Giggleswick School evening service 26 June 2022

I’m so pleased to be back in Chapel as an OG. 

If Giggleswick helped make me what I am, Chapel and the Chaplain - in my day Mr Curtis - were key. I’m grateful to Mr Womack and the Head for renewing the invitation to share with you all this evening.

First I want to hear from you. Put your hand up if you are involved in or saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?

What do you think was the moral of the story? Have a think about it. 

Put your hand up if you’ve got thoughts to share. Feedback

Roald Dahl’s novel and its adaptations - the film, play and musical - contain truth found in folktales from across the world. Charlie - poor, unlucky yet kind and likable - is rewarded, whilst other children who represent vices are punished. The message is “Don’t be like them, be like Charlie.”  Another is “Bad parenting makes bad children”.

The moral I picked up from Roald Dahl’s tale full of delicious chocolate is: ‘Be good’.

‘Be good’ - this familiar parental greeting is the strap line of our scripture and my message this evening. ‘The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good’ (Luke 6:45).

I’m a writer and broadcaster. Over lockdown I prepared a book called Pointers to Heaven and a radio series of the same name. Both start with Mrs Foster, the lady across the road from our family home who stepped in to care for my brother and I when my parents were hard pressed. She exuded goodness and that fascinated me.

I remember the warmth of her smile. Through it her face became a pointer beyond herself to something more enduring. Allied as it was to her practical help offered to us seemingly at the drop of a hat, Mrs Foster pointed to a reason and purpose beyond herself. 

Her self-forgetfulness was my first spiritual teacher. Her visits underlined goodness to me in such a way that I couldn’t see it as other than a gift much to be desired. 

When she smiled down at me in my mishaps I felt uplifted. Facing her, to own up to wrongdoing, seared my soul because I was made aware of my own lack of goodness and how that hurted her.

People don’t get on in the world without people to look up to, and - with my parents and teachers - Mrs Foster was such a lady. 

As I reflect on her with you, I judge her goodness to have been a pointer beyond herself to the world beyond this world our Dome points to, the world we call heaven, a place thrilling with the goodness of God so evident in this lady.

Pointers to heaven like the goodness of Mrs Foster have a ripple effect. Thanks to her and many good people including teachers, chaplains and former pupils of Giggleswick I keep up with - and my own crucial opening up to God himself - I stand before you this evening where I sat as pupil half a century ago.

‘The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good’. Seeking goodness for Christians is inseparable from seeking God and the purification he grants. Goodness as a moral quality builds through life experience but it can also diminish depending on where your heart is set. It is my conviction that the vision of God is transformative of the heart and its fullness will be at the heart of heaven. Conversely the heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart. As Thomas More wrote: ‘whoever bids others to do right, but gives an evil example by acting the opposite way is like a foolish weaver who weaves with one hand and unravels the cloth just as quickly with the other’. Standing here - talking, writing and broadcasting about heaven - would be presumptuous unless my own heart were set in that direction and its problems being alleviated by the Holy Spirit.

As St John writes in his first letter: ‘Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.’ (1 John 3:2-3) 

On my visits here I take time to look up into the Chapel Dome, filled with angels, to renew that hope and purification, when it's as if God says to me what I now say to you: Be good!

St Mary, Balcombe Trinity Sunday 12th June 2022

 

Today we celebrate the revelation of God as an eternal fellowship of love, three persons equal in majesty, undivided in splendour, yet one God.

The doctrine of the most holy and undivided Trinity is challenging, relevant, intriguing and essential – four headings to steer our delving this morning into foundational truth and life.

Firstly it’s a challenge. Reason takes you so far in Christianity. We could never have invented God in three persons, its revealed truth. Then you have the question of weighing other revelations – Islam and Hinduism besides the Judaism from which the Trinitarian revelation came. 

Preachers go on leave this Sunday for fear of a seemingly cold, calculated, mathematical doctrine. Three in one and one in three. Why three? Why not one, says Islam, why not more says Hinduism, why not none says the atheist mocking our feeble attempts to get our mind round God three in one.

There’s the challenge set before us in Trinitarian faith but that challenge is based on historical events. These clearly reveal the nature of God in the coming of Jesus, whose death and resurrection we’ve been following up to Ascension Day, and the coming of the Spirit on Pentecost Day. It’s a challenge that might lead you to the library or the internet so you can better answer for your faith to those who believe in one God, no God or many gods as opposed to one God in three persons.

Secondly the doctrine of the Trinity is utterly relevant. I’ve been busy preparing couples for marriage recently and how good that’s been, yes, how countercultural even given the falling away in this commitment. Marriage as a union of life-giving love points us to the Trinity, because human beings are in the image of God who is himself a union of life-giving love. Keeping true to ourselves as human beings, and true to the life-giving nature of marriage is keeping true to God as he has revealed himself to us.  God as love within himself. How could God be so without the distinction of persons within him? 

Challenging, relevant – thirdly the doctrine of God should be intriguing. The eternal fellowship of love that is God draws us into himself. What after all is the Church for other than to serve God’s purpose to bring as many souls on earth as possible into fellowship with him? 

The doctrine of the Trinity is revealed first of all in Our Lord’s coming into a human family with Mary and Joseph, into village life in Nazareth, then into the missionary partnership of the disciples. That divine society continues after his resurrection and the gift of the Spirit as one, holy catholic and apostolic church which is God’s never-ending family!

How intriguing God is, and we are. If you want evidence for God look in the mirror and read Psalm 8 You have made (us) little lower than the angels and crown (us) with glory and honour. More than that, a human being in isolation isn’t a true human for, in John Donne’s words, no man is an island. What’s intriguing about God as divine society mirrors what we find intriguing about ourselves, namely our desire for society and friendship. This desire will be fully satisfied only in the communion of saints who can be thought of as standing near God as a corona or crown around the sun.

Challenging, relevant, intriguing – lastly the Trinitarian doctrine of God is essential.

It is essential because Christianity is a religion of salvation and that salvation stands or falls on the divinity of Jesus Christ. We read Jesus words in today’s Gospel all that the Father has is mine…the Spirit will take what is mine and declare it to you (John 16:15). 

Does my eternal destiny depend on my own good works, lacking as they are, or on a relationship freely offered me by God in his Son? 

In Jesus do we really meet with God himself? 

These, as they say, are the twenty four thousand dollar questions hidden behind keeping a feast day for the Blessed Trinity. 

The doctrine might sound cold and mathematical but it follows a logic of love, love beyond all measure, extravagant, unconditional love for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son Jesus Christ so that all who believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)

To believe this is to believe God isn’t One but One God in three persons. 

It’s challenging to so believe – God is God and has revealed himself in this way and not another way.

It’s relevant - the way we see God affects the way we see ourselves and steers us from unworthy pursuits.

It’s intriguing because the loving fellowship of God in three persons chimes in with our sociable nature and draws it to joyful completion in the communion of saints

It’s essential doctrine because without it the divinity of Christ falls, the word of God is emptied of power and the sacraments become empty ritual as God’s coming to us in Jesus and the Spirit is denied.

May all I have shared enrich the eucharist we now offer through, with and in Jesus Christ, to whom, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, be all might, majesty, dominion and power now and for evermore. Amen.