St Augustine, Scaynes Hill Trinity 12 (22A) 30th August 2020 Love Romans 12.9-21

I’ve been spoiled these last few weeks attending or celebrating Sunday eucharist because my favourite book of the Bible is the letter of St. Paul to the Romans, and we’ve been following that epistle on Sundays for the three months since Trinity Sunday, with Christians across the world, as decreed by the universal lectionary. 

Why is Romans so exciting and important? I think because, unlike other letters, you really find the whole gospel within it, both in principle and in application. 

You start in chapters 1 to 3 with the downward spiral of the human condition and its crying out for salvation summarised by Paul in chapter 7:19: ‘I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do’. You then move on in Chapters 5-11 from our need for help to the good news of Christianity of God’s loving provision in the accomplished work of Christ’s death and resurrection and the gift of the Spirit by which God’s love is poured into our hearts. After a little excursion in Chapters 9 to 11 on how the Christian good news is good news for the Jews as well the letter moves to its conclusion, like any good sermon, by turning to application. 

This is the background to today’s reading from Chapter 12 I would entitle sincere love.

How should the good news of the gift of God’s love show out in the Christian life?

I want to look with you at our passage on Christian love under six headings: love, like Jesus himself, is warm-hearted, inspired, hospitable, humble, extravagant and lastly militant.

I invite you to turn to the passage if you can access it from your bible or your phone starting with  verses 9 and 10 of Chapter 12. 

Let love be genuine; hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honour. 

At the beginning of the hinge chapter 12 in Romans there is the key word: Therefore…

The first part of Romans reminds us that Jesus Christ is God’s gift of love covering our sins to be accepted by faith and sealed in baptism. ‘I am not ashamed of the gospel, it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes’ Paul writes (1:16)

The second part of Romans teaches that since God has given us Christians salvation we need to live it out in love. Chapter 12 starts Therefore…I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, which is your spiritual worship…it continues with our section from verse 9 Let love be genuine.

We pass from what Jesus has done for us to what Jesus wants to do with us and most of all he wants our sincere love – or in the Greek original our anhypokritos or literally unhypocritical love.

What is meant here? When I was a child I was accused of showing cupboard love, affection to my parents to get a biscuit out of the cupboard. Love that’s genuine has no pretensions. It comes from the heart. Later in 1 Corinthians Chapter 13 when Paul says to give your body to be burned means nothing he’s saying love is to be warm-hearted if it's to be anything at all. 

Christian love is, like Jesus himself, warm-hearted. Then secondly it is inspired - reading on in the passage.

Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. 

If Christian love is from the heart it’s also inspired from beyond our situation. Earlier in Romans Chapter 5:5 Paul said ‘God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom he has given us’. 

The spiritual fervour of Jesus is meant to reach right inside of us, deep down into our hearts. When I was an undergraduate fifty years ago up at Oxford I stumbled into St Mary Magdalene’s which unknown to me had a fervent priest called Fr. Hooper. I remember going to tea with him one Sunday. At length he asked me if I’d ever considered going to Confession. I had no good answer! Somehow the spiritual force of the man hit me – I had to go to Confession, the fervour, the warmth of the Spirit of Jesus Christ was in him and inspired me. I never looked back from then, although Confession has not always been so easy for me. By the way, if you ever want to make your Confession don’t be shy of approaching any of our visiting priests to make an appointment. The Anglican saying on confession is all may, none must, some should.

Let’s read on, what are verses 13 and 14 of Romans Chapter 12

Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. 

In Romans Paul teaches Jesus the author of Love and how we might imitate him.

His love is warm-hearted, inspired and thirdly hospitable.

When Jesus comes to us he is in our lives but he mostly seeks not to get in the way of our lives.

He’s not like the lady C.S.Lewis once described as so wanting to do good to others you could tell the others by their hunted look!

When the warm-hearted love of Jesus inspires us it makes more space in our relationships. It is not a pushy love but a convivial love. Surely the church needs more natural, convivial living for it is there that Jesus finds himself in good company and there, in good company that Jesus can be found.

Christian love is a practising of hospitality which might mean not talking about God too much with not yet believers. More can be achieved to spread the faith by patient hospitable friendship coupled to intercessory prayer than we sometimes imagine. Let’s read on:

Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. 

If love is warm-hearted, inspired and hospitable it’s also humble.

‘Do not be haughty but associate with the lowly’. One of my Christian heroes is Henri Nouwen who wrote books about the spiritual power that abounds in the community of the intellectually disabled.

Associating with the intellectually disabled like associating, living and working, with children is both a sign of loving - and a tonic to loving. 

Both children and intellectually disabled people live in the present moment without the frustrating agendas and future plans that burden most of us.  To love effectively we need to be free from the grip of past regret and future anxiety to live in the present moment. To love with Christ is to seek humility so that we see our lives as part of a whole and not the centre of things including what is going on around us and its timing.

In his many books Nouwen writes about the struggle to make himself present and vulnerable to other people in the L’Arche handicapped community when his preference was to run to his computer and write books!  I know that feeling - I am a writer too!

So often though the world of computers can subtract from our loving by taking us away from people!

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written: ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord’. No, ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed him; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads’.

How should the good news of the gift of God’s love show out in the Christian life?

With a love that is warm-hearted, inspiring, hospitable, humble and, fifthly, extravagant.

What extravagance to heap love on your enemy! As Paul reminds the Romans earlier in Chapter 5:8 ‘God demonstrated his own love for us in this: while we still sinners – his enemies – Christ died for us.

At the heart of Christianity is a God who has no favourites, not even his friends, and who calls us to be similarly extravagant in love. The extravagance to an enemy that’s like heaping burning coals on his head! 

Falling off her horse into the mud one day St. Teresa of Avila once shook her fist at God and said ‘God if that’s how you treat your friends it’s not surprising you have so few’. In a better state of mind, reflecting on God’s extravagant love for her and for all she wrote after years of Christian service: ‘We should forget the number of years we have served him. The more we serve him, the more deeply we fall into his debt.’

How many years have you served Christ? Are you more deeply in his debt? Does anything you have achieved do anything more than reflect back upon God who’s given you life and health and strength to do it – as well as the heart to do it with love? 

He wants more extravagant service from you and I, believe me!   The last verse.

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Our love is to be warm-hearted, inspiring, hospitable, humble, extravagant and lastly militant.

Love is in battle for the soul of the world. The war has been won by the decisive battle on Calvary and our Sunday worship is a living memorial of this. We come as living sacrifices to eat the living Bread and be made afresh into living hope through offering the eucharist.

Since the world so lacks hope we come with a militant love! Isn’t that a contradiction? No - because Christ’s perfect love drives out fear (1 John 4:18). All our Christian loving is meant to be militant overcoming evil with good. It raids the kingdom of fear, not least the fearfulness of those who oppose the church. We counter fear and apathy by good humour, warm-heartedness, God’s inspiration, hospitality, humility, extravagance and militancy.

Soldiers of Christ arise therefore and put your armour on this day! Armed with God’s word, united as a living sacrifice to Christ and fed by his living Bread go forth into battle knowing in the great words of the letter to the Romans that we are more than conquerors through him who loved us (8:37).

Holy Trinity, Cuckfield Trinity 11 (21st of Year) ‘Therefore’ 26th Aug 2020

 We have just heard 700 words of scripture but it's one word I want to call attention to this morning at the start of the second reading in Romans 1 verse 12 and its ‘therefore’. 

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice.

In Greek this is a little word oun just three letters but it’s a great hinge so that the ethical teaching in Romans 1 to 15 has been called oun ethics. All the doctrine taught in Romans Chapters 1 to 11 brings ethical implications spelled out somewhat unsystematically in Romans 12 to 15 and the key or hinge conjunction or adverb is oun – therefore.

Christianity is something beautiful that holds together without seams doctrine, worship, ethics and prayer so that you can’t have one without the other. Starting from the catechism at confirmation classes, and going on from there, we teach the Creed, the sacraments, the Ten Commandments and the Lord ’s Prayer and we teach them as interconnected as they are.

For the last two months we’ve followed St Paul teaching in his letter to the Romans the new life from God Jesus brings. Now he goes on from Chapter 12 to spell out application – how the new life from God becomes a new life lived for God and verse 2 of our reading gives us a major principle: Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.

A great novelist was sitting down after Church to Sunday lunch with his mother and she asked about the sermon. ‘It said the obvious’ he replied. ‘But what did it say about applying the obvious’ his mother replied.

Here’s the rub for any preacher. Paul knew this because all of his letters, even this most theological letter to Rome, contain help to apply the truth revealed in Jesus Christ.

People need to be reminded more than they need to be instructed wrote Dr Johnson. One of the most difficult things to comprehend is how people can forget events and gifts on which their life and salvation depends.

I would summarize the core teaching of Romans as dynamite with two blasts concerning law and history. Romans challenges the part of us that seeks to earn good will legalistically through good actions and the other part of us that’s deep down lost hope for the future of the world. 

The first eleven chapters of Romans says reaching into a right relationship with God is impossible from our side but that God has reached down to us in Jesus to lift us to his heights.  The righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith is the banner heading of the letter, Chapter 1:17 saying we’re saved ultimately not by following laws but by welcoming grace. 

The second blast of Romans is that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ has rewritten the history of the world, making the church God’s new Israel and tying in the very destiny of the cosmos with that of God’s children so that, as we read in Romans 8:21 the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

Saint Paul, having taught this in Romans 1-11 moves on to describe its practical or ethical implications and how the doctrine of Christ has power to reset our life and our hope if we apply it. From next week we shall hear more of the practical outworking of faith as the Sunday Lectionary moves forward into Romans 12. Like this practical advice from verse 9 headed in my Bible ‘Marks of the True Christian’:  Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honour. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. 

Paul’s teaching against legalism finds application in outdoing one another in showing honour. His teaching against pessimism about the state of the world is applied by the fortitude that Rejoices in hope, [is] patient in suffering [and] perseveres in prayer.

There is a link between what we believe of Christ and how we live our lives and this extends into how we worship and how we pray. 

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

Christianity is a seamless robe. It is very different to the patchwork of post-modern society which stitches a bit of this belief and that practice together, gives a nod to worship at Christmas and admires Buddhist meditation.

Our Christian faith is something very beautiful, a beautiful as the One who holds us together in his church that weaves together without seams doctrine, worship, ethics and prayer. 

If at times I get despondent about change in the Church it’s because so much of the propounded changes tear that seamless robe, or patch onto it things that are alien to it lessening its beauty. Marriage and holy orders are sacraments,  fountains of grace instituted of God, with age old disciplines. When we change those disciplines or doctrines even there’s a knock on effect that has implications for ethics, prayer and worship as well as the doctrine. 

There is a link between what we believe and how we live our lives and this extends into how we worship and how we pray.  All of this is implied by those first two verses of our second reading this morning from Romans Chapter 12.

In the life of Holy Trinity our worship and prayer links into its biblical and doctrinal moorings and into outgoing care for the community.

We have a great brand as Christians but, individually as much as together, we need to value its seamless beauty and use it to cloth the needy God sends to us.

I end with what’s probably that simplest of prayers of application we call the choristers’ prayer: 

Bless, O Lord, your servants who minister in your temple. Grant that what we sing with our lips we may believe in our hearts, and what we believe in our hearts we may show forth in our lives. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Holy Trinity, Cuckfield Trinity 10 (20th of Year) 16th Aug 2020

Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish” Matthew 15v28

How do we get thinking people to believe and believing people to think?

Our Lord praised the Canaanite woman for her thoughtful faith.

She got a hard run for her money. Few people in the Gospel get as hard a time as this lady. Think about the passage - at first Jesus doesn’t answer her request for her daughter at all. Then his disciples want him to send her away. Jesus goes so far as to tease her for being a Canaanite, thinking probably about his Jewish audience who in those days would have indeed wanted her sent away. They’d forgotten God’s promise we heard in that reading from Isaiah about his love for foreigners. 

The woman argues on for attention for her daughter with a word play on the term ‘dog’ which was and is an abusive term for outsiders. ‘Lord, even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table’ she says, imploring Jesus.

The Lord gives in and heals her daughter and, exceptionally, gives a reason for answering this woman’s request: it was on account of her great faith; her great confidence that Jesus would grant her request. 

There are a lot of questions you could raise about this Gospel passage but I want to look at the one I raised at the beginning which is really important in this day and age.

How do we get thinking people to believe and believing people to think?

The woman was both educated and a believer.  Often we don’t see the two together. A lot of education in our society seems to lack a spiritual component and a lot of religious people can have closed minds.

When Richard Dawkins wrote The God Delusion it divided Christians in my acquaintance. Some read it to engage with his criticism of religion. Others wrote it off without engagement. Most derided his arrogant tone forgetful that Christianity can also come across as arrogant.

That goes against advice in the New Testament in 1 Peter 3v16 to give clear answer for our faith to anyone who asks us about it ‘with gentleness and reverence’.

There is a second aspect of today’s Gospel as we respond to the appeal for Lebanon. This healing miracle occurred in the region of Tyre and Sidon in Lebanon where scenes of destruction in Beirut are fresh in our minds. That explosion was second only to those whose 75th anniversary we commemorated ten days ago, the nuclear blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Though loss of life was relatively small, the ammonium nitrate explosion has pushed Lebanon close to anarchy, such a beautiful land caught already in the dark storm of Middle East politics.

Few writers have wrestled with the challenge of suffering to thinking and believing more than the French philosopher Albert Camus in his book ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus pushed a boulder up a hill, saw it roll down the other side and pushed it back up again, endlessly repeating that process. Camus compares search for the meaning of life in the face of suffering to the quest of Sisyphus. His conclusion is once you realise life’s absurdity you are forced to make protest at this. This voiced and acted revolt is like the hard work of Sisyphus, granting contentment, as for a tasked labourer in the face of a world devoid of truth, meaning or God. 

You sense the protestors in Beirut have Sisyphus frustration as the only sense they can make of their plight is to protest it.  A Nobel laureate, brought up in poverty, who fought for the French Resistance, charismatic and principled, Camus wrote his short book on Sisyphus during the bleakest period of the 1939-1945 World War. It presented a challenge to the Christian ascendancy of his day in affirming the reality of evil, its moral challenge and the need to counter the suffering of the innocent. An atheist, Camus once debated the resurrection of Our Lord with French Dominicans. He complained that the resurrection was an unreal, unsatisfactory happy ending. They answered by pointing to the wounds in the side of the risen Christ as evidence of God coming to share our suffering to expiate the sin of the world. No suffering we have to endure is now strange to God. As one of Wesley’s hymns puts it: Those dear tokens of his passion still his dazzling body bears. Cause of endless exultation to his ransomed worshippers. With what rapture gaze we on those glorious scars.

How do we get thinking people to believe and believing people to think?

Well I’m trying to get some believing people to think here at Holy Trinity this morning, if you like! The moral strength of Camus in describing the enormity of human suffering and the associated problem of its meaning is widely recognised. His writings illustrate how the very capacity to reflect on suffering we have and human beings makes our suffering probably the worst in the animal kingdom. The ascent of human beings in the evolutionary chain is furthermore at the cost of suffering to that wider kingdom. If this process evidences the triumph of mind over matter in what sense does the mind triumph, i.e. make sense of the gravity of evil under God?

Wrestling with the Lebanon’s of our age half a century after Camus American Christian writer Timothy Keller points to an inconsistency among those who use suffering to shoot down belief in God. ‘If you have a God great and transcendent enough to be mad at because he hasn’t stopped evil and suffering in the world… you have… a God great and transcendent enough to have good reasons for allowing it to continue that you can’t know... you can’t have it both ways’. Suffering is beyond the human mind but once we accept the sovereignty of the mind of God we humble our questioning. This humbling is represented in scripture where we engage with the revelation of God in the face of suffering. The book of Job starts with a vivid picture of suffering that makes no sense until Job is granted a vision of God, in a glimmer half way through and in fullness at the end of the book where he actually repents of his questioning.

How do we get thinking people to believe and believing people to think?

The book of Job reminds us of the importance of worship, of seeking God in a believing community as we are doing this morning. We believe - and worship strengthens belief - but we cannot escape thinking about Lebanon and the agony of humankind not least those whose lives and livelihood’s are in the balance with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Thought and prayer flow from reason and faith respectively, two wings of the Holy Spirit lifting us up to God, for God gave us both a mind and a heart. This means shaking off Julie Andrews ‘I have faith (confidence) in faith itself’ religion by doing more to explore our Christian Faith. For those who rely wholly on reason, by contrast, they need reminding how reasonable the holocaust was to those who approved and engineered it. Living as a rationalist can be as dangerous as living as a mindless fundamentalist.

This morning let’s seek for ourselves the great faith of the Canaanite woman, an educated faith, one that holds to the reasoned faith of the church through the ages. This is expressed in the words we are now to say in the Creed, the worship of the Sacraments, behaviour trained by the Commandments and prayer modelled on the Lord's Prayer. As priest, as writer and broadcaster, I’ve been engaged over the years in promoting thoughtful mainstream Christian belief. I want to leave you with the challenge to do something, read something, join a study group, talk to a priest, browse the internet, so as to help build a great faith true to a great God whose readiness to answer prayer exceeds our imagining.

How do we get thinking people to believe and believing people to think - we start with ourselves!

Wivelsfield Trinity 8 (18th of year) 2nd August 2020

Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live Isaiah 55:3

These words of Isaiah imply there is no word of God without power. As we incline our ears to listen to God, and hear in the depth of our being what he has to say to us, we gain life. By the Holy Spirit words of God from scripture or contemplation energise our lives. In the words of today’s Collect they help direct, sanctify and govern our hearts and bodies in God’s ways. The Sunday sermon is part of that direction and energising, as is our day by day study of scripture.

I’m lifting the bar on the sermon. It’s 1500 words will be 5% of the 30,000 words an average person hears during the course of a 24-hour period. We speak 7,000 words so my sermon will be a quarter of what I say today. Most significantly we retain just a quarter of what we hear. I’m hoping that this quarter of my speech will be part of the memorable quarter of what you hear today. More than that, my prayer is that something of the precious, transformative word of God reaches through what we have just read from the Bible and what I am now to share.

This morning’s Old Testament and Gospel readings are on the same theme of how God provides for us. Isaiah writes at the start of Chapter 55: The Lord says this: Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat!  In the Gospel from Matthew 14 we read the Lord had compassion for the crowd and cured their sick and went on to feed them supernaturally, sensing their hunger. All ate and were filled and those who ate were about five thousand. 

The two passages point to the heavenly banquet and to the eucharist but they are also reminders of how God is a provider.

Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live.

I am a regular visitor to Wivelsfield and not just when Fr Christopher is on holiday. Living up in Haywards Heath on the High Weald I regularly walk or cycle down Slugwash Lane to the Low Weald enjoying the view of the Downs. Indeed during lockdown I’ve been putting together a new book ‘Fifty Walks from Haywards Heath’ in which Wivelsfield features strongly. As I listen to God, Slugwash Lane can be as powerful in delivering his word as my daily pursuit of scripture. These last months we have been hindered in attending to God in worship but not in prayer, bible reading, self-examination and service to others. The opportunity to do more walking has brought some of us into fresh conversation with God. Reading this month’s Wivelsfield News has schooled me in how some of us have been getting more involved in service through the Coronavirus Buddies scheme.    At our eucharists and Zoom services  we have been finding encouragement from stories of God’s provision, in answer to prayer, sometimes through fellow church members. Several of you listening to me are carers in households including frail or elderly folk. The selflessness that serves unrelenting physical and emotional demands can be inspirational. You think – how on earth do they cope? Talking to church members more afflicted than I by COVID-19 I recognise how much service to others flows from watching out for people’s needs and taking God at his word to help them be supplied. 

In today’s Gospel Jesus was watchful. We heard how he had compassion for the hungry and needy around him. He felt their hunger, being with them in the desert, and he looked to his Father to provide through enlisting his disciples in service. I hope you and I feel so enlisted in this crisis, watchful with Our Lord’s watchfulness and trustful of his promises. He had compassion on them and cured their sick. Is that a word of God with power for us at St Peter & St John’s? 

Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live.

One of Our Lord’s actions in this passage is repeated by priests at the eucharist. Taking the…loaves…he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves. In the eucharist we make a big ask – the priest looks up to heaven for a miracle, for God’s Spirit to sanctify bread and wine using Christ’s own words. The eucharist shows us the power in such words and encourages us to incline our ears to more of them in the Gospel. Sometimes though it’s easier to believe the miracle of God coming among us through the altar than his coming down to help a chronic state of disease. Our faith shows most, I think, when we counter the negativity of a poor health condition with an arrow prayer to heaven. God provides - but we don’t ask him to. That’s why St James in his letter chapter 4 verse 2 says in so ‘in your face’ manner: you do not have because you do not ask (James 4:2).

For a plethora of reasons we don’t ask God to provide for us. There’s the false pride that refuses to ask for my own needs. There’s unbelief in which we sink to the default of Wivelsfield woman or man who, unlike us, don’t believe God took our flesh. Unless you believe God took flesh in Jesus you’re unlikely to believe he can take diseased bodies and animate them. One of the great encouragements in recent years in this Church has been the renewal of the ministry of healing through which there are people well today who wouldn’t be - and people alive today who wouldn’t be - if they hadn’t asked God.

The Collect for Trinity 8 asks the Lord to direct, sanctify and govern both our hearts and bodies in the ways of [his] laws and the works of [his] commandments; that through [his] most mighty protection, both here and ever, we may be preserved in body and soul. We prayed that prayer with the universal church but are we ready to let it echo down through the week ahead, to percolate our circumstances so that we act always mindful of God’s gift of healing and his most mighty protection?

God is our provider and protector. It may be you are sensing frustration at lockdown, or something new ahead, a change of life or home or job. Are you listening to God to discover the best provision and avoid the fruits of careless action? Better to get things right than get them now – better, above all, to get the good things God has for those who love him?

I’ve been touching on a number of material needs but I end with a reminder concerning spiritual needs. Is your prayer dry? Are the scriptures closed to you? Is the eucharist empty ritual? Ask for the Holy Spirit to grant you the grace of discernment as you listen to God.

Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live.

Our Blessed Lord started his great Sermon on the Mount which we’ve been reading through this summer of the Year of Matthew with these words: Blessed are those who know their need of God. Do you know your need of God? Do you want to know your need of God? Do you want to want to know your need of God? 

The Lord says this morning through Isaiah: Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; come and drink of the Holy Spirit. It may be you need prayer from another to attain this and phone ministry is available as ever after this service.  The Lord says this morning through Matthew: all ate and were filled. Put faith in God’s provision this morning - that the word [and the bread] you receive are his gift to you, bringing healing, joy and peace deep within you, so others who see you later today will be led to wonder where you’ve been this morning!  Let’s reflect for a minute or so on the word of God.