Ecumenical fools

St Paul 's first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 1 verse 25: Divine folly is wiser than the wisdom of man. And chapter 4, verse 10: We are fools for Christ's sake.

I want first to thank Father Stephen for the kind invitation to come diagonally right across Dorset, from the top left hand corner to the bottom right, to join you for this United Service in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. And I also ought to thank my Roman Catholic colleague in Sherborne, Father Rodney Schofield, for his understanding: I preached for him at Sunday Mass this morning, but my journey here has meant that I have not been at the Abbey to welcome him to preach at Evensong. What a pulpit-hopping lot we are!

Not long ago someone in Sherborne was telling a member of my congregation about a problem which was troubling her. My church member helpfully suggested that she might come and talk to me about it. ‘Oh no, I couldn't possibly talk to the Vicar', came the immediate reply: ‘I'm not at all religious.' ‘Don't worry' was the response. ‘The Vicar isn't very religious either.'

You know, that's one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me. I want to be known as a Christian, but I'm not at all sure I want to be known as ‘religious', not least because it seems to me that the reason why the Gospel doesn't flame through our nation like a forest fire is that Christians as a whole are suffering from too much religion and not enough faith; too much church and not enough God. And that is also the reason why Christendom is so divided, why the Body of Christ is so torn apart. In my church, the Church of England, we always seem to be debating second-order things to do with church governance and practice, rather than getting on with the business of being infectious with faith and spreading the contagion of the Gospel to all around. And we do it with such seriousness and pomposity, as though in all things we know we know the mind of Christ. And my friends in other Churches tell me that it's just the same in their Communion or denomination too. I can remember complaining, many years ago now, to a wise old Roman Catholic friend that all Anglicans seemed capable of talking about was the Ordination of women. ‘Never mind', he said. ‘At the next Vatican Council all our bishops will be bringing their wives with them, and at the Vatican Council after that they will all be bringing their husbands.'

Perhaps you think religion shouldn't be joked about like that. But I believe it needs to be joked about more than anything in the world. Only God is to be taken with unreserved seriousness, and the trouble is that we have a tendency to treat other things, including ourselves, with the seriousness that is really due to God alone. That's when our ideas about God and about religion tend to go badly wrong. So to keep itself from blasphemy, religion – and religious people – both need to be able to laugh at themselves. I like the cartoon that once appeared in Private Eye of the trendy clergyman in the pulpit saying ‘Of course God isn't an old man with a long white beard in the sky', and up above him was an old-man-with-a-long-white-beard-in-the-sky-kind-of-God looking down and saying ‘How does he know?

A bit more laughter in the church and the barriers that separate us wouldn't seem so insurmountable. When I was a theological student at Cambridge my wife and I lived for two years in the Methodist theological college, Wesley House. The Methodists in Cambridge were at that time the only ones with any money, because they had been left pots of the stuff by Lord Rank, and they built a hideous block of flats with it and kindly rented one to us. The block was officially called the Lord Rank Building, but we Anglicans thought we knew why Lord Rank had left all that money and so we called it ‘Lord Rank's Fire Escape'. The large hall where we held joint services was the Lady Rank Room, also in the Lord Rank Building , and we used to tease the Methodists by asking them if they were going to call us to worship with a great big gong. But they got their own back in all sorts of ways.

For example, we shared a dining room, and we Anglicans were terribly smug about going to chapel every morning at 7.30 and having breakfast afterwards, while the Methodists insisted on breakfast first before chapel at 8.30. One day we all piled into the dining room from our chapel, fragrant with the odour of sanctity and oozing religious superiority. Not looking up from his toast and marmalade, one Methodist student said to his neighbour in a loud voice: ‘It's their earlier-than-thou attitude I can't stand.'

And the laughter dissolved the barriers and spelt acceptance. It is when we cease to take ourselves so seriously and share together the joys of our common faith that we begin to hear the laughter of heaven, and understand what the Lady Julian of Norwich meant when she wrote over six hundred years ago that the Company of Heaven itself is ‘right merry'.

And it is in this kind of laughter, holy laughter, that we discover also the acceptance of God. That's why one of the most popular of Radio 4 Thought for the Day contributors is Rabbi Lionel Blue: he understands both the laughter of heaven and the cry of the anguished human heart, and how the first is the best healer of the second. He tells the stories that sustained his fellow Jews in the ghettoes, in the concentration camps and, yes, even on the way to the gas chambers – and when you aren't crying tears of laughter with him you are crying tears of pain. And you know too that it is by not taking himself too seriously that he has been able to accept himself as he is, and not as some other people might have wanted him to be.