Holy Tuesday online 7 April 2020

Hello and greetings from Anne and I in 13 Marylands off New England Road where we’re growing in the spirituality of the housebound. I’m grateful with us all to Fr Chris for the online network his gifts have generated. Besides saying the office with a group of us on the phone I’m offering Mass here every day at 715am as a rule and friends at St Richard’s are high on my list of intentions. 

It’s Holy Week and we’re trying to get more holy. We’re doing that, most of us, without Holy Communion. How do we manage? C.S.Lewis said ‘next to the Blessed Sacrament… your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses’. I’ve always liked that saying but being shut in for weeks on end seeing our close neighbour as ‘the holiest object presented to your senses’ is another matter. I feel for Anne!

In today’s Gospel we read of Our Lord’s close associates in the days of his flesh, Judas and Peter, and how they failed Jesus their close neighbour. Both had spent years with Christ but when it came to the crunch self-interest triumphed over loyalty. Both were living by their own power with its sinful devices and not by the power of the Holy Spirit. Think better of them a bit because the Holy Spirit was only released as a result of the uncomfortable events of Holy Week they were living through. 

To be made holy we need the Holy Spirit and that we have received at baptism and confirmation. Holy Week is a call to renew that anointing which doesn’t just come from above us. It comes also from around us and within us. Those difficult decisions we have to work out with one another being housebound are part of our sanctification. At our family video conferences online we’re struggling to get the quieter members to speak and shine. Not everyone is like you and me - I speak to an online congregation - not everyone is comfortable with being on TV if you like. My youngest son James, like some of you listening working from home, is expert on the protocol of such conversations with ten or more folk on screen. He’s leading our struggle to get the best listening to one another in the fun, chaos and time consumption of video linking.

Christianity is about love of God, neighbour and self. Sin is about falling short in all three dimensions. Sometimes we deceive ourselves through going to Church, praying, reading the Bible, serving others and confessing our sins that we’re getting holier. Those things are good but they can be done in our own power and not in humility with confidence in the Holy Spirit. That’s why having Holy Week on our own away from Church fastened in at home, save for an hour, maybe family members is a God-send. 

I dare to say it though I don’t fully live it - the struggle to see God in our closest relations is an opportunity for spiritual growth. 

On Friday we come to the foot of the Cross where the ground is level. Corona puts everyone on that level ground in terms of our mortality. As Christians that ground is level in a more profound sense. When you live knowing your need of the Holy Spirit you recognise the sinful shortcomings that put you at the foot of the Cross. Living housebound, alone or in company, can awaken our need for God and loosen us from judging overmuch the shortcomings of others.

On Easter Sunday we’ll renew our baptism promises. In baptism our sinful nature got drowned, in principle, and the new Holy Spirit graced nature came to life, in principle. Christian life, growing in holiness, is about putting the principle of baptism into practice. The sinful nature is still in us but so is the Holy Spirit. Holy Week gives us a chance to put the old nature down and to invite the Holy Spirit to rise in us - so be it even if the Spirit comes as grace under pressure, the pressure of these extraordinary times.

St Bartholomew, Brighton Maundy Thursday 18 April 2019

Do this in remembrance of me!

"Was ever command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth".

"Men have found no better thing to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover;

“Week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the holy common people of God".

Do this in remembrance of me! Was ever a command so obeyed?

In these striking words Anglican monk, Gregory Dix celebrates the awe and wonder of the Holy Eucharist instituted on this most sacred night. In his book The Shape of the Liturgy still used in Anglican Theological Colleges Fr Dix writes "the eucharistic action (is) inextricably woven into the public history of the Western world...the eucharist (has the) power of laying hold of human life, of grasping it...in the particular concrete realities of it..laying hold of them and translating them into something beyond time".

Our Lord Jesus ordained the sacrament of the Eucharist in order that we might be able to join on earth in the pleading of His eternal sacrifice sealed in his blood before the face of God the Father. Then, secondly, that he might feed our souls with his sacred Body and Blood and unite us into One Body, the Church, the Body of Christ.

I wonder how many of us would remember or believe or continue to hold fresh in our memories from Confirmation training those facts

- I mean: Our Lord giving us the eucharist first to allow us to plead his memorial Sacrifice and offer our lives with him to be consecrated lives and then second, second, note, to give us heavenly Food and make us one Bread, one Body? Or do we tend to make our default the second purpose of the Eucharist? Do we come to Church like we go to Sainsbury’s to get supplied for ourselves and to meet our friends?

That should come second. We come first to offer the eucharist - to plead Christ's Sacrifice for the needs of the living and the dead, for others as well as for ourselves. That long list from Gregory Dix reminds me how all through my life the Eucharist has been means of sanctifying the lives I minister to, of taking, blessing, breaking sometimes a situation brought on my heart to the Altar for Christ to carry in Sacrifice to his Father.

Each Eucharist, majestic or simple, pleads Calvary.  Pleads, note, not repeats. Christ died once for all. His death can’t be repeated but his Sacrifice abides for ever. It is that sacrifice being solemnly renewed before us this evening as he blesses bread and wine through his priest."This is my Body...this is my Blood" offered for you to the Father, given to you in Communion. It's a good Anglican practice to bow or bend the knee as we come into Church or leave Church, or as we approach or leave the Altar, a practice saluting the Real Presence of Christ. Outside the eucharist, Christ is present, truly present, under the veil of the Tabernacle. To honour that perpetual presence by bowing or bending the knee does not deny that presence elsewhere through the reading of Scripture, in Christian Fellowship, in nature, in holy people and so on.

Yet mindful of Christ's Presence let us never forget its vital link to the first purpose of every Eucharist, announced by Our Lord on this Eve of his passion, which is action, sacrificial action. We are to give our lives, our souls and bodies, our needs, our joys, our sorrows, our hopes, our fears, in union with his perfect Offering.  Lives so given are lives consecrated, lives transformed by the Gift of the consecrated elements, "The Body of Christ", "Amen","The Blood of Christ", "Amen".

Through Him, with Him and in Him, then, let us give glory to God the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit this most holy night, confident that God will accept our self offering and as ever give us more than we can ask or imagine in this most Holy Sacrament.

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.

Palm Sunday 8am 9th April 2017

This morning is something of an unforgettable experience for me.

Anne and I are sharing like Jesus a last week with everyone before death and resurrection - I speak half in jest. Haywards Heath also is no paradise compared to Horsted Keynes.

This morning's liturgy blends the triumph and sorrow associated with Experiencing Christ's Love, the title of my new book, of which I mentioned last week 8 o’clockers would get pre-launch availability. Its sub title is establishing a life of worship, prayer, study, service and reflection and it’s somewhat autobiographical

The large palm branches on its cover represent triumphant love which works out, as our reading of the Passion illustrated, through bearing sorrow.

As your parish priest bearing many of your joys and sorrows I have carried Christ from you. He has rubbed off on me as I hope he's rubbed off from Anne and I to you. Worshipping, praying, studying, serving and reflecting here for 8 years has been immensely fruitful for us.

The book is one fruit grown from the partnership between priest and people we’ve exercised together and it’s about holding yourself to a rule of life.

The clue to effective living is to find the main things and keep the main things as the main things.

For over 60 years I’ve been working with a rule of life at both finding and holding myself to those things. I still have work to do. As a priest for most of my life you’d have thought I’d have this sorted by now, but, though theological expertise helps me speak and write about experiencing Christ’s love, its outworking in real life is all the more challenging.

There are no professional Christians, though some get paid for their work. We are all amateurs, hopefully in the sense of devotees rather than incompetents!

As I prayed for God-given competence to frame my book the Lord drew me to an image of his hand reaching down to me and my own hand grasping his with its five digits expressing five loves commended in his own summary of the Law in Matthew 22:37-39: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”

Worship and prayer are to be seen as heart and soul of our love for God, Jesus implies, but without study, engaging the mind with divine teaching, that love will be ill formed, and without service, love of neighbour, and reflection, loving care of self, our loving God is a delusion.

Those five commitments - worship, prayer, study, service, reflection - make a hand that can grasp the hand of God reaching down to us in Jesus Christ to raise us into his praise and service with all the saints, an image of Love's endeavour for us in Holy Week. The five commitments provide the chapter headings of this short book of 90 pages commissioned and published by the Bible Reading Fellowship.

The God and Father of Jesus is a God of joyful goodness who loves us through and through and whose grace is overall and in all. That loving grace isn’t a quantity so much as a quality of helpfulness given us by God who simply desires it for us, not because we’ve done anything to earn it. This benevolence shown by God toward the human race is at the heart of the good news of Jesus we're celebrating in Holy Week.

‘God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ' Paul writes to Ephesus.

'By grace you have been saved - and [God] raised us up with [Christ] and seated us with him in the heavenly places’. (Ephesians 2:4-6)

After seeing a 1960s street advertisement Austin Farrer amusingly compared the Church of England to corsets: 'for ladies, for comfort and for general uplift'. It's a half truth- my mother tells me she's struck by the number of men at St Giles!

Christianity is indeed 'for comfort and uplift'. To be raised up we need to welcome and respond to God’s grace, putting faith in him, placing our hand in his, and that’s going out of our way. It’s a countering of self-deception as expanded in this book. 

Attending worship may be inconvenient but ‘where there’s a will there’s a way’. The discipline of prayer isn’t necessarily accompanied by feeling God’s presence. Awkward questions about the Bible matter and there are times to get your head down to address them. We’ll never be good at serving others without a readiness to shoulder life’s little humiliations that break the ego’s shackle round us. Unless we are ready to regularly examine ourselves and confess our sins to God ‘the truth is not in us’ (1 John 1:8).

Christians live under the favour of God which is grace with a big aim - God’s glory and the world’s salvation - and a tight focus expressed as we worship on Sunday, pray every day,  study the Bible, serve our neighbour and reflect upon our lives confessing our sins. That big aim and tight focus is taken up into the love of Christ for God, for us and for all.

‘All is grace’.

The clue to effective living is to find that main thing reaching out continually in worship, prayer, study, service and reflection to grasp ‘the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit’. 2 Corinthians 13:14

Through this book, through Holy Week or in whatever way he opens to you I repeat the bidding of the last line of my book from Ephesians 3:19 'May you know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God’.