Trinity 19 (30C) St Bartholomew, Brighton Jesus Prayer 27.10.19

How can I live a simpler Christian life? 

Is there a summary of faith that’s clear, memorable and portable?  A biblical aid to praying at all times? A means of Holy Spirit empowerment which can bypass a distracted mind? Is there an instrument of Jesus Christ useful to carrying his worship into life and vice versa?

The Jesus Prayer of Eastern Orthodoxy, ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’ is such an instrument. Thoroughly biblical, carried forward by the faith of the church through the centuries, it stands as a unique gift and task.

It’s based on the prayer of the tax-collector in today’s Gospel from Luke 18 verses 9 to 14. This so-called Publican’s prayer is there contrasted by Our Lord with the ostentatious prayer of the Pharisee. The man would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast saying ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner’. From this prayer the Jesus Prayer is built, a simple repeated prayer for quiet individual use with capacity to empower and lead into simplicity of life.

I have come to believe there’s nothing new in Christianity, just the need to enter the day by day newness of Jesus. That newness refreshes me day by day through attending Mass and through reciting ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’ in an aspiration to carry my Communion forward obedient to the biblical injunction to pray at all times. The Jesus Prayer is inhabited by Jesus who is an effective reminder that God is love and has mercy on us frail mortals.  

It’s a prayer discipline in use across the Christian world since the 5th century and preserved to this day across Eastern Orthodoxy from where it is spreading as a blessing to us in the western Church. 

The Jesus Prayer states the simple good news of Christianity, provides Holy Spirit empowerment to bypass distracted minds, links worship and life and resonates with the faith and prayer of the church through the ages. 

We live in times when many find themselves burdened by anxiety or mental distraction and are seeking help from Buddhist type mindfulness exercises. If only they could enter the spiritual discipline Christians have built from today’s Gospel!  The Jesus Prayer is a ‘God-given mantra’.‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’. Repeating that sentence brings power to bear upon the soul besides helping us as Christians in relating worship to life.

I knew of the Jesus Prayer for thirty years before I welcomed it as the gift and task it is to help us ‘pray without ceasing’ (1 Thessalonians 5:17).  As a priest leading worship, attending to people’s joys and sorrows and the stresses and strains of church administration I have found the Jesus Prayer an invaluable aid and this is because of the simple message it holds before me - that God loves me and all that is, minute by minute, day by day and for all eternity.  

In the early years of the Church, when there was heavy persecution, if a Christian met a stranger in the road, he sometimes drew one arc of a simple fish outline in the dirt. If the stranger drew the other arc, both believers knew they were in safe company. The early Christians used the secret sign of the fish because the Greek word for fish ‘icthus’ was an acronym for ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God and Saviour’, the earliest creed and the shortest statement of Christian faith. The Jesus Prayer is a short expansion of that personal creed. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God’ implies the historical figure of Jesus is universal Lord and Son of God. Behind the statement is a conviction that the invisible God has in one human life at one time and place made himself visible, supremely upon the Cross, showing us his love to be witnessed to every generation. 

God who made all and loves all desires to claim all - starting with the human race made in his image.  The first clause of the Jesus Prayer affirms the good news Jesus brings to our lives, news that we come from God, we belong to God and we go to God. ‘The eternal God is our refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms’ (Deuteronomy 33:27 NIV)

It’s that faith I express when, for example, in the gym.  ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’ I repeat on the machine. Time in the gym helps get me out of my mind into my body and that’s especially welcome when been sitting around at home with the family or on the computer. Gym time helps our bodily well being. It can also be deep thinking time, though this can turn into anxious mental preoccupation, which is why I think many people wear headphones to engage their minds as they exercise their bodies. No headphones on occasion for me in the gym, but rather a conscious coming back into the Lord’s presence.  As I recover repeating the Jesus Prayer it flows with the movement of the gym machines just as its pace fits the natural rhythm of breathing in and out. 

‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’ 

As the prayer centres me I become aware again of God’s love present alongside me in Jesus, of a dispelling of negative preoccupation and an outward focussing upon those around me wherever I am.  The Lord uses the discipline of continuous recitation to turn me out of myself in loving intercession towards my neighbours. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God’ I repeat the Jesus Prayer under my breath, and find myself emphasising the second phrase ‘have mercy on me a sinner’.  The phrase ‘have mercy on me a sinner’ in the Jesus Prayer echoes both today’s Gospel and a phrase that recurs in Christian worship: kyrie eleison, literally ‘O Lord take pity on me’:

To show mercy is to treat others as better than they are. In the Jesus Prayer we are not so much asking the Lord repeatedly to demonstrate mercy to us but affirming and celebrating that quality and allowing it to brush off on us and make us more fully his instruments of forbearance. 

The great thinker Simone Weil writes ‘that two great forces rule the universe: gravity and grace. Gravity causes one body to attract other bodies so that it continually enlarges by absorbing more and more of the universe into itself. Something like this same force operates in human beings. We too want to expand, to acquire, to swell in significance. …Emotionally, Weil concluded, we humans operate by laws as fixed as Newton’s. “All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.” Most of us remain trapped in the gravitational field of self-love, and thus we “fill up the fissures through which grace might pass.”’ 

The choice to live for God is a choice to live under grace and mercy and not under compulsion. It is an ongoing choice which the Jesus Prayer can facilitate. The beauty of the Prayer is its being a continual reminder both of God’s mercy towards us and of our call to imitate it in our dealings towards others and towards ourselves. It is a reminder true to the action we’re part of this morning in the eucharist as we see that mercy before us in Christ’s body broken and his blood poured forth, mercy we all the better carry out with us after Mass through the quiet discipline of reciting the Jesus Prayer.

Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us!

We do not presume to come to this your table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in your manifold and great mercies. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner!

Sermon at Vespers in St Paul, Haywards Heath on the day of St John Henry Newman’s canonisation 13th October 2019

Love and truth walk in the presence of God, writes the Psalmist (89:14) and so do his saints. Saint John Henry Newman’s walk with God appeals to both heart and mind as expressed in his motto and grave inscription. Cor ad cor loquitur - let heart speak to heart. Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem - from shadows and images into the truth. 

Today the Christian world gives glory to God for raising up an exceptional servant who has moulded Anglican and Roman Catholic traditions up to this day through his teaching and holiness. Both traditions helped form our Saint and both are built up in love and truth through his patronage. I stand here this evening grateful to Newman with millions of fellow Anglicans. Through his influence and that of the Oxford Movement the 1662 Prayer Book Catechism was revised 300 years later in1962 to include this definition. ‘The Church of England is the ancient church of this land, catholic and reformed. It proclaims and holds fast the doctrine and ministry of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church’.

Our Saint contributed to a recovery of Anglicanism as being in continuity with the early and medieval Church though that perception was so unwelcome in his day as to trigger Newman’s transition to Roman Catholic obedience. I dare to say such a perception is more accepted nowadays even if recent discontinuities in Anglican ministry await the verdict of history.

As a scientist by training, I have always been attracted to Newman whose writings counter what would put a brake on the best forward thinking. His great Apologia affirming both Anglican and Catholic heritage was published 5 years after Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), a story of spiritual evolution complementing Darwin’s thesis on biological evolution. To live is to change Newman wrote and to be perfect is to have changed often. Life is a forward movement we can choose - he chose it - from what Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 3 and 4 as from such shadows and images into the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 

Our Saint, though aware through his sufferings of life’s sad limitations, is a teacher affirmative of life’s value and dynamic, an ecumenical, forward looking saint whose teaching, love and prayers are with both Churches he belonged to over his long life.   Saint John’s work on church development and how we protect the church from godless innovation to secure godly reform came into its own at the time of the Second Vatican Council of which he’s been called patron This through his stress on the centrality of Christ and the dignity of the laity and their role in keeping the Church faithful to God’s truth. What Catholics, what Church doctors, as well as Apostles, have ever lived on, he wrote, is not any number of theological canons or decrees, but ... Christ Himself, as He is represented in concrete existence in the Gospels.      In those words Newman speaks true to his Evangelical Anglican upbringing about the centrality of Christ to Christian experience which is at the heart of the reshaping in emphasis within Roman Catholic teaching expressed in the decrees of Vatican II.

Our Saint was always ready to defend dogma, the fence alongside the well trodden path of Christian believing, but intellectual formulation of Christianity was second to his warm hearted approach to God. His motto Cor ad cor loquitur expresses this, let heart speak to heart. Newman teaches us holiness is the best guide to the science of God, not argument, as in his hymn Lead, kindly light. There he speaks of surrendering rational choice, fears, and pride to be opened up to a fuller vision by the light of the Holy Spirit. This poem written during a health crisis admits the importance of the trials of life in leading us into more certain faith. Whereas scientific research reaches conclusions by appeal to the necessary and unchanging, human action by contrast works beyond logic. Certitude is moral not intellectual and its shown in humble determination to head from shadows and images into the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 

To Newman church development and reform is rooted in such individual transformation, under the authority of both the faith of the church through the ages and the golden thread of spiritual direction reaching down the Christian centuries. Faith is nurtured from discipleship, from upholding in our lives worship, prayer, study, service and reflection. Such disciplines express our choice to be nurtured in holiness by and with those who have sought and today seek the Holy Spirit within the Christian Church. Newman found such a community at Littlemore and later on in the Oratory of St Philip Neri he founded in Birmingham and London. 

When our Saint decided to make his transition into communion with the See of Rome, his Anglican friend, Edward Pusey observed wisely of the separation between Anglicans and Roman Catholics: ‘it is what is unholy on both sides that keeps us apart’.
 Today’s Canonisation is both a celebration and a challenge. The Church’s mission to the world is damaged by its spiritual immaturity expressed in its divisions even if there are friendships across denominational divides. 

It is appropriate to recall Anne and my friendships with many here at St Paul’s through our 18 years in Haywards Heath or nearby Horsted Keynes. The recent loss to Christine and all of you of Deacon Gerard Irwin was our loss as well. Over recent years I recall heart-warming occasions like the 24-7 prayer in St Paul’s Hall in 2004, Churches Together events in the Dolphin Leisure Centre and bridge building occasions fostered by charismatic renewal and the True Life in God apostolic network. I’m delighted to hear of a new venture of ecumenical prayer starting at St Paul’s and we hope to be part of it.

As someone who attends Mass at St Richard’s and here on occasion Saint John is my patron. I yearn for the visible unity of the Church to complement the spiritual unity expressed tonight. ‘We are one in the spirit, we are one in the Lord’ - but let’s not stay there, as the song continues, ‘and we pray that all unity may one day be restored’. Why? So that Our Lord’s prayer for us in John 17:21 can be answered: ‘As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me’.

That prayer and task is ours for the good of Haywards Heath and the world. In such an aspiration, heart will speak to heart as we invoke our new Saint trusting God for many among us to be drawn from shadows and images into the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 

Trinity 17 (28C) St Richard, Haywards Heath 

I live by God and my phone. One of those who never uses cash, flicks their phone over the till and goes off paperless. Anne and I were driven mad by chasing till receipts and comparing them with bank statements at three monthly intervals. Now it's a monthly perusal of a rather longer bank statement in which we recall our till transactions with five A4 sheets rather than 200 unreadable till receipts.

All very good, but what do you do faced with a street person seeking assistance if you don’t carry cash? At least talk to them, listen to them, affirm them, rather than passing by on the other side. Homelessness is a growing scourge. In Bentswood some of my neighbours recently found a man camping in the woods, took him in and fed him. That’s why I’m pleased St Richard’s is taking note of World Homeless Week with harvest collections and goods today being given to a local homeless charity.

I’m pleased to ‘speak into’ a eucharist geared to advancing God’s kingdom in this realm having two years ago left a village divided over building more homes. Horsted Keynes has yet to finalise it’s village plan over where houses should go as quite a few don’t want them in their backyard. A very human response, but Sussex has a housing crisis on that account.

Today’s Gospel from Luke 17:11-19 fits our harvest theme of thankfulness which might prompt us to be more grateful for a roof over our heads. As I engage with people living on the streets, my first thought is, what it must be like to live outside through a blustery night let alone the deep chill of winter that’s approaching? My hedge is covered with berries, said to be a pointer to a hard winter ahead.

To the Gospel! It’s linked to the Old Testament story of Syrian army commander Naaman healed by bathing in the Jordan which is parallel to the story of the ten lepers healed more simply just by meeting Jesus. In the second part of the Gospel one leper is praised for showing gratitude. ‘We’e not all ten made clean?’ Our Lord asks. ‘The other nine, where are they? It seems that no one has come back to give praise to God, except this foreigner.’ And he said to the man, ‘Stand up and go on your way. Your faith has saved you.’ 

Notice the nine were spoken of by Our Lord as being ‘made clean’ but the thankful leper was said by Jesus to be saved. In other words thankfulness is a quality that demonstrates the fullness of life we Christians call salvation. It’s a sign we’re living life to the full, life as God wills it. Archbishop Michael Ramsey described thankfulness as ‘a soil in which pride finds it hard to take root’. If we see our whole life as given by God that recognition protects us from obsessive self interest. 

To walk through life in God’s company makes us less out for ourselves and more out for those on the heart of God - and can we imagine Our Lord’s heart other than warmly extended to those living on the coldness of the streets? 

‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest’ he says in Matthew 11:28. As Christians we are bearers of that invitation through practical action, such as we’re about at harvest festival, but also by our presence alongside the homeless. Of course there’s politics here, issues of lifestyle, family breakdown and the like. The beauty of thankful living is that you go blind to all of that and, seeing all you have as a gift, those you meet, even on the streets, can be welcomed as part of that gift.

On a recent visit to Crawley Down Monastery being a Feast Day there was a talking meal. I sat beside a man who explained to me how the monks took him in regularly as he had no home. I learned quite a bit about what it was like to live on the street, the way drunken youths harass street people, and so on. I asked him what was most important to him about the way people react to the homeless. ‘Speak to us’ he said, ‘recognise our humanity. That’s much more important than any coin you can give us’. 

It’s easier said than done. I’m more on the case than I’ve been in the past, fuelled by a lack of 50p pieces, determined though to provide something as from the Lord.

This morning in Rome Pope Francis is canonising former Anglican priest John Henry Newman. Some of you know I’ve been invited by Fr Trevor to preach at 6.15pm Vespers up the road at St Paul’s. Newman’s motto ‘Cor ad cor loquitur’, let heart speak to heart, captures what it is to live thankfully with compassion towards others. I want to end with his famous fragrance prayer, his prayer for grace to radiate Christ to a needy world.

Dear Jesus, help me to spread your fragrance everywhere I go.
 Flood my soul with your spirit and life.
 Penetrate and possess my whole being so utterly, 
that my life may only be a radiance of yours.

 Shine through me, and be so in me 
that every soul I come in contact with
 may feel your presence in my soul.
 Let them look up and see no longer me, but only Jesus!

 Stay with me and then I shall begin to shine as you shine,
 so to shine as to be a light to others; 
the light, O Jesus, will be all from you; none of it will be mine;
 it will be you, shining on others through me.

 Let me thus praise you the way you love best, by shining on those around me.
 Let me preach you without preaching, not by words but by my example,
 by the catching force of the sympathetic influence of what I do, 
the evident fullness of the love my heart bears to you. Amen.