Yesterday some of us were here for the Leeds heritage open day. A day where many folk who’ ve perhaps always wondered what goes on in this beautiful building on City Square could satisfy their curiosity.

Of course we’re always open here on Sundays at 10.45 – but its quite understandable that some people will have other commitments, and others will simply find the idea of church off putting.

I am committed to the idea of opening our doors more frequently and beginning to welcome people, including members of the congregation of course, on weekdays as well as Sundays.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that a closed door can be a very off putting signal but I experienced it myself the other day and it made me think about our church. I pass a pub on my walk home to Holbeck and I saw that they host a ‘folk evening’ – the longest running such event in all Leeds ‘regular since 1962’ it said on their sign so I thought “well I’ll go along; I like a folk session.” So when I left here on Friday evening, thats what I did, I swung in to the pub and bought myself a drink and walked back to the room where the folk music is – and the door was shut. And I hesitated; I didn’t want to walk in and have everyone turn round and look, I didn’t know if there would be someone in mid-song, or if the door would open directly on to the middle of the stage or whatever so I thought “I’ll go and sit over there and see if any one comes in or goes out.” And, I know it sounds silly, but I started thinking of all the reasons I didn’t really want to go in after all: I thought it was probably not my kind of thing, probably be packed full of folkies, and anyway it was really late and after all what I really wanted was to go home to bed. Isnt it amazing? All that spiral of crazy negativity just because the last person to go in had pulled the door closed behind themselves.

 

Now I like to think that ours is an open tradition that the kind of religion we do has an open door theology.

And that idea has some positive and some negative attributes, one real positive is that unlike many other styles of religion we don’t try to co-erce anyone to believe. We ve never believed in Hell or eternal punishment for unbelievers, we got rid of that horrible idea about four hundred years ago and as soon as we did we opened the door to accepting that other traditions, other religious faiths were quite likely to have just as much claim to religious truth as our own. We began to preach and practice religious toleration well in advance of the mainstream – as early as 1568 in fact.

 

When I mentioned this a while ago, some wag said “yes and we’ve been losing members ever since” and although it was intended as a joke in a certain way it is true; liberal religious traditions have been losing members while more conservative traditions like the evangelicals are thriving. Why should that be? Well of course its partly because of our open door policy, we keep the door open and, without any promise of heaven or threat of hell, of course some people walk out of the open door and slip away. But there is another reason I think, a deeper one.

 

Last week I spoke of the role of poetry in our understanding of faith – I said that the poetic, the allusive, is a way of communicating truth that is not reachable by other forms of understanding. I talked about some of the beautiful but puzzling sayings of Jesus and quoted the line in Mark 4 when the gospeller says that Jesus spoke in parables and ‘without a parable spake he not unto them’ ; he didn’t say anything without using a parable. Parables are a non-literal story – a way of expressing truth in a poetic way and perhaps the defining characteristic of poetry is ambiguity, poetic meaning can be multiple and open ended.

 

For our faith tradition living with ambiguity and uncertainty is central. We reject creedal formula because we do not believe that the complex and manifold truth can encompassed in any one perspective, instead we acknowledge life for what it is; messy, ambiguous, uncertain.

 

In the words of the Welsh poet and minister RS Thomas

 

Poetry is religion. Religion is poetry. The message of the New Testament is poetry. Christ was a poet. The New Testament is metaphor. The resurrection is metaphor; and when I preach poetry I am preaching Christianity; and when one discusses Christianity one is discussing poetry in its imaginatve aspects.

 

I know I have spoken before about the passage in Exodus when God spoke to Moses. When Moses asked for the name he can use to identify God to God’s people Moses hears the words  ‘I am that I am’ which can be translated ‘I am that which I shall become’.

Recently a colleague who is learning Hebrew described the passage to me; he told me that the Hebrew becomes intensely difficult to translate at this point in the writing – he told me that the Hebrew verb ‘to be’ is ‘imperfect’ it implies incompleteness so we cannot really say ‘I am’ but more ‘I am becoming’.

The term or ‘name’ in Hebrew is transcribed with the tetragrammatron, four letters: yhwh there are no vowels as such in Hebrew and to make it pronouncable it must be aspirated or breathed so it sounds like YHVH from which the mispronounciation Jahweh is derived:- but the writer Richard Rohr has suggested that YhVH is intended to sound just like breathing in and out, YH — VH

 

something as close to us as breathing.

 

The poet Paul Celan is famous for his use of ambiguity his poetry is difficult to understand completely because he deliberately introduces ambiguity into his writing using words which can be interpreted in many different ways. He wouldn’t say much about his work but he did say:

“Poetry is perhaps this: an Atemwende, a turning of our breath. Who knows, perhaps poetry goes its way—the way of art—for the sake of just such a turn? … Perhaps, along with the I, estranged and freed here, in this manner, some other thing is also set free?”

 

We keep our door theologically open and that lets some of us free. Perhaps some of us us leave, some perhaps to find the reassurance of greater certainty elsewhere, in more dogmatic traditions, although some of them soon return too.

But more than anything it lets many things in new truths new experiences new ways of understanding god and of being understood.

 

And some Other is also perhaps set free?