St Bartholomew, Brighton Visitation of Our Lady 31 May 2022

 

In today’s Gospel of the Visitation Mary in her pregnancy visits her cousin Elizabeth, also pregnant with the Lord’s forerunner, St. John the Baptist.  As the holy women meet the children in their wombs greet one another.  Their joy expands and bursts out as Mary expresses it in the great canticle we call Magnificat which the Church uses daily at Evening Prayer – My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord.

The shared joy starts with the greeting of Mary.  We read: Now as soon as Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leapt in her womb and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.

Mary is the first evangelist. It is by her voice that John the Baptist and Elizabeth recognise the presence of Jesus.

I say Mary is the first Christian evangelist.  By that I mean her words communicated from her depths and her integrity the mystery of the Nativity soon to be revealed.  

As baby John heard Our Lady’s voice it was as if one depth sounded across to another, the joy in one being excited joy in another.

In his book ‘The Soul of the Apostolate’ (picture), Dom Chautard appeals to his readers to live with God in order to be able to speak of Him, with the best results; the active life (of a Christian)…should be…the overflow of its interior life.

Mary’s words in today’s Gospel made an impact because of what was interior to her. Our Lady is the model Christian – she models the indwelling of Christ and the priority of the interior life.

We have here in this place a beautiful Church in a prominent place. It is a place we promote not least by opening our doors day by day. When people draw near to this building, which is so prominent, we should take care that they will be drawn by all they hear and see of those who worship here: Christ in us.

We can build lovely buildings in prominent places to honour God, but they only become instruments of his kingdom as the Lord’s presence sanctifies them through the Eucharist and through the indwelling of Christ in his people.

The subtitle of my book ‘Soul of the Apostolate’ is ‘Jesus must be the Life of my work. Otherwise…’ we are left to complete the otherwise.

There is no ‘quick fix’ for getting more of Jesus in your life. It requires dedication and determination, even if it is a grace from above.

Dom Chautard’s wisdom is timely.  Our apostolate, our sense of being ‘sent’ as Christians, will be utterly ineffective unless it comes as an overflow from what is being cultivated within.

What are we doing, here at St Bartholomew’s, to cultivate the interior life? 

We welcome Jesus day by day in word and sacrament.  How are we savouring that gift in our daily prayer?  In our discipline of bible reading, Confession or of generous service to those in need?

Where people are meeting deep down with Jesus, the joy of  Jesus is taking hold of them so that all that they say and do will be permeated by that joy.

Jesus living in Mary - crown of this feast - live in us!

St John the Evangelist, Burgess Hill Unity 29th May 2022

‘May they all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.’ John 17:21 

It seems to me Our Lord’s invitation reaches us as a church at three levels, local, national and universal.

First local. It has always been a privilege for me to serve St John’s, starting 21 years ago as diocesan mission & renewal adviser working with Fr Clay and Fr Kevin and more recently in your pastoral vacancy. With no parish priest our Churchwardens with Deacon Stephen have worked hard through thick and thin to build our collaboration as we seek to promote Christianity in Burgess Hill and we salute that work as the vacancy draws thankfully to a close. 

Fr David comes among us with welcome oversight to develop the life of St John’s with an eye to renewing worship, engaging youth and families and enhancing our buildings for better Christian service and outreach. He will need our support and prayers from day one as he presides over the coalition of catholic, evangelical and liberal Christians here at St John’s, keeping us united and outwardly focussed.

Our Lord’s invitation to be one as he is one within the Godhead reaches us as a church at a second level, nationally. 

Through the Five Guiding Principles the Church of England is fully committed to all orders of ministry being open equally to all, without reference to gender. It also remains committed to ensuring those who cannot receive the ministry of women priests or bishops are able to flourish, continuing their witness to the Church of England’s claim to hold the faith and practice of the universal church. The majority decision to ordain women in 1992 failed to take the minority with it. There’s a majority but no consensus. This is a slow burner made more complicated by the ordination of women to the episcopate in 2015 which was effected under the understanding spelled out in the Five Guiding Principles. 

St John’s members have given exemplary patience in bearing with the national division over views of the ordained ministry. It isn’t sexist to hold to the Bible and the practice of the worldwide church, Catholic and Orthodox over 20 centuries. Neither is it a betrayal of Christian principle to seek the ordination of women. It’s just that changing holy orders, one of the seven sacraments, is like changing the heating system in a church. There’s an upheaval and a chilling effect – and the national church remains in the middle of it! No easy answers here, just patience. The Holy Spirit is saying one thing to part of the church and another thing to the rest. We must wait and see and avoid knee jerk reactions, seeking to maximise unity as a national church which believes its part of the ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic church’.

Thirdly let’s look at how Our Lord’s invitation to be one with one another gels with the international level of the universal church. In first century Corinth there were Chloe’s and Apollos’ and Cephas’ groups. In the world of the 21st century there are not three but 45,000 Christian denominations! Reversing this astonishing, alarming disunity seems impossible - but with God nothing is impossible! 

Today’s second reading, looking to the Lord’s return, reminds us that the joy of Easter season is incomplete. ‘Surely, I am coming soon. Amen, come Lord Jesus’ (Revelation 22:20). Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again! As we move next week to Pentecost, the end of Easter season, we also move towards Advent. In the letter to the Ephesians scripture likens Christ our risen and ascended Lord to a heavenly Bridegroom preparing to gather his Bride the Church after her purification from sin, including her divisions, is ended and her holiness is made complete. The world will not be ready for this until the church is ready - that is, made one and holy - which is an astonishing thought! What we are celebrating this morning, our being made one bread, one body, is an anticipation of what is to come, of the Christ who is to come in his fullness. 

The divisions of the world at this moment, linked to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, are linked to Christian divisions, a reminder of how we fail to serve the overarching plan of God to gather a people to himself through his church from every people and nation. Part of the tragedy is the failure of Orthodox Church leaders to present that vision, keep their flock united, condemn the killing of church members by other church members or even call for a ceasefire. The Pope’s intervention has been striking in condemning Patriarch Kirill. This sets back ecumenical relations though it makes clear that the cause of the kingdom of God, of justice, love and peace comes first and church unity rides on the back of that aspiration.

Only as the different churches come together to the foot of Christ’s Cross and admit their need of his forgiveness are they ever going to be made one, as he desires. This happens worldwide whenever Christians opt to maximise holiness and cooperation with their sister churches. As Edward Pusey said ‘it is what is unholy on both sides that keeps us apart’. I am aware that the Jesus Prayer I pray hour by hour - ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’ - is a gift from Russian orthodoxy. Though much harm flows from Russia at this time there is also holiness in  many new monastic communities and that holiness is overflowing across the world 

Christian unity grows – locally, nationally or internationally - as Christians grow together in both holiness and love. Let’s make that our priority as much as we can as a new partnership of priests and people emerges here from June 9th. 

‘May they all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.’

St Richard, Haywards Heath Easter 5(C) 15th May 2022

 

 

In dealing firsthand with the hike in the cost of living, with COVID and many of us second hand with Ukraine, not to mention our own contingencies, those words of the apostles in Acts 14 have a resonance ‘We all have to experience many hardships before we enter the kingdom of God’. It's that kingdom in its fullness beyond this world, which we yearn for, which is subject of our second reading from the book of Revelation Chapter 21. John the visionary speaks there of a new earth and heaven and a new Jerusalem. These new things are to be found already in the Church on earth inasmuch as the resurrection of Jesus thrills through her life. That’s why we read Revelation in Eastertide. 

God does indeed dwell with men and women through Jesus veiled in word and sacrament. We’ve got his life in the Christian community. This life is a foretaste, a preview of forthcoming attractions, where ‘mourning and crying and pain will be no more’. Oh yes there’s mourning and crying and pain in the life of the Christian church as much as outside it - but it’s mourning, crying and pain sweetened by the Lord we know who’s with us. 

Just a month ago I was in the sanctuary to hear the priest say, piercing the candle with the five studs at the Easter Vigil: ‘By his holy and glorious wounds may Christ our Lord guard and keep us’. The Paschal Candle is a triumphant witness, standing tall, that says God is above death. It also reminds us he’s not above suffering, as witnessed to all on Good Friday. That is so very, very important to us as witnesses to Christ in a world losing hope. God, the God and Father of Jesus, expects nothing of us he’s not prepared to go through himself. This is the main ground of hope we cling to as Christians as we ourselves experience hardship, hope that isn’t just out of this world - though the resurrection is all of that - but hope rooted in sharp human reality, in blood, sweat and tears. 

Our Blessed Lord has drawn the sting of death and suffering for all who turn to him. The vision of St John in our second reading, the vision of Christianity, is a now and then vision. What is then to be in a transformed universe is now present – this is the gospel and it is particularly expressed in the Paschal Candle and its piercings which towers over the sanctuary for the 50 days of Easter season

I always take heart when I pray before the coronation altar in Westminster Abbey. Above it there’s another quotation from Revelation: ‘The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ’. What does it mean to seek that ‘the kingdom of the world becomes the kingdom of God’? Certainly it is a robust vision of inclusion though that inclusion extends beyond this world into ‘the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting’. Nevertheless at St Richard’s we take very seriously our responsibility to serve the common good in our community evident yesterday at the craft fair and week by week in Ric’s Bench and Memory Moments cafe. With you I pledge to do my bit to help these ventures during the pastoral vacancy - may that be short! May God’s richest blessing follow Fr Chris, Carolyn and Sam and remain with us - ‘give and it will be given to you’ - as we seek a faithful priest to succeed a rich legacy! As we serve here the good of our town we are serving the aspiration for each and every person to be granted opportunity to reach their full potential especially those hardest pressed in the current economic climate.

The kingdom of God is nothing less than his reign. That’s not just for the new heaven and earth but for now. God reigns now where folk will let him in. I am always praying we see more prophetically gifted leadership in public life, not least a Wilberforce or two or three in Parliament! It says in Proverbs 29 verse 18 that ‘where there’s no vision the people perish’. Away from God’s reign there’s ‘mourning and crying and pain’ without consolation. Those who promote a vision of God help keep us faithful to enduring values paving the way to the heavenly Jerusalem descending from God. 

Lastly let’s see what we can glean from today’s Gospel from St John chapter 13. ‘A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you’ (v34). Love makes the world and the church go round. The best sort of evangelism is a community that intrigues people with the love of Jesus. The vision thing centres in Christianity on loving God and your neighbour as yourself. It’s resourced by God’s love poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit as St Paul writes in Romans 5 verse 5. ‘As I have loved you’ – as God loves us – we’re to love one another. This is the Christian call and when it’s applied it brings transformation.

Wise politicians know their need of the voluntary sector. Communities can’t be built and neither can citizens be formed without people who’re prepared to put themselves out for others.

What’s the answer to the abortion rate? To family breakdown? To care for the elderly? To those who wish to legalise mercy killing? The answer doesn’t lie so much in policies as in a spiritual revival bringing a fresh outpouring of love. ‘A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you’.

Just to take one of my list, isn’t the problem of people wishing they were dead and not suffering  linked not just to low pain tolerances but also to the lack of compassion around in our families? If people know they’re loved they can brave pain. You can cope with no end of hardship if you know you’re loved. Values come from vision and we sorely need vision in our society. The Lord send more visionaries into public office, some of Christian conviction with a yearning for the new heaven and the new earth where righteousness dwells.

May the kingdom of this world advance a little towards becoming the kingdom of our God and of his Christ through this eucharist, through our prayer, through fresh concern for the world of politics and through a new wave of the Holy Spirit pouring his love upon us, upon our town, county, nation and world. Amen.

St Bartholomew, Brighton Feast of St Matthias, Apostle 14.5.22

 

Today’s Collect rejoices at ‘how God’s love has been allotted to us’.

Do you ever think why the Lord has allotted you a place in the company of the saints and not your neighbour or your sister or your brother?

The mystery of the choices of God is something to ponder so as to deepen humility. As the entrance antiphon from John 15:16 reminded us: ‘It was not you who chose me, says the Lord, but I who chose you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.’

Today’s Saint must have pondered ‘the lot of God’s love’. Matthias wasn’t one of the original Twelve but after the betrayal of Our Lord and death of Judas Iscariot, someone was needed to take his place. Two men were selected, and lots were drawn to see which should be made an Apostle and we read in today’s passage from Acts how the lot fell on Matthias. 

Being chosen by casting lots seems a random choice at one level but, being a gamble set up by the Holy Spirit after prayer, its consequence came to be seen as expressing God’s will. It was a way of putting the important choice to make up the Twelve into the hands of God.

My presence and yours at Mass this morning traces back both to people we have met who have influenced us towards Christ and, like Saint Matthias, a readiness to put to God’s service the gifts and talents he has given us. It's humbling to consider the seemingly random element of ‘how God’s love has been allotted to us’.

‘It was not you who chose me, says the Lord, but I who chose you to go and bear fruit’. God has chosen us, with our needs and inadequacies as well as with our gifts and strengths to be his servants - and before that to be his.

We work for God, yes, but today’s feast reminds us of the beautiful grace that lies behind that reality. It reminds us as we celebrate Mass, or serve, do the flowers or whatever that the work of the Lord flows from the Lord of the work who is ours for ever.

The Lord make us aware, at the prayer of St Matthias, of his love allotted to us from beyond this world, the One we love before we make the object of our employment.

May your love be upon us, O Lord! It is that love we trust - may you, the Lord of our work, always come before the work we do for you at the altar, in the Sacristy or out there in the world that awaits us after Mass!

St Mary, Balcombe Easter 4 Friendship 8th May 2022

 

We live as ‘the connected generation’ and we live as Christians. When we make our communion we network with all those in this Church and with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven. It’s great to be just a small part of such a wonderful whole that’s going to be revealed in its fullness beyond death. It’s great to have faith in the Risen Lord who connects us with one another, with the whole church and the risen Christ’s transformation of the cosmos. 

The great priest and thinker Teilhard de Chardin saw the pathway of creation moving from inanimate being to the animation which is life, then from life to self-consciousness as in human beings made in God’s image. He saw that the next obvious stage would be the connecting up of human consciousness globally, which we now see in the internet. Teilhard de Chardin prophesied almost a century ago the connecting up of conscious beings into the collective consciousness we call the World Wide Web.  The picture that came out of his thought and prayer is of the whole cosmos resembling a cone with the movements within it converging upon Jesus as the apex or omega point. Our individual futures, that of the universal church and the whole created order rests in Jesus and is to end in Jesus. As we heard in the Gospel, his gift to us is eternal life. This is the ultimate vision of what it is to ‘be connected’ and to be Christian and it is based on the truth of the risen Lord Jesus Christ underlined to us year by year in the Easter season.

The internet and the growth of high speed electronic communication seems to me, to be part of a God planned connecting, but, it inevitably has a downside. Electronic communications have facilitated ever tighter personal and work schedules that seem to be squeezing out family and village engagement, though of course they can and do serve these. There are many people living in the village deprived of time to stand and stare which is harsh for them and for us. Villages lose heart when people haven't time for one another.

Connecting is different nowadays. There is ‘e-anxiety’, the feeling that comes on as soon as you’re unable to check your email or take a look on social media.

How many of your children or grandchildren will sit with you this Sunday lunchtime with their phone on the table? Of course they’re only doing what human beings have always done – polyphasing, keeping in with different networks, only simultaneously – simultaneously, there’s the rub. You can’t be with someone truly if you’re on the phone as well!

To bring ourselves back to the sorts of connecting that gel with the Christian vision, that rests and ends in Jesus, we need to be reminded about the nature of friendship and how it is rooted in friends being fully present to one another in space as well as time.

Living in a village, worshipping at a parish Church, provides the opportunity for making lifelong friendships through being regularly present to one another. 

You can have friends on Facebook and Instagram – I have and I tweet them – but the friends that really matter are those you’ve lived close to over time. Through the common life of village and church we build friends who can help rub off our rough corners and make us better instruments of bringing all things together in Christ.

They say a dog can be your best friend (picture). More profoundly, friendship’s a spiritual reality. We see our inner selves, as if in a mirror, through our friends, with their honesty about us, something we can best bear from a friend.

Friendship holds us to principle. It’s also empowering to know someone who’ll be on your side through thick and thin. In the first reading Dorcas seems to have had many friends who grieved at her passing and no doubt rejoiced at her return to them.

A year or so back I bumped into a young man at the gym with an eight digit number tattoed on the inside of one arm. Curiosity got the better of me. Jokingly I asked him which jail he’d been in. ‘No jail’ he said. ‘It’s the military number of my best friend. He died in Afghanistan’. I praised him for keeping his friend’s memory and sacrifice alive. It got me thinking.

Christianity’s a religion of friendship.

God made us for friendship. Sin came in as a barrier. By his dying and rising Jesus Christ removes that barrier making us friends with God.

Just as that young man had his friend’s number tattoed on his arm so Our Lord has got your name and mine written on him.

‘See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands’ the Lord says in Isaiah 49 verse 16.

In this Church, through its worship and supremely through the eucharist, the memory and sacrifice of our friend Jesus are kept alive.  Christianity builds beyond earthly friends and networks towards a communion with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven. Through friendships with Our Lord built up as we engage with scripture and sacrament it populates heaven, no less! As we heard in the Gospel: ‘My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.  I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand’ (John 10:27-28).

May our hearts burn as we reflect now upon Jesus our Good Shepherd as he speaks his word to us this morning and may our eyes be opened as he makes himself known to us afresh in the awesome encounter ahead which is Holy Communion in his Body and Blood, Christ in us the hope of glory.

St Wilfrid, Haywards Heath Easter 3 Getting to know God 1.5.22

How do you get to know God?

Some get to know him in a blinding flash, others find gradual illumination and many stay in the dark.

My own illumination has been through gradual flashes helped especially by holy people.

It came also through a doctorate in Chemistry researching carbon polymers. As I opened up new realms of knowledge through neutron scattering, I had a sense Someone had seen these things before. 

Science works through humility so that hypotheses that get disproved are good news bringing advance. My old research field is a bit strange to me nowadays. I have been fascinated though to read recently of carbon-breathing batteries that use Aluminium to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere whilst making electricity. 

How do you get to know God?

We scientists pursue truth but many of us have a sense that truth is with us and awaiting us. Reason and faith both lift us to God. Saul of Tarsus whose Conversion is the subject of our first reading originally followed a reasoned religion lacking faith. He lacked openness to the transcendent. God was in his religious books and laws so he was rattled to encounter the first Christians. They spoke of laws and indeed life itself transcended through the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. 

It was too much. He raged against it. But Saul was to become Paul, the reasoned man became the man of faith as heavenly light came over him on the Damascus Road. His eyes were opened to a God built less to his dimensions and more to those of God who is God!

How do you get to know God?

As God is truth you need to seek truth, but that's not enough. You need to be open to truth as something or Someone seeking you! 

The best of scientists like old Archimedes get eureka moments - I see it! These moments are, like Paul’s today, a lesson in humility, that is, in disbelieving yourself so as to see something more wonderful. To get to know God – and what an awesome, joy-giving and life-enhancing business that is - you need a readiness to loosen from self preoccupation, see the big picture of reality and be put in your place!

That happened to Saul of Tarsus in a flash which really put him in his place. He was temporarily blinded, and had to be led by the hand into Damascus where he joined the very body he was persecuting.  Later on Paul wrote of this in 1 Timothy 1:16 I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life.  Paul saw himself as the foremost of sinners since he had persecuted the very body he came to join and lead. If God can use me, he says, he can use anyone.

How do you get to know God?

On my way back from St Wilfrid’s to Bentswood I always catch a glimpse of the South Downs waiting at the traffic lights at the top of New England Road. God is before me in that grand view as much as he’s before me here in Church looking at our beautiful window of the risen Lord Jesus. 

St Nicodemus who lived on Mount Athos in the 18th Century admired the grand views there. He pondered and came up with an astonishing two liner that captures what it is to be in the image of God. Human beings are the macrocosm. The whole universe is the microcosm. I repeat: Human beings are the macrocosm. The whole universe is the microcosm. 

You can find God by pondering yourself, or, one step back, reflecting on what it is to reflect.  As your mind and heart contain the view of the Downs from Haywards Heath, and indeed, in a thought, the whole universe, you become in a sense greater than all that is as you contain it. Human beings are the macrocosm. The whole universe is the microcosm. 

God is God and always will be God. We’re made in God's image capable of his glory but that capacity isn't automatic. People miss God through two deceptions. They reason to the exclusion of faith or they believe to the exclusion of reason. 

The greatest threats to peace on earth are folk who deny the transcendent and folk in possession of mindless religion. God is love and love transcends reason – it goes beyond but not against reason. 

To know God who is truth you need to be drawn beyond any mental construct. You might also need freeing, as Paul was, from false and compulsive images of God.

A few ideas this morning on how you get to know God. 

I want to encourage you to pray sometime, in quiet, on your own, this honest and risky prayer: 

God if you're there and you love me show yourself to me. Give me a vision of yourself more to your dimensions and less to my own. 

It's an honest prayer - saying 'if you're there' tames reason as it admits we can't prove God is there however strong the evidence. It's a risky prayer because you're expressing a readiness to be put right on God by God – but… God is love! It’s an ongoing prayer - you need to wait for an answer. God if you're there and you love me show yourself to me. Give me a vision of yourself more to your dimensions and less to my own. 

If you already know God you’re asking for a fuller vision of him, something I find myself doing often, but not as often as I should so I’m preaching this morning at myself too.

Have a go - you won't regret it!

In Paul’s own words to Corinth, God give you the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. (2 Corinthians 4v6)

God who shone on Paul shine on us all! 

[Picture of Saul’s Conversion by Caravaggio]