St Richard, Haywards Heath Easter 5(C) 15th May 2022

 

 

In dealing firsthand with the hike in the cost of living, with COVID and many of us second hand with Ukraine, not to mention our own contingencies, those words of the apostles in Acts 14 have a resonance ‘We all have to experience many hardships before we enter the kingdom of God’. It's that kingdom in its fullness beyond this world, which we yearn for, which is subject of our second reading from the book of Revelation Chapter 21. John the visionary speaks there of a new earth and heaven and a new Jerusalem. These new things are to be found already in the Church on earth inasmuch as the resurrection of Jesus thrills through her life. That’s why we read Revelation in Eastertide. 

God does indeed dwell with men and women through Jesus veiled in word and sacrament. We’ve got his life in the Christian community. This life is a foretaste, a preview of forthcoming attractions, where ‘mourning and crying and pain will be no more’. Oh yes there’s mourning and crying and pain in the life of the Christian church as much as outside it - but it’s mourning, crying and pain sweetened by the Lord we know who’s with us. 

Just a month ago I was in the sanctuary to hear the priest say, piercing the candle with the five studs at the Easter Vigil: ‘By his holy and glorious wounds may Christ our Lord guard and keep us’. The Paschal Candle is a triumphant witness, standing tall, that says God is above death. It also reminds us he’s not above suffering, as witnessed to all on Good Friday. That is so very, very important to us as witnesses to Christ in a world losing hope. God, the God and Father of Jesus, expects nothing of us he’s not prepared to go through himself. This is the main ground of hope we cling to as Christians as we ourselves experience hardship, hope that isn’t just out of this world - though the resurrection is all of that - but hope rooted in sharp human reality, in blood, sweat and tears. 

Our Blessed Lord has drawn the sting of death and suffering for all who turn to him. The vision of St John in our second reading, the vision of Christianity, is a now and then vision. What is then to be in a transformed universe is now present – this is the gospel and it is particularly expressed in the Paschal Candle and its piercings which towers over the sanctuary for the 50 days of Easter season

I always take heart when I pray before the coronation altar in Westminster Abbey. Above it there’s another quotation from Revelation: ‘The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ’. What does it mean to seek that ‘the kingdom of the world becomes the kingdom of God’? Certainly it is a robust vision of inclusion though that inclusion extends beyond this world into ‘the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting’. Nevertheless at St Richard’s we take very seriously our responsibility to serve the common good in our community evident yesterday at the craft fair and week by week in Ric’s Bench and Memory Moments cafe. With you I pledge to do my bit to help these ventures during the pastoral vacancy - may that be short! May God’s richest blessing follow Fr Chris, Carolyn and Sam and remain with us - ‘give and it will be given to you’ - as we seek a faithful priest to succeed a rich legacy! As we serve here the good of our town we are serving the aspiration for each and every person to be granted opportunity to reach their full potential especially those hardest pressed in the current economic climate.

The kingdom of God is nothing less than his reign. That’s not just for the new heaven and earth but for now. God reigns now where folk will let him in. I am always praying we see more prophetically gifted leadership in public life, not least a Wilberforce or two or three in Parliament! It says in Proverbs 29 verse 18 that ‘where there’s no vision the people perish’. Away from God’s reign there’s ‘mourning and crying and pain’ without consolation. Those who promote a vision of God help keep us faithful to enduring values paving the way to the heavenly Jerusalem descending from God. 

Lastly let’s see what we can glean from today’s Gospel from St John chapter 13. ‘A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you’ (v34). Love makes the world and the church go round. The best sort of evangelism is a community that intrigues people with the love of Jesus. The vision thing centres in Christianity on loving God and your neighbour as yourself. It’s resourced by God’s love poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit as St Paul writes in Romans 5 verse 5. ‘As I have loved you’ – as God loves us – we’re to love one another. This is the Christian call and when it’s applied it brings transformation.

Wise politicians know their need of the voluntary sector. Communities can’t be built and neither can citizens be formed without people who’re prepared to put themselves out for others.

What’s the answer to the abortion rate? To family breakdown? To care for the elderly? To those who wish to legalise mercy killing? The answer doesn’t lie so much in policies as in a spiritual revival bringing a fresh outpouring of love. ‘A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you’.

Just to take one of my list, isn’t the problem of people wishing they were dead and not suffering  linked not just to low pain tolerances but also to the lack of compassion around in our families? If people know they’re loved they can brave pain. You can cope with no end of hardship if you know you’re loved. Values come from vision and we sorely need vision in our society. The Lord send more visionaries into public office, some of Christian conviction with a yearning for the new heaven and the new earth where righteousness dwells.

May the kingdom of this world advance a little towards becoming the kingdom of our God and of his Christ through this eucharist, through our prayer, through fresh concern for the world of politics and through a new wave of the Holy Spirit pouring his love upon us, upon our town, county, nation and world. Amen.

St John, Burgess Hill Easter 2 Hope 24th April 2022

There’s a lot around to trouble us. Warfare in Europe we never imagined would return to our continent. COVID hitting more widely now though mercifully in a less deadly fashion. The rise in energy costs and the associated fall in living standards linked to it. These are three things that trouble almost everyone and they provoke a variety of responses including more talk about the essential meaning of life.

In the midst of widespread pessimism our religion shapes and gives meaning to our lives but some of our peers are saying ‘no wonder people turn to religion to escape this awful scenario’. The assumption widely held is that religious belief provides an escape from reality – and yet the realities we live through seem to demand such an escape, however irrational. Without faith people are entering deep pessimism as they face the troubles we all share at this season.  

What does Easter have to say to such pessimism? Is what I’m about as a Christian just otherworldly escapism? How does the Easter good news engage with the reality of human suffering and how can it best impact the loss of hope around us?

As I reflect with you on this Octave Day of the Easter Feast I look back eight days to our blessing of the Paschal Candle when five pins were stuck in it to represent the wounds of Christ, commemorating today’s Gospel reading. Jesus said to Thomas, 'Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.' Thomas answered him, 'My Lord and my God!'

How did Our Lord deal with Thomas’ pessimism? He pointed him to those very same wounds the Risen Christ carried from his crucifixion. In other words ‘you can be sure it is I, Thomas, and you can lay hold of sure and certain hope in the face of all in your world that would confound you’.

As Peter and the apostles answered the high priest in our first reading from Acts Chapter 5: The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. The Jesus raised up at Easter is the same Jesus killed by hanging … on a tree in other words the Cross. That’s why the Church decorates, if that is the right word, its Easter candle symbol with the wounds. As the priest says piercing the candle with the five studs at the Easter Vigil: By his holy and glorious wounds may Christ our Lord guard and keep us. 

The Paschal Candle is a triumphant witness, standing tall, that says God is above death. It also reminds us he’s not above suffering. That is so very, very important to us as witnesses to Christ in a world that’s losing hope. God, the God and Father of Jesus, expects nothing of us he’s not prepared to go through himself. This is the main ground of hope we cling to as Christians, a hope that isn’t just out of this world - though the resurrection is all of that - but a hope rooted in human reality. What I am about as a Christian IS an engagement with otherworldly consolation, it’s absolutely true. Christianity is a metaphysical religion, it’s beyond (meta) the physical because of Christ’s resurrection. Yet it’s rooted in the most basic and painful human reality.

God revealed the resurrection by sending his Son to die for us. The five wounds of Christ on his arms, legs and side are the great symbol of this and as such they engage with our sorrows for he is and he remains for us as Isaiah prophesied a man of sorrows acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53v3). 

If I am talking about Christian hope this morning I am talking not about a shallow optimism but resurrection faith firmly rooted in Christ as the suffering Saviour from all eternity. Second century Bishop Melito of Sardis in an Easter sermon wrote of how Christ’s sufferings should be seen in the suffering of holy people right back through the Old Testament: He is the Passover of our salvation. He was present in many so as to endure many things. In Abel he was slain; in Isaac bound; in Jacob a stranger; in Joseph sold; in Moses exposed; in David persecuted; in the prophets dishonoured. He became incarnate of the Virgin…buried in the earth, but he rose from the dead, and was lifted up to the height of heaven. He is the silent lamb, the slain lamb, who was born of Mary the fair ewe. He was seized from the flock and dragged away to slaughter.  

In Christ’s sufferings we see human suffering in a new light. I can’t speak too well myself, my sufferings have been slight, but I’ve been close to women and men of God who say so, who say God in Christ comes close in suffering. I think of people I’ve visited in great pain telling me of the grace they’d experienced grasping a holding cross. I think of instances where my marking the cross in holy oil on the foreheads and palms of the sick, commemorating Christ’s wounds, lifts their spirits. Péguy said a Christian is a sad man saved from despair by the Cross of Christ. 

In the book of Revelation we read of how grace… and peace come from Jesus Christ… the firstborn of the dead, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood. St John goes on to predict the risen Christ’s return Look! He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him. The wounds of Christ are source of hope to believers, though they will be troublesome to those who pierced him and that includes you and I through unrepented sins. 

Easter is incomplete until the Lord’s Return. Charles Wesley’s Advent hymn Lo he comes enters imaginatively into the sight of the risen Christ coming to be judge of the world:

Those dear tokens of his passion still his dazzling body bears; 
cause of endless exultation to his ransomed worshipers; 
with what rapture gaze we on those glorious scars!

Indeed it will be, and that is our sure and certain hope, which should help us bring all pessimists to Christ’s Cross. 

We Christians are saddened by suffering but our sadness is saved from despair by that very Cross and by the out of this world resurrection truth we’re celebrating in these great days of Eastertide which will be fully revealed at the Lord’s return! 

Alleluia Christ is risen - he is risen indeed, alleluia!

St Gabriel, Pimlico Trinity 2 (11B) 13.6.21

 

With the G7 summit we have been following thinking and resolutions about the future of the world linked to countering COVID by vaccination and addressing the environmental crisis. Sometimes people see Christianity apart from such forward thinking and that is sadly mistaken. The worship of Jesus Christ is inseparable from an aspiration that ‘the kingdom of this world become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ’, a scripture emblazoned behind the altar in Westminster Abbey, Revelation 11:15.

Today’s readings touch on the future - the future of the world, the church and each one of us as individuals chosen and loved by God. The Gospel reading from St Mark, Chapter 4 touches on the nature of God’s kingdom and can be read in relation to his ultimate plan for the world. The first reading from Ezekiel Chapter 17 illuminates God’s forward plan for the church and the second reading from 2 Corinthians 5 the best future he has for us as individuals. I wasn’t at the zoom meeting to look at these readings on Thursday but I picked up from Jack how people saw in them those three lines of thought: the key role of God in inspiring mission, that whether a Church thrives or not is up to him as also to the carrying of responsibilities by individuals like us called to execute his will in Pimlico in 2021.

Three readings then, and three aspects of mission, all of which we can engage with further after Mass over lunch. The process we are in at Heaven’s Gate is true to the Gospel where ‘using many parables … Jesus spoke the word to them, so far as they were capable of understanding… and he explained everything to his disciples when they were alone’. Lockdown has been a set back to us here but what we are about is set within a longer term process and that should help us gain heart.

'This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man throws seed on the land. Night and day, while he sleeps, when he is awake, the seed is sprouting and growing; how, he does not know. Of its own accord the land produces first the shoot, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. And when the crop is ready, he loses no time; he starts to reap because the harvest has come.' I love that image - ‘first the shoot, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear’. Though in terms of numbers we feel set back if there is sowing going on reaping will come about. My task as a visitor is to encourage our keeping faith in that big picture and using what resources we have to bless and go with what God is accomplishing in Churchill Gardens stage by stage.

When the kingdom of God is preached and lived the church grows.

Anne and I spent a couple of nights in Hastings last week. A century ago this was home to one of Christianity’s most forward thinkers, the French priest scientist Teilhard de Chardin who trained there because of the anti-clericalism of his day in France. As a geologist he climbed the cliffs. As a seminarian he trained as a priest. Teilhard said his first Mass in Our Lady, Star of the Sea Church at Hastings (bottom left). On Friday’s feast I walked under the cliffs and recalled Teilhard’s devotion to the Sacred Heart, to Christ who promised to ‘cast fire upon the earth’ (Luke 12:49) seeing the fire of divine love as parallel to the fiery lava in the heart of the earth. When Christ’s heart was pierced at his death stones were heard breaking in the earth beneath. This groaning of the earth anticipated the transformation and gathering together in Christ of the whole creation. When we lift up host and chalice at the eucharist, transformed material, Teilhard taught, we anticipate the transformation of all things starting in this room and rippling out through this estate, across London, the world and the cosmos! Rich stuff, which came back to me walking by the sea in Hastings. What we sow through prayer and the celebration of the eucharist is preparing a kingdom harvest, that is, it anticipates Jesus Christ being made the be all and end all. 

Our first reading from Ezekiel with its image of grafting has a bearing on how we see the Church in this bigger picture of God’s kingdom forming up in Christ. The Lord is ‘the one who stunts tall trees and makes the withered green’. This small gathering is green at different levels - we might like to explore that over lunch - maybe a green-ness that is naive, we hope not, or one that sees lockdown as a passing winter that will be followed by church growth. Ezekiel’s image of green fruitful branches that give shade is a precious one as we gather today in a place as needy as this estate. Lastly, making the withered green is a work of the Holy Spirit in the individuals associated with St Gabriel’s committed to Heaven’s Gate mission, which brings us to the second reading.

‘We are always full of confidence’ Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5 verse 6 going on to affirm how that confidence is linked to faith and not sight, to the hope of heaven more than to earthly appearances. As ‘Heaven’s Gate’ it is that sort of faith we are to instil but it must start with each one of us as individuals keeping their faith green. How do we do that? It is more than receiving the love of God in Jesus Christ which we will do shortly in Holy Communion. I mean, if you want to build that faith, that love, the recipe is to give it away. The only way to keep yourself in the love of Jesus is to be forever sharing it with others. Heaven’s Gate is made so by you and I being always ready to hand on the love of Christ. Remember the Magic Penny song sung for years at primary school - it never loses its force - ‘Love is something if you give it away, give it away, give it away. Love is something if you give it away, you end up having more. So be it in Churchill Gardens starting at Heaven’s Gate.

Today’s scripture has as much relevance to the future of the world as the G7 meeting but like that meeting it needs practical application through you and I in generous living woven together within this pioneer Christian community. The Lord who ‘makes the withered green’ is at work among us and in this Garden Estate as part of a greater work impacting the future of the world in which the kingdom of this world is giving way to ‘a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace’ (Preface of Christ the King).