St Richard, Haywards Heath Trinity 11(22C) Humility 28.8.22

‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.’ Luke 14:11

There’s a great deception that humility is something passive. It’s not, it's the most active tendency there is if you’re truly in the business of countering the strength of self-will and we all need more of that.

In case I get praise for this sermon - some of you are very kind to me - the words of Thomas More are at the back of my mind: ‘whoever bids others to do right, but gives an evil example by acting the opposite way is like a foolish weaver who weaves with one hand and unravels the cloth just as quickly with the other’.

Yes, humility is the Christian distinctive and it’s far from making yourself a doormat it's the day by day struggle for holiness commended by Our Lord in the Gospel as a taking of the lower place where we can and by our first reading from Ecclesiasticus as refusal to forsake the Lord. ‘The beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord; the heart has withdrawn from its Maker’.

When people live without God they’re bound to centre themselves on themselves though many I know who live without God show immense kindness to others. I put that down to God giving them a better start than I! As a believer I don’t see myself as the centre of the world in principle but in practice to my dying day I’ll be actively countering touchiness, resentfulness against criticism, impatience when I don’t get my own way, eagerness for fame, anxiety lest I miss being thanked and praised and so on.

‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.’

Our Lord mixed with everybody. Today’s Gospel shows him mixing at the upper end of the society of his day at the home of a prominent Pharisee. He felt the need to address people trying to get places near the most famous. It’s a bit like when the Bishop visits - as hopefully he will do soon to inaugurate a new parish priest - when you struggle at the buffet to get near him, sometimes on account of the clergy around him!  

What is it about the human condition that makes us so celebrity conscious, wanting celebrity for ourselves and delighting on occasions we meet real live celebrities? 

I met Edwina Currie on the train a year or two back which got my mind thinking about eggs and other things. What really struck me in this face to face encounter though was the caring way she saw onto and off a busy train a frail man I took to be her husband. ‘Judge not and you will not be judged’. How hard it must be to serve in government nowadays with the relentless unforgiving gaze of 24-7 media upon you!

The deception we live under that humility is something passive links very much to the way our media school us unconsciously or consciously in deriding the weak. We need sermons, retreats, books to read that help undeceive us about the truly active virtue of humility. This sermon links a little to a retreat I took in Lisieux three years ago where I stayed a few days close to the Shrine of St Therese whose life in many ways was quite unremarkable. Born in 1873 she lived just 24 years, the last nine in a convent. When she contracted TB the Convent superior was concerned to get some obituary together and asked her to write it for herself - it became a bestseller - ‘Story of a Soul’ (show) . The rest is history - do read it! Yes, Therese in a way was herself victim of church celebrity cultus, being made a saint so soon after her death, but many are the wiser through her teaching as a Doctor of the Church.

Engaging with Thérèse I find to be primarily engagement with self-acceptance, something built in her by the Lord and her acceptance by a loving family and the community she joined at 15. ‘Story of a Soul’ captures this struggle to welcome God’s love and accept ourselves within its embrace. Thérèse inspires us to talk with the Lord about our difficulties in self-acceptance and how such failings can become happy pretext for looking to him. To know this, to accept ourselves and our life circumstances, helps divert us from these towards the addressing of our deeper needs and aspirations especially the best use of our gifts in God’s praise and service. 

It IS an effort to gain humility even if it's also a grace. We need to ask for it again and again as a grace from God. Secondly, we need to accept the humiliations of life though recognising the world of difference between being humble and being humiliated. How many times do we say the wrong thing and feel the hurt to our pride more acutely than the hurt we did to the person we spoke to or spoke about?

The school of humility is a school of self-acceptance impossible without confidence in God. We live as Christians with knowledge of God loving us through and through and his invitation to recentre our lives on him and our neighbour. Putting that wisdom into practice is the action of humility. 

One day when Therese was nearing the end of her life and feeling absolutely bereft and forsaken by God, she was in the Convent garden, walking very slowly because of her weakness and constant pain. Suddenly she saw a hen at the side of the path, hustling her newborn chicks out of the nun’s way, protecting them with outstretched wings. Therese writes how she immediately thought how God had loved and protected her all through her life and how God wants to envelope everyone with the tender protectiveness of that mother hen. She writes how she was so moved her eyes filled up with tears and had to look away from the scene. 

THAT’S HOW GOD LOVES US TOO - no matter what we feel like, no matter what kind of personal history we have. If we want holiness we build our foundation on this rock of God’s love and acting with humility is the master builder. We may be strong willed but such strength is a perilous gift since it links to the desire for the self to triumph over others including God. In holiness the will yields first place to love by always seeking a lower place so as to put no unnecessary obstacles in love’s way.

‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.’

To be a saint - and we should all aspire to be saints - is to keep in tune with our deepest needs and aspirations by actively countering our lower impulses, that  attention-seeking insecurity, touchiness, impatience or whatever. We're the ones who block our way to holiness, to the joy of becoming what God made us to be, by remaining slaves to these lower impulses.

With me, I invite you to pray for humility, not to be a doormat people walk over but to have active determination to counter self-centredness and get better centring of our lives upon God and neighbour, whose eternal fellowship in the communion of saints we anticipate at this Mass, with angels, archangels and all the company of heaven. 

St Wilfrid & Presentation, Haywards Heath 14 July 2021

 

Moses looked; there was the bush blazing, but it was not being burnt up…and God called to him..”Here I am” he answered. Exodus 3:1-8

Though formerly diocesan mission officer I struggle daily with the idea of mission. If ever there was an area in the life of the Church full of variety, confusion and oversimplification it is this area.

‘The Church exists by mission as fire by burning’ they say. 

Yet is ‘mission’ really the fire that keeps the Church burning with zeal?

‘Mission’ - or ‘Mystery’?

I would say that the Church exists for ‘Mystery’, the worship of Almighty God before it exists for ‘Mission’.

Look at Moses in our first reading this morning. We see his vocation to mission born as he encounters the mystery of God in the burning bush. Awestruck he could not refuse the Lord’s invitation to carry out the greatest mission in the Old Testament – the Exodus.

Look at Isaiah whose vision of God’s holiness is enshrined forever in our Eucharistic prayers. He first heard the angelic hymn we repeat again and again: Holy, holy, holy… the mystery brought him like Moses to ‘take off his shoes’ and fall down before the divine majesty.

Again and again in scripture we see the calling to mission flowing from an encounter with God cloaked in awe and mystery.

Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Samson, Gideon, Samuel, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Our Lady, SS. Peter & Paul...all find their vocation in encounters with God that are both personal and mysterious, moving the recipients to worship.

This morning in this eucharistic gathering the Lord Jesus is wonderfully in our midst, the Holy One. How much do we sense that holiness? How much do we sense our own unworthiness to attend this altar?

The fellowship, mission, and service of Christians flows from their encounter with mystery, their sharing, as we are now sharing, in the worship of the Trinity. 

In my own humbler faith pilgrimage I can trace the missionary zeal that flows in me to a mysterious challenge at a particular stage in my life.

It was the ‘something about’ a priest that made all the difference. As an Oxford undergraduate I fell under the influence of a man who was charismatic in the old sense. The sense of presence and conviction about Fr. John Hooper so intrigued me it won me to his Oxford tea table and then to his Confessional, bowled over by a sense of the immediacy of God about the man. His was a Church where sermons were long but full of the glorification of God. Little logic in those sermons, looking back, but plenty of presence and conviction in the preacher. 

His services were also long. High Mass with ceremonial imbued with a spirit of adoration.

Looking back, ‘evangelisation’ at St. Mary Magdalene’s was one depth sounding across to another, deep chords rung in the heart. There was no newsletter, no home groups, no mission action plan but godliness, awe and wonder. 

The burning bush that kindled my vocation was the sure, unselfconscious majesty of Sunday worship in the great tradition of the church, evoking awe before the mystery of God in a way that no self-conscious construct can achieve.

There was force of conviction about the mystery of the Faith and this bowled me over.

‘Mission’ in my case is about ‘Mystery’. I yearn to see the church rid of so much anaemic, diluted Christianity.

It was the mystery of divine revelation that kindled the missionary call of Moses and God has not changed.

Encountering the mystery of Christ is at the heart of what the church is all about or it is about nothing at all!

Whether we are ‘high church’ or ‘low church’ or ‘broad church’ we need to be deep church if people are to be reached by the Lord through us. 

Churchill Gardens Estate, Pimlico Pentecost 23rd May 2021

 

On Pentecost Sunday we celebrate the Holy Spirit’s vital and vitalising role.

He is God in the present moment bringing all that Jesus has done for us into play here and now. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. This was so that right there in Jerusalem and right now in Pimlico the love of God might be communicated mind to mind and heart to heart.

Christianity is a seizing with exhilaration upon the wonder of God seen as never seen before in the coming, dying and rising of Jesus Christ.

It means if God had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it. If God had a wallet, your photo would be in it.

God loves us so much that though he can live anywhere in the universe he seeks to live in a place only you can allow him to live – in your open heart.

When the Spirit of truth comes, he will lead you into the complete truth Saint John writes. That truth is of our making by God, our redeeming by the Son of God and our being made holy by the Spirit of God.

As Pascal said, holiness is the church’s greatest influence. When God gets into people’s lives it makes them holy enlarging their hearts and it shows. It brings our humanity into its right mind as the Holy Spirit rights what’s wrong in us.

God, who gave us life, loves us so much, with all our shortcomings, he wants to give us his life, to dwell deep within us, for that is why we were made. 

The truth of God and of ourselves is this – God loves us and loves us just as we are – but he loves us too much to leave us that way and so he offers us the Holy Spirit to dwell with us and in us.

Pentecost as Feast of the Spirit is a Feast of truth-telling as we heard in the reading from the Acts. The Holy Spirit brought the truth of God’s love into all those national groups, Parthians, Medes, Elamites and so on by his miraculous translation through the gift of tongues.

Holiness and truth communicated with love and power.

This truth of God’s desire to fill every human heart with holy love, according to St Paul, already infects the universe, as he writes in Romans 8 verse 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.

I have seen and met on occasion people whose godliness contained a force it was hard to resist. There’s something of this around in Churchill Gardens – would there were more - since holiness is indeed the church’s greatest influence. 

So today, and always, our prayer should be Come Holy Spirit and kindle in us the fire of your love! Or, as in the Psalm set for today, Psalm 104: Send forth your Spirit, O Lord, and renew the face of the earth.

The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth and holiness. He’s also the power of God. At the eucharist we speak in the Creed of Christ’s incarnation being accomplished from the Holy Spirit. We pray that by the power of your Holy Spirit the gifts of bread and wine may be changed. Send the Holy Spirit on your people we pray. 

And sometimes send us out in the power of your Spirit to live and work to your praise and glory. The Holy Spirit is into application – making God take flesh, making bread and wine God’s vehicles, taking us out into the world as those first disciples went so that in [their] own languages [they] hear [us] speaking about God’s deeds of power.

So how can we make Pentecost more applicable in our own lives and in our community this morning? 

Each eucharist is meant to be a mini-Pentecost, each Holy Communion an individual Pentecost, set within the Spirit sealed communion of the Church whose birthday we mark today. 

Whatever grand spiritual aspirations we make, the Holy Spirit is closest to us when we are about our neighbours, sorting out our destructive attitudes, putting love in where there is none, recognising the humanity of those who are somewhat blind to ours.

This is the humble work of Jesus’ redemption being applied to our lives and through our lives to others. It starts in us here as by the power of the Holy Spirit the gifts of bread and wine are taken and given so that sent out in the power of the Spirit we might live and work to God’s praise and glory.

Living in his holiness and truth communicating his love through his empowerment!

Come Holy Spirit and kindle in us the fire of your love! Send forth your Spirit, O Lord, and renew the face of the earth – starting with me!

Picture: Ardingly College Crypt Chapel

St Bartholomew, Brighton Feast of the Holy Family 29th Dec 2019

This morning the liturgy moves from Bethlehem via Egypt to Nazareth. On Wednesday we celebrated the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. Today we celebrate the beginning of his childhood in Nazareth. As we heard at the end of the holy gospel, the angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph and he left [Egypt] for the region of Galilee [and] settled in a town called Nazareth. 

I once went to Nazareth. I’ll never forget seeing two young boys at a well drawing water for their families. They could have been Jesus and his cousin John. The water was probably from the same source as that drawn on 2000 years ago, for wells do not move. This morning we are all going in heart and mind to Nazareth, to the household of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. We’re going, with the scriptures and the holy liturgy to seek inspiration from the Holy Family for our own families and for the family we enjoy here at St. Bartholomew’s as a local expression of God’s never-ending family, the holy, catholic church.

As we go to Nazareth we find welcome, challenge and empowerment.

We find firstly a welcome. The hearth of Mary and Joseph is an open hearth. How could it be otherwise? How could this couple who welcome God into their earthly home be guilty of turning any away?

In the Holy Family there is hospitality, the generous reception of friends and strangers alike. To enter the story of Jesus, Mary and Joseph is to find yourself welcomed into that great hospitable procession of the people of God heading for the heavenly Temple. Mary and Joseph remind us we can never have Jesus to ourselves. To be a Christian is to be one with Mary and Joseph and Bartholomew and Francis and Clare – and the list goes on!

In the Holy Family we find the welcome that marks the church from its beginning, God’s people belonging to God and belonging together. 

You and I haven’t chosen one another but God has chosen us together to be his family here at St Bartholomew’s. As we heard in the first reading from Colossians: Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts. (Colossians 3:13-15a) In Nazareth we see an image of Christian family, of mutual belonging. Jesus, Mary and Joseph are present to one another in a way we can only hope to imitate by the grace of God.

Our families and church families need to go to Nazareth, so to speak, and learn there how to be more present to one another. As we go to Nazareth we find such a welcome – and also a challenge. It is the Feast of the Holy Family today. 

There’s so much sentimentality surrounding Mary and Joseph, we need to get back to scripture to see them as they are – two of God’s holy ones and holiness is nothing comfortable but rather something challenging. This morning’s Gospel gives evidence of St. Joseph’s capacity to hear the voice of God and guide the Holy Family. And Mary! If she had not been what we call ‘ascetic’, a woman set apart and well disciplined in the spiritual life, she would not have become the God-bearer by whom God came down to live in your life and mine. As someone wrote, it was as if the human race were a little dark house, without light or air, locked and latched. The wind of the spirit had beaten on the door, rattled the windows, tapped on the dark glass, trying to get in – and yet the Spirit was outside. But one day a woman opened the door, and the little house was swept pure and clean by the wind. Seas of light swept through it, and the light remained in it; and in that little house, God was born as a Child.

As we go to the home in Nazareth we encounter the challenge of holiness, what Pascal said was the most important influence in the world. We see a Holy Child formed by a Holy Mother and her Spouse. How can we enter such a home?

There are families I know where there is such a sense of the Holy Spirit that I am made to feel deeply challenged. Some households have about them a transcendent quality, a joy that is pointer to heaven our true home. 

This is also true of churches. Just welcoming visitors is not enough. They need to be challenged, intrigued by what they see inside our buildings, both the worship of Jesus and the people of Jesus in their self-lessness and joy.

This morning we go to Nazareth to takes our seats in the school of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, of a welcoming love and a challenge to holiness. Lastly we will find at Nazareth a source of empowerment.

For 2000 years people have been empowered by the saving grace of Jesus Christ born of Mary. What a Saviour – a practical Saviour! As practical as his foster father, Joseph, in carpentry where Our Lord picks up his capacity to mend, yes, even families.

How many of us have had to bring our marriages and our families to be mended? To the Carpenter, the One who anoints and empowers and saves – and seen the difference Christian Faith makes?

How much we need to get back to Nazareth, to Jesus, Mary and Joseph and see there a work of intense spiritual transformation open to all. And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favour St Luke relates (Luke 2:52). He did so that we too might increase in the same fashion!

Either Jesus Christ makes a difference, either he is born ‘to raise the sons of earth’ or our religion is moralistic do-gooding. If Christianity is about ‘do gooding’ it is only in the sense that Christians have access to a power beyond this world that incidentally helps you do what is right. 

For that empowerment, for the challenge and welcoming love the Holy Spirit brings we go in gratitude once more this morning to Nazareth!

Through modelling Jesus, Mary and Joseph, may our families and our church be places of welcome so people may find a home with us and with the Lord!

May our families and our church be challenging places where people get intrigued by Jesus Christ living in the midst of his people!

Father grant that our families and our churches may become places of spiritual empowerment where we share in the anointing of your anointed Son, who with you and the Holy Spirit live and reign, one God for ever and ever. Amen.

Sermon at Vespers in St Paul, Haywards Heath on the day of St John Henry Newman’s canonisation 13th October 2019

Love and truth walk in the presence of God, writes the Psalmist (89:14) and so do his saints. Saint John Henry Newman’s walk with God appeals to both heart and mind as expressed in his motto and grave inscription. Cor ad cor loquitur - let heart speak to heart. Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem - from shadows and images into the truth. 

Today the Christian world gives glory to God for raising up an exceptional servant who has moulded Anglican and Roman Catholic traditions up to this day through his teaching and holiness. Both traditions helped form our Saint and both are built up in love and truth through his patronage. I stand here this evening grateful to Newman with millions of fellow Anglicans. Through his influence and that of the Oxford Movement the 1662 Prayer Book Catechism was revised 300 years later in1962 to include this definition. ‘The Church of England is the ancient church of this land, catholic and reformed. It proclaims and holds fast the doctrine and ministry of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church’.

Our Saint contributed to a recovery of Anglicanism as being in continuity with the early and medieval Church though that perception was so unwelcome in his day as to trigger Newman’s transition to Roman Catholic obedience. I dare to say such a perception is more accepted nowadays even if recent discontinuities in Anglican ministry await the verdict of history.

As a scientist by training, I have always been attracted to Newman whose writings counter what would put a brake on the best forward thinking. His great Apologia affirming both Anglican and Catholic heritage was published 5 years after Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), a story of spiritual evolution complementing Darwin’s thesis on biological evolution. To live is to change Newman wrote and to be perfect is to have changed often. Life is a forward movement we can choose - he chose it - from what Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 3 and 4 as from such shadows and images into the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 

Our Saint, though aware through his sufferings of life’s sad limitations, is a teacher affirmative of life’s value and dynamic, an ecumenical, forward looking saint whose teaching, love and prayers are with both Churches he belonged to over his long life.   Saint John’s work on church development and how we protect the church from godless innovation to secure godly reform came into its own at the time of the Second Vatican Council of which he’s been called patron This through his stress on the centrality of Christ and the dignity of the laity and their role in keeping the Church faithful to God’s truth. What Catholics, what Church doctors, as well as Apostles, have ever lived on, he wrote, is not any number of theological canons or decrees, but ... Christ Himself, as He is represented in concrete existence in the Gospels.      In those words Newman speaks true to his Evangelical Anglican upbringing about the centrality of Christ to Christian experience which is at the heart of the reshaping in emphasis within Roman Catholic teaching expressed in the decrees of Vatican II.

Our Saint was always ready to defend dogma, the fence alongside the well trodden path of Christian believing, but intellectual formulation of Christianity was second to his warm hearted approach to God. His motto Cor ad cor loquitur expresses this, let heart speak to heart. Newman teaches us holiness is the best guide to the science of God, not argument, as in his hymn Lead, kindly light. There he speaks of surrendering rational choice, fears, and pride to be opened up to a fuller vision by the light of the Holy Spirit. This poem written during a health crisis admits the importance of the trials of life in leading us into more certain faith. Whereas scientific research reaches conclusions by appeal to the necessary and unchanging, human action by contrast works beyond logic. Certitude is moral not intellectual and its shown in humble determination to head from shadows and images into the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 

To Newman church development and reform is rooted in such individual transformation, under the authority of both the faith of the church through the ages and the golden thread of spiritual direction reaching down the Christian centuries. Faith is nurtured from discipleship, from upholding in our lives worship, prayer, study, service and reflection. Such disciplines express our choice to be nurtured in holiness by and with those who have sought and today seek the Holy Spirit within the Christian Church. Newman found such a community at Littlemore and later on in the Oratory of St Philip Neri he founded in Birmingham and London. 

When our Saint decided to make his transition into communion with the See of Rome, his Anglican friend, Edward Pusey observed wisely of the separation between Anglicans and Roman Catholics: ‘it is what is unholy on both sides that keeps us apart’.
 Today’s Canonisation is both a celebration and a challenge. The Church’s mission to the world is damaged by its spiritual immaturity expressed in its divisions even if there are friendships across denominational divides. 

It is appropriate to recall Anne and my friendships with many here at St Paul’s through our 18 years in Haywards Heath or nearby Horsted Keynes. The recent loss to Christine and all of you of Deacon Gerard Irwin was our loss as well. Over recent years I recall heart-warming occasions like the 24-7 prayer in St Paul’s Hall in 2004, Churches Together events in the Dolphin Leisure Centre and bridge building occasions fostered by charismatic renewal and the True Life in God apostolic network. I’m delighted to hear of a new venture of ecumenical prayer starting at St Paul’s and we hope to be part of it.

As someone who attends Mass at St Richard’s and here on occasion Saint John is my patron. I yearn for the visible unity of the Church to complement the spiritual unity expressed tonight. ‘We are one in the spirit, we are one in the Lord’ - but let’s not stay there, as the song continues, ‘and we pray that all unity may one day be restored’. Why? So that Our Lord’s prayer for us in John 17:21 can be answered: ‘As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me’.

That prayer and task is ours for the good of Haywards Heath and the world. In such an aspiration, heart will speak to heart as we invoke our new Saint trusting God for many among us to be drawn from shadows and images into the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 

St Bartholomew, Brighton Trinity 11(22C) Humility 1.9.19

‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.’ Luke 14:11

There’s a great deception that humility is something passive. It’s not, it's the most active tendency there is if you’re truly in the business of countering the strength of self-will and we all need more of that.

In case I get praise for this sermon - some of you are very kind to me - the words of Thomas More are at the back of my mind: ‘whoever bids others to do right, but gives an evil example by acting the opposite way is like a foolish weaver who weaves with one hand and unravels the cloth just as quickly with the other’.

Yes, humility is the Christian distinctive and it’s far from making yourself a doormat. It's the day by day struggle for holiness commended by Our Lord in the Gospel as a taking of the lower place where we can, and, by our first reading from Ecclesiasticus, as refusal to forsake the Lord. ‘The beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord; the heart has withdrawn from its Maker’.

When people live without God they’re bound to centre themselves on themselves though many I know who live without God show immense kindness to others. I put that down to God giving them a better start than I! As a believer I don’t see myself as the centre of the world in principle but in practice to my dying day I’ll be actively countering touchiness, resentfulness against criticism, impatience when I don’t get my own way, eagerness for fame, anxiety lest I miss being thanked and praised and so on.

‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.’

Our Lord mixed with everybody. Today’s Gospel shows him mixing at the upper end of the society of his day at the home of a prominent Pharisee. He felt the need to address people trying to get places near the most famous. It’s a bit like when the Archdeacon visited on the patronal. Over our excellent buffet you couldn’t get near him for clergy - I tried! I wanted to congratulate him on pulling out his finger a bit for us in accepting the PCCs business plan clearing the way for the appointment of a full time parish priest. 

What is it about the human condition that makes us so celebrity conscious, wanting celebrity for ourselves and delighting on occasions we meet real live celebrities? 

I met Edwina Currie on the train the other week which got my mind thinking about eggs and other things. What really struck me in this face to face encounter though was the caring way she saw onto and off a busy train a frail man I took to be her husband. ‘Judge not and you will not be judged’. How hard it must be to serve in government nowadays with the relentless unforgiving gaze of 24-7 media upon you!

The deception we live under that humility is something passive links very much to the way our media school us unconsciously or consciously in deriding the weak. We need sermons, retreats, books to read that help undeceive us about the truly active virtue of humility. This sermon links a little to my retreat in Lisieux last month where I stayed a few days close to the Shrine of St Therese whose life in many ways was quite unremarkable. Born in 1873 she lived just 24 years, the last nine in a convent. When she contracted TB the Convent superior was concerned to get some obituary together and asked her to write it for herself - it became a bestseller - ‘Story of a Soul’ (show) . The rest is history - do read it - a book I’ve commended to you before from the pulpit! Yes, Therese in a way was herself victim of church celebrity cultus, being made a saint so soon after her death, but many are the wiser through her teaching as a Doctor of the Church.

Engaging with Thérèse last month I found to be primarily engagement with self-acceptance, something built in her by the Lord and her acceptance by a loving family and the community she joined at 15. ‘Story of a Soul’ captures this struggle to welcome God’s love and accept ourselves within its embrace. On my retreat I felt inspired by her to talk with the Lord about my own difficulties in self-acceptance and how my failings can become happy pretext for looking to him. To know this, to accept ourselves and our life circumstances, helps divert us from these towards the addressing of our deeper needs and aspirations. Maybe thanks to Thérèse - it’s still early days - I run less risk of seeing the way to my true self blocked by staying slave to lower impulses though, like her, I can’t presume on Our Lord. As she writes, ‘I am not perfect but I want to become so… effort means more to God than victory’.

It IS an effort to gain humility even if it's also a grace. We need to ask for it again and again as a grace from God. Secondly, we need to accept the humiliations of life though recognising the world of difference between being humble and being humiliated. How many times do we say the wrong thing and feel the hurt to our pride more acutely than the hurt we did to the person we spoke to or spoke about?

The school of humility is a school of self-acceptance impossible without confidence in God. We live as Christians with knowledge of God loving us through and through and his invitation to recentre our lives on him and our neighbour. Putting that wisdom into practice is the action of humility. 

One day when Therese was nearing the end of her life and feeling absolutely bereft and forsaken by God, she was in the Convent garden, walking very slowly because of her weakness and constant pain. Suddenly she saw a hen at the side of the path, hustling her newborn chicks out of the nun’s way, protecting them with outstretched wings. Therese writes how she immediately thought how God had loved and protected her all through her life and how God wants to envelope everyone with the tender protectiveness of that mother hen. She writes how she was so moved her eyes filled up with tears and had to look away from the scene. 

THAT’S HOW GOD LOVES US TOO - no matter what we feel like, no matter what kind of personal history we have. If we want holiness we build our foundation on this rock of God’s love and acting with humility is the master builder. We may be strong willed but such strength is a perilous gift since it links to the desire for the self to triumph over others including God. In holiness the will yields first place to love by always seeking a lower place so as to put no unnecessary obstacles in love’s way.

‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.’

To be a saint - and we should all aspire to be saints - is to keep in tune with our deepest needs and aspirations by actively countering our lower impulses, that  attention-seeking insecurity, touchiness, impatience or whatever. We're the ones who block our way to holiness, to the joy of becoming what God made us to be, by remaining slaves to these lower impulses.

With me, I invite you to pray for humility, not to be a doormat people walk over but to have active determination to counter self-centredness and get better centring of our lives upon God and neighbour, whose eternal fellowship in the communion of saints we anticipate at this Mass, with angels, archangels and all the company of heaven. 

St Bartholomew, Brighton Palm Sunday 14th April 2019

Why did Jesus die?

The Creed answers he was crucified for us. It does so after it names him God from God, light from light, true God from true God.

Because of who Jesus is what he suffered in Holy Week carries forward to all times in a way only God can accomplish.

When the celebrant takes bread and wine in a moment what Jesus did then will become a living reality for us now.

This is the Church’s faith, that the death of Jesus impacts us today, but where is this impact on my life?

How you see Jesus is inseparable from how you see his death and what difference it makes for you.

For what Jesus has done for us in Holy Week to come real to us we need to put our lives on the line, to act as if he were alongside us still – then we understand.

Why did Jesus die?

He died for us, say the Bible and the Creed. When you approach the crucifixion with faith in Christ’s divinity you see it as an action demonstrating the truth that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. John 3.16

It is an awesome act of substitution in which Jesus dies in our place so as to live in our place bringing us his own immortal life.

To believe in the crucifixion of Jesus is to commit to a holy God who loves us and reaches out to us in love though we’re sinners most especially in Holy Communion.

In his holiness God cannot be reconciled to sin, but through the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross the horror of sin is overcome and we’re credited with God’s own love and holiness.  

The power of evil over humankind is overcome by the Cross.   When we see that power being overcome in our own lives the Cross makes sense. We see benevolence flowing where there was self-seeking and humility where there was self-sufficiency.

In recognising those sinful tendencies and finding the merciful therapy of God in Jesus Christ we discover how wonderful the Cross is, what awesome yet living and practical truth it contains. This Week priests are available on request to help us go to the Cross and receive the assurance of God’s forgiveness individually in the sacrament of confession.

The letter to the Ephesians affirms God has made us acceptable in the beloved. By the death of his beloved Son God has made all who abide in Christ acceptable to himself.

God seeks intimacy with us. To achieve this, in an awesome mechanism beyond human understanding, Jesus Christ was crucified for us.  

This is good news to all who will face both the truth of it and the truth about themselves as sinners in need of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Amen.