Sermons

Candlemas kept as Education Sunday 29th January 2012

2012-01-29T01:11:00.000-08:00

Today we combine the Feast of the Presention with Education Sunday.

As Mary and Joseph presented their Child to God so we present the 120 children of our School to him and seek a blessing on our stewardship.

It is occasion to reflect upon the work of education.

The Gospel of the Presentation ends with the statement in Luke 2.40 that the child Jesus grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favour of God was upon him.

Education is linked to growth in mind, body and spirit.

Our children probably get less of a balance here than they did in past generations. Time given for physical exercise and Christian formation is lost to mental training and with some good effect. We have reason to be proud of our school with its record for academic excellence.

Today's full liturgy involves the procession of candles during the singing of the canticle Nunc Dimittis in today's Gospel which speaks of the Light to lighten the Gentiles.

Education is similarly about illumination. My alma mater, Oxford University, has as its motto Dominus illuminatio mea. Words from the 27th Psalm The Lord is my light.

In Christianity the pursuit of truth is seen as inseparable from Truth's quest of us so that as we seek truth the pathway finds illumination.

Our own growth with Our Lord in wisdom is a lifelong process that will end with the Beatific Vision the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians).

The children in our school have unprecedented access to human knowledge through the great library of the Internet. One of our current projects as a school is to invest in the IT department with this in mind.

We seek increased wisdom for our children and increased knowledge can be of service. Indeed education requires a solid acquirement of knowledge. The wise prioritising of such knowledge is at the heart of a good education. Some say the Internet is causing a loss of basic wisdom and that is probably true of some users even if for others it provides access to education unknown in past ages.

As we present the work of our school to the Lord at this morning's eucharist we might for discernment that builds wisdom out of knowledge. Recognising that education is of mind, body and spirit we would seek for our children the best challenges to stretch them in all three areas - mental, physical and spiritual.

For ourselves too this morning we could reflect on our own ongoing formation and the things we allow to influence our thinking and to serve our physical and spiritual well being.

What use is a daily paper or news feed? What use do I put it to? How often do I reflect upon it or pray about it?

What books, radio series, TV programmes or web resources might build wisdom?

For us, unlike children in school, there is choice, but to be educated we need to be decided about the issues we pursue that will touch body, mind and spirit for good. Unlike children we have no class to interact with educationally unless again we choose to interact with others.

This morning we celebrate the Lord's Presentation in the Temple. The liturgy of the day encourages us to present our whole life - body, mind and spirit - in union with him seeking in exchange divine illumination.

The holy eucharist is such an offering. In it Jesus continues to be offered in the Temple of his Church and we, our needs and those of our School, with Him.

In it this morning may we find something of Simeon's light to lighten the Gentiles, the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians).

Epiphany 2 15th January 2012 8am

2012-01-15T00:50:00.000-08:00

Last week we kept the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord with anointing in the oil of chrism representing the touch of the Holy Spirit.

I am pleased to report that one or two individuals experienced something afterwards that reminded them God was alongside them.

We are God’s Church and must be open to his surprises.

In today’s readings we have evidence of how God is in the business of surprising his devotees.

The call of Samuel was a great surprise to him. The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread. We are told. Yet At that time Eli, whose eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see, was lying down in his room; the lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the temple of the Lord, where the ark of God was. Then the Lord called, ‘Samuel! Samuel!’ and he said, ‘Here I am!’ and ran to Eli, and said, ‘Here I am, for you called me.’

After two rebuttals we heard how Eli perceived that the Lord was calling the boy.

Samuel – and Eli – have a surprise of the Spirit which they need to come to terms with. In consequence of Samuel’s recognition of God’s call Israel receives a new start that leads through Samuel to Saul, David and the Kings.

For our second reading we had a passage from the Revelation of Saint John the Divine. I have actually been to Patmos, the Island where we’re told John’s vision came to him when he was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day. I attended the Orthodox Liturgy on the Island and when you read the passage of the priestly elders falling down before the sacrificial Lamb you could imagine John dreaming at the eucharist which is so structured – led by elders we gather round the altar as Christ’s sacrifice is represented and we behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

The book of Revelation is a mighty surprise of the Spirit to any who read it with devotion. We had a particularly upbeat section of it read for us today.

Then the Gospel reading has Philip found by Jesus. What a surprise! So much taken up was Philip, we read, that he went and got Nathanael, Saint Bartholomew, who, initially sceptical of Jesus was won over by the surprising knowledge Jesus had of his being under the fig tree.

Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel! He says in homage to Jesus who presents him with this astounding promise that extends to all believers:

I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.

Now that will be a surprise for us on the last day or on the day of our death as it was for those first disciples when they saw their friend and Lord ascending into heaven at the end of his earthly ministry.

So what can we draw for ourselves from today’s readings?

That God is a living and therefore surprising God.

We can’t tie him down in human categories since we are to him as dust to the heavens above. Indeed in God’s house whether you’re the greatest saint or worst sinner puts you either top or bottom of the carpet so to speak.

In that respect what’s most surprising is God’s actual interest in us humans in the first place. How he takes trouble to call Samuel, John, Philip, Nathanael – and, yes, you and I - for we too are called and to be equipped for his purposes?

C.S.Lewis wrote a book ‘Surprised by Joy’ to describe the confounding of his dismal atheism by a surprising encounter with the living God.

Sometimes it can be the same for us. We go through phases of practical atheism when God doesn’t seem to count much in our lives only to be woken up like Samuel by a voice from above spoken through our circumstances as were the people touched in last week’s anointing.

Here I am, for you called me, we find ourselves saying in obedience to God’s surprising intervention.

If you want to make God laugh, just tell him your plans. The point is we need an openness to his possibilities that’s bred in humility.

At the end of the day we’re not ultimately in control of our lives - God is.

God must many a time be amused at the presumption of humanity in the plans we make since we can’t possibly comprehend the variables as we look forward in life as he does.

Plan we must, as this New Year gets underway, but let our plans leave us open to welcoming the surprises of the Holy Spirit.

Baptism of the Lord 8.1.12

2012-01-08T01:05:00.000-08:00

John the Baptist said: I have baptised you with water; but he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit Mark 1:8

Why do we need the Holy Spirit?

To pray, to love, to serve, to evangelise, to be obedient, to forgive, to heal…

Without the Holy Spirit:
God is far away,
Christ stays in the past,
the Gospel is a dead letter,
the Church is simply an organisation,
authority is a matter of domination,
mission is a matter of propaganda,
the liturgy no more than an evocation,
Christian living a slave morality.

But in the Holy Spirit:
the risen Christ is there,
the Gospel is the power of life,
the Church shows forth the life of the Trinity,
authority is a liberating service,
mission is a Pentecost,
the liturgy is both memorial and anticipation,
human action is deified.

(Words for Pentecost Sunday from the Greek Orthodox Archbishop Athenagoras)

As baptised, confirmed - and some of us - ordained Christians we possess the Holy Spirit!

We possess the Spirit - but does he possess us? That is the key to a spiritual vitality!

As Our Lord says in St John Chapter 7:37-39 If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.

Our renewal in the Holy Spirit is about the releasing of the life of the Spirit within us.

The late Dom Ian Petit of Ampleforth wrote these words in his book 'You Will Receive Power': Baptism and Confirmation confer a supernatural gift, but ignorance or lack of understanding of the gift, can block its full effect. In other words, while the sacrament is valid and has been given, the effect has been blocked. When the block is removed then the full effect floods in...(a) baptism in the Holy Spirit… an opportunity for awakening in (people) their sacraments of initiation..

The New Year begins with a liturgical reminder about our ongoing need for this unblocking and awakening to the power of the Holy Spirit who visits us in every Eucharist. We have the possibility after the sermon of receiving anointing on our foreheads with the oil blessed by the Bishop for use at baptism, confirmation and ordination. We call it chrism oil and it represents the anointing in the Holy Spirit given in baptism, confirmation and ordination. We are allowed to use it occasionally to express and effect the renewal of faith and baptism as this morning.

The Feast of the Baptism of the Lord is the grand reminder that Christians are people who have woken up to Jesus and to the Gift of the Holy Spirit, to the living God - nothing less.

An awakening to the Spirit, a releasing of the Spirit, an unblocking of his flow – this is the invitation and challenge of today’s Feast!

There is one baptism for the forgiveness of sins and it confers the Holy Spirit. A gift though is given that needs to be received. For Christians to seek the renewing power of the Spirit – as we do as we receive Holy Communion every Sunday - is a matter of seeking to be more fully what we are in Christ and nothing more or less than that!

We want to be a people that live knowing their need of grace!

The Spirit is waiting to confirm to us the same words that were spoken to Our Lord at his baptism: You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.

Christians share in the anointing of the Anointed One – Jesus is the Christ or Anointed One so he can share his anointing with us and speak into our hearts those words of adoption: You are my son, my daughter; with you I am well pleased.

There’s a great tale from C.S. Lewis' about a doubting Bishop. Lewis once imagined an additional scene at the Marriage at Cana - a sceptical bishop sitting further down the table from Our Lord and Our Lady. There are the guests with the water turned into wine. As everyone enjoys the new wine of the Kingdom Feast the doubting bishop is holding up his glass and scrutinising, "How can this be? How can water become wine? How can the philosophical difficulties about an interventionist God be overcome? Is this some sort of conjuring trick?" All the while the rest of them at table are drinking up the Spirit in whatever sense you like!

There are many who make an 11th Commandment Thou shalt not commit thyself! Such folk – and they are around in the Church today – miss out on Christian basics, on the empowering promised in today’s feast.

If you hesitate about coming forward this morning shelve your doubts! Be open to the touch of the Lord through his Church.

I have baptised you with water; but he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit. This baptism or gift of the Holy Spirit is an ongoing reality for those who will commit themselves. The Gift is not so much a once for all thing or commodity but rather something dynamic and ongoing.

Baptism in the Holy Spirit is a process in which the relationship that opens up at baptism involves an ongoing flow of love, praise and power leading into ongoing consecration in the Truth.

It is worth recalling that though Our Lord himself was conceived by the Holy Spirit he waited 30 years for his Baptism in Jordan. So it can be – as it was for me and can be for you- that though I had received the Spirit through Infant Baptism, Confirmation and Ordination the first deep experience came many years later – and through, of all things, a crisis of faith – and a recommitment!

I have mentioned my faith crisis before and how I went on a retreat years back and prayed God if you’re there show yourself, give me a vision of yourself more to your dimensions and less to mine – and he did – but it needs refreshing!

Another way to look at it is like this: if the Christian life is like a rose bush there are great spurts of growth from time to time that push out new branches with new flowers. One such branch and its some branch in its fruitfulness – is, if you like, a new opening up to the Spirit. Yet the life of the rose bush before and after such a new spurt of growth is the same life.

We possess the Spirit - but does he possess us? That is the question we are being asked on this feast of the Lord’s Baptism. There is a commitment issue here we need to address.

As we come to receive Jesus in Holy Communion are we really committed and open to his empowering? Are we ready to hear and to believe those wonderful words: You are my son, my daughter; with you I am well pleased.

After the silence you have a chance to act in faith upon those wonderful words and come forward for the Father’s touch and anointing expressed sacramentally through his minister’s anointing touch upon your forehead.

As this happens we will continue in prayer and sing hymns to the Spirit.

Christmas 1 1st January 2012

2012-01-01T01:25:00.000-08:00

Is there anything new in Christianity?

Surely it’s the same old truths that we need to be continually apprehending!

As G.K. Chesterton wrote Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.

In today’s gospel we have Mary’s example of dwelling on Christian truth with an eye to implementing it. When the shepherds saw the circumstances of the nativity, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.

How do we recover this capacity to treasure the mysteries of Christ and ponder them in our heart so we can better put our faith into practice?

We need, some of us, to get recollected in heart - but this may need the reframing of our mental processing as well.

Last year my IT literate son bought me a book called Future Minds by Richard Watson that considers how the digital age is changing our minds, why this matters and what we can do about it. He admitted he needed to read it more than I!

Watson picks up on how the sheer volume of information brought our way by computers and the internet is drowning out learning and wisdom.

I picked up from this book Einstein’s distinction between what he called the intuitive and rational minds. ‘The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant’ Einstein wrote. ‘We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift’.

Our minds are given us to reflect deeply on the world around us and help us make a difference. This intuitive sense is far above the so-called rational mind which, computer-like, serves processing information.

Part of healthy living is giving our minds space day by day for reflection upon our life situation and engagement with creative study. The technology that serves to gather knowledge and spread information at high speed can distract us from this vital activity of what we call cogitation, chewing things over in our mind.

As cows eating grass must chew the cud for it to create milk so our take up of information needs pauses for reflection by the intuitive mind if we are to be creative.

Through the discipline of mental reflection we mirror our creator in his over sight of the world and enter more into his creativity.

New Year’s Day is the first day of the rest of our lives as well as 2012.

Will it be a holiday, a holy day, doubled as it is with tomorrow, in which I can take time to assess what’s really important in my life, what are the main things, and how I can keep the main things the main things?

Indeed this may be a good Sunday to remind everyone of the fourth commandment: Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy. For six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.

As Christian believers in a 24-7 culture we need to attend to the truth of the Sabbath which is a call to turn attention once a week from the work of the Lord to the Lord of the work and what he’s got to say to us about the main things in life!

We’ve got his warning about good time management, the 4th Commandment, on the wall for us to see everytime we leave the altar after Holy Communion.

Good time management isn’t the be all and end all but it’s a vital component of living a peacable life.

For myself I take the most part of a day a month to reflect on my work as a priest, the liturgical, teaching, administration and pastoral demands and how best to prioritise. I would recommend to anyone this discipline of sitting down for a time with nothing much in front of you and just thinking. I spent a day in the British Library doing this last week.

It’s the release of the mind’s intuitional gifting made possible by getting off the rational treadmill which serves our getting on with the next thing or inventing an excuse for not doing so! The mind can’t take us where the heart refuses to go.
So let’s go on from mind to heart since our text is Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.

Just as a discipline of mental reflection serves the good organisation of our life so a discipline of daily prayer aids our Christianity.

Prayer in one definition is the lifting of heart and mind to God. For example if I decided to take the news sheet away and use it for prayer supplemented by browsing the church website to read this sermon again that would be a mental decision.

Then I could read the scripture, and the events and sick list, until something tugged my heart.

When I did this I was struck both by the invitation to ponder in Luke 2 and by the last phrase of the Isaiah 61 You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.

When I put thought together for this sermon I picked up a heart tug from that verse and used it at my daily prayer time.

In that time I spent 20 minutes settling my mind by slowly repeating the Jesus prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.

In this way I managed to empty my mind of thoughts about what to have for breakfast or what task to do first thing and to centre my being on God. Then I read, as if from God, the beautiful affirmation from today’s first lesson: You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.

Lastly I dwelt in silence upon the Lord attending to this scripture verse.

Just an example, from my own recent practice, to encourage you to make prayer a treasuring of God’s words, a pondering of them in your heart.

If we find prayer difficult – who doesn’t? – it may well be because we need to settle our mind from being a tree full of monkeys so we can attend unimpeded from our heart to God. The main discipline of prayer is making that 14” or so journey from the brain to the heart so we can centre our being on God heart to heart.

As you know I commend the Jesus Prayer as a means to attaining this settling and am ready to explain it in more detail to any interested. I will be leading a quiet day on it for the Bible Reading Fellowship at St Cuthman’s Coolham on Thursday 15th March if any are interested.

There is nothing new in Christianity, only the age old truths we need to get refreshed and applied to our lives. Another more accessible aid might be committing this year to our monthly St Giles night with a spiritual focus. On Tuesday week 10th January we’ll have investment manager Simon Witheridge leading on how faith links to life and work.

Let’s make 2012 a time to take a leaf out of Mary’s book, setting apart time to treasure the main things in life, Sabbath time, and to pray, so our outward actions may ring more true to the faith we profess!

All age Christmas eucharist address 2011

2011-12-25T06:14:00.001-08:00

If there are children with a favourite present to show us could they be ushered to the front?

While they’re on the way let’s try a joke or two, like:

What did the reindeer say before launching into his comedy routine?

This will sleigh you.

What do you call the fear of getting stuck in a chimney?

Santaclaustrophobia

What do you get when you eat the Christmas decorations?

Tinselitis

Christmas is here and it’s time to be thankful for Jesus.

All the gifts we’ve been given this morning are given to honour the greatest Gift from the greatest Giver!

So what gifts have we been given?

Time for children to share.

I’ve brought my gift in – I got it early for Christmas and it’s the book from the David Attenborough TV series Frozen Planet.

Any other dads or mums got this too?

There’s a jingle on TV about it to the tune wonderful world that goes through some of its breath-taking images of polar animals.

Here’s one – what is it? p133

Polar bear

Here’s another – what is it? p165

Penguin chick

And these? p122

Killer whales

But this is my favourite (p75). It’s the Arctic woolly bear caterpillar.

Each year it feeds for just three weeks - as you may be able to see - on Arctic willow leaves. Then it gets frozen solid.

Fourteen times this living creature gets frozen solid and then after 14 years it becomes a moth and is able to fly.

According to my book it survives its annual freezing by producing glycerol. This prevents ice crystals forming inside it and damaging its vital functions.

Isn’t God wonderful?

The maker of the Arctic woolly bear caterpillar would have had no trouble planning his own way into human existence in the birth of Jesus.

Now a history test for the oldies in Church this morning!

If Jesus is the most famous who is the second most famous Jewish person of all time?

Albert Einstein lived between 1879 and 1955 and is the most distinguished of all scientists whose ideas on the working of the universe are still being confirmed by experiments.

Just before Christmas experiments with the Hadron Collider, the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, confirmed the likely existence of the long-sought Higgs boson or God-particle that was predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Einstein openly admitted amazement at the harmony of the laws of nature which he said reveals an intelligence of such superiority that compared with it all systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.

Be it Einstein’s thinking or David Attenborough’s observations we can’t doubt that the world around us is the product of someone very, very clever indeed.

What must he be like who made the Arctic woolly bear caterpillar, or the Higgs boson?

Christmas gives us an answer.

As the Maker of All isn’t a thing but a person he was in a position to get in touch when he saw it was the right time and to show us more of who he is. This he did by taking human form in Bethlehem around 2000 years ago.

God showed us God in Jesus born of Mary - going on to teach and heal, suffer and die, rise, ascend and give us the Holy Spirit.

The power that made the universe, baby penguins and killer whales, Arctic caterpillars and Higgs bosons, is a person.

Actually he’s three persons in one God, a Trinity, because only a being who shares love within himself can be a God of love – for how could God be love when there was nothing to love 14 billion years ago?

He had to be love within himself, love of a Father for a Son and a Son for a Father with that go-between of love we call the Holy Spirit.

That first Christmas God’s love, poured by the Spirit into Mary, came to land on the earth in baby Jesus.

This Christmas the same love is destined for earth again - only for your heart and my heart.

Do not be afraid; for see - I am bringing you good news of great joy.

In the joy of this morning you may know many limitations in your life – regrets, fears and anxieties – but perfect love has come today to cast out fear.

Today God who made each of us out of love invites us to open ourselves to him so we can know afresh the glorious liberty of the children of God!

O holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us we pray. Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today!

Let’s pause for a quiet moment to reflect on all of this.

Midnight & Dawn Eucharists 2011

2011-12-25T01:09:00.000-08:00

Fear not the coming of your God: fear not his friendship. He will not straighten you when he comes, rather he will enlarge you...You see then, if you love, how much room he gives you. Fear is a suffering that oppresses us. But look at the immensity of love.

Words on Christmas from Saint Augustine who lived at the turn of the fifth century.

I was taken by his image of Christianity as enlarging.

It’s so against people’s perception of what we’re about.

Yet the Babe of Bethlehem accepted those swaddling bands to give us the glorious liberty of the children of God.

God got straightened, bound up, so we could find new spaciousness and the power to become children of God.

Recently I had one of those awkward medical examinations and I amused my examiner by muttering courage equals fear plus the Holy Spirit.

To be a Christian is to have a capacity to rise through natural fear into the glorious liberty of the children of God.

You see then, if you love, how much room he gives you. Fear is a suffering that oppresses us. But look at the immensity of love.

To know you are loved, that God’s Spirit has been poured into your heart, is to connect with the centre of the universe and see his perfect love casting out your fear and its oppression over you.

One of the saddest caricatures of Christianity is that it’s narrow minded, a sort of strait laced morality. That Christians are holier than thou’s sent as moral policemen to keep the world in order.

I’ve been there, and maybe still am there, God knows!

A priest once had the privilege of speaking to the comedian Groucho Marx. I’d like to thank you, Mr. Marx the priest said, for all the joy you’ve brought into the world. Quick witted as ever Groucho replied And let me thank you, Father, for all the joy you’ve taken out!

God forgive us Christians for making our religion seem so constricting.

Tonight/today Jesus was bound in swaddling bands to set us free but we’ve undone his work trying to bind the world with strictures not of his making.

The Victorian priest Father Frederick Faber captured this in two verses of his hymn There’s a wideness in God’s mercy:

For the love of God is broader than the scope of human mind, and the heart of the eternal is most wonderfully kind. But we make his love too narrow by false limits of our own; and we magnify his strictness with a zeal he will not own.

When people look at a Church door they too often think of it as a way to narrow down your existence. Jesus did say enter by the narrow gate!

Once you come through the Church door – and I mean really come through into day by day discipleship and week by week worship - it’s more like the door of Doctor Who’s Tardis. You enter another dimension, the very dimension opened up by tonight.

I believe the new glazed doors serve this perception in the way they open up St Giles to our visitors.

God became man in Palestine and lives today in bread and wine – so he can live in you and me, opening up our horizons to his and widening our human possibilities into his.

There are people in Horsted Keynes this Christmas who’re struggling through cancer, unemployment, family breakdown or whatever who know this – I’ve seen them brave their fears and take a larger view!

When the One born to raise the sons of earth comes into our lives he enlarges us to make the most of the world around us in all its frailty.

Man is the macrocosm wrote Saint Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain. The whole created universe is the microcosm.

Human beings are pivotal to the universe because they bring the mind and thought of God into matter and there’s no thought or word of God without power.

Welcoming God’s love and his Holy Spirit gives us a life. It makes us what we’re meant to be according to God’s plan for the cosmos.

O Christian, be aware of your nobility wrote St Leo in another 5th century Christmas sermon. Be aware of your nobility. It is God’s own nature that you share: do not then, by an ignoble life, fall back into your former baseness.

Or St Augustine once again: Fear not the coming of your God: fear not his friendship. He will not straighten you when he comes, rather he will enlarge you...You see then, if you love, how much room he gives you. Fear is a suffering that oppresses us. But look at the immensity of love.

Look indeed, on this holy night/morning, and see in the Crib that immense love which makes you noble!

Pray for yourself and for all of us to live as God made us to live!

Christingle service 2011

2011-12-25T01:05:00.000-08:00

What do we most like about Christmas?

I like the quiet. Everything stops and there’s time to wonder.

Because the nights are dark and long there’s time to wonder about the moon, the planets and the stars.

I look at them and think ‘what must he be like who made all of these?’

If I can fill my mind with the sight of the moon, Jupiter, Orion, the Pleiades and so on I can imagine the mind of God.

If my mind can take in the starry sky God’s mind can take in so much more because he sees all and loves all.

God doesn’t just see one section of the sky he sees the whole of it and all the skies above all the planets in the universe.

God sees right back through history to the when there were no stars at all!

Who’s sitting by the List of Rectors of Horsted Keynes?

Can you give me the dates of the first Rector? Richard de Berkyng became Rector in 1177.

That means Christmas has been celebrated in this Church at least 834 times.

When did people first come to this area?

500,000 years ago – the earliest human remains were found 20 years ago in Boxgrove outside Chichester.

When did life on earth begin?

5 billion years ago. That’s 5000,000,000 years.

How old is the universe?

14 billion years. That’s three times as old as life itself.

It began with what scientists call the Big Bang but Christians know that by another name.

Tonight we are celebrating the revelation of the meaning and origin of the universe.

At one point in time chosen by him as the best time, the Creator of the Universe chose to show his face in Bethlehem in Judea some 2011 years ago.

This Jesus, the anniversary of whose birth we keep tonight, is nothing less than the Big Bang!

We know this from the way he died and rose at Easter more than from the stories of his birth, as in one of the earliest Christian texts from the letter to the Hebrews Chapter 1 verse 2. There it says Jesus, born in Bethlehem, is God’s Son whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds, the one who reflects God’s glory, the exact imprint of God’s very being who sustains all things by his powerful word.

This Jesus born of Mary in a stable made the Big Bang bringing time and space into being. He sustains all things which means he holds you and I together! He is to be heir or inheritor of all things.

We come from him, belong to him and we go to him.

So Christmas to me is a time to wonder!

To wonder at the stars above, the earth below, the existence of life and why human beings are here – and to see afresh in Jesus the power that brought us into being.
What sort of power?

The power of love - love wider than the ocean, immense as the earth and stars and cosmos - love that sees and enfolds all that is!

Love that came down at Christmas. The Love that set the world in motion to begin with became one of us for 33 years starting in Bethlehem.

This is nothing we could ever work out for ourselves but something God has revealed to us. Being a personal God he could do so and did do so in the birth, life, suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus his Son.

Christmas is about the love that makes the world go round!

The orange, the candle and the red band tonight stand for the world, the light of the One who made it and the blood he shed for us out of love upon the Cross.

Love came down at Christmas – so let’s celebrate it with our Christingles.

Advent 4 18th December 2011

2011-12-18T01:10:00.000-08:00

How does Jesus come into our lives?

He comes by the Holy Spirit.

He comes by the Sacraments.

He comes by the Word of God.

He comes by holy people as they rub off on us.

He comes by circumstances – which links to a second question:

Why does Jesus come into our lives?

He comes to bring us into his life, death and resurrection – and here is the rub.

Look, as the Church invites us to do so today, at his Mother.

She was first to welcome Jesus into her life – and where did it lead her?

She was led into hardship, led to a shaming pregnancy and a Cross of sorrows before taking the shine of glory.

I want Jesus in my life. I want the shine of glory – but, if I am honest, I don’t want hardships!

This is where Jesus sorts us out because it's by endurance of hardship that salvation is forged.

The great Christian writers speak of the need to gratefully accept most of what comes our way, including suffering and hardship.

Sharing life with Jesus means self-sacrifice.

Mary gives us the clue. I am the Lord's servant, she says in today’s Gospel, let it be for me according to the Lord's will and not my own.

Jesus gives us the Holy Spirit, the sacraments and scripture.

He also gives us hardships but we have to decide whether to endure them or quit.

In that decision we bring Jesus closer or we push him further away.

In recent weeks a good number of us in the congregation have had to endure hardships directly or alongside a loved one. Some of us have shown remarkable fortitude.

Last Sunday’s preacher announced he’d started chemotherapy and so engaged us dramatically with the practical side of faith.

He left me feeling I was a fair weather Christian!

I was reminded that the means by which we grow in holiness aren’t necessarily sermons or books or forms of prayer, the right sort of retreat or spiritual guide.

The means of our sanctification, of our cleansing from sin, healing from hurt and so on lies in the day to day circumstances of our life as we welcome them as the Lord’s gift.

As we read in Psalm 112:6,7 the righteous will not be overthrown by evil circumstances...he does not fear bad news, nor live in dread of what may happen. For he is settled in his mind that the Lord will take care of him.

The spiritual writer De Caussade in his book Self-abandonment to Divine Providence emphasises how our welcoming of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament Sunday by Sunday focuses the welcoming of the Lord in every circumstance that comes our way.

Jesus is as ready to meet us in the circumstances of our life as he is to meet us in the Sacrament of Bread and Wine.

To be glad deep down in your heart in every situation is a grace given by God, a grace we have to seek - just as Mary sought divine help to brave her expressed fear: How can this be?

If we aren't glad at heart it may be because we’re not fully submitted to God’s will revealed in the circumstances of our life.

Jesus comes into our lives – by the Spirit, Sacrament, Scripture or by circumstances - to bring us into his own life, death and resurrection.

He is ready to help us face discomfort so that his resurrection life may grow in us by the Spirit and our old proud and sinful nature is further humiliated and put down.

As we prepare for Christmas may we have our spiritual ears open to hear God speaking into our lives so that we might decrease in self orientation and gain within us the love of Christ that will never fail.

Advent 2 8am 4th Dec 2011

2011-12-03T23:28:00.000-08:00

From the Old Testament passage, Isaiah 40.3 A voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord’

Words fulfilled in the coming of St John the Baptist recorded in the Holy Gospel who came proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

A few thoughts this morning about repentance.

The word ‘repentance’, in Greek metanoia, means turning, turning humbly to God and to my brother and sister in sorrow for sin.

Repentance is a thoroughly practical business. It means coming humbly before God and practically before my neighbour, both of whom are hurt by my sins. It is no good mouthing religious words in church to God without the practical back up of asking forgiveness from the people we have hurt when that’s obviously appropriate.

Christians change their lives by amputation not by compromise. We go places – we go to heaven – by our decisiveness under God.

If only we could see what we’re missing through holding back from a deeper repentance!

A preacher was on his way to Church but had a row with his wife. Hard words were exchanged. As he closed the garden gate the Lord said, “Go and make peace with your wife.” “But Lord,” he protested, “I’m already late!” “O.K.”, the Lord replied, you go and preach your sermon but I’ll be staying here with your wife.” Because he was a man of God he went back to the kitchen.

When he finally made it to Church he preached one of the most powerful sermons of his ministry.

Every decisive act of turning to Jesus is costly to pride - but it brings with it the gift of the Spirit and a fresh empowering for Christian life and ministry.

Advent challenges us to deeper repentance. For some of us this might get expressed in the use of the Sacrament of Confession which is always available by arrangement with the parish priest. There’s an old Church of England saying on confession which might help you. It’s all may go, none must go, some should go

It’s a subtle trick of Satan’s to make repentance look lurid and not as down to earth, boring and matter of fact as it really is for most of us. If you read the newspapers you will see terms like repentance and sin most always associated with something lewd.

By contrast the sin of unforgiveness which is probably just as destructive a sin as sexual misdemeanour can get applauded in the media.

Then what about the sin of self-sufficiency write pride? Living as a self-made man worshipping your creator! It’s quite fashionable! But where will it lead you?

In Advent season the church calls us to deepen our humility before God and our love for him and for our neighbour.

Advent might be a chance to think about why some of our prayers are not being answered. Sometimes there’s a reason and God might show us it in an attitude or a way of behaving we need to deal with. It’s said, I repeat, Christians change their lives by amputation not compromise!

Our decisive welcoming of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament in church should focus the decisive welcoming of the Lord in every circumstance that comes our way and our decisive casting aside of temptation.

Jesus is as ready to meet us in the circumstances of our life as he is to meet us in the Sacrament of Bread and Wine. We need to repent – to turn away from evil to Jesus - again and again, hour by hour. I believe we can only be glad at heart and overflowing with the life and joy of Jesus if we do so!

A person who’s not resigned in a positive way to the will of God revealed to them in the circumstances of their daily living is someone who’s being worn away and destroyed. This is why St. Paul encourages us to give thanks in all circumstances for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. (1 Thess 5v16 18).

Maybe we need to bow down to the Lord in trying circumstances, thanking Him instead of complaining to him about them, seeing them as a gift from his left hand, ending any sort of argument with him about our circumstances

In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord – sometimes it seems that God gives us directions best when we admit we’re in the wilderness!

Advent is a call to decisiveness in preparing the way of the Lord deeper into our hearts.

So in the coming weeks let’s be decisive in tackling the things that should have no place in a Christ filled life.

Bluebell railway carol service 3rd December 2011

2011-12-03T23:25:00.000-08:00

The Reverend Wilbert Awdry would be glad to hear of a clergyman selling books about Jesus on the railway.

His daughter Hilary protested that a recent television series on her father’s Thomas the Tank adventures would have dad spinning in his grave. They’d changed all references to Christmas to ‘winter holidays’.

This year is Awdry’s centenary and I’m glad Bluebell has not just one but two chaplains here tonight and 5 minutes on the programme geared to put Christ into Christmas rather than take him out!

Am I getting steamed up? I hope not – sorry – I hope so – standing where I’m standing!

The great thing about Jesus is he’s bigger than any religion even Christianity. Now he really is out for inclusivity and an inclusivity that goes beyond political correctness.

Jesus came to show God isn’t just God of the paid up followers of religion but everyone’s God. He paid a price for that in rejection, suffering and death.

When he rose from the dead – no historical event has been as closely examined than that Easter event – it was God’s way of putting this truth on the map.

God’s not the God of insiders but of outsiders. That’s why he was born outside the inn in a cave and died outside the city on a Cross.

We’ve every right to criticise his followers when they close ranks and make Jesus inaccessible to non-members.

The Reverend Awdry knew some church folk like that. Grumpy Gordon is modelled on a difficult parishioner!

How about the Fat Controller? We don’t know who’s behind the name but I’m told he’s been as much a victim of Thomas the Tank rewriters as Christmas.

Is it so amazing that the Christmas story angers some folk so much they don’t want it repeated in a public place?

The idea of God as a personal God who’s made us and come in person to show us his love and seek entry into our hearts can rattles cages! Some resent the idea of a God who sees all they do and to whom they’ll have to give account.

I beg to differ. I beg them see in Jesus one who makes God actually credible.

If God really is love that would need to have been demonstrated in history and the person of Jesus is the best witness to it we’ve ever been given – read my book!

Oh dear – forgive me! Clergy like trains can get pushy and demanding! We don’t need tons of coal like a train but we still ask too much of folk sometimes!

A priest once had the privilege of speaking to the comedian Groucho Marx. I’d like to thank you, Mr. Marx the priest said, for all the joy you’ve brought into the world. Quick witted as ever Groucho replied And let me thank you, Father, for all the joy you’ve taken out!

Well that’s not our task at the Bluebell Chaplaincy – I hope not!

A clergyman had mourners in hysterics at a Crematorium. He’d rushed into the Chapel from a distant place carrying his sat nav. As the coffin was laid on the trestles a tinny voice resounded: You have reached your final destination!

Over all the earth, down through twenty centuries the warm light of Jesus has continued to shine drawing people to a great destination.

It’s been given to lighten our minds, warm our hearts and energise our lives - if we will welcome it.

Just as the light of the coal and its heat energises the cylinders of this train the Christ Child is given to energise our living, warm up our souls and to get them moving in worship and service towards a great destination.

Over Christmas there’ll be plenty of opportunities to stoke our inner furnace as we go to Church.

What Jesus announces is this: there’s a refuelling possible in life. There’s a warming of the heart.

There’s a joy from outside of ourselves waiting to come in if we’ll but welcome its source.

Joy to the world! The Lord is come! Let earth receive her King; let ev’ry heart prepare him room.

Let’s sing again and warm our hearts as we do so!

Advent Sunday 27th November 2011

2011-11-26T23:24:00.000-08:00

He shall come again in glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead that we may rise to the life immortal

What difference does this Cinderella of Christian truth make to us.

I say Cinderella because the doctrine of the Second Coming must be about the most neglected of doctrines. It gets eclipsed by Christmas, which now covers Advent and beyond, and is tinged with such sentimentality that many preachers get scared off attending to the four last things: death, judgement, heaven and hell.

The first benefit of the doctrine of the Second Coming is it puts us in our place!

What you are before God - that is what you are and no more. The doctrine that He shall come again in glorious majesty to judge us warns us to avoid the error of valuing ourselves overmuch by what others say about us.

No one can take away or enhance who we are before God.

This is a very difficult truth to take on board and get into our hearts of hearts. The blame or praise of any other human being is of no matter compared to God's praise or blame. If what we find others think of us inflates or deflates us overmuch we’re not fully centred on the Lord.

Fear God and there’ll be no one or nothing else to fear!

The second benefit of the doctrine of the Second Coming is the reminder it gives that once we accept the love of Christ there will be no need to fear his judgement. As St Paul writes to the Romans,'There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus' (Romans 8.1).

The universe will be ended by Jesus Christ and he is the one who first came to reveal the Love that moves the sun and the stars in Dante's immortal phrase.

If all through our Christian lives we have been looking to Jesus his appearing 'in glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead' will be consummation not condemnation.

In Lent we read Bishop Tom Wright’s commentary on Matthew's Gospel. The former Bishop of Durham writes about the Second Coming in his book Simply Christian. There he encourages us to see the Lord’s return as less about our being snatched up into heaven than about the New Jerusalem coming down in which Jesus will reappear as King of Heaven.

Bishop Tom sees Jesus now as present, I quote, hidden behind that invisible veil that keeps heaven and earth apart, and which we pierce in those moments such as prayer, the sacraments, the reading of scripture and our work with the poor, where the veil seems particularly thin....one day that veil will be lifted; earth and heaven will be one; Jesus will be personally present, and every knee shall bow at his name; creation will be renewed; the dead will be raised; and God’s new world will at last be in place.

If the first benefit of the doctrine of Christ's Second Coming is to put us in our place and the second is to remind us that place is one of being loved, the third benefit is to open up a vision of the purpose of all things so as to spur us on.

This world isn't just here! It’s God's world made for God’s purpose! The kingdom of this world is to become the kingdom of our God and of Christ, his Son.

He shall come again in glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead that we may rise to the life immortal.

God’s a personal God who’s created a world where personal beings who bear his image stand not at the centre but, in Teilhard de Chardin's phrase, as the 'structural keystone’ of the universe.

Almighty God made the universe to put in the centre of it his Son, Jesus Christ.

The first Coming of Jesus was into the womb of a holy woman, the Blessed Virgin Mary, demonstrating that we human beings are no mere compartment of the animal kingdom but are capable of union with God.

His Second Coming will occur when human beings, drawn to Christ and his Church in the Spirit, have completed the divine plan 'to bring all things together in Christ'. (Ephesians 1.10)

Materialists, ecologists are inevitable pessimists when they look at how the world is going. Christians though see in world events a forward movement. As Christ waited for the holy woman to be his Mother he now awaits a holy people to be his Bride so that as heavenly Bridegroom he can one day embrace his church so that we may rise to the life immortal.

Christ awaits the purification of his church for this consummation just as he had to await a woman for his conception. The purification of the church is inseparably bound up with the evolution of the created world that moves forward in history engaging through Christian mission with the good news as it spreads from pole to pole, news of the salvation which is God's gift in his Son Jesus Christ.

I could go on - what riches there are behind the doctrine of the Second Coming - but we need to land this exalted vision here into some practicalities.

To summarise, it is a benefit and not a bane to know there is judgement. Many unbelievers may be unbelievers because they resent deep down the idea of a God who sees all they do and to whom they will one day have to give account. We should not resent it - and if we do we should repent of our pride!

In Advent season we provide a number of occasions for deepening repentance, our sense of need for God. Tonight we have a special evensong with conscience examination. The sacrament of confession is also available tonight, on Christmas Eve and by appointment.

Next Sunday after the 10am all age eucharist the ministry of prayer for healing will be available to individuals, something the PCC has agreed we provide after every all age eucharist. Such prayer for physical, emotional and spiritual needs can be very helpful. On Tuesdays in Advent we have an extra Eucharist at 10am and our Wednesday evening 630pm worship is going to include a time of silent reflection.

In these ways and in our own individual prayer and bible study we can engage with the wonder of Advent season as it speaks to us of the love and judgement of God in Christ and his purpose for the church and the world.

The Lord is concerned with our lives and with all we and his concern is one of pure love! As Christians we are in the words of St Gregory the Great one in him who is everywhere. That union in the Holy Spirit is to be manifested when the world reaches its consummation and God is all in all in perfect love with the saints.

It is a glorious truth that no one can take away or enhance who we are before God - the love he has for us is will be everlasting!

As we welcome that love in Holy Communion this morning let’s hold in our hearts those we know who know not the Lord Jesus praying they too will open their hearts to him and experience the love of the Lord!

All Souls Day 2011

2011-11-03T01:06:00.000-07:00

How do we see death?

The right instinct for self-preservation would see it as our enemy. Much of our physical life and energy is taken up in looking after our bodies and protecting them from harm. There is, alas, little attention given in modern medicine to facing up to death on this account, since, at a natural level, when a patient dies it is seen as a defeat.

As we mature in spirit a new perspective opens up and we ponder death as the stranger it is. In that pondering there lies a quest for meaning, not least when those we love are taken from us. There is strangeness especially in sudden death or the death of a child. Death puts a strange, uncomfortable question to every one of us so that death has become in the 21st century as unspeakable as sex was in the 19th century.

Many stay with death as enemy or stranger. Some though, and here faith comes in, some go on to see death as a friend. If faith means anything, it has to see beyond death to an unseen God who sees all, loves all and desires nothing to be lost. When faith and death meet it is death not faith that is changed. In the words of John Donne Death, thou shalt die.

A Christian is a far sighted one. Someone adventurous. One whose confidence in the victory of Jesus over death spurs them on. One who presses through the false boundaries of unbelief, sin, apathy, fear, sickness and, last of all, death, towards the gift of God in Jesus Christ.

To be a Christian is to be opposed to nostalgia in the sense of wanting to stop the flow of time and change. Christian faith is a forward journey with an eternal perspective that welcomes the challenges and surprises of life with Spirit given creativity since Jesus Christ is ever new.

If you live your life not content with a boring sameness but with what is other than, or apart from, yourself, this fascination draws you forward day by day into the possibilities of God which exceed your imagining.

If you centre in love on what is other than yourself you get prepared to face what is the ultimate strange ‘other’ – I mean death. We come to see death as nothing more than the frame of our earthly life. A frame is the picture’s friend. It shows it off. Without the defining of our life’s duration in time the span of our life would stretch into an infinite void. Without being born and dying we would be ageless beings. No one would be older or younger than anyone or anyone’s parent or child – we would be no one at all!

Who I am in my inner self is what matters ultimately. This is a product not just of heredity and environment but of my own free choices - to love or not to love. By growing love in my life I make of myself, with the Lord’s help, a being stronger than death.

This is what the scriptures are speaking of when they say love never ends. As we heard in the 23rd Psalm if I should walk in the valley of darkness no evil would I fear. You are there with your crook and your staff; with these you give me comfort. To live with love takes us out of ourselves and into the forward movement of He who is love itself.

Hope is not deceptive, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts. (Romans 5.5) Or, as we heard in today’s Gospel, it is (the) Father’s will that whoever sees the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life.

To live a human life is a process of formation that reaches its end in death in a more profound sense than end-finish. All that we are is moulded in us through our life in time so that we can be taken into our end-fulfilment in eternity.

The best preparation for death is through the inner wisdom of faith that presses us forward to live in hope day by day and to give ourselves in love to God and neighbour.

Three things abide – faith, hope and love – and the greatest of them is love.

Love is the best preparation for death because it takes us out of ourselves and shapes our inner self so we see our physical death as no enemy or stranger but the last friend we encounter on earth.

Saint Francis expressed this neatly when he gave death honoured place in his great hymn of creation: And thou, most kind and gentle death, waiting to hush our latest breath! Thou leadest home the child of God, and Christ our Lord the way hath trod.

On All Souls Day the Church invites us to ponder death not as enemy or stranger but as our friend because of this future orientation we hold.

It reminds us that love is the key to facing death.

Beyond contemplating our own mortality and need of God today we are showing love for our own dear dead. To pray for departed loved ones is to enfold them in our love, as we did in their life time, knowing, through the risen Christ, that the love which animates our prayer is stronger than death.

The faithful departed have passed beyond the frame of death into eternal love. The destruction of death destroys everything about us that is destructible but it cannot destroy loving commitment to God and neighbour.

Death, thou shalt die. As we offer prayer for our loved ones at the eucharist on All Souls Day we do so confident, in the love of God, that purifies them and us, building our lives on the unshakeable foundation that is Jesus Christ.

All Saints’ Festal evensong 30th October 2011

2011-11-03T01:04:00.000-07:00

We will see him as he is, and all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure. 1 John 3.2-3

We shall see him says St John. The Christian hope set forth on the Feast of All Saints is no less than this.

In placing the Blessed Sacrament before us at evensong the Church gives us a focus and a reminder of the vision of God.

As one of our Eucharistic hymns says; O Christ whom now beneath a veil we see. May what we thirst for soon our portion be. To gaze on thee unveiled and see thy face. The vision of thy glory and thy grace.

Tonight at Benediction we gaze on Jesus enthroned but under the veil of bread. One day we shall see him unveiled in heaven with all the saints.

We shall see him and this is a call to purify ourselves, just as he is pure.

Two thoughts.

We shall see him

The vision of God is too wonderful for me alone. This is the understanding we receive from the second reading which speaks of a great cloud of witnesses.

There’s a movement called inclusive church working for women and gays. I would not dare to criticise it, of course, but inclusion in Christianity is something much more profound and far reaching than liberal Anglicanism.

True inclusivity is this – the democracy of the dead! It’s the inclusion through the Risen Christ of witnesses from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages before the throne of God.

Some forms of Christianity are good at throwing a line to unbelievers and drawing them in. They go on to promote their spiritual development as a one to one hotline to Jesus. Today’s Feast presents the drawing power of Jesus not as a line but as a net. The communion of saints is a net that by example and prayer draws us together around the throne of God to worship him day and night within his temple.

We shall see him

My text from St John’s First Letter complements the Hebrews passage which reminded us heaven is something corporate. It reminds us that to be a Christian is to live for the vision of God centred in hope of the heavenly vision of God.

I remember vividly a scene in the play A Man for All Seasons in which Thomas More stands before his accusers. He swears to be truthful saying he believes any untruthfulness will lose him the beatific vision. It is the thought of seeing God face to face that sustains him, and indeed sustains many of us in our tribulations.

This is the one true and only blessed life Saint Augustine writes to Proba that we should contemplate the delightfulness of the Lord for ever, immortal and incorruptible in body and spirit…Whoever has this will have all that he wishes…There indeed is the spring of life, which we must now thirst for in prayer, so long as we live.

To believe in heaven is to yearn in that way for the delightfulness of the vision of God. Now, in the silence, as we gaze upon Jesus veiled in the Blessed Sacrament, we have a chance to anticipate this joy which we will one day see face to face with all the saints.

Baptism of Rhys Johnson & Christophe Matthews 23rd October 2011

2011-10-23T01:09:00.000-07:00

I looked up on Wikipedia the Christian names we’re giving our two baptism candidates this morning.

Rhys, a Welsh name, means "fervour" or "passion".

Christophe, French version of Christopher, means “the one who bears Christ in his soul".

Hopeful names – may these boys grow indeed with spiritual fervour! May Our Lord be with them and in them through the rites we celebrate over them this morning.

This is certainly the desire of their parents Chris and Katie, Francis and Patricia. They want the best for their children and they know the best will take effort.

Just as these children visit their uncles, aunts and grandparents so they visit us here in St Giles. We’re like an extension of their extended family.

Christophe’s dad, Francis was confirmed last year. It’s one of my greatest encouragements to see people made Christians as babies own up to it their later years – and I’m praying for a good few in that category among us to take courage and become full church members.

The horse on the front of the service booklet is a reminder of Francis’ trade as a provider for Polo, the Sport of Kings. His vision is to make this most ancient of all games accessible, as it was in the beginning, to anyone who can ride a pony, so you won’t need to be royal, titled or a millionaire to play.

In Polo each player needs access to more than one pony, so tired mounts can be exchanged for fresh mounts between or even during chukkas. A player's "string" of polo ponies may number 2 or 3 in Low Goal matches (with ponies being rested for at least a chukka before reuse), 4 or more for Medium Goal matches (at least one per chukka), and even more for the highest levels of competition.

It’s a game where everyone plays their part and so, in turn, do the horses.

This is a lovely image of collaboration, a relay race of horses, that can illustrate the heart of Christianity.

We as Christ’s body are a team – a winning team, contrary to what you might hear!

We’re engaged in a battle to establish the love of God and neighbour on the earth, as Jesus explains in today’s Gospel reading - and we need one another.

You can’t be a Christian on your own, you need to be part of the team, and in that team we give way to one another on occasion for tasks that we’re not suited to.

In my forthcoming book, Meet Jesus one of the stories I tell on this theme comes from the time we were very isolated by the extreme cold weather early in 2010. Caroline Rich served as she does now with her husband, John, in the village ‘dial a lift’ scheme. Since they had a four-wheel drive vehicle they were able to help Lesley, who had cancer, obtain vital treatment at the local hospital.

Caroline told me about Lesley’s situation and I visited to offer her prayer which was gratefully received. We celebrated the sacrament of anointing for her in church and I became aware of how Lesley’s faith grew over the months. The acts of service of both Caroline and I were in partnership with Jesus but in different ways. Her service was being helpful. Mine was healing prayer. Both of us became channels for Jesus. Lesley’s faith, incidentally, has become an instrument of care for cancer sufferers internationally through her championing of the cyber knife treatment she received.

At their baptism Rhys and Christophe are entering the winning team of the Christian Church – but they need to be taught to play the game and be God’s instruments!

Here is a great responsibility for their parents, teaching their children to love God and neighbour- and they can only do their best. God requires nothing more than that. For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business as T.S.Eliot wrote.

St Giles, particularly our Sunday Club leaders, will be with you in this endeavour, as, surely, will the children’s godparents and grandparents.

So will the Holy Spirit!

This morning we light a pilot light, so to speak – and we trust God to turn the gas on in due course.

The Holy Spirit who makes water and oil, bread and wine his instruments this morning wants to make us all, led by Chris and Katie, Francis and Patricia, his instruments of spiritual care for Rhys and Christophe.

Then, in turn, he wants these boys to grow up so aflame with the love of God and neighbour that they’re evident instruments of blessing to the world they are to inhabit over the coming century.

It’s team work, but we’ll all be playing in the best game in the world.

Christian life, with all its ups and downs, makes for a contest that’s even more challenging fun than you find on a Polo field!

Trinity 18 23rd October 2011 8am

2011-10-23T01:05:00.000-07:00

Jesus said to him, "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets " Matthew 22:37-40

The world is moving towards one point. The financial troubles that are bringing the world towards more of an economic union are connecting up the world. They are, strangely, ironically, part of a greater movement into unity. This movement is a gathering up of all things in Christ so that the love of God and neighbour flow perfectly together in the communion of saints made perfect.

This Holy Eucharist is an anticipation of that union – more than that, it is an instrument of advancing the love of God and neighbour within the cosmos. As often as we celebrate this sacred mystery we show the Lord’s death and the work of salvation is advanced towards the point where Jesus will be supreme and God will be everything to everyone.

If the trajectory of cosmic history looks like a cone with space and time spinning out from the Big Bang the trajectory of salvation history is an inverted cone bringing all things together in Christ. To the outer eye of science there is divergence as things move apart. To the inner and deeper eye of the Spirit there is convergence towards what someone called the Omega Point where Christ is the be all and end all.

There our gospel reading will be fulfilled by perfect love for God and neighbour within the community of saints. Self-love will have vanished – what a thought – we shall lose self-preoccupation and be caught up in the vision of God and the shared joy of the redeemed!

Meanwhile we have to take the Gospel reading to heart so that we lose something more of self-love and gain something more of the love of God and of our neighbour for that is God’s will for us, each one of us here in church on this 18th Sunday after Trinity 2011!

Each one of us I guess struggles with self-preoccupation. We can hardly avoid it as individuals who have the duty of looking after ourselves, feeding, clothing ourselves, entertaining ourselves and putting ourselves to work in different ways.

Our Lord Jesus came upon the earth to challenge this self-preoccupation. He says to us, each one of us in church this morning "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind and … your neighbour as yourself".

Jesus commands this love of us and his is a gracious command – he gives us the grace to obey it – he gives us the Holy Spirit, not least as we receive his body and blood in this most holy sacrament.

To love God and neighbour energises us. The love of self drains us of energy.

How easily do you and I voice the sacrificial talk of the eucharist with but little deliberation. Every Eucharist calls forth not just our bread and wine and money but our souls and bodies as a living sacrifice in union with Jesus who is uniting all things with himself. Jesus desires the offering of love for God and neighbour from his people. He desires to unite that love with his own love that is drawing the whole universe to himself.

Sometimes the Eucharist is cheap grace. We grow blind to the sacrificial aspect of Christian worship in our over eagerness to grab easy grace when it’s convenient.

Jesus wants to take us out of ourselves and direct our concerns to God and neighbour which is why he has given us sacrificial worship.

We don’t come to church to be entertained but to be drawn into Christ’s Sacrifice which is drawing all things to the Father.

As the host and chalice are lifted up at the altar we look towards that final exaltation of Jesus over all the powers of sin, sickness, death, doubt and the devil, the Omega Point where God will be all in all. I when I am lifted up he says will draw all people to myself.

The natural concerns we share about low interest rates, the cost of living, our mortgage repayments and so on are to be elevated to a supernatural level by the Eucharist we share which builds our faith.

It is love for God who has given this ungrateful world so much and for our neighbours, who are as hard if not more hard hit by the economic crisis, that is to overcome selfish preoccupation let alone self pity at the way the world is dealing with us.

Lift up your hearts invites the priest. We lift them to the Lord.

Through the familiar action of taking, blessing, breaking and sharing an outward rite is accomplished which takes us right up into the heavenlies to be joined with the perfect love of God and humankind to be found for all eternity in Jesus Christ, true God and true man, present as eternal priest and saving victim at this altar under the sign of bread and wine.

Take your place with him now as we prepare to offer through him, with him and in him this most holy Eucharist for the praise and glory of his name, for our good and the good of all his church. Amen.

Trinity 17 16 October 2011

2011-10-16T01:20:00.000-07:00

What’s good about being a Christian?

Share things that are valuable including significant answers to prayer in recent weeks

Christianity is good for the soul! The Gospel is good! This Church is a place of purpose in a confused world, a place of belonging in a lonely world.

If this good news is going to get around some more the church has got to grow and draw in the next generation.

Do you think we at St. Giles have something that the friends we care for are missing out on?

We need to believe this if our prayer and our invitations for them to join us are to be wholehearted.

How can we help the church grow?

Discussion

A question we do well to ask ourselves is how we would feel if our best friend came with us to Church? Would we feel embarrassed about what and who they encountered? If so, why should we feel so?

What wisdom is there so far as the revitalisation of faith and our need to work for church growth in today’s Gospel?

Behind the questions and answers lies a trap set for Our Lord which touches on the relation of the believing community to its surrounds.

In the story we see the Pharisees making common cause with the Herodians who supported paying tribute to Rome against the Zealots who didn’t, hoping to put Jesus in the wrong with one side or the other. They ask ‘Is it permissible to pay taxes to Caesar or not?’

Our Lord’s reply does not actually make a choice between the two parties. It accepts the reality of Caesar’s rule, without touching on the question of its validity. Give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar – and to God what belongs to God.

Keep responding to God’s claim, Jesus says, whilst never forgetting the claim of the world around you.

To be effective in our mission as his Church we need an ever-deepening confidence in God allied to an ever-deepening humility before both God and neighbour.

We can’t escape those dual obligations – to God and to Caesar. It’s up to each individual and each religious community to balance these obligations. To ignore God denies us our distinctive of godliness. To ignore Caesar – read the human community to put it into today’s language – is to make our religion sectarian and destructive.

We live as Jesus did in a culturally diverse society. As such we can’t avoid speaking two languages. Our Christian Faith is the language of ‘identity’ – it makes us what we are as God’s people seeking godliness through word, sacrament and fellowship. Our shared citizenship demands we speak the language of our community.

If religious communities don’t engage with their wider communities and seek to speak their language they become sectarian.

To paraphrase Our Lord with a slant to St. Giles, we need to give society its just service, throwing ourselves as a Christian community into the fray of Horsted Keynes and its surrounds, whilst giving God his due by building up our confidence as a distinctively Christian community.

As your parish priest I need to encourage you to work on both aspects.

For St Giles to grow we need an eye to both God and the community. We need to firm up our confidence in God by getting ourselves deeper into our worship and schooled more in the Scriptures. However bad a name religion has got we cannot escape the call we have to be better and firmer Christians.

To be a Christian is to have confidence in God – and humility before him and before people.

A Christian who’s humble without confidence in God has no missionary potential.

A Christian who’s every confidence in God yet lacks humility before other people and their view of things is a danger to our cause!

In particular failure to be sensitive to the needs of our community and speak its language will show us up to be less than Christian in the sense of working for human and social flourishing.

Today’s Gospel makes clear the separate demands of God and man upon us as Christians but those demands flow together. Our Lord brought these conflicting demands together in his own body in his sacrificial death for us upon the Cross.

Through what he has done for us, which we recall at every eucharist, he builds our confidence in God and lends us his own humble love for people

In this Eucharist he is waiting to touch us in our heart of hearts, so we can touch others for him!

May the Sacrament we share refresh in us the purpose for living and the reason for dying given to us in our risen Lord. As God makes himself so near to us may he make himself near to the people of this community.

The Gospel is good! This Church is a place of purpose in a confused world, a place of belonging in a lonely world. May more belong here with us to Jesus so that God’s world may be enriched by the growth of his Church!

Harvest Festival 9th October 2011 8am

2011-10-13T02:19:00.000-07:00

Harvest Festival is an annual reminder as the eucharist is a weekly reminder of the profound truth of thanksgiving.

Our lives are not our own – and that’s an unfashionable truth in a self reliant age.

The Christian faith calls for inner eyes to be opened up to gratitude.

We come from God. We belong to God. We go to God.

This means, as creatures made and loved by God, that we believe in thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a key mark of the Christian church which has as its first service the Eucharist or great thanksgiving over bread and wine for Jesus sake.

Christians have every reason to live with thanksgiving. In Jesus Christ they find belonging, purpose for life, empowerment, forgiveness, spiritual direction and so many blessings.

Archbishop Michael Ramsey made many a profound remark and one was that ‘thanksgiving is a soil in which pride doesn’t easily grow’.

Thanksgiving is a soil in which pride doesn’t easily grow – now there’s a deep thought!

To believe in thanksgiving is to believe that the centre of your life is outside of yourself.

This truth lies behind those words on divine providence that we just heard from Our Lord in the Gospel from St Luke Chapter 12: Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest?

St. Paul expresses this truth of our belonging at the deepest level within the providence of God when he writes to the Colossians our life is hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3v3b).

To live thankful for such a grace is to live in infectious joy so that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving to the glory of God quoting the apostle Paul again only from 2 Corinthians 4v15b.

Doesn’t thanksgiving undermine a right self-reliance? Surely God helps those who help themselves?

Yes and no. Yes we are subjects not puppets. God never undermines our free will. No because the whole wonder of Christian life is God’s readiness to be helper of the helpless. He’s eager to release his possibilities into so many of our situations. If you rely on self alone you’ll always be disappointed. Depression is self-reliance that has failed. Death is the utter loss of self life.

Christian faith, thankful living, reverses both of these scenarios.

It is a matter of immersing ourselves in the self-offering of Christ as we do week by week in the holy eucharist.

Blessed art Thou, Lord God of all creation, through thy goodness we have this bread and wine to offer...

These gifts are offered as an expression of gratitude, the sign of our lives being given up to God. The bread and wine’s transformation to Christ’s body and blood and our receiving of these is the instrument of our own ongoing transformation into thankful living.

We come from God. We belong to God. We go to God.

All things come of thee O Lord and of thine own do we give thee!

Trinity 14 Repentance 25th September 2011

2011-09-25T01:10:00.000-07:00

Repentance is at the heart of our religion and it’s at the heart of today’s scripture.

The parable of the two sons in Matthew 21 picks up on the Ezekiel passage in its highlighting of human responsibility. We are free at any time to turn from wrong to right dealing, the scripture says, and we will be judged according to the evident determination we show towards right. The wrong we have done will not be held against us if we repent or turn from it.

This doctrine of repentance is written through the Scriptures. In the New Testament it first appears on the lips of Saint John the Baptist. Then, when Our Lord begins his public ministry it is with the call to repentance (Matthew 3:1–2; Matthew 4:17). When he sends forth messengers to proclaim his gospel, he commands them to preach repentance (Luke 24:47; Mark 6:12).

After his death and resurrection we see, in the book of Acts how his apostles, led by Peter command repentance. In Acts 2.28 Peter says to the crowd who witnessed Pentecost: Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Saint Isaac of Syria says, "This life has been given to you for repentance. Do not waste it on vain pursuits."

So what does it mean to repent or to live in repentance?

The meaning of the word is to turn. To turn to God. To turn away from ‘vain pursuits’.

The meaning of repentance is filled out by the form of baptismal vows we use in St Giles: I turn to Christ. I repent of my sins. I renounce evil.

Repentance is more than lip service.

A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, “Son, go and work in the vineyard today.” He answered, “I will not”; but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, “I go, sir”; but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?’ They said, ‘The first.’ (Matthew 21.28-31)

To repent is to act so as to move your life forwards into the will of God.

Through our conscience and our awareness of the love of God in Jesus Christ we have an awareness of what’s required of us. More than that we mouth those requirements as we did earlier in the eucharist by making an outward confession of our sins.

Repentance though is more than thinking or saying what you need to do – it is doing it!

One great mystery of our existence is the freedom we have to know what’s right and aspire to it but to be given space to delay and delay and delay.

The Confessions of Saint Augustine of Hippo who lived in the fourth century are still in print as the first great autobiography. Augustine connected with the Church and gradually came to recognise he was living in a wrong relationship. Later he admits his prayer was ‘Lord, make me chaste – but not yet’. Isn’t that a prayer we’ve all prayed about something or other be it diet, gossip or judgmental attitude – ‘not yet, Lord’!

To repent is to submit. As human beings we aren’t puppets on strings, no. Neither though is our relationship with the Lord the give and take of pure unfettered cooperation. With your Maker you more than cooperate, such is his claim upon you, such is his aspiration for you to really make you the holy one he has in his mind’s eye when he thinks of you!

As Augustine found repentance is submission, the end of all argument with God. It is the realisation there and then of God and his gracious demand, in Paul’s words to Corinth, now is the day of salvation (2 Corinthians 6.2).

When we’re driving a car our turning of the wheel is a parable of the repentance, the turning, which heads our life to its proper destination. How often do we drivers end up having to turn back on our tracks? Or fall prey to deceitful information? I listen to my Sat Nav, most kind gift of a parishioner. It works nine times out of ten but there’ve been times when in my heart of heart I know I am going wrong. I have been forced to turn its advice to one side!

Back to St Isaac: "This life has been given to you for repentance. Do not waste it on vain pursuits."

This morning’s scripture is a wake up call to check where we’re heading in life. If we’re lacking a sense of the Holy Spirit’s working that may be because we’re heading wrong somehow. The remedy is plain – I have already given the three stages from Acts 2.28: Repent, so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Repent – decide you’ll turn from whatever it is. Secondly ask God that your sins may be forgiven. Thirdly welcome the Holy Spirit.

I turn to Christ. I repent of my sins. I renounce evil. The life of the baptised is a life lived in that ongoing principle so that if our spiritual life is in the doldrums it may be, in that becalming, there is message from God, as expressed in the first reading: Cast away from you all the transgressions that you have committed against me, and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! (Ezekiel 18)

There’s a lot at stake for us in today’s scripture. "This life has been given to you for repentance. Do not waste it on vain pursuits."

Baptism of Zachary Francis & Alice Langman 18th September 2011

2011-09-18T01:01:00.000-07:00

Self-sacrifice is what we’re all meant to be about.

We were made to lose ourselves.

This is why in the traditional baptism rites candidates were, and sometimes still are, immersed in a symbolic drowning.

We are so grateful for the lives of Zachary and Alice - their drowning would be a million miles from our thoughts this morning! Nevertheless all we are about this morning announces the desire they have their sinful human nature drowned to death. That they come to live lives not full of themselves but full of the unselfish Spirit of God.

We can trace our existence this morning in five stages: the creation of inert matter, the formation of the earth, the emergence of life, of consciousness and then, in human beings, self-consciousness.

Only self-conscious beings are capable of fulfilling what the universe is all about, the sixth moral and spiritual stage, which is self-sacrifice.

This action came to perfection, and so perfected the universe, on an April day around 30AD when God who had taken human form gave himself up to death for us and for our salvation.

Self-sacrifice, losing your life to universal gain, is not applauded uniquely in Christianity of course.

In the book Born in Tibet Chogyam Trungpa tells of a saintly man in north-east Tibet whose compassion was so great he opened his house at all times to the poor. When, as an old man, he knew he was about to die he gave this instruction: ‘When I die you must not move my body for a week; that is all I desire’.

Soon he did die; and his body, wrapped in old clothes, was carried into a small room. The bearers noted that although the old man had been tall his body had already appeared to have grown smaller. On the sixth day when the family peeped into the room they saw it had grown still smaller. On the eighth day when men came to bear the body to the cemetery they undid the coverings they found nothing inside save nails and hair.

When the family reported the event to the local lama he said that this had happened in the past and was a matter of saintly people ending up being absorbed into the Light.

There is a lot of wisdom in the east which can work to remind us of Christian basics. We were made not to be full of ourselves but to lose ourselves to God and other people.

Buddhist teachers of Western pupils complain ‘They are so full of opinions on everything; and so they can never know anything’. This is quite a judgement on the spiritual immaturity of a postmodern, post Christian society.

We reach for our newspapers every morning to fill ourselves with opinions in a society where we once reached out to God every morning. We have plenty of knowledge but so little wisdom we have to turn east to cultures relatively unaffected by the 24-7 information flow.

Our greatest prayer for Zachary and Alice this morning, and for us in their service, is for the capacity to know what’s important – God – and to be made holy as we grow into the divine nature - to live not full of ourselves but of Christ.

As we heard from St Paul in the first reading, a man in prison mind you, to me living is Christ, dying is gain.

We allow ourselves to be saddened over much by our worldly failings. How much sleep we lose over useless things – that promotion we missed, that deal we messed up, the ageing of our bodies, the growing infirmity of our minds.

None of these things are cause for ultimate sadness so much as our failure to live selfless lives.

As Léon Bloy wrote: there is only one sadness, the sadness of not being a saint.

For 30 million years God has prepared us with Alice and Zachary for this day since he made the earth, brought about living beings, conscious and then self-conscious beings.

What we are doing at these baptisms is to announce the final stage of life – to be able to give it away in thoughtful compassion and kindness.

In baptism we announce the principle of drowning to self. In the sacrament we also give and gain the way to accomplish it.

One only has been able to give of himself totally for others in the history of the world. He died in our place to live in our place.

Self-sacrifice is what we’re meant to be about. We were made to lose ourselves in love to Jesus so Jesus could live within us and make us ever more capable of this, and of holiness.

To me living is Christ, dying is gain

Trinity 10 28th August 2011

2011-08-28T01:02:00.000-07:00

This morning’s Gospel from Matthew 16 has the challenge for us to deny ourselves, take up our Cross and follow Jesus. It is illuminated by the Old Testament passage from Jeremiah on the cost of discipleship – the Old Testament passages on Sundays are always chosen with the Gospel in mind. The New Testament reading has wisdom which speaks for itself.

Sometimes it is appropriate for the preacher to let the day’s scripture speak for itself and to touch on a wider theme. Today I believe it will be useful to stand back from the Sunday readings, beyond what I have said, and to give an over view of the liturgical calendar.

The Church of England is, as the Catechism defines her, ‘the ancient church of this land, catholic and reformed’.

As such we are a liturgical church holding to the seasons and feasts kept by the catholic or universal church.

That word ‘liturgy’ is a very important one. It means at one level holding to a standardized order of proceedings. In the case of the Church of England the standard is the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 and the Common Worship provision of 2000. This standard allows supplementary resourcing such as the prayer over the gifts, postcommunion prayers and antiphons from Roman Catholic use. The liturgical use in this village church has about it a character that would be recognised in Cahagnes, Brazil, India, Australia and the majority of Christian churches gathered for the eucharist this morning.

Liturgy though, means more than holding to a standard. More profoundly, liturgy, from the Greek, means ‘the people’s work’. In Christianity this work of participation by the people in worship is also seen as the work of God. When we follow day by day the ordered celebration of morning prayer, eucharist and evening prayer – liturgy isn’t just for Sunday - we follow an ordered lectionary with set vestment colours. Because that ordering is obedience to the Lord’s command through his church it is said that liturgy is God’s work as well as our own. Through the liturgy Jesus Christ is considered to continue the work of redemption in union with his Church.

The liturgical calendar divides the year into a number of seasons, each with their own emphasis, colour and scripture passages specified by a list we call the lectionary. Here is the lectionary that aids our sacristy team. Incidentally we’re currently one short in that team if anyone wants to join.

The liturgical year begins a month before Christmas with Advent when church is vested in solemn purple, flowers are banned and the Gloria is removed from Sunday eucharist. This is the time of preparation for both the celebration of Jesus' birth, and his expected second coming at the end of time. This season lasts until Christmas Eve when church is vested in white and the flowers return. Christmastide follows, beginning at evening prayer on Christmas Day and ending around three weeks later with the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord. After this church vests in green for a stretch of what is called ordinary time until Ash Wednesday when the flowers and Gloria go again and green gives way to the purple of penitence.

Lent is the period of purification and penance which begins on Ash Wednesday and ends at the Easter Vigil eucharist. It is also as you know associated with fasting. The last two weeks of Lent are called Passiontide when crosses and statues have mourning veils. The last week is called Holy Week. The last three days are called the Triduum: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday. The seven-week liturgical season of Easter, where all stops are pulled out to decorate Church and the Paschal Candle stands proud in the sanctuary, immediately follows the Triduum, climaxing at Pentecost. This last feast recalls the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Jesus' disciples after the Ascension of Jesus. Pentecost Sunday is the second feast Christianity ranking above Christmas but below Easter. The red vestments on that day give way to green the Monday after as the church enters the longest stretch of the ordinary time also known as the Trinity season.

In Christian liturgy there are two main cycles around the great feasts of Christmas and Easter each having a preparation in Advent and Lent. There is though a third and lesser cycle of Saints days which can literally colour a particular Sunday. Two Sundays ago we were in best white because it was the main Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary and next Sunday we’ll be in best white again for our patronal feast of St Giles.

Most days of the year are associated with a saint and these days are ranked into three categories of lesser commemorations called memorials, feasts, and greater feasts or solemnities and it is only solemnities that can trump a Sunday. Here at St Giles only three saints days are ever kept on a Sunday – the Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary in August, Saint Giles Day in September and All Saints Day in November. Every major feast day, or ‘Red Letter Day’ to use the old Prayer Book terminology, is kept through an additional weekday 10am celebration of the eucharist advertised in P&P. Next month, for example, besides St Giles we keep the feast of Saint Matthew and St Michael and All Angels.

So what difference can all of this make to us?

If you’re a new worshipper or one with a Free Church background and haven’t had the liturgical calendar explained you’ll hopefully be wiser!

If you’re a well schooled Anglican you’ve had a reminder- and don’t forget nine tenths of preaching is reminding.

I suggest that the main reminder for us all is the point made earlier to have expectancy about participating in the liturgy because it is God’s work as well as our own. Through the liturgy we touch on all aspects of Jesus Christ, his coming, his suffering, death, resurrection, ascension and the gift of his Spirit. It’s worth getting excited about and interested in. All the riches behind the liturgical calendar are given for the good of your soul and mine. Hopefully this teaching sermon will fill what might be seen as empty ritual with the fullness of Christ by making sense of the seasons and colours that come and go in St Giles and have done so for 1000 years on this hill.

Through the action of his Church Our Lord continues his work of redemption, which means we are drawn in to all that Jesus has done for us once and for all by both the action of the Sunday eucharist and the underlining of the liturgical year.

In Advent we are reminded that Jesus comes and has come into our lives so we search our souls. At Christmas we welcome afresh Emmanuel, God with us. In Lent we aim to nail the sinful self to his Cross. At Eastertide we have our vision lifted to the destiny Jesus opens up for us beyond this world. Then Pentecost reminds us that we have his Spirit.

Today’s liturgy is set within the green or ordinary season. It is the 10th Sunday after Trinity or 22nd ordinary Sunday, these Sundays being the total of the green Sundays between Christmastide and Lent and those after Pentecost.

The scripture for Trinity 10 from Matthew 16 and Jeremiah 15 has a challenge intrinsic to the whole liturgical cycle, namely to deny ourselves and make more space for Jesus in our lives.

As we participate together in that cycle we call the church’s year may Jesus renew expectation of our being drawn more fully into what he has done for us by his coming, death and resurrection, to whom be glory, with the Father and the Spirit, now and to the end of the ages. Amen.

Baptism of Kyle, Liam & Joshua Jones 21st August 2011

2011-08-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

There’s a scheme running with mystery worshippers.

They go from church to church and report their findings on the Ship of Fools website.

They can find the service a little dead, the sermon a bit boring and the fellowship rather lifeless with no one speaking to them!

How would St Giles rate? Is there conviction, life and love? I hope so - especially as we want our visitors to be impressed!

Kyle, Liam and Joshua are more familiar with another building across the road, The Horsted Club - which their granddad manages. If that Club’s their second home, St Giles is made the same today by what we’ll be doing in a minute or two.

The Church is a sort of second home. It’s extended family, God’s never ending family, built on the belief expressed in today’s Gospel that Jesus is the Son of the living God.

Because Jesus is God’s Son who loves us we can become his brothers and sisters in baptism which makes us God’s children and part of God’s family.

It’s a family with conviction, life and love that helps build up our human families.

Just like The Horsted, St Giles is in the business of building community as it brings together individuals and families in Horsted Keynes and its surrounds to be refreshed.

The refreshment Andy offers isn’t so different to that offered by the Maker’s rep here in God’s house. There’s alcohol, laughter, life and there’s caring.

Imagine Jesus a mystery visitor to Horsted Keynes. As Son of God he’d be up at Church. As Son of Man he’d be around the drinking places.

He actually is the mystery visitor here this morning. He’s going to be mysteriously present in water and word, bread, wine and fellowship because he said where two or three are gathered in my name I will be there in the midst of them.

One of the attractive things about the followers of Jesus is this. They have a right minded humanity – for the most part they do! Some let us down, of course. Yet if you took away the Christians many of the village institutions that help our health and well being would flop!

Christianity is convivial is it’s anything at all. Look at Jesus. They called him a drunkard and a friend of sinners! He went out of his way to be with those who felt there no one cared about them.

The crisis in our cities has been linked to a lack of compassion there in families and communities. Where people feel they don’t matter, that there’s no one on their side, they can be easily misled. Hence the sort of degrading incidents we’ve been shocked to see on our televisions.

Jesus, the Son of God, came into the world to bring us the conviction, life and love that has the potential to make everyone stand tall.

Even little Kyle, littler Liam and littlest Joshua! One day these boys will stand physically tall. Today Jesus is giving them the means to walking tall morally and spiritually as they’re washed from worldliness and marked with God’s love.

As their dad, Kevin, read in the first reading, they, like us, are not to be conformed to this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of their minds, so that they may discern what is the will of God— what is good and acceptable and perfect.

This comes to all who seek Jesus, God’s unique Son, whose inspiring portrait lies in the Bible – the boys baptism gift from St Giles is a collections of the stories of Jesus to read.

The Russian Novelist Dostoevsky once wrote: There has never been anyone lovelier, deeper or more sympathetic than Jesus.

That loveliness, depth and sympathy revealed to us in Jesus is at the heart of reality. It’s the face of God, no less.

Mother Julian of Norwich speaking of Jesus captures his loveliness in these words: Completely relaxed and courteous, he himself was the happiness and peace of his dear friends, his beautiful face radiating measureless love like a marvellous symphony.

When we read the portraits of Jesus in the Gospels they breathe out such warmth and humane compassion.

Are there any depths of human misery deeper than those Jesus has endured for us? Despised, rejected, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief ... Who can say God in Jesus expects anything of them that he has not been prepared to go through himself in his suffering and death?

I believe Jesus, as mysterious visitor, finds a home in St Giles and would find a welcome at the Horsted. There is space for him in both places, different as they are. The space he seeks, though, above all spaces, is here in our hearts. It’s as we open our lives that he can really make a difference to us as his warmth and compassion take more hold of us.

Come to him this morning admitting that deep down need! Come with the expectation that he’ll touch you - and you won’t be disappointed.

Let the beauty of Jesus be seen in me. All his wondrous compassion and purity. 0 Thou Spirit divine, all my nature refine and let the beauty of Jesus be seen in me.

Blessed Virgin Mary 14th August 2011

2011-08-14T01:11:00.000-07:00

There are five windows dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary in St Giles that trace her involvement in the saving work of her Son.

In the Lady Chapel we have the representation of the Annunciation, the Angel Gabriel’s visit, and the Visitation, when Mary was praised by her cousin Elizabeth and herself praised God in her Magnificat.

In the south aisle she is there at the birth of our Saviour in the Benson Window. At the west end Mary is depicted with Joseph presenting Jesus in the Temple in the beautiful Kempe window.

All four scenes are joyful. The last is sorrowful and it captures our mood as we come before the Lord at a time of national and international crisis.

This morning on the Feast of the Blessed Virgin, our eyes lift to the east window which shows her at the foot of the Cross.

We are to associate that image with ourselves as the spectators day by day of a nation dissolving into anarchy.

We come this morning with Mary to the foot of the Cross. We come, at this eucharist, to plead with Mary her Son’s Sacrifice for a broken world.

This Church was built for that purpose, shaped initially like a Cross, so that the people of Horsted Keynes could bring their joys and sorrows to God with, through and in the offering of Christ’s body and blood.

Within these walls people gathered to celebrate Magna Carta, to mourn the Black Death, to hear the scriptures read in English for the first time, to mourn the fire of London, to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo and to mourn the death of Queen Victoria.

In November 1963 Harold MacMillan suggested the Rector change the Sunday readings after President Kennedy’s assassination.

This morning is also historic for this village and church. Once again a Rector has changed the readings – from Mary of joy in St Luke to Mary at the foot of the Cross in St John.

We come to church this morning with all the sorrow and confusion of our Holy Mother Mary on Good Friday. Like her we’re looking at a crucifixion but ours is a crucifixion of London by forces of anarchy.

Like her we look beyond the east window to the light of the resurrection for whenever you look at a crucifix believers must see their risen Lord standing behind.

This morning church isn’t a soothing business but a call to battle.

The battle of prayer!

At the height of Monday’s conflagration the most popular post on Twitter was ‘pray for London’. Through my involvement in Premier Christian Radio I’m aware of the network of churches in London committed to pray for our capital. The inability of people to meet in London this week spurred me to invite us to meet here in St Giles which some of us have since Monday to say the litany as we just did.

The challenge of our national and international crises puts a particular responsibility on Christian people to stand with St Mary by the Cross of her Son and pray with Jesus and Mary to the Father: Our Father - in this situation - hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done...deliver us from evil.

By his cross and resurrection action Jesus has, in Paul’s words, disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in what he has done.

We Christians are salt and light because like Mary we can ask Jesus, by the sufferings he has borne uniquely, once and for all, to soak up the evil around us and turn the tables on it.

Our prayers, litanies and eucharists bring the potential of the Cross, which is like a mighty engine out of gear, into gear so the love of God floods into Tottenham and Croydon, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool as well as the workings of international finance.

Paul says God’s love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. It was true of Mary at her Annunciation and it is equally true of us in our baptism and confirmation. That love is poured upon us so that, at our prayer, it may cascade extravagantly upon all whom we bring to the foot of the Cross.

With Mary we stand at the Cross on behalf of a troubled, hurting, godless nation and a troubled world this morning - but if we leave church fired up to pray all the more for our nation he who is in us will show himself more powerful than those troubles.

Jesus living in Mary live in us is our prayer in church at every eucharist. Jesus living in Mary live in them is to be our prayer of intercession as we leave church and encounter the needy both in the media images and closer to home.

In a profound sense the key moment of the eucharist isn’t the sermon, or the consecration - but the moment we go out the church door.

You have come with London and our nation and the world’s financial crises upon your heart this morning.

Go forth refreshed by this knowledge: God sees what is in your heart.

Keep lifting the pain you see on the TV to him. Stand with Mary by Jesus crucified. Treat those you see suffering on the media as if they were Christ upon the Cross. Ask the Father to send them healing love and resurrection!

As you do so, pray in your own words. Use the slow recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Use the Jesus Prayer, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner. Use the Hail Mary if you know it. Use the Litany or prayer sheet you’ve been given this morning.

Take time for a quiet 5 minute of prayer after switching off the TV news you’ve watched. In that way hat you’ve watched will be turned to good and to God.
Come before him knowing that, through the Cross, there’s no human sorrow God’s aloof from.

Your prayer will make God less aloof from those you pray for. It will also help this Christian community to be better evidence to all around that, though cities burst into flame and the innocent suffer violence, there is a God who answers prayer.

Look at the Cross in our east window and the city depicted behind it. You be Mary this week standing by Jesus and make Jerusalem London.

Today the Church issues you a call to arms, my brothers and sisters.

The battle is the Lord’s and it is a battle.

Take up the weapon of prayer to come before the Lord with this aching nation upon your heart day by day, hour by hour in the coming week.

Mary at the Cross, Our Lady of Sorrows, pray with us and for us!

Trinity 7 7th August 2011

2011-08-07T01:00:00.000-07:00

I want to say something about the value of contemplation this morning.

This is provoked by the 1 Kings reading set to illustrate the Gospel passage from Matthew 14. In both passages those open to God engage with him in contemplation after storms. Elijah finds God in ‘the sound of sheer silence’ and the disciples see Jesus mysteriously on the lake.

Our relationship with the Lord has the ingredients of penitence, thankfulness and the requesting of our needs but it is in its root a call to intimacy. It is a call to just be with him and listen to what he has to say to us. Just as at this moment we are opening our ears in church to the preacher expounding God’s word we are invited to grow more skilled in opening our ears to listen to what the Lord has to say to us day by day and hour by hour.

Contemplation in its call to intimacy is no call to cosiness but a call to being totally available to God.

To grow closer to Jesus we need to identify any resistance within us to the word of God. We need to be checking out daily if there is any difference between what we want and what God wants.

The school of holiness is in the circumstances of our life interpreted to us by the word of God.

In the first reading from the first book of the Kings Chapter 19 we pick up on the story of Elijah after his battle with the prophets of Baal. Threatened by Queen Jezebel Elijah retreats to Mount Horeb to seek God. In the account you can follow again in the news sheet we read of a storm which prepared the way for him to hear God. Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’

This passage has been much interpreted by writers in the contemplative Christian tradition which built up on Mount Carmel. To this day the Carmelites keep the Feast of Elijah as one who heard and handed on the word of God.

In the Gospel reading from Matthew 14 we see a similar dynamic: Jesus went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. And early in the morning he came walking towards them on the lake. But when the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified, saying, ‘It is a ghost!’ And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, ‘Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.’

God speaks again to awed, frightened disciples in the wake of a storm to give them courage.

In both passages storms are the immediate preparation, the herald for God to speak. For Elijah it is in the sound of sheer silence that he hears God questioning him. For the disciples the sight of Jesus and his word of encouragement follows a battering by the waves on Lake Galilee. In both passages disciples of God hear God speak - but only after being shaken around a little!

Isn’t this true of our own discipleship? Very often our attention to God and what he has to say to us is captured when life shakes us up through an unsettling of our circumstances. Of course God speaks to us in our settled routines, such as Sunday obligation to church, regular commitment to prayer, personal study of scripture, devotional reading and so on. But intimacy often grows when we are forced to contemplate and face up to him through a change of circumstances.

In the last week I have been privileged to enter some of your personal circumstances linked to the loss of a loved one, an unsettling of employment prospects and the coming to terms with a sudden loss of mobility through injury. In all of these tumultuous events we have been seeking to contemplate and attend to what God is saying. I become, in a famous phrase used last week to welcome me in The Green Man, the Maker’s rep. As Maker’s rep my task is to help people as best I can see the Maker’s instructions. I need them myself and will be seeking them from another priest as I confess my sins before next Sunday’s feast.

Sin is basically a refusal to listen to God who says to us again and again in his word, written and spoken, that we are loved. All the time we are busy developing strategies to help us think we are in control of our lives but the God of power and might is expert in gaining our attention to him – and to his repeated assurance, ‘I love you’. ‘Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.’

Contemplation is the heart of prayer - being still and knowing God is God. It’s no selfish navel gazing but the shaking up and out of self regard to see with excitement and awe how and who God is. Through such prayerful attention we come to see and love as he sees and loves.

As for Elijah this means letting go of lesser gods so we can welcome the God who is Love more profoundly. This letting go involves what has been called ‘the dark night of the soul’ since intimacy with the Lord demands withdrawal from unhelpful things and this brings pain. The heart is so complex and in need of purification.

The contemplative way is a way opened up by Our Lord Jesus, a way of death and resurrection into being a better human being so that the best contemplatives are shown up by their attitude to their neighbour.

May the eucharist we celebrate build a spirit of contemplation within us and a readiness to hear God’s word not just peaceably on a Sunday at 10 o’clock but in every turn, up or down of the roller coaster of our lives.

Trinity 5 24th July 2011

2011-07-24T01:05:00.000-07:00

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Matthew 13.44

One Sunday allegedly in January 1927 this passage from Matthew 13 was the subject of a sermon by my predecessor The Revd Frank Stenton-Eardley. It was an exceptionally profitable sermon. One of the congregation from Broadhurst Manor went home, dug in a field there and unearthed a hoard of sixty-four gold nobles. This gold, deposited 500 years before, is now in the British Museum.

How profitable will this sermon be? Indeed how profitable is any sermon? Did you know you can engage with the sermon not only by grabbing the preacher over coffee but also by going on his blog linked to the church website which, thanks to David Ollington, has each week’s teaching displayed for further digestion.

There is no word of God without power. The preacher’s role is to read and study it and read and study his people and their context and make connections in a 10-15 minute talk that will help such an engagement with Our Lord that it will echo on in their lives in the coming week.

The guy who found the treasure at Broadhurst remembered the Rector’s sermon when his spade clinked the treasure. What does today’s Rector suggest you might find memorable about the same Scripture?

I don’t know enough about the circumstances of the finding of the sixty-four gold nobles to say whether the finder gained, though I guess he did, or was it the then owner of Broadhurst Manor?

What I think you and I can gain 84 years on is the reminder to renew our spiritual alertness and determination. These are the clue to an ongoing welcome of treasure that’ll never be shipped off from us to the British Museum!

The two parables of the treasure and the pearl remind Christians of the need to put supreme value on building our longing for God and his kingdom.

It is not what you are or have been that God looks at with his merciful eyes but what you would be wrote the mystic author of that Medieval classic, The Cloud of Unknowing.

What would you be? Where’s your heart set?

In our first reading from the book of Kings we heard of Solomon’s being approached by God in a dream with a similar question: Ask what I should give you. He answers with a prayer for wisdom and is praised accordingly. God said to him, ‘Because you have asked this, and have not asked for yourself long life or riches, or for the life of your enemies, but have asked for yourself understanding to discern what is right, I now do according to your word. Indeed I give you a wise and discerning mind; no one like you has been before you and no one like you shall arise after you.

God wants his aspirations to be of supreme value to his children and we can’t attain these without alertness and determination, two virtues that come out of the parables of the treasure and the pearl in our gospel reading from the end of Matthew Chapter 13. Like the Broadhurst Manor labourer if we proceed about our lives with wise mindfulness we don’t have to go far to find God and his riches. The purpose of scripture, of sermons and bible study, is to school us to be alert to the possibilities of God breaking into our situation, as the clink of the spade on the gold alerted the farm worker schooled by the Sunday sermon preached from this pulpit in January 1927.

Speaking personally I always find the number of God-incidences in a day linked to the fervor or length of my morning prayer. The more something of God’s eternal wisdom has touched my heart the more alert I am to the need to give ear to that villager I meet on the road or to visit, phone or e mail this person or that. Treasured encounters come to me inasmuch as my heart is set to evaluate everyone I meet as if they were Christ, to see my diary as containing what’s ultimately important as well as what’s merely pressing upon me.

The treasure parable of God’s kingdom is a reminder to recognize the treasure that’s already there in our lives and the joy its discovery brings. Over the summer vacation we’ve got great opportunities to rediscover the joy of marriage and family as the demands of work lift from many of us.

If this parable is a reminder to be alert to God’s moments the parable of the merchant is a reminder to be spiritually determined. The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it. Jesus emphasises in this parable how being his follower takes you on a determined spiritual search. The cost of this will be eclipsed by the outcome but there is a cost.

To be better disciples of Jesus we need opportunities to discipline ourselves so our personal agendas give way more and more to his. This cannot occur, Jesus cannot reach into our lives, without prayer, scripture and the eucharist.

In the coming year we’re going to have a monthly Tuesday evening with a discipleship theme at which we’ll be sharing with one another some of the ways that help build up our spiritual determination.

It is not what you are or have been or are that God looks at with his merciful eyes but what you would be. Saint Seraphim, a great Russian spiritual teacher, was asked what was the secret that lay behind people who appear to have more of the Holy Spirit than others. Just their determination was his reply.

May the Lord build that determination for him as well as the day by day, hour by hour alertness to the treasure we don’t need to go on holiday to find since it lies buried and awaiting us in Horsted Keynes.

Baptism of Charlotte Hord 17th July 2011

2011-07-23T04:52:00.000-07:00

The parable of the wheat and the weeds is a reminder that the world we inhabit has good and bad in it which God has allowed but that good will triumph in the end.

God like any good parent has forbearance. He’s patient with us, taking a long term view, knowing that harvest day is coming. On that day of judgement he will see a good harvest from the moral struggles of his children. The weeds, the bad they’ve live alongside, will finally be discarded.

To let us off trials and temptations in the here and now would make us lesser people in the hereafter.

At present Horsted Keynes has 16 babies under a year old. This remarkable surge in the birth rate has bred close fellowship within a large group of parents which include John and Helen. In celebrating the birth of these children there are a variety of rites being considered in the group from civil naming ceremonies to a blessing in church and last but not least, as today, infant baptism.

The difference between these rites has a story to tell. To name a baby without religious ceremony can have integrity about it. If people don’t go to Church why should they make hypocrites of themselves? To bless or dedicate a baby is a good thing. It’s asking God to be with the child whilst refraining from making a commitment to the church. This has integrity for folk who believe in some sort of God but aren’t sure about committing their child to a religion they themselves aren’t committed to. No point in buying the Brownie outfit if she’ll never be taken to Brownies.

To baptise a child is to make clear to them and to yourselves as parents that there’s a moral, spiritual and communal framework with definite boundaries that you believe to be essential to their well being.

The argument for baptising a child can run like this. British society has evolved to a point where the old Christian boundaries are no longer upheld by law so unless parents uphold these standards themselves their children will grow up confused. To baptise a child and keep the promises you make is to place that child within a safe framework for their moral and spiritual nurture.

The default for moral standards is no longer the law of the land. If parents want their children to do what’s right by any historic standard they will have to make a commitment to that standard or else their children will be deceived into wrong doing by the fashion of the day.

Let me explain. Because the Law gives people the right to do immoral things doesn’t mean it’s right to do them.

When the Law changes on anything it represents a shift in the social consensus, usually on behalf of people who feel hard done by if they can’t do what they want to do. Yet many of the things we might want to do aren’t right to do – and here is where the revealed and tested teachings of Christianity come in.

Many young people are of the mindset that if the Law gives you the right to do something it must be right to do it. Poppycock!

We have a right to have sexual intercourse from the age of sixteen but all religions affirm the value of abstaining until you find and marry a life partner. We have a right to divorce after two years but the rightness of divorce is contested especially by Christianity and all people who have experience of the damage done to children by the break up of a family. I know there are divorced people in Church this morning but most of them have a tale to tell which shows they didn’t quit their marriage as lightly as many are quitting their obligations today. Soon we will have a right to kill ourselves, especially if we think people don’t want to pay for our upkeep in our old age, but that won’t make it right that we should do so.

When you go up to the altar this morning look up when you get up and turn from the kneeler and you will see the ten commandments on the arch above your heads including Thou shalt not kill. The language and the script may be old fashioned but the words are just as true in 2011 as they were when those words were hung up four centuries ago.

Just because people have a right to kill doesn’t make it right to do so in most circumstances! We read on the wall Thou shalt not bear false witness in a month that has shown gross deceitfulness taken for granted in public life through News International.

If parents want the best for their children it’s going to cost them. Wise parents know a good bank balance, though desirable of course, is no receipe for well being. For their children to live well they need to uphold and be upheld by standards that are true even if the whole world denies them or that bank balance will be emptied in destructive living.

To baptise a child and keep the promises you make is to place the child under those standards in a safe framework for their moral and spiritual nurture.For Christians those standards are set out in a covenant relationship with God so that the Ten Commandments affirm before they condemn. Thou shalt not – you shall not – not you shall not. Why? Because as one of the baptised you’ve got the mark of God on your head. You’re precious and he loves you. He grieves when you act against the dignity he’s given you as his beloved child.

As today’s gospel of the wheat and weeds indicates God is our loving parent who’s infinitely patient with us, taking the long term view knowing that the end day is coming. On that day we’ll see that the moral struggles we have endured have been infinitely worthwhile!

Trinity 3 8am 10th July 2011

2011-07-10T15:26:00.000-07:00

I dropped in on the Christadelphians bible study at the Village Hall on Wednesday evening. Though we differ from them in our Trinitarian faith for them as for us the scriptures are of vital significance. I read some verses as they went round the table reading through Matthew Chapter Five. I gave them a greeting from St Giles and some of them expressed interest in our planned evening on the King James Bible in September.

There is no word of God without power. Christadelphians see the words of scripture as literally words of God. We as Anglicans look rather to the interpretation of that word and to the Holy Spirit’s inspiration to help our reading scripture.

In today’s first and last readings we have an underlining of the importance of scripture. Isaiah speaks prophetically for God:

My word that goes out from my mouth.. shall not return to me empty,but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. Isaiah 55.10-13

The interpretation of the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13 concludes but as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.

The seed sown represents the word of God. Our Lord firstly expects us to believe when we hear the Bible read that we are in some profound sense hearing God.

Then we need to prepare the very ground of our being to welcome that word. The seed that fell on rocky ground failed to produce fruit because it lacked moisture and withered away in the heat of the sun. To hear God’s word is to receive it actively into our heart and mind. If it remains just on the surface of our minds it will not yield fruit.

Receiving it deep within us requires the discipline of studying and pondering it. It is an admirable discipline to take away the pew sheet and do just that, using whatever thinking has been kindled by the Sunday sermon. If we feel touched in our spirit at Sunday worship it is good in the days that follow to fan the flame of whatever touched us.

To return to the images used in today’s Gospel we need to break up the stony ground of our heart to be made capable of receiving what God has to say to us. There is no word of God without power but the word within us fades away and loses power unless watered by the Holy Spirit who comes to us through prayer, fellowship and Holy Communion.

The Holy Spirit – and here we rather differ from Christadelphians – the Holy Spirit who inspired the Scriptures is ready to grant inspiration to all who read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them a practical understanding.

There is no word of God without power. We should expect our engagement with scripture to be transformative. The key to that is to hold onto all God says to us in it rather than getting overwhelmed by the cares of the world and the lure of wealth that choke the word (so) it yields nothing.

The key to seeing scripture transforming us is to make it possible for the seed to fall on good soil which comes about when we keep the word alive within us by the Spirit and obey it. This produces the abundant harvest the Gospel speaks of.

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts produce such a harvest this morning as we take the word of God to heart by the Holy Spirit. God make us good soil bearing an abundant harvest in his praise and service, to whom, Father, Son and Holy Spirit be all might, majesty, dominion and power now and forever. Amen.

Trinity Sunday Mary Benson 19th June 2011

2011-06-19T01:10:00.000-07:00

The doctrine of the Trinity, of three persons in one God, holds a creative tension between enthusiasm and sympathy that should infect us all.

We just read Our Lord’s enthusiastic call to Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Belief in the Trinity isn’t something to be kept to yourself but something missionary, to be carried to others. Too often we fall short on this task, identifying with those who would condemn religious enthusiasts as lacking human sympathy.

Christian mission is enthusiastic and sympathetic. It reflects the sympathy God has within himself as Father, Son and Spirit as St Paul reminds us in the second reading where he uses Trinitarian doctrine to appeal for more sympathy among the Corinthian believers . Agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. He says. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.

The creative tension between enthusiasm and sympathy, between love and truth is hidden in the mystery of God himself. As we draw closer to God we find enthusiasm, sympathy - and in that tension creativity.

All of this I found powerfully illuminated in a book just off the press of interest to all who live in Horsted Keynes and especially to members of St Giles in particular. This book - Rodney Bolt’s As Good as God, as Clever as the Devil - The Impossible Life of Mary Benson.

The book gives sight of religious enthusiasm, Victorian and Edwardian England, same sex friendship, country life in Sussex and leaves you wiser about the wellsprings of creativity.

Mary Benson was born in 1841 and lived at Tremans from 1900 to her death in 1918. She was wife then widow of Archbishop Edward Benson, and this book tells the tale of her loves, trials and family. Mrs Benson worshipped here, her family gave the nativity window in her memory and her son Arthur wrote the fulsome memorial tablet in the porch.

Though religious enthusiasts are notorious for their failure to sympathise where sympathetic gifts are allied to a force of conviction there is a true reflection of the God one in three and a creative dynamic emerges. This appears to have been the case in the extraordinary marriage of Edward and Mary though the force of conviction was at Edward’s end and the pastoral sympathy at Mary’s. Headstrong Edward, loving yet exacting, proposes to Mary when she is only twelve. His helpmate eagerly sympathises with him, his family and many others with such humour and wisdom as to make her a great subject for Rodney Bolt’s biography covering her life, loves and faith pilgrimage.

Edward’s career, founded in the muscular Christianity of Rugby and Wellington College, takes him to Lincoln Cathedral, then onward to be first Bishop of Truro and, as climax, to be Archbishop of Canterbury. His pioneering at Truro earns recognition for gifts of leadership that he carries, with a psychological downside, so that, 12 years older though he was than her, it was Mary who was destined to carry him through many a dark mood. Her support came from a series of same sex friendships compensating for the emotional shallowness of their marriage and helping her recover from the eventual loss of both Edward and the high social standing that fell from her at his death in 1896.

Mary’s same sex friendships, especially the one with Edward Benson’s predecessor, Archbishop Tait’s daughter, Lucy, that continued after Edward’s death, have been controversial. The biographer draws from Mary’s diaries the distinction she made between the love she held in mind and heart for these friends and the physical expression of that love which she fought off. Her underlining of certain passages in her copy of Thomas à Kempis The Imitation of Christ illustrates the struggle she had with, to quote, ‘carnal affection’. Her counsel against physical sex outside marriage to her children is recorded in the book. Rodney Bolt is careful to honour her stated faithfulness to traditional Christian ethics. This is somewhat unintelligible through the sexualising of friendship in post-Christian society.

Is this understatement? St Giles is a haven for all of us, straight or gay, married or single since God’s sympathetic love is utterly inclusive. At the same time, I myself counsel, when asked, marriage and celibacy as the two Christian vocations, with sexual activity outside of marriage as a shortcoming to be repented of.

Others say the Holy Spirit is at work opening up new institutions, including same sex unions. A century on from Mary Benson the Church of England is divided here. As in the matter of women’s ordination the jury is out. All of which means we need to hold in tension a sympathy for individuals, especially those cohabiting, gay or straight, and those who are pushing for a revised Christian ethic, a sympathy, as I say, that doesn’t avoid acknowledgement of the well trodden path of the faith of the church through the ages. Our Christian faith covers our shortcomings, if we repent of them, and challenges us to keep a distinctive standard in terms of sexual morality. It’s a standard that, given Our Lord’s teaching that looking at someone lustfully is already to commit adultery, puts us all on the bottom step!

Back to the Bensons who set us on this thinking. If Edward was head, Mary was heart of an extraordinarily creative family. Arthur wrote the words for Land of Hope and Glory and edited Queen Victoria’s papers. Fred became a highly successful author and ice skating champion and Maggie a famous Egyptologist. Roman Catholic convert, Hugh gained fame as preacher and writer. All made their mark and all suffered great frustrations which, as writers, they document both indirectly and directly. Some of them blame their mental instability on their extraordinary parents. It seems that their living with unfulfilled longings – none married – became a crucible for creative expression. In one of Arthur’s inspirational images life can feel as two lady birds might feel on the inside and outside of a window signalling to one another yet unable to find intimacy.

Arthur’s last word on his mother on her memorial in the porch speaks of Mary’s eager sympathy, wise counsel, abundant humour and far seeing love. These qualities are captured in Bolt’s very readable book that follows her life story whilst opening up the story of England past through many delightful anecdotes. I loved the absent-minded Truro priest whose sister had to secure him to the altar rail with a dog chain and padlock to prevent him wandering off before the service was over. Mary’s attempts to get Arthur to St Giles brings from him a similar image of the liturgy as people penned in rows like sheep intermittently crying out together like ducks in a pool. The book, like its subject, easily catches the imagination.

Let the Bensons be reminders of the creative tension between enthusiasm and sympathy that should infect us all as Trinitarian believers.

God who is three in one enfolds us in his enthusiastic love. The Lord God enfolds us, as in this eucharist, meeting us just where we are.

In his enthusiasm he can’t bear to leave us there. He challenges us, not least in our human relationships, to move forward, with his help, to be ever more perfect reflectors of him, to whom, Father, Son and Holy Spirit be praise now and forever. Amen.

Pentecost all age eucharist 12th June 2011 Birthday of the Church

2011-06-12T04:33:00.000-07:00

Is it anyone's birthday today? This week? This month?

Tell us.... who you are, how old you’ll be and what you expect will happen on your birthday.

Well, whilst I’m very happy that your birthday coming up, today's eucharist is to celebrate another birthday.

It's not really the birthday of another person (although some people do talk about 'her') and it doesn't seem right to call it a thing.

Can the children think whose birthday they might be celebrating today?

Ask one of the children to open the present with the Spanish dictionary in it.Are they any clearer?

Ask another child to open the card and read out the greeting: 'Happy Birthday, The Church'.

How can the Church have a birthday?

When Christians talk about the Church, they aren't just talking about a building – they’re talking about all the people in the world who follow Jesus.

Nowadays there are about 2,000 million Christians in the world but roughly 2,000 years ago there were only about 120. Not 120 million, but just 120.

On the day that the Church was born, a day which Christians call Pentecost, these 120 people were hiding in a house in Jerusalem.

It must have been rather squashed in that house.

Rather like a baby ready to be born is a bit squashed inside its mother's tummy.

These 120 people were all together because they were very anxious. In the previous month they had been through a lot. First, they had seen Jesus die on a cross. That had made them very sad.

Then they had seen Jesus alive again. That had made them very happy.

Then, before their very eyes, Jesus had gone up to Heaven.

Now they were very confused and concerned.

What was going to happen next?

So the 120 people went back to Jerusalem and waited.

Ten days later, something amazing happened. There was a great wind from Heaven...

Let’s blow very hard as if we were the wind

Along with the wind there was something that looked like flames. These flames fell on the heads of Jesus' 120 followers and, like a baby being born, they came out of their hiding place and into the big wide world.

Now children who can tell me the first thing they did when they were born?

No doubt you cried. Babies cry because they want people to take notice of them. The first followers of Jesus didn't cry when they emerged out of their hiding place, but they did get the attention of other people in the city by using their voices.

They told everyone in the city about Jesus. But they all spoke in different languages - languages that were different from their own and which they had never learned. This was one of the many birthday presents that God gave the Church.

That’s behind the dictionary. At Pentecost God gave people the capacity to share about Jesus in every language and nation and send them out to just that.

Church members read out one of the different translations of 'Happy Birthday'.

At that time in Jerusalem, there were many people from different parts of the world. They were so amazed to hear their own languages being spoken that they gathered around to hear what the followers of Jesus were saying.

After Peter, one of Jesus' followers, had spoken to the crowd, 3,000 of them became Christians. Like a newborn baby, the Church had started to grow bigger.

Well no birthday would be complete without a cake.

Server lights the candles.

While this is being done the candles can be a reminder to us of the flames that fell at Pentecost on the heads of the first Christians.

Invite children to blow out candles.

When the candles are blown out, remember the great wind from Heaven that blew the disciples out of their house and into the street.

That’s what Pentecost means today, it’s a reminder that the Holy Spirit who came on this day is still with us and is waiting to inspire us to share with others about Jesus.

Just as the first Christians shared their love of Jesus with people, the cake will be shared amongst everyone after the eucharist.

Easter 7 Healing ministry 5th June 2011

2011-06-04T23:11:00.000-07:00

In the news sheet you can see some of the means by which the church’s ministry of healing is made available at St Giles, places where Our Lord ministers to people at their point of need through his church:

• through the sacraments – eucharist, confession and anointing
• through laying on of hands - now available first Wednesdays 6.30pm starting 6th July.
• through the last Thursday of the month visit to Burrswood
• Through people’s names being placed on the sick list or submitted to the telephone Prayerline

I put this list in the news sheet following a series of PCC discussions triggered by a visit in April from the deanery healing ministry consultant Penny Sullens which had one outcome in a promise I gave to speak one Sunday about the church’s ministry of healing.

I thought this Sunday would suit well as it is set in those great days before Pentecost when the church is reminded of her dependence on God the Holy Spirit and of how the Spirit glorifies Jesus.

The church’s ministry of healing is a gift of the Spirit which brings God glory through Jesus Christ.

11 years ago the Church of England published a best seller. This book, A Time to Heal, has provided a vital contribution to the ministry of healing which it describes on the back as visionary, prophetic and dynamic.

This morning I have 6 brief observations, 2 under each of those three headings in A Time to Heal – visionary, prophetic and dynamic.

1. Visionary – what we’re about in the healing ministry is part of a recapturing of the power of the gospel
a) as some thing that is good and practical. Not just a theory but the power of God for salvation Romans 1:16. It’s practical in that it’s linked to people’s demands. Our response to these demands is set within a wider vision eg. social and ecological besides a vision for body, mind and spirit but it is essentially based on a vision of Jesus as practical Saviour
b) as the grounds of a new confident engagement of the church with the local community. Confidence rooted in the promises of God cf. +Rowan: What do I pray for in the Church of the future? Confidence; courage; an imagination set on fire by the vision of God the Holy Trinity; thankfulness. Confidence linked to humility – note the concerns for the safety of those we serve in ministry in ATH guidelines.

This morning as I lift up the vision for healing a question we might ask ourselves is: how can we help bring more people in our community to catch sight of the healing power of God?

2. Prophetic – what we are about in the healing ministry is being channels for God to speak prophetically to individuals and to the church herself.
a) Of redemption – the Saviour is a practical provider for body, mind and spirit and one who roots our life in his community and fellowship. The healing ministry is redemptive in that it fills what is needful in people’s lives. It is also redemptive in its transformation of suffering and sorrow as set out in Paul Bilheimer's Don’t Waste your Sorrows. People are stopped from wasting their sorrows by a prophetic word that opens them up afresh to a vision of God. Above all the prophetic element of the ministry of healing helps people relate faith to the nitty gritty of life cf. The Woman at the Well John 4
b) A call for fuller collaboration of laity and the ordained ATH stresses sacramental,pastoral and charismatic aspects. Prophetic renewal of healing ministry broadens from anointing (apostle) to charisms (prophets) since we are members of the household of God built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone Ephesians 2:19,20

A second pair of questions we might ask ourselves as a Christian community: How do we see the prophetic impact of what we do in the Lord’s name – where are the changed lives? Then secondly when it comes to raising up the ministry of healing how can we improve the partnership between priest and people to make better provision?

3. Dynamic

a)Explain cyclical/dynamic strands in church life – Zechariah 8:23 Thus says the Lord of hosts: In those days ten men from nations of every language shall take hold of a Jew, grasping his garment and saying, “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you”. Simon Magus, Leatha
b) Linked to spiritual transformation 2 Cor 3:18 And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit - wholeness/holiness – spiritual direction.

A last summary pair of questions to provoke more thought might be: What brakes are there here at St Giles on the dynamic we are talking about? What’s stopping the church as a whole and individuals from moving forwards to become more fully what God wants them to be?

I leave you with those thoughts as we take time to reflect on God’s word to us this morning.

Baptismal eucharist for Arthur Beesley and Thomas Kerby 29th May 2011

2011-05-31T07:43:00.000-07:00

I will love them and reveal myself to them Jesus says and we take this as a promise for Arthur, Thomas and all of us.

How do we see this love?

It’s a gravitational field that lifts us up to become what we’re meant to be.

The gravitational pull of the love of God competes with the gravitational field of the evil in the world and that, in our souls, we call sin.

When the astronauts trod on the moon they found themselves able to leap and jump with ease because gravity on the moon is a sixth that on earth.

If they had been able to visit Jupiter they would have crawled on the surface so strong is the downward gravity.

You and I get pulled down all the time. Our bodies, thankfully, get pulled down to stay on earth in Horsted Keynes. But our spirits – they get pulled down too. They can feel very heavy - as heavy as what we call depression.

I will love them and reveal myself to them says Jesus and in doing so he invites us to look up and find the gravity of God’s love which lifts us out of ourselves to head where we’re meant to head.

In baptism this morning Arthur and Thomas are being set off in the direction they were made to go with the support of their family. The love they’re being drawn up into is already real to Gordon and Penny and has been proved so through the trials they so cheerfully bear on behalf of their children.

There is one gravitational field of the spirit drawing us into God’s love and there’s another spirit dragging us down.

Human beings, you and I, are caught! We’re caught in the gravitational field of evil: of pride, anger, lust, envy, gluttony, avarice and sloth – remember – PALE GAS – P-A-L-E-G-A-S - the seven deadly sins.

For some of us this heaviness is sloth, laziness - especially as we get older. For others it’s the weight of indulgence through gluttony. Or it’s the dead weight of pride that sinks so many of our relationships. Then we have avarice – greed - which, as I describe in the news sheet, weighs down the world around you.

So we can picture and imagine the downward gravity of sin that affects us all.

When we try to rise above it by our own efforts we feel like the man in the gym trying to lift weights that are beyond his capacity.

The more we try to lift ourselves the heavier life feels.

The gravitational field of God’s love that lifts our lives can’t be felt through our own efforts. It reaches down to offer us a hand up in Jesus and all he has done for us by his life, death and resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit.

As we struggle with our relationships, insecurities and spiritual emptiness we find ourselves caught by the gravitational lure of sin as if in a quicksand.

The more we struggle in our own strength to release ourselves the deeper we go down. I remember someone driving his father’s land rover onto a beach south of Morecambe Bay where it sank hopelessly into a quick sand there before they could get a purchase on it. He had some answering to do to his dad!

It is a sad truth of life that so many of our attempts to better ourselves prove counter-productive. People caught in quicksand sink faster through gravity the more they struggle to get out of it.

They need an upward pull from outside themselves.

Jesus does that for us.

I will love them and reveal myself to them.

Every Sunday is a day of resurrection, but particularly a Sunday in Easter Season.

Through resurrection from cruel death the gravitational pull of God’s love has been proved more powerful than the quicksands of sin, death and the devil.

You can prove that’s true - if you accept it!

You won’t escape the quicksands of pride, anger, lust, envy, gluttony, avarice and sloth on your own. You need an upwards pull from outside.

There’s a Man outside of you who can. Jesus. He’s alive. He loves you and wants to give you that lift so you can become what you’re meant to be!

That’s why, in a moment, we’ll rightly say I turn to Christ. I repent of my sins. I renounce evil.

As we baptise Arthur and Thomas we are reminded of the two gravitational fields of the spirit we’re all caught up with and the need to welcome God’s rescue provision daily.

We can’t become godlike. We can’t elevate ourselves beyond the quicksand that drags us down however hard we try.

Jesus can, though - he can make us godlike.

He will - if we will let him - provide us with the upward pulls we need hour by hour to rise above the heaviness of our human condition into the glorious liberty of the children of God.

I will love them and reveal myself to them so be it, for Arthur, Thomas and all of us in St Giles this morning.

Easter 4 Good Shepherd Sunday 15.5.11

2011-05-15T01:10:00.000-07:00

One sign of health and spiritual vitality in our church is the level of charitable giving. Last year our missionary and charitable giving of £4668 was double the 2009 figure of £2272. This total is beyond the money raised for Christian Aid, as in this important week, and the Children’s Society at Christmas.

Later in May our charitable giving focus is to be the Guyana Diocesan Association and once again and I am pleased to give some feedback on Anne and my visit over the last two weeks.

We enjoyed our trip and did a good deal for the church. We spent a week on the coast and a week in the interior. No serious mishaps save having my shaving gel eaten by a racoon in the night and having to rescue the archdeacon when he fell in a trench at a friend’s farm when the bridge broke. There was a forty foot snake in the trench – we got him out!

Guyana’s an exciting place and I’m pleased to say the church is on the up once more. St Giles is being made partner to its developing mission thanks to the new bishop Cornell Jerome Moss who made use of both of us to do some training whilst on leave in the beautiful land where we were married 23 years ago. The letter he gave us on our departure

I was encouraged to see the level of faithfulness in men I trained for the priesthood 20 years ago. With that I was impressed by the hunger for God especially at an evangelistic service of healing where I spent over an hour hearing confessions as the local clergy laid on hands assisted by Anne and other laity.

Another encouragement was Bishop Cornell himself who will be back with us on 3 July. He is proving a good shepherd and, to quote the Gospel, the Anglican sheep are following him.

One thing that impresses about the churches in Guyana is that they are full of young people. Youth are the clue to revitalising the ordained ministry, which is the major challenge in the Diocese of Guyana. Many parishes are short of a resident priest. Within a year Bishop Cornell has identified 5 ordination candidates and the UK based Guyana Diocesan Association will be paying for their training next year at Codrington College in Barbados so please be generous in your charitable gift in two weeks time.

I addressed the annual Diocesan Synod promising this support and met the five men who are well worthy of our backing. I also handed over £400 raised by St Giles School to purchase a computer for the Anglican school opening in September which will serve to link our pupils next door to one of the poorest communities in the Caribbean.

Bishop Cornell has appealed to all Anglicans to tithe, which means to give 10 per cent of disposable income to the church. There is already a good response to this challenge. The Diocese is determined to stand on its own feet so that our gifts will be less important in years to come.

What impressed me was the awakening of new pride in being Anglican that is coming about in Guyana alongside a new honesty and transparency about the money and ministry needs.

So is there a message to bring back to St Giles on this Good Shepherd Sunday?

Indeed there is! That we are helping make a difference on the other side of the world and can continue to do so through the 29 May collection. That what we do at this altar associates us with the Anglican communion as part of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church; that bishops and priests who shepherd their people in a Christ-like fashion get a following; and last but not least that the Christian good news is something that opens hearts in penitence and brings healing - I felt the readiness to seek God over there incredibly refreshing;

As Our Lord makes plain at the end of today's Gospel: 'I have come that they may have life and have it to the full'.

Easter Sunday evensong 24th April 2011

2011-04-24T12:20:00.001-07:00

Archbishop William Temple once commented that it does very little harm if an eager layman talks heresy, provided he shows and imparts a love for the Lord Jesus whereas it does great harm if a priest talks orthodoxy so as to make men think the Gospel is dull or irrelevant.

When it comes to the great Truth we are celebrating of the Resurrection of the Lord this is supremely true. I can as a preacher argue for the Resurrection of Jesus but what may matter more is for you to meet with a life set alight by the Truth "Christ is Risen" however bad that person may be at expressing that truth!

I owe my convictions to meeting such a life in 1967 and I am still going strong.

These Glorious Forty Days are for me a celebration of the heart of my Christian Faith. The Paschal Candle stands in the Sanctuary as a sign of the basic truth of Christianity.

Like Paul at Athens I should like it said of me as is written in Acts 17v18 "he preached Jesus and the resurrection"!

The Truth of the Resurrection is a historical truth.

It goes beyond history but it is rooted in history. We have four slightly different accounts affirming that when the disciples went to the tomb of Christ they found his grave clothes folded and no sign of the dead. In the next six weeks the Resurrected Christ was seen according to Paul by over 550 people on 11 different occasions. The disciples lives were transformed and the Church grew at an astonishing rate surviving nearly 20 centuries to this day. Over these centuries, particularly the last two highly sceptical centuries, much critical investigation has gone into the claim for Jesus Christ being the only Man to come back from the dead. In this connection the former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Darling, made this comment about Christ's Resurrection:

'In its favour there exists such overwhelming evidence, positive and negative, factual and circumstantial, that no intelligent jury in the world could fail to bring in a verdict that the Resurrection story is true'.

The Resurrection being a historically founded truth challenges us as an universal truth. Just as the Battle of Waterloo will remain for ever in the history books as the event that changed European history two centuries ago so the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is an event that has not just European significance over two centuries but one that has universal meaning, stretching backwards and forwards in time and in space to every place and era in this Universe.

In the Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence I once saw the beautiful 15th Century picture by Masaccio of the Trinity. It shows Jesus on the Cross being handed over to us by the Father. The picture used to hang over a tomb with a skeleton laid on top of it. On the tomb was this inscription: "I was what you are and what I am you shall be" (repeat)

The Resurrection shows us that God has come in the flesh and suffered our death so that we in turn, welcoming this gift of the Risen Christ, may become sharers in His divine Life.

Speaking of Jesus C.S.Lewis said 'It seems 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'.

"Christ has risen from the dead!" sing Orthodox Christians at Easter, "He has crushed death by His death and bestowed Life upon those who lay in the tomb". The Son of God has "crushed death by his death" in the greatest of all imaginable revolutions. Now death to those in Christ is something to look forward to.

May the revolutionary truth of the resurrection seize each one of us this evening. To be a Christian is to be irrepressible. We cannot be put down!

Easter Sunday John 20.1f 24th April 2011

2011-04-23T23:24:00.000-07:00

There are two sides to Easter Sunday.

There’s what actually happened and how people saw it and see it today.

In the account we just heard from St John’s Gospel something happened outwardly and something happened inwardly.

Simon Peter...went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie; and the napkin that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself. Then went in also that other disciple...and he saw and believed.

Easter is about an event for which there is clear evidence. Something happened that just got summarised for us in the words of the Creed. And the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures.

This event makes Jesus Christ the only founder of a world religion without a grave. His resurrection is said to be as well attested as any event in history. The low key tone of the accounts of Easter in the four gospels would be absent in any made-up tale. The, what was then, remarkable and controversial role of women as witnesses would not have been included in any made up story. There was a new confidence found among frightened disciples and eventually even a new holy day as the first Jewish believers changed their weekly celebration of Sabbath from Friday night to Sunday morning. All of these things are accepted history. They confirm something happened outwardly that first Easter Sunday.

When we look at the accounts we see that some believed, some didn’t.

There are two sides to Easter. There’s what actually happened and how people saw it and see it today.

How you see the resurrection of Jesus makes all the difference in the world because how you think about the greatest things in life determines how you do the things that are least.

If you believe Jesus is the risen Lord, the Son of God and Saviour, that affects everything – take three examples: the way you treat other people (since Easter we know that human beings are sacred), the way you fill in your tax return (Easter is such a truth it makes untruthfulness a wasted space), the attitude you have to growing old (this life is just the preface to the book of life Jesus has written for us and age brings us nearer to this).

If the fact Jesus rose from the dead is one side of Easter the other side is the brightness of faith.

For many people it is too good to believe so their faith is dim. At the beginning of Christianity the apostles didn’t want to believe did they? The women’s words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them St Luke writes.

We human beings have an inner blindness that Jesus touched upon when he once took mud and put it over the eyes of a blind man so that he could see again. There may be some of us, even in church today, who need the brightness of faith to dispel the darkness of unbelief. Jesus can do this if you ask him to.

The fourth century writer Ephrem the Syrian writes ‘Blessed is he who gave the mind’s eye – which we have managed to blind.’ He goes on to describe how, just as God made us first out of clay, Jesus made new eyes out of mud for the blind man and will ‘open the eyes which our own free will has closed’. We need to exercise our free will to gain the brightness of faith and let both sides of Easter ring true.

Through such a choice for him may the risen Lord open our inner eyes this morning in Communion so we see new brightness in our faith!

Maundy Thursday 21 April 2011

2011-04-21T14:25:00.000-07:00

If there is one word that captures what is distinctive about Christianity it is 'grace'.

If there is one wonder of our life that expresses that most it is the Blessed Sacrament.

As someone wrote, 'the world can do almost anything as well as or better than the church. You need not be a Christian to build houses, feed the hungry or heal the sick. There is only one thing the world cannot do. It cannot offer grace.'

To live as a Christian is to live conscious of another world, open to the supernatural enfolding and empowering of grace.

Grace - G-R-A-C-E - God's Riches At Christ's Expense - I've heard it put that way.

What riches are ours, particularly in this Sacrament. Anyone who eats this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world.

God's riches - all the benefits of his acceptance, love and empowering - at Christ's Expense - flowing from the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus all of which is already present at the Maundy Thursday supper table and at every eucharist.

Blessed, praised and hallowed be Our Lord Jesus Christ, upon His Throne in Glory, in the Most Holy Sacrament -and in the hearts of all his faithful people.

Tonight God's riches, his unconditional love, are poured into our hearts at the expense of Jesus Christ Himself!

By tonight’s action Our Lord gives himself by intention, and intention to be sealed on the Cross by the actual breaking of his body and shedding of his blood.

His intention is love of Jesus since sacrifice is about love before it is about death. For Our Lord it is about a love stronger than death.

The Blessed Sacrament is His Body Broken for us, his Blood outpoured for us.

We are never worthy of this Gift, as we say repeatedly before Holy Communion. Lord I am not worthy to receive you...

There is nothing we can do to make ourselves worthy, to make Jesus love us more.

There is also nothing we can do to make him love us less, that is the wonder of it all.

'There's a wideness in God's mercy, like the wideness of the sea' wrote Fr. Faber 'but we make his love too narrow by false limits of our own; and we magnify his strictness with a zeal he will not own. If our love were but more simple, we should take him at his word; and our lives would be all sunshine in the sweetness of our Lord.'

Grace, God's riches at Christ's Expense, this is the very sweetness of our Lord to us.

Grace, unconditional love and acceptance, is foundational to Christianity.

The Blessed Sacrament is not given to us tonight as a reward for good behaviour, even if God's grace is not to be presumed upon.

Jesus makes as free a gift to us which he desires to give to all people.
It is a free gift but not a cheap gift. What expense Our Lord has borne to provide this gift!

And in the garden secretly and on the Cross on high should teach his brethren and inspire to suffer and to die.

After the joyful table gathering tonight we have a procession to a place of sorrows where we keep the Gethsemane Watch before the Blessed Sacrament. I hope a few of us might manage to obey the plea Jesus made to his disciples on this holy night

Could you not watch with me one hour?

So we move back into the action of tonight, the footwashing, the Last Supper Table and Gethsemane , pondering grace, God’s riches at Christ’s expense, given for us and for our salvation on this most holy night.

Palm Sunday 17th April 2011

2011-04-16T23:22:00.000-07:00

So we begin Holy Week recalling how Jesus put his life on the line for us.
Through the centuries people who have met and followed Jesus have readily done the same obedient to his words:

'If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it’. (Matthew 16:24-25)

Self-sacrifice is a powerful brand. When I have seen it in the Christian people around me it has made Jesus more real to me.

Jesus calls forth witnesses. The most effective have been martyrs who have lost absolutely all self-interest. Such self-sacrifice has branded Christianity in every age. As the second century writer Tertullian famously expressed it ‘the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church’.

Where people have followed Jesus to distant lands to bring his good news their sacrifice has regularly been infectious.

In a recent chronicle of the church in China called The Heavenly Man the exiled Pastor Yun chronicles three imprisonment’s (1983-88, 1991-3 and 2001) in a story that starts in the Cultural Revolution of 1974. Mindful of the teaching and sacrifices of western missionaries in the early 20th century the sixteen year old Yun and his family are led in desperation to pray to Jesus for his father to be healed from cancer. He is remarkably healed so that Yun recognises the power of Jesus. From this first encounter his story goes on testifying to the Lord’s intervention again and again as people are repeatedly humiliated and reduced by circumstances that are again and again turned on their head. This brings praise to God and dramatic growth to his church. The book is as exciting as any adventure story, with miraculous healings, prison escapes and the greater wonder of mass conversion of lives to Jesus all happening in these days on the other side of the world.

Thousands in China are now emulating the heroic witness of the hundreds of western missionaries who gave their lives over a thousand years to plant the church there. They sowed gospel seed but it is only now that the harvest is beginning, so that hundreds of Chinese missionaries are even now taking the gospel back west on foot to Jerusalem challenging Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu cultures on their way with the unique claims of Jesus Christ.

Brother Yun writes: ‘The gospel grows through hardship and will spread throughout the world. The truth will enter everyone’s heart. Truth is always truth. Nothing and no one can change that. It will always conquer’. This uncompromising word of faith captures the spiritual force of his witness. Yun’s recent flight from China has brought him into direct contact with the wider church where he senses something is missing. He writes of God’s desire to loosen our selfish attachments, release more of our energies into prayer and worship, open our minds to scripture and equip us with new boldness to witness for Jesus so that the harvest of transformed lives seen in China can extend into our own nation.

Because Jesus is God’s Word made flesh (John 1:14) he expects the words of his followers never to be empty. He leads them again and again to invest themselves fully in their profession of faith in him.

When people know Jesus they know their witness to him in words will be weighed according to their perceived obedience to his call to die to self and rise to new life in the Holy Spirit. As all England cricketer turned missionary C.T.Studd once wrote ‘If Jesus Christ be God, and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him.’

Last week I was blessed to see one of the most powerful films I have ever seen, Of God and Men. It centres on the monastery of Tibhirine, where nine Trappist monks lived in harmony with the largely Muslim population of Algeria, until seven of them were kidnapped and assassinated in 1996.

It tells the tale of a peaceful situation between local Christians and Muslims becoming a lethal one due to external events rather like those that have recently swept through Libya and other Arab lands.

The reconstruction of their martyrdom shows the monks at worship, serving the poor Muslims around the monastery and encouraging one another as the violence grows. They have to choose whether to leave Algeria. The screen play focuses on conferences of the community where they debate the possibility of martyrdom which in the end becomes a reality. It is a beautiful film which won a Grand Prix at the 2010 Cannes Festival. It ends with the reading of the letter one of them, Brother Chretien, left for his mother in case of his death.

Here it is.

‘I have lived long enough to know that I am an accomplice in the evil which seems, alas, to prevail in the world, even in the evil which might blindly strike me down. I would like, when the time comes, to have a moment of spiritual clarity which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God and of my fellow human beings, and at the same time forgive with all my heart the one who will strike me down. I could not desire such a death. It seems to me important to state this. I do not see, in fact, how I could rejoice if the people I love were indiscriminately accused of my murder. It would be too high a price to pay for what will perhaps be called the ‘grace of martyrdom’’.

To the letter to his mother Chretien adds a note to the one who will kill him: ‘In God's face I see yours. May we meet again as happy thieves in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both. Amen! In H'Allah!’

What grace! To recognise God in the face of one’s murderer!

It was a profoundly moving film made more so by its accurate representation of well documented events 15 years ago in Algeria and by its topicality with all that is happening in North Africa today.

Holy Week lifts the bar. We have performed the annual reading of the passion of Our Lord. We have heard some stories of how that story has drawn forth self sacrifice in China and Algeria.

Back to Horsted Keynes! For us self sacrifice will be more mundane but nonetheless significant for that.

We can’t get to be like Jesus without it.

Holy Week is I crossed out. It’s a time to identify and break selfish attachments and release more of our energies into prayer and worship. It is an opportunity, if we make it so, to follow the way of the Cross in the services later this week, to open our minds to scripture and be equipped with new boldness to witness to him.
As has been said Jesus Christ expects the words of his followers never to be empty. He wants us to commit ourselves, our souls and bodies into the profession of faith we make in him.

‘If Jesus Christ be God, and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for him.’

Mothering Sunday 3rd April 2011

2011-04-03T01:09:00.000-07:00

It’s Laetare Sunday, Rejoice Sunday, rejoice Jerusalem I read for the opening antiphon. Mothering Sunday.

We’re allowed a little respite from Lent – today is also called Refreshment Sunday - and we even have flowers. The daffodils will appear at the end for you to take away.

We rejoice today in Mother Church, our Jerusalem on the hill but also the heavenly Jerusalem above. As God is our Father the Church is our Mother.

The world has reduced this day to a celebration of our earthly mothers, which is no bad thing, especially when, as for many of us, our faith is owed to good mothering as well as fathering.

There is another mother I need to speak to and her image is on the altar.

In Scripture Mary is there, as in the Gospel at the foot of the Cross, She’s there for Jesus and for us without getting in the way.

Do you know what I mean? We should be there for people, especially at times of need, but without getting in the way.

This is the art of Mary – and it should be ours as well.

‘I am the handmaid of the Lord’ she says in the Gospel we read on Lady Day a week ago: ‘Let what you have said be done to me’.

We’ll do nothing to bring Christ into the world unless we’re there for God and for people. We’ll do nothing, either, to bring Christ into the world if we serve God and other people dutifully whilst deep down serving them on our terms rather than theirs

That’s not the religion of the child in a manger but the religion of the dog in a manger!

We’re called like Our Lady to let Christ and his kingdom prevail. This means being like midwives who come sympathetically alongside people and situations that cry out for attention and help what God wants to come to pass. We stand by, we facilitate, we pray, knowing our place as unprofitable servants – and, praise God, we see Jesus build his kingdom.

We best serve God and others with a loving discernment that starts from a determination to listen to God with Mary. The more real Jesus becomes to us and in us, not least through our Lenten devotion, the more our actions will grow loving as he is loving. It’s not how much we do or say or even listen that matters so much a how much love we put into it so to speak, which is why our listening to God is so important.

How can we best give more of ourselves? By listening to God and then secondly to ourselveswith Mary. Mary encourages us towards a positive self-regard. The Almighty has done great things for me.

Take stock of all that Jesus is doing in your life and rejoice!

Take stock also of the ingrained selfishness, the ‘dog in the manger’ bit so you can give it to God in confession.

Take stock of how you and I at times put the work of the Lord before the Lord of the work. It’s when we get too busy in the Lord’s work that our own selfishness can become sadly all the more evident.

Listen to God, listen to yourself, sift and purify your agenda, then listen to those God puts your way who need your ears! As we listen to others on this feast of family with our outer ears let’s keep two inner ears listening to God and to our own reaction to what we hear lest it get in the way.

Like Mary let’s be there for people without getting in their way. Being surrendered ourselves, as at this Eucharist, to whatever God wants of us to be made a Christ-bearer under the watchful care of the Mother of believers.

Jesus who was first carried by Mary at Bethlehem, who is carried to us in Bread and Wine this morning, waits to be carried by you and I to a waiting world!

Lent 1 13 March 2011

2011-03-13T01:34:00.000-08:00

The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote a short story called The Two Pilgrims. It tells of two Russians who set out on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem intent on being present at the solemn Easter festivities. One had his mind so set on the journey’s end and object that he would stop for nothing and take thought for nothing but the journey.

The other, passing through, found people to be helped at every turn and actually spent so much time and money along the way that he never reached the Holy City. Yet he received a blessing from God the other failed to find in the great Easter celebration.

As we start Lent Tolstoy’s story reminds us that true religion is more about generosity than proper ritual observance. Keeping short accounts with our neighbour is more important to our sanctification than freeing ourselves of all distractions.

What distracts is very often flesh and blood which we sweep away at our spiritual peril.

It comes down to choices, as our first reading reminded us. The story of Adam and Eve warns against choosing things which conflict with the destiny we have under God. It is a poem full of truth about the human condition that is picked up by St Paul who describes how Our Lord’s obedience counters human disobedience. That obedience is represented in the Gospel reading from Matthew Chapter 4.

You may have read Bishop Tom Wright’s commentary on this passage set for yesterday in his Lent for Everyone commentary on Matthew’s gospel. He points out how temptation is about good things being distorted. 'Bread is good. Jesus will later create a huge amount of it from a few loaves, to feed hungry people. But should he do that just for himself?'

Coming back to Tolstoy’s Lenten pilgrims it is good to be singleminded but it is also good to be sympathetic.

In the story the sympathetic guy is the hero. Better slower together than faster alone.

My son bought me for Christmas a book that’s full of insight about the impact of the screen culture. In Future Minds Richard Watson recognises that the internet is probably going to rank with the alphabet and numbers as a mind-altering technology of universal significance. He goes on to warn about the associated cult of the immediate and contemporary with all the unsympathetic impatience it carries with it.

Whilst it is wonderful to see electronic networking bringing down dictators as in the Middle East and North Africa our best future is challenged by the erosion of conversation and reflective thinking it brings. There is a need for some users to find space and time for these lest electronic technology saps their patience and the resilience essential to creativity.

Internet usage illustrates the creative tension there is in many an area of life between singleminded pursuits and relational obligations. Both are encouraged in Christianity. The seeking first of God’s kingdom is there in one text alongside a warning in another text that to do so, to go for loving God whilst ignoring your brother or sister in need is a serious failure.

If Lent is a call to singlemindedness it is so with the spiritual health warning that comes out of Tolstoy’s story. The singleminded pilgrim so set on his object that he stopped for nothing was not commended as he lacked discernment and sympathy for his fellows. The second pilgrim who was so occupied helping people he got spent up and never reached Jerusalem was commended.

As part of the stocktaking of Lent we might examine where we are on the big life journey and how much our own preoccupations, even spiritual ones, are helping build authentic humanity in us and around us. In a village like our own we have less excuse for not wasting time with people as the Spirit leads us. Love is wasting time, really. When I hear people say ‘time is money’ I feel slightly uncomfortable. There should be sufficient time for us to be ourselves and be ourselves with others, not least those nearest and dearest. Yet the demands of the workplace and commuting are incessant upon many of us. There are no easy fixes here, just a warning to work for a balance.

In this month’s P&P I wrote of Lent as the annual reminder to look to the main things in life and to keeping them as the main things and that for Christians the main things are attention to God and neighbour but you’ve got to give attention to yourself to succeed in these. Examining our stewardship of time, talents and money is part of this, as well as refocusing on the Lord and giving him the things that agitate us.

I quoted another Russian writer, St Seraphim: ‘Acquire inner peace and thousands around you will find salvation’. In Tolstoy’s story the blest pilgrim was the one who let his peaceable heart be emptied on the journey in the flow of circumstances and the human needs that presented themselves. The other pilgrim achieved his personal target but was judged to have missed the mark by seeing the people on the journey as potential distractions.

How often do we get put into that position, treating people as less than they are because we’ve got ourselves set upon the next thing or the next person. This gives me opportunity to warn us as a community to be always alert for Our Lord’s presence with us in the person of the occasional newcomer or visitor after service. St Giles is a place to catch up with our friends on a Sunday, but let’s make sure everyone in church is treated as a friend!

The moral is, whatever grand spiritual aspirations we make, the Holy Spirit is closest to us when we are about our neighbours, sorting out our destructive attitudes, putting love in where there is none, recognising the humanity of those who can seem to be somewhat blind to our own.

May Our Lord deepen such sympathy in us and among us as we prepare in this holy season for the Easter Feast. May we see triumphs of his Spirit as we correct the balance of our lives in obedience to his call upon our lives to seek a richer humanity that is more in his likeness.

Sunday before Lent 6th March 2011 8am

2011-03-05T14:36:00.000-08:00

As the Church begins to set her sights on Easter the Sunday liturgy before Lent starts centres in the Gospel on an anticipation of the Easter festival that we are shortly to prepare for in the coming holy season.

We just read in the Gospel a very beautiful incident from the account of the life of Our Lord.

Jesus ascends a high mountain with Peter, James and John. While praying up there the Lord’s face glows with the brightness of the sun and his garments became dazzling white.

The splendour of Christ’s divinity penetrates through his human body as the Son of God appears in his splendour and glory.

The glory that was to shine at Easter shone in this isolated incident through the person of the earthly Jesus.

The disciples were shown as much glory as they could bear.

Just as when there is an astronomical event like a transit of Venus across the sun people are warned to view the event indirectly so it was when God shone in Jesus on the earth. The disciples fell to the ground and hid their faces.

‘No one can see God and live’ we read in Exodus 33 verse 20. Yet moving from Old to New Testament texts we catch something of the revolution that Our Lord brings, as in St John’s Gospel Chapter 1 verse 18: ‘No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known’.

At the heart of Christianity is a yearning to see God as he is. This has sprung up from the days Jesus walked and shone on earth with the promise we could see God.

Not with mortal eyes but in the resurrection.

The Transfiguration of Our Lord anticipates both his Resurrection and our own. As children of God we are heading for the full, glorious sight of God.

‘Beloved we are God’s children now; what we will be has not been revealed’ Saint John writes. ‘What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is’. (1 John 3:2)

As Lent approaches we should be in the valley of decision about some action that can help us better head for the beatific vision, the vision of God.

It is a time to refocus upon Our Lord, to turn our eyes upon Jesus. Lent challenges us to look to the main things in Christian life and to keeping them the main things.

This season is a call to study God’s word and I do commend again Tom Wright’s Lent for Everyone which helps you read through sections of Matthew’s Gospel day by day. The book includes the scripture text.

Through contemplating today’s Gospel we see an image of devotion as the yearning to see God as he is. This yearning that sprang up from the coming of Jesus remains at the heart of Christianity.

May the Lord excite our yearning for him by the devotion we seek in the coming weeks through things given up and taken up to mark the season of Christ’s Passion.

Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in his beautiful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace.

Epiphany 8 27 February 2011

2011-02-27T04:24:00.000-08:00

There is no Word of God without power so that this place – the pulpit – and the book expounded here – this book – are about energising.

Four hundred years ago the translation of the Bible into the language of the people energised the church and I want to use this sermon to encourage us to study God’s Word today and to welcome it afresh.

I am mindful as I speak that we have some copies available of the equivalent of the King James Bible for the 21st century – the New Revised Standard Version – as well as our Lent book, Bishop Tom Wright’s commentary on St Matthew’s Gospel – and also a newly produced children’s Bible that can be ordered - so this sermon can have practical consequences in a resolve to get into the Bible and seek the empowering of the Holy Spirit with one tool or another.

Why is it so important we familiarise ourselves with the Bible?

Because the Bible speaks to those with open ears of God’s people, provision, promises and purpose.

In reading the Bible we find...God’s people

The Bible is the family history of the Christian church. It is our life story. We are to see it as part of our own story since Christians see themselves in the sacred history it provides. When, for example, in the story of Cain and Abel we read God’s words to Cain, ‘where is your brother?’ they are words that remind us that God’s family find God again and again through love of other people. When we read the story of the Exodus we see ourselves going through the Red Sea – the waters of baptism – fed by manna – the heavenly bread of the eucharist – destined for Canaan – a glorious homeland.

When we read and study Matthew’s Gospel as we shall do in Lent, we see a Sermon on a Mount from Jesus presented by Matthew as the new Moses since his Jewish readers knew it was Moses who first brought teaching down from Mount Sinai, the Ten Commandments. When we read in the Acts about Pentecost we see a reversal of the Tower of Babel in Genesis so that people heard the same message in their different languages. The Holy Spirit who drives the Church forward from Pentecost is the same Lord working secretly throughout the biblical story of God’s people.

We read the Bible because it tells us who we are – God’s children made so by God’s provision.

This provision, the gift of Jesus, is a second motivator for bible reading so that Saint Jerome could say that ignorance of scripture is ignorance of Christ no less.
The Bible reveals how God who created the world provided his Son, Jesus Christ to redeem it from sin through a new creation.

This is the year of Saint Matthew in the three year cycle of Sunday readings and we have a chance to dig deep into this Gospel during Lent with Bishop Tom Wright’s Lent book.

When we open a Bible Matthew is on its hinge, the hinge between the Old and New Testaments. The word Bible comes from the Greek τὰ βιβλία ta biblia "the books" whose contents and order vary between denominations. The Old Testament has 39 books of Hebrew Scripture, though some denominations including our own give authority to a series of Jewish books called the deuterocanonical or apocryphal books. The New Testament contains 27 books the first four of which form the Canonical gospels, first Matthew’s, recounting the life of Christ and central to our faith.

There is no Word of God without power because scripture points us to Jesus. Saint Tikhon, an 18th century Russian writer, says ‘whenever you read the Gospel, Christ Himself is speaking to you. And while you read, you are praying and talking to Him’.

This is why we read the Bible – to seek and find God’s provision. The Bible is an instrument of divine revelation, the word of God communicated in human words. As such it has unique authority and inspiration and cannot mislead anyone as it presents the salvation truth of God in Christ.

This is what the Bible says about itself through what Paul writes to Timothy in 2 Timothy 3.15-17 where he reminds his assistant bishop, and through him, all of us, how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.

In the Bible we meet God’s people, see God’s provision for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. Thirdly we find God’s promises.

The Bible contains what Saint Peter describes in 2 Peter 1.4 as God’s precious and very great promises for us to ‘read, mark and inwardly digest’.

In his book on Matthew Lent for everyone Tom Wright comments on Our Lord’s temptations and how Jesus himself holds fast to God’s promises as he resists them.
Once more, we are not simply spectators in this extraordinary drama. We too, are tempted to do the right things in the wrong way or for the wrong reason. Part of the discipline of Lent is about learning to recognize the flickering impulses, the whispering voices, for what they are, and to have the scripture fuelled courage to resist.

I like that phrase ‘scripture fuelled courage’. When I am tempted by anxiety it is the fuelling of my spiritual life by the biblical promises of God that defend me, such as those in today’s Gospel or these other texts. ‘My peace I give unto you’ (John 14.27) ‘You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you’ (Isaiah 26.3) ‘The peace of God which passes all understanding keep your heart and mind’ (Philippians 4.7). The point is that unless I knew these verses, and had memorised them, the Bible would have no power to help me. I would lack what Tom Wright calls ‘scripture fuelled courage’.

There is no word of God without power! The bible itself points to the power of Holy Spirit who inspired it and will inspire its readers. In particular the discipline of Bible study helps us get into ourselves some of the key promises of God by the inspiration they give to heart and mind, an inspiration that evidences itself in our lives.

Fourthly if the Bible brings us the family history of God’s people, God’s provision for us in Jesus and his promises to fuel our courage it brings us hope for the future - God’s purpose.

The Bible contains God’s plan. It sets human history in the perspective revealed by Christ’s resurrection, his gathering of God’s people, building of the kingdom and promised return. In his commentary on Matthew Chapter 13 Bishop Tom speaks on the importance of the bible in opening up God’s future to us and of the kingdom of God in Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus is looking for people to sign on, people who are prepared to take his kingdom-movement forward in their own day. In telling us the old, old story the Bible invites us to sign up to having faith for the future. As its last book affirms ‘the kingdom of the world (is to become) the kingdom of our God and of his Christ’ (Revelation 11:15)

This is what we sign up to at every eucharist since this sacred meal anticipates the heavenly banquet. So too our pondering of the Word of God energises our thinking and acting. It builds our conviction that if this is the day the Lord has made so is tomorrow.

The Bible – a way into being God’s people, knowing his provision, his promises and his purpose for our lives and that of the cosmos. The Lord deepen our hunger for God’s Word as he makes us hungry now for the table of the eucharist.

Epiphany 5 6 February 2011

2011-02-06T01:17:00.000-08:00

'Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven' (Matthew 5:16)

I could sit down now really couldn't I?

There's the message to take home this morning - Matthew 5 verse 16!

The historian and satirist Thomas Carlyle used to complain at long sermons. Over Sunday lunch he suggested to his mother that the preacher that morning would have done better to say: 'Good people you know what to do just go and do it'.

But Thomas, his mother replied, gently. 'Wouldn't you tell them how!'

I won't sit down yet.

How do we let our light shine to God's glory?

We have to get lit up and we have to shine in the right place.

First then: How do we get lit up as Christians?

Jesus kindles his light in our hearts by scripture, eucharist and prayer.

'Your word is a lantern to my feet and a light to my path' writes the Psalmist (Psalm 119.105). Tell me - can you get close to Jesus, can his light be lit in your heart, without ever opening a Bible? Oh yes, you need a guide, you need to select, but may it be for us, day by day, what those first disciples said after meeting Jesus on the Emmaus Road: 'Did not our hearts burn as he opened the Scriptures to us?' (Luke 24.32). This will also be the best fruit if this year's 400th anniversary celebration of the first authorised English Bible. If you want to act on this morning's sermon pick up and take away for £5 a modern language bible from the back of church and/or sign up for the Lent Course next month which is on the Bible.

Jesus kindles his light in our hearts by scripture -and the eucharist. Show me a better way of getting more of Jesus into your life than the regular receiving of his body and blood? With scripture comes the eucharist because words are not enough for Jesus. His love is shown sacramentally because his love, like ours, needs practical expression. 'This is my body which is given for you...my blood which is shed for you’.

How do we get lit up as Christians?

The bible, the eucharist - and prayer. Day by day we seek irradiation as we come before the Lord. It’s a discipline that some, like the preacher, neglect at times. You sense when your prayer discipline fails that you're not glowing and warm – and you remember you've not been in front of the fire!

Some of us heard Leslie Whiting speak two weeks ago about her spiritual healing. Her story is a story that moves us from the first to the second half of the question.

How do we let our light shine to God's glory?

A year ago during the - or should I say during a freeze up Leslie was recipient of the helpfulness of John and Caroline Rich who took her for vitally needed chemotherapy. This village scheme is in itself a 'good work that gives glory to God'. In the case of the lift given to Leslie it served a process in which she invited first these helpers, and then Jesus himself to come alongside her.
As she put it the other week, though the cancer was now in her skull she didn’t presume to ask for healing but rather for the Lord to be with her on her forward journey. Leslie received the sacrament of anointing. Afterwards she was led by God to identify a surgeon who was making trials with a cyber knife that could destroy the tumours in her skull without damaging her brain. She had successful treatment and has gone on to bring light to others in need through the campaign she’s spearheading for the cyber knife facility to be made more available. Do sign her petition detailed in this week's news sheet.

'Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.'

To welcome this light we seek Jesus through scripture, eucharist and prayer.

To let our light shine we need discernment as to the dark places Jesus has for us, where he wants us to be placed.

Someone said to me recently, when I tried to console them after an accident, that they were confident that the circumstances they had been placed in would be a receipe for their spiritual benefit. What faith, I thought! Just as I thought when I heard Lesley's testimony, which seemed so unselfish. Not all cancer sufferers are so - there but for the grace of God go I...

How do we best shine? With an openness to Jesus and a readiness to be used by him wherever he wants us day by day. May this Eucharist be our pledge to offer our souls and bodies to be where he wants us this week and nowhere else.

‘Jesus bids us shine with a pure, clear light, like a little candle buring in the night. In this world of darkness: so we must shine, you in your small corner and I in mine!’

'Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven'

You are invited to sign Leslie's petition at
http://www.gopetition.com/petition/42313.html

A Time to Heal Sunday 23rd January 2011

2011-01-22T13:37:00.000-08:00

I was listening on the radio to the book programme last week.

Now so many books are online it has been possible to survey the use of words and phrases over a couple of hundred years.

Inevitably the word internet appears only in the last twenty years. The words ‘I must’ occur an awful lot until the 1960s. The word ‘I want’ rarely occurs before the 1950s.

Do you see where I am leading?

Where there is .... selfish ambition, writes James in our reading from Chapter 3 of his epistle – where ‘I want’ reigns - there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.

Healing and wholeness link to inner peace and inner peace is very often countered by our selfish craving.

I want it, and I want it now is more of a destructive impulse than we dare to own, so much are we carried along by the flow of electronic media, including advertising, that indulges our selfishness.

Christian healing has been defined as meeting Jesus Christ at your point of need - and restlessness of spirit is a very common need.

Those who take themselves to shopping malls for retail therapy get less return than we will gain tonight through the church’s ministry of healing.

He will quiet you by his love we read in Zephaniah Chapter 3 verse 17.

We cannot escape our desires, and not all our wants are selfish. Yet the quietening of useless desires can be, if we allow it, the gift of the Lord whose love covers the multitude of our sins, negligences and offences against him, against our neighbour and against ourselves.

Saint Seraphim of Sarov lived in Russia from 1759 to his death in 1833. He’s one of the most renowned Russian monks and mystics in the Orthodox Church and is remembered for extending the monastic teachings of contemplation, self-denial and the acquiring of the Holy Spirit to the layperson.

Perhaps Seraphim's most popular quotation amongst Orthodox believers is: Acquire inner peace, and thousands around you will find salvation.

How closely this advice echoes that of Saint James in tonight’s reading: The wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.

If we want wholeness we need the peace of Spirit that comes with the wisdom from above.

God loves us and wants us to experience peace and life-abundant and eternal.

As we read in the Magnificat refrain from Isaiah 26.3-4:You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock.

Saint Paul says we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Romans 5:1

This peace is given as we ask the Lord to come alongside us.

This action means an act of faith in him preceded by an act of repentance.

Repentance means turning, in this case turning from all that distracts and consumes our inner energies.

As was found written in the Breviary of 16th century Spanish mystic Saint Teresa of Avila:

Let nothing disturb thee,
Nothing affright thee
All things are passing;
God never changeth;
Patient endurance
Attaineth to all things;
Who God possesseth
In nothing is wanting;
Alone God sufficeth.

This evening is A Time to Heal. As we seek the Lord we have an opportunity to bring to him our needs of body and mind, soul and spirit and our relational needs. The ministry of healing is automatically holistic.

If your body is hurting it affects your mind and spirit. If your spirit is disturbed it has physical implications. If you are living with unforgiveness in your relationships you will pay a price for that all over. If your sense of what you must do is eclipsed by what you merely want to do, again you will lack wholeness and peace.

At this point it is my privilege to introduce Leslie who received the sacrament of anointing some months back for a serious physical condition and has a message for us about how God can come aside us in our needs bringing peace and healing.

Epiphany 3 23rd January 2011

2011-01-22T13:18:00.000-08:00

Let me start by reading an advertisement.

Do you want a faith that stands on the authority of scripture and yet remains thoughtful?

Teaching that rings true to the faith of the Church through the ages?

Would you value worship that is awesome yet accessible?

A Christian community with loose boundaries and a vision for caring within the community?

Here we are - the Church of England!

We do not look down on Roman Catholic or Free Churches but hold hands out to both as 'the ancient church of this land, catholic and reformed' (Catechism definition).

Our worshippers are evangelical, catholic, charismatic and radical because the Church has to be all these things.

Yes, we have our problems, some of our own making, but many on account of the honesty with which we are facing up to a fast changing world.

The Church of England is part of the Church in England and has respect for those of other Faiths or no faith at all.

We welcome all who wish to engage with Jesus Christ through the Bible and the Sacraments and through Christian fellowship and service.

As they first said of Jesus, 'Come and see!'

Horsted Keynes will be reading this advertisement in P&P next week. I wrote it out of concern about the bad press the Church of England seems to be getting at the moment.

It was also prompted by preparing this sermon based on part of the second lesson set for today from 1 Corinthians 1.10-12. Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you should be in agreement and that there should be no divisions among you, but that you should be united in the same mind and the same purpose. For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters. What I mean is that each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul’, or ‘I belong to Apollos’, or ‘I belong to Cephas’, or ‘I belong to Christ.’ Has Christ been divided?

This call to unity coincides with the annual week of prayer for Christian Unity held every year from 18-25th January.

It seems to me that St Paul’s warning reaches us as a church at three levels, local, national and universal, so here’s a minute or two on each level.

First local. I have to say, I sense I inherited from Father Timothy, a high degree of unity and a great sense of collaboration as we seek to promote Christianity and develop the life of St Giles with an eye to renewing worship, engaging youth and families and enhancing buildings for better Christian use. We should not be complacent, but St Giles is a coalition of catholic, evangelical, charismatic and liberal Christians that is outwardly focussed, praise God.

Second, nationally the Church of England is suffering bad press. Why? Because the majority decision to ordain women has failed to take the minority along with it. There’s a high majority but no consensus. Those of us who cherish the Church of England’s catholic inheritance can’t see a clear way ahead, with some taking up the Pope’s offer of the Anglican Ordinariate. Those impatient for a church with no prejudice against women are getting very impatient with Anglocatholics. There seems no easy way forward in terms of structures since women bishops seem inevitable. This will be a slow burner and we need even more patience to bear with one another’s views of the ordained ministry.

It isn’t sexist to hold to the Bible and the practice of the worldwide church, Catholic and Orthodox over 20 centuries. Neither is it a betrayal of Christian principle to seek the ordination of women.

It’s just that changing holy orders, one of the seven sacraments, is like changing the heating system in a church. There’s an upheaval and a chilling effect – and the national church is in the middle of it! No easy answers here, just patience. The Holy Spirit is saying one thing to part of the church and another thing to the rest. We must wait and see and avoid knee jerk reactions, seeking to maximise unity as a national church which believes its part of the ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic church’.

Thirdly let’s look at that international level of the universal church. About this Christians should really be getting impatient. In first century Corinth there were Chloe’s and Apollos’ and Cephas’ groups. In the world of the 21st century there are not three but 39,000 Christian denominations!

Each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul’, or ‘I belong to Apollos’, or ‘I belong to Cephas’, or ‘I belong to Christ.’ Has Christ been divided?

He has. His purpose to bring all things together is being much frustrated. There’s a need for each Christian church to recognise afresh that they exist by God’s grace - and so do the other denominations! Only as the different churches come together to the foot of Christ’s Cross and admit our need of his forgiveness are we ever going to be made one, as Christ certainly desires. This is happening worldwide whenever Christians opt to maximise cooperation with their sister churches. We should congratulate ourselves, for example, that the Martindale tonight will be a place of healing prayer uniting Catholic, Reformed and Anglican churches.

I was at Westminster Abbey for evensong last Sunday. There I was reminded of the shared evensong of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope in September that was preceded by Pope Benedict’s visit to the Archbishop at Lambeth Palace. There Rowan Williams said these wise words: In 1845, when John Henry Newman finally decided that he must follow his conscience and seek his future in serving God in communion with the See of Rome, one of his most intimate Anglican friends and allies, the priest Edward Bouverie Pusey.. wrote a moving meditation on this "parting of friends" in which he said of the separation between Anglicans and Roman Catholics: "it is what is unholy on both sides that keeps us apart".
　
That should not surprise us: holiness is at its simplest fellowship with Christ; and when that fellowship with Christ is brought to maturity, so is our fellowship with one another. As bishops, we are servants of the unity of Christ's people, Christ's one Body. And, meeting as we do as bishops of separated church communities, we must all feel that each of our own ministries is made less by the fact of our dividedness, a very real but imperfect communion. Perhaps we shall not quickly overcome the remaining obstacles to full, restored communion; but no obstacles stand in the way of our seeking, as a matter of joyful obedience to the Lord, more ways in which to build up one another in holiness by prayer and public celebration together, by closer friendship, and by growing together both in the challenging work of service for all whom Christ loves, and mission to all God has made.

Wise words. "it is what is unholy on both sides that keeps us apart". Christian unity grows – locally, nationally or internationally as Christians grow together in both holiness and mission. Let’s make that our priority as much as we can in the coming years.

Epiphany 2nd January 2011

2011-01-02T01:16:00.000-08:00

Today the church enters a glory-filled season, that of Epiphany. The coming of the wise men to Jesus brings the first showing of God’s glory to the nations in the face of Jesus Christ.

Epiphany means the revealing of glory.

This morning is an occasion for celebrating with you some occasions in my ministry I have been on the scene when the glory of Jesus illuminated someone.

Starting with myself!

Jesus first deeply impacted me in Oxford around 1970 through an extraordinary priest and an extraordinary Church.

I say extraordinary because the whole show was unconcerned about something our age is obsessed with and even the Church at times – I mean image.

There was no magazine or newsletter, hardly a noticeboard let alone an Internet Homepage or Church Logo. But there was presence!

There was something very deep and awesome about the worship at Mary Mags, the sure, unselfconscious majesty of the Sung Eucharist, of Sunday worship in the great tradition of the Church, evoked for me an awe before the mystery of God - something that many of our modern services, constructed out of ten minute sound-bites rarely attain!

Then there was charismatic presence in the old, richer sense of that word.

I recall being invited to tea by the Vicar and being strangely moved in my spirit at the encounter. Within weeks I had made a deeper surrender to Christ through making my First Confession.

I remember Epiphany in those days because it was at that time that the practice of genuflecting to the Blessed Sacrament became my own.

In Mary Mags there was a safe on the altar, like our Aumbry in the wall on the right of the old high altar containing bread consecrated bread kept over from the eucharist with a perpetual light burning alongside it. I noticed that when people came into or left church they went down on one knee or did a low bow towards it.

I had been brought up to believe scraping your knees before things was Roman Catholic. Mary Mags challenged my thinking so that one day kneeling at the Christmas Crib I realised that as the Kings fell down before the glory of Jesus there was nothing wrong with my doing so.

It was an Epiphany moment, a manifestation of Christ to me, seeing the glory of Jesus hidden behind the Aumbry veil as he lay hidden in the stable. 40 years on I still genuflect to the Blessed Sacrament. Indeed I would not have come here as parish priest had the sacrament not been reserved here because Jesus showed me that time that the bread is his glorious body and I should treat it as such. He has taught me since that he’s in people as well as in that bread, and in the bible and creation and everywhere – but I remain eternally grateful for that Epiphany experience in Oxford long ago.

The Christian faith spreads by Epiphany, by the manifestation of the glory of Jesus in word and sacrament to and through people. Evangelism has always been rooted in being more than doing. It is a process of spiritual awakening to the Real Presence of God alongside us and within us, inviting us forward on our spiritual journey.

For the faith to spread and the church to grow we need priests and people whose baptism is fully owned, who have presence, presence and conviction to challenge others to become more irradiated, more luminous with Christ’s glory. This Jesus, who walks besides us, would display himself, his Real Presence, in sacrament and word and, most tellingly, in lives lived surrendered to him.

I said I would share occasions in my ministry when I have been on the scene when the glory of Jesus illuminated someone. I’ve time for two more examples

I think of Bernard, a young man in my first mining parish who had been on our life in the Spirit course, a precursor of the Alpha Course. Bernard and Anne were stalwarts of SS Philip & James where I was Curate. Bernard had prayed for the Holy Spirit to come upon him as we encouraged people to pray. One morning he stumbled round to the Clergy House beaming all over his face. Was he drunk? I thought. No. Jesus had come real to him. The Holy Spirit had opened his inner eyes. He never looked back and possessed a great gift of joy and encouragement to us all.

Then I think of an older man to whose troubled deathbed I’d been summoned. The relatives were very concerned at his fearfulness and agitation as he moved towards his death. I came to his hospital bed myself with apprehension. Who was I to help a man faced with death? What on earth could I do to help? Shortly after I arrived I read the 23rd Psalm and as I read a deep peace descended upon him. It was as if Jesus manifested himself, appeared and just took him away. This man died joyfully as I read the words of assurance from Deuteronomy 33.27 The eternal God is your refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms.

What a difference it makes to someone when they see Jesus! They see glory – glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.

To see Jesus is to catch hold of a radiant beauty quite out of this world, a beauty that is compelling and extraordinary in its attractiveness.

Could we wish anything more wonderful for anyone than a personal epiphany, a personal revelation of the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ?

I believe the Lord seeks always to manifest himself, chiefly through the bible and the eucharist, and that we need to make space for that to happen.

This season of the Epiphany is a season for looking to Jesus and his manifestation to us and through us to our village. Since it coincides with New Year it’s a time to refresh our daily discipline or prayer, to open our bibles, to seek Jesus in his Sweet Sacrament divine, especially at the quiet midweek celebrations.

In our eucharist we make space for such Epiphany in the silences of the word and sacrament. God bless us now as we ponder the gift of Jesus and help us mark and inwardly digest the divine words we need to hear deep into our hearts from the human speech I have been uttering.

Christmas 1 26th December 2010

2010-12-26T01:18:00.000-08:00

Noblesse oblige!

One must act in a fashion that conforms to one's position, and with the reputation that one has earned.

The unfashionable nature of this truth fuels our mass media from the irresponsible expenses claims of our MPs to the goings on among minor royalty.

Whoever claims to be noble must conduct himself nobly.

This morning we ourselves have such a reminder as Christians.

The Prayer Book collect for the eight days of the Christmas Octave states the truth behind Christmas from God’s point of view:

Almighty God, you have given us your only-begotten Son to take our nature upon him and as at this time to be born of a pure virgin:

The prayer goes on to tell how this has consequences from our own point of view:

grant that we, who have been born again and made your children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by your Holy Spirit;

The Son of God took our whole nature upon him, our total manhood, not just our body but our mind and will and emotional makeup so that our mortal nature might be capable of the divine nature.

Something happened yesterday on Christmas Day that affects us profoundly and affects the whole world through us.

Why did God become man? In order that we might become God, be made God’s children by adoption and grace and be daily renewed by God’s Holy Spirit.

To pray as our Christmas collect prays is to ask to be re-born in Jesus and become a partaker of the divine nature. In other words to ask that we may ourselves obtain the full benefit of the Christmas gift of Jesus.

Just as everyone is born of natural parents, if they wish to be regarded as God’s children, they need to be born again in a spiritual fashion, by water and the Spirit, by baptism, through which we share God’s essential nature and are joined to him.

Through the coming of God in Christ there is a new creation. From the incarnation – which means the making flesh of God – the whole world is divinised working from the souls of women and men out into the whole cosmos.

Noblesse oblige – we who are made children of God by the Son of God becoming Son of Man have obligations with such an awesome nobility.

Saint Leo the Great preaching in Rome at Christmas around 450AD had this appeal to his hearers which I hand on to you:

This is the day our Saviour was born: what a joy for us, my beloved! This is no season for sadness, this, the birthday of Life – the Life which annihilates the fear of death, and engenders joy, promising, as it does, immortality...

My beloved, let us offer thanksgiving to God the Father, through his Son, in the Holy Spirit. In the great mercy with which he loved us, he had pity on us, and in giving life to Christ, gave life to us too, when we were dead through sin’, so that in him we might be a new creation, a new work of his hands.

Let us then be quit of the old self and the habits that went with it. Sharers now in the birth of Christ, let us break with the deeds of the flesh.

O Christian, be aware of your nobility – it is God’s own nature that you share: do not then, by an ignoble life, fall back into your former baseness. Think of the Head, think of the Body of which you are a member...you have been made a temple of the Holy Spirit; do not, by evil deeds, drive so great an indweller away from you.

Those words are as true in 2010 as they were in 450. Praise God for the faith of the church through the ages carried down to us by the liturgy of Christmas.

We are God’s children made so by the gift of his only-begotten Son to take our nature upon him and as at this time to be born of a pure virgin:

Christians, be aware of your nobility!

Born again and made God’s children by adoption and grace, may we daily be renewed by the Holy Spirit;

Noblesse oblige! Whoever claims to be noble must conduct himself nobly.
So are we made noble, so should we conduct ourselves!

Christmas day all age eucharist 2010

2010-12-25T08:47:00.000-08:00

What did the snow man order at Macdonalds?

Iceburgers with chilli sauce!

What do you get if you cross an apple with a Christmas tree?

A pineapple!

Well, Christmas is here so we’re going to light the Christmas candle from one of the Advent candles. Which reminds me - what did the big candle say to the little candle?

I'm going out tonight!

Well this one isn’t going out, it’s coming on – who shall we choose?

Sunday Club member to light candle.

Christmas is here and it’s time to be thankful for Jesus.

All the gifts we’ve been given this morning are given to honour the greatest Gift from the greatest Giver!

So what gifts have we been given?

Time for children to share.

All of these gifts were given us because of what the angel told those shepherds in our bible reading.

Let’s read it our loud together. It’s the fifth paragraph of this morning’s gospel reading from Luke chapter 2:

What did the angel say to them?

'Do not be afraid; for see - I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.’

Good news of great joy! God has come to earth to give himself a human face, the face of Jesus!

What does it say the child was wrapped in?

Bands of cloth or what were called swaddling bands. Swaddling is an age-old practice of wrapping infants snugly in blankets or cloth strips so that movement of their limbs is tightly restricted. People believed that swaddling bands helped an infant to develop proper posture.

Swaddling fell out of favor in the seventeenth century. It has become popular again as modern medical studies indicate that swaddling assists babies to sleep, and to remain asleep.

Come back to Jesus though, the baby tightly bound lying in a manger.

We believe this infant Jesus was bound up so that we could be free!

Can anyone point me to an image of Jesus in church outside of the crib that shows him once again bound up?

When Jesus was bound up in the manger it pointed towards his being bound to a cruel cross 33 years later.

Mary and Joseph were told to call their son Jesus, which means Saviour. We know about Jesus more because of how he died and rose than on account of his birth. We keep Christmas because of Easter.

This Christmas eucharist is Christ’s Mass in which we see the broken body and shed blood of Jesus. The eucharist is about the gift of Jesus who’s always alive and with us and loving us – that’s the truth of Christmas.

Jesus was bound so we could be free!

In recent weeks I have seen people released from the power of guilt by the power of Jesus’ forgiveness, people released from the power of cancer by his healing power, worried people released from their anxieties. I have come across people who’ve died freed from fear of death by their faith in the power of Jesus’ resurrection.

Do not be afraid; for see - I am bringing you good news of great joy.

In the joy of this morning you may know many constraints in your life. There is the constraint of a guilty conscience. There is the constraint of regret, of anxiety, of the fear of death, of loneliness.

Today the Son of God was bound in swaddling cloths to free you! We know as Christians, as lovers of Jesus, what we call salvation, a new dimension of freedom in our lives that is the best gift of Christmas.

God who made each one of us in love loves us so much he wants each one of us to be one with him. The Son of God became man so all who open their hearts to him could know the liberty of the children of God!

Let’s pause for a quiet moment to reflect on that great thought

Our service moves on now to centre on a new born baby, Arthur Beesley, whom we are to bless on the day God showed himself in the Babe of Bethlehem.

Midnight Mass 2010

2010-12-25T08:39:00.000-08:00

The world turns and the world changes, but one thing does not change. In all of my years, one thing does not change, however you disguise it, this thing does not change: the perpetual struggle of Good and Evil wrote T.S.Eliot.

We shall never cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

These words are appropriate as the calendar turns once more to Christmas.

For over 1000 years on this hill the church calendar has turned. 50 generations have revisited the coming of God to the earth year by year throughout their life time and gained wisdom from this.

Tonight we arrive where we started and know the place as if for the first time.

The Word became flesh so that those who receive him, who believe in his name, may gain power to become children of God (John 1.14, 12). In the Christmas event we welcome life and light afresh. By the Holy Spirit the words of scripture enter our hearts afresh so we know that life and light as if for the first time.

Though 50 generations have prayed here before us we do not inherit that life and light. God has children, not grand children. To be a child of God is to receive him, to believe in his name, the name of Jesus, and so to gain power.

Tonight we recapture the sense of our being God’s children through the love that came down at Christmas. The annual celebration takes us back to basics with its reminder of the dignity afforded the human race by the incarnation.

The world turns and the world changes but this thing does not change: the perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.

In that struggle there’s a winning side we’re called to enlist in as God draws us to his side and his victory in Jesus over sin, death and the devil.

The truth I am sharing is a hidden truth. It started off hidden away in a stable and continued in the obscurity of Palestine over 33 years. Then it was revealed by the resurrection.

We live in a more and more transparent society as the WikiLeaks saga has been reminding us, which is both good and evil. The aggression behind the hacktivity as they call it is such that when the Australian Prime Minister announced plans for censoring the internet the hackers took down his website and that of the Australian parliament.

This thing does not change: the perpetual struggle of Good and Evil...and internet technology is to be found on both sides.

The knowledge that is most powerful remains hidden to pride. It is concealed tonight in a stable away from the mainstream. God, as much as WikiLeaks, sees all. And he loves all. That is the Christian good news in an internet age or any age!

God sees all and he loves all - and all can respond to this truth.

The Word became flesh so that those who receive him, who believe in his name, may gain power to become children of God.

Love needs a body to show itself. Tonight divine love takes flesh.

This year is the centenary of the birth of one of the 20th century’s great explorers, Wilfred Thesiger. I have been reading his life in pictures which has a particularly Christmassy scene on the back.

He twice crossed the so-called Empty Quarter of Arabia, lived in the 1950s with the Marsh Arabs of Iraq and finally among the Samburu of Kenya.

Just as the internet is changing our lives today for good and ill, so Thesiger lamented the changes to Arab society that came about through the demand for oil. His writings are an invaluable record of a desert culture that has been largely lost.

Wilfred Thesiger explored by going native. He took no radio, let alone iPhone, to keep up with what was going on at home. He lived as the natives. Through this he became the first European to see amazing sights, many captured in his brilliant photography.

He writes of the fearful splendour of the desert being offset by human companionship. In the pitiless light of day we were as insignificant as the beetles I watched labouring across the sands. Only in the kindly darkness could we borrow a few square feet of desert and find homeliness within the radius of the firelight.

In human solidarity the fearfulness of nature is countered. Just as Thesiger’s work gained from hiding himself away for years among the natives so it is with God’s work of hiding himself in Bethlehem and Horsted Keynes. God is in the homeliness that counters the impersonal forces at loose in the world.

The Christian faith holds God has taken a body and kept it for ever in the body of Christ. God made a home in Bethlehem, literally the House of Bread, so he can continue in that bread, through Christ’s Mass, and in the hearts of all who will receive him.

Love needs a body. Divine love provides the body of Christ which now embraces the world in the words of scripture, in signs of water, oil, bread and wine and in the human warmth of Christian fellowship.

Love needs a body for this thing does not change: the perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.

The light and life of Jesus show us a body with love stronger than death.

Though our lives move on from Christ’s Mass the end of all our living and exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

Bethlehem. God made flesh. Love incarnate – this is the place we need to know!

Advent 4 The choices of God 19th December 2010

2010-12-19T01:23:00.000-08:00

Decisions, decisions! Our life runs on decision making hour by hour, day by day.

Some of these, like whether to have coffee or tea, are trivial.

Others, like whether to marry Liz or Anne, are less so.

Our decisions are caused by the time frame we live in. As time flows on we come to vital junctions where we can go one way or the other, for one thing or another, for one person or another.

The woman or man of God sees decision making in another perspective. We know that when time has ended we will face the consequences of our decision making.

We will see how closely our lives have run within the will of God and how much they have been lived off the rails.

For it is Christian faith that you and I, through the exercise of our faith, are chosen and guided by God. This means our lives including our decision making are shaped by the choices of God.

This morning we see God’s great choice of Our Lady to be mother of Our Lord. When we look closely at Mary’s story, especially in Luke’s account, we see how she struggled before saying Yes to God’s choice of her to be the mother of his Son.

In our own lives we also struggle many a time to conform our lives to what God would have us do.

I remember when I was praying about marriage God opened a door to me to serve as a missionary in Guyana. They told me a dozen men were waiting for a teacher to train them as priests so the sacraments could be available across Guyana’s hinterland. With reluctance I offered myself since the post was for a single man. I met Anne at missionary college and so my obedience to his call also answered the prayer of my heart.

This morning in Mary the church invites us to ponder the choices of God and to think about how much our lives are faithful to God’s choice of us.

Two years ago a process came about that tested my vocation as a priest ending with a decision to come with Anne and James to Horsted Keynes.

Since then I have helped or am helping fourteen couples as they seal their vocation or calling to marriage. I have been helping one young man as he explores his calling to the priesthood.

I have had a number of conversations about vocation with various church members as they seek what God most wants of them in life.

Some have been thinking about a change of job. Others have been making the most of a redundancy. One or two have felt they have done a task in the village or the church for long enough and have been seeking new possibilities which have connected with my own agenda as parish priest for ever seeking volunteers.

Christianity is a faith that holds disparate truths together – God is one and three, Jesus is God and man – and one of these mysteries is that God has chosen you and I and yet we have to decide how to live our lives.

It seems to me that Christians are at two ends when it comes to divine guidance. Some see God ‘s choice as starting us off and then leaving us with common sense – sanctified common sense – to get going on our own. Others, if you ask them to do something, will say they need to pray about it, and they talk of God’s guidance as very immediate and direct.

I am not coming down on one side or the other. What matters is to recognise the hand of God in our lives and to cast aside the things that draw us away from his leadings.

The sanctified common sense sort of guidance needs supplementing by openness to God’s surprises in the form of obvious divine intervention. Those who sense something of a hotline to God need to work harder to check their leadings by arguing the case at times with other experienced believers. Both reason and faith are God’s gift and they shouldn’t contradict each other.

If we want our lives including our decision making to go where they’re meant to go it means developing what Paul in our second reading from the opening verses of the letter to the Romans calls the obedience of faith.

This obedience is more than avoiding deadly sins. It is the best directing of our energies. It is knowing we are in the right employment or state of life, be that married or single. It is a readiness to ask ourselves whether where we are at is truly in God’s will or whether it is at variance with it.

If you are on the rails God gives us, living close to Jesus, you move more peacably than if your life is off the rails. A lack of inner peace can be a helpful warning from God to take stock of your life.

Christmas and New Year bring us such an opportunity to reflect. Some of us will use the sacrament of reconciliation or take opportunity to talk to the priest or another experienced Christian. Others may appreciate being put in touch with a spiritual director. All of us can ask God directly:

‘Show me the needs that are deeper than my wants. Place my energies more and more to your service and less and less to aimless self interest’.

When God chose Mary he invited her to be his mother by a surprise of the Spirit. He did not compel her but won the obedience of her faith.

It is the Christian faith that followers of Jesus, through the voluntary obedience of their faith, are chosen and guided by God.

God seeks our yes to his future possibilities as he sought that of the Blessed Virgin. Her life became a roller coaster of a life, a Lady of sorrow and joy, and so it is to be for us.

God’s hand on our lives, God’s choice of us, is a wonderful and a costly thing. We have a lifespan to exercise our faith in that choice. The penitent thief who turned to Jesus as he died shows us it is never too late to seek God’s leading.

God has chosen you and I and yet we have to decide how to live our lives.

In making this decision the clue is WWJW – maybe you have seen the Christian bracelet – WWJW – What would Jesus want?

The eucharist is all about WWJW. We offer our souls and bodies with Christ to the Father so that our lives are put back on the rails Sunday by Sunday.

With Mary we say: I am God’s servant. Let it be to me as God wills!

Take my energies and use them for good since there is work for those God has chosen. There is a harvest to gather and labourers are few.

Remembrance Sunday 14th November 2010

2010-11-14T01:09:00.000-08:00

Would the children please come to the front as I’ve got some things to show them?

We’re about remembering this morning.

On my desk I’ve got a little list to help me remember things I’ve got to do. Some times I do this to remember knot hankie. Other times I use some of these show yellow 'post-it' notes and stick them somewhere to help me remember.

Today is Remembrance Sunday when we remember all those people who died in the World Wars. Just as the little yellow note is a visual reminder of the things we need to do, the poppy is our visual reminder to remember those sad times.

In the early part of the 20th century, the fields of France and Belgium were filled with red poppies. The flowers grew in the same fields where many soldiers lost their lives fighting in World War I.

John McCrae was a Canadian surgeon in the First World War. He wrote poetry and produced a famous poem called "In Flanders Fields". The day before he wrote this one of John's closest friends was killed and buried in a grave decorated with only a simple wooden cross. Wild poppies were already blooming between the crosses that marked the graves of those who were killed in battle.

"In Flanders Fields" was first published in December, 1915 in England's "Punch" magazine. Within months it became the most popular poem about the First World War. Many people felt the poem symbolised the sacrifices made by all those who participated in World War I.

David Shankland reads:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Today we also remember that out of that sadness and terrible events there must be a longing for peace and that we should ALL work to make everyone's lives peaceful.

We can also remember the other sign mentioned in the poem. That of the cross. It reminds us that Jesus loves us so much he died for us. It reminds us of the victory of Jesus over death because Jesus is alive today, and he gives his life to people today.

I have a very special cross – here it is.

It was given me thirty years ago by a miner's widow.

During the First World War, her father, a British Soldier fought in one of the trenches in the Somme surviving 4 years of World War between 1914 and 1918 to return to his native Yorkshire. He took with him a spent brass shell case from the trench of the Somme. In his spare time he took that case and moulded it into a crucifix, an image of the Cross of Jesus.

Years later his daughter gave me that crucifix when I visited her in her old age in Doncaster.

Here it is. A cross made from a shell to show God's love.

A cross made from a weapon of destruction to hold Jesus our crucified Saviour.

I keep it on my desk to remind me of Jesus as One who can turn the raw material of our lives with all its pain and sorrow into a thing of beauty, just as the brass shell became this crucifix.

Through the cross of Jesus we know God has overcome the worst things in the world that can ever come against us – sin, fear, doubt, disease, even death – all these powers are overcome.

Jesus, the Son of God, has been through the darkest valley so I know that there is nothing God and I together cannot overcome in this world or the next.

So on Remembrance Sunday we’re asking God to give help to the living and rest to the departed, peace to the earth and heavenly life to men and women.

There are few more concise and beautiful prayers than the one carved on the outside wall of Westminster Abbey which I have copied onto the back page of our service sheet.

May God grant to the living grace, to the departed rest, to the church and the world peace and concord and to us sinners eternal life.

As we move now into prayer I want us all to say that prayer together but first I invite the cubs to lead us. Let’s keep quiet for a moment.
Reader 1 Walk among us Jesus
Reader 2 and be with soldiers and peacemakers.
Reader 1 Walk among us Jesus
Reader 2 And be with the hungry in their need.
Reader 1 Walk among us Jesus
Reader 2 And be with the frightened and lonely.
Reader 1 Help us see them,
Reader 2 Hear them
Reader 1 And in their darkness make us part of your light.
Reader 2 Amen.
Let’s all join together in the Westminster Abbey prayer:
May God grant to the living grace, to the departed rest, to the church and the world peace and concord and to us sinners eternal life. Amen.

Baptismal eucharist 7th November 2010

2010-11-06T15:29:00.000-07:00

Little James and his parents were in church and there was a baptism.

The boy was taken in by all of this. He observed the priest saying something whilst pouring water over the infant’s head.

With a quizzical look on his face, he turned to his father and asked with all the innocence of a five year old ‘Daddy, why is he brainwashing that baby?’

Out of the mouth of babes!

As we baptise Barnie today we will be reminded of what it is to be a Christian.

We will say we turn to Christ, repent of our sins, renounce evil and believe in God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

As we say it we will all be a little more brainwashed into Christianity. At no other place does the Church of England make it so clear what it is to be a Christian than in the baptism service. As John Barnabas is so young he relies on his parents and sisters for most things. They have to speak for him today and we join with them in making the statements of Christian faith.

We will be brainwashed that bit more, we will, as Paul says, let this mind be more in us that was also in Christ Jesus.

As we say what we believe our words enter our ears and descend to our hearts so that we believe it all the more.

Little James had a point.

In choosing baptism for their children Stephen and Dawn are seeking to influence them by Jesus. They know that their children will be influenced by all sorts of worldly things and have concern that in all of this they will have the spiritual focus that Jesus offers.

In today’s scripture readings we are reminded about the central doctrine of Christianity which is the resurrection.

The passage from Job is a rare glimpse of life after death in the Old Testament. I know that my redeemer liveth Job says in words made famous by Handel’s Oratorio Messiah. Then in the Gospel reading Our Lord speaks of the existence of those who are considered worthy of a place...in the resurrection of the dead being like angels...children of God being children of the resurrection.

The background is a conflict between Jewish Pharisees and Sadducees who believed respectively in a future resurrection and in no resurrection. We can remember which side was which because the Sadducees were sad you see!

Anyway Our Lord comes down clearly with the belief of the Pharisees, a belief the truth of which his own resurrection was shortly to confirm. The dead are raised he concludes God is god not of the dead but of the living; for to him all of them are alive. (Luke 20.37, 38)

The hope of Christians for life after death is based not on wishful thinking but on the very nature of God himself who is decidedly a God of the living.

One of the things we get brainwashed or disciplined into as Christians is coming to church on a Sunday. Barnie’s sisters Grace and Sadie got an award for their Sunday attendance last week. We Christians gather on a Sunday because our God’s the God of life.

Sunday’s the day life triumphed over death in the resurrection of Jesus and there’s no more meaningful thing in life than what conquers death.

Earthly life’s a prologue. The book of life proper starts beyond the grave with Christianity’s Founder who is the life, the truth and the way.

Life is what Jesus is all about. We rejoice today that he’s given it to Barnie and that he’s got something more than earthly life up his sleeve for this little man and for all of us.

God who gives us life wants to give us his life.

I came to bring them life and have it to the full Jesus says in St John 10 verse 10.

For a Christian the glass is never half empty it’s half full at the least and it gets to overflowing.

Another scripture, again from John, makes this plain. Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. Jesus says Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.

When we choose Jesus there’s a fruitful overflowing.

As someone said God wants spiritual fruit, not religious nuts.

Religion can get a bit nutty, yes. It’s God-given but it does get man-handled.

We seek for Barnie the spiritual fruitfulness that is already growing around him in the Hitchen family. I can’t resist applauding Grace in particular for her cheerfulness faced with a broken collar bone, grace in name, grace in deed.

For us Christians we are so in name – our service requires us to say so again – but we seek to be so more in deed.

I have a final image from a book, which perhaps came into my mind by the vision of Stephen cycling day by day to the station. It’s called Bicycling with God and depicts the Christian life as life on the two seated bicycle we call a tandem.

At the start of the story the Christian is in the front seat steering the bicycle whilst God patiently pedals behind him. At some point they decide to swap seats and then the story becomes more exciting and energising and less predictable.

As many of you may know the Hitchens are committed to diplomatic service in the Middle East which makes for an adventure which little Barnie is now joined into. There have been comings and goings from Horsted Keynes and there will be comings and goings in years to come.

May God take the front seat in their travels, Jesus be in their adventures and the Holy Spirit bring excitement and energising to them all as life moves on from this great day in their family and God’s family here at St Giles!

All Saints Feast 31st October 2010

2010-10-31T02:15:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I get exasperated in my pastoral encounters, especially when people seem over concerned with material things.

Don’t get me wrong, with the government squeeze many of us are feeling the pinch and we’ve a duty to be alongside the most vulnerable.

Sometimes though, I find among us an over concern for this world’s goods and their security.

I want to dare to say in those pastoral encounters what I can say quite fearlessly in the pulpit on All Saints’ Day.

Remember – the most meaningful thing in life is what conquers death.

Earthly life is a prologue. The book of life proper starts beyond the grave with Christianity’s Founder who is the life, the truth and the way.

Christians live knowing their homeland is in heaven. We come to church to develop a taste for that homeland through bread and wine that anticipates the heavenly banquet and through the word of God which promises the same.

Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Happy are those who are called to his supper.

In the eucharist we come before Jesus. We’re happy to eat and drink of him now knowing we’ll be the happier to eat and drink with him in his kingdom.

Happy are those who are called to his supper. That phrase in the liturgy has a double meaning referring to both the eucharist and the celestial banquet. This Holy Communion service is, like the cinema trailer, the preview of a forthcoming attraction in the joy of all the saints.

If people in our village could see the way things really are they’d fight to get a place at this celebration! It’s our failure, my and my predecessors, your and your predecessors as worshippers failure, to believe and to communicate this that is robbing them of this privilege.

The most meaningful thing in life is what conquers death.

I go to the Chemists and see a rack of booklets on how to overcome various conditions - arthritis, indigestion, osteoporosis, stress, varicose veins and so on.

One question not addressed is how you deal with dying.

Perhaps you wouldn’t expect doctors to have much to say about how we deal with death. Maybe they see death as the ultimate defeat for health professionals.

Yet the whole of life leads up to death. It's something quite natural, in a sense. The end of man - but in which sense - 'end' as 'finish' or 'end' as 'fulfillment'?

Dying is just as much a daily medical condition as arthritis or indigestion. Yet how do people find a consultant who can advise them on how to die?

Where do people facing eternity go to for help?

Our Christian Faith is built upon the risen Christ. He is our Consultant.

Who else can advise and prepare, console and strengthen in the face of death than Jesus?

Jesus, who in dying bore the agony of death for us.

Jesus, who in rising burst open the gates of paradise!

Our Consultant writes these words for us in his manual - though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, fear no evil. I am with you.

This church points up to a world beyond this world because it is the church of Jesus Christ

That community is one mystical Body of Christ where there is no division between the living and the dead but all are one in the death defying love of God.

Dead or alive we belong to the same family - so we pray for each other. On All Saints feast we recall our solidarity with the Christians who’ve gone before us especially those who’ve worshipped in this church over 40 generations.

These stones that have echoed their praises are holy, and dear is the ground where their feet have once trod. Yet here they confessed they were strangers and pilgrims, and still they were seeking the city of God.

We are one today also with our beloved dead - our families, friends, benefactors - those who have inspired us or enriched our lives, who now pray for us wrapped in the mantle of God’s love for all eternity.

We are one in worship with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven.

This worship no better described than by a person who attended the Divine Liturgy in the icon filled Cathedral of Kiev in the Ukraine:

‘There is always a crowd’, he said, ‘ a promiscuity of rich and poor, of well dressed and tattered, a kaleidoscope mingling of people and colours - people standing and praying, people kneeling, people prostrated... There is no organ music, but an unearthly and spontaneous outburst of praise from the choir and the clergy and the people worshipping together...
‘And from the back and from the sides - and from the pillars and from the columns, look the pale faces of antiquity, the faces of the dead who are alive looking over the shoulders of the alive who have not yet died...All praising God, enfolding in a vast choric communion the few who in the Church have met on the common impulse to acknowledge the wonder and the splendour of the mystery of God.

‘You lose the sense of Ego, the separated individual, you are aware only of being part of a great unity praising God. You cease to be man and woman and become THE CHURCH (the Bride of Christ)’

And that is what we are this morning – the church, the community of Jesus - stretching beyond these four walls into eternity - living with lives that gain meaning from the conquest of death which brings and should bring our humanity into its right mind.

May Christ dwell in our hearts prayer exploration 24th October 2010

2010-10-23T23:34:00.000-07:00

I want to share a few hints about private prayer expanding to start with on p2-4 of the May Christ Dwell booklet and using part of an interview I did some time back with the Archbishop of Canterbury for Premier Christian Radio.

One of the most important things about our daily prayer is in fact the time we give. Whatever we feel or don't feel at prayer it is the offering of 5, 10, 15 minutes daily that is pivotal.

Archbishop Ramsey's quote – when asked how long he prayed for each day he said about two min but it sometimes took him half an hour to get there.

Time matters. It is also important to offer Our Lord what we might call ‘prime time’.

We will make way for him better when we are most fully ourselves.

Some say the morning is the best, avoiding that burned out feeling at night, and I am one of those who prays in the morning, with more of a nod to God at night.

Time, and then secondly, place. At St Giles we are all privileged to have a church that is open all day and each of us could make more use of this fact. Or we could decide afresh at this time on a prayer space at home.

We need then to be quiet, but perhaps not too quiet so we keep our feet on the ground. In a household there needs to be agreement.

We need perhaps to be comfortable, not so much that we fall asleep.

Prayer invites attentiveness. Some people say a hard backed chair gives you that business like feeling. Myself I use a comfy chair, but try to stand or kneel as well for some of the time.

Then what - now we move onto the real business of prayer and for that we enter on a number of options as starting points. Prayer is a lifting of heart and mind to God and there are many different ‘airports’ for lift off.

Speaking for myself day by day I look to a variety of airports.

Shall I choose a bible passage? Am I so tired it would be better to sit looking at the Cross? Is there a piece of paper with some prayer biddings that I could start from? Or something that struck me in that sermon I heard the other Sunday? Or that spiritual book I’m reading? Shall I get my rosary out? Or say the Jesus Prayer from today’s Gospel – Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner - to empty my mind of distraction? Today I will say Morning Prayer and stop to contemplate wherever the Spirit underlines something. Or - it’s about time I did a thorough self-examination so I’ll get out a sin list or read the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians and see where love, joy, peace and all the rest are growing in my life. There was something terrible on the news this morning so I’ll look up Job 38-40 and think how God is so wonderful and beyond us. I was asked to pray for that lady whose son’s on drugs so I’ll start with them before I forget and see where my intercession leads. Or – what a lovely view through the window this morning – the sun on the leaves. Let’s start there.

I say Let’s – prayer is something we do with God. It’s also a human discipline. This is why it helps to have a decided base for prayer, the airport I’ve called it, as you start your prayer and hope for take off!

It matters to hold yourself to it eg. if you are praying from a bible passage hold the bible for all 20 minutes to keep the focus.

Confession of sin before you pray is also important since the bottom line for prayer is honesty.

That’s enough on how I pray! Now let’s hear how Archbishop Rowan prays! This is part of an interview he gave me in 2004 at Lambeth Palace.

To welcome more of the radiance of Jesus into our hearts involves us in a life-long struggle because of our fallen nature.

Christianity is the gift of Jesus but it involves us in the task of prayerful devotion. Through that devotion, renewed among us this month, may others catch on to what Jesus is doing and be drawn to him through us.

When the church becomes a house of prayer it’s said the whole world will come running!

Harvest Festival 10.10.10

2010-10-10T01:11:00.000-07:00

I remember on my holidays attending a weekday eucharist in a parish church up in North Yorkshire.

The old priest was struggling to celebrate.

The twenty five minutes of the celebration were full of devotion.

They were also a battle against infirmity as Fr Tony fought his infirmity to take, bless, break and share with the dozen of us gathered in church for the daily offering.

I had a cup of coffee with him after and he gave me this poem that challenges people who whine about life that I have always valued:

Today upon a bus I saw a lovely girl with golden hair.
When suddenly she rose to leave I saw her hobble down the aisle.
She had one foot and wore a crutch but as she passed she smiled.
O God forgive me when I whine, I have two feet … the world is mine.

It meant a lot to me, and it will mean even more as physical infirmities grow with old age.

There will come a day when the gestures of the eucharist will be painful to my own body as it grows feeble.

The elderly priest and his poem reminded me once more of all I take for granted especially health and strength.

I recalled the very name of the service: Eucharist which means thanksgiving.

When Jesus took bread and wine he gave God thanks and so should we.

Thank you Fr Tony for reminding me of this.

Today our thanksgiving is writ large on harvest festival.

Archbishop Michael Ramsey once said that thanksgiving is a soil in which the weed of pride will not easily grow.

‘All things come of you’ we pray ‘and of your own do we give you’

For the beauty of the earth, for the joy of human love, for health and strength and for grace to overcome our infirmities we thank you, Lord!

We join our thanksgivings to those offered today on a million altars across the world in this great sacrifice of thanks and praise, the holy eucharist. Amen.

Dedication Festival 3rd October 2010

2010-10-03T01:12:00.000-07:00

As parish priest I carry a lot of keys.

The Church keys are big – they make holes in my pocket!

I’ve got other keys for my house and my car and the smallest is this - my key fob to London’s Boris bikes.

Yes, Tuesday, my day off, saw me taking a series of 30 minute cycle rides across London thanks to my new membership of Barclays Cycle Hire.

Put this key into the docking station and it releases you a bike near Victoria station so you can cycle, as I did on Tuesday, to the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth.

I docked and then, after my visit, like changing horses in the middle ages, I used my key to release for me another bike that took me to my next port of call in Bloomsbury.

With Boris bikes you can ride all day for £1 if you make multiple journeys of under 30 minutes each.

This is a precious key, opening up London to me.

This is a no less precious key, opening up Church.

It is our Feast of Dedication. We recall the day this building was set apart, after its construction, for the worship of God.

Church keys take us into church buildings but what you do there is the real thing.
We worship. We lift heart and mind to God standing on the shoulders of thousands who’ve been here before us in this holy place seeking God’s face.

There was worship in heaven before Saint Giles was built and there will be worship in heaven after this building lies in the dust.

The question is will you and I in a century’s time be part of that worship?
We will need a key to do so.

That will be our faith in Jesus who opens wide the gate of heaven to those below.
By faith, the conviction of things unseen, we unlock possibilities for this world and the next.

Just as this key fob gives you access to free journeying in London so the gift of faith gives you access to a sense of belonging, purpose and empowerment that makes life really worth living.

On this Feast of Dedication we have a challenge to deepen our spiritual life.
In ten days time St. Giles is launching a prayer exploration fortnight. Next Sunday at Harvest Festival every church attender will be offered a free resource booklet to aid their personal prayer.

The booklet will provide exercises linked to the three interactive teaching sessions on Thursday evenings spaced a week apart starting on October 14th. These prayer exercises will be commended and talked through during the sermon on Sunday 17th and 24th October.

The three Thursday evening sessions will centre on praying from scripture, silent contemplation and charismatic prayer. There will be reference to Ignatian meditation, use of the Jesus Prayer and experience of the Holy Spirit among other aspects of prayer. The overall theme will touch on inviting the indwelling of Christ and building the desire to be his instrument in the work of spreading the good news Jesus brings to us.

When the church becomes a house of prayer the people will come running. wrote Brother Roger of Taizé

The church’s mission is weak because her prayer is weak. This month could be the key to a new work of the Holy Spirit here at St Giles. Last Sunday we had the excitement of several new faces on Back to Church Sunday a well as a gift of £5,000 to bring the welcoming doors project back to life.

Refreshing our prayer has enormous implications if we really set our hearts to it – and this month is a privileged place if you will make it so.

Prayer is the key of faith. By it we unlock the eternity we were made for and the eternal love that welcomes open hearts to make them one with the just made perfect .

Prayer is the key that unlocks the way into what God has in store for each one of us.

Through the prayer of faith we are able to make better life choices from the countless possibilities that lie before us all.

When I was 21 I remember getting cards with keys upon them. ‘Key of the door – 21’.

Life has moved on so that the things I gained access to at 21, to vote, to open a bank account and so on, come earlier than they did years ago.

My key fob works through an electronic internet new to the world this century. Through it there can be an oversight of 6,000 cycles at 400 docking stations across London.

My church key opens up access to a building where through preaching and sacrament we encounter one whose oversight extends across this world and the next.

Your faith and mine, the Christian faith, owns that oversight and welcomes through it a purpose for living and a reason for dying.

This is what lies behind what we are about this morning on our Feast of Dedication which is today a call to the prayer of faith which is the key to life.

I close with some words addressed to Our Lord in a hymn of Charles Wesley:
Visit then this soul of mine, pierce the gloom of sin and grief, fill me radiancy divine, scatter all my unbelief. More and more thyself display. Shining to the perfect day!

Trinity 17 26th September 10am

2010-09-26T01:29:00.000-07:00

Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory says Amos in the first of three hard-hitting scripture readings this morning.

I wonder what went through Harold Macmillan’s mind as he heard those words and the parable of Dives and Lazarus sitting here in St Giles 25 years ago?

I say so because I have just enjoyed reading Supermac his latest and most authoritative biography by Richard Thorpe who I am hoping we can get to our historical society. It’s a great read - in more sense than one!

Macmillan, Prime Minister 1957-1963, died in 1986, was one of those good all-rounders getting all the rarer in our specialised world. He ticked boxes in the worlds of the university, commerce, the military and religion. His politics were liberal yet conservative, rebel yet loyalist. He was a crofter’s great-grandson yet his father-in-law was a Duke. Possessing all these qualities guarantees personal complexity and an interesting biography.

Great men and women are usually people who have suffered. In this way their humanity appeals through the braving of fear. Macmillan’s courage was forged in the trenches of the First World War and a near death experience in the Second World War. His family life was traumatic but he braved humiliation sticking it seems to Christian principle and refusing to contemplate divorce. The courage he possessed made him his own man. He stood alone in cabinet when he told the aged Churchill his days as Prime Minister needed to end. Macmillan even dared to suggest to Pope Pius XII he would serve Christian unity by recognising the orders of Anglican priests – to be received by silence!

Harold Macmillan was a great wit. Interrupted in a speech by Khruschev banging his shoe on the table at the United Nations he looks up and says quietly, ‘Well, I would like it translating if you would.’ Unveiling a bronze of Mrs Thatcher at the Carlton Club he makes an audible stage whisper, ‘Now I must remember that I am unveiling a bust of Margaret Thatcher, not Margaret Thatcher’s bust.’ On a trip to Russia, told ‘dobry den’ means ‘good day’ he regales everyone with the words ‘double gin’!

His brilliant intellect made him too clever for some, including Churchill who saw him as an opinionated subordinate. Macmillan saw his undergraduate reading parties as the very anticipation of heaven. Throughout his life his work was energised by his reading times. His experience at the sharp end of things did something to redeem his cerebral tendency but a negative image persisted. His Labour political opponent Aneurin Bevan saw him as a poseur. Bevan concluded cruelly that having watched the man carefully for years ‘behind that Edwardian countenance there is nothing’.

His fellow Tory rival Butler was kinder and saw two sides to him ‘the soft heart for and the strong determination to help the underdog, and the social habit to associate happily with the overdog’.

It was this phrase that came to mind as I finished reading Macmillan and started reading the scripture set for the 17th Sunday after Trinity in the third of our three year cycle.

Amos thundered against those who like ivory couches. Like Macmillan many of us have a tendency to associate happily with the overdog, like the Rector of Horsted Keynes – I am the Rector of Horsted Keynes. Like my predecessors I have access to people at the top of the academic, political, commercial and military worlds as this goes with the job alongside its more humble pursuits . I know Fr Mark Hill-Tout read to Macmillan in his final illness. A previous Rector allowed Macmillan to change the lectionary reading the Sunday Churchill died to ‘let us now praise famous men’. Dorothy Baxter, now 96, will tell you how Macmillan used to keep the choir in order.

This is not a ‘books I have recently read’ sermon – I am getting to the point, believe me!

Macmillan once said ‘It is thinking about themselves that is really the curse of the younger generation...a curious introspective attitude towards life, the result no doubt of two wars and a dying faith’.

The danger of self-absorption lies behind what prophet Amos, Saint Paul and Our Lord and Saviour are speaking of in this morning’s readings.

Those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction says Paul. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains. Those pains are described in the chilling parable I read chosen for today’s Gospel. Chilling is hardly the word for it describes the fires tormenting Dives – the rich man – on account of his neglect of poor Lazarus. Remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.

It is always chilling to encounter people whose self-absorption with pleasing themselves has made them totally indifferent to the needs of those around them. I think for a start of the people who walk across Victoria station texting away and bumping into everyone else – but I wouldn’t quite wish them hell fire!

Let me go back to Macmillan. He possessed a clear sense of divine providence working through the historical events that propelled his career and the illness that saved his addressing the prime ministerial succession. To his Christian sensibilities we owe the appointment of two of the Church of England’s most famous 20th century clerics, Michael Ramsey to Canterbury and Mervyn Stockwood to Southwark.

What is evident in Richard Thorpe’s biography, which brings out the Christian side, is Macmillan’s own sadness in his later years at the self-preoccupation that seemed to have grown up in the wake of the decline in Christian allegiance. He ends the book quoting his call to ‘restore and strengthen the moral and spiritual as well as the material’ rather countering the materialist ‘you’ve never had it so good’ association people make with Harold Macmillan.

Today’s scripture is a wake-up call. Rather as David Cameron said to the Pope last Sunday Christian faith is something to make us ‘sit up and think’. If we really believe in God this should take us out of ourselves and waken us up to the realities around us, both God and neighbour, whose service brings perfect freedom in this world and the next.

Among these realities are the eight Millennium Development Goals which take us into the global politics Harold Macmillan served for so many years. These eight goals all 192 United Nations member states and at least 23 international organizations have agreed to achieve by the year 2015. They are:

• To eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
• To achieve universal primary education
• To promote gender equality and empower women
• To reduce the child mortality rate
• To improve maternal health
• To combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
• To ensure environmental sustainability
• To develop a global partnership for development

If today’s gospel says anything it is a warning about the failure of partnership and its consequences.

The rich man was guilty not of being rich but of being a bad steward of his possessions. By God’s generosity he possessed, as we possess, an awful lot, and yet he would not imitate that generosity by sharing with those in need, with Lazarus ‘who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table’.

Today’s scripture is hard hitting. The needs of the world are very urgent. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has said ‘World military spending has now risen to over $1.2 trillion dollars. This incredible sum represents 2.5% of Gross Domestic Product. Even if 1% of it were redirected towards development, the world would be much closer to achieving the Millennium Development Goals’.

God raise up new Macmillan’s to work in politics for these ends, and raise up generosity in his people here, not least in our support for St Anne’s Hospital, Tanzania in today’s charitable giving.

God free us from ourselves through the eucharist, the thanksgiving for his love we offer day by day, to be more centred on his heart which encompasses poor and rich, near and far. So be it.

Trinity 17 26th September 8am

2010-09-26T01:26:00.000-07:00

Go and sit down in the lowest room…for whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.Luke 14v11

The Gospel is no hand book on dining etiquette. It’s a parable, Jesus says, a story with a moral. The moral is aimed at those who saw their obedience to God earning them a place at God’s side. Jesus announces in both his words and his deeds a revolution in religious thinking. To be at God’s side you need to renounce any worthiness you think you’ve got to be placed there.

When we look at how Jesus managed power he seems to have made a point of giving it up wherever he could, passing praise for his healings on to his Father, emptying himself for others to suffer and die. He is supremely the humble one who has been exalted by his glorious resurrection.

Christianity isn’t a straight forward sort of religion. It’s full of paradoxes, things that contradict in logic but that God shows us we have to hold together in the practice of faith and life.

God is the be all and end all - yet human beings can live without him. Jesus isn’t God and he isn’t man - he’s God and man. Ultimate reality has three persons - but they are also one God. Believers live by God’s providence - but they live their own lives. The bread and wine we share taste like bread and wine - but they are the body and blood of Christ.

I could go on. The paradox of today’s scripture is that God is the same as us and yet he’s different from us. He’s a personal being who made us like himself. He’s also out of this world and can’t be fitted into worldly standards.

Here’s a parable that tries to explain the paradox in today’s Gospel.

Each year the President of the nation had a banquet in the palace for all his employers at which ministers and the accredited diplomats sat side by side with civil servants, cleaners and gardeners. As the meal got under way one of the gardeners, overwhelmed by the occasion and a bit thirsty, picked up his water filled fingerbowl and drank from it. People laughed. Quick as a flash the President realized both the error of his gardener and the cruelty of the mocking laughter. The President took hold of his own fingerbowl, though put there to clean diners’ fingers and not for drinking, and drank from it himself. This wiped the smiles off the faces of those who had mocked the poor gardener. Some of them felt so awkward they followed the President and drank themselves from their finger bowls.

How slow we can be as Christians to see the central paradox of our faith - the way to God is through seeking humility. The Pecking Order isn’t at all like the pecking order most people identify.

In making the best of who we are and the gifts we’ve been given, through all the choice of shades of grey we choose between, unless we have that over arching desire to be with Jesus who descends to greatness all we do can be nothing worth.

In the course of my ministry I have met people who have chased a dream of success and power over relentlessly. Their neglected families had paid the price for this so that the people they thought they were working for in the end got literally divorced from them. They were left emotionally and physically broken. Their worldly achievements actually mocked them rather than rewarded them.

As Christians we worship a God who is far from this sort of dis-connectedness. The God shown us in Jesus has no ‘better faster alone than slower together’ upward mobility about him at all.

'The Word became flesh and dwelt among us'. He came, and in coming announced his 'downwardly mobility'. Eternal Truth came to be fleshed out in a stable so we could know him and flourish as people loved by him. He comes to us to this day in the humble obscurity of bread and wine

I want to end with a quote from Henri Nouwen, a priest who had a great ministry to the mentally handicapped:

People seek glory by moving upward. God reveals his glory by moving downward. If we truly want to see the glory of God, we must move downward with Jesus. This is the deepest reason for living in solidarity with poor, oppressed and handicapped people. They are the ones through whom God's glory can manifest itself to us. They show us the way to God, the way to salvation.

As Jesus says to us this morning Go and sit down in the lowest room…for whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.

Trinity 16 19th September 2010

2010-09-19T01:19:00.000-07:00

God our Saviour desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. (1 Timothy 2v3-4)

I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also (John 10v16)

Christianity is a draw.

We are drawn here this morning by a Saviour’s desire to save and gather his flock.

I must bring them also. Jesus says. And so he is working always in the world to draw people’s attention and bring them into his church so that they in turn may be a draw.

It’s helpful to think of God as a magnet who is magnetising the church to be a draw to those as yet outside of her.

Bishop Walsham How caught something of this in the second verse of his hymn, ‘O my Saviour lifted’:

Lift my earth-bound longings,
fix them, Lord, above;
draw me with the magnet
of thy mighty love.

When we baptise people we enfold them in God’s powerful radiance and make them spiritually magnetic.

They are then capable of growing in their own magnetic force and of drawing others to the love of God.

In baptism we are given a special capacity for God like iron filings have capacity to get shaped up by a magnet.

I would not be standing here nor you sitting there without such magnetism of the Spirit. We are all drawn into the Christian community by the drawing power of others. My own Christian commitment traces back to the example and drawing power of my parents, of friends at my Oxford College, of a holy priest or two, of countless individuals right down to my time here in Horsted Keynes.

Reading the lives of the saints has been an important influence on me. It’s a good counter to the rubbish we often find ourselves reading if we don’t plan to read things that will build us up.

I remember not so long back reading the autobiography of Bishop Helder Camera who died in 1999 having spent his life in the service of the Brazilian poor. He abandoned his Bishop’s palace to live among the poor and hitched lifts instead of riding in his official car. When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint, he used to say. When I ask why the poor have no food they call me a communist.

He was always controversial, a great pioneer of the social gospel.

Camera writes of the spiritual magnetism that steered the direction of his life, notably an encounter with a Cardinal he once helped run a Church Congress in Rio de Janeiro. This man, moved by what he saw of Rio’s shanty towns, suggested Camera would be better putting his organising talents to the service of the poor. He writes: And so the grace of the Lord came to me through the presence of Cardinal Gerlier. Not just through the words her spoke: behind his words was the presence of a whole life, a whole conviction. And I was moved by the grace of the Lord. I was thrown to the ground like Saul on the road to Damascus.

A chance conversation proved to have enormous force, for Camera, and for the poor of Brazil.

The magnetising of the interior life of one man of God by another brought about wonders for the world through the extraordinary possibilities of God.

When a baby or infant is baptised they are given the capacity to receive God’s love in Jesus Christ through others. Their parents and godparents, who share their love for one another with their children, go further to share with their children their love for God.

If parents are seeking God they have in a sense already found Jesus. You can’t seek something you haven’t in some sense found already. Your love for God, my love for God, is actually measurable by our desire to seek God and especially on the occasions when we can’t seem to find him.

Like with magnetism we’re drawn to God from outside of ourselves as well as from inside of ourselves, drawn by our contemplation for transformation and for the transformation of others.

Pope Benedict, who this morning beatifies former Anglican priest John Henry Newman, has written helpfully against people’s negative perception of the Christian church:God rejects no one. The Church rejects no one. Yet in his great love God challenges all of us to change and become more perfect.

This saying of the Pope echoes our second reading from1 Timothy: God our Saviour desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

God draws us – but he also challenges us to get shaped up to be more like Jesus since he desires our salvation.

We need saving from ourselves – from our sin, fear, sickness, doubt and despair as well as from death and the devil!

The question is do we want to be changed in this way? Do we want to be saved? To be shaped up to be like Jesus?

In the baptism service the parents and godparents say they do. They want their children to be shaped up in this way, magnetised by the mighty love of God set forth in Jesus Christ.

Justin and Liz want this for Jessica, Rebecca, Brandon, Paul and Emily. They want their family to have more of the love, joy and peace of Jesus so that others may be drawn to Jesus through them.

They are grateful for their children and want the best for them.

They also struggle, as we all do, with the workings of God. Little Brandon’s brain tumour has been allowed even if it is not God’s will that he or we suffer such sickness. It is natural that we pray healing for Brandon at his baptism as well as trust and patience for his mum and dad and brothers and sisters.

Today’s readings remind us of the need to trust the power of God that is working to draw everyone to himself through their circumstances. Next Sunday is Back to Church Sunday and we have a chance to implement this morning’s word from God by inviting someone to come to St Giles with us next Sunday.

When it comes to drawing people back to church the secret is the contemplation of Jesus which deepens our spiritual magnetism.

So we turn once more to contemplate magnetic Jesus, to reflect on his word, to gaze on him in the holy sacrament of his body and blood, praying that we will be drawn to him more and be made ourselves more of a draw for Jesus to build his body, the church and who reminds us this morning I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also (John 10v16)

West Hoathly evensong Trinity 13 29th August 2010

2010-08-29T01:06:00.000-07:00

I was in Eastbourne some time back walking on the promenade. Something landed beside me.

It came from a seagull – and, no, it wasn’t what you might expect!

It was a clam. The bird was continually dropping the shellfish until it broke.

Powerless to break into the clam by its own strength, the seagull invoked a higher power, that of gravity. By working with gravity the bird got its dinner.

This remarkable scene reminded me of how many an impenetrable problem – even a pastoral vacancy - can yield when we have the humility of faith to call upon a higher power to assist us.

In Jesus God has come to us, is ready to give himself to us, and is able to help us grow to rely on him more and more in all circumstances of our life.

We only need to take on board the invitation of Jesus to humble ourselves with confidence in his provision.

He must increase, but I must decrease we heard in the second reading from St John’s Gospel chapter 3v30. This is a call to humility.

He whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure, verse 34.

What a wonderful promise! There’s nothing in short supply for those who take God at his word. As Isaiah promised in chapter 33 verse17 Your eyes will see the king in his beauty.

How could that vision of God be possible for us in our own strength?

Yet God, who loves us through and through, has promised it.

The same promise of the beatific vision is found amplified in the
first letter of St John chapter 3: See what love the Father has
given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is
what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did
not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will
be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.

We will see him as he is...Your eyes will see the king in his beauty. What promises!

Though God calls us to decrease in ourselves he sets before us the heavenly promises referred to in today’s collect.

To be a Christian we need twin virtues – confidence in God and humility before him.

To have Christian faith is to say yes to God’s promises freely and wholeheartedly, to open our hands to welcome his mighty provision to reach into the waywardness and poverty of our lives.

This is what we mean by having faith - saying yes to what God promises, freely and wholeheartedly, trusting him with the whole self. Saying yes with humility, knowing we’re not actually the centre of things however much our senses delude us into thinking so.

Faith isn’t sophisticated beliefs, strong convictions, or some sort of moral perfection.

It’s a readiness to reach out and receive from Jesus.

Faith is less something we have and more something we do.

God has far more riches in his treasury of grace. They’re on offer. You need faith to lay hold on God’s grace. That means a readiness to open your hands to receive.

To live by faith is to live humbly with confidence in God’s empowerment!

The seagull couldn’t get the clam open but saw a helper in his situation so he could get his dinner.

We’re looking ahead as a church and as individuals.

We face many situations both as a church and as individuals that we need to approach not with the clenched fists of battle but with the open hands of faith.

Maybe God is laying on these situations to build our faith, to teach us wisdom and make us more open to his power from on high.

By faith we come to welcome the riches God has for us in Jesus. We discern God's loving wisdom and direction for our lives.

By faith we are sustained through disappointments, frustrations, and failures.

Faith is possible for all. It is a simple turning to God as we are.

This is what St Margaret’s is all about – and St Giles – our prayers are very much with you at this time.

Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, writes St Peter (1 Peter 5) that he may exalt you in due time.

With two wings, humility and confidence in God’s word we lift ourselves heavenwards like the seagull and see the impossible made possible.

Trinity 13 Sunday 29th August 2010

2010-08-29T01:01:00.000-07:00

How do you make the best of who you are and the gifts you’ve been given?

We do so day by day not so much by choosing between black and white but through choosing the lesser shade of grey. We do so as Christians also with an eye to more than self advancement.

The Gospel and its matching first reading hardly need a commentary. Pride was not created for human beings, we heard from Ecclesiasticus. Later on we heard from Luke Chapter 14: Go and sit down at the lowest place…for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

The Gospel is no hand book on dining etiquette. It’s a parable, Jesus says, a story with a moral. The moral is aimed at those who saw their obedience to God earning them a place at God’s side. Jesus announces in both his words and his deeds a revolution in religious thinking. To be at God’s side you need to renounce any worthiness you think you’ve got to be placed there.

This quality of humility isn’t passive however, or a matter of speaking hollow words like the ritual ‘yes man’ Uriah Heep. Its an active quality. Humility is a call to downward mobility with Jesus. This is the thrust at the end of the Gospel. When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbours, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed. (Luke 14v12-14)

When we look at how Jesus managed power he seems to have made a point of giving it up wherever he could, passing praise for his healings on to his Father, emptying himself for others to suffer and die. He is supremely the humble one who has been exalted by his glorious resurrection.

Christianity isn’t a straight forward sort of religion. It’s full of paradoxes, things that contradict in logic but that God shows us we have to hold together in the practice of faith and life.

God is the be all and end all - yet human beings can live without him. Jesus isn’t God and he isn’t man - he’s God and man. Ultimate reality has three persons - but they are also one God. Believers live by God’s providence - but they live their own lives. The bread and wine we share taste like bread and wine - but they are the body and blood of Christ.

I could go on. The paradox of today’s scripture is that God is the same as us and yet he’s different from us. He’s a personal being who made us like himself. He’s also out of this world and can’t be fitted into worldly standards.

Here’s a parable that tries to explain the paradox in today’s Gospel.

Each year the President of the nation had a banquet in the palace for all his employers at which ministers and the accredited diplomats sat side by side with civil servants, cleaners and gardeners. As the meal got under way one of the gardeners, overwhelmed by the occasion and a bit thirsty, picked up his water filled fingerbowl and drank from it. People laughed. Quick as a flash the President realized both the error of his gardener and the cruelty of the mocking laughter. The President took hold of his own fingerbowl, though put there to clean diners’ fingers and not for drinking, and drank from it himself. This wiped the smiles off the faces of those who had mocked the poor gardener. Some of them felt so awkward they followed the President and drank themselves from their finger bowls.

How slow we can be as Christians to see the central paradox of our faith - the way to God is through seeking humility. The Pecking Order isn’t at all like the pecking order most people identify.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. Philippians Chapter Two (v5-8).

In making the best of who we are and the gifts we’ve been given, through all the choice of shades of grey we choose between, unless we have that over arching desire to be with Jesus who descends to greatness all we do is nothing worth.

What are you doing with your life that will last forever? That’s the question we need to be asking ourselves – and Jesus asks it in the Gospel when he challenges those who seek upward mobility.

Christ’s humility was rewarded, as that passage from Philippians confirms, by his being highly exalted… and given the name that is above every name. So it is for us as we choose from time to time a lower pathway in worldly terms.

In the course of my ministry I have met people who have chased a dream of success and power over relentlessly. Their neglected families had paid the price for this so that the people they thought they were working for in the end got literally divorced from them. They were left emotionally and physically broken. Their worldly achievements actually mocked them rather than rewarded them.

As Christians we worship a God who is far from this sort of dis-connectedness. The God shown us in Jesus has no ‘better faster alone than slower together’ upward mobility about him at all.

'The Word became flesh and dwelt among us'. He came, and in coming announced his 'downwardly mobility'. Eternal Truth came to be fleshed out in a stable so we could know him and flourish as people loved by him. He comes to us to this day in the humble obscurity of bread and wine

As Christians we have truth, words to share but they are most effective when fleshed out in a loving and authentic way. People today, especially young people, need witnesses before they need teachers in the strict sense. They look for integrity. When they see humility in action it can be intriguing to them, even if they can also exploit it. As people exploited Jesus they will go for us to!

I want to end with a quote from Henri Nouwen that rejoices in the God who is 'downwardly mobile' and can be encountered in the service of the needy. Nouwen was an academic priest who chose in his last years to work among the mentally handicapped. This is the quote from his memorial volume, 'The Road to Daybreak':

People seek glory by moving upward. God reveals his glory by moving downward. If we truly want to see the glory of God, we must move downward with Jesus. This is the deepest reason for living in solidarity with poor, oppressed and handicapped people. They are the ones through whom God's glory can manifest itself to us. They show us the way to God, the way to salvation.

As Jesus says to us this morning When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed… Go and sit down at the lowest place…for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

Trinity 13 29th August Luke 10v23-37 BCP 8am

2010-08-29T00:57:00.000-07:00

The Parable of the Good Samaritan reminds us that looking to the needs of others as true neighbours brings joy both to them and to us.

A teacher found that most of her class got through their reading work very quickly. This made it hard for the slow readers and hard to keep discipline.

She found an answer to the problem that made everyone happy. When the fast readers finished they were set the task of helping the slow readers. In this way the class stayed very happy whenever it came to reading time.

The children were given a task of service and in fulfilling that task they rose above their inadequacies into joy.

So it is, to come back to you and I, that Jesus doesn’t promise us joy other than in facing our limitations and then reaching out beyond them into his service and the building up of his kingdom.

We’re not encouraged to delight or find happiness in ourselves, much as he loves us, but in putting ourselves to his work.

I looked for my soul, but my soul I could not see.
I looked for my God, but my God eluded me.
I looked for my brother and I found all three.

Joy comes as we repent, or turn away from our own selfish desires towards God and neighbour.

Happiness is self-forgetfulness. It can’t be worked up. It’s worked out.

How is it worked out?

Firstly by working out our sin and short-comings and confessing them. This is a vital discipline we do on our own but there is a sacrament available. As we could have read to us later in this service from the Book of Common Prayer, it might be that some of you requireth further comfort or counsel; let him come to me, or to some other discreet and learned Minister of God’s Word, and open his grief; that by the ministry of God’s holy Word he may receive the benefit of absolution, together with ghostly counsel and advice, to the quieting of his conscience, and avoiding of all scruple and doubtfulness. Priests are ordained to provide absolution. Appointments are possible at St Giles even!

Joy comes firstly as we repent, or turn away from our own selfish desires towards God and secondly as we set ourselves to the service of our neighbour, directing our energies outside of ourselves.

In doing all of this – facing inadequacy, rising above it, pushing ourselves outwards in service - we receive a ‘buzz’ and that ‘buzz’ is as near to happiness as we ever get on this earth.

We find the deepest joy through letting Jesus show us more of our inadequacy and our need for him - for only by depending upon him can we reach full potential.

What a strange process it is, this growing to full potential within the Communion of Saints.

We start life dependent upon our parents.

We struggle towards independence.

Our fulfilment though lies in achieving interdependence with others.

God grants us our independence not that we may go our own way but that we may choose to depend upon him as we turn our lives to the common good.

To live as Jesus Christ promised – as the children of God – is a calling to interdependence. This is a state of joy, one that openly proclaims our individual inadequacy and our reconciliation to God and neighbour.

For there is no joy for those without a sense of inadequacy in the ultimate picture of things!

So we come to the Lord through the confession of sin, not trusting in our own righteousness but in his manifold and great mercies.

We come seeking afresh the joy of the Lord who can bind up the wounds within us, pour in his healing balm and set us afresh on the path of service.

Trinity 12 Sunday 22nd August

2010-08-22T01:06:00.000-07:00

I want to look this morning at the second reading from the fourth chapter of the letter to the Colossians. In this passage St. Paul invites his readers to: devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful. 3And pray for us, too, that God may open a door for our message, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ.

What does it mean to reach someone for Christ?

Only the Holy Spirit can reach people for Christ. Our task is to be there for people as we invoke the Spirit on them – and not to get in God’s way. Know what I mean? To really care for folk, to be alongside them, but only pushy in our prayer!

Our day by day ministry as Christians is as verse 4 expresses it to proclaim the message clearly, as I should. Part of this clear proclamation is our engagement with questions people have about Christian faith, something I have myself been very active in resourcing with Premier Christian Radio and as Diocesan apologetics consultant.

In this month’s Chichester Magazine I have commended a book which we’re holding a discussion on in November. Here it is, Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God. We’re getting copies for people (they cost £5) hoping a good number of us will use it to dust the cobwebs off their past Christian formation, confirmation classes or whatever. I am also commending my own Firmly I Believe which answers questions about forty areas of believing concerning the creed, sacraments, commandments and prayer.

Commercials over – back to our scripture!

Proclaim the message clearly…know how to answer everyone This advice in verses 4 and 6 of Colossians 3 parallels that of St. Peter in his first letter chapter 3v15 where he says Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect Peter says.

Talking of ‘respect’ Narnia author C.S.Lewis wrote about a lady he knew who spent her life on other people. He said you could tell the people by their hunted look!

5Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders; Paul continues in verses 5 and 6 of Colossians Chapter 4, make the most of every opportunity. 6Let your conversation be always full of grace,

What does it mean to reach someone for Christ? Mission is about getting attuned to people and to God so they may both connect, which makes us bridge-builders. Jesus though is the real bridge, the bridge over troubled waters.

Pray… that God may open a door for our message, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ.

We can’t open the doors of people’s hearts but Jesus can. Is anything too hard for the Lord?

There’s a team poised this morning to get us working towards Back to Church Sunday on 26th September. My job this morning is to present the basic scissor strategy of church growth.

Show scissors Very obvious – two blades – prayer and invitation. The church grows as her members pray for people to experience God and invite them on occasion to join with God’s people. Back to Church Sunday is such an occasion and you’ll be hearing more on this at the end of the eucharist.

First prayer. Pray… that God may open a door

The Norwegian writer on prayer, Professor Hallesby writes these inspiring and helpful words: The work of prayer is prerequisite to all other work in the kingdom of God, for the simple reason that it is by prayer that we couple the powers of heaven to our helplessness, the powers which can turn water into wine and remove mountains in our own lives and the lives of others, the powers which can awaken those who sleep in sin and raise the dead, the power which can capture strongholds and make the impossible possible.

To be missionary isn’t about knocking on doors so much as inviting God to do so – to knock on heart doors. Mission Horsted Keynes and surrounds is calling you! The Rector is pleading with you to serve in an executive capacity. You don’t however necessarily need to meet with him or the Back to Church Sunday organisers of to be in that ‘executive’ capacity. You need rather to promise to meet daily with Jesus Christ on behalf of Horsted Keynes and its surrounds, including your own friends and families who live without the blessings of faith and this will indeed make you mission ‘executives’. It is by prayer that we couple the powers of heaven to our helplessness ...the powers which can awaken those who sleep in sin and raise the dead, the power which can capture strongholds and make the impossible possible.

So many are losing out on the blessings of faith! We want some from among our acquaintance, as the Lord leads, to open their hearts and discover the possibilities of God - the very possibilities that operate among us here as members of St. Giles Church.

So in the coming month I’m inviting action – we’re going to act. I’m asking you each day to pray for the growth of the church mentioning particular individuals known to you upon whom you desire God’s richest blessing.

It may be a matter of praying the Our Father slowly, ‘Thy Kingdom come’ in Horsted Keynes, in Mid-Sussex, in the life of my friends.

It may be a matter of fasting a little for the special Sunday maybe on Fridays the day Jesus died, or of coming to an extra service, of saying a prayer of our own like, ‘Lord Jesus draw her to yourself’ with a special intention for each of those on your prayer list.

We have, as the news sheet indicates, a visit on Saturday week at 8am from the Mid-Sussex prayer walk sponsored by The Point Anglican network Church in Burgess Hill. Every Saturday though at 8am we have Prayer for St Giles – just half an hour –open to all!

Intercession has been described as ‘love on its knees’. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale writes: Personally I believe that prayer is a sending out of vibrations from one person to another and to God. All the universe is in vibration. There are vibrations in the molecules of a table. The air is filled with vibrations. The reaction between human beings is also vibrations. When you send out a prayer for another person, you employ the force inherent in a spiritual universe. You transport from yourself to the other person a sense of love, helpfulness, support - a sympathetic, powerful understanding - and in this process you awaken vibrations in the universe through which God brings to pass the good objectives prayed for.

We have a mini mission coming up at St Giles in a month’s time - and you’ve got a place on the executive committee - you are to act - by the prayer you offer over the next month and by the invitations you will give out to your friends and acquaintances.

Someone once said ‘prayer is doing business with God and is every bit as practical as any earthly transaction’.

Prayer is very practical. It also requires a right attitude, one of wholeheartedness. So I ask you this morning:

Do you think it is the will of Our Lord for the Christian faith to spread in this land and his church to grow? Scripture says yes!

Take John 10:16: I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice.

Or 1 Timothy 2:3: This is good, and pleases God our Saviour, who wants all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth.

Prayer is the first blade of the church growth scissor strategy cutting a way forward for God. Then, the second blade – invitation.

I want to ask you, do you think we at St. Giles have something that the friends we are called to pray for are missing out on? In our worship here, and in the several strands of our outreach?

We need to believe this if our prayer is to be wholehearted.

Let me put it the other way around. How will you feel when the friend or neighbour you’re going to pray for comes with you to church? Will you feel embarrassed? If so, why should you feel so? Is the celebration of your own faith helpful to your human and social flourishing? How good is the gospel to you - good enough to be worth sharing?

Or is your faith something private, something weird and wonderful, special for Sundays but nothing you would dare to trouble your friends and neighbours with?

Are you more a consumer than a citizen when it comes to church? Are you ready to take more responsibility for building up the body of Christ, or are you content to leave it to the priest, churchwarden and PCC?

If you’re going to be an effective member of the Mission Executive you’ll need to deal with such an attitude. You won’t be praying very well for people to come to Christ and his church if you doubt deep down in your heart that it will be a blessing for them to do so.

May the Lord touch us this morning as we welcome him in his word - touch us to touch others.

May we be refreshed in the purpose for life granted to us by our Risen Lord. As God is so near to us may he make himself near to all whom we entrust to him in the coming weeks.

The Gospel is good! This church is a place of purpose in a confused world, a place of belonging in a lonely world.

May that belonging extend to more and more here at St. Giles - through prayer and invitation and the grace of God!

Devote yourselves to prayer... that God may open a door for our message, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ, to whom with the Father and the Holy Spirit be glory now and forever and the ages of ages. Amen.

The Blessed Virgin Mary 15th August 2010

2010-08-15T01:21:00.000-07:00

Last year was the double centenary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the sesquicentenary of his book The Origin of Species published in 1859.

Many see the wane of Christian allegiance in Britain as stemming from the creation-evolution debate that began in those days and which continues to reveal a lack of intellectual rigour in Christian circles.

When we look at human origins we enter troubled waters for those who stick to biblical literalism. I was reminded of this when David Lamb gave me a copy hot from Mitchell Beazley publishers of this book Origins – human evolution revealed by Douglas Palmer. It’s a fascinating summary of the 20 million year evolution of the human family involving 20 separate species and illustrated.

Thomas Huxley’s famous skeleton illustration of 1863 showed the evolution of humans from apes. Helped by a so-called paleo-artist, John Gurche, this new book gives us life like reconstructions from fossils of the faces of 12 iconic members of the extended human family who lived and died out over the last 20 million years. They range over three pages entitled ‘Meet the Family’ and going from the Proconsul plant-eating monkey to chimpanzee-like descendants up to 2 million years back. Then homo habilis, erectus, neanderthalensis and sapiens.

The issue of creation versus evolution is a consuming issue among some Evangelicals struggling with a self-contained Christian authority. If you take the Bible literally you run the risk of defending it against other interpretations of human origins and you narrow down Christianity. If you go with the main flow of Christianity biblical interpretation you go hand in hand with God’s other reference book, the book of nature. We expect truth from both sources, God’s written word and the study of the creation we call science. The truth about salvation is, of course, only in one of those books.

Christians believe the Bible can’t be mistaken as it presents the good news of Jesus to honest seekers but we don’t claim its infallibility as a science text book.

When we look back at human origins we’re bound to the biblical doctrine of our being created in the image of God and human beings’ fall expressed in the poem of Adam and Eve and in the doctrine of original sin. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God we read in the letter to the Romans 3v23.

How we see the emergence of consciousness, the soul and its capacity to be both one with God and to sin is an important question that’s worthwhile wrestling with but one that needs setting in perspective.

Whether the world came into existence over 4.6 billion years or 4004 as Archbishop Usher taught fades into a little less significance when you turn your mind towards the world’s destiny.

Being given a book on human origins last week connected, in my mind, with preaching this Sunday on the Blessed Virgin Mary who is the great reminder of human destiny as the first of the redeemed.

God gave us life through the great chain of being described both by science and by Genesis. This chain started with one cell organisms and moved through multicellular organisms to plants, reptiles then mammals climaxing in the human family.

God gave us life so he could give us his life. It is a difficult question to answer, exactly when the human soul first emerged, exactly when a human being first welcomed, worshipped and sinned against God.

If the supposed 4.6 billion year history of the earth is crammed into a single day, the whole of recorded history is compressed into one fifth of the second before midnight, a blink of an eyelid.

In that blink we have the emergence of the soul and human sin.

In the same blink we have the emergence of a soul perfectly open to God.

When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. (Galatians 4v4)

The process of creation, the evolution of the human race, led to the woman ‘fairest of that race’ whose soul opened to welcome the life of God and its consequences so that we might receive adoption as children of God.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God...(who) for us and for salvation came down from heaven, was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and was made man. (Nicene Creed)

Through Mary the Son of God became the Son of Man so that children of men could become children of God.

God came into the soul and body of the Blessed Virgin forever. It was a new creation as important as the first. God, who made all out of nothing, who set up and steers the chain of evolution, went deeper with the world.

Having established by his grace perfect obedience in a human heart he entered the depths of that heart and opened up a new chain of being that we’re part of, the communion of saints.

In Christian tradition we look backwards to Eve. We look forwards to Mary. The greeting of Gabriel, Hail, in Latin Ave can be written backwards, Eva, Eve. Mary is the new Eve as Christ is the new Adam.

The great Anglican hymn writer Bishop Ken’s hymn speaks of this:

As Eve, when she her fontal sin reviewed,
wept for herself and all she should include,
Blest Mary, with man’s Saviour in embrace,
Joyed for herself and for all human race.

Then speaking of today of Mary’s heavenly birthday the hymn goes on:

Heaven with transcendent joys her entrance graced,
Near to his throne her Son his Mother placed;
And here below, now she’s of heaven possest,
All generations are to call her blest.

We see the exaltation of Mary in all our scripture readings today. It’s an exaltation to be the lot of all who welcome Our Lord as she did. Mary is first redeemed and first fruits of the harvest of souls God planned when he made the world and re-made it through her.

This feast of Mary, Mother of the Lord, centres on human destiny.

We came to this day through the animation of the material world, the evolutionary process from cells to plants and animals to monkeys to homo sapiens.

We can head from this day towards the fulfilment of the new creation beyond this world in heaven for God who gave us life has given us his life which is immortal.

That life first planted in Mary is open to all who’ll direct their attention away from self-indulgence and self-centredness to let Jesus make them members of his family of redeemed humans we call the church.

We were made, however that may be, in God’s image.

We are destined, however that might be, for God’s glory.

The ‘how’ of our creation is beyond us. Not so the ‘how’ of our redemption.

Just as Mary cooperated with God so must we. This is the only way for human nature to flourish as it’s meant to.

Salvation is human flourishing in this world and the next. It’s communal, being one with the church in this world and the next.

God gave us Jesus through Mary and with Mary he gave us a new destiny that we need to choose and own.

It’s not what you have been or what you are that God looks at with his merciful love but what you would be. So wrote the author of the medieval book, The Cloud of Unknowing.

God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly says Mary in today’s Gospel.

God lifts those who’ll let him lift them - like Mary herself, those with a heart for God’s future.

Mary stands close to us and to the whole church as an example and as one who prays with the company of the saints that surrounds us for all of us to reach the destiny God has for those who’ll be uplifted.

We can’t save ourselves. God can but without us he cannot. Without our permission God can’t get his life into ours nor join us to the company of the redeemed.

Getting that Christ-life into our hearts is what Christianity is all about, what the bible’s all about, what the eucharist’s all about, what Mary’s all about and what the church is all about.

That all comes down to obedience and discipline, as it did for Our Lady, Blessed Mary. She was supremely anointed by the Spirit and she was supremely obedient. There’s no anointing, no heavenly joy without earthly devotion.

God grant us such devotion, with and to the Blessed Virgin, and grant, as we have already prayed, that we who are redeemed by his blood may share with her in the glory of his eternal kingdom. Amen.

Trinity 10 Faith 8 August 2010

2010-08-08T01:14:00.000-07:00

What does it mean to have faith?

Faith is trust in a person or thing. Christian faith is wisdom to trust God.

We all have faith in things - like our car getting us to the station or that our wages will go into the bank. Often that faith disappoints Sometimes we put too much confidence in a person or in things which prove to be unfaithful like the stock exchange, housing market, job opportunities, marriages and other "things". You could ask whether there is anything truly worthy of our faith.

Jesus, we might answer. The one who’s been through it for us, who expects nothing of us that he’s not been through himself and who brings his possibilities into our empty situations.

I was with a lady who has stage 4 cancer this week. She brought alive to me the definition of faith we had in this morning’s first reading: faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Hebrews 11v1). For this lady and her husband faith is not just a reaching out to something in the future that’s absent. It’s the experience of future blessings spilling into present day life. All the time the cancer has been spreading faith has been growing and bringing a solid future reality into their lives. Remarkable opportunities for special forms of radiotherapy have opened up. There is a peace and joy in their household that demonstrates the reality of God alongside them. It has been a privilege to visit and share and pray with people whose trust in God for the future is solid – even in the face of cancer.

When we put faith in God this affects our future because God is Lord of the future. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. If this is the day that the Lord has made so is tomorrow.

Tomorrow also is God’s.

When you get thinking about the flow of time a materialistic view of life crumbles to pieces. What a deceit we live with! Just because we have lots of control nowadays over our physical environment we close our minds to what we have no control at all over - the flow of time and the eternity that lies beyond it!

Belief that there’s nothing after death is the main demoralisation of humanity in our age. This materialistic view of human beings misses the point. It misses out on the glorious future there is for us in God. It demoralises - for why should you sacrifice yourself or your possessions for others if you believe deep down that in the end nothing you do ultimately makes any difference?

But what if Christ is raised? What if the purpose that brings people to church on Sunday, the Day of Resurrection, be true?

What if we admit material things fail to satisfy and reach out to the life Christ has opened up beyond this life, a life we know intuitively, are driven towards and yet cannot describe?

That would be faith. To be one with those who in the words of our reading desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them.

Faith is accepting truth for things you may not fully comprehend, believing and expecting things you cannot see. By faith that goes beyond but not against reason we accept Jesus as the Son of God, the redeemer, forgiver of our sins, giver of the Holy Spirit and promiser of eternal life. This is why we say in our baptism service, faith is the gift of God to his people.

When we accept Christ we show our faith by acting to lay our sinful nature aside, asking for forgiveness and seeking God’s direction for all that we do day by day.

When we turn to Christ, repenting of our sins, renouncing evil he shines the light of our glorious future into our lives right now. His Spirit within us, ‘this little light of mine’, acts as a moral compass for us and an inspiration to those around us.

Jesus. Here lies the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen. (Hebrews 1v1).

In Christian belief God’s revealed himself and given us right now the substance of things hoped for. We look forwards alongside Jesus who’s conquered sin, death and the devil.

Today Sunday 8th August has within it unspeakable joy from the eternal Sundays of the resurrection ahead of us. Like the cinema trailer this Sunday is preview of forthcoming attractions in the country of resurrection where God is all in all.

The Christian church is the most forward looking body on the earth. God has invested in her and you can’t have God with you in Jesus without the knowledge that the future’s worth waiting for and working for.

Tomorrow also will be good - as good as God is good.

This is the Christian faith.

Peter Vince on St James. 25th July 2010

2010-07-25T01:11:00.000-07:00

“The pilgrim of the middle ages shared with the modern tourist the conviction that certain places and certain things possessed spiritual power and that one was a better person for visiting them.”

The opening sentence of the highly regarded modern book on The Pilgrimage to Santiago.

I would much prefer not to be here today and after I have spoken to you for a few minutes the feeling may be mutual.

Today is the feast day of St James the Apostle known also as St James the Greater.

He is the Patron Saint of Spain where he is called Santiago.

What do we know of him?

He was the brother of John and they were fishermen and partners with Simon Peter. His father was Zebedee his mother Salome and she was reputed to be the sister of the Blessed Virgin Mary so he was by my reckoning a cousin of our Lord.

He was one of the first to be chosen. He was present we know:-

At the healing of Peter’s mother in Law
At the raising of the daughter of Jairus
At the Transfiguration
With John and Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane
At one of the Post Resurrection appearances
And in the upper room after the Ascension

He was almost certainly present during much of Jesus ministry including key events such as the Last Supper

He was not present at the Crucifixion.

Jesus called him and his brother John “Sons of Thunder” maybe because they showed characteristics which fitted with such a description or maybe because they suggested that Our Lord called down fire from heaven to punish a village who had not taken them in.

That really is all we know with any degree of certainty.

In the Middle Ages much faith was placed in relics maybe because folk lacked confidence in the present so people obtained comfort from things which represented what they saw as the perfection of the past. Never slow to pass up an opportunity for betterment the church embraced the culture of relics with abandon. A “good” relic would bring pilgrims and prosperity. Quite an industry evolved with raiding parties from one church or cathedral nicking the relics from others.

There are three churches who to this day claim to have a relic of the arm of St Ann. There were enough fragments of the “True Cross” to build a bridge over the River Styx let alone a boat.

It was all the better to travel out of duty and faith and love to these relics especially as the church still preached on the dreadful Day of Judgement and the risk of eternal damnation. The only sure antidote was contact with the Saints who would intercede for them. There were plenty of Saints to choose from but if the Saint was a martyr so much the better and if that Martyr was one of the 12 disciples salvation was assured. So we know why the relics of Saints were important but where did James fit in with all this?

James was the first Christian Martyr after Stephen and the first of the apostles to be martyred.

After they were exhorted by Jesus to preach the Gospel James is supposed to have travelled to Iberia where he remained for two years. He returned to Jerusalem and during the persecution of Christians under Herod Agrippa I he was executed. His remains were taken by two of his disciples to Spain and buried and eventually they were buried with him and the tomb became lost for some 800 years by which time Spain had been conquered by the Moors from North Africa. The remnants of the Christians seized on the discovery of the Tomb and the cult of Santiago was born.

Bit by bit the story grew. St James appeared miraculously at various battles to help drive out the occupying Arabs. So his reputation as saviour of Christian Spain grew and the tiny shrine built over his tomb grew with it until the great flamboyant cathedral and the town which surrounded it came about which we see today.

The evidence for all this is flimsy. There is no proof that he went to Spain in the first place. Some of the legends are clearly nonsense but the Spanish people now rid of the invaders were easy to persuade and the church did little to contradict the belief that James preached and was buried there.

James was the only Saint with such credentials to be linked with any country in western Europe and it was only to be expected that pilgrims flocked to him from all over Northern and western Europe. At the height of the pilgrimage half a million people a year walked or rode to Santiago. In around 1990 I went there for the first time. In those days and for many hundreds of years (after an interview with a priest) the successful pilgrim was given a certificate called a Compostela. In 1990 2500 were issued. This year is a Holy Year, when St James day falls on a Sunday and 250,000 pilgrims are expected.

Edwin Mullins describes the road to Santiago as a monument to the creative strength of Blind Faith. Maybe his is right – the standard of forensic proof is low but then there is nothing more easy than for a sceptic to raise doubts over things that cannot be proven.

For me I can only say that having travelled 1000 miles under my own steam to kneel in a tiny cell with the casket containing the bones of St James the Greater I had no doubts whatever.

If I and thousands of others are wrong and the sceptics are right nobody can argue that James the Apostle has not inspired, motivated and nurtured countless Christian souls for centuries and for that we should give thanks. There can also be no doubt whatever that James had qualities of obedience , loyalty and love which all of us would do well to emulate.

Going back to the start the reason I would prefer not to here is that, as I speak thousands of Pilgrims will be celebrating in the Cathedral at Santiago the joyful feast day of their special saint and I wish I were there with them.

So we pray,

Lord God,
You accepted the Sacrifice of St James, the first of your Apostles to give his life for your sake,
My we and your Church find strength in his Martyrdom and Inspiration in his service and Love to our Lord.
Help us to serve you in the same Spirit of Love and Sacrifice,

Through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.

St James' Feast 25 July 2010

2010-07-25T01:05:00.000-07:00

When the Feast of St James falls as it does this year on a Sunday it’s a very big day in Spain. Indeed its part of what they call a Holy Year, defined as the years their Patron Saint’s feast falls on Sunday. The King and Queen go to the Shrine of St James in Santiago de Compostella for High Mass during which the famous Botafumeiro, the giant Thurible is allowed to swing up and down the Cathedral nave.

The origin of the Thurible or incense burner is in thousands of sweaty feet. Santiago de Compostella is at the end of the world’s most famous Christian pilgrim route.

Seven years ago there were two extra pairs of sweaty feet in the Cathedral – those of my then12-year-old son James and I. We had completed a foot pilgrimage to the Shrine of St James covering the minimum distance required to attain the Compostella. Here it is – the Latin certificate you receive from the Cathedral Office at the end of your journey. (Show) This is the pilgrim badge (show)

The 100km hike required weeks of preparation including walking with packs on the Downs. We had no back up team so all we would need had to go on our backs as we travelled from refugio to refugio on the ancient pilgrim way.

The most important part of our preparation was deciding what not to take! Trial walks with laden rucksacks helped sort our priorities. When you're a beast of burden with a choice about that burden you soon thin your load! Though I'm an avid reader I was forced to shed all books but the Bible. James and I settled for little more than one change of clothes. My luxury was a short-wave radio. His was a Gameboy Advance. Off we went to Santiago de Compostela, or rather to the 100km point from which we hiked day by day along the pilgrim route and with much lighter burdens than we’d first planned.

One of the great things about being a Christian pilgrim is you travel light! Preparing to go on our pilgrimage gave me an enduring spiritual lesson. We brought nothing into this world and we can take nothing out of it. The lighter we travel the easier and more joyous our tread on life's pilgrimage to the city of God!

The call to detachment is part of the call to poverty intrinsic to the Christian Gospel. It goes alongside the confidence we should have as children of God in Our Father to provide for us in all circumstances.

Although today’s Gospel includes a rebuke for St James and his brother we assume that he took the message: whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant.

Or, as the Lord puts it elsewhere, blessed are the poor in spirit – those who have a right and humble assessment of themselves before God. Such folk see what they have – including any worldly status – as counting for nothing other than when it is used for service. They are detached from material possessions

The wealth of the rich is their strong city we read in Proverbs 18:11-12, in their imagination it is like a high wall…but humility goes before honour.

The ‘high wall’ riches can literally raise up – and you see them literally not a million miles from here – can all too easily put worldly honour before humility.

This ‘honour’ is the ultimate evil of materialism which we are brain washed into day by day – the valuing of people by what they possess rather than for who they are as those loved by God and bearing his image!

What does it mean to be ‘poor in Spirit’? It means to have a true knowledge of God for who he is and of ourselves as who we are. To know God in his infinite grandeur is to know oneself as a nothing and a less than nothing through sin.

When Our Lord spoke in the Gospel to James and John he was asking for poverty of spirit.

When attained this would be the sign of discipleship since a true knowledge of God in his infinite grandeur brings with it a recognition of one’s self as an utter nothing!

If we were but ‘nothings’! Our capacity to do harm brings us down one peg further, even if it is balanced by the capacity to do beautiful things as well.

As someone put it, our poverty is like that of a song compared to the singer. We are like a song of the Lord – he is the singer, we are the song. How can the ‘song’ compare itself to the singer?

Yet it is our privilege to be able to live in the praise of God! Here at the Eucharist, the great thanksgiving sacrifice of the Church we can admit this truth – all things come of you and of your own do we give you..through Christ and with Christ and in Christ!

We are to welcome Jesus in a moment in the Blessed Sacrament. God in the material order, hidden in bread and wine. As we welcome him here may he open our spiritual eyes to see him elsewhere in the material order – particularly in the run of our lives in the coming week that we may encounter him in the needy. The needy in body, mind and spirit – those who are enduring personal ordeals and badly in need of attention – our attention, our time, our money if needs be.

God free us to travel lighter in our Christian pilgrimage with deeper detachment from material things, abandoned more and more to his purposes.

The Lord deepen our confidence in his provision and also our humility. We need both confidence in him and humility before him to serve him aright.

As we own up more and more to our own spiritual need and poverty may we see Jesus – Jesus on his throne in glory, Jesus in the sacrament of the altar and Jesus in the hearts of the poor and the hearts of all his faithful people!

Trinity 7 18th July 2010

2010-07-18T05:47:00.000-07:00

Genesis 18v1-10; Ps 15; Colossians 1v15-28; Luke 10v38-42

Martha and Mary – who chose the better part?

God desires us to have intimacy with himself - this is the basic truth of Christianity.

The wonder of the stars…

The God who made all of them, who holds all of them in his hand, desires intimacy with me!

The hospitality of Abraham – icon of the hospitality of the Trinity (Genesis 18)

The majesty of Christ ‘for in him all things in heaven and earth were created…’ (Colossians 1v15-28)

‘Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her’ (Luke 10v42)

God desires to have union with us, intimate union, heart to heart.

The Majesty and yet the availability....How is this intimacy brought to us?

On God’s side by the gift of the Spirit - on our side, we receive our friendship by humility and expectancy...

On God’s Side...how can God be one with us? The Maker of the stars hold me close, answer my prayers, guide me, free me from fear, heal me, forgive me?

God is after all different...

The answer is by the Holy Spirit who is God and who brings God in all His Fullness to fill my heart eg. The ocean which is no less for filling a pool... eg. 1 Cor 2v10 ‘the Spirit searches the depths of God...we have received the Spirit...who...interprets spiritual truth (intimacy)’

On my side the intimacy is established as a gift welcomed. How? By humility and by expectancy...cf. St. Francis de Sales twin virtues.

Humble cf. Humous - of the earth, a readiness to see our nothingness before God and our less than nothingness through sin...

Then Expectant on God, Confident in God... St. Therese ...& the Sacred Heart, her faith that God could make her a Saint - the Lift...

Intimacy with God is God’s gift by his Spirit It is welcomed by humility and expectancy.

The eucharist is the great parable and seal of all of this...here God gives his Spirit, his own Life, par excellence...here we come empty-handed, in total humility before the Lord and yet with expectancy...

‘Lord I am not worthy...but only say the word’

Ronald Rolheiser in his book ‘Forgotten among the Lilies’ writes: ‘Perhaps the most useful image of how the Eucharist functions is the image of a mother holding a frightened, tired and tense child. In the eucharist God functions as a mother. God picks us up; frightened, tired, helpless, complaining, discouraged and protesting children, & holds us to her heart until the tension subsides and peace and strength flow into us’

Such is the intimacy we are privileged to share this morning and day by day in the Lord’s Presence.

‘There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her’ Luke 10.42
‘He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me and I live in him’ John 6.56

Trinity 6 MAP launch Luke 10.25-37 11th July 2010

2010-07-11T04:31:00.000-07:00

In the parable of the Good Samaritan Jesus teaches us to identify and serve people’s needs where they are, to make a difference to them and to keep on the case.

The Samaritan, unlike the priest and Levite, had his eyes on the world around him and the call of that beaten up man. The priest and Levite were strict legalists. Like the community police man who let a boy drown because he had not done health and safety training they went by their ritual law book which said you’d be made unclean if you touched a corpse. They left the man for dead.

The Samaritan, a religious outsider, obeyed a higher law than religion, the law of God and of common humanity. He met the man’s needs. He made a difference, He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

Furthermore the hero of the tale kept on his case. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, “Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.”

The parable speaks about our mission calling as followers of Jesus.

We are called to identify people’s needs and go serve them. Serve them not on our terms but theirs. Serve them without getting in the way of what’s best for them. Serve them also with a view to their ongoing welfare.

A year ago forty of us met one Sunday after service in the Martindale to seek vision for the future and to begin to set priorities for St Giles for 2010 to 2015.
Four groups of us identified independently the same three priorities: renewing our worship, engaging with youth and families and enhancing our buildings.

Over the last year the PCC has been overseeing progress on this vision. Last month we submitted an updated parish MAP to the bishop and this is copied for you in this week’s news sheet.

How are things going a year on? What have we done to accomplish these priorities? What needs to be done? How can we as church members better serve this planned action?

Our MAP is about perceived needs and serving them in an ongoing way.

We have a big vision as a church – God’s glory and the salvation of the world – but we have a tight focus: renewing our worship, engaging with youth and families and enhancing our buildings.

What must I do to inherit eternal life? …You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.

In today’s Gospel Jesus gives us the big vision and illustrates it in a focussed example.

This morning we are reminded of St Giles’ aspiration to serve that same vision with its own particular focus. Like the Good Samaritan we are keeping on the case.

A year on how are we delivering on our three priorities?

First renewing worship. Over the last year we have offered the Holy Eucharist Sunday by Sunday with a monthly variant of all age eucharist at 10am and Book of Common Prayer at 8am. The meaning and significance of word and sacrament has been unpacked for us by a good variety of preachers including some church members.

Outside of Sunday eucharist our worship has included services of reconciliation, healing ministry, Taize, hours of contemplation, devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, lay led evening prayer and the Saturday prayer group. Individuals have been discovering the sacraments of confession and anointing.

A major thrust in preaching has been the call to adopt a rule of daily prayer and bible reading and better preparation for the self offering called for by participation in the eucharist.

This autumn we will be running a prayer exploration fortnight on three Thursday evenings starting 21st October. These will involve receiving 20 minutes teaching on an aspect of prayer, 20 minutes praying together and 20 minutes reflecting in threes on the prayer experience.

Brother Roger of Taizé once said ‘when the church becomes a house of prayer the people will come running’. Renewing worship is about renewing the prayerfulness of its participants more than it is about changing service formats important as they are.

Our second mission action priority has been to engage with youth and families.

Over the last year Sunday Club has had something of a revival thanks to an increase in volunteer leaders and excellent connection with Wednesday’s First Steps in the Martindale. At the same time we have seen the hopefully temporary suspension of the Junior Choir though I am aware of musically gifted children who would like to join up and of some individuals who might offer their services to get things going again. On other fronts I have been getting alongside village youth activities alongside my regular commitment to visit the elderly and housebound. The MAP mentions an aspiration to run a parenting course which we would like church members to help lead.

Our third mission action priority has been to enhance buildings for better witness. Over the last year we have seen quite a lot of work on church culminating in the south transept renewal which is accomplishing at this time the long overdue refurbishment of the sacristy and vestry areas. The completion of the repairs recommended at the last five yearly inspection is also in hand, primarily the painting of our porch and sections of the Lady Chapel and sanctuary walling now dried out after water penetration.

On the MAP you will see that we are working towards better Christian witness through the Martindale Centre and towards creating amenities including toilets at St Giles.

At the vision day last year we recognized that any church to grow requires, beyond awesome yet accessible worship, parking, heating and toilets. The PCC is working through its fabric committee to engage with our architect on the best plan for amenities. These are the lowest, longest term priority. Above them stands the Martindale.

Last year at the vision day people felt that St Giles needs the Martindale to engage with Hosted Keynes and go half-way from the church site to where most people live. Over the year we have held special worship and social events there. Church members are involved in the Wednesday First Steps and Thursday coffee morning as well as, less up front, in the youth club, gym and scouting activities. Over the last year work has gone into clearing out the basement rooms and spaces in the Martindale. Numerous possibilities exist for developing Christian work there but their development and the improvement of what goes on there from the point of view of connecting with St Giles is up to church members.

This is the main challenge for us as we plan our mission action. Are there church members who could work with the Martindale Committee to be link people for the activities listed in the news sheet? Or members who would like to run their own evangelistic or other events that would help people in Horsted Keynes to meet up for a good cause or for Christian formation?

In the parable of the Good Samaritan Jesus taught us to identify and serve people’s needs where they are, to make a difference to them and to keep on the case. When it comes to the action we’re planning in the coming year for prayer, youth or buildings we need like the Good Samaritan to see from God what’s needed and be generous in providing for it with an ongoing commitment.

The Lord bless us through this eucharist as we express our love for him!

The Lord guide us, individually in the coming week and corporately in the coming year, as we seek better expression of the love for our neighbours that he is calling us to.

In particular may he bring such life to the Martindale Centre that it earns a coat of paint!

Trinity 5 4th July 2010 8am

2010-07-04T07:09:00.000-07:00

As you know I spent some time as a priest working in the interior of Guyana, South America and we have the Bishop here with us later on this morning.

There was actually a place called ‘El Dorado’ in my parish, that of the Rupununi.

Goldminers regularly passed through the village from the ‘Gold Shouts’.

My wedding ring has Guyana gold in it from a ‘Gold Shout’.

A ‘Gold Shout’ happens when a miner finds some gold worth shouting about. The only thing is, he doesn’t actually shout. He hides the information about a seam of gold as long as he can.

‘Jesus Christ’ writes the apostle Paul, ‘is the key that opens all the hidden treasures of God’s wisdom and knowledge’

To discover Christ is like a ‘Gold Shout’. It can be a first discovery – what we call evangelism – in which folk speak dramatically of being found after being lost.

It can also be an ongoing discovery as more of Christ’s riches dawn upon us. Either way there’s something about Jesus worth making a noise about.

In a Guyanese ‘Gold Shout’ there is a loss to the discoverer if he shouts too soon.

When we spread our news about Jesus it causes us further gain and not loss.

Love is something that if you give it away, you end up having more…just like a Magic Penny runs the children’s song.

As the seventy appointed in the Gospel went out for Jesus they returned shouting for joy at the blessings that accompanied there evangelistic outing. As we in turn take courage to give out in deed and word for Jesus’ sake we get richer in spirit.

Gold is magic but it can’t rival the magic of Jesus.

A ‘Gold Shout’ is actually quite a dangerous place where the miners readily fight for their coveted discovery.

When we find Jesus we have found something, or rather, someone, we fight not to keep but to give away, to draw people’s attention to, to share or even shout about.

In this Holy Eucharist we welcome afresh the treasure which is Jesus.

With all our heart we should affirm in a moment our Christian faith.

Lord, you are more precious than silver. Lord you are more costly than gold – and nothing I desire compares with you

Trinity 4 BCP Luke 6.36f 27th June 2010

2010-06-27T01:00:00.000-07:00

Give and it shall be given unto you.

Besides football we’ve been thinking a lot about the economy this week.

You could see our gospel reading as topical in its call for generosity – topical or countercultural!

Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal, it shall be measured to you again.

Give - in this word and action lies success in life although it flies in many ways against the spirit of the world.

We could think of our home economy and how it is best served by Christian principles but I will choose something more basic to many households.

Think of the meaning of marriage. In it we give ourselves. We take, yes. People don’t get married unless they got something out of one another, so to speak, but unless there is giving there is little blessing.

Giving of time one to another, giving of patience, giving the benefit of the doubt, giving care to one another.

This is not a natural action. It is so far, but when our human capacity to give seems exhausted, be it in marriage or in other realms, we need our Christianity which is the open line to heaven Jesus gives us.

Christianity is about grace, about help from above. Blessed are those who have discovered that grace and help as a reality to aid daily living and loving!

In Jesus, God's unbounded love is given to all who will welcome his Holy Spirit. We receive from his Spirit to give more than we can humanly give to others.

In the sacrament of marriage couples receive a special anointing in that Spirit. In this, the sacrament of the altar we receive the same Spirit.

With that gift, in Holy Communion or marriage, comes the call to love as the Lord loves you, to give as the Lord has given to you.

Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal, it shall be measured to you again.

Our lives, our marriages, our churches, to be most fruitful need to be open to God, who is able, by his spirit, to melt our meanheartedness and make us ever more generous.

Through this Holy Communion Jesus gives himself to us under the veil of bread and wine.

Let us respond to his word to us this morning by a resolve to be generous and make space for others and for him in our hearts. Amen.