St Bartholomew, Brighton New Year’s Day 2022

 

Today Christmas thoughts of eternity entering time in Jesus Christ give way to thoughts about time itself. 

It’s New Year’s Day under the patronage of the Blessed Virgin Mary and with this new day the calendar moves further into the second decade of the second millennium.

The bible says in the book of Psalms that we’re made for seven decades, maybe eight. I’m well through and have lived almost all my life by that reckoning.

How many New Year’s Days lie ahead for you and I?

Time like a never ending stream bears all its sons away. They fly forgotten like a dream dies at the opening day.

This morning we’re reminded that our time is running out and will one day carry us out as mortality wears us away. This last year has seen the last days of several parishioners. I think especially of Mark Mytton and William Parker. Our prayers this morning are with them and with so many who have passed on through COVID and with their families

We’re frail mortals. We should approach a New Year with humility because we’re from the earth and will return to the earth.

We’ve also grounds for confidence though. God loves mortals and desires to plant immortal life within them in Jesus Christ whose naming we mark today. 

If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, says Paul he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.

Today is the first day of the rest of our lives.

What’s most important as I live my life in the days and years ahead is to possess the Spirit who gives life to mortal bodies in this world and the next.

Every Eucharist is a calling down of the same Spirit, upon the gifts and upon the people, making holy gifts and holy people. 

Let’s welcome the holy and life giving Spirit as 2022 begins. He’ll be our main asset, the ground of Christian confidence to face the uncertainties ahead. Let’s give an invitation for him to empower us now in a moment of silence before we profess our faith together.

St John the Evangelist, Burgess Hill Feast of St Stephen 26.12.21

Yesterday we celebrated the descent of God’s love. Today we celebrate the ascent of St Stephen, first to die for Jesus, who ‘filled with the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God’ (Acts 7:55).

The Son of God became the Son of Man so children of men can be made children of God led by Stephen, deacon and martyr. Our Lord was born to raise the sons of earth yet that raising is through death and sometimes a very cruel death.

The stoning of Stephen followed a verbal assault upon the high priest and his council in verse 51 of Acts 7: ‘You stiff-necked people… for ever opposing the Holy Spirit… betrayers and murderers [of the Righteous One]. You are the ones that received the law as ordained by angels, and yet have not kept it’. Fiery words. We read on: ‘ When they heard these things [the high priest and his council] became enraged and ground their teeth at Stephen… dragged him out of the city and began to stone him’ (v54, 57, 58).

We gain insight into Stephen’s conflict with the Jewish authorities which caused his martyrdom in the second reading from Galatians. Paul’s experience of God’s love like Stephen’s centres on the crucifixion where he sees ‘the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me’ and professes it is consequently by ‘faith in Christ, not by doing works of law’ that we are put into right and enduring relationship with God (Galatians 2:20,16). 

In the fullness of time 2000 years ago God chose to enter history and reveal himself as the Trinity, as love, with the invitation to live in relationship with himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That relationship, that love, is a wondrous gift, a grace given which cannot be earned even by the holiest and most law abiding of humans but only by trusting that love. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life’ (John 3:16).

The context of Stephen’s martyrdom is similar to that of Our Lord’s crucifixion. It follows the announcement that God is no longer to be seen as God of just one group, the Jews, but as God and loving Father of all. That announcement or revelation conflicted with the legalistic distortion of Judaism that had come to see God’s relationship with humans as conditional upon their doing right, and that seen as following the letter more than the spirit of the law. In the parable of the Good Samaritan Our Lord portrays the infuriating truth that the priest and Levite did right passing a man good as dead, avoiding contamination by possibly touching a dead body. It was the non-legalistic one, not bound by the letter of the law, the Samaritan, who did right by the love of God Jesus came to reveal. 

How is it that communicating the love of God is so costly?

Looking at Jesus on the Cross and in his body and blood offered at the eucharist we see the price of love from God’s side which has implications for our costly discipleship. Holding God as God of all counters and angers those who see God as exclusively their God, the God whose reward they earn following the rules of their religion. I feel uncomfortable about Stephen’s diatribe which seems to have been the immediate cause of his martyrdom but it echoes Our Lord’s countering the same Jewish authorities with a vision of God as God of all and the Law as an instrument of love and not a tyrant. 

There is much to consider about the martyrdom of Stephen but it's time to draw things together with an eye to practical application both corporate and individual.

First a thought about the so-called cancel culture, a term, first used in the US, to describe attempts to block or ‘cancel’ people or groups with certain viewpoints. The celebrities Russell Kane (picture) and Maureen Lipman went on BBC last week suggesting comedy shows were in jeopardy because people are getting so angry at the beliefs of others. Comedians live in fear worrying whether they can ever be funny again. What a sad thought! To live as Christians is to be the but of comedians at times - we can bear that - though persecution of Christians elsewhere in the world is no laughing matter. Then, another thought, within the church we need vigilance to respect diverse views as for example on the remarriage of divorced persons, the ordination of women and same sex unions. St. John’s is said to be an inclusive church but that inclusion is founded on respect, not just tolerance, for our diversity, so-called traditional and progressive followings, lest we lose the plot and block each other. Communicating the inclusive love of God starts at home, in my heart and yours, with giving the benefit of the doubt as the Samaritan did, though that does not exclude selfless voicing of righteous anger after the example of St Stephen.

How is it that communicating the love of God is so costly? Not only do other people not want to know they are loved by God, we ourselves, as believers, find pain in the truth of it. Speaking as someone who does a lot for God in evident ways I need to be continually reminded that my love for the work of the Lord comes second to my love for the Lord of the work. When I come into church to do something I need to remind myself to kneel first and homage God before I do what I have to do for him. Letting the love of God into your life needs vulnerability, owning our flaws, and exposure to the heart warming work of the Holy Spirit. Like those microwaves defrosting things for use at Christmas dinner the Holy Spirit reaches our centre, our heart of heart, last but we need to allow the love of God access. 

Come, Holy Spirit, melt our hearts and melt our hearts to others so we pay the price of love and with St Stephen one day ‘see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God’ (Acts 7:55)

Christmas Day eucharist at Presentation, Haywards Heath 2021

I haven’t opened all my Christmas presents yet but I know there’s at least one gift card. That will give me a choice of what book to buy for my Kindle.

Christmas Day is about choice, about the choices of God no less.

Choosing a gift card for someone may seem unimaginative but it is also affirming. It's a choice leaving them with choice and avoids choices that end under the bed with those unwanted Christmas presents!

Which brings me to the choices of God flowing from the birth of his Son.

Here’s a one line summary of Christmas: The Son of God became Son of Man so children of men can be made children of God.

Let’s say that : The Son of God became Son of Man so children of men can be made children of God.

Let’s try some actions: The Son of God (hands pointing to heaven) became Son of Man (hands pointing to the ground) so children of men (hands on heart) can be made children of God (hands point up diagonally)

Once again!

The choice of God to come close to us can bring us close to God and do so for ever.

His choice today is not just of Mary and Joseph and Bethlehem but of eighty generations of faithful Christians dedicated to God’s praise and service among whom we might wish to be counted. As we heard in the Gospel: ‘to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God’ (John 1:12).

To receive Christ and believe in him gives you entry into what St. Paul describes as ‘the glorious liberty of the children of God’ (Romans 8:21). The gift of Christmas Communion renews that freedom, liberating our ensnared humanity into glorious freedom as we enter again and again through the Blessed Sacrament into what God has chosen for us despite our dull sight of this.

The choices of God are a mystery.

That you and I should be at Christ’s Mass this morning is a mystery. Most of Haywards Heath is not attending to Christmas in the full sense that we are.

Do you ever reflect on the mystery of the choices of God, that you and I seem chosen to be worshipping Christians from an unbelieving circle? 

That this is linked to God’s choice reassures us we are no better from those in our acquaintance who do not worship. Like yeast in the loaf or catalysts in a chemical process you and I are used by God to effect a wider purpose. Just as Israel was chosen by God to be a blessing to all nations, we are chosen on behalf of others to bring the needs of our circle, our town and our world in prayer to God. 

When I was a baby they called me ‘the dreamer’. I had an apparent capacity to day dream. In later life this sometimes brought unfavourable attention from my teachers. I see that capacity to look heavenwards in retrospect as indicating God’s choice of me. One repeated dream I had as a teenager was of gathering others to look up with me in worship, to concelebrate, if you like, the wonders of the Lord. So here I am, a priest, though that high calling, of which I am unworthy with my sins and failings, is less to bless me than bring others into blessing. 

I would encourage each one of us in Church this morning to look back and see the evidence for the choice of God upon your life. That evidence of God’s choice and leading of you always outweighs the evidence of your unworthiness.

The Son of God became Son of Man today so you in your unworthiness could be made God’s child and part of God’s family. Jesus came to Bethlehem and died in Jerusalem, as St. John writes later in his Gospel ‘to gather together the scattered children of God’ (John 11:52). That gathering continues and Presentation Church is part of it. We are gathered this morning by the choices of God to build unity he desires in this sinful, fragmented world. 

We reflect on Christmas Day upon the humility of God shown in his Son Jesus Christ. The child wrapped in swaddling bands for us was later constrained by suffering when he said, ‘Not my will, but thy will be done… I don’t want things to be about me - I want them to be about you, Father, your plans and purposes for my life. I want your will to be done’.

The Son of God became Son of Man so children of men could enter his obedience as children of God. We rejoice at this today and its implications for each one of us who own God as our Father, that, whatever our circumstances, we live in that dignity.

As St. Peter invites: ‘Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time’ (1 Peter 5:6). Lord, that is what we seek to do today, to humble ourselves and be completely open to hearing from you. We want to do what pleases you. Make your will known. Help us to see that clearly and to act upon it so we can continue to marvel at the choices of God which exceed our imagining!

St Mary, Balcombe Advent 3 God’s invisibility 12th December 2021

 

You can’t see God but there are pointers and John the Baptist is one of them.

God’s unseen-ness is a major stumbling block to Christian belief in a materialistic world. People too often believe in, or rather value, only what they can see.

Anne and I recently had time with our friends in Barbados, Bishop Wilfred and Ina Wood. I had to worry Ali about the delay on our return in getting a negative COVID result but it came and here I am. Wilfred, first black Bishop in the Church of England, retired early from being Bishop of Croydon when he became blind. The couple went back to Barbados where we visit them annually. 

Wilfred can’t see Ina but I don’t need to ask him if he believes in Ina’s love for him, or indeed ask Ina about Wilfred’s for her. Similarly it’s possible to experience God’s presence and love without seeing him with our eyes. That’s what we’re about in Church this morning in fact. God making himself real to us through the words of a book and through bread and wine.

Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.  Jesus once said.

There are many unseen things in life that are really important. People who complain at God’s invisibility don’t complain they can’t see electricity or the air around them. 

We see the effect of the wind even if we can’t see it directly. Similarly though God is unseen he can be experienced by faith. 

I’ve strayed a little from John the Baptist. He is a historical pointer to God.

He pointed to Jesus. As one in the great succession of prophets he also pointed to injustice. Like Zephaniah in our first reading he shared God’s heart to save the lame and gather the outcast.

John pointed to human wrongs but first he pointed to divine goodness.

Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world he said, pointing to his cousin.

When God landed on the earth he came into a specific place and time and culture for which St John the Baptist was herald. He didn’t land out of the blue.

Christianity is well thought out. It’s well thought out because it’s from the mind of God no less! You can’t rubbish Christianity as an unthinking faith because it’s a faith that’s rooted in history. There are few faith traditions so rooted in unambiguous historical events.

Listen again to the historical details provided by St Luke in introducing the third chapter of his gospel which we heard last Sunday and which prefaces today’s reading: 

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip, ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.

No wonder historians of all ages have applauded St Luke, whose gospel we’re reading in Year C of the Sunday Lectionary, as being one of them. You can check his historical facts. We can consequently be 95% certain John the Baptist and Jesus Christ met in the River Jordan where the first baptised the second. Because the ancient dating schemes slipped forward about 6 years we’re pretty certain that the baptism of Jesus in his 30th year by St John occurred in 24AD just as the first Christmas was probably 6BC.

When John baptised Jesus we read in several New Testament accounts that the Holy Spirit was seen to come down on him. There was also a voice from above, said to be from God the Father, saying You are my Son.

Jesus came into his own as Son of God at his baptism. He was conceived of the Spirit from Our Lady but the Spirit came upon him in power in a second anointing that occurred in the River Jordan at the hand of St John the Baptist. In today’s Gospel we read: As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, ‘I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. St John in a parallel to this passage in Luke Chapter 3 writes: He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit. And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God (1.33b-34).

You can’t see God but at one point in history you could because God became one of us. John the Baptist was sent as the pointer to this. More than that, a pointer to the one who’d help everyone who wanted to know God to know God and share God’s life for ever. 

To be a Christian is to share the baptism or anointing of the Holy Spirit who makes the invisible God known as surely as the wind makes the air known.

It’s implied in the Bible that God is invisible to protect us from his glory. This invisibility serves our freedom to love without being manipulated. If he were visible that would dramatically affect our freedom to grow in pure love. By being invisible God can be with us without overwhelming us. He can stand at a distance to grant us freedom to make our own decisions including the decision to love him and our neighbour and ourselves. 

A God we could see would actually be less wonderful than the God Christians believe in. We’d be able to contain him in our minds! Instead the Christian vision of God is one that expands continually from our limited dimensions to his unlimited ones. If you want a magnificent God the price you pay seems to be that of worshipping a God that’s invisible to mortal eyes.

The magnificence of God is shown to us by St John when he points to Jesus. The Jesus he points to goes on to demonstrate God’s magnificence by 3 years of teaching, a voluntary death, a glorious resurrection and Pentecost, the sending of the Holy Spirit upon believers which is the way the Church finds God made real to her.

How can I believe in a God I can't see? I’m tempted to answer ‘you wouldn’t need to believe in someone if you could actually see them!’ Faith, as the letter to the Hebrews puts it, is conviction of things unseen (11:1).

The question ‘How can I believe in a God I can't see?’ is really the question ‘how can I find faith?’ 

A quick answer is ‘you should ask God for it, ask him to open your inner eyes to his all powerful yet invisible presence’. 

I remember once my faith going right into the doldrums. It really burned low, so low I went back to the monastery at Mirfield where I trained as a priest and asked for help.

Maybe it’s not God who’s gone but your vision of him, the monks said. Pray for a vision of God more to his dimensions and less to your own they said. For three days I prayed a prayer rather like God, if you’re there, show yourself! He did – I survive to tell the tale – he spoke to me through a leaf on a tree.

I made you. He said. I love you. I want to fill you with my Spirit. That he did, though I’ve leaked since.

Asking God for a vision of himself more to his dimensions and less to your own seems always to bear fruit. Faith grows – it enlarges, especially if it is enriched by prayerful reading of the Bible and celebration of the sacraments.  

You can’t expect great things of God if you don’t believe he’s capable of them. The wonder of Christmas is its magnification of the Lord. The very thought that he who contains all that is could come to Mary’s womb, could come to this altar in bread and wine – could come into this heart and that heart and that heart! It’s an astounding thought really.

It’s faith that opens up such a vision. Now let’s be clear, faith isn’t a feeling you can work up or enlarge. It’s our capacity to compass God through an ongoing decision to reach towards him and be energised by him.  

Christian mystics write of faith as a practical commitment. In the medieval Cloud of Unknowing the anonymous medieval author describes faith as an ‘eager dart of longing love’ that reaches out to touch God and release his possibilities into our situation.

John the Baptist pointed to God so that we too could be drawn to reach out to God ourselves.

Faith always takes us out of ourselves towards God and neighbour.

When C.S.Lewis asked himself ‘Do I believe?’ he said his belief seemed to go - just like when he asked himself in the midst of pleasure, ‘am I enjoying myself’ his enjoyment seemed to go. Both actions, he said, are like taking one’s eyes out instead of keeping them in the right place and seeing with them. Faith like enjoyment has its focus outside of self. 

How can I believe in a God I can't see? You need to make a decision. That’s what faith is – a decision to act as if God were there and to be energised by a power quite outside and beyond oneself. 

To have faith is to go beyond and not against reason. As John Donne wrote Reason is our soul’s left hand, faith his right, by these we reach divinity.

Both faith and reason lift us to God and in Jesus God himself reaches down to us revealing himself to both our reason and our faith. In St Luke’s record of history of John the Baptist and Jesus Christ we should see a reasonable case for the Incarnation, the coming of God upon the earth. 

Here, in the coming of Jesus that Advent centres upon, what we believe and what we see come together. 

As St John writes No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known (John 1:18)

You can see him now with your mind and heart’s eye - in his word, in the breaking of bread, in our Christian fellowship.

St John the Baptist invites you again, for his words are true today as they were yesterday and will be tomorrow: Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world. 

Look at Jesus with both your faith and your reason. Look at him! Look at him and welcome him this morning in word and sacrament!

St Richard, Haywards Heath Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary 8.12.21

 

As Christmas approaches the sombreness of Advent season breaks today to honour the Blessed Virgin Mary on the Feast of her sinless Conception. 

December 8th is a day of joy marking the choice of Mary to be worthy Mother of the eternal Son of God. In the ancient Greek title given her by the Church Council of Ephesus in 431 AD she is theotokos, the God-bearer. In the Western Church this was translated Mother of God, a source of confusion to some. 

How much we owe to Mary! We owe the formation of the Saviour, no less, and not just in his nine month dwelling within her. With Joseph her spouse Mary brought Jesus up. It is an astonishing thought that she would teach him, the Son of God, to pray – Mary a mortal being inviting God’s Son to pray to his true Father!

I like to think of Mary as a woman of great devotion. This devotion is hinted at in her greeting from the Archangel Gabriel in today’s Gospel from the start of St. Luke’s Gospel: Mary, do not be afraid, you have won God’s favour. Listen, you are to conceive and bear a son, and you must name him Jesus.

You have indeed won God’s favour, Blessed Mother – and through you we have all won that favour, the favour of Jesus.

We best serve God and others with a loving discernment that starts from a determination to listen to God with you. By listening to God and then secondly to ourselves with you at hand. You, Blessed Mother, encourage us towards a positive self-regard. The Almighty has done great things for me. Take stock of all that Jesus is doing in your life and rejoice is your invitation! Take stock also of the ingrained selfishness so you can give it to God in confession. Take stock, Mary invites, of how you and I at times put the work of the Lord before the Lord of the work. It’s when we get too busy in the Lord’s work that thoughtlessness can subtract from our good deeds.

Listen to God, listen to yourself, Mary invites, sift and purify your agenda, then listen to those God puts your way who need your ears! As we listen to others in these coming days with our outer ears, let’s keep two inner ears listening to God and to our own reaction to what we hear lest it get in the way.  Like Mary let’s be there for people without getting in their way. Being surrendered ourselves, as at this Mass, to whatever God wants of us, being made a Christ-bearer under the watchful care of the Mother of believers. Jesus who was first carried by Mary at Bethlehem, who is carried to us in Bread this evening, waits to be carried by you and I under the patronage of Mary to a waiting world!

Giggleswick School Remembrance Sunday 14.11.21

Eternity intersects time.

When Walter Morrison built Chapel he planned a reminder of such an intersection, placing the dome, symbol of eternity, on the Craven landscape, with seasons governed by the changes and chances of time. Over my lifetime the dome itself has seen such changes and chances, losing its green coat of verdigris, growing less striking but no less majestic. Within the dome, the interlaced angels are better lit up than when they first appeared, and shine, as they’ve shone upon five generations of Giggleswickians, a reminder of the eternal God above who is our refuge.

Eternity intersects time.

We’ve had a reminder of that truth as time stopped for two minutes and eyes and hearts lifted to the Dome and beyond it. The ritual of Remembrance Sunday is slightly younger than Chapel. Year by year it brings people across our nation to look up from time to eternity and engage thankfully with the selflessness of service. Reflection upon those who gave their lives in warfare is focussed for Christians upon the verse in John’s Gospel, subject of our anthem, capturing the moral significance of eternity’s intersection with time: ‘No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends’ (John 15:13). 

Recognising that love found in Jesus Christ, true God and true man, I knelt years back under the Dome to be confirmed. I set my passion for Chemistry in an eternal context thanks to the inspiration of masters like Bill Brocklebank, John Dean and The Reverend Philip Curtis. Off I went to Oxford and the nuclear reactor at Harwell down the road to continue experiments I’d begun at Giggleswick, and in our garden shed, to search out the forces that bind polymers. 

As scientist I see faith as a form of wisdom that goes beyond but not against knowledge accessible to our minds. How can I believe in a God I cannot see? I’ve made a well weighed decision. That is what faith is – a careful decision to act as if God were there and be energised by a power beyond oneself. Some things in life can’t be tied down rationally. God is one such thing, and so is much of chemistry. Contrary to popular perception the revelation of truth in chemistry relies on the subjective imagination of the scientist as well as the objective truth awaiting discovery. Similarly, theological pursuit of truth, especially in Christianity, relies on stubborn historical research as well as philosophical speculation. Science by definition excludes the supernatural but does not deny it or the associated realm of metaphysics we are invited into by Christ’s resurrection. Both faith and reason lead us up to God, so Christian revelation is partner with and not rival to scientific knowledge, as the witness of so many believing scientists makes clear. To have faith is to go beyond not against reason. As John Donne wrote ‘Reason is our soul’s left hand, faith his right, by these we reach divinity’. Faith and reason lift us to God and in Jesus God himself reaches down to us revealing himself to both our reason and our faith.

Eternity intersects time.

A few years after I left Giggleswick the angels in the Dome came real for me. I was heading on my Lambretta from Harwell up the A34 to my Oxford College when the front tyre burst and I went across the road to slide under a lorry. I was heading to keep the feast of St Michael & All Angels at my church of St Mary Magdalene in Oxford. The good news is I passed under the lorry though I missed that service and ended up in the Radcliffe Infirmary. I remain convinced St Michael and his angels were sent by God to protect my life for a purpose. A few years later that purpose was revealed. I left my work at Oxford University and the nuclear power station at Harwell to train as a priest. The angels who shifted the lorry, or my scooter, helped shift my career their way. I say ‘their way’ because angels and priests have the same mission: to bring God’s love to people and people to God’s love. I am here to preach this morning because of a direct experience of eternity intersecting time on the A34.

‘No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends’. 

This Remembrance Sunday we have recalled the self sacrifice of many in an eternal context, that of the death of Jesus on the Cross. As evangelist Oswald Chambers (1874-1917), who died during World War One, wrote:  ‘The Cross is the point where God and sinful man merge with a crash and the way to life is opened - but the crash is on the heart of God’. The overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God chases us down through our years with the provision attained by his sacrifice, his crash with wickedness on the Cross and the gift of the Spirit that burst out of Christ’s tomb on Easter Day.

Eternity intersects time.

Your troubles, my troubles, seem slight compared to those on a battlefield. As we take time to put troubles before God in prayer, as did many of those we remember  today, eternity intersects time, our time, to strengthen the important things in our life and shake off what is peripheral.  

For many of us the silence we kept was a reaching out towards the eternal God to care for those gone before us and help us gain peace of heart to bless our circle. Keeping silence regularly before the Lord, the silence we call prayer, is a means of becoming a channel for eternal love and peace passing understanding to intersect with time and flow into our troubled world including the environment. It affirms another world we are now to sing of, the eternal country whose ways are ways of gentleness and paths are peace. God’s kingdom come - his will be done, on earth as it is in heaven!

All Souls requiem eucharist at Presentation Church, Haywards Heath Tuesday 2nd November 12 Noon

It is the day of the dead.

Our vestments are somber purple as we contemplate the loss of life and proximity of those we love but see no longer.

Death for Christians is a vanquished enemy.

That he has power is more evident than society is prepared to admit. The death of a loved one is a life changer, a loss of life, literally and psychologically.

How we miss those who lit up our lives for a season now veiled from our sight even if we believe today’s scripture as it proclaims God will destroy... the shroud cast over all peoples and... will swallow up death forever (Isaiah 25:7-8) 

Death is our enemy, there’s no getting around it, even though Christian faith sees through it. Just as we see the risen Lord behind every crucifix so we see those we love alive with Him beyond the dust.

On All Souls Day we affirm such faith built on the foundation of our risen Lord who helps us see through death to the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.

It is Christian faith that at the moment of death the soul is judged by God to pass toward one of two ultimate destinations, bliss or loss, heaven or hell. In that passage the prayer of the Church surrounds and helps all those souls the Christian community commends to God who will welcome help, the origin of the maligned term purgatory. 

God wishes nothing or no one to be lost from the sight of his holiness.

We imagine the moment of death, however merciful physically through palliative care, will be for most of painful as we come to see God, turning our eyes away at his loving, holy glance. 

His invitation to look him in the eyes, like that of any good parent chastising his child, will be painful on account of our sins. Purgatory can be thought of, some theologians hold, as just momentary. A moment of pain as holiness meets the unrepentant sin within us, then the soul passing on to await the next stage of cosmic history.

Those who die without sin face God, as if in heaven, and begin to see him face to face, but heaven is not yet heaven until that vision is shared in the company of all the saints.

Those without love continue their self-chosen loneliness into hell, which God permits as he permits free will, but doesn’t will for them such choices.

The Christian hope is consummated by the return of Jesus Christ who will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. That final judgement will complete our individual judgement at the moment of death. 

Scripture indicates the general judgement as bringing humanity of past ages to bodily resurrection to greet Christ’s return and be clothed afresh with the body, to make their heaven fully heaven, or their hell fully hell, in the life of the world to come.

In that world the faithful departed will continue in a salvation that is personal, practical, purposeful and permanent. 

We will continue to know personally, only unveiled, the one who so knows and loves us. We will experience the practical benefit of our sins being cast away from us. We will be fully taken into the purpose of God and with permanence. The pains we've suffered will be lost in celestial praise. Such is salvation.

What I have shared is an outline of Christian salvation projected from the promises of God in scripture which open the eyes of faith to see death as a vanquished enemy for those who hold to the Saviour.

As today’s Collect and Gospel affirm, Christian faith is built on the risen Christ. We do not, as believers, know fully what’s there so much as who’s there after death.

Our Lord Jesus Christ - he is there! He is there as sure as he’s the same yesterday, today and forever!

It is the day of the dead, but it is also Jesus' day!

The same Jesus who came, died, rose and says to us this afternoon it is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.... Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.  (John 6:38, 54)

Amen - come Lord Jesus, in the eucharist, and on the last day, when you are sole hope and consolation for us and those we love but see no longer!