This morning is something of an unforgettable experience
for me.
Anne and I are sharing like Jesus a last week with
everyone before death and resurrection - I speak half in jest. Haywards Heath
also is no paradise compared to Horsted Keynes.
This morning's liturgy blends the triumph and sorrow
associated with Experiencing Christ's
Love, the title of my new book, of which I mentioned last week 8 o’clockers
would get pre-launch availability. Its sub title is establishing a life of worship, prayer, study, service and reflection and
it’s somewhat autobiographical
The large palm branches on its cover represent triumphant
love which works out, as our reading of the Passion illustrated, through bearing
sorrow.
As your parish priest bearing many of your joys and
sorrows I have carried Christ from you. He has rubbed off on me as I hope he's
rubbed off from Anne and I to you. Worshipping, praying, studying, serving and
reflecting here for 8 years has been immensely fruitful for us.
The book is one fruit grown from the partnership between priest
and people we’ve exercised together and it’s about holding yourself to a rule
of life.
The clue to effective living is to find the main things
and keep the main things as the main things.
For over 60 years I’ve been working with a rule of life at
both finding and holding myself to those things. I still have work to do. As a priest for most of my life you’d have
thought I’d have this sorted by now, but, though theological expertise helps me
speak and write about experiencing Christ’s love, its outworking in real life
is all the more challenging.
There are no professional Christians, though some get
paid for their work. We are all amateurs,
hopefully in the sense of devotees rather than incompetents!
As I prayed for God-given competence to frame my book the
Lord drew me to an image of his hand reaching down to me and my own hand
grasping his with its five digits expressing five loves commended in his own
summary of the Law in Matthew 22:37-39: “You shall love the Lord your God with
all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the
greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your
neighbour as yourself.”
Worship and prayer are to be seen as heart and soul of
our love for God, Jesus implies, but without study, engaging the mind with
divine teaching, that love will be ill formed, and without service, love of
neighbour, and reflection, loving care of self, our loving God is a delusion.
Those five commitments - worship, prayer, study, service,
reflection - make a hand that can grasp the hand of God reaching down to us in
Jesus Christ to raise us into his praise and service with all the saints, an
image of Love's endeavour for us in Holy Week. The five commitments provide the
chapter headings of this short book of 90 pages commissioned and published by the
Bible Reading Fellowship.
The God and Father of Jesus is a God of joyful goodness
who loves us through and through and whose grace is overall and in all. That
loving grace isn’t a quantity so much as a quality of helpfulness given us by
God who simply desires it for us, not because we’ve done anything to earn it.
This benevolence shown by God toward the human race is at the heart of the good
news of Jesus we're celebrating in Holy Week.
‘God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with
which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive
together with Christ' Paul writes to Ephesus.
'By grace you have been saved - and [God] raised us up
with [Christ] and seated us with him in the heavenly places’. (Ephesians 2:4-6)
After seeing a 1960s street advertisement Austin Farrer
amusingly compared the Church of England to corsets: 'for ladies, for comfort
and for general uplift'. It's a half truth- my mother tells me she's struck by
the number of men at St Giles!
Christianity is indeed 'for comfort and uplift'. To be
raised up we need to welcome and respond to God’s grace, putting faith in him,
placing our hand in his, and that’s going out of our way. It’s a countering of
self-deception as expanded in this book.
Attending worship may be inconvenient but ‘where there’s
a will there’s a way’. The discipline of prayer isn’t necessarily accompanied
by feeling God’s presence. Awkward questions about the Bible matter and there
are times to get your head down to address them. We’ll never be good at serving
others without a readiness to shoulder life’s little humiliations that break
the ego’s shackle round us. Unless we are ready to regularly examine ourselves
and confess our sins to God ‘the truth is not in us’ (1 John 1:8).
Christians live under the favour of God which is grace
with a big aim - God’s glory and the world’s salvation - and a tight focus
expressed as we worship on Sunday, pray every day, study the Bible, serve our neighbour and
reflect upon our lives confessing our sins. That big aim and tight focus is
taken up into the love of Christ for God, for us and for all.
‘All is grace’.
The clue to effective living is to find that main thing
reaching out continually in worship, prayer, study, service and reflection to
grasp ‘the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship
of the Holy Spirit’. 2 Corinthians 13:14
Through this book, through Holy Week or in whatever way
he opens to you I repeat the bidding of the last line of my book from Ephesians
3:19 'May you know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may
be filled with all the fullness of God’.
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