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!

 

St Bartholomew, Brighton Pentecost Sunday 28.5.23

A tale is told of a monk who became so holy people touching his garments got healed.  

Marvelling at such wonders, especially as the monk seemed outwardly little different to his brothers, his superiors called him to account.  

‘What causes all these miracles?’ they asked. 

‘I am quite mystified’ he replied.  ‘All I do is try hard to will only what God wills.  Prosperity does not lift me up.  Adversity does not cast me down.  I am persuaded that God does all things, or permits all that happens, for his glory and for our greater good; so I am at peace no matter what happens and pray as best I can that God’s will may be done fully in me and through me’.

Now you or I may not be monks but we are certainly called to take a leaf out of this monk’s book.  

We may yearn to be people who heal before they hurt other people, but where is the secret of being such a healer?  

Surely it is in a deep acceptance of our circumstances as being in the will of God?  

How simple – and yet how challenging – is the route to holiness.  

It’s making our wills one with God’s will; as best we can, in all the circumstances of our life, that brings with it anointing in the Holy Spirit.

That anointing first came today, the Day of Pentecost, when ‘the disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit… and the crowd gathered and was bewildered, amazed and astonished’ (Acts 2:4,6-7)

As Pope Francis has said, the Holy Spirit is the best Easter present. This evening the Paschal Candle is removed to signal the end of Eastertide but the risen Christ’s greatest gift remains with us.

What a wondrous gift! Associated with creation itself, ‘breathing on the face of the waters’, associated with the resurrection in today’s Gospel where Christ breathes the gift upon the apostles and, in today’s first reading, associated with fire and power and speaking in strange languages on the Day of Pentecost!

What a wondrous gift - and yet also an everyday gift! One for people who make their wills one with God’s will in every circumstance of their life.

‘Come down, O Love divine, seek thou this soul of mine and kindle it thy holy flame bestowing… for none can guess your grace ‘til they become the place wherein the Holy Spirit makes his dwelling!’

In March I went on retreat to Crawley Down monastery praying, among other things, about the struggle we have at home with a family member diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. 

A remarkable insight came to me linked to the Holy Spirit about how God can work through dementia where there’s faith in him. When memory fades you live more in the present moment. This means being left behind somewhat by family and friends with busy diaries and work and recreational commitments. 

As I prayed on retreat I recalled a book I’d read by the contemporary novelist Santa Montefiore. entitled ‘Here and now’. The key figure, Marigold, spent her life taking care of those around her, juggling family life with the running of the local shop, and being an all-round leader in her community. When she finds herself forgetting things the story underlines how she is blessed to dwell more and more with supportive family and friends in the ‘here and now’ which is the book title. 

Are we not all meant to attend to every moment of life as best we can, to be as present here and now as we can be? I thought. And God - this was my key thought on retreat - God too is found in the here and now. Not so much by pondering the past or the future. 

The Holy Spirit has been defined as ‘God in the present moment’. Living with dementia is therefore potentially about living with God and others close to you through rediscovery of the ‘here and now’ - and the joy of living in God’s presence can often be manifested in those suffering this ailment. 

Hardships of every kind throw us back on God and our friends. The readings today remind us how the anointing of the Holy Spirit comes in shared circumstances. In Acts 2v1 we read how ‘they were all together in one place’. In 1 Corinthians 12v13 ‘in the one Spirit we were all baptised into one body - Jews or Greeks, slaves or free - and we were all made to drink of one Spirit’. The Gospel from John 20 recalls how on Easter Day evening ‘the doors of the house where the disciples had met being locked out of fear, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you… Receive the Holy Spirit”’.

Today is the birthday of the Church. The anointing of the Holy Spirit comes into the day by day circumstances of believers whose faith engages week by week with the meaning and power of scripture, the Breaking of Bread together. Preaching and music at St Bart’s always has an eye to leaving time for fellowship at the end of Mass, and that fellowship, often with conversation about Christian Faith, sometimes continues over food. Thank you, Holy Spirit for your work among us as a congregation, part of God’s never ending family, the holy Catholic Church!

How simple – and yet how challenging – is the route to holiness.  It may be that you are in a trial of one kind or another. I invite you to a deeper acceptance of that trial as being within the will of God. Such acceptance, as the monk said in my story, brings with it the anointing of the Holy Spirit.

Easter season which ends tonight brought me to producing a radio series available on listen again at www.premierchristianradio.com/joy. Finding joy in the Lord relates to our turning 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 knowledge of Christ grows. It takes courage though to leave aside regrets about the past and anxieties about the future to attend to the present moment where the Holy Spirit, God’s Easter present, can be found whatever our circumstances.  

I close with the prayer of Saint Paul in Romans 15:13: ‘May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit!’

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!