St Bartholomew, Brighton Easter 2 Hope 28th April 2019

There’s a lot around to remind us how reversible human progress is. False optimism protects us from voicing overmuch falling living standards, the poor unemployment prospects of our children, empty pension pots let alone our approaching death, harsh reality that it is.

Though it’s widely admitted people need religion to shape and give meaning to their lives this often comes down to a sort of ‘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 the realities we live through seem to demand such an escape, however irrational. Another coping mechanism we might identify is denial so that when you ask people how they’re getting on they come up with more and more bullish American style answers than the historic English pessimism that’s worked to date for the weather upwards.

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 on Holy Saturday Night 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 human reality for 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 the 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 in life so far, 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 a dying priest I’m visiting telling me how important and helpful the holding cross was that he’d been given. I think of many such instances where marking the cross in holy oil on the foreheads and palms of the sick, an action in itself a memorial of 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!

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

St Bartholomew, Brighton Easter Vigil Mass 20 April 2019

Tonight the full visual stops of the Liturgy are pulled out. Light and darkness, candles, the sprinkling of water – all go beyond words.

Christ is Risen - and as no tomb could contain him, no words can fathom the wonder of  the Resurrection - we rely on symbols. This annual reminder of the foundation of our Faith gives exuberance to our spirits. O truly blessed night, worthy alone to know Christ’s rising…let Mother Church rejoice, arrayed with the lightning of his glory, let this holy building shake with joy… let the trumpet of salvation sound our mighty King’s triumph!

Archbishop Anthony Bloom preached once on the story in the Acts where the miracles of the Apostles led them to be mistaken as living gods. ‘Look statues have become living men’ they said of them. We are all in a sense like statues, said the Archbishop, but as an Easter People we have become in a profound sense a living people. He went on: ‘Meeting us – me and you – can people say, ‘Yes, it is true. Christ is risen, because this woman, this child, this man is alive with a life of which I had no suspicion, a life I couldn’t even imagine’.

All of this is coming about in our lives because of the historical event we commemorate this evening. In four slightly different accounts we have the record of how, when the disciples went to the tomb of Christ, they found his grave clothes folded and no sign of the dead. In the next six weeks the Resurrected Christ was seen, according to Paul, by over 550 people on 11 different occasions. The disciples’ lives were transformed and the Church grew at an astonishing rate surviving 20 centuries to this day. Over these centuries, particularly the last two highly sceptical centuries, critical investigation has failed to overturn the historical base of the resurrection.

To capture the exuberance of Easter we have to let the historical facts and their implications take full hold of us by open-ness to the Holy Spirit. Over the centuries Spirit-given exuberance has led missionaries to the four corners of the earth. Thousands of martyrs have cheerfully faced death in the hope of the eternal kingdom opened up to the eye of faith this Easter Night!

Christ is raised – and look – so are the people here in St Bartholomew’s – they too are raised. ‘Statues have become living men’.

Those of you who follow social media may have seen an inconclusive  discussion about the timing of this service in St Bartholomew’s. When I was at Theological College this Vigil was kept at dawn at the end of an arduous week of prayer, study, fasting and community work. As the sun broke through the East window of the Community Church at Mirfield the Gloria was intoned. Grown men broke down into tears through the emotion of that moment.

Our exuberance continued throughout this Great Easter Day as gin bottles opened after 40 days! I have a good supply for later today!

Drink is good to ‘cheer the heart of man’ as Scripture says. It can also make statues of living men, as my encounter with a paralytically drunk Irish Man on St. Patrick’s Day once showed me. Years back I found a man lying as if dead on the street and got a friend to help me carry him to the nearby hospital where he was diagnosed merely paralytic!

If drink can make us as if we were dead, the Risen Christ is in the opposite business. In Anthony Bloom’s words, he’s in the business of making living men out of statues.

His joy and delight is to see people brought fully alive as the One who came to bring ‘life to the full’, the indestructible life of the resurrection gifted to us  this most holy night.

‘Meeting us – me and you –  may people say, ‘Yes, it is true. Christ is risen, because this woman, this child, this man is alive with a life of which I had no suspicion, a life I couldn’t even imagine’.

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

Easter Sunday - my last Sunday at St Giles 16.4.17

You can write about Experiencing Christ’s Love - the book’s on sale today (show) for a fiver - but it’s no substitute for experiencing it.

Thinking and writing about God is less important than being present to him. If you're present with a loved one you don’t have to construct thoughts about them since they’re there before you and you just enjoy them. Rather like when you’re listening to music you don’t think about the music so much as lose yourself in it.

The Lord is truly risen. Alleluia!

The last word isn’t with corruption, death and loss but with the loving presence of God. Thinking about the truth of Christ’s resurrection is natural - but it only takes you so far. We can think of the solid historical evidence of fearful disciples changed to bold witnesses and the Jewish Sabbath getting shifted to the Lord’s Day neither of which could just happen.

We can think about Jesus and how his name lives on in the consciousness of the world after 80 generations - but we can experience him.

Experiencing Christ’s love in worship, prayer, study, service and reflection got me writing my book. I did so though as both an ideas person and a people person - actually as a parson. Experts are uncertain about the exact origins of parson, although one theory says it’s a shortened form of the Latin persona ecclesiae, "person of the church."

The priest or parson gives a face to the institution and it’s been my privilege with Anne’s help to do that up to my 9^th Easter here at St Giles.

Just as my personal encounters with God are more significant than my sermons and books your personal engagement with me, your encouragement and forbearance weigh more than any imaginable written evaluation.

In my book I tell how my own devotion to Christ has been rekindled through engagement with villagers.

I know there’ve been times when the ideas person has won over the people person, when I’ve been so preoccupied with my thoughts I’ve passed you by. Times when the ideas person has held forth in the Horsted Club, Men’s Lunch, or wherever there’s a good argument to be had, and maybe the parson got a bit forgotten as the Harvey’s flowed!

All is shortly to be history as another partnership of priest and people ends tonight and a new name chosen, soon we hope, to go up on the Rectors’ board.

The Christian cause will outlive me here as surely as the Risen Christ surpasses the boundaries of space and time. God who brought everything out of nothing and Jesus from a virgin womb today brought inextinguishable life from the grave. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever!

In this forward movement here at St Giles I want to commend to your prayers and active help our Churchwardens David Lamb and Peter Vince, Deacon David Howland and the Parochial Church Council as they continue to serve and lead in Jesus Christ through the demands of the pastoral vacancy that starts tomorrow.

I look forwards to coming back to St Giles as is fitting, and most especially to celebrate the 40^th Anniversary of my priesthood on St Thomas’s Day, Monday 3rd July 7.30pm when you'll have visitors from near and far including the Bishop of Guyana.

Thinking, thought, sermons, books aren’t the last thing rather its presence, the presence of one to another and of Christ through us all that’s ultimate .

On this hill we serve a cause that outlasts us as we engage with those precious gifts, the Bible and the Eucharist.

My last word to you is: seek those gifts, experience Christ’s love, establish a life of worship, prayer, study, service and reflection. Keep a stake in the cause that will outlast us all.

Jesus Christ will outlast the cosmos and host a reunion. Easter is the pledge of that.

His Resurrection will be ours and he will be everything to everyone!

Easter vigil and 8am eucharist 27th March 2016

Joy isn’t just a component of Christianity it’s the key.

How can you believe in God without sensing joy?

Today/tonight we see God writ large, God to the dimensions of God and not to ours, showing his grandeur as taking human form he breaks through death and reveals eternal life to us and for us.

On the third day he rose again in accordance with the scriptures.

We gain joy as we gain God and that’s in the present moment. This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.  Psalm 118:24

What the resurrection effects is twofold. It delivers us from the prison of our mental constructs of past and future.

To know Christ is risen is to know God’s unalterable newness, the same yesterday, today and tomorrow – to know it and live in it is joy.

This is eternal life, to know God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent. John 17:3

In that knowledge of what God in Christ has done for us we gain two benefits.

First we’re freed by forgiving both wrongs we've suffered from others and by welcoming forgiveness for the wrongs we ourselves have done.

Second we’re relieved of fear for the future. Tomorrow also is God’s and his love is stronger than the worst power we’ll ever encounter – and that includes death.

You will be with me always, he says, nothing can separate us, enter my joy, as the Psalmist writes: You show me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy; in your right hand are pleasures forevermore. Psalm 16:11

Absence of joy links to self-sufficiency and pride, imprisonment in past regrets, future anxiety all of which cut us off from the living God.

Today/tonight we affirm God for who he is, and his opening to our intuition of death’s diminishment.

The only meaningful thing in life is what conquers death, not what but who, Jesus Christ, true God and true Man.

Since April 33AD, or maybe 27AD with a six year slippage, humanity has the full picture of God in his grandeur and humans in their immense potential as those in his image destined for the glorious liberty of the children of God (Romans 8:21).

The hope of this glory is cause of our joy.

Our intellects balk at death and wrestle with its reality 20 centuries on from Easter. How has the world changed, we ask, with the reality of evil this week in Brussels and the genocide committed by Radovan Karadzic?

There are no rational knockdown arguments here but when your heart is touched by the risen Christ its enough.

We are joyful in spirit today/tonight and always as Christians for we know deep down God is God and he always will be God and we have fellowship with him that’ll never end.

Joy isn’t just a component of Christianity it’s the key.

We can’t believe in God as he truly is without sensing joy and today/tonight we see him as he really is, God writ large, God to the dimensions of God, showing his grandeur, taking human form, breaking through death and revealing eternal life to us and for us.

This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.  

May the unalterable newness of Jesus be our joy today, tomorrow, to the last syllable of recorded time, and beyond that to eternal ages! Alleluia!

Easter 2 (B) 12 April 2015

Last week I attended Easter Mass in a suburb of Dieppe, a joyous occasion with drinks after showing Easter week retains its religious significance among the French.

Highlight was a conversation with Martin a young man just setting out on a three month walk to Santiago de Compostela. Having given up his job in IT he is set for the priesthood. His joy was part of the joy that overflowed from the Mass led by his mentor Père Geoffroy, the Curé of Dieppe, a remarkable priest I also met and to whom I suggested a visit to Saint Giles.

What impacted me in that brief encounter with the French Church was - I ticked this box myself - a priest enjoying Christianity pointing people at Mass to the joy of faith, and, secondly seeds of faith sprouting into vocation and counter-cultural self-sacrifice.

Martin the mid 20s computer guy shared how the last two years have meant his turning tables on how the world sees poverty, celibacy and obedience. What he shared built on impressions I gained in conversation from 15 young people we hosted here in Holy Week and with my own sons that I want to build from this morning.

I tend to see the young as nothing like poor, chaste and obedient but they - some of them - are rejecting the counsel that money, sex and power are all it’s about and, unless you get loads you'll be a loser.

These conversations came back to me as I read that first lesson from Acts which I'd like us to read again as a mighty reminder of the counter-cultural consequences of the resurrection of Jesus: 

The whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.

What a counter to worldly ways of thinking be they 1st or 21st century! 

I think of how first of all the passage counters the fashion of individualism by which each of us does our own thing as something of a default, often with the ready permission of family members - like my trip across the ocean to France which Anne blessed. 

To think of individuals and families so impacted by the truth this world is to be lived in the light of future resurrection they became of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions! Young Martin is losing all to have the church for his family. I of course do live in a church house - but I have my own down the road for later. 

Just landing the thought of sharing life as Christians one lovely feature of St Giles like Sacré Couer is the capacity to share our life together after l'heure de Jesu. As in Dieppe the priest here says a one hour Mass but stays for two hours. 

Back to that passage. It has countercultural obedience as well as poverty. As many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet and it was distributed to each as any had need. 

Martin has wrestled with what it means to surrender your life to those over you in the Lord. He is part of an authoritative local church, under a charismatic pastor but he himself is under no illusions. Christianity is ideally authoritative but practically it's a matter of putting yourself under authority. He won't always have a charismatic over him but he is set to obey whoever will be over him for the next 40 years.

It made me think of 14 Bishops of different hues I've had over my years, three of Bradford, one of Oxford who selected me for training, two of Sheffield, two of Guyana, one of Coventry, two of London and three of Chichester including Bishop Eric who appointed me to the diocese. 

To live as a Christian, let alone as a priest, is to live submissive to the risen Christ and, in bible based ecclesiology, obedient to those over you in the Lord so that, though at times I balk at it, I, we, remain happy to lay our tithe at the apostles’ feet i.e. that of the Bishop and Diocese of Chichester who have oversight of Saint Gilles. 

When I ask you to accept my authority it's that the Bishop shares with me and it's in the context both of Christian obedience and of my own and indeed the Bishop's fallibility. The apostolic office calls forth obedience but, as I was sharing the other week, the office bearing person is as much in need of mercy as the next Christian.

These sorts of question were probably little in the minds of the believers described in Acts 4 whose whole lives had been turned upside down by what God did to death through Jesus as we read in the passage. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.
The Easter season is an opportunity to refresh ourselves as Easter Christians. As such we are or we should be determined to face up to death and other inescapable things in life with an ongoing challenge of the things that deceive us both internal and external. As I listened to Martin I recalled recent conversations with my sons about mortality following their grandmother's death which illustrate one such deceit, namely the one that we'll never die, or that our life in this world should be our only concern.

We have many world views in play and it is the loud voice of so-called relativism that we can believe what we choose. We must answer though for what we choose to believe and a materialistic world view has no answer to a holy God. 

John Henry Newman who's now made Saint in France and England said To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often. He also said  Fear not your life shall come to an end, but rather that it shall never have a beginning. Meeting, sharing with young people recently who have seen that spiritual beginning. I have been heartened by openness to the only creed which both addresses mortality directly and puts humanity right. As Newman again said - I read him on my break - The name of Jesus can raise the dead and transfigure and beautify the living. 

So may this Easter Octave Day eucharist be imbued with great power, grace and freedom as we exalt in the resurrection of Our Lord who transfigures and beautifies us as part of his counter cultural joyous purpose for the world, for France, for the United Kingdom, mid Sussex and Horsted Keynes Saint Giles!

Easter Sunday vigil and dawn eucharist sermon

Yes to celebration, yes to sorrow, yes to today, yes to tomorrow.

Easter gives us what the world would give its bottom dollar for - I mean hope.

This is the day that the Lord has made so that tomorrow also is God's.

Even if today is the day of your death there will be a tomorrow for yesterday, today, tomorrow Jesus is the same. All must change but Jesus will never change!

Talking of giving your bottom dollar last week I visited an art exhibition in St Marylebone Church on the theme of Stations of the Cross. I talked to an artist who’d made a giant cross suspended horizontally above the nave covered in one dollar bills.

Another cross he’d painted was on a large canvas surrounded by images of hypocrisy. Another life size Cross among the fourteen Stations I saw in a side Chapel was carried by a human skeleton I assumed to be plastic!

In different ways only art can accomplish creative men and women captured the weight of hopelessness in our culture.

The dollars festooning the large cross represented the uselessness of putting hope in amassing money.

The hypocrisy surrounding the cross in the large canvas represented the uselessness in putting your ultimate hope in leaders be they of state or church.

The skeleton carrying the cross alarmed me with its graphic reminder of how death mocks any hope that you put in this world only for, as far as you and I are concerned, in a matter of a few years death will carry us forward.

Forward to where? That is the million dollar question - worth your bottom dollar to have answered - and this anniversary day is about an answer!

300 years of critical biblical scholarship hasn't disproved what Jesus Christ revealed to us at Easter concerning what is forward and ahead of earthly life.

Yes to celebration, yes to sorrow, yes to today, yes to tomorrow.

Years ago Timothy Lynch was given a dishonorable discharge from the Army for an incident he would have just as soon forget forever.

He walked away from it deeply hoping that he’d never run into the men from his platoon for the rest of his life.

There was one soldier though he couldn’t run away from, his father.

His father came from a generation that held military service in the highest of esteem and had excelled as a soldier, a no nonsense man, strong on discipline but not so communicative with love. The thought of having to tell his father that he’d failed in the service filled him with dread.

After some years Timothy took the cautionary step of sending a telegram to his father explaining his dishonourable discharge, rather than tell him face to face. He got back a three line telegram. It said:

I will stand by you no matter what happens.
I will be there tomorrow.
Remember who you are.

Those three simple sentences brought reconciliation and hope to Timothy and they sum up in essence the message of Easter.

The women who met the risen Lord Jesus carried the same to his disciples.

I will stand by you no matter what happens.
I will be there tomorrow.
Remember who you are.

Despite their compromise and weakness, God promised he'd be with them and us no matter what.

Like the first disciples who denied, betrayed and forsook  Christ we can reject God but, like Timothy's good father, God won’t reject us.

Despite the very real tragedy and evil that surround us in the world, God promises the triumph of hope in the glorious resurrection of his Son Jesus Christ.

We can despair but God won’t stop infusing hope in the darkness.

Despite the fact we will die, life is to triumph over death.

God’s immortal life filling the world since Easter shines through the universe to brighten every tomorrow lifting our anxieties.

Yes to celebration, yes to sorrow, yes to today, yes to tomorrow.

On Easter Sunday a profound miracle began. Fearful, anxious men and women with low self-esteem and no hope, were made confident, empowered, courageous and daring.

God gave them the gift of the Spirit and said to them, you’ve already got everything you need, here is my blessing, now go and heal the world.

Are you with them?

Alleluia Christ is risen! He is risen indeed, alleluia!