we speak – the story and the joke – are at war with each other? We tell stories in order to put our experiences in some sort of order. We tell jokes in order to come to terms with the fact that life disrupts that meaning. “Do you want to hear about the kind of day I’ve had?” may sound as though I’m about to tell you a story – but actually, what follows wors like that, if you think about it, is usually a lot more like a string of jokes, sometimes dark jokes that are difficult to laugh at, about what life has done to me today. I can tell you the story of my life, and that usually does sound like a story, because I have thought about it, and spent years making sense of it, and ordering it into episodes, which are more or less self-contained, or which lead on from one period to another in a sequence which makes sense. The sense, in fact, which I have managed to make of my life up to this point.  And many a long conversation among family and friends this Christmas will be along the lines of  storytelling.

In fact, one of the ways in which we heal ourselves, and help others heal, is by telling and hearing accounts of what’s happened in a real human life, and turning them into a story.

But if life is still raw and hard, if the bits don’t make sense yet, then what we do is to go over and over the jaggy bits, the bits that we can’t fit in. And have you noticed that one of the things that human beings do when they are doing that – going over the things that didn’t go to plan, the bits that spoiled and disrupted what we thought was going to be a perfect story? They laugh.

Watch any soap opera, or drama, or film, on television this week. This is your homework, by the way! Watch for any moment when a character, for whom something has gone very wrong, laughs – and it isn’t funny.

It certainly isn’t because they find these things funny, and it certainly isn’t because they see some sort of a joke. Or is that so? Again, how often does a fictional character in a situation like this say something about being the victim of a cosmic joke, or how so-and-so must now really be laughing at them, and enjoying this...

In earthly terms, John’s Gospel starts with John the Baptist. The great German scholar Rudolf Bultmann thought that John’s Gospel came from circles of people who had thought to begin with that John the Baptist might be the Messiah;  only John mentions that the first disciples, for instance, had started out with John the Baptist, and that John had pointed them to Jesus. “Behold the Lamb of God...”  The Fourth Gospel interrupts its vast cosmic prologue, on the Word that was with God before ever there was anything else, to mention John, and to say that he was not the one:

He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light.

In terms of what we have already said, you could say that Big John has come, and even he isn’t the one. In fact – and this is really an astonishing thing to say – the whole point, the whole significance,  of John the Baptist is that he is not the one.  He is the one who starts off with what looks like his own story, but it’s a story that tails off as soon as Jesus appears, a story that, for all the Gospels, becomes a disconnected set of reports that Jesus and his disciples hear about John: that he’s baptising somewhere; that he’s been arrested; that he’s been executed.

Even the story of that execution, which John’s Gospel doesn’t tell, is a strangely tragic tale, a story which destroys itself in the end. Herod, the king who has had him imprisoned, is mesmerized by John’s message, even while he is condemned by it. Herodias, his brother’s wife whom Herod had caused scandal by taking, is determined to get rid of him, and you will remember the rest. Herodias’s daughter so captivates Herod by her dancing that he promises her anything – and she demands the head of the Baptist on a plate. It isn’t a story in itself. It’s an incident, an event. It’s been turned into a huge story, in many different ways, in the first place by being fitted into the Gospel narrative by Mark, and not least by being teased out in several operas. But on its own it’s just the sad, meaningless end of a life lived in witness to the truth.

But here’s the paradox. Even then, it’s more than that. Because John’s life, John’s story, is just exactly a life and a story that points beyond itself.

In itself, it adds up to nothing. And yet it is a crucial part of something bigger, without which it doesn’t make sense, but set in which it suddenly coheres – hangs together powerfully.

And it becomes something more. It becomes a model for Christian living.

This is the pattern which Christians, for two thousand years, have used to make sense of their own lives. That we are part of a story so huge that we can only grasp it in outline – if even that - even now. That the disconnected bits of our own living, our own real lives, are drawn into a whole in which they do make sense, even when there are times, in the midst of life, when all we can do is to shake our heads, and maybe laugh sadly.

But this is no joke. Even when we experience them that way, our lives are not just sad wee stories that refuse to hang together. Our lives point beyond themselves to a story that makes sense of them – a story we don’t have in its entirety yet, because it isn’t finished yet. They are not self-contained, and the meaning they have is not just whatever meaning we choose to give them. We can’t grasp their meaning from where we are, but we do have a story that organizes them, and points them in the direction of meaning.

And we are about to reach a crucial point in the living-out of that story.

Christmas is the point at which our little human stories get mixed in with another tiny human story that nobody would have noticed, about a homeless couple forced to give birth to their first child in drastically improvised circumstances. A stable. A manger.

And we have heard it all before. And perhaps what we have missed is that, take away the angels, the shepherds and the wise men, this is a completely typical little story of human beings. This is the kind of thing that life throws up for millions and millions of people. We didn’t have our first child in a stable, but we did have a fall of soot followed by a powercut one Christmas when the children were tiny. We talk about that one still. It’s more of a joke than a story in the telling, and it doesn’t add up to much in the family history, and it’s not in the same league as Mary and Joseph that first Christmas, except that there’s a shared humanity there that cuts oddly deep.

And yet, we make sense of the stories of our lives in terms of the story of the Gospel. And that’s the difference. When our little tales peter out in a laugh or a tear, we can say that God was here, because the Christmas story – including the manger and the stable – is the great story that makes sense of all our little ones.

And it’s that story that lets us say the crucial things that faith really needs to be able to say. God knows. God understands. God is with us in this. In fact, in all of this...

And all of this is in God...