St Mary, Balcombe Feast of the Holy Family 30th December 2018

This morning the liturgy moves from Bethlehem via Jerusalem to Nazareth. On Tuesday we celebrated the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. Today we celebrate his childhood in Nazareth. As we heard at the end of the holy gospel, following the incident in the Temple: Jesus went down with Mary and Joseph and came to Nazareth.

I once went to Nazareth. I’ll never forget seeing two young boys at a well drawing water for their families. They could have been Jesus and his cousin John. The water was probably from the same source as that drawn on 2000 years ago, for wells do not move.

This morning we are all going in heart and mind to Nazareth, to the household of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. We’re going, with the scriptures and the holy liturgy to seek inspiration from the Holy Family for our own families and for the family we enjoy here at St. Mary’s as a local expression of God’s never-ending family, the holy, catholic church.

As we go to Nazareth we find welcome, challenge and empowerment.

We find firstly a welcome. The hearth of Mary and Joseph is an open hearth. How could it be otherwise? How could this couple who welcome God into their earthly home be guilty of turning any away?

In the Holy Family there is hospitality, the generous reception of friends and stranger alike.  We catch something of the extended life of the Holy Family in today’s Gospel story of Jesus getting lost in the Temple when the three of them travel in a large extended family. To enter the story of Jesus, Mary and Joseph is to find yourself welcomed into that great hospitable procession of the people of God into the heavenly Temple. Mary and Joseph remind us that we can never have Jesus to ourselves. To be a Christian is to be one with Mary and Joseph and Paul and Augustine and Francis and Giles – and the list goes on!

In the Holy Family we find the welcome that marks the church from its beginning, God’s people belonging to God and belonging together.

You and I haven’t chosen one another but God has chosen us together to be his family here in Balcombe. Welcome one another says the Apostle as God in Christ has welcomed you.

In Nazareth we see also an image of Christian family, of mutual belonging. Jesus, Mary and Joseph are present to one another in a way we can only hope to imitate by the grace of God.

Our families need to go to Nazareth, so to speak, and to learn there how to be more present to one another.

As we go to Nazareth we find such a welcome – and also a challenge. It is the Feast of the Holy Family today.

There’s so much sentimentality surrounding Mary and Joseph we need to get back to scripture to see them as they are – two of God’s holy ones and holiness is nothing comfortable but rather something challenging. The infancy narratives in the Gospel give evidence of St. Joseph’s capacity to hear the voice of God and guide the Holy Family.

And Mary! If she had not been what we call ‘ascetic’, a woman set apart and well disciplined in the spiritual life, she would not have become the God-Bearer by whom God came down to live in your life and mine. As someone wrote, it was as if the human race were a little dark house, without light or air, locked and latched. The wind of the spirit had beaten on the door, rattled the windows, tapped on the dark glass, trying to get in – and yet the Spirit was outside. But one day a woman opened the door, and the little house was swept pure and clean by the wind. Seas of light swept through it, and the light remained in it; and in that little house, a Child was born and the Child was God.

As we go to the home in Nazareth we encounter the challenge of holiness, what Pascal said was the most important influence in the world. We see a Holy Child formed by a Holy Mother and her Spouse. How can we enter such a home?

There are families I know where there is such a sense of the Holy Spirit that I am made to feel deeply challenged. Some households have about them a transcendent quality, a joy that is pointer to heaven our true home.

This is also true of churches. Just welcoming visitors is not enough. They need to be challenged, intrigued by what they see inside our buildings, both the worship of Jesus and the people of Jesus in their self-lessness and joy.

This morning we go to Nazareth to learn in the school of Jesus, Mary and Joseph of a welcoming love and a challenge to holiness. Lastly we will find at Nazareth a source of empowerment.

For 2000 years people have been empowered by the saving grace of Jesus Christ born of Mary. What a Saviour – a practical Saviour! As practical as his foster father, Joseph, in carpentry where Our Lord picks up his capacity to mend, yes, even families.

How many of us have had to bring our marriages and our families to be mended? To the Carpenter, the One who anoints and empowers and saves – and seen the difference Christian Faith makes.

How much we need to get back to Nazareth, to Jesus, Mary and Joseph and see there a work of intense spiritual transformation open to all. And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favour (Luke 2:52). He did so that we too might increase in the same fashion!

Either Jesus Christ makes a difference, either he is born ‘to raise the sons of earth’ or our religion is moralistic do-gooding. If Christianity is about ‘do gooding’ it is only in the sense that Christians have access to a power beyond this world that incidentally helps you do what is right.

For that empowerment, for the challenge and welcoming love the Holy Spirit brings we go in gratitude once more this morning to Nazareth!

Through modelling Jesus, Mary and Joseph, may our families and our church be places of welcome so that people may find a home with us and with the Lord!

May our families and our church be challenging places where people get intrigued by Jesus Christ living in the midst of his people!

Father grant that our families and our churches may become places of spiritual empowerment where we share in the anointing of your anointed Son, who with you and the Holy Spirit live and reign, One God for ever and ever. Amen.

Midnight Mass 2018 at St Bartholomew, Brighton

Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. Luke 2:10

Fear not - trust! Trust God - he is above all to be trusted!

There is great tumult in our nation. As 2018 ends no one knows how 2019 will shape Britain’s future in relation to the rest of the world. The credibility of Parliamentary democracy has taken a tumble with that of ministers, politicians and the media leaving many bewildered not knowing who to trust.

Fear not - trust! Trust God - he is above all to be trusted!

His are truth, goodness and beauty and those qualities remain evident among us. Such is the crisis in truth telling that the second and third qualities are becoming preferable pointers to him, beauty especially.

As we gather to celebrate Midnight Mass we owe much to our choir and orchestra and the composer Joseph Haydn for the beautiful music these words interrupt to speak of truth. In his Credo there is no mistaking his witness to Christian truth in the incarnation and resurrection as we shall see.

Haydn like us knew tumult. Whilst he lay dying in the Vienna of 1809 Napoleon was bombarding his neighbourhood. Such was his international reputation as a composer that Emperor Napoleon sent guards to his house to protect him.

The score of the St Nicholas Mass is marked ‘in nomine deo’ as were all Joseph Haydn’s works. With all his flaws Haydn put trust in God seeking the Holy Spirit to make him his conduit of beautiful composition, musical beauty we are being fully immersed in this Christmas night.

Fear not - trust! Trust God - he is above all to be trusted!

In the tumult of an earlier age, as the Roman Empire fell apart in the 5th century, St Augustine of Hippo preached these words in his Christmas sermon on the same text I gave you from Luke 2:10: Fear not the coming of your God: fear not his friendship. He will not straighten you when he comes, rather he will enlarge you...You see then, if you love, how much room he gives you. Fear is a suffering that oppresses us. But look at the immensity of love.

I was taken by his image of Christianity as enlarging. It’s so against people’s perception of what we’re about.

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

God got straightened, bound up, so we could find new spaciousness and be granted power to become his children.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tonight Jesus was bound in swaddling bands to expand us out of fear into the joyful immensity of divine love!

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

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

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

Fear not - trust! Trust God - he is above all to be trusted!

There are people in Brighton this Christmas struggling through cancer, unemployment and family breakdown. Where there’s faith in the Christ Child these circumstances aren’t able to bind and restrict Christian joy – I’ve seen it for myself in many I’ve been privileged to minister to here at St Bartholomew’s.

When the One ‘born to raise the sons of earth’ comes into our lives he enlarges us so we can embrace the world around us in all its frailty and tumult.

Tonight we celebrate God’s investment in humanity giving us new value through a new creation started in the Virgin Mary’s womb. We celebrate the Child of Bethlehem bound in swaddling clothes who went on to be bound on the Cross so we could expand into a whole new dimension of life.

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

Look indeed, on this most holy night, and see in the Crib that immense love which enlarges you!

As you welcome Christmas Communion pray for yourself, and for all of us, to live as God made us to live - with greater trust in him!

St Bartholomew, Brighton Advent Sunday 2nd December 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Almighty God made the universe to put in the centre of it his Son, Jesus Christ. The first Coming of Jesus was into the womb of a holy woman, the Blessed Virgin Mary, demonstrating that we human beings are no mere compartment of the animal kingdom but are capable of union with God.

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

As Christ waited for the holy woman to be his Mother he now awaits a holy people to be his Bride so that as heavenly Bridegroom he can one day embrace his church so that we may rise to the life immortal.

Christ awaits the purification of his church for this consummation just as he had to await a woman for his conception.

In Advent season we provide a number of occasions for deepening repentance, our sense of need for God such as making available the sacrament of confession. You can approach either priest after this Mass to make an appointment for confession before Christmas. Anglicans have a quite relaxed attitude to confession - all may, none must, some should - but there’s a strong tradition of preparing for Christmas and Easter by such an act. If you’ve never made your Confession you could again talk to a priest or more experienced church member you know about what’s entailed.

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

It is a glorious truth that no one can take away or enhance who we are before God - the love he has for us is will be everlasting! As we welcome that love in Holy Communion this morning let’s hold in our hearts those we know who know not the Lord Jesus praying they too will open their hearts to him and experience the love of the Lord!

Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, now and for ever. Amen.

St Bartholomew, Brighton Christ the King Mass & Blessed Sacrament Procession 25 November 2018

What is the biggest challenge Christianity faces?

I believe it's the need to heal the schism between the supernatural truth of Christ’s reign and the reign of the evolving body of human truth in people’s minds.

A few years back we celebrated the double centenary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the sesquicentenary of his book The Origin of Species published in 1859. There was a book published entitled Creation or Evolution – do we have to choose? which posed the gravity of this split.

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

Does our kneeling to Christ as King require a surrender of intellectual integrity in the face of evolutionary theory? If the truth of Christ is an anchor that holds us, has it any affinity with the forward movement of the universe? Is Christianity a brake on the world or a spur to world transformation?

Well we need fidelity to Christ which sets us in some ways against the world but we also need audacity for Christ – indeed Our Lord summons it from us!

We need more intellectual audacity to overcome the taunts of the Darwinians. It is Catholic Faith that both reason and faith lift us to God. If you want to be a Catholic Christian you can no more be a mindless fundamentalist than a Richard Dawkins rationalist!

As a former scientist I have a good investment in this collaboration of reason and faith. That’s why I’ve been meeting with a group on Wednesdays this month in the parish room to engage together in the reasoned defence of Catholic faith, so called apologetics. That’s not apologising for faith by the way, but making an ‘apologia’, a reasoned defence of faith.

My doctorate was on the forces between the chains in polythene and Teflon. I wrote it years ago. It’s won me the nickname ‘non-stick-vicar’. I wish that were true!

From that scientific work on what holds polymers together I’ve now moved forward to another concern - what holds the universe together.

We’re here this morning to celebrate the One who does just that – Jesus Christ. He holds all things in being scripture says and he’s bringing all things together in himself.

My mission now as a priest is to help people know Jesus and the truth that’s in Him, truth that’s married to the wider body of human truth that’s emerging day by day as the world evolves. As Our Lord says to Pilate in the Gospel: All who are on the side of truth listen to my voice.

The gentle reign of Christ the King is over hearts and minds. Being subject to that reign, living with Jesus as Lord, entails audacity as well as fidelity. Its having confidence that the world around us is his, that his reign is there in its unfolding truth and so are his mission opportunities.

Mission is God’s business. Jesus Christ our King is there in front of us awaiting our faith in him.

All we need is the Holy Spirit to transform our fear into courage.

The Lord is ahead of us if we attend to him.

Earlier this year I did a series of posts on social media about the French priest scientist and mystic Teilhard de Chardin.   

For Teilhard the Jesus whose reign today’s readings announce is the one who holds all things together and who leads us forward to a fulfilment that will coincide with his majestic return.

The whole cosmos is like a cone with the movements within it converging upon Jesus as the apex or omega point. Our individual futures, the future development of St. Bartholomew’s and of the whole church and the future of Brighton and the whole created order rests in Jesus and is to end in Jesus.

You have so filled the universe in every direction, Jesus wrote Fr. Teilhard, that from now on it is blessedly impossible for us to escape you…Neither life, whose progress reinforces the hold you have on me; nor death which throws me into your hands, nor the good or bad spiritual powers which are your living instruments; nor the energies of matter, into which you are plunged;…nor the unfathomable abysses of space, which are the measure of your greatness;…none of these things will be able to separate me from your substantial love, because they are only the veil, the “species”, under which you hold me so that I can hold you. (Le Milieu Divin 1957).

His last reference draws an analogy that as Jesus is hidden under the species of bread in the Holy Eucharist so that he can come to us and change us into himself, so Jesus is hid in the creation itself as the binding force, as joy and sorrow visible to the eye of faith.

Teilhard teaches me that when I as a priest in his name - and your name - say This is my body… over bread and This is my blood over wine, something spills out from the altar mystically across the church and its surrounds. This priestly act extends even beyond the transubstantiated host to the cosmos itself Teilhard writes.

Wondrous stuff – but Christianity and the dynamic that urges it forward are wondrous stuff!

The best encouragement I can provide for our mission here at St. Bartholomew’s is to point to Jesus before you and within you in the Blessed Sacrament, building our faith towards seizing his possibilities.

Jesus Christ holds you and I together. He holds Brighton together – or he would hold Brighton together, not overriding free will but by compelling love. St Paul says of Our Lord in Colossians ‘He…is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

As we heard in today’s first reading: I am the Alpha and the Omega...God who is, who was and is to come, the Almighty.

Mission is God’s business. Our Lord is there in front of us awaiting our faith in him.

All we need is to see Jesus mystically in all the people and things in our lives as one beckoning us forward into ever greater audacity for him.

In his book Mass on the World Teilhard addresses directly this apparent schism between Christianity and the world. Reflecting there on the Eucharist and how we seek here both purity and charity he says: The true meaning of purity is not a debilitating separation from all created reality but an impulse carrying one through all forms of created beauty…the true nature of charity is not a sterile fear of doing wrong but a vigorous determination that all of us together should break open the doors of life.

Jesus is saying the same to us today as his great purpose weaves forward incorporating our lives and those on our hearts and the whole community of Brighton to break open the doors of life as we consecrate ourselves to God in this Eucharist.

Can you see with Teilhard that when the priest lifts the paten, the holy plate with bread to offer what is offered is the whole cosmos including our little part as it is the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands? When he offers the chalice of wine to God it is a chalice containing the pressing out not just of grapes but of lives and communities under pressure to become for us the chalice of salvation?

Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation…this is your body…this is your blood…this bread and wine, our lives and potentially the lives of all those linked to ours in the marvel of the created order. Open our spiritual eyes to your leading and your resourcing through this Mass!

Grant us fidelity and audacity in service of Our Lord Jesus Christ who is before all things, and in whom all things hold together…. the Alpha and the Omega...God who is, who was and is to come… to whom with the Father and the Holy Spirit be all might, majesty dominion and power henceforth and forevermore. Amen.

St Bartholomew, Brighton Trinity 22 (30B) Bartimaeus 28 October 2018

I want to take us into the Gospel Reading using our imagination in the manner taught by St Ignatius Loyola.

I invite you to personalise the story of Bartimaeus in Mark 10:46b-52 as we seek the ministry of the Holy Spirit to do what he is always ready to do - make Our Lord real for us today. So, come Holy Spirit, touch our minds and hearts as we read through this sacred text. It may help to follow me on the pew sheet.

Look at verse 46: ‘They came to Jericho: and as he went out of Jericho with his disciples and a great number of people, blind Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus, sat by the highway side begging’. ['Then they came to Jericho. As Jesus and his disciples, together with a large crowd, were leaving the city, a blind man, Bartimaeus (that is, the Son of Timaeus), was sitting by the roadside begging.NRSV]

A few notes on the context:

1) Holy Land Geography meant Galileans coming to Jerusalem Feasts came through Jericho to avoid Samaria

2) Jesus approaches his Passion. Of the 20 pages say of Mark's Gospel 10 are about Holy Week & Jesus' suffering, death & resurrection. Chapters 10 set the scene for Chs. 11-16. This chapter of St. Mark is the last word before Palm Sunday

3) The large crowd were no doubt drawn not just to Jerusalem for Passover Feast but drawn to travel with Jesus to Jerusalem.

4) The preoccupation of Jesus with his coming Passion..the last few days of teaching before His saving action...the pressing in of the crowd..in all of this Jesus is open to the Spirit drawing him to stop and give his all to one needy person...Bartimaeus son of Timaeus.

Wonder at the availability of the God Jesus shows us...Earlier this month we heard that the first moon outside our solar system, a gas giant the size of Neptune, may have been discovered...wonder at the immensity of it all... He made all of this yet He listens to my heartbeat… the attentiveness and availability of God in Christ!

Read  v47-48 second paragraph ‘And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out, and say, Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me. And many charged him that he should hold his peace: but he cried the more a great deal, Thou son of David, have mercy on me’. ['When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!"  Many rebuked him and told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more, "Son of David, have mercy on me!"']

1)  Faith is a virtue and a gift. Some people find the virtue of faith easier than others by nature and temperament.

We can all ask for faith and those who are asking for faith always receive and their faith grows.

Bartimaeus was given a special gift of faith to recognise Jesus as who He was, the 'Son of David', the Messiah, the One promised in the Old Testament who would bring in God's rule over all evil. The One Isaiah said would 'open the eyes of the blind'. In our Old Testament reading Jeremiah promises God’s special care for the blind.

The healing of the blind in Chapter 10 of Mark's Gospel comes just before the account of the Lord's Passion, as if to say "the Messiah, the One who is promised to be an opener of the eyes of the blind has come. Now see in the account of His Passion what he is prepared to do for you and for me!"

Fr. Hebert of Kelham wrote of this Gospel passage, "I am Bartimaeus and hear the Lord passing by on the way to the Cross, but because of the dullness of my blinded sight, I do not know what it means..so I cry to Him for light".

The Creed says Jesus is God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God  and Jesus is as available to you and me as he was to Bartimaeus. Only unbelief pretends this is not so...

2)  'Have mercy on me' Bartimaeus cries. Would that be my prayer before Jesus today? It is a frequent bidding in our liturgy. We call out for mercy half a dozen or so times in the Mass: in the Kyries of course, then in the middle of the Gloria, in the Agnus Dei and its implied when we say the ‘Lord I am not worthy’.

The prayer of the lips has to become the prayer of the heart. Only when I admit my need for God deep down can He fill me deep down - however many times I pray with my lips!

3)  Note the determination and persistence shown by Bartimaeus. One commentator on this Gospel says, 'Jesus is halted by the impassioned cry of need characterised by determination, definiteness and faith'. In other words Bartimaeus was not messing around with the Lord  He meant business.

Have you got business with God this morning?  Facing Jesus means facing myself and all that falls short in my life, my relationships, my sin...'Square with God and He will square with you'. It's a deal and it takes courage to lay all our soiled cards on the table before the Lord. Yet the Lord has deep compassion. Our sins are but dust before Him.

Read v49-52 last paragraph: ‘And Jesus stood still, and commanded him to be called. And they call the blind man, saying unto him, Be of good comfort, rise; he calleth thee. And he, casting away his garment, rose, and came to Jesus. And Jesus answered and said unto him, What wilt thou that I should do unto thee? The blind man said unto him, Lord, that I might receive my sight. And Jesus said unto him, Go thy way; thy faith hath made thee whole. And immediately he received his sight, and followed Jesus in the way.

['Jesus stopped and said, "Call him." So they called to the blind man, "Cheer up! On your feet! He's calling you." Throwing his cloak aside, he jumped to his feet and came to Jesus. "What do you want me to do for you?" Jesus asked him. The blind man said, "Rabbi, I want to see." "Go," said Jesus, "your faith has healed you." Immediately he received his sight and followed Jesus along the road.]

1) Notice the eagerness and openness in that action of throwing off the cloak. Much of Christian discipleship is a matter of 'throwing off the cloak'. Facing God, letting God into areas of our life he knows full well about but needs our permission to deal with. He respects our privacy though as God he sees right through us. It's up to us not him to reveal ourselves, to cast off our cloak bit by bit for the healing work of the divine mercy.

2) Jesus said to him, 'What do you want me to do for you?'

What - a blind beggar in front of him and Jesus asks 'What do you want me to do for you?'?

It's conceivable Bartimaeus as a beggar saw Jesus as rich enough to reward him well if he heard him calling. On that theory Jesus in this testing question might have been making a final check on whether Bartimaeus really wanted to lose his blindness  - it was after all a source of income. If he wanted to be healed he must be prepared to face the consequences earning his own keep rather than begging.

Thinking more widely it helps to look at the whole of Mark Chapter 10 since, as we learned last week, Jesus asks exactly the same question of his two apostles James and John, 'What do you want me to do for you?' They answer 'Give us important posts'. Bartimaeus answers, 'help me to see more clearly'.

In the Old Testament God offered King Solomon wisdom or riches. Because Solomon chose wisdom God rewarded him with both. James and John asked for privileges and were humbled by Jesus. Bartimaeus asked for mercy and for sight and he was granted it.

The fact that Bartimaeus followed Jesus shows his cure was not just physical healing but a deeper work. His inner eyes were opened to the reality of God in Jesus just as his outer eyes were opened to the world around him in all its beauty. Bartimaeus gained access to a greater beauty than physical sight can show us, the beauty of Jesus in his fullness as Lord and Saviour.

So we come back to this Gospel passage. It was written nearly 2000 years ago about Bartimaeus and Jesus. As we welcome the Holy Spirit we see this Scripture to be really about God and I.

I am Bartimaeus in need of sight and light on my life's journey.

I am Bartimaeus persistent in prayer, determined to get what God wants for me.

I am Bartimaeus ready to throw off the cloak of pretentiousness and open my life to the Lord.

And if I am Bartimaeus Jesus is the Son of God, the same yesterday, today and always.

He is present right now as he was in Jericho and is willing and capable of flooding my soul with Light, Glorious Light.

He has a way forward for me, a reason and purpose for all who will welcome Him this morning.

Let us keep silence for a moment before him...

Lord Jesus, we believe You are here as you were in Jericho long ago.

We want to spring into Your presence like Bartimaeus.

We are casting off our cloaks now before You.

Touch our inner eyes that we may see things as they really are.

Open our eyes to the reality of Your presence with us and our great need of Your mercy.

Make us ready to follow you as You summon us to go with you.

Bless us as we turn to you, O Christ, with all the expectancy of Bartimaeus!

Jesus, bringer of Sight and Light, have mercy upon us in Your great Compassion!