Wivelsfield Church Memoria of St Polycarp Mark 9:38-40 23.2.22

‘Anyone who is not against us is for us’ Mark 9:40

‘Does God confine the gift of his Spirit to authorised channels?’ is the question raised and answered in today’s Gospel. We read there how Our Lord’s disciples tried to stop someone casting out demons in his name because he was not an obvious, or should we say ‘legitimate’ follower of Jesus. ‘But Jesus said, ‘Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterwards to speak evil of me’.

Our Lord in the Gospel, like Moses faced before him with the same question, disowns clerical arrogance which sees the Holy Spirit just flowing through the channels they have authorised. God is bigger than the institutions he sets up to help his people function right. God is bigger than the church and can make exceptions we should go along with, but - and it's a contentious ‘but’ - we are bound as a rule to expect the Holy Spirit to flow primarily through the channels he authorises. 

For us Anglicans the Holy Spirit is known as God’s grace and comes primarily through the church. ‘In what ways do you receive… God’s grace?’ Our Catechism asks and it gives this reply. ‘I receive… grace within the fellowship of the Church, when I worship and pray, when I read the Bible, when I receive the Sacraments, and as I live my daily life to his glory’.

Without bishops and priests we cannot have sacramental grace, making my visit this morning to cover for Fr Christopher a necessity. We need apostolic order, as today’s feast of St Polycarp reminds us - he worked within the 2nd century in immediate succession to the apostles - but apostolic order is no use without apostolic vitality. Through bishops and priests in apostolic succession we have authority to break Bread this morning pleading Christ’s Sacrifice for our community and our world and  receiving the grace of Holy Communion in Christ’s body and blood.

The eucharist is vital and vitalising, helping Christ dwell in us, but today’s Gospel invites us to keep on the look out for Christ’s presence and action outside the orbit of his Church. Though God commits to work through channels he has authorised like the eucharist - how wonderful to find him here as he has promised - we have surprises of the Spirit outside this orbit and need to be open to these.

The God we worship is deep in all things, working wherever goodness, truth and beauty are being built, inside and outside the fellowship of believers. We are his coworkers, sent out from here in the power of his Spirit to live and work to his praise and glory, alongside other unwitting servants of God.

‘Anyone who is not against us is for us’.

St Mary, Balcombe Baptism of the Lord 9.1.22

You can be baptised but have little experience of the Holy Spirit. We know you can be baptised and have little experience of the church - compare the numbers in our baptism registers with those in our service registers!  Yet those of us who come to Church still need encouragement to welcome the Holy Spirit and today’s Feast of the Baptism of the Lord is such an encouragement.

In the second reading we heard of the predicament of the Samarian Christians. ‘Peter and John… prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit (for as yet the Spirit had not come upon any of them; they had only been baptised in the name of the Lord Jesus). They laid their hands on them and they received the Holy Spirit’ (Acts 8:15-17).This passage is often read at confirmation services where the Bishop does what Peter and John did - lay hands on those baptised invoking the Spirit. We receive special anointing of the Spirit at baptism, confirmation and ordination but need to experience what God has given us.  

How do we wake up to the Holy Spirit?

Scripture gives us two answers – by looking outside of ourselves and inside of ourselves. 

Our Lord welcomed the Holy Spirit from above as in today’s Gospel. Elsewhere he speaks of the Holy Spirit flowing from within as in John 7:38:  ‘Out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water’.

Scripture records how Moses’s faith lit up when God kindled a flame in the burning bush and yet Paul advised Timothy to ‘rekindle the gift of God which is within’ (2 Timothy 1:6).

Sometimes we need to ask God to give us a vision of himself outside of ourselves so we get humbled into receiving his love. Other times we seek a release from the stuff within us that’s blocking the flow of that love.

If we have been baptised God is already at work within us. In Timothy’s case Paul reminded him that he’d laid hands on him for the Holy Spirit to come years ago. Wake up, he said, to what God has given you. Stir up the gift – in another translation. 

I always think of sugar in the bottom of an unstirred cup of tea. Does that fit your life this morning? God’s inside of you but your life needs sweetening by a bit of a stir? Or, to use another image, that of a gas fire, is it a matter of recognising the pilot light is lit within you but you need to turn the gas on and let the Holy Spirit really take hold of you?

Come, Holy Spirit, and awaken us! You are God in the present moment, make God more present to us, stir us up within, ignite our faith and our prayer on this Feast!

Today Jesus was anointed by the Holy Spirit as the Christ which means the Anointed One. To be a Christian is to share in the anointing of the Anointed One. As we heard in the Gospel: ‘Jesus Christ will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire’ (Luke 3:16).

How do we wake up to the Holy Spirit?

I remember as a student meeting a special priest who had holiness and integrity. Just a few choice words now and then from him were like commands from God - the Holy Spirit zapped me through those words and got me praying - and you know, the more you pray the more you want to pray! Then the more the Spirit burns within us, the more others around us are drawn to the fire of God’s love. Our thirst for God - and the Spirit gives you a thirst for God - infects others. When we pray ‘Come, Holy Spirit’ - and I recommend doing that as part of offering your life to God first thing every morning - we see spiritual needs and opportunities and the hand of God working in our lives hour by hour.

Brother Roger of Taize once said something that’s at the heart of church growth and revitalisation by the Spirit. He said: ‘When the church becomes a house of prayer the whole world will come running!’. It is so. As another Frenchman, Blaise Pascal, said three centuries before him: ‘Holiness is the church’s greatest influence’.  The Holy Spirit who works through scripture and the pulpit works to make the bread and wine extraordinary so that you and I can be extraordinary - the Holy Spirit makes us so. That extraordinariness links to both suffering and the supernatural. 

When I see joy on the faces of Christians near to death - I think of my friend Eve - it is the Spirit. When I hear people speaking in tongues, I recognise a supernatural gift of the Holy Spirit. Speaking in tongues is a love language commended as an aid for private prayer by St Paul though its public use can have extraordinary impact. I commend praying for this gift if your prayer life is in the doldrums.

An awakening to the Spirit, a releasing of the Spirit, an unblocking of his flow – this is the invitation and challenge of today’s Feast which links in with suffering and experience of the supernatural. There is ‘one baptism for the forgiveness of sins’ and it confers the Holy Spirit. A gift though when given needs to be received. For Christians to seek the renewing power of the Spirit – we do so as we receive Holy Communion every Sunday - is a matter of seeking to be more fully what we are meant to be in Christ in terms of spiritual empowerment and nothing less! 

We want to be people who know their need for such empowerment! Meanwhile the Spirit is waiting to confirm to us the same words spoken to Our Lord at his baptism: ‘You are my Son, [my Daughter], the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’ (Luke 3:22). Come, Holy Spirit! 

St Bartholomew, Brighton New Year’s Day 2022

 

Today Christmas thoughts of eternity entering time in Jesus Christ give way to thoughts about time itself. 

It’s New Year’s Day under the patronage of the Blessed Virgin Mary and with this new day the calendar moves further into the second decade of the second millennium.

The bible says in the book of Psalms that we’re made for seven decades, maybe eight. I’m well through and have lived almost all my life by that reckoning.

How many New Year’s Days lie ahead for you and I?

Time like a never ending stream bears all its sons away. They fly forgotten like a dream dies at the opening day.

This morning we’re reminded that our time is running out and will one day carry us out as mortality wears us away. This last year has seen the last days of several parishioners. I think especially of Mark Mytton and William Parker. Our prayers this morning are with them and with so many who have passed on through COVID and with their families

We’re frail mortals. We should approach a New Year with humility because we’re from the earth and will return to the earth.

We’ve also grounds for confidence though. God loves mortals and desires to plant immortal life within them in Jesus Christ whose naming we mark today. 

If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, says Paul he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.

Today is the first day of the rest of our lives.

What’s most important as I live my life in the days and years ahead is to possess the Spirit who gives life to mortal bodies in this world and the next.

Every Eucharist is a calling down of the same Spirit, upon the gifts and upon the people, making holy gifts and holy people. 

Let’s welcome the holy and life giving Spirit as 2022 begins. He’ll be our main asset, the ground of Christian confidence to face the uncertainties ahead. Let’s give an invitation for him to empower us now in a moment of silence before we profess our faith together.

St Wilfrid & Presentation, Haywards Heath Discernment Acts 12:24-13:5a

 

The Holy Spirit is evident again in this morning’s eucharistic reading from Acts Chapter 12 as the guiding light and force of the early Church. So much is he the agent that the Acts of the Apostles might be better named the Acts of the Holy Spirit. In today’s reading we hear about the gift of discernment granted from the Spirit as a group of leading Christians were offering worship to the Lord and keeping a fast. We read how the Holy Spirit said, ‘I want Barnabas and Saul set apart for the work to which I have called them’. After prayer and laying on of hands the two were, we read, ‘sent on their mission by the Holy Spirit… to Cyprus’.

God has not changed 2000 years on. Our faith and expectation of God is something of the variation from the apostolic era. To give an example of how the Spirit’s gift of discernment remains in operation among Christians here is the story of how a significant community ministry was born in a south London parish. A young man was going to Church Sunday by Sunday and stepping over the tramps that slept in the Churchyard. It was a part of London with a good number of street folk who'd come to see the Churchyard as a safe haven. As this Church member passed these men and women week by week God eventually gave him a burden of prayer for them, which he carried into Church and offered up at the Eucharist. One Sunday he had the idea of running a lunch club for the vagrants and he persuaded his fellow worshippers.  This ran for some months.  Then the organisers advertised for helpers in the local community and received hundreds of enquiries. One man's vision discerned from God got accepted by his Church and became the instrument for Christians and non-Christians working together in the service of a local need.  Many of the non-Church folk got drawn into the life of the Church in the process. It all started from one man's discernment - isn't that encouraging?

How often we sense the Holy Spirit ourselves when we go out of our way to help others, joy in the midst of empathising with and maybe alleviating hardship being endured by others. Such joy provides evidence of the presence of God in the midst for, as the Psalmist writes, in God’s presence there is the fullness of joy. (Psalm 16:11) It’s not how much we do that matters so much as how much love we put into the action. To live in the love of God is the clue to discerning the best form of service to others. Each day I look back at what I’ve done or failed to do and confess to God. Very often the sins I confess are opportunities I’ve lost because my attention’s been elsewhere and very often on myself. Discernment is a gift of the Holy Spirit whom we welcome day by day, hour by hour - God’s love pouring into our hearts - but do we? Or do we get so filled with a self-serving agenda that God’s love gets blocked out?

A practical suggestion. Start making a morning offering to the Holy Spirit. Sit on your bed and say ‘God I thank you for the gift of this new day and give myself to you. Send your Holy Spirit to use my gifts to God’s praise and service’. 

I find that such a prayer sweeps the day up into God’s hands so that, as I keep my attention on him, I discern what’s important and get on with it. Living with Holy Spirit discernment and empowerment is actually very simple if we set our hearts upon the Lord. 

We live in one place and time relatively ignorant of where and when to serve. God sees all space and time and the needs that cry out. 

The Holy Spirit rejoices to enlist those who give themselves day by day to his service and helps them discern where they can make a significant difference. 

Give yourself to God and he will give you to others!

Wednesday in Eastertide 14.4.21

 

This morning we continue with the Acts of the Apostles, capturing the remarkable dynamic lent to the church in the wake of the resurrection. The apostles are imprisoned ‘but during the night an angel of the Lord opened the prison doors, brought them out, and said, "Go, stand in the temple and tell the people the whole message about this life”. Christ is risen and puts into gear this life - the eternal life he promised Nicodemus in today’s Gospel: ‘for 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). As believers we possess that life, sealed by baptism and confirmation, divine life gifted from out of the tomb, revealed over forty days and from Pentecost sent deep into the hearts of believers by the Holy Spirit.

‘The message about this life’ is rooted in the event we celebrated ten days ago. Christianity takes us beyond this world but it does so from the axis of time, from history, that of Christ and that of our own. In sharing ‘the message about this life’ we begin with the events arguing for their historicity. In weighing up the New Testament accounts one problem is that the references to the tomb are in the Gospel accounts written at least 20 years after the first letters of Paul which give little reference to the tomb save reference to Christ’s burial. Paul’s witness to the resurrection builds from his later encounter with the risen Lord Jesus which he associates with those of the apostles at Easter. So central is the resurrection to Paul’s thought that Acts 17:18 relates ‘he was telling the good news about Jesus and the resurrection’. Just like the angel bidding the apostles in today’s reading Paul hands on a message of divine life. Opponents of Christianity see this preaching as built on Paul’s subjective visionary experiences and not on the history of Jesus. The Christian defence is to point to Paul’s many repeated references to Christ’s dying and rising as the objective side of the personal relationship believers enter into. This is linked to our subjective dying again and again to sin and rising again and again to new life in the Spirit. Death and resurrection is the pattern of Christian experience because it was the experience of Jesus. 

On Easter Sunday we renewed our baptism vows with this in mind, turning afresh to Christ as Saviour and inviting the Holy Spirit into our lives afresh. ‘The message about this life’ which is Christianity is inseparable from the ongoing drowning of our old sinful nature and our ongoing receipt of the new nature given by the Holy Spirit. As we prayed in the Collect, ‘grant us so to put away… malice and wickedness that we may always serve God in pure ness of living and truth’. So be it! More at https://elucidatingcontroversy.blogspot.com/

Trinity 9 (20C) ‘Holy Fire’ Presentation Church, Haywards Heath & St Peter & St John, Wivelsfield 18.8.19

I came to bring fire to the earth… is not my word like fire, says the Lord. Luke 12:49a & Jeremiah 23:29a

Holy fire is an unfashionable image of God.

We are warned though in the letter to the Hebrews to offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; for indeed our God is a consuming fire. (Hebrews 12:28a-29)

Just as God fashioned earth out of the fire of the lava that lies below he is fashioning heaven through the holy fire from above whose first appearance came in tongues of flame upon the disciples at Pentecost.

Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit we pray at the eucharist. May we whom the Spirit lights give light to the world.

Were not our hearts burning within us while he was… opening the scriptures to us?  the disciples said of Our Lord in their Easter experience on the Emmaus Road (Luke 24:32). The good news of Jesus comes like fire, like dynamite flashing out, bringing light for the mind, kindling of the heart and power to live a holy life.

I was talking the other day to a young man whose wife had been unfaithful. His Christian faith was affronted by her unholy deed. As we talked he recognised his own unholiness in neglecting her. He saw his need of cleansing as well as hers which brought me hope for reconciliation for their good and the good of their children.

Holy fire is an unfashionable image of God yet it is thoroughly biblical and we need its reality in our age and in our lives as much as any believer in any age!

There are several Old Testament incidents in which God’s anger, judgment, holiness or power are displayed in fire from heaven bringing cleansing and a new start. Moses speaks of God as a devouring fire going ahead of the Israelites into the Promised Land destroying their enemies. He receives the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai through fire and thunder. Elijah confronts the false prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel calling down fire from heaven to make his sacrifice acceptable. 

In the eucharist priests sometimes pray these words, silently recalling Elijah’s offering, as they arrange the gifts at the altar: Come thou fount of holiness eternal God and bless this sacrifice made ready for thy holy name. 

We make ourselves one today with the sacrificial gifts of bread and wine, work of human hands, in asking the fire of the Holy Spirit to descend upon us to cleanse the thoughts of our hearts and make the self offering made in worship a holy offering.

God is God - different and more powerful than us - but also having sameness to us in Christ. Through the gift of his Son God can work to overcome the evil within us and fit us for eternal company with himself. Our love for God and people matters most in this world because that alone survives into the next world in the communion of Saints… the resurrection of the body and the life eternal. 

God’s holiness burns up anything unholy including our lack of love for him and for our neighbour. His holiness is part of his nature holding him apart from us as the sinners that we are. Who among us can live with the devouring fire? Who among us can live with everlasting flames? Isaiah complains in Chapter 33v14 and he gives the following answer in v15 Those who walk righteously and speak uprightly, who despise the gain of oppression… and shut their eyes from looking on evil. 

I heard someone speak of how God’s holy fire cleanses them from looking at pornography. When I see the pictures or texts I imagine the Holy Spirit as like a fire extinguisher they said. I ask him to fire on me, quench the lust within me, and take me from the situation as quickly as possible. Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit. 

In the passage I read from Isaiah Chapter 33 we heard how only the righteous can withstand the consuming fire of God’s wrath against sin, because sin is an offense to God’s holiness he needs to overcome. Later in Chapter 64 Isaiah troubles his readers by questioning whether anyone can actually be righteous by God’s standards. We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth he writes. Such pessimism prepares the world for the coming of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

I came to bring fire to the earth… is not my word like fire, says the Lord. 

Out of the great love with which he loves us God provided the cleansing righteousness we need by sending Jesus Christ to us.  On the Cross, as Paul says to the Corinthians, God made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21). The hatred of God for sin was engaged with by Jesus whose crucifixion both demonstrates this and provides God’s loving remedy of the forgiveness of sins. Jesus died in our place so he might live in our place, live within us bringing the holy fire of his Spirit, a consuming fire indeed, one that cleanses us from the deadliness of pride, anger, lust, envy, gluttony, avarice and sloth.

The French priest, geologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin, who lived in the last century had a great love for the eucharist. His vision of its cosmic implications has enriched and given purpose to my own engagement with the Sacrament. Like the best theologians his writings evidence a rooting in prayer and worship, as in his great ‘Mass on the World’, one of my favourite spiritual texts. In the invocation of the Holy Spirit at the eucharist I referred to earlier he sees an echo both of Our Lord's desire to 'cast fire upon the earth' in today's Gospel and the stellar fires and molten lava that energise the earth's development. In the elevation of the Host in the eucharist Teilhard sees earth and heaven coming together. The consecrated bread and wine show nature transformed in anticipation of the ultimate transformation of all things on the return of Christ, what he calls the 'Omega Point', a point anticipated in our service when the Bread and Wine are lifted up for adoration.

I came to bring fire to the earth… is not my word like fire, says the Lord. 

Teilhard was aware of that fire both as a geologist and as a Christian. God fashioned our planet by the fire of lava but sent his Son to refashion things through casting down upon earth the holy fire of the Spirit. This he does by entering human hearts especially at this service as we seek cleansing and empowering for ourselves, those on our hearts and for the whole created order.

Come down, then, Love divine, seek thou this soul of mine, and visit it with thine own ardour glowing; O Comforter draw near, within my heart appear, and kindle it, thy holy flame bestowing…. cast out our sin and enter in through the eucharist we celebrate! 

All Saints, Roffey Pentecost 9 June 2019

How do you experience God?

As Christians we see him as the source of all that is, as the one who redeems our failings and as the fount of love: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

God is the One who is - the fount of being - and being fully alive is about living close to him.

The world makes us defensive about such belief because its blind to what’s beyond the physical order but God needs no defence. He is the One who is - the ground of being and as such beyond our grasp. That violent wind on Pentecost Sunday touched the disciples directly, personally, so they became aware of the closeness of the God who is the ground of all being.

Cutting my hedge last week I was very aware of the wind, working round it as it came and went. The hedge cuttings got carried across the road. Bees sheltering from the wind in the hedge didn’t like the hedge cutter and flew out at me. It was quite an experience! When the wind’s blowing you really know it, your skin gets refreshed and you breathe more freely but you’re reminded of your little place on earth compared to the elements. Who can tell where the wind comes from, where it starts or where it will end? We can only experience it, be in the midst of it, be touched as it blows, and work with it's consequences as I did with the hedge cuttings and the bees.

How do you experience God?

Like the wind, as Our Lord said to Nicodemus, the wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. (John 3:8). Seeing God, engaging with God, is as here and now as experiencing the air around you. As the Psalmist writes Be still and know that I am God (Psalm 46:10).

To be at home with God we need regular silence to be at home with ourselves. We live alas in an age full of artificial noise distracting us from this vital task. In today’s Gospel Our Lord says the Holy Spirit… will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you a the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. (John 14:26-27). How can we experience the Holy Spirit who is peace and balm for troubled hearts without opening ourselves to the present moment?

The Holy Spirit is God in the present moment. To experience God we must discipline ourselves to attend less to past regrets or future anxieties but to what’s here and now. In that discipline of prayerful attendance to God we experience again and again what the Gospel promises my peace I give to you… do not let your heart be troubled.

On Pentecost Sunday we end the liturgical cycle which started six months ago with Advent, a cycle that displays year by year the God who loves us so much he gives us himself, his Son and his Spirit. The Son of God became Son of man so children of men could become children of God! The God who made us loves us through and through so much so that he sent his Son to die and rise for us. Together on the Day of Pentecost they sent the Holy Spirit, to dwell with us, in us and among us in the Church. As we heard in the Romans reading: all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God… when we cry, ‘Abba! Father! it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. (Romans 8:14, 15b-17a)

How do you experience God?

Stop the flow of your life! Pray, Come, Holy Spirit! Be present to God - pray, read the bible, examine yourself, come to Mass, look to the needs of others!

God addresses you in the present moment, here at All Saints this 9th day of June at 11 o’clock! Then God in the present moment tomorrow morning at work or wherever - be still and know that I am God - this is the Holy Spirit’s invitation day after day, wherever, whenever!

Like the wind we can’t contain God but we can experience him. To secure us in the experience of his love God’s Son gives us bread and wine as living memorial of his saving work. By the Holy Spirit bread and wine are changed so we can be changed and the world can be changed through us. Today’s Feast recalls the outward flowing dynamic captured at every Mass that started with the wind of the Spirit at Pentecost and has blown the good news of Jesus worldwide. It challenges us to hoist our sails to the wind of Spirit so we can be taken where God wants us to be taken, as Bishop Mark said on Monday, bringing love wherever he knows there’s need of it.

‘I ask not to see. I ask not to know. I ask simply to be used’ wrote Cardinal Newman. Whilst its good to ask ‘How do you experience God?’ we shouldn’t expect to understand God so much as to place ourselves at his disposal and pray ‘Come, Holy Spirit’ to be empowered to travel on the best forward course. This we do now offering ourselves as a living sacrifice with Christ, welcoming the experience of his close presence in the Holy Sacrament, God in his Spirit, in the present moment, the radiance of his love calling us to make him loved in the world on 9th June 2019.

St Mary, Balcombe  Baptism of the Lord  13.1.19

John the Baptist said, ‘I have baptised you with water;… but he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit Luke 3:16

Why do we need the Holy Spirit?

To pray, to love, to serve, to evangelise, to be obedient, to forgive, to heal…

Without the Holy Spirit:

God is far away,

Christ stays in the past,

the Gospel is a dead letter,

the Church is simply an organisation,

authority is a matter of domination,

mission is a matter of propaganda,

the liturgy no more than an evocation,

Christian living a slave morality.

But in the Holy Spirit:

the risen Christ is there,

the Gospel is the power of life,

the Church shows forth the life of the Trinity,

authority is a liberating service,

mission is a Pentecost,

the liturgy is both memorial and anticipation,

human action is deified.

(Words for Pentecost Sunday from the Greek Orthodox Archbishop Athenagoras)

As baptised, confirmed - and some of us - ordained Christians we possess the Holy Spirit!

We possess the Spirit - but does he possess us? That is the key to a spiritual vitality!

As Our Lord says in St John Chapter 7:37-39 If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.

Our renewal in the Holy Spirit is about the releasing of the life of the Spirit within us.

The late Dom Ian Petit of Ampleforth wrote these words in his book You Will Receive Power: Baptism and Confirmation confer a supernatural gift, but ignorance or lack of understanding of the gift, can block its full effect. In other words, while the sacrament is valid and has been given, the effect has been blocked. When the block is removed then the full effect floods in...(a) baptism in the Holy Spirit… an opportunity for awakening in (people) their sacraments of initiation..

The New Year begins with a liturgical reminder about our ongoing need for this unblocking and awakening to the power of the Holy Spirit who visits us at every Eucharist.

The Feast of the Baptism of the Lord is the grand reminder that Christians are people who have woken up to Jesus and to the Gift of the Holy Spirit, to the living God - nothing less. An awakening to the Spirit, a releasing of the Spirit, an unblocking of his flow – this is the invitation and challenge of today’s Feast!  

There is one baptism for the forgiveness of sins and it confers the Holy Spirit. A gift though is given that needs to be received. For Christians to seek the renewing power of the Spirit – as we do as we receive Holy Communion every Sunday - is a matter of seeking to be more fully what we are in Christ and nothing more or less than that! We want to be a people that live knowing their need of grace!

The Spirit is waiting to confirm to us the same words that were spoken to Our Lord at his baptism: You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.

Christians share in the anointing of the Anointed One – Jesus is the Christ or Anointed One so he can share his anointing with us and speak into our hearts those words of adoption: You are my son, my daughter; with you I am well pleased.

There’s a great tale from C.S. Lewis' about a doubting Bishop. Lewis once imagined an additional scene at the Marriage at Cana - a sceptical bishop sitting further down the table from Our Lord and Our Lady. There are the guests with the water turned into wine. As everyone enjoys the new wine of the Kingdom Feast the doubting bishop is holding up his glass and scrutinising, "How can this be? How can water become wine? How can the philosophical difficulties about an interventionist God be overcome? Is this some sort of conjuring trick?" All the while the rest of them at table are drinking up the Spirit in whatever sense you like!

There are many who make an 11th Commandment Thou shalt not commit thyself!  Such folk – and they are around in the Church today – miss out on Christian basics, on the empowering promised in today’s feast.

I have baptised you with water; but he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit. This baptism or gift of the Holy Spirit is an ongoing reality for those who will commit themselves. The Gift is not so much a once for all thing or commodity but rather something dynamic and ongoing.

Baptism in the Holy Spirit is a process in which the relationship that opens up at Baptism involves an ongoing flow of love, praise and power leading into ongoing consecration in the Truth.

It is worth recalling that though Our Lord himself was conceived by the Holy Spirit he waited 30 years for his Baptism in Jordan. So it can be – as it was for me and can be for you- that though I had received the Spirit through Infant Baptism, Confirmation and Ordination the first deep experience came many years later – and through, of all things, a crisis of faith – and a recommitment!

In a faith crisis years back I went on a retreat and prayed God if you’re there show yourself, give me a vision of yourself more to your dimensions and less to mine – and he did – but it needs refreshing!

Another way to look at it is like this: if the Christian life is like a rose bush there are great spurts of growth from time to time that push out new branches with new flowers. One such branch  and its some branch in its fruitfulness – is, if you like, a new opening up to the Spirit. Yet just like the life of the rose bush before and after such a new spurt of growth we have the same inner life.

We possess the Spirit - but does he possess us? That is the question we are being asked on this feast of the Lord’s Baptism. There is a commitment issue here we need to address.  As we come to receive Jesus in Holy Communion are we really committed and open to his empowering? Are we ready to hear and to believe those wonderful words: You are my son, my daughter; with you I am well pleased.

In the silence that follows you have a chance to act in faith upon those wonderful words and place fresh trust in our heavenly Father preparing for an especially solemn and transformative Act of Communion this morning.

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful people as they look to you with expectation on this day of anointing with power!