St Wilfrid & Presentation, Haywards Heath All Saints Day 1.11.20

Haywards Heath owes an immense debt to the heart for social renewal possessed by William Allen (1770-1843) who founded the town’s America estate. Allen was a man of many parts, a scientist and pharmacist, educationalist and prison reformer, pacifist and slavery abolitionist. He established a ‘home colony’ to build self-sufficiency and empower agricultural workers from Lindfield off Gravelye Lane. This was when people recalled the poor being sent across the Atlantic to what had then just become Britain’s former colony. Haywards Heath street names, including my own in Marylands, recall Allen’s contribution through the America estate. 

On All Saints Feast we recall a succession of folk who have gone before us spurred by a Christian vision like William Allen and Mary Otter, benefactor of Presentation Church, not enrolled in the Calendar of Saints but ‘of virtuous and godly living’. The unselfish contribution of these two to the good of our town lives on to our benefit as they themselves we trust live on with the unclouded vision of God with all the saints that fulfills Christian faith. ‘When Christ is revealed, we will be like him, for we shall see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure’ writes St John

Looking to that ultimate reality William Allen wrote these words. In the multitude of things which harness the mind, the main object is the good of others. It’s true, the human mind gets harnessed by a lot of unworthy things and is in sore need of purification. Sometimes our minds feel overwhelmed currently by the flow of news concerning the pandemic. As Allen writes, in the multitude of our thoughts, good or ill, we should not be distracted from our main object as Christians that is outside of ourselves in God and other people. As deeper knowledge of how God loves us through and through breaks upon us we grow in self knowledge and self love and generate a self forgetfulness that looks more and more in love to God and neighbour.

Making our main object the good of others is a lifelong struggle for the self knowledge, self love and self forgetfulness Our Lord describes in his Sermon on the Mount. Eugene Peterson's paraphrase of today’s Gospel draws out the challenge of a passage so beautiful and familiar we can miss its force. Here is Matthew 5 in The Message translation: 

‘Arriving at a quiet place, Jesus sat down and taught his climbing companions. This is what he said: 

“You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule.

“You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.

“You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are - no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought.

“You’re blessed when you’ve worked up a good appetite for God. He’s food and drink in the best meal you’ll ever eat.

“You’re blessed when you care. At the moment of being ‘care-full,’ you find yourselves cared for.

“You’re blessed when you get your inside world - your mind and heart - put right. Then you can see God in the outside world.

“You’re blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That’s when you discover who you really are, and your place in God’s family. 

I like those words but they are discomfiting. Behind them is the ongoing challenge to wake up from the negativity and self delusion of much of my thinking to what God, what scripture, has to say about me, about who I am and what I shall be as a child of God. As we heard in the wonderful paragraph read for our second lesson, 1 John 3:1-3: ‘See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are… we are God’s children now.. when he is revealed we shall see him as he is. And all who have this hope purify themselves, just as he is pure’.

The first reading from Revelation Chapter 7 portrays the ultimate gathering of God’s family in the communion of saints with people ‘from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages’ gathered in triumphant song with that sight of God in Jesus Christ for which the saints yearn. After the many trials of Christian life ‘[we] will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not smite [us], nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be [our] shepherd, and he will guide [us] to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes’.

This is our faith - this is the faith of the Church - ‘the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting’.

On All Saints Feast we look back in thanksgiving on all whose selfless service has made a difference to our lives, our circle and our town and forward with a recommitment to service of God and neighbour. This morning as we contemplate God in communion with the saints we are changed - and so is the world weighing on each of our hearts. In pleading this memorial sacrifice of Christ’s death and resurrection we are lifted into the heavenly hub of adoration, in communion with the Church in paradise and on earth, to effect the consecration of all that is to God’s praise and service. 

‘Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honour and power and might be to our God for ever and ever. Amen’ (Revelation 7)

Trinity 20 (30A) St John, Burgess Hill Love 25.10.20

There’s a lot of suffering around and we see it day by day in our lives, in our circle and on our screens.

There’s also a lot of love around - as Christians we sense we are loved through and through by God and pray that more would share that saving knowledge!

If you were given the choice between a world with no suffering, but also no capacity to love or a world where suffering was allowed but everyone had power to love, which would you choose?

Surely we would choose the world where there was the power to love despite that capacity being yoked to the existence of suffering. The thing that helps us love is free choice even if that gives us power to sin. Without free choice there’d be no love, no sin and no suffering.

We worship a God who is love, who in today’s Gospel commands us to love. God never wants from us anything he hasn’t first given us. His command to love is inseparable from the truth revealed in Christ - that each one of us has been loved through and through from the foundation of the world. That awesome reality lies behind the words we just stood to hear from Our Lord in Matthew 22:37-39: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ 

My great hero is 20th century theologian Austin Farrer. Seeing a phrase on a 1960’s poster for ladies corsets ‘for uplift, comfort and general support’ Farrer thought to himself and said: ‘The Church of England’. 

Christianity is indeed ‘for uplift, comfort and general support’. To be uplifted though we need to put faith in God, place our hand in his, and go out of our way. We need discipline to counter our self-deception. 

As I sought inspiration for a recent book the Lord spoke to me through today’s Gospel of love with an image of his hand reaching down to me, and my own hand grasping his, with its five digits expressing five loves. 

These five loves are contained in Our Lord’s summary of the Law. Worship and prayer are the heart and soul of our love for God, Jesus implies, but without study, engaging the mind with divine teaching, that love will be ill formed, and without service, love of neighbour, and reflection, loving care of self, our loving God is a delusion.

Those five commitments - worship, prayer, study, service, reflection - make a hand that can grasp the hand of God reaching down to us in Jesus Christ to lift us into his praise and service with all the saints, an image of Love's endeavour to embrace us and make us agents of his love in a suffering world. Through that engagement, that disciplined relationship, we help change suffering from something destructive into something uplifting and transformative.

Last week I read of the death in St Christopher’s Hospice of its co-founder Dr Mary Baines, a palliative care physician who, with Dame Cicely Saunders, helped set up the UK’s first Hospice in 1967. She is quoted: “I have to say that I thought it very odd, this idea of caring for the dying… It was a new speciality, no one had done it before. Doctors had no interest in people who were dying; they were only interested in who could be cured.” Her obituary notes how ‘Baines had met Saunders in the Christian union of St Thomas’ Hospital in London when they were both doing their clinical training. Saunders had returned to train as a doctor after nursing a young Jewish refugee from the Warsaw ghettos. As he lay dying in pain, and fearing that his life had been “worthless”, he left £500 in his will to Saunders so that she could build a hospice… It was a petition that Saunders acted upon.’

Miracles like St Christopher’s and our own St Peter & St James are graphic evidence of how suffering can breed love and the house of the dying can through love become the hour of God and gate of heaven.

 

My book ‘Experiencing Christ’s Love’ comes out of my own sufferings and joys. It explores five loves of worship, prayer, study, service and reflection. It was commissioned by Bible Reading Fellowship to address a major flaw in western Christianity - lack of engagement with the disciplines that keep Christians Christian. At the heart of the book is counsel on self-deception. Attending worship may be inconvenient to us but ‘where there’s a will there’s a way’. The discipline of prayer isn’t necessarily accompanied by feeling God’s presence but you do it. Awkward questions about the Bible matter and there are times to get your head down and address them. We’ll never be good at serving others without shouldering humiliations sent to break the ego’s shackle round us. Unless we regularly examine ourselves and confess our sins to God ‘the truth is not in us’ to quote the Bible (1 John 1:8).

The God and Father of Jesus, a God of joyful goodness who loves us through and through, is our good news as Christians. As we seek him through the disciplines of Sunday worship, daily prayer, bible study, service and self examination he rubs off on us -  not least through one another.  

He says to us, mindful of the great love he has for us, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ God who loves us through and through also says through Ephesians 3:19:  'May you know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God’.  The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all evermore. Amen.

The Annunciation, Brighton Trinity 18 (28A) 11th October 2020

The 22nd Chapter of St Matthew’s Gospel and the second verse: The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. God is the king, Jesus is the son and we and the cosmos are part of the preparing of the bride for that banquet. The whole of history is headed towards a wedding banquet where Jesus is Bridegroom and the Church is Bride.

All we’re about this morning at Mass is preparing for the end of all things when God will be everything to everyone at his wedding banquet. Blessed are those who are called to his supper!

Out of the puzzle of today’s Gospel we can distil such joy and hope!

Matthew 22 IS a puzzle. You need bible scholarship to make sense of it. Things like invited guests killing servants who bring their invitations, a man hauled unexpectedly from the streets expected to have a wedding garment! Fortunately we have four Gospels we can look at side by side, as well as knowledge of the circumstances in which St Matthew wrote his edition, especially the Jewish War with Rome that ended with the Jerusalem’s destruction in 70AD. If you look at the parallel version in Luke Chapter 14 you see a more life-like parable of people making excuses after being invited to a great dinner. Matthew, writing primarily for Jews who’d rejected and put to death Christian evangelists, shades Our Lord’s original story with an allegory that presents Jerusalem’s loss as judging their rejection of Christ. That expansion explains the un-Jesus-like sound of today’s Gospel. As for the man without a wedding garment, it's a separate parable about the need to be ready for the Lord’s invitations Matthew’s  stitched onto the banquet parable. Also, whereas Luke’s banquet is given by a private person Matthew’s is given by a king for his son, the element I’m picking up on, and that’s an interpretation of Jesus’s original parable in the light of his death and resurrection.

Like St Matthew we read the teaching of Jesus Christ in the light of what followed. The Buddha gave his teaching - there are many Buddhas on sale down the Lanes - but, unlike the Buddha, Christ gave his life. When you leave the streets of Brighton to enter the Annunciation you see no Buddha but a Cross above a beautiful altar. Here Sunday by Sunday, day by day we recall Christ’s parables whilst going on to plead the sacrificial gift revealed upon the Cross. Wagner built this Church as a great place to celebrate this greatest of gifts.

The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. God is the king, Jesus is the son given on Calvary who, by the Holy Spirit, is gathering through history the scattered children of God to his banquet. History is about the purification of God’s children in anticipation of full union with the Blessed Trinity when we shall see God as he is and become like him. In the gift of the eucharist we eat and drink of Christ veiled in the sacrament to anticipate his unveiling when God will be all in all.

In his book Corpus Christi Anglican theologian Eric Mascall writes ‘there is only one Mass, offered by the great high priest, Jesus Christ, at the Last Supper, on Calvary and in heaven… ultimately we do not celebrate masses or attend mass; we celebrate mass and attend mass. For every earthly mass is simply the Church’s participation in the one heavenly Mass… the Eucharist makes accessible to us (human beings), at our different points of space and moments of time, the one extra-spatial and supra-temporal redemptive activity of Christ, ‘who ever lives to make intercession for us’.

As we sing in Bourne’s great hymn: Paschal Lamb, thine Offering finished once for all when thou wast slain, in its fullness undiminished shall for evermore remain, cleansing souls from every stain. Sacrifice is about love and not death, Christ’s once for all death is part of his perpetual love offering seen at Mass. As Thomas Aquinas says of the Mass: O sacred feast in which we partake of Christ, his sufferings are remembered, our minds are filled with his grace and we received a pledge of the glory that is to be ours.

If Brighton’s Buddha’s - though pointers to godly detachment - distract from the unique gift of God in Jesus Christ, her cinemas are more attractive - I speak as a regular sad they are being taken away in some respect due to COVID. To make a more favourable comparison, those clips we see in the cinema before the main film give us a preview of forthcoming attractions. What we’re about this morning like a cinema trailer, is a meal that’s a taster of the full thing, the heavenly banquet.

Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world happy are those who are called to his supper - in this meal we see the sacrificial gift of Jesus opening heaven to us under the veil of bread and wine. We eat and drink expressing our hope and our joy, in anticipation of heaven which scripture and sacrament depict as a banquet. 

The whole of history is headed towards this banquet at which Jesus is Bridegroom and the Church is Bride. And, yes, we will indeed need garments for this wedding, the garments of humility and confidence in God expressed in that beautiful and challenging prayer of the Eucharist: Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.

St Augustine, Scaynes Hill Harvest Sunday 4th October 2020

The parables of Jesus thrill with harvest imagery, sowing on the ground, reaping the fields and keeping grain in barns.

As a countryman in the days of his flesh it was natural for Jesus to use the harvest imagery of sowing, reaping and keeping to illustrate the purposes of God. Today in the Gospel Our Lord uses the vineyard story to explain his rejection and vindication.

As Jesus’ disciples we serve a threefold process of sowing, reaping and keeping. The kingdom of God, Jesus says in Mark 4v26 is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground...the seed would sprout and grow...but when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come. 

We interpret such parables as encouragements to sow God's love and harvest a response in God's good time which bears fruit in a body kept faithful in God's praise and service. 

We can use Jesus's parables of sowing, reaping and keeping as a form of self examination for ourselves and our Christian community. 

How much of our energies are put into serving others for their own sake - which is sowing? 

When we find people ready to commit themselves in love to God, have we the courage and means to reap for him by inviting and sealing that commitment? 

Are the spiritual disciplines of worship, prayer, study, service and reflection so active in me and my church that newcomers naturally come close to God with and through us?

These soul searching questions trace back to the words and deeds of Jesus who sowed himself upon the Cross like a grain of wheat to reap and keep a harvest of love for God through the Church's praise and service.

Let's follow then such soul searching as we look for a few minutes at sowing, reaping and keeping using three pictures that address these headings.

SOWING - How much of our energies are put into serving others for their own sake?

I'm asking you to answer for yourself or for St Augustine’s to which I'm a new comer.

Today’s harvest gifts have a destination - where? These are evidence our service, as does the Anchor coffee shop when it can function. 

As we serve we at times sow ideas. Helping people into Christian Faith requires countering a lot of misinformation, notably affirming 'God is good' and 'the Church is OK' (ecumenical brief - the abuse crisis hits us all). Sowing ideas online - my own ministry. Recent post of testimony of famed geneticist Francis Collins who realised, to quote him, that ‘my atheism was dangerously thin’. Lovely quote: ‘Atheism is the most daring of all dogmas, for it is the assertion of a universal negative’.

REAPING - When we find people ready to commit themselves in love to God, have we the courage and means to reap for him by inviting and sealing that commitment?

Missed opportunities - value of Alpha Course etc in providing a pathway into commitment and empowerment by the Spirit. Work of Open Book in our school. Horsted Keynes week of prayer, providing different interactive means of prayer and intercession, WCCM 

KEEPING - Are the spiritual disciplines of worship, prayer, study, service and reflection so active in me and my church that newcomers naturally come close to God with and through us?

The church's mission is weak because its prayer is weak.

I want to end by reading a passage from a book I wrote published by Bible Reading Fellowship entitled Experiencing Christ’s Love which a fivefold template for a Christian rule of life:

• Sunday church attendance

• day by day formal and free prayer times

• ongoing study of the bible and the church’s faith 

• occasions spending time serving others

• regular self-examination and occasions for confession/guidance

The Christian discipline of reflection is a reminder of love, being loved and loving, and of our failure to love in which attitudes are key. This book has at its heart a reminder to stick at loving God through five attitudes commended by Jesus Christ knowing ‘we love because he first loved us’ (1 John 4:19). The Lord Jesus gives us this overarching rule: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.. and your neighbour as yourself’ (Matthew 22:37, 39b). Loving God with your heart and soul can be seen as what worship and prayer are primarily about, linked to loving him with your mind in study, your neighbour in service and yourself through reflection. To experience Christ’s love we’re therefore invited to follow five disciplines interrelated, like the thumb and fingers of the human hand, set to grasp the hand of God that reaches down to us in Jesus Christ.  Worship and prayer are heart and soul of our love for God but without engaging our minds with his teaching our love will be ill formed, Jesus implies, and without service, love of neighbour, and reflection, loving care of self, our loving God will be a delusion.

Like the Hamsa hand symbol of hope and peace the five loves invited by Jesus in Matthew 22:37-39 are a call to and a reminder of balanced and effective discipleship.  What’s distinctive about Christian as opposed to other spiritual disciplines is the ‘hand up’ of grace they engage with. If Christian disciplines attain salvation they do so by grasping the hand of the Saviour. Experiencing Christ’s love in the five disciplines of worship, prayer, study, service and reflection is a taking of God’s hand in ours, the welcoming of his loving provision of forgiveness and healing that’s a hand up into his possibilities. 

Experiencing Christ's Love book p83-84 

On Harvest Sunday, as we offer this thanksgiving eucharist, the Lord bless our work of sowing, reaping and keeping - of sowing gospel seeds, reaping Christian commitment and keeping ourselves individually and as a Christian community close to the Lord who is to come close to us in this great sign of love, the Holy Communion. [Picture: Anne Twisleton]