God be in our speaking and our thinking, God be in our music and our silence, God be in our end and our beginning. Amen.

So much has been going on here in Lichfield over the last couple of weeks that it’s hard to know where to begin. I decided that the dictionary would make a good starting place, so I looked up the word ‘festival’. It gives a range of definitions: 1. A day or period set aside for celebration or feasting, especially one of religious significance. 2. Any occasion for celebration, especially one which commemorates a significant event. Or 3. ‘An organised series of special events and performances.’ Well, that fits the bill. Although there’s also definition 4: ‘a time of revelry and merrymaking’. I understand there’s been a bit of that going on as well. The festival can be very hard on the liver. The dean told me that. 

At the heart of the word festival lies the word feast, of course. And this is what we’ve been enjoying over the last fortnight – a lavish cordon bleu feast of the arts: music and words, painting and sculpture, drama, improvisation, orchestras and quartets, soloists and choirs, singing and dancing. Some forty courses dished up for our delectation by the world’s master chefs. I hope you’ve all feasted well. I know I have. And the great thing about this kind of over-indulgence is that you don’t have to go on a diet afterwards.

Festival was a churchy word originally. It comes from Church Latin, my dictionary tells me, from festivalis, meaning ‘of a feast’. You might think that it’s come adrift from its church moorings a bit over the years, given how many festivals we now have. I checked on the internet and found festivals of food, film, and drama. Folk and rock festivals, science festivals, chocolate festivals, the festival of Belgian alternative music, the Wakefield Rhubarb Festival, the Peruvian Guinea Pig festival. Not forgetting Lichfield’s other festival, the long-running Town Centre Festival of Roadworks. All those cheerful orange barriers. You name it, there’s a festival for it somewhere.

To celebrate and be creative, and then to celebrate creativity, is part of what it means to be human. We have festival running through our core like lettering through seaside rock. If we look at the Genesis accounts of creation we get some clues about why this might be. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. To start with, it’s chaos, a complete mish-mash, everything all over the place. Let’s impose some order, says God: light over here, darkness over there. Good. Water over here, land over there. Excellent. Night over here, day over there. Now we’re getting somewhere. Right: trees and vegetation. Good. Birds in the air, fish in the sea, beasts and cattle and creeping things on the land.  And then God said, ‘Let’s make man in our own image, after our own likeness.’ Someone like us, God seems to be thinking, someone after our own heart, who’ll love our world, who’ll enjoy this creation the way we do, who’ll impose a bit of order on it, landscape the garden, and notice that the dark purple lilac works really well next to the blue ceanothus.

I’ve heard people say that for God to create the human race so that it can worship him is an act of monumental vanity. I’d describe it more as an act of monumental humility, that God might want to take us into partnership in this vast creative project.  Monumentally reckless humility, as anyone who has ever tried to work with children knows. Baking cakes, for instance. It tends to go a bit like this: that’s lovely! tip it all in the bowl. Whoops! It’s all right, dear, I’ll just scrape it up. Now stir it round. Gently. That’s right! Don’t eat it. Don’t spit it back in! Oh, never mind, just mix it around, the heat’ll kill all the germs.

I love the bit in the second chapter of Genesis where God brings the birds and animals to the man ‘to see what he would call them.’ The implication here is that God is not a control freak, it wasn’t some kind of test, an early prototype GCSE in zoology: God was genuinely interested in what Adam would come up with. My sister once, rather foolishly, allowed her three year old to choose a name for the new pet rabbit they were planning to buy. I’ve checked with the chancellor, and he says that the name my nephew chose is too rude to say from the pulpit. My sister said, ‘That’s an interesting name. Why don’t we wait till we see the rabbit, and then maybe we’ll think of some other names that are even better.’ (The rabbit’s called Flopsy.)

To be brutally honest, adults can usually bake better cakes and name animals more appropriately than small children can, but without the same element of surprise and discovery and delight. Presumably God, being God, could ordain music of such crystalline angelic perfection it would make Bach sound like a footling amateur. But it seems as though there is something about this earth with its race of beings so riddled with the urge to experiment and create, something specifically about us that truly engages the interest of the creator. Despite the risks inherent in working with amateurs, it seems as if Project Earth can say and do things which no other creative form could say or do.
If we look at our Gospel reading, we see something similar happening. A lawyer takes Jesus on in a legal debate. It ends with a technical question about what constitutes a neighbour. The lawyer is anticipating a legal definition, so that he can disagree with it on some technicality and justify himself, the text suggests. Instead, Jesus tells him a story. As a novelist, I like that, because the story does what a carefully worded piece of legislation cannot do – it brings the lawyer to admit that generosity and neighbourliness burst through social and racial limitations. Who is my neighbour? -- the one I have mercy on, the one who has mercy on me.

Ah, the neighbour. The neighbour is both the bane and the blessing. You may have been aware of your neighbours during the various events of this Festival. The ones who hum along to the music, or who insist on conducting. Or who have been eating garlic. Or who have a coughing fit. Have you noticed how you only ever get a cough like that in a concert, never when you’re in Morrisons? Then there’s the neighbour stealthily trying to unwrap a cough sweet very, very quietly. For about ten minutes.

But this is how it is in this world of ours. I am not God, and neither am I the sole focus of divine attention. I am not the centre of the universe. My neighbours are here to remind me of this. Mutuality and relationship are built into this great sprawling exercise of creativity. We’re all in it together. It isn’t a question of artists in lonely garrets creating exquisite works of art. Without readers, a novel remains just ink on the page. Without the audience there can be no performance. And in the case of a festival like this one, there can be no performance without a whole army of planners, visionaries, sponsors, stage crew, organisers, caterers, volunteers and gofers.

We human beings have a deeply ingrained urge towards shared experience and enjoyment, to turn to our neighbours and say, ‘Wow, wasn’t that fantastic?’ To point out shooting stars or baby ducks to complete strangers, to be part of an audience, not the one solitary observer with nobody to share the moment with. This, I think, is another echo of the image of God in us. Like Wallace and Grommit, we have our maker’s thumbprints all over us. Just as God chooses to share his life with his creation, so we turn instinctively to one another to share our enthusiasm for that young Russian pianist, to celebrate, to sing and make music together, to have a festival; and here in the Cathedral this morning, to bounce back that joy to our creator.

Sometimes, though, celebration is against a backdrop of dark clouds and endless rain – as we have perhaps noticed over the last ten days. Life isn’t one happy Strauss waltz, we know that only too well. Earlier this year I helped teach a creative writing course for a group of asylum seekers brought together by the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. I’ve taught many times before, but when I came to look at my usual material in preparation, it all seemed shallow and trivial. I was expecting the week to be traumatic and harrowing, but I came away with an overwhelming sense of the grace and dignity of the human spirit, of its resilience and creativity, of its capacity for joy, even when it has suffered the very worst that the human spirit can invent and inflict on others. Evil is very evil indeed, but evil will not have the final word.

This was the big risk inherent in God’s big creative enterprise – that the orchestra wouldn’t play the score in front of them, wouldn’t even improvise on its grand themes, but would disintegrate into discordant warring factions and turn and lynch the conductor. We are living an unfinished symphony. This world is still a work in process, one so vast that we can only see a fragment of it. But one that is still held in its entirety in the composer’s mind.

The church bears witness to the belief that we are heading towards resolution. There are times when we can sense it, just as you can tell that the end of the organ voluntary is approaching, even if you’re a musical ignoramus like me. Some modulation of key, or change of tempo, some gathering in of disparate threads – you music buffs will know the technical language. I’m thinking of the lowest ebb of the year, the end of January, dark at 4 in the afternoon, still dark at 8 in the morning, but then one day you hear it – the first stealthy tuning up of a blackbird on a rooftop, and you think Ah! Spring will come. It will come. And from then on part of you is always listening out for the song until finally it breaks forth in all its fullness.

Until that day comes, May we be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may we be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled us to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light. Amen.