St Bartholomew, Brighton Feast of the Holy Family 29th Dec 2019

This morning the liturgy moves from Bethlehem via Egypt to Nazareth. On Wednesday we celebrated the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. Today we celebrate the beginning of his childhood in Nazareth. As we heard at the end of the holy gospel, the angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph and he left [Egypt] for the region of Galilee [and] settled in a town called 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. Bartholomew’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 strangers alike. To enter the story of Jesus, Mary and Joseph is to find yourself welcomed into that great hospitable procession of the people of God heading for the heavenly Temple. Mary and Joseph remind us we can never have Jesus to ourselves. To be a Christian is to be one with Mary and Joseph and Bartholomew and Francis and Clare – 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 at St Bartholomew’s. As we heard in the first reading from Colossians: Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts. (Colossians 3:13-15a) In Nazareth we see 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 and church families need to go to Nazareth, so to speak, and 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. This morning’s Gospel gives 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, God was born as a Child.

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 takes our seats 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 St Luke relates (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 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.

St Bartholomew, Brighton Midnight Mass 2019

‘Glory to God in the highest and peace to his people on earth’

You’ve come to Midnight Mass, to glorify God, welcome him into your heart and be made a channel of his peace. This day is set apart from all other days to begin with Holy Communion, Christmas is Christ Mass nothing less. 

We’re glorifying God, led by choir and orchestra, in Brighton’s greatest Church. We’re prepared for Our Lord to enter our hearts in the Blessed Sacrament. We’re expecting the peace promised ‘to his people on earth’ to flow in and through us.

St John of the Cross describes the soul prepared for God as like a house grown still and silent. Centred on God we leave the inner chatter of self behind to welcome and be absorbed by the presence of the Prince of Peace. From such inward stillness flows the outward peace the world longs for.

In this great Church, in this great city there’s a miracle gift tonight which is ‘the peace of God which passes all understanding filling our hearts and minds with the knowledge and love of God and of his Son Jesus Christ’.

‘Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.’

If the soul is like a house it’s openness to God floods it with peace so beyond understanding it intrigues it’s neighbours. St Seraphim of Sarov says famously, ‘acquire peace in your heart and thousands around you will find salvation.’

My son works at Brandwatch on Middle Street and when we meet up there I pass the Brighton Buddhist Centre round the corner. Hundreds enrol there on a quest for peace through meditation. I quote a comment on their website: ‘A wonderful location for Sunday morning yoga and meditation with great teachers, calm atmosphere and welcoming environment’. Thousands more, including this congregation, engage with Christianity to be made instruments of peace. That peace for us is less an end in itself - God as the genie in your lamp - but more part of life lived glorifying God in heaven and building peace on earth. 

‘Rejoice in the Lord always’ the apostle Paul writes from prison ‘and the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus’ (Philippians 4:4,7). As we look to praise God tonight may that peace descend to us and through us to all in our circle. It’s peace beyond understanding as Paul knew in prison and many other hard-pressed believers have discovered.

Walter Ciszek spent 23 years in Soviet prisons and Siberian labour camps. Over those years he lived with brief respite between four walls, yet he writes these words in his autobiography ‘He leadeth me’ : ‘No one can know greater peace… no one can achieve a greater sense of fulfilment in their life than the one who believes in this truth of the faith… to accept every moment of every day as a gift from the hands of God and strive always to do his will… it’s to know a peace, to discover a meaning in life, that surpasses all understanding’.

Our trials aren’t prison walls - for now! They’re real enough though - family strains, living alone, unemployment, bereavement or depression. Keeping in God’s peace links to ‘accepting every moment of every day as a gift from the hands of God’. How did you feel 10 o’clock on 12 December? Were you able to accept the exit poll and its consequences? Maybe you rejoiced, maybe you lost peace for a day or two? Acceptance of what God sends day by day, hour by hour is pivotal to Christianity, even if we have to work at times to change those circumstances in accordance with his will. That the process is finally in hand to leave the European Union is a relief to many. It’s a sad outcome for others. Christians fall on both sides but we shouldn’t lose peace over it.

‘Glory to God in the highest and peace to his people on earth’

Tonight we entrust earth’s peace and justice to God, including the needs of our nation, as we give him glory and welcome his presence in Holy Communion. Christmas Communion is a sign we own Christianity and the reason and purpose it gives to life. In an age of anxiety, with mental health high on the social agenda, the message of the angels is as ever timely. It’s as ever timely as Our Lord is ever new, ‘the same yesterday and today and for ever’ (Hebrews 13:8). Living in that perpetual newness is the gift above all gifts since it brings peace beyond understanding.

Bless the Buddhists for their witness to detachment and mindfulness but what the world needs is not mindfulness but thoughtfulness, the overflow from knowing you’re loved forever by the almighty love revealed at Bethlehem. To live close to God is to welcome that love and gain a peace that prevails through earthly trials. Practically, as Walter Ciszek reminds us, that peace flows from acceptance of both the Lord and our circumstances as in some way his gift.

As you start Christmas with this hour be inspired to start each Sunday with it and each day with prayer so the Lord’s peace may fill your life and make you his channel to intrigue those in your circle. ‘Acquire peace in your heart and thousands around you will find salvation’ wrote Seraphim. Let your soul be made Bethlehem, the house of bread, in Christmas Communion so your soul be made a still, house with outflowing peace: ‘Glory to God in the highest and peace to his people on earth’

St John, Burgess Hill Advent 4 22.12.19

This morning we see God’s great choice of Our Lady to be mother of Our Lord. 

When we look closely at Mary’s story, especially in Luke’s account, we see how she struggled before saying Yes to God’s choice of her to be the mother of his Son.

In our own lives we also struggle many a time to conform our lives to what God would have us do. 

This morning in Mary the church invites us to ponder the choices of God and to think about how much our lives are faithful to God’s choice of us.

One of the advantages of being a semi-retired priest is that you get a choice of where to go to Church or indeed, as today, of where to celebrate the Eucharist. I’m learning to get family weekends in the diary well in advance so I can respond to vacancy calls such as that from St John’s and St Bartholomew, Brighton. I’m to be a monthly visitor to each over the next three months from my base in Haywards Heath.

Before I left Horsted Keynes two and a half years ago I totted up some of the pastoral involvements from the baptism, marriage and burial registers. Over 8 years I helped celebrate 39 baptisms and 40 marriages with double that number so far as funerals go. That doubling is significant. Birth and marriage today are seen much less in terms of faith than funerals as these reflect Christian formation three generations back.

Nowadays the choice to baptise your child is less about fitting in with the norm in a Christian country but a decided act to own the Christian church with its particular vision and values as an extension of your family. 

Similarly to commit to your partner before God with the understanding of life-long irrevocable union is counter cultural. Aspiring to a gift of self that will not be called back, mirroring God’s love given on Calvary in blood, sweat and tears, goes against the grain today. 

I love you so often means I love me and want you rather than I love you and want to give to you now and for ever.

Life choices make or break us.  So much moral decision making is about choosing the least bad option. This is where the Holy Spirit, prayer ministry and the sacrament of confession are so precious to us as church members seeking what God most wants of us in the different crises of life.

Some of us are thinking about a change of job. Others making the most of a redundancy. One or two may feel they have done a voluntary task for long enough and are seeking new possibilities.

Just a few thoughts, returning to Our Lady, on the process of guidance.  You might have spotted the connection between the Isaiah 7 passage and the Gospel from Matthew 1:18-25 with the prophecy of the virginal conception: the young woman – the Virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him ‘Emmanuel’, which means ‘God is with us’. For Mary and Joseph their choice of one another was set within a bigger choice of God to which they deferred to in facing indignity. As we profess Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord, was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary 

Christianity is a faith that holds disparate truths together – God is one yet three, Jesus is God yet man – and God has chosen us yet we have to decide how to live our lives.

It seems to me that Christians are at two ends when it comes to divine guidance. Some see God‘s choice as starting us off and then leaving us with common sense – sanctified common sense – to get going on our own. 

Others, if you ask them to do something, will say they need to pray about it, and they talk of God’s guidance as very immediate and direct.

I’m not coming down on one side or the other. What matters is to recognise the hand of God in our lives, as Mary and Joseph did, and to cast aside the things that draw us away from his leadings.

The sanctified common sense sort of guidance needs supplementing by openness to God’s surprises in the form of obvious divine intervention. Those who sense something of a hotline to God need to work harder to check their leadings by arguing the case at times with other experienced believers. Both reason and faith are God’s gift and they shouldn’t contradict each other.

If we want our lives, including our decision making, to go where they’re meant to go, it means developing what Paul in our second reading from the opening verses of the letter to the Romans calls the obedience of faith.  

This obedience is more than avoiding deadly sins. It is the best directing of our energies. It’s about knowing we’re in the right employment or state of life, be that married or single. It’s readiness to ask ourselves whether where we’re at is truly in God’s will or whether it’s actually at variance with it, if only we’d take courage to open our ears to him.

If you are on the rails God gives us, living close to Jesus, you move more peaceably than if your life is off the rails. A lack of inner peace can be a helpful warning from God to take stock of your life. 

Christmas and New Year bring us such an opportunity to reflect. 

Some of us will use the sacrament of reconciliation or take opportunity to talk to the priest or another experienced Christian. Please do so after the service. Others may want to find a spiritual director or prayer guide. 

All of us can ask God directly: ‘Show me the needs that are deeper than my wants. Place my energies more to your service and less to aimless self interest’.

God’s hand on our lives, God’s choice of us, is a wonderful and a costly thing. We have a lifespan to exercise our faith in that choice. The penitent thief who turned to Jesus as he died shows us it’s never too late to seek God’s leading. 

God has chosen you and I and yet we have to decide how to live our lives. 

In making this decision the clue is WWJW – maybe you have seen the Christian bracelet – WWJW – What would Jesus want?

The eucharist is all about WWJW. We offer our souls and bodies with Christ to the Father so that our lives are put back on the rails Sunday by Sunday.

With Mary we say: I am God’s servant. Let it be to me as God wills!

Take my energies and use them for good since there is work for those God has chosen. 

There’s a harvest to gather and the labourers are few.

St Bartholomew, Brighton Advent 2 Election 8 Dec 2019

We stand at an important junction in national life so let’s take guidance from the word of God as we prepare to play our part in the events of the coming week.

So far as Thursday goes all I can tell you to do from the pulpit is vote! How you vote is a matter of conscience, but informed conscience of course and sermons are meant to be about the education of conscience. 

With that in mind, let's look again at the lectionary readings, set in place long before the choice of Election Day, starting with the Romans passage. ‘Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God’. That text touches on the sort of inclusion Christians hold to which for centuries has been the moral basis of countering discrimination against ‘second class citizens’ of any kind in the UK and across the world especially those who live in hunger. 

It’s a reminder to further policies that work with the voluntary sector including churches for practical action to serve our neighbour, not least the million Britons now having to queue at food banks, that reflect the love of God in Christ. Where do we find policies that will help bring hope to the dispirited true to ‘the God of hope [who fills us] with all joy and peace in believing’ to quote the first reading?

Then that uncomfortable Gospel - John the Baptist’s no punches pulled manifesto for preparing the way for God’s kingdom! It’s not a good example of the toned down rhetoric rightly called for concerning Brexit. We can take from it nevertheless, with its direct attack on the religious and civic leaders of John’s day, the need in voting to consider beyond the policies to vote on the virtues of the local candidates asking for our votes. 

T.S. Eliot wrote of the futility of dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. Politics stands or falls on personnel as much as policy. Our prayers for the election process, for respect going beyond mere tolerance of those we disagree with, are an important contribution, not least for people we know prepared to stick their heads above the parapet and serve in public life. They suffer ‘slings and arrows’ indeed, not least from social media. I have been distressed to see candidates holding to Christian ethics on abortion and marriage deselected - its rough territory, not least for those belonging to UK faith communities.

On Thursday we have opportunity to elect MPs and we should have particular sympathy for candidates who are church members taking courage to enter the fray with determination to serve the common good of Brighton and its surrounds. We want the best folk to serve, those who know the city, gifted with a strong moral compass who’ll be their own men and women.

This morning we’re singing G.K.Chesterton’s hymn O God of earth and altar, with its lovely Vaughan Williams harmonisation. Gilbert Chesterton was one of the brightest Christian minds of the last century. I like this story about him. When a newspaper asked several writers to answer the question “What is wrong with the world?” Chesterton answered: Dear Sirs, I am.  Sincerely yours, G. K. Chesterton.

That underlines the point made earlier about right government coming best from right people, or people as right as they can be given the sinfulness of the human condition. The moments in any election campaign that make most impact on me are those rare ones where there’s been humility exhibited, something very difficult with the power and pride of 24-7 mass media. 

Chesterton’s 1906 hymn starts with the sentiment of human frailty:  O God of earth and altar, bow down and hear our cry, our earthly rulers falter, our people drift and die; the walls of gold entomb us, the swords of scorn divide, take not thy thunder from us, but take away our pride.

His reference to entombing walls of gold link to my mind with the issue of debt. Debt, individual and national, entombs us, the latter souring relations between generations. It’s important to vote in a government that’s not profligate, that has some sort of eye towards decreasing it. Chesterton’s hymn reference to entombing walls of gold also voices the materialism of our age, much heightened I guess a century on from his, so that day by day we’re suffering something of a bribe campaign vis a vis where our bank balances might head after Thursday.

The major challenge in our society has been described as the transformation of consumers into citizens. People resist the call to public service through a self interest unconcerned about the common good beyond making sure they have the consumables they want and the neighbourhood watch functions in case others want to take these from them. The lack of readiness among people to take responsibility for civic life and the common good is alarming. So many of us live in the mini world of our household and the mega world of social media Facebook, Twitter etc leaving out the midi world of the local community including the parish church.

We salute those prepared to be candidates for election. There is a lot at stake nationally and internationally from our visits to the polling booths on Thursday! Those visits and votes are our taking responsibility for our nation as the citizens we are. Further than that our voting takes responsibility for a world in crisis through abuse of the environment.  

Climate change is linked to human abuse of the environment. It’s good we have grapes now growing in Sussex but further south there are deserts growing, unfriendly to human habitation, which will do nothing to arrest the northward flow of migrants. Tackling those migrants is a vast, complicated issue for any government balancing our capacity to be hospitable against the capacity of each national infrastructure. 

‘Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God’. Linking migration and the associated environmental challenge to this teaching on inclusion is poetic licence to a degree. The right interpretation of the text is in its call to intimate union with Jesus Christ.  In this eucharist, though many we’re welcomed together by participating in one holy Bread as we abide in Christ and he in us. Together we stand like branches coming forth from Jesus Christ the true vine and our aspirations for the world at election-tide can’t be separated from that vision for unity. 

Our scripture readings this morning remind us of how the Holy Spirit can raise world leaders, build justice for the poor, create wealth and a better stewardship of the environment. To find the Holy Spirit, as a rule, though, we need to find Jesus, and to find Jesus and to dwell in him we need his body and blood, his word and the fellowship of his Church which is the vanguard of God’s kingdom.

May the kingdom of this world advance a little towards becoming the kingdom of God through this eucharist, through our prayer, through our voting on Thursday and through a new wave of the Holy Spirit pouring his love upon our town, nation and world. Amen.