St Wilfrid & Presentation Eucharist 24 February 2021

As is common in Lent and Advent the first reading is chosen from the Old Testament to illuminate the Gospel passage.

Today Jonah is the link. The story of Jonah connects with Christianity in two ways. He is seen first as a symbol of Christ dying and rising through his being swallowed by a whale for three days and then reappearing. He is like Christ secondly as one who preaches and causes people to repent. He gets a response.

Jonah, when you read the book – it can be read in 5 minutes – is seen to be a reluctant evangelist. God tells him to go to Nineveh but he goes the other way at first. God has to put him right.

Aren’t we all reluctant evangelists? Who wants to be the messenger of an uncomfortable message? Who likes putting people right when they’re in the wrong?

Actually only God can really and effectively put people right. If we speak for God with discernment, at the time and in the place he clearly suggests to us, then things happen. They happened in Nineveh and they can happen in Haywards Heath.

The clue is our getting attuned to God’s leading. If we’re living hour by hour with God it should work out. Coming to share in the Eucharist effects a deep work of tuning. Something happens to shape us up when we hearing the word and share the body of Christ.

When I take my guitar out I’ve usually got to tune it before it will make a melodious noise. So it is with you and I as we attempt to play out our lives for God. Like Jonah we need treatment so to speak, attuning – and that can mean getting stretched a little.

What’s at issue in today’s Gospel is our role in the spread of the faith. The world needs Jonahs, evangelists who can swallow their reluctance to speak out for Jesus.

Some see the tide turning for the church. We’ve been salt more than light for long enough. Especially in the Church of England our people have been proud to be salt savouring the life of the nation but hesitant to stand against it as light that lightens darkness. 

We’ve made Christianity less than what it is. Now is the time to change gear and to be bold and to let our light shine. In this increasingly secular nation people are only going to hear of a purpose for living and a reason for dying if we gain boldness to open our mouths and declare however hesitantly the mystery of Christ. 

Pray for me St Paul says to the Ephesians that utterance may be given me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel. We might pray the same!

Ash Wednesday 21st February 2021

In Lent we are called to discover afresh the power of Christ’s Cross.

This is why at the centre of Ash Wednesday eucharist we have the signing of the cross on our foreheads even if we must do it ourselves today.

It seems a long time since we were in Tenerife walking in the mountains.

We visited the small town of Santiago del Teide perched on the lower slopes of Mount Teide which towers almost 4000 metres above sea level, the highest point above sea level of any island in the Atlantic Ocean, and third highest volcano on any volcanic island in the world.

The volcano last erupted in 1909. When it did so the inhabitants of Santiago del Teide were faced with the prospect of their town’s obliteration. 

It’s a deeply Christian place, Tenerife. When they saw the volcano erupt the villagers didn’t hesitate to act. 

They took the cross from the altar and went up the hill to meet the lava. The flow stopped where they met and each year since there’s been a thanksgiving procession. 

I walked to the place where the lava stopped and said a prayer by the Cross there and before the original cross that’s in the beautiful church there.

The people saw burning lava halt before the Cross and the victory of their Christian faith. 

In my own experience the Cross is as sure a weapon against no less fiery assaults against my spirit. 

To believe in the Cross is to believe in the risen Lord Jesus Christ who stands behind it and beside each one of us. His power in us, by his Spirit, is greater than the power of any enemy, however powerful.

From today Christians are paying special attention to the Cross of our Saviour and how it engages with our personal struggle against sin.

You may struggle with lack of faith in yourself – the Cross says God loves you, turn from such disbelief.

You may struggle with lack of faith in other people – the Cross says God loves them as well as you and much more, so forgive those who upset you or who seem to be against you.

You may struggle with lack of faith in God – the Cross tells you God loves you enough to die for you.

When we take the ashes we take them on our heads because Jesus said God loves us so much he numbers every hair on our head.

When we make the cross on our foreheads today we’re invited to say the words Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ. These words can be paraphrased as ‘God loves you. Turn from sin’.

‘God forbid that we should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ’ Saint Paul once wrote (Galatians 6:14) and he goes on to invite us to let the Cross bring God's grace into our lives. 

We’re now to seek such grace for the empowerment of our lives, grace that comes from the foot of the Cross.

Let’s turn there now as we think in a moment of silence of our forgetfulness of God, times we’ve let people down and times we’ve let ourselves down through not doing our best.

Photo by Budkov Denis

St Wilfrid, Haywards Heath eucharist 10.2.21

Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile… it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come… evil things come from within, and they defile a person. Mark 7:18, 21, 23

As a priest committed to the Daily Office I am regularly brought up short when I am able to go to the monastery at Crawley Down since they say the Psalms much slower than I do in my private devotions. Through sharing their Office I recognise how much I say prayers ‘to get through them’ rather than to be fully present to God. I slow down on my return!

Left to myself my prayer easily goes off the rails and becomes self oriented. In his earthly ministry Jesus made a point of challenging self-satisfied religion as in this incident in Mark Chapter 7 following accusations that his disciples hadn’t washed before dinner as the purity laws required. Mark is handing on the story to Gentile Christians who in his day were engaged in a similar conflict over the degree they should take on Jewish practice. 

It’s not the food going into us that matters so much as the words and deeds that come out of us. How brilliant a capacity Jesus has of turning things on their head!

Jesus knew our nature through and through. His challenge to ritual law doesn’t extend to the core commandments of God but gives a reminder to examine spiritual practices lest they get disassociated from the call to obey God and become ends in themselves, and that can be true of joining in a streamed weekday eucharist!

Our Lord saw the heart of the human problem as being the human heart. Our relationship with God is from the heart, from deep within, or else it is a formality.

Melvyn Bragg once asked Rowan Williams what God meant to him. Here’s the answer he gave: ‘God is first and foremost that depth around all things and beyond all things into which, when I pray, I try to sink. But God is also the activity that comes to me out of that depth, tells me I’m loved, that opens up a future for me, that offers transformation I can’t imagine. Very much a mystery but also very much a presence. Very much a person’.

Seeking God is a business of committing trustfully to him as the depth beyond all things, to see the world as no longer a flat surface but to descend to the goodness at the heart of all things and be impacted. To be caught up into something utterly mysterious and countercultural which is divine reality. 

Saying our prayers, attending the eucharist, reading our Bibles, serving our neighbour and reflecting regularly upon our need for God are expressions of that quest.

St Wilfrid, Haywards Heath talk on perseverance 3.2.21

I think the letter to the Hebrews is a Godsend at this time. We’ve been reading it as first lesson at the eucharist for the last month. It was written to help Jewish Christians make sense of a time of tumult that included the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70AD [sculpture from Titus Arch in Rome]. 

This brought to climax the divisions between Christianity and Judaism with the loss of the sacrificial cult. The author of Hebrews explains the coming of the Messiah as being not that of a ruler but that of a priest, fulfilling Temple worship, whose rule will come later. As Jews turned to synagogues in place of the Temple there was a parting of the ways between the first Christians, who continued to worship in the Temple until its destruction but were rejected from synagogues by fellow Jews. This division occurred parallel to the mission to the Gentiles initiated by God from Jerusalem across the world through Saint Paul.

In today’s passage we have wisdom about making something of suffering linked to the first believers' sense of loss at the destruction of the Temple and the hardship of being shunned by fellow Jews. ‘Suffering is part of your training; God is treating you as his sons. Has there ever been any son whose father did not train him?.... hold up your limp arms and steady your trembling knees and smooth out the path you tread… always be wanting peace with all people, and the holiness without which no one can ever see the Lord. Be careful… that no root of bitterness should begin to grow and make trouble; this can poison a whole community’ (Hebrews 12)

What wisdom and implications for us! Our lives have a lot of suffering at present as the coronavirus pandemic locks us down, weighs us with concern for those we love and the heavy media preoccupation with it dampens our spirits. According to Hebrews we are to see these privations as a spiritual discipline allowed by our loving Heavenly Father. ‘The Lord trains the ones that he loves and he punishes all those he acknowledges as his sons’. The letter to the Hebrews encourages us to see Our Lord alongside us in our sufferings, working things for good, inasmuch as we put faith in God. Here is the rub. Are we able to see life’s circumstances, however hard they may be, as willed by God. Just as Our Lord saw his crucifixion, wrong as it was at a human and legal and moral level, as a saving event.

To accept the hand of God in suffering is not fatalism. In the case of coronavirus we are minimising our sufferings and the sufferings of others by costly precautions and vaccination. One day we will look back at the pandemic, as our parents looked back at the World War, or those first Jewish Christians looked back at the Temple’s destruction. We will look back like them and see the good that grew out of the hardship. For us in February 2021 the letter to the Hebrews resonates with a perspective that sees God at work. Protecting that work in us is our prime concern, less the business of interpreting his hand working through coronavirus, though that will one day be made clear to us. Seeing our trials as part of building patience in us, precious gift from a Father patient beyond limit, seeking to build peace, uprooting bitterness - all of this is the gift of Christian faith which will bring its reward.

To accept the hand of God in suffering is not fatalism. In the case of coronavirus we are minimising our sufferings and the sufferings of others by costly precautions and vaccination. One day we will look back at the pandemic, as our parents looked back at the World War, or the first Jewish Christians looked back at the Temple’s destruction. We will look back like them and see the good that grew out of the hardship. For us in February 2021 the letter to the Hebrews (12:4-7, 11-15) resonates with a perspective that sees God at work. Protecting that work in us is our prime concern, less the business of interpreting his hand working through coronavirus overall. Seeing our trials as part of building patience in us, gift from a Father patient beyond limit, seeking to build peace, uprooting bitterness - all of this is the gift of Christian faith which will bring its reward.