Wivelsfield & St Richard, Haywards Heath Death 25.10.23

‘You must stand ready, because the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect’ (Luke 12:40)

Today’s Gospel invites us to keep prepared for the Lord’s coming. Historically this has been seen as an invitation to keep prepared both for Christ’s return and for our own death as both will take us into his closer presence.

As Christians we fear neither because as the letter to the Romans makes clear a few verses before today’s section ‘there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus’ (Romans 8:1). Our well prepared participation in Holy Communion renews that belonging in Christ day by day. Our death will be a passing from one part of the Church to the next. Devout preparation for Holy Communion, living in humble sorrow for sin with confidence in God guarantees a good death.

Alas post-Christian culture is far from this coming to terms with death. Our society is saturated with the adult themes of sex and sexuality but it runs a mile from another adult theme that of death. I was talking to someone the other day who had been engaging with their grandson on the meaning of life and she asked him whether he had thought a lot about what will happen when we die. That’s a good levelling platform for debate about the truth of Christianity.

As a priest I am privileged to have free access to St Paul’s Cathedral besides the privilege we all have of daily choral evensong in that splendid building. I often walk round. One of the most striking images on the ground floor so to speak is the memorial of former Dean John Donne, body veiled in a shroud with only his head visible. He is responsible for the beautiful saying about the funeral bell Ernest Hemingway took up in his book about the Spanish Civil War, ‘For whom the bell tolls’. Donne’s quotation on death tallies with his desire to have a memorial which will graphically preach it for all time. He died in 1631 and his memorial survived the destruction of the Cathedral in the greater fire of London 30 years later with just a scorch mark. This to me makes his memorial all the more telling. Here is his poem:   ‘No man is an island, entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were. As well as if a manor of thine own or of thine friend's were. Each man's death diminishes me, For I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee’.

‘You must stand ready, because the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect’ 

In last week’s Times there was a fine obituary of another priest, a Jesuit, Michael Campbell-Johnston who died last month. I copied the last paragraph about his last days and leave you with it: ‘Surrounded by photographs taken from across his life, he would gaze out of the window and wonder how many leaves were on the tree outside. He was reconciled to his end. "How can I be afraid of my death?" he wrote on a scrap of paper. "It marks the last amen of my life and the first alleluia of my eternity."

St Mary, Balcombe Trinity 20 (29A) 22.10.23

What’s good about being a Christian?

Share things that are valuable including significant answers to prayer in recent weeks

Christianity is good for the soul! The Gospel is good! This Church is a place of purpose in a confused world, a place of belonging in a lonely world. 

If this good news is going to get around some more, the church has got to grow and draw in the next generation.

Do you think we at St Mary’s have something that the friends we care for are missing out on?

We need to believe this if our prayer and our invitations for them to join us are to be wholehearted.

How can we help the church grow?

A question we do well to ask ourselves is how we would feel if our best friend came with us to Church? Would we feel embarrassed about what and who they encountered? If so, why should we feel so? 

What wisdom is there so far as the revitalisation of faith and our need to work for church growth in today’s Gospel?

Behind the questions and answers lies a trap set for Our Lord which touches on the relation of the believing community to its surrounds. 

In the story we see the Pharisees making common cause with the Herodians who supported paying tribute to Rome against the Zealots who didn’t, hoping to put Jesus in the wrong with one side or the other. They ask ‘Is it permissible to pay taxes to Caesar or not?’  

Our Lord’s reply does not actually make a choice between the two parties.  It accepts the reality of Caesar’s rule, without touching on the question of its validity. Give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar – and to God what belongs to God.

Keep responding to God’s claim, Jesus says, whilst never forgetting the claim of the world around you.  

To be effective in our mission as his Church we need an ever-deepening confidence in God allied to an ever-deepening humility before both God and neighbour.

We can’t escape those dual obligations – to God and to Caesar. It’s up to each individual and each religious community to balance these obligations. To ignore God denies us our distinctive of godliness. To ignore Caesar – read the human community to put it into today’s language – is to make our religion sectarian and destructive.

We live as Jesus did in a culturally diverse society.  As such we can’t avoid speaking two languages.  Our Christian Faith is the language of ‘identity’ – it makes us what we are as God’s people seeking godliness through word, sacrament and fellowship. Our shared citizenship demands we speak the language of our community.

If religious communities don’t engage with their wider communities and seek to speak their language they become sectarian.

To paraphrase Our Lord with a slant to St Mary’s, we need to give society its just service, throwing ourselves as a Christian community into the fray of Balcombe and its surrounds, whilst giving God his due by building up our confidence as a distinctively Christian community.

As one of your priests I need to encourage you to work on both aspects.

For St Mary’s to grow we need an eye to both God and the community. We need to firm up our confidence in God by getting ourselves deeper into our worship and schooled more in the Scriptures. However bad a name religion has got we cannot escape the call we have to be better and firmer Christians.  

To be a Christian is to have confidence in God – and humility before him and before people.

A Christian who’s humble without confidence in God has no missionary potential.

A Christian who’s every confidence in God yet lacks humility before other people and their view of things is a danger to our cause! 

In particular failure to be sensitive to the needs of our community and speak its language will show us up to be less than Christian in the sense of working for human and social flourishing.

Today’s Gospel makes clear the separate demands of God and man upon us as Christians but those demands flow together. Our Lord brought these conflicting demands together in his own body in his sacrificial death for us upon the Cross.

Through what he has done for us, which we recall at every eucharist, he builds our confidence in God and lends us his own humble love for people.

In this Eucharist he is waiting to touch us in our heart of hearts, so we can touch others for him! May the Sacrament we share refresh in us the purpose for living and the reason for dying given to us in our risen Lord. 

As God makes himself so near to us may he make himself near to the people of this community.

The Gospel is good! This Church is a place of purpose in a confused world, a place of belonging in a lonely world. May more belong here with us to Jesus so that God’s world may be enriched by the growth of his Church!

St John, Burgess Hill & St Richard, Haywards Heath Feast of St Luke 18.10.23

The evangelist St Luke is one up on Matthew, Mark and John - literally because he wrote not one but two books in the New Testament. His two volumes set forth the mission of Jesus starting with his acts in the flesh recorded in his Gospel and then continuing after his death and resurrection by the Holy Spirit through his apostles and disciples in his Acts of the Apostles. Luke’s two volumes make up about a third of the New Testament and are compelling reading.

They engage with the love, truth and empowerment of Jesus Christ presented by Doctor Luke, an affectionate title that builds from Colossians 4:14 where Paul describes his companion as 'Luke, the beloved physician'. Luke was neither apostle nor eye witness of the earthly life of Jesus but is famed both by his being companion to Paul and by association with the third Gospel and Acts. His close companionship with St. Paul is noted in the epistle chosen for his feast we just heard. There Paul mentions Demas deserting him, Crescens and Titus going off so that ‘only Luke is with me’ (2 Timothy 4).

Today’s Gospel from Luke Chapter 10 ends with Our Lord’s command to heal: ‘Cure those in the town who are sick, and say, ‘The kingdom of God is very near to you’. It is to Doctor Luke among all four Gospel writers we owe a clear statement that the good news of Jesus extends not just to mind and heart but to our bodies as well. The healing ministry then and now is part of the good news of Jesus as it breaks through bonds of sin, sickness, bondage, death and the devil to bring us more fully into what we were made to be in God's praise and service. Luke's story of Jesus chronicles not just physical healing but the healing from exclusion of lepers and the way Jesus includes social outcasts and ministers to women, counter to the culture of his day.

On this Feast of St Luke we welcome the power of God's word through his words into our varied situations. This day is an invitation to pick up a copy of Luke’s Gospel - here’s one - or find it in your Bible - and spend a morning reading it - and maybe another morning or afternoon reading his sequel the Acts of the Apostle. Such an exercise would refresh for you where Christian faith flows from and how it flows on and through us as we open our own lives to the Holy Spirit as the apostles did.

There is no word of God without power and it is power to heal. As with Simon's mother-in-law in Luke 4 healing for us can be into helpfulness. The paralytic lowered to Jesus through the ceiling in Luke 5 is a call to take trouble over healing prayer for sick friends. The good news of Christianity recorded by Doctor Luke in his inspired writings breathes joy and carries a forward momentum, the very mission of Jesus carried forward by the Holy Spirit bringing healing of body, mind and spirit so people say as they did in today’s Gospel: ‘The kingdom of God is very near to us’ (Luke 10:9) 

St John the Evangelist, Burgess Hill Trinity 19 (28A) 15.10.23

The 22nd Chapter of St Matthew’s Gospel and the second verse: The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. God is the king, Jesus is the son and we and the cosmos are part of the preparing of the bride for that banquet. The whole of history is headed towards a wedding banquet where Jesus is Bridegroom and the Church is Bride.

All we’re about this morning at Mass, set within the tumult of the world including Israel-Palestine, is preparation for the end of all things when God will be everything to everyone at his wedding banquet. Blessed are those who are called to his supper!

Out of the puzzle of today’s Gospel we can distil such joy and hope!

Matthew 22 IS a puzzle. You need bible scholarship to make sense of it. Things like invited guests killing servants who bring their invitations, a man hauled unexpectedly from the streets expected to have a wedding garment! Fortunately we have four Gospels we can look at side by side, as well as knowledge of the circumstances in which St Matthew wrote his edition, especially the Jewish War with Rome that ended with the Jerusalem’s destruction in 70AD. If you look at the parallel version in Luke Chapter 14 you see a more life-like parable of people making excuses after being invited to a great dinner. Matthew, writing primarily for Jews who’d rejected and put to death Christian evangelists, shades Our Lord’s original story with an allegory that presents Jerusalem’s loss as judging their rejection of Christ. That expansion explains the un-Jesus-like sound of today’s Gospel. As for the man without a wedding garment, it's a separate parable about the need to be ready for the Lord’s invitations Matthew’s  stitched onto the banquet parable. Also, whereas Luke’s banquet is given by a private person Matthew’s is given by a king for his son, the element I’m picking up on, and that’s an interpretation of Jesus’s original parable in the light of his death and resurrection.

Like St Matthew we read the teaching of Jesus Christ in the light of what followed. Most religions centre on their founder’s teaching but Christianity has a different focus. 

The Buddha gave his teaching but Christ gave his life as well. When you enter St John’s you see no Buddha but a Crucifix above an altar. Here Sunday by Sunday, day by day we recall Christ’s parables whilst going on to plead his sacrificial gift revealed upon the Cross. I often point out in sermons here the permanent sermon in our two small west windows of the Cross and the altar. They explain that St John’s was built for the pleading of Christ’s sacrifice by a priest with bread and wine upon this altar.

The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. God is the king, Jesus is the son given on Calvary who, by the Holy Spirit, is gathering through history the scattered children of God to his banquet. History is about the purification of God’s children in anticipation of full union with the Blessed Trinity when we shall see God as he is and become like him. In the gift of the eucharist we eat and drink of Christ veiled in the sacrament to anticipate his unveiling when God will be all in all.

In his book Corpus Christi (show) Anglican theologian Eric Mascall writes ‘there is only one Mass, offered by the great high priest, Jesus Christ, at the Last Supper, on Calvary and in heaven… ultimately we do not celebrate masses or attend mass; we celebrate mass and attend mass. For every earthly mass is simply the Church’s participation in the one heavenly Mass… the Eucharist makes accessible to us (human beings), at our different points of space and moments of time, the one extra-spatial and supra-temporal redemptive activity of Christ, ‘who ever lives to make intercession for us’.

As we sing in Bourne’s great hymn: ‘Paschal Lamb, thine Offering finished once for all when thou wast slain, in its fullness undiminished shall for evermore remain, cleansing souls from every stain’. Sacrifice is about love and not death, Christ’s once for all death is part of his perpetual love offering seen at Mass. As Thomas Aquinas wrote 900 years in a lovely summary of the meaning of the eucharist: ‘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’.

My family have been to the cinema in Burgess Hill a time or two over our 22 years living in the area as its the nearest one to us. Do you know those clips we see in the cinema before the main film to give us a preview of forthcoming attractions? What we’re about this morning is like a cinema trailer - the Eucharistic meal is a forward looking taster of the full thing, the heavenly banquet no less, ‘a pledge of the glory that is to be ours’.

‘Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Blessed are those who are called to his supper’ - in this meal we see the sacrificial gift of Jesus opening heaven to us under the veil of bread and wine. We eat and drink expressing our hope and our joy, in anticipation of heaven which scripture and sacrament depict as a supper. 

The whole of history is headed towards this banquet at which Jesus is Bridegroom and the Church is Bride. And, yes, we will indeed need garments for the wedding, the garments of humility and confidence in God, both qualities to be expressed in the beautiful and challenging prayer we shall make in a minute or two: ‘Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed’.

Picture from Shanghai Museum visited 2017.

St Mary, Balcombe Trinity 18(27A) Suffering and the Supernatural 8 October 2023

There are two main ways God manifests himself. 

These are through the supernatural and through suffering.

These two ways are the trademark of Jesus Christ who both suffered and rose again.

In today’s Gospel Our Lord speaks of both, coupling his retelling of Isaiah’s parable of the vineyard we heard as the Old Testament reading to predict his sufferings, to a quote from Psalm 118:22 to predict the supernatural intervention of God which would effect his resurrection: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord's doing, and it is amazing in our eyes'?’

As Christians we have the same dual trademark so St Paul writes in our second lesson from Philippians in Chapter 3 verse 10: ‘I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings’.

When we were baptised we gained that trademark with the cross on our forehead and the promise of resurrection - Holy Spirit - empowerment. For us, bearing suffering makes sense on account of Jesus as he again and again opens up a forward vision in our lives.  

Christianity is less a moral code than supernatural empowerment through faith in Jesus Christ, ‘the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings’. Once our faith gets woken up - and that happens repeatedly - we find ourselves loosened from the pains of life into achieving wondrous things through the supernatural working within us of the God who raises the dead.

There’s a lot of pain involved for any family afflicted by Alzheimer’s. You are dealing with relentless frustrations as domestic routines falter through increasing forgetfulness. These hardships bring people down. I observe, though, that where there is faith in Christ the sufferings that bring you down bend you like grass in the wind which is capable of springing up again. The truth of Easter comes real in life through sufferings born in faith, through spiritual perseverance. Christians are Jesus-shaped, J shaped irrepressible folk – you know if you press an I down it becomes a J - and a springy, irrepressible J springs back again. To be J-shaped, to be Christian, is to be on the winning side of life through the inner spring of perseverance.

‘I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings’.

In today’s Gospel Our Lord spoke of his suffering and resurrection in the parable of the wicked vineyard workers who killed the owner’s son. That great poet and priest, Fr. Raneiro Cantalamessa writes of the Cross in these words: ‘In the Alps in summer, when a mass of cold air from the North clashes with hot air from the South, frightful storms break out disturbing the atmosphere; dark clouds move around, the wind whistles, lightning rends the sky from one end to the other and the thunder makes the mountains tremble. Something similar took place in the Redeemer’s soul where the extreme evil of sin clashed with the supreme holiness of God disturbing it to the point that it caused Him to sweat blood and forced the cry from Him, ‘My soul is sorrowful to the point of death...nevertheless Father, not My will but Yours be done’

‘O generous love!’ wrote John Henry Newman, ‘That he who smote in man for man the foe, the double agony in man (that is of body and soul) for man should undergo, and that he should do this, ‘in the garden secretly, and on the Cross on high.  Praise to the holiest in the height!’

Suffering is close to the supernatural action of God - this is Christ’s experience and ours. 

I remember my parish priest when I was an Oxford student evoking the victory of the Redemption in these sorts of words. Imagine, he would say, the immense pressure on a point in space which had the whole force and weight of the universe upon it.  Then imagine the moral universe and the weight of sin from the creation of the world up to now and beyond to the completion of things.  Then imagine that moral weight pressed to one point upon the heart of Jesus in Gethsemane.  Then see the value of the sweated blood and the victory it attains through a disposition of one human heart totally transparent to the love and power of God. It attains the resurrection.

I was once a Missionary in Guyana, South America where I worked among the native Amerindians. These indigenous people believe in many evil spirits, above all what they call ‘kenaima’. A youth around 18 was fishing one day and felt kenaima attack him from behind. The evil spirit is said to go up the rectum. Whether it was a physical attack by the demon or psychological I do not know. What I can tell you is that when I came to his hammock the life was literally ebbing away from him and his family were planning where his grave should be. To be attacked by kenaima was a death sentence without respite in the old village religion.

Praise God for the new religion and for the Cross of Jesus and his Sacraments that take their force from him! 

We encouraged the youth as we prepared him for Anointing and Holy Communion in words from St. John’s first letter: ‘Jesus in you is greater than kenaima’. Most of the village gathered into Church  for a prayer vigil for the boy during which a priest took Holy Communion to him. A vigil of prayer and praise to God continued all night as the boy’s strength returned. The next Sunday he was with the Music group playing the guitar at Mass.

I am convinced his right understanding of Holy Communion as bringing the power and presence of Jesus right into him saved his life. We saw a remarkable testimony to the victory of Our Lord over evil powers. Those words from St. John’s first letter chapter 4 verse 4 have never lost their power over me: ‘He who is in us - Jesus - is greater than he who is in the world - the devil’.

‘I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings’.

Do you want that - to know Jesus? His resurrection power is here among us as the Lord’s people on the Lord’s day gathered around the Lord’s table - and - here’s the rub - in your individual life and mine, in our sufferings, not resented but born cheerfully with the Holy Spirit’s assistance. 

As you share the joys and griefs of your circle and carry their sufferings to Our Lord in prayer you will bear the irrepressible trademark of Jesus, J-shaped and on the winning side of life through him who ‘was sorrowful unto death’ and rose to make this day ‘the day of resurrection’. Alleluia!

 

Wivelsfield & St Richard, Haywards Heath St Francis 4.10.23

I have always been fascinated by today’s Saint - here he is in a picture that makes a 13th century face and life immediately real to us. It's from around 1278 and it's by the great early Renaissance Italian artist Cimabue who is thought to have best represented the Saint. 

As Cimabue’s portrait brings Francis alive to us so Francis himself brings Christ alive to us. One of the prayers that captures to my mind the power of today’s Saint begins ‘Lord Jesus Christ, when the world was growing cold, you renewed the sacred marks of your passion in the flesh of the most blessed Francis, to inflame our hearts with the fire of your love’. 

The centre of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is Our Lord’s suffering for us upon the Cross. We represent that suffering day by day at the altar and try to understand our own sufferings with a eye to his which are life-giving through Our Lord’s resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Just as his words ‘This is my body which is given for you… my blood which is shed for you’ are at the centre of the eucharist, whenever Christianity is refreshed in people or in cultures it is through the appreciation of just what God did in letting his Son bear the suffering of the Cross for each and for all. Though God’s love extends back to creation and forward to heaven it has found its focus in the wounds it bore on Mount Calvary almost 2000 years ago. 2033 will be a big year for Christianity across the world.

So was the 13th century and the early 1220s when one man was privileged to be made a fresh focus of the love of God shown in the crucifixion of Our Lord by receiving the wound prints of Christ’s passion on Mount La Verna. Show Pietro Lorenzetti’s fresco Francis, close to the end of his life, told of seeing an angel or seraph with six wings hovering above him, whose outstretched hands and closed feet were fixed to the Cross. Suddenly, he relates, traces of wound prints, so-called ‘stigmata’ began to be visible on his hands and feet as he had seen them shortly before on the crucified image above him, an extraordinary gift which continued to the end of his life about which Francis spoke little but which are well attested from the 13th century.

One of the mysteries of Christianity is its timespan. Over 2000 years Christian faith has waxed and waned across the world. Wherever faith has grown and spread you can always trace it back to the preaching of the Cross in some way and Francis, as you can see from what I am sharing, has become to us a very great visual aid if I dare say that. 

St John Henry Newman admitted that, though regular contemplation of the sufferings of Christ was essential to living in God’s love, it was for him more a discipline and less a joy for him to dwell upon them. The life of St Francis is an encouragement here, and an invitation to have cold hearts rekindled in love towards God, through pondering regularly the wounds of Christ borne on our behalf and to invoke the prayers of a great lover of God.

There is a coldness towards Jesus Christ in post-Christian culture. May the prayer and example of St Francis, who received the sacred marks of his passion in his flesh 800 years ago, inflame our hearts with the fire of God’s love shown to us in the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.