One Saturday in April Revds Andrew and Pat went on a course.  Clergy do that.  We lesser mortals go shopping, or get out the Hoover, or do the gardening, or stick up some shelves or do the laundry on a Saturday.  Clergy get to go on courses.  This course (one of the kind which does not have 18 holes, I hasten to explain) was led by the Archdeacon of Dorset and someone from Spire FM, the commercial radio station based in Salisbury, and the point of it was apparently to teach clergy how to do “sound-bites”.  Clergy are notoriously bad at this bright shiny right-on modern means of communication.  Think of all those times you’ve seen a Bishop being interviewed on TV fiddling with his beard and going “um” and “er” for five minutes together without having said anything comprehensible in answer to a simple question by the end of it.  Excruciating, isn’t it?  All well and good, then, if clergy can be trained to keep their ends up in media situations, so long as the sound-bite habit doesn’t become ingrained to the extent that sermons become mere 30-second bursts of catch-phrases and buzzwords strung together in an order which makes some sort of limited sense.  Surely it’s difficult to imagine such a sermon having any kind of long-lasting effect on anyone, for good or ill! I thought.

But then I fell to thinking more about the notion and it struck me that perhaps the idea of God working through sound-bites isn’t as naff as it would at first appear.  This came about through thinking how, in an unimaginable epoch which had no duration as such but was possibly something like an immense drawing-in of breath before uttering (there was no Time before Space existed, so it’s practically impossible for us, as short-lived creatures dwelling in Time and Space, to get our heads round this one) God the Holy Trinity was alone in No-when and No-where, and the Universe, with all its galaxies, stars and planets and orders of mortal and immortal beings, had substance only in his thought.  Then - he spoke the Word which he had been preparing to pronounce throughout all that Eternity of waiting—and Space and Time began, together.  In a fraction of a second an incredibly dense ball of matter about the size of Dame Julian of Norwich’s famous hazel-nut expanded to vast proportions (it is still expanding), and the Universe, which until then had not been, now was.  In scientific terms this was the famous “Big Bang”.  The  notion of the Big Bang is an understanding of the origins of the Universe that is nowadays accepted by most scientists as correct, although it was once thought that the Universe had always been as it has been observed throughout human history, and  would always remain so.  Some scientists who are religious believers would say that God caused the Big Bang to happen, but others, who aren’t, would say that we just don’t know what caused it.  At any rate, as far as we can tell, this astonishing event took place about 15 billion years ago.  The Earth and the rest of our solar system came into being about 11 billion years after that, and our planet was already getting on a bit in years when life finally began to appear on it.  Human beings are such a late arrival on the scene that it’s like we arose only yesterday, although people recognisably like ourselves have now been around for at least 100,000 years!  Certainly this is a very long period of time indeed, but it is nevertheless quite easy for the human mind to comprehend— easier than to try to think of billions of years, and a whole lot more so than attempting to imagine how things were before Time and Space existed!

No-one was around to hear that original sound-bite, although judging from the results, Let it be seems to have been the general gist of it.  Perhaps it was Make it so! It might even have been simply Amen.  Whatever, it was and remains the greatest and most powerful sound-bite ever uttered! 

Interesting foot-note: St Augustine of Hippo, the famous North African divine who lived in the 4th Century, understood that Time could not have existed before the Universe came into being (this was about 1,600 years before scientists cottoned on!).  Many of his thoughts on Time and Creation are contained in Book XI of his “Confessions”, where he also wonders what the Word actually was.  It would be wonderful to know that!  But if we knew, to quote  (from a different context) Professor Stephen Hawking, “then we would know the mind of God” .