The Thirteen Sunday after Trinity
6th September 2009

Following our Leader

On the last full day of our holiday in Weymouth the town pulled the stops out. There was a carnival, fireworks and, best of all, a display by the Red Arrows.

A display by the Red Arrows is phenomenal on many levels. Unlike most displays, you never see them arriving and getting ready and getting started - they just appear out of nowhere. In our case just as their narrator was telling us they always arrived on time so they did, shooting out from above the hotels over our heads and out to sea - and back again. From that moment onwards we watched spellbound with a combination of awe, excitement, pride and fear. Bright red planes flew in tight formation, separated out, changed formation, criss-crossed one another, came and went zooming in and out of what was a perfect blue summer sky above a perfect glittering blue sea. At the end, they signed off with a stream of red white and blue trails and flew off - totally deaf of course to our enthusiastic clapping. We clapped not just because what they had done was wonderful but also because they had done it so well and nothing untoward had occurred. In that space and at that speed there is no room for error and any error would be fatal. We were perhaps also relieved that they had come and that they had also safely gone.

In your mind there is always the thought - how do they do it? I had a go in the flight simulator that was part of the entourage afterwards - being chucked around for 20 minutes with the sky and earth rolling around one was quite enough to confirm that one would never be able to do it. But their narrator had explained it to us - there is a flight engineer and a pilot and the pilot watches only the leader and they listen only to the leader's call. We could also hear the calls as they were relayed to us. The level of skill is matched only by the level of courage, confidence and sheer exuberance in what they achieved.

That combination of skill and speed and courage and joy will be beyond the reach of most of us in life, but I found myself thinking about the significance of following the leader and listening only to the leader's call regardless of anything else going on around us. There are a lot of situations in life where that is the case, and it seemed to me that there was something in that relating to a life lived by faith in God. What goes on around us in a world and a nation moving on and changing all the time, can be baffling, sometimes demoralising and even frightening: but as the angel at the tomb said in St Mark's Gospel of Christ at his resurrection: he goes before you into Galilee. Christ is always going before us and if we keep our minds and hearts trained on him and let his voice speak to us amid the clamour of all around us, then we will move safely, however hazardous the path that lies ahead.

Amen

© PCC St Martin's and St Paul's Canterbury 2008 - 2009