St John, Burgess Hill & St Richard, Haywards Heath St Teresa Benedicta 9 August 2023

 Introduction

We offer this Mass for the Jewish People and for peace in the Holy Land. It is said that the future of the world belongs to the intercessors and connectors. Today’s Saint Teresa Benedicta, formerly Edith Stein, helped change the world through prayer and empathy. She is a patron Saint of Europe on account of her connections with Germany and the Netherlands, her roots in Jewish faith, her life as a contemplative nun and her tragic death in the gas chamber. Her dust remains with millions of her coreligionists around Auschwitz which must be Europe’s darkest place in current memory. She offered her death as an intercession to God for her Jewish people to connect as she did with Jesus Christ our Saviour. 

St Teresa wrote words that might challenge us as we begin Mass calling to mind our shortfalls in love:  ‘If ‘God is within us and if God is love, it cannot be otherwise than that we love our brothers and sisters. Therefore our love of human beings is the measure of our love of God. For the Christian, there is no such thing as a stranger. At any time it is our neighbour who stands before us, the one who needs us the most’

Sermon

‘I will bethroth you with integrity and justice, with tenderness and love… and you will come to know the Lord’ (Hosea 2:21-22) we heard promised in the Old Testament reading anticipating the love of God revealed in the Cross of Jesus and documented in the New Testament. Today’s Saint first became familiar with this passage from Hosea as a child in a practising Jewish family in Germany. 

Edith Stein, now honoured as St Teresa Benedicta, born in 1891, went on to lose her faith when she was 14 and had a distinguished career as a philosopher. Reading the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Ávila during her philosophical studies helped her engage with the tenderness and love of God prophesied by Hosea revealed upon the Cross. She was baptised in 1922 continuing to teach at a Dominican girls’ school and study Catholic philosophy. 

She became a lecturer but was thrown out of her post in 1933 as a result of the Nazi régime’s anti-Semitic legislation. In 1938 she was professed as a Carmelite nun in Cologne and took prophetically the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Her order moved her to the Netherlands to keep her safe from the growing Nazi threat. While a Carmelite she wrote an important philosophical book linking to the understanding of empathy and also wrote on St John of the Cross.

On 20 July 1942 the Dutch Bishops’ Conference had a statement read in all churches condemning Nazi racism. In retaliation the authorities ordered the arrest of all Jewish converts to Christianity. Edith Stein was taken to Auschwitz and killed in the gas chamber on 9 August 1942. Pope John Paul II canonised her in 1998 as a ‘martyr for love’ and she has been made co-patron of Europe along with St Benedict, St Bridget, St Catherine of Siena and SS Cyril & Methodius.

In her philosophical work ‘On the Problem of Empathy’, Stein argued that the way we encounter humans is not the same as the way we encounter other things in the world, and this difference is no add on but something basic to being human. Our basic empathy helps us know that someone is fearful, ashamed or happy. We just know. We can also, uniquely, adopt the perspective of the other. We can, in a way which we are unable to do as fully with non-human encounters, care. Stein’s word for what we encounter in the other is their “spirit”, a  term that is problematic for philosophers on account of its religious connotations. In relation to her own pilgrimage from Judaism through atheism to Christianity her study of empathy is a document of her spiritual awakening which led her to give her life by intention for the Jewish people with, in and through Jesus Christ. In the face of the anti-Semitism that took her to death she told her Prioress before heading to Auschwitz: ‘Human action cannot help us, but only the sufferings of Christ. My aspiration is to share them’.

As we celebrate St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross we seek to emulate her love for God and empathy with humankind which took her, and will sometimes take us, to bear suffering cheerfully and creatively to bring light to those around us living in darkness and the shadow of death.

St John the Evangelist, Burgess Hill Transfiguration of Our Lord 6 August 2023

God has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6b)

The radiance of Jesus lightens the mind, warms the heart and energises the will.

Just as dynamite contains within itself potential energy that can be released to give light, heat and a surge of momentum so it is with Jesus Our Lord.

The Feast of the Transfiguration provides first disclosure of that radiant energy central to Christianity which is at the heart of its forward momentum flowing from ‘the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’.  

Christianity goes forward today by radiant energy as we come again and again before Jesus in word and sacrament and in the hearts of his faithful to see our minds, hearts and wills irradiated.

As Fr. Bull, one of the great Mirfield Fathers put it, the glad tidings of Christianity are in what Jesus Christ did for men and in the abiding energy of that work.

We gather at the eucharist this morning to be caught up afresh into the radiant energy of Jesus which shines from today’s scripture with an invitation to seek a fresh illumination from the truth that is in Jesus (Ephesians 4:21), a fresh warming of our hearts by his Sacred Heart and a fresh energising for active service from the working of his great power (Ephesians 1:19b).

All of this will flow from the radiance of Jesus, what the Apostle calls the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 

As dynamite is ignited to release its potential energy into light, heat and momentum so our faith ignites the radiance of Jesus to light up our lives and through us light up a world so desperately in need of that irradiation.

I want to suggest that this ignition process has three dimensions – intellectual, devotional and practical. 

There is an intellectual challenge to lay hold afresh on Christian basics so we better answer for our faith. I wonder when you last read a book about the Christian Faith.  Or even the Bible itself? If someone asked you why you thought Christianity was true would you be able to argue for the truth of the resurrection? 

Just a few questions to get us thinking about what’s called apologetics - not apologising but working at thinking through our faith so as to be able to give a better ‘apologia’ or reasonable defence for believing as Christians. I have brought a few copies of my own book itself entitled Elucidations - light on Christian controversies. (Show) It costs just a fiver if any of you fancy summer reading about  topics ranging from self-love to unanswered prayer, Mary to anti-Semitism, suffering to same-sex unions, charismatic experience to the ordination of women, hell to ecology and why we should trust the Church.

The radiance of Jesus lightens the mind. It also warms the heart to an overflow of love.

A radiant Christian is more than someone buzzing with ideas about Christ. There’s something out of this world streaming through them. To gain the radiance of Jesus we need to be exposed to his radiant love. Christian friends, holy priests, all of them help – but nothing can replace our own individual business with God. Welcoming the radiance of Jesus into our hearts is a life-long struggle because of our fallen nature. We need a regular time of prayer, a discipline of self-examination and confession, a resolve to intercede for others, to give a proportion of our income to God’s work and so on. You may have a chance in these summer days - or with greater opportunism the odd rainy day - to review and renew your Christian rule of life, maybe even plan a retreat. Anne and I are discovering Worth Abbey’s monthly Quiet Fridays. Ask one of our clergy if you want advice on planning a Retreat or Quiet Day. 

The radiance of Jesus lightens the mind, warms the heart and then, lastly, it energises the will.

Where would our study and prayer be if it never led us into action, to be part of what Fr. Bull called the abiding energy of the once-for-all work of Jesus Christ?  We are here at the eucharist to gain that energy. 

To go back to the physics analogy, just as the potential energy in an explosive is released to give light, heat and a surge of momentum so all Jesus attained through his life, death and resurrection is given to be celebrated and released so as to give power and direction to our lives. Send us out in the power of your Spirit to live and work to your praise and glory we pray.

How have we acted to transform our environment to be more as Christ would want it since last we met at the altar? How have we acted in recent weeks to change the world around us for Christ? Inasmuch as the radiant energy of Jesus is in us, we find ourselves raiding the kingdom of fear with love, encouraging those who are down, forgiving those who come against us harshly and providing for those in need from our own resources. This energy carries our lives forward to work for the kingdom of this world (to) become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ (Rev 11:15). 

For such energising of will, warming of heart and illumination of mind we lift our hearts to the Father at this Transfiguration Mass seeking our own transfiguration through the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

 

St Wilfrid & St Richard, Haywards Heath Diving for Pearls Matthew 13:46 2.8.23

I am grateful to our former diocesan spirituality adviser, Fr Andrew Mayes, for drawing my attention in his book ‘Diving for Pearls’ to the 7th century Saint Isaac of Syria’s commentary on the second half of today’s Gospel. Fr Mayes’ book draws on Isaac’s maritime, nautical and underwater imagery yoked to Our Lord’s parable in today’s Gospel: ‘the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it’ (Matthew 13:45). 

The merchant becomes a diver to St Isaac who presents the spiritual life as less ascent to God and more descent into his ‘everlasting arms’ to quote Deuteronomy 33:27. Mayes writes: ‘Ascent encourages us to think in terms of hierarchy. The goal is achieving success, spiritual attainment. It also seems to emphasize the place of human effort in the spiritual quest and downplay the role of the divine. The model of descent, rather, leads us towards surrendering, sinking into God, letting go, unlearning…This contrasts with ideas of ascendency and advancement - mastery, conquest of mountains, and yes, prideful achievement. The idea of elevation of the soul sounds like superiority. We notice a contrast between gritted determination and exertion required in climbing the mountain of prayer and a gentle sinking into the ocean of grace, as Isaac commends. Will we desire to sink or strive? Cling on or let go?’

The pearl of great price is to be placed into our possession in a moment as the body of Christ is placed into our hands and we express our appreciation outwardly in one word. Simply saying ‘Amen’ to that gift is an understatement. ‘So be it’ is, yes, a sinking into the ocean of God’s grace. It’s taking a plunge to seek the depth of God’s mercy. A favourite hymn of mine is ‘There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea’ written by Fr Frederick Faber which has the lines ‘we make his love too narrow by false limits of our own and we magnify his strictness with a zeal he will not own’.

Our Lord’s parables are amazing vehicles of the love and truth of God which speak afresh to generation after generation. ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it’. Our spiritual determination links, or, under God, opens us to an anointing in God’s Spirit. As we read in John 7v37: ‘The scripture has said, "Out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water'.

Our prayer, contemplation, study of scripture and the saints and our growth in grace is like an oyster generating, or opening us up to, the gift of the pearl which is Christ within us, the Lord we welcome in Holy Communion. As Isaac wrote 1300 years ago of the pearl of Jesus Christ forming within us: 

‘Let us consider as oysters the prayers upon which the intellect alights, the contemplative insights, divine knowledge, wisdom, joy in spirit… The primary pearl is Jesus Christ himself – a deeper appreciation of him’.

Once again I will read the last sentence of today’s Gospel and invite you to own it more fully as the invitation it is to spiritual zeal:

Prayers

‘The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it’.

Let us ask the Lord who invites us to open our hearts more to him in praise and more to others in service to grant us the anointing of his Holy Spirit as we bring to God the needs of the church and the world:

Holy Father it is said you look less on what we have been or are than on what we would be. We would be more fully your sons and daughters and we ask your cleansing and healing for this to come to pass. Lord, hear us.

Your invitation to Holy Communion requires our ‘Amen’ or ‘So be it’, a sinking into the ocean of God’s grace, a plunge to seek the pearl of God’s mercy. May our hearts be expanded by this gift to the wideness of your mercy so we are made a grace and a blessing to all in our acquaintance. Lord, hear us.