St Wilfrid & Presentation, Haywards Heath Easter 4 30 April 2023

 

I love the fifty days of Eastertide. They balance and outweigh the forty days of Lent lending our lives a dynamic of life, growth and movement which is well captured in today’s readings.

‘I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly’ we just heard in John 10:10 at the end of the Gospel - what a summary of Christianity! 

That life has its origin in the events of Holy Week as the second reading reminds us, especially its last two verses 1 Peter 2:24-25: ‘Jesus Christ bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness… for you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls’.

To know you can be freed from sin is life giving. I had the joy of giving someone one to one assurance of God’s forgiveness last week. The man arose with new energy, a lighter speedier step to his life. That’s an occasion when priests very much act as ‘under shepherds’ for the Good Shepherd to bring his sheep healing into righteousness, literally right living.

Life, growth and movement. We see that movement and growth in the Acts Sunday readings of Eastertide as today, Acts 2:42, 47:  ‘They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers… and day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved’.

Then lastly in our Gospel from Saint John in Chapter 10 that movement is captured in the action of the Good Shepherd, earliest image of the risen Christ, who: ‘calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice’.

We Christians have life, and have it in abundance, and its a life on the move which draws others into its dynamic since we follow the risen Lord who gives us that life through scripture and the Breaking of Bread through his ‘under shepherds’, we priests with the bishops and, thinking of Saturday, Christian leadership in our nation.

This morning as we ‘devote ourselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers’ we gain like my friend earlier in the week, a new spring in our step. We leave Church with a new eagerness as resurrection people who know more surely that our risen Lord the Good Shepherd treads before us out through the Church door. We, his sheep, ‘follow him because we know his voice’. As today’s Post Communion prayer implies we believers are ‘kept always under his protection, and given grace to follow in his steps’.

That’s our Christian faith, knowing the promise of God to give life to the full and forever in Jesus Christ was fulfilled on Easter Sunday! Its something infectious, just as it was seen to be in the Acts of the Apostles when ‘day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved’ (Acts 2:47). 

As you may have read in the weekly bulletin I’ve been busy on a series for Eastertide being broadcast on Premier Christian Radio Freeview 725 every Sunday 7.30pm until 21 May. 

‘Finding Joy in the Lord’ has five 20 minute episodes with Easter hymns and readings. The second programme is tonight and all episodes will be available on listen again at premierchristianradio.com/joy. The first episode is already available at that address. I mention this series because it was motivated by the love for the fifty days of Eastertide I mentioned earlier which balances and outweighs the forty days of Lent lending our lives a joyful spiritual dynamic.

This first episode centres on joy as the gift of the risen Lord Jesus to all who believe and trust in him. I’ve been reflecting a lot on joy as we have a family member struggling with Alzheimer’s. It's a learning curve for us all in which we feel hurt by circumstances in which someone we love is growing in forgetfulness. Happiness eludes our grasp many times so far as our emotions go but we possess a joy which goes deeper than happiness. 

Jesus Christ is risen - that’s our faith - and in his presence is the fullness of joy. The joy sustaining us links to our belonging to the Christian community, a community founded on the resurrection whose existence can’t be explained without it. The New Testament record of how Christ’s sad and defeated disciples were changed into fearless missionaries is hard to explain without a cataclysmic external impact upon their lives. The abandonment by devout Jews of a weekly tradition of Friday Sabbath to keep Sunday as the day of resurrection has no rival explanation. There is no grave venerated for the founder of Christianity compared to founders of other religions, only the empty tomb in Jerusalem. These considerations are brush strokes painting a picture of an event pointing beyond itself to the unique action of God in raising Jesus from the dead, pledge of an imperishable hope and source of joy to a third of the world’s population today.

We may not have Alzheimer’s but each one of us will one day develop a terminal illness and life is either totally meaningless or totally meaningful, depending on the vantage point we have on that fact. Thornton Wilder paints the dilemma of two vantage points, one without and one with the perspective of the resurrection of Jesus: ‘Some say that…to the gods we are like the flies that boys kill on a summer day. And some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God’. What we see about death depends upon our vantage point. The atheist Bertrand Russell had this to say about life and death: ‘There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within.  There is no splendour, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment and then nothing’. Contrast this sad vision of death with a joy-filled statement of resurrection faith from the writings of the nineteenth century theologian Kohlbrugge who once imagined someone finding his skull a century later: ‘When I die - I do not die anymore, he wrote. If someone finds my skull, let this skull still preach to him and say: I have no eyes, nevertheless I see Him; though I have no lips, I kiss him; I have no tongue, yet I sing praise to Him with all who call upon His name.  I am a hard skull, yet I am wholly softened and melted in His love…All suffering is forgotten’. 

Finding joy in the Lord links to such a conviction about the love, truth and empowerment that lies in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ witnessed to by the New Testament. Our joy as Christians is founded upon the supreme power of love seen in the risen Lord Jesus Christ. We believe that by dying Christ destroyed the power of death, and by rising again opened up a new and imperishable life to all believers and says to us ‘I came that you might have life, and have it abundantly’. That life is all that matters ultimately. Yes - the only meaningful thing in life is what conquers death - not what but who! In Jesus Christ we gain not ideas, doctrines, rules but Life, life that breaks out beyond this world in the joy of the resurrection - alleluia!

St Bartholomew, Brighton Feast of St Mark 25.4.23

As many of you know I’m often peddling books even in Church - Bart’s hosted the launch of my 30 walks from Brighton Station in January - but this evening I want to push a book that’s probably the widest read in human history written by Saint Mark whose feast we celebrate this evening.

Over my time I’ve handed this copy to scores of friends, enquirers, baptism families, couples preparing for marriage and so on with a plea they spend the 90 minutes it takes to read its 50 pages and find out who Jesus is, why God sent him and what it means to us today.

Likely as not a co-worker of Peter and Paul Saint Mark the Evangelist wrote the shortest of the four Gospels. From the earliest days of the Church Mark’s been associated with the lion, one of the four creatures worshipping the lamb of God in Revelation 5:6-14 symbolic of the four Gospel writers. This may be because his Gospel starts with John the Baptist, ‘a voice crying out in the wilderness’ recalling the roar of the desert lion.

When you read through the 16 Chapters of Mark - and I do commend the short exercise as a task for Easter season - you find the first half centres on who Jesus is climaxing in Chapter 8 verse 7 where Our Lord puts that very question to his disciples and Peter responds ‘You are the Christ’ going on to explain why God sent him, namely to suffer, die and rise again. 

When Peter remonstrates with him - Mark writes almost with Peter at his shoulder, Our Lord goes on to explain how his coming invites extraordinary, wholehearted commitment in verses 34 and 35 of Chapter 8: ‘If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me. For anyone who wants to save his life will lose it, but anyone who loses his life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it’.

Today’s Saint has made the good news of a suffering Saviour sent to rescue us from sin accessible down through the centuries. The world isn’t as it should be because we’re not as we should be. The heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart. God’s Son was sent to earth to show us our sin and to show us his own heart and bring us, in Victor Hugo’s phrase, to ‘life’s greatest happiness’ which is ‘to be convinced we are loved’ for ever.

To give a short visual of Mark’s Gospel using the booklet: God made us for friendship. Sin made a barrier to this. Jesus died to destroy the barrier so restoring friendship with God.

Faith is an ongoing wholehearted choice for God and his provision in Jesus. In baptism Our Lord’s principle of losing life to gain it is impressed on us. The key is losing John Twisleton, Thomas Cotterill or whoever to gain the Holy Spirit living more inside of us who keeps us capable of living and being and sharing the good news of God.

This evening we thank God for Saint Mark the Evangelist who put the ‘Evangel’ or Good News into a 50 page paperback to make the astonishing love we celebrate in Easter Season accessible. That love we welcome at Mass, joined by two and half billion people the world over. 

Let us spend a moment praying silently in union with Mark, Peter, Paul, Bartholomew and all the Saints for hearts to be opened in our circle to the same love and that we like Mark, armed with his Gospel, may be more effective evangelists announcing the love of God shown in our suffering and risen Saviour.

St Mary, Balcombe Easter 3 & St George 23.4.23

This Sunday in Easter Season takes precedence over the feast of England’s patron saint so the church calendar moves full celebration of St George to tomorrow. Nevertheless the flag of St George flies across the land today so it’s good to start with him in opening up the scripture for today. The tradition is that George, a soldier, was martyred at Lydda in Palestine during the persecution of Emperor Diocletian in 303 AD. With his military background he was seen as a great warrior for Christ and legends built of his slaying a dragon, symbol of Satan, making him patron of the spiritual battle Christians cannot escape. This conflict has two fronts: spiritual deepening and evangelism - inside of us in accepting Christ’s reign and shaking off futile pursuits and outside of us in working to establish Christ’s reign in our circle, nation and world. 

To pause on that last point for a minute or two, the flag of St George flies today over a nation preparing to gather around the altar at Westminster Abbey in two weeks time for a Coronation Eucharist where a disabled ramp has just been built (picture). On TV the nation will see something there as strange to them as to many villagers of Balcombe - this action - the taking, blessing, breaking and sharing of bread and wine linked to renewing Christian commitment at the Eucharist. At the end of the service the King and Queen will take off their crowns and kneel to offer their souls and bodies as a living sacrifice in union with that of Christ and receive Holy Communion. They will commit, as we are  this morning, to Christian service. As they do so  three dragons, three enemies of faith, prowl round them and us. These are relativism (the view religions stand side by side with none pre-eminent), secularisation (the view religion has had its day) and atheism (the view dismissing God altogether). Charles and Camilla will be inaugurated, as Bishops and priests are, at a Christian Eucharist, but theirs and ours is a nation as strange to Christianity as the Eucharist today is strange to Balcombe, a nation like the nations St George evangelised 1700 years ago leaving such a mark on Europe as to be made patron saint of England, Ethiopia, Georgia and Portugal.

Back to our scripture and how it marries with the challenge of St George to spiritual deepening and evangelism. Developing these two aspects are vital to our Christian witness. The spiritual depth and force of Saint Peter permeates the first two readings and what a response there was to that with as many as three thousand seeking baptism! In the wake of the anointing of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost Peter stands up and proclaims: ‘Let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified’ (Acts 2:36). The core of evangelism, of the good news, is Christ’s divinity which is to fill our hearts by the Spirit as we do, as Peter says, namely: ‘Repent, and be baptised… in the name of Jesus Christ so that [our] sins may be forgiven; and [we] receive the gift of the Holy Spirit’ (v38). 

On Easter Tuesday I was busy in London recording my new series for Easter Season on Premier Christian Radio, ‘Finding Joy in the Lord’ which starts tonight at 7.30pm on Freeview Channel 725. The 20 minute programmes will be available week by week on listen again at premierchristianradio.com/joy. The overall thesis of the series is that of the verse just quoted, Acts 2v38, that as we turn afresh to the risen Lord Jesus, repent of our sins and renounce evil, his presence is renewed within us. This brings joy to our hearts as we own our baptism afresh, put faith in Jesus, seek cleansing from sin and welcome the Holy Spirit into the circumstances of our life. Finding joy in the Lord relates to our turning again and again in faith and repentance to the risen Lord Jesus and welcoming his Spirit into every circumstance of our life. The joy of the Lord becomes our strength as heart to heart knowledge of Christ grows. As with St Peter in Acts that joy overflows and infects others rooted as it is in conviction towards God in Christ.

In our second reading Peter in his first letter affirms, again with a note of certitude, ‘Through Christ you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God… now you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart’ (1 Peter 1:21-22). St Peter insists that trusting in God who raised Christ from the dead opens believers to the outpouring of love which forms believers into a caring community. The spiritual deepening of believers is inseparable from such Christian fellowship nurtured by word and sacrament. The meaning and power of scripture and the eucharist are presented obliquely in the Gospel passage from Luke 24:13-35. Here two disciples walking to Emmaus, whose dreams had been shattered, were consoled and energised by a stranger opening scripture to them, warming their hearts, and making himself known as God in Christ as he breaks bread. This is gentle evangelism, that of the Emmaus Road, making Christ known in a process, contrasting with the forceful one-off impact in the story in Acts of Paul’s blinding conversion by light from heaven in his own journey on the Damascus Road.  

This morning’s readings on St George’s Day present us with the reminder of our work in hand as Christians, a work of spiritual deepening and evangelism. As the second reading expresses it our deepening in love for God best comes in recognising as we do at every Eucharist the work of Our Lord who is the Lamb of God slain for us all from the foundation of the world: ‘You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish… destined before the foundation of the world… Through him you have come to trust in God’  That trust and its accompanying joy are the spring of evangelism, our desire to spread the good news of amazing sacrificial love. The love and truth recalled and presented to us in every Eucharist is also a wellspring of spiritual purification if we will accept its refreshing of the parts of us no one but the Holy Spirit can reach and cleanse.

So be it, though there be cost and conflict for us, inside of us to cast off futile ways and outside of us to graciously tackle the ‘dragons’ or deceptions of the world, the flesh and the devil. To quote CT Studd  ‘If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him’.  So at the Eucharist, the church’s great thanksgiving for redemption, we offer our souls and bodies as a living sacrifice in union with Christ, to whom with the Father and the Holy Spirit be all might, majesty, dominion and power, henceforth and for evermore. Amen. 

St Richard & St Wilfrid, Haywards Heath Easter Wednesday 12.4.23

The readings for the Eucharist on Easter Wednesday have a certain dynamic. In the Acts passage we the cripple at the Temple gate is put on the move by healing in the name of the risen Lord. What an image - ‘walking and leaping and praising God’. It captures the dynamic of the resurrection, as does the Gospel passage. There we see a journey to Emmaus accompanied unknowingly by the risen Lord and a fast journey back to Jerusalem after Christ reveals himself, as he is doing this morning in the action of Breaking of Bread. The dynamic of both stories traces back to the movement of the stone from Christ’s tomb by the Holy Spirit on Easter Sunday. 

If I was invited to explain the truth of the resurrection in a few sentences I would start with this dynamic, evident in the community founded by the resurrection which had a dynamic and growth inexplicable without it. Josephus, Pliny and Tacitus give independent evidence for the remarkable growth of the church after Christ’s death. I would mention next the credibility of the New Testament witness to the resurrection surviving two centuries of critical scholarship. The New Testament record of how Christ’s sad and defeated disciples were changed into fearless missionaries is hard to explain without a cataclysmic external impact upon their lives. 

The evident minor inconsistencies - the geography of appearances of the risen Lord, Jerusalem or Galilee, the number of angels and so on - reflect less their being a fabrication and more their being halting attempts to describe a hereto unimaginable event. 

The role of women as witnesses is controversial for those days and would not have been included in any fabricated story. 

The abandonment by devout Jews of a weekly tradition of Friday Sabbath to keep Sunday as the day of resurrection has no rival explanation. 

Lastly there is no grave venerated for the founder of Christianity compared to founders of other religions, only the empty tomb in Jerusalem. These considerations are brush strokes painting a picture of an event pointing beyond itself to the unique action of God in raising Jesus from the dead, the pledge of an imperishable hope held to by a third of the world’s population today. 

Returning to our readings wherever we encounter Christ he lends a dynamic. As the disciples at Emmaus were put on the move and lost the drag of sadness and the cripple was taken off the floor into the joy of leaping and bounding so we, whose hearts burn to hear scripture today, can have our lives animated and moved forward by Jesus Christ ‘who is the same, yesterday and today and for ever’ (Hebrews 13:8)

Picture from Louvre of Emmaus pilgrims by Paul Bril (1617).

St Richard, Haywards Heath Maundy Thursday 6th March 2023

Tonight we begin our retreat together. We have four days of blessing, a privileged opportunity to enter afresh into the events at the heart of our Christian religion. Through Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday we literally take to heart the suffering, death, buriaI and resurrection of Our Saviour. This commemoration sees our lives engaging in a special way with God who so loved the world he gave his one and only Son Jesus Christ so that all who believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life.

We start our retreat at the Maundy Thursday supper table for the Lord Jesus Christ; who, in the same night that he was betrayed – that is, on this night – took bread and giving God thanks; he said the blessing, broke it and gave it to his disciples saying: Take this all of you and eat of it; for this is my body which will be given up for you… do this in memory of me. By commanding us to take bread and wine in his name Jesus Christ  instituted a living memorial which has continued through 80 generations and is promised to continue until the end of time for as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup you show the Lord's death until he comes.

This is my body... This is my blood he says indicating a love for us and for all that would reach to death and beyond. There is only one thing more powerful than death and it was first made plain at that Maundy Thursday supper table in the elements signifying separation of body and blood. That separation Our Lord made by intention on this most holy night to be accomplished the next day in his death for us upon the Cross. The resurrection fully shows this awesome mystery

In his antiphon O sacrum convivium St Thomas Aquinas, whose hymn we shall use at in the procession at the end sums up the Eucharist in these succinct words: 'O sacred feast in which we partake of Christ, his sufferings are remembered, our minds are filled with his grace and we  receive a pledge of the glory that is to be ours'.

This evening we begin our celebration of the passion with the age old action of taking, blessing, breaking and sharing exactly as Jesus Christ commanded. Out of the great love with which he loved us he gave us this memorial so we could be imbued day by day with his life, and he washed his disciples' feet to underline that love.

In the foot washing Our Lord models his call to humble service but there is here as well a pointer to our redemption through the waters of baptism. Our Redeemer came to wash away our sins, which will take a lifetime and probably beyond that! The stain of sin is washed off each time we worship, pray, read his word, study, serve, reflect and seek forgiveness. Especially it occurs when we humbly confess the dirt and grime of our sins and welcome the sacrament of reconciliation.

Tonight we begin our retreat together. These four days of blessing will be cause for deep reflection in between services, opportunity to enter afresh into the events at the heart of our Christian religion: to die as Christ died but to our sins, that they be cleansed; to rise as Christ rose seeing the new nature he gave us at baptism polished up like the church silver this weekend, to sparkle more with Holy Spirit shine.

God’s love will never fade on earth because of his incarnate presence in the Eucharist and the community that bears Christ’s name from one generation to another. In this extraordinary memorial service we do not just recall Jesus, we call him, the one who suffered and died for us, into our midst as the living Lord that he is, to whom be praise with the Father and the Holy Spirit now and for ever. Amen.