Ninety years ago, there was a newspaper headline which read, “New Ford set to roll horse into history” and ends, “An automobile beats a horse and buggy any day. It’s quicker and it’s cheaper”. It was the same year that Lloyd George became the new Prime Minister, and Captain Lawrence backed the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire. The monk Rasputin was murdered, eventually. Lord Kitchener was killed when his ship, travelling to Russia struck a mine off the Orkneys; there were no survivors. In fact in World history terms, 1916, was a pretty awful year as you know well. But there was one little ray of light that year, because that was the year ‘our Eva’ was born, on this very day.

Now, I’m very aware that we have had, thankfully, many a person who has achieved that amazing milestone in this Parish, becoming 90! But I hope you don’t mind if we make a bit of a fuss over Eva, because the contribution and dedication and devotion that Eva has made to this Church over the past 46 years, makes her a rather remarkable person indeed. Now, I’m not going to go through her history, but just to tell you that Eva and her husband Bill, a clergyman, moved to Seahill Road in 1960. Bill and George Hill, the then Vicar, were best of friends. And when she told me that, I said to her, “You know I was one year old in 1960!” She turned to me and replied, “Well little did I know then that there was out there a little baby who would one day end up being my Vicar!”

There are countless stories about Eva, and, indeed she has countless stories of her own. But this is just to let you know Eva, today, just how much we appreciate all that you still do here in this Parish, your wisdom and your wit are legendary, and there is nobody I would turn to quicker for advice and guidance. We all owe you are deepest gratitude. Just one last thing; today is the feast day of St. Barnabas. Barnabas means ‘the son of encouragement’. He was the one who put his arm around John Mark, when Paul had kicked him out, and said, “Don’t worry; you’re OK!” And if he hadn’t done that, we would never have had the Gospel of St. Mark. How appropriate it is that Eva was born on St. Barnabas’ Day! So, I invite you all again to spend a few moments, that none of you was expecting to spend, while we cut your beautiful cake and sing Happy Birthday to you after this service in the Church Hall.

All I’d like now is for you to come up here and explain to us all the Doctrine of the Trinity; I would much appreciate it!

Don’t you just love the doctrine of the Trinity? In my limited theological understanding, I think what the Trinity comes down to is explaining the one thing that differs mainstream Christianity from all other ‘sects’ (if I could call them that) and that is the divinity of Christ; that Jesus is God. It is to try and understand how Jesus can be fully human and fully divine at the same time. Did you get that? Not half man and half God; but fully man and fully God.

It had to mentioned sometime didn’t it, but did you see the Da Vinci Code? Or, I’m sure you’ve read the book? I looked up its website to see how many million copies had been sold, and although I couldn’t find the number, I know it is one of the best selling novels of all time.

And that’s the first thing to say about it. I read it a couple of summers ago; its website says, “It is a novel and therefore a work of fiction”. It’s a wonderful read and perfect summer holiday reading, but don’t take it all too seriously. I had several questions about it as I was reading it, and nobody I’ve asked since has come up with any answers.

Of all the years the Christian Church has survived and all the great people it has produced, it is laughable that the Church is going to crumble over some bloke writing a fictional story. To get upset about it shows a bit of insecurity about what the Church teaching stands for. We have no doubt about who Jesus was as a person; that he was a part of the Trinity at the time of creation – just read Colossians chapter one. We don’t have to understand it all to believe it. But what I always found fascinating about the questions and issues raised over the Da Vinci Code was Jesus, not so much as fully God, which we seem so easily to accept after 2000 years of history, but Jesus as fully human at the same time. It’s the human side of Jesus which sometimes seems almost forgotten; the same temptations, the same feelings of hunger and pain and bereavement and all the rest. The point that God the Father allowed himself to be tempted, the Creator to be a part of his creation, to cry and laugh and eat and drink, is all mind-blowing. How could we ever get our heads around that? Yet how wonderfully true it is.

The Gospels, such as the wonderful Gospel of Mark, which we’ve already mentioned, pre-dates the Emperor Constantine by hundreds of years; the period that Dan Brown suggests that Christianity was rewritten as a ‘cover-up’, that it is based on a lie, where, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth! So you can’t go back and change what the Gospels say. We are left with the truth we have known all along:

You know well the great CS Lewis quote, which acts as a perfect conclusion: “We are faced with a frightening alternative. The man we are talking about was (and is) just what he said or else a lunatic or something worse. Now it seems to me obvious that he was neither a lunatic nor a fiend; and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that he was and is God. God has landed on this enemy occupied world in human form.”