St Bartholomew, Brighton Trinity 11(22C) Humility 1.9.19

‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.’ Luke 14:11

There’s a great deception that humility is something passive. It’s not, it's the most active tendency there is if you’re truly in the business of countering the strength of self-will and we all need more of that.

In case I get praise for this sermon - some of you are very kind to me - the words of Thomas More are at the back of my mind: ‘whoever bids others to do right, but gives an evil example by acting the opposite way is like a foolish weaver who weaves with one hand and unravels the cloth just as quickly with the other’.

Yes, humility is the Christian distinctive and it’s far from making yourself a doormat. It's the day by day struggle for holiness commended by Our Lord in the Gospel as a taking of the lower place where we can, and, by our first reading from Ecclesiasticus, as refusal to forsake the Lord. ‘The beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord; the heart has withdrawn from its Maker’.

When people live without God they’re bound to centre themselves on themselves though many I know who live without God show immense kindness to others. I put that down to God giving them a better start than I! As a believer I don’t see myself as the centre of the world in principle but in practice to my dying day I’ll be actively countering touchiness, resentfulness against criticism, impatience when I don’t get my own way, eagerness for fame, anxiety lest I miss being thanked and praised and so on.

‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.’

Our Lord mixed with everybody. Today’s Gospel shows him mixing at the upper end of the society of his day at the home of a prominent Pharisee. He felt the need to address people trying to get places near the most famous. It’s a bit like when the Archdeacon visited on the patronal. Over our excellent buffet you couldn’t get near him for clergy - I tried! I wanted to congratulate him on pulling out his finger a bit for us in accepting the PCCs business plan clearing the way for the appointment of a full time parish priest. 

What is it about the human condition that makes us so celebrity conscious, wanting celebrity for ourselves and delighting on occasions we meet real live celebrities? 

I met Edwina Currie on the train the other week which got my mind thinking about eggs and other things. What really struck me in this face to face encounter though was the caring way she saw onto and off a busy train a frail man I took to be her husband. ‘Judge not and you will not be judged’. How hard it must be to serve in government nowadays with the relentless unforgiving gaze of 24-7 media upon you!

The deception we live under that humility is something passive links very much to the way our media school us unconsciously or consciously in deriding the weak. We need sermons, retreats, books to read that help undeceive us about the truly active virtue of humility. This sermon links a little to my retreat in Lisieux last month where I stayed a few days close to the Shrine of St Therese whose life in many ways was quite unremarkable. Born in 1873 she lived just 24 years, the last nine in a convent. When she contracted TB the Convent superior was concerned to get some obituary together and asked her to write it for herself - it became a bestseller - ‘Story of a Soul’ (show) . The rest is history - do read it - a book I’ve commended to you before from the pulpit! Yes, Therese in a way was herself victim of church celebrity cultus, being made a saint so soon after her death, but many are the wiser through her teaching as a Doctor of the Church.

Engaging with Thérèse last month I found to be primarily engagement with self-acceptance, something built in her by the Lord and her acceptance by a loving family and the community she joined at 15. ‘Story of a Soul’ captures this struggle to welcome God’s love and accept ourselves within its embrace. On my retreat I felt inspired by her to talk with the Lord about my own difficulties in self-acceptance and how my failings can become happy pretext for looking to him. To know this, to accept ourselves and our life circumstances, helps divert us from these towards the addressing of our deeper needs and aspirations. Maybe thanks to Thérèse - it’s still early days - I run less risk of seeing the way to my true self blocked by staying slave to lower impulses though, like her, I can’t presume on Our Lord. As she writes, ‘I am not perfect but I want to become so… effort means more to God than victory’.

It IS an effort to gain humility even if it's also a grace. We need to ask for it again and again as a grace from God. Secondly, we need to accept the humiliations of life though recognising the world of difference between being humble and being humiliated. How many times do we say the wrong thing and feel the hurt to our pride more acutely than the hurt we did to the person we spoke to or spoke about?

The school of humility is a school of self-acceptance impossible without confidence in God. We live as Christians with knowledge of God loving us through and through and his invitation to recentre our lives on him and our neighbour. Putting that wisdom into practice is the action of humility. 

One day when Therese was nearing the end of her life and feeling absolutely bereft and forsaken by God, she was in the Convent garden, walking very slowly because of her weakness and constant pain. Suddenly she saw a hen at the side of the path, hustling her newborn chicks out of the nun’s way, protecting them with outstretched wings. Therese writes how she immediately thought how God had loved and protected her all through her life and how God wants to envelope everyone with the tender protectiveness of that mother hen. She writes how she was so moved her eyes filled up with tears and had to look away from the scene. 

THAT’S HOW GOD LOVES US TOO - no matter what we feel like, no matter what kind of personal history we have. If we want holiness we build our foundation on this rock of God’s love and acting with humility is the master builder. We may be strong willed but such strength is a perilous gift since it links to the desire for the self to triumph over others including God. In holiness the will yields first place to love by always seeking a lower place so as to put no unnecessary obstacles in love’s way.

‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.’

To be a saint - and we should all aspire to be saints - is to keep in tune with our deepest needs and aspirations by actively countering our lower impulses, that  attention-seeking insecurity, touchiness, impatience or whatever. We're the ones who block our way to holiness, to the joy of becoming what God made us to be, by remaining slaves to these lower impulses.

With me, I invite you to pray for humility, not to be a doormat people walk over but to have active determination to counter self-centredness and get better centring of our lives upon God and neighbour, whose eternal fellowship in the communion of saints we anticipate at this Mass, with angels, archangels and all the company of heaven. 

St Wilfrid, Haywards Heath Trinity 10 25.8.19

St Wilfrid’s was built on this hill to crown the development of Haywards Heath. 

As Town Team puts together over the next year the 2020 Haywards Heath history celebration the parish Church will fittingly have pride of place. There’ll be a Light Show here day by day complementing an exhibition in the Town Hall and culminating in the expanded version of September’s Town Day that occurs every few years. 

We rightly take pride in the Churches role and Fr Ray has been working as ever on our behalf to help tell our story at St Wilfrid’s as part of the bigger narrative. This narrative began at a crossroads east of Cuckfield. There the Roman Road heading north from Hassocks met and crossed the well drained high ground we know as the Weald, later the pilgrim way to Canterbury. From the Hayworth animal enclosure on the Weald near that cross roads Haywards Heath was born when the railway was laid parallel to the Roman Road in 1841.

Haywards Heath grew from an ancient cross roads to become the heart of Sussex. Getting trains to Brighton, now known as London-by-the sea was the motivator. Our town’s strategic worth is captured in the title of the town’s authoritative 1981 history, Ford and Gabe’s ‘Metropolis of Mid Sussex’. Due to railway phobia in Cuckfield and Lindfield we were a new build in 1841 after 5000 men and 50 horses made the tunnel we stand on. As Sussex metropolis we draw life from the County, at first through the arrival of thousands of so-called lunatics at the County Asylum and cattle for the market once so famed as to be in the top 12 in the country. The Asylum and market have gone but the strategic role and growth of our town has continued. The 2020 celebration is geared to affirm and direct our Sussex-wide role. Haywards Heath draws economic life from those who commute to London but it's also in the Greater Brighton City Deal. Such was the success of the railway to Brighton that brought this town to birth some are calling London ‘Brighton inland’!

Our family moved to Haywards Heath from London in 2001 so I could serve the mission and renewal of Chichester Diocese. Bishop Eric who appointed me expected me to work from the centre of the Diocese, the centre of Sussex. We took residence in Gatesmead and on our first Sunday we joined the Palm Sunday procession here at St Wilfrid’s. My licensing was to St Richard’s but I’ve continued close to St Wilfrid’s, through friendship especially with Fr Ray, and literally close to the Presentation from 2017 when Anne and I retired next door to Marylands after 8 years as parish priest of Horsted Keynes. My former diocesan role reminds me how Haywards Heath isn’t just the heart of Sussex but at the heart of a great Diocese stretching from Crawley to Brighton and Rye across to Chichester. 

Before I change gear from town history to engage with today’s scripture might I invite your participation in our 7 September 2019 town day Festival of Hope here in St Wilfrid’s and, beyond that, with me in preparing the 9-13 September 2020 History Celebration? We’ve written as Town Team, under the oversight of Councillor Ruth De Mierre, to schools inviting them to lead a project countering an amnesia destructive to the health of our community. The idea is to encourage pupils to interview parents, grandparents and elderly neighbours to gather stories of Haywards Heath, recording them and presenting them suitably at the 2020 Celebration not least at next year’s planned night by night Light Show in St Wilfrid’s.

From today’s second reading: ‘Since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe’. In his great commentary on the letter to the Hebrews Bishop Lightfoot makes this note on verse 28 of Chapter 11, and I quote, ‘though at first sight there is something strange in the idea that thankfulness is the means whereby we may serve God, we are perhaps inclined to forget the weight which is attached in Scripture to gratitude and praise. It is the perception and acknowledgement of the divine glory which is the strength of man. The sense of love is the motive for proclaiming love’.

We gather at the eucharist primarily to give thanks - the word means thanksgiving - and in so doing to build ourselves more into what we’re called to be. St Wilfrid’s was built on this hill by Bodley its great architect precisely for that purpose: a temple for divine worship, for giving thanks and praise to God, more than a preaching house for human edification. When we look back over the history of our town there’s so much to give thanks to God for, not least the Wyatt’s, father and son. Our role, as ongoing part of the Church in Haywards Heath, is to secure that worship for generations to come in response to the unshakeable security of God’s love.

We were born as, and we continue as, a community Church. Our gift paraphrasing Mark 12:17 is to render to the community what is owed by love and to God the things we owe to him. We’re bi-lingual, speaking the language of our community and the language of faith. This sets us apart as both a community group and as a Christian church. Unlike other community groups - the Golf Club, U3A or Air Cadets - we have an other-worldly reference. Unlike the other 17 Churches - Roman Catholic, Methodist, New Church and so on - far from being a gathered separate community we’re one with a commitment beyond our Christian faith to Haywards Heath. ‘You are the light of the world’ Our Lord says in Matthew 5:14. ‘A city built on a hill cannot be hidden’ and those words make me think of St Wilfrid’s so visible to our town. The Lord continues: ‘let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven’ and here we think of our membership, the 7 generations that have maintained this beacon of faith on Church Road.

We have a calling to gracious dialogue with this town and to come thankfully ‘in reverence and awe’ before God with the people and the needs of Haywards Heath on our hearts. The parish eucharist brings both aspirations together. 

Getting more members to have a heart for drawing people into the life of the church is pivotal. Reaching out, cutting through spiritual apathy, by prayer and invitation is the strategy, picking up on a saying of Walter Wink: 'The future of the world lies with the intercessors and connectors.' 

Very many of us have that gift of connecting – building friendships which season the community life of our town and its surrounds. Some of us like myself are very active on Haywards Heath’s social media groups which are coming into their own through the history project. To complement such ‘connecting’ I find myself and would encourage each one of you in turn to seek the Holy Spirit’s guidance in prayer so we attain the best directing of our energies and those in our orbit. ‘More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of’ wrote the poet Tennyson. 

Our splendid tower with its pyramidal cap affirms this, pointing modestly to a God whose possibilities exceed our imagining and who listens to and answers prayer.'The future of the world lies with the intercessors and connectors.' 

‘Since [then] we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks [in this eucharist], by which we offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and awe’.

Trinity 9 (20C) ‘Holy Fire’ Presentation Church, Haywards Heath & St Peter & St John, Wivelsfield 18.8.19

I came to bring fire to the earth… is not my word like fire, says the Lord. Luke 12:49a & Jeremiah 23:29a

Holy fire is an unfashionable image of God.

We are warned though in the letter to the Hebrews to offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; for indeed our God is a consuming fire. (Hebrews 12:28a-29)

Just as God fashioned earth out of the fire of the lava that lies below he is fashioning heaven through the holy fire from above whose first appearance came in tongues of flame upon the disciples at Pentecost.

Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit we pray at the eucharist. May we whom the Spirit lights give light to the world.

Were not our hearts burning within us while he was… opening the scriptures to us?  the disciples said of Our Lord in their Easter experience on the Emmaus Road (Luke 24:32). The good news of Jesus comes like fire, like dynamite flashing out, bringing light for the mind, kindling of the heart and power to live a holy life.

I was talking the other day to a young man whose wife had been unfaithful. His Christian faith was affronted by her unholy deed. As we talked he recognised his own unholiness in neglecting her. He saw his need of cleansing as well as hers which brought me hope for reconciliation for their good and the good of their children.

Holy fire is an unfashionable image of God yet it is thoroughly biblical and we need its reality in our age and in our lives as much as any believer in any age!

There are several Old Testament incidents in which God’s anger, judgment, holiness or power are displayed in fire from heaven bringing cleansing and a new start. Moses speaks of God as a devouring fire going ahead of the Israelites into the Promised Land destroying their enemies. He receives the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai through fire and thunder. Elijah confronts the false prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel calling down fire from heaven to make his sacrifice acceptable. 

In the eucharist priests sometimes pray these words, silently recalling Elijah’s offering, as they arrange the gifts at the altar: Come thou fount of holiness eternal God and bless this sacrifice made ready for thy holy name. 

We make ourselves one today with the sacrificial gifts of bread and wine, work of human hands, in asking the fire of the Holy Spirit to descend upon us to cleanse the thoughts of our hearts and make the self offering made in worship a holy offering.

God is God - different and more powerful than us - but also having sameness to us in Christ. Through the gift of his Son God can work to overcome the evil within us and fit us for eternal company with himself. Our love for God and people matters most in this world because that alone survives into the next world in the communion of Saints… the resurrection of the body and the life eternal. 

God’s holiness burns up anything unholy including our lack of love for him and for our neighbour. His holiness is part of his nature holding him apart from us as the sinners that we are. Who among us can live with the devouring fire? Who among us can live with everlasting flames? Isaiah complains in Chapter 33v14 and he gives the following answer in v15 Those who walk righteously and speak uprightly, who despise the gain of oppression… and shut their eyes from looking on evil. 

I heard someone speak of how God’s holy fire cleanses them from looking at pornography. When I see the pictures or texts I imagine the Holy Spirit as like a fire extinguisher they said. I ask him to fire on me, quench the lust within me, and take me from the situation as quickly as possible. Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit. 

In the passage I read from Isaiah Chapter 33 we heard how only the righteous can withstand the consuming fire of God’s wrath against sin, because sin is an offense to God’s holiness he needs to overcome. Later in Chapter 64 Isaiah troubles his readers by questioning whether anyone can actually be righteous by God’s standards. We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth he writes. Such pessimism prepares the world for the coming of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

I came to bring fire to the earth… is not my word like fire, says the Lord. 

Out of the great love with which he loves us God provided the cleansing righteousness we need by sending Jesus Christ to us.  On the Cross, as Paul says to the Corinthians, God made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21). The hatred of God for sin was engaged with by Jesus whose crucifixion both demonstrates this and provides God’s loving remedy of the forgiveness of sins. Jesus died in our place so he might live in our place, live within us bringing the holy fire of his Spirit, a consuming fire indeed, one that cleanses us from the deadliness of pride, anger, lust, envy, gluttony, avarice and sloth.

The French priest, geologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin, who lived in the last century had a great love for the eucharist. His vision of its cosmic implications has enriched and given purpose to my own engagement with the Sacrament. Like the best theologians his writings evidence a rooting in prayer and worship, as in his great ‘Mass on the World’, one of my favourite spiritual texts. In the invocation of the Holy Spirit at the eucharist I referred to earlier he sees an echo both of Our Lord's desire to 'cast fire upon the earth' in today's Gospel and the stellar fires and molten lava that energise the earth's development. In the elevation of the Host in the eucharist Teilhard sees earth and heaven coming together. The consecrated bread and wine show nature transformed in anticipation of the ultimate transformation of all things on the return of Christ, what he calls the 'Omega Point', a point anticipated in our service when the Bread and Wine are lifted up for adoration.

I came to bring fire to the earth… is not my word like fire, says the Lord. 

Teilhard was aware of that fire both as a geologist and as a Christian. God fashioned our planet by the fire of lava but sent his Son to refashion things through casting down upon earth the holy fire of the Spirit. This he does by entering human hearts especially at this service as we seek cleansing and empowering for ourselves, those on our hearts and for the whole created order.

Come down, then, Love divine, seek thou this soul of mine, and visit it with thine own ardour glowing; O Comforter draw near, within my heart appear, and kindle it, thy holy flame bestowing…. cast out our sin and enter in through the eucharist we celebrate! 

St Bartholomew, Brighton Trinity 8 (19C) Faith 11.8.19

I’ve had some pastoral encounters in which people have taken me aside to ask how they can regain the faith their parents instilled in them so they can find hope to carry them through a trial. It’s a reminder to me of how Christianity’s getting eroded all around but that there are residual embers of faith that can be fanned into flame.

People say they find faith hard, but if I dare say it’s simply a matter of opening up to God, opening your inner eye as suggested in today’s first reading. The letter to the Hebrews famously defines faith as conviction of things not seen. That conviction is just the same as the one that clicks the kettle on to release an invisible power. Being a Christian is being like a kettle. We always need the surge of the Holy Spirit to warm us up to boiling point so that faith fizzes out into overflow. I hope our children will remember what overflow there’s been from Anne and my believing and seek the same for themselves. God has no grandchildren.

When we possess faith, that conviction is practical wisdom. Its practical in that it counters our fears, which is why Jesus says to his disciples in today’s Gospel Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. 

Faith sets your sights on the big picture of things, as we read in the letter to the Hebrews, it is to desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. As for Abraham faith is taking God at his word when he promises you something good ahead of you. By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going.  By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land… For he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God…  because he considered him faithful who had promised. Therefore from one person, and this one as good as dead, descendants were born, ‘as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.’    

We, people of God, are the descendants of Abraham who is our father in faith!

So this morning I want to remind everyone that we have a mission at St Bartholomew’s to grow in faith as well as in love and numbers.

How can we grow in faith?

We need to commit again and again to God in Jesus Christ. God, give me a vision of yourself more to your dimensions and less to mine. Open my inner eyes! If we really prayed that prayer day by day we’d have an awareness of God in the present moment that wouldn’t just satisfy inner restlessness but make our faith grow, warm up and fizz out to bless and serve others.

To grow in faith, as our Hebrews passage said, we need the conviction of things not seen…By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.

Thomas Aquinas wrote wisely that to one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible. The wisdom of this saying is brought out in the story of the acrobat who in an action now I imagine prohibited wheeled his son in a wheelbarrow as part of his high wire act. When they asked his son how he felt about the exercise he was said to say I trust my dad. 

Here is faith defined as the extra sense it is, quite beyond the natural senses, but nevertheless based on experience. 

The boy needed no explanation for the faith he had in his father though few others would rise to it. By analogy Christian faith in God is the certain conviction you will be carried forward in all the perils of life by one who loves you beyond reason. The strength of Christianity lies in this revelation of God as the Father of Jesus who acts by his Spirit to carry us forward through all the pitfalls in our life to resurrection glory. 

Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom Jesus says. 

How can we grow in faith?

Commit yourself to God – and see yourself more fully as he sees you. This means more prayer, more space to ponder God in his creation.

It also means a certain biblical literacy, that is, getting into scripture, where there are so many promises addressed to believers. Those like Abraham praised in today’s purple passage from Hebrews are praised for taking God at his word. Only when you experience a passage of scripture being underlined to you by God and the consequences of that, can you see the powerful implications of taking God at his word. 

Repentance is necessary for us to grow in faith. The Book of Common Prayer exhortation says because it is requisite that no man should come to the holy Communion, but with a full trust in God’s mercy, and with a quiet conscience; therefore if there be any of you, who by this means [of self examination and prayer] cannot quiet his own conscience, let him come to me, or to some other discreet and learned Minister of God’s holy 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. 

It’s appropriate I mention the forthcoming Patronal Festival since some have been asking about confession times beforehand. The answer in the spirit of the Prayer Book is come to me, or to some other maybe more discreet and learned Minister of God’s holy Word on our team and fix a time to suit you.

To grow in faith we need from prayer, scripture and turning to God in repentance a fuller sense of who we are as his children, filled with his Spirit, promised his provision and destined for his glory. 

Seeing yourself more fully as God sees you is a real eye opener. It comes though from a readiness to allow the opening up of those inner eyes that are the Spirit’s gift to every human being, even if, mysteriously, so few seem graced to see them opened. 

As something God-given, faith is inevitably mysterious. Believers hold things together in their experience that live in tension from a rational perspective. Hence faith is seen as both a virtue and a gift, a human act yet one prompted by God, a personal act yet inseparable from the corporate faith of the church. The paradox of faith is captured in the famous definition of Thomas Aquinas: Believing is an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth by command of the will moved by God through grace.  (Repeat) Though seen as a human virtue, faith is seen as something moved by God through grace.

So here we are this morning open to grace, seeking those inner eyes to operate more fully in an unbelieving culture. Here we are encountering God in word and sacrament, God who embraces us in the eucharist, as a mother embraces her children, to assure them they are loved. May the love of the Lord indeed be upon us as we put our faith in him!

Trinity 7 (18C) St Wilfrid, Hayward Heath 4.8.19

Today's Gospel is one of many passages in the Bible concerned with misuse of wealth which remind us that Our Lord had much more to say about the misuse of wealth than the misuse of sex. No doubt sexual sin can separate you from God but, as our reading from Luke indicates, so can the greedy use of wealth. St Luke's Gospel is famous for its highlighting Our Lord's engagement with material poverty and criticism of the rich.

The parable of the Rich Fool in Luke Chapter 12 needs little explanation. It speaks of self centredness expressed in material terms with a warning that 'one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions'. 

Pulling down barns to build larger barns the rich man congratulates himself. 'Soul, you have ample goods...eat, drink and be merry.' But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you....so it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich towards God'.

What does it mean to be rich towards God?

It means seeing a loss of self interest that equips you to see the big picture - God's picture - whereby your gifts are consecrated for the good of all and most notably those on the sharp end of things.

In the Old Testament Joseph built barns for Pharaoh not to serve himself but to serve lean years ahead in Egypt. In building those barns he also profited, if you read Genesis, through a family reconciliation as the world's hungry came to Joseph. Material goods are given by the creator primarily to bless those in his image and to fit them for his glory. 

This is what the priest affirms when he takes bread and wine on our behalf this morning. 'Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, through your goodness we have this bread and wine to offer which earth has given and human hands have prepared. They will become our spiritual food and drink.' In the Eucharist we protest against the selfish use of material things and direct our whole life, including our bank accounts, to God's praise and service. Our standing orders to St Wilfrid’s, or the money we put in the envelopes, is evidence of true worship and God centredness.

Being rich towards God is about using our time, talents and possessions to build relationship with God and neighbour. Of course our immediate family is a main priority - the rich man in the Gospel may have had them in mind - but that priority isn't to the detriment of the people around us awaiting a material blessing from us at home or abroad. The charitable giving we provide to SPCK, Family Support, Christian Aid and so on balances what we give directly to God's work through Christian stewardship at St Wilfrid’s.

Christian work in this place will be eroded unless we pay for a priest.

This morning's Gospel has a challenge far more profound than to our use of money though. It draws attention to our mortality in a vivid wake up call to put people and relationships before the pursuit of material things

I want to end by reading a brief meditation from Fr Anthony De Mello which is a last word in more sense than one. 

Imagine your funeral. See your body in its coffin…in a church for the funeral rites.

Now look at all the people who have come to your funeral …go slowly from one pew to another looking at the faces of these people …to see what they are thinking, what they are feeling.

Now listen to the sermon that is being preached. Who is the preacher? ....What are they saying about you? Can you accept all the good things they are saying about you?

Look again at the faces of your friends who have come to attend your funeral …..Imagine all the good things they will be saying about you when they return home from your funeral …what do you feel now?

Is there something you would like to say to each of them before they go home? .....Some final farewell in response to what they are thinking or feeling about you, a response, which, alas, they will never hear now?  ….Say it all the same, and see what this does to you… 

Imagine that the funeral rites are now over. You stand in imagination above the grave in which your body lies, watching your friends leave the cemetery. What are your feelings now? ....As you stand here now, look back on your life and your experiences ….Was it all worthwhile?

Now become aware of your existence here in church and realise that you are still alive and still have some time at your disposal …Think of these same friends now from your present point of view. Do you see them differently as a result of this exercise?

Think of yourself now …Do you see yourself differently or feel differently about yourself as a result of this exercise?

                Anthony De Mello Sadhana p97-98