What if you arrived in Church this morning and you were handed a blank order of service? We could have, perhaps, the ‘Welcome sentence’ written on it, what Sunday it is and the date. But what would we do if the rest were completely blank? You know, we’ve only started these Service Sheets relatively recently; we used not to have any at all. A lot of Churches have their entire Service written out on a sheet, which saves looking up hymns and page numbers in Prayer Books. I always say that our service sheet is a half-way measure between having everything written down, and having nothing at all. As we have it, it is a skeletal run-down of what’s happening and I hope it is useful to know where we are; all the page numbers we need to know and the hymns we’re singing!

But an entirely blank Service Sheet? There would hardly be any point.

I had a new experience the other week (which is always a good thing at my age)! Unfortunately, it was at a funeral which was held at the Quaker Meeting House in Friends School, Lisburn. We were handed a piece of card which explained (for the uninitiated) what was going to happen: “The Meeting is based on silence and reflection. The family hope, that anyone present who feels prompted by the spirit, will take the opportunity to speak during the Meeting”.

And that was it. We remained in silence until several people stood up to speak. I’m sure some of you have been to a Quaker Meeting, and I have a friend who attends that very Church, so I had an idea of what went on, but that was my first real experience of such a gathering.

I was speaking afterwards with one of the ‘elders’ or ‘leaders’ or whatever they term themselves (there being no clergy, of course) and he asked what did I make of it all. And I said perhaps we’ll try it next week in our own Church! What if we actually all turned up next week and our service was on a blank piece of paper? There was no set format and no one knew what was going to happen.

It is fascinating to see how various denominations go about worshipping our same God. Since he has deliberately made us all so different, I’m sure He gets a bit of a kick out of how we all go about our business of worship in often quite contrasting ways. Just cast your mind back to when we had the Salvation Army here one Sunday; noise and music and singing and all the rest. Here, in Anglican worship, we stuff our service with as much liturgy as we can, making sure we get all the elements included that we believe make up proper worship; confession, absolution, praise and prayer and all the rest, our Presbyterian friends up the road with their concentration on the Word and preaching and talking, the Roman Catholic Mass with the Sacrament and liturgy, again, and what I want to ask is, when does any of us actually ‘shut up’ and listen to what the Holy Spirit is saying?

Every form of worship has its strengths and its weaknesses. There is no such thing as a perfect Church! You know that I’ve said it before, if you ever find a perfect Church (what?) you should leave it immediately, because you’ll only ruin it!

I know that we love our liturgy, and we do try our very best to do things properly, but if I thought I couldn’t sing a good rousing hymn when I come to Church, I’d find it very hard to truly worship. (Music inspires the soul, even if you haven’t a musical note in your head.) We are all very different in our styles of worship, but we can learn a great deal from each other.

We read, this morning that wonderful story of the Syro-Phoenician Woman coming up to Jesus. We looked at it before, not long ago. To us it is a very strange encounter, and the words used are very difficult to our ears. But the main point is that a Gentile woman challenged the person of Jesus with a faith that he had not come across before. It impressed him and astonished his disciples. As I have said before, Jesus learned a lesson that day that we Western men have known for years, and that is you don’t mess with Gentile women! This extraordinary encounter demonstrated that this ministry of Jesus was clearly not for the Jewish nation alone, but for the whole world. For the first time, the disciples, as they say these days, were challenged to think ‘outside the box’.

The Holy Spirit cannot be confined. He needs to be heard and maybe we should make a point of listening to him more. When we truly listen to him, we sometimes have to burst with excitement, to open our minds and to think outside the box.

There’s a true story told, way back when, in America, a mainly white congregation sat in the seats on the main floor of the Church. The African-Americans sat in the balcony. Whenever the preacher said anything particularly good in his sermon, a man named Frank from the balcony couldn’t help but shout out words of praise to God.

This was always a bit disconcerting; not least to the white minister himself. After Service one Sunday morning Frank’s white master made a deal with Frank that if he wouldn’t interrupt morning worship and remained quiet throughout the whole sermon, he would buy him a brand new pair of boots. Frank agreed he wouldn’t utter a word during worship. The following Sunday, however, the minister had some exceptionally good things to say. Frank struggled hard to contain himself all during the Service and kept very quite, with the image of those new boots in his mind.

At one point, the preacher said something so incredibly wonderful that Frank just couldn’t contain himself any longer. He stood up and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Boots or no boots – praise the Lord”.

The Holy Spirit is a lot bigger than any one individual or any one denomination. There are times, for all of us when we need to be quiet and listen to what the Holy Spirit is saying to us, until we reach a point when we can only burst with excitement and joy. Whatever denomination we belong to, I think it is often very important to think ‘outside the box’. When are we ever going to spend the time listening to the Holy Spirit, instead of just talking to Him?

It is very significant, in the second story we read in our Gospel reading this morning, that Jesus healed the man’s ears before he loosed his tongue. With two ears and one tongue, we should be twice as willing to listen as we are to talk.