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!
Sunday, 26 December 2010
Saturday, 25 December 2010
Christmas day all age eucharist 2010
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.
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
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!
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!
Sunday, 19 December 2010
Advent 4 The choices of God 19th December 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, 14 November 2010
Remembrance Sunday 14th November 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, 6 November 2010
Baptismal eucharist 7th November 2010
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!
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!
Sunday, 31 October 2010
All Saints Feast 31st October 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, 23 October 2010
May Christ dwell in our hearts prayer exploration 24th October 2010
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!
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!
Sunday, 10 October 2010
Harvest Festival 10.10.10
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.
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.
Sunday, 3 October 2010
Dedication Festival 3rd October 2010
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!
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!
Sunday, 26 September 2010
Trinity 17 26th September 10am
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.
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
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.
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.
Sunday, 19 September 2010
Trinity 16 19th September 2010
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)
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)
Sunday, 29 August 2010
West Hoathly evensong Trinity 13 29th August 2010
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Sunday, 22 August 2010
Trinity 12 Sunday 22nd August
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.
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.
Sunday, 15 August 2010
The Blessed Virgin Mary 15th August 2010
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.
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.
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