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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baptism of Jasmine Pike 21st September 2014

To live is Christ – or living is Christ in today’s translation of Philippians 1:21 – what does that mean?

What does it mean to 1st century Paul and 21^st century you and I?

To Jasmine whose happy day of Christian initiation this is?

To live is Christ. It’s a mystical saying, four words that sum up the life philosophy of Christianity’s greatest teacher. After a blinding light of revelation on the road to Damascus Paul had carried resurrection news of Jesus to the four corners of his world and now he is in prison. The words we read today are a letter from one under sentence of death who writes to me, living is Christ and dying is gain.

What assurance! Assurance linked to personal knowledge of our risen Saviour Jesus Christ. The Lord who had said to him what he would say to us this morning:  Your way leads to a hopeless end. My way leads to an endless hope!

To live without Christ is to live towards a hopeless end. To live with Christ is to live towards an endless hope, for dying Jesus broke the power of death and rising opened joyous eternity to all who’ll live in him.

To live is Christ. What does that mean? It means to live your life with the gift of faith, rooted and grounded in the Christian community, walking with them in the way of Christ and the worship of his Church. So says the baptism service!

This is the way Harry, Milly, Anthia, Anicia and Jasmine want to follow and its lovely for Anthia and Anicia, baptised and confirmed last year, to be standing by their little sister this morning as the family commit her to God’s family of which they’ve made themselves part.

To live is Christ. Making an analogy with classic figures from ancient history St Alphonsus Liguori who lived in the 18^th century wrote: Diogenes went about seeking a man upon earth: hominem quaero; but God seems to be seeking a Christian among the many faithful: Christianum quaero. For very few are they who have the works, the greater part have only the name; but to these should be said what Alexander said to that cowardly soldier who was also named Alexander: change either your name or your conduct: Aut nomen, aut mores muta. But as written elsewhere it would be better if these miserable creatures were put in confinement as madmen, believing as they do, that a happy eternity is prepared for him who lives well, and unhappy eternity for him who lives ill, and yet living as if they do not believe this.

We cannot say with Paul to live is Christ unless we not only believe in and pray in Christ’s name but also act in Christ’s name, act as if we believe.

Ten days ago I attended the Chichester diocesan clergy conference at the University of Kent. 300 priests and deacons worshipped, prayed and learned together gaining a new sense of purpose and collaboration under the leadership of our diocesan Bishop Martin Warner and his assistant Bishops Mark Sowerby of Horsham and Richard Jackson of Lewes. We were privileged to stay in freshly restored rooms at the University, to be fed like kings and to worship with Archbishops, so to speak, down the road in Canterbury Cathedral.

In his closing address Bishop Martin, who is like me a Latinist, took an ancient motto lex orandi lex credendi which means ‘the law of praying is the law of believing’ and added lex agendi, the law of action. The bishop wants seamless connection between Christian worship, the Christian creed and Christian action. What we pray is to be more fully linked to both what we believe and what we do with our lives and in our churches.

To live is Christ and to be rooted in Christian prayer, teaching and action.  Bishop Martin extended this challenge to us as fellow priests and diocesan leaders to form up a diocese that’s younger, financially solvent and better at risk-taking.  He wants tighter and more immediate communication across the church in Sussex and many more gifted laity operating in the counsels of the diocese, especially in finance, property and liaison with the political world.

Above all he applauded the virtue of kindness as a key quality of life in Christ. If to live is Christ that is to live kindly, literally in kindred, related to one another, to those whose nature, whose humanity we share. All of which is counter to the depersonalising commodification of the person that afflicts our culture.

The German philosopher Nietzche was no friend of Christianity and famously said: Show me that you are redeemed and then I will believe in your redeemer. He had a point. St Augustine was fully aware of that point 1500 years before him when he said No fragrance can be more pleasing to God than that of his own Son. May all the faithful breathe out the same perfume. If to live is Christ it is to be Christ to others through kindness.

To live is Christ which means not as mean-spirited, narrow-mind sour pusses lacking in mercy but as those who know forgiveness from God and who show it to others.

I know that my redeemer lives said Job in words prophesying Christ’s resurrection. To know that redeemer and his redemption from the tendency within to harm others is the work of the Holy Spirit. It is also the basis of hope in the face of death, as Paul adds, after saying to live is Christ, to die is gain. We are in life if we’re in Christ, life that can never die, eternal life.

Your way leads to a hopeless end. My way leads to an endless hope!

God’s nothing to do with death he’s our life and hope for ever!

To live is Christ is to know that life, to know that your redeemer lives, that he is your redeemer and that he lives in you by the grace and the fruit of baptism.

It’s to be the fragrance of Christ, giving people opportunity to breath in the perfume of his Spirit’s work in our lives.

To the joyless we bring joy, to the loveless we bring love to the unforgiving we bring forgiveness.

May such grace be ours through the eucharist we celebrate this morning.

Epiphany sermon on Hope 5th January 2014

I want to look with you this morning at hope.

Where there’s life there’s hope is a Latin proverb.

If it were not for hope the heart would break runs another proverb.

Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attaining her eternity wrote Herbert Melville.

God has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ wrote St Peter (1 Peter 1:3b)

Hope does not disappoint us because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us wrote St Paul (Romans 5:5)

I am a man of hope, not for human reasons nor from any narrow optimism, but because I believe the Holy Spirit is at work in the Church and the world, even where his name remains unheard wrote Joseph Suenens.

These last ten days I’ve been curled up with Robert Harris’ Pompeii which Anne and I obtained after our visit last year to the British Museum Pompeii exhibition.  In his No 1 bestseller Harris paints a brilliant word picture of ‘a luxurious world on the brink of destruction’ as days run through August 79AD in the Bay of Naples to the day Mount Vesuvius exploded. His book was excellent company through our power cuts and through my cold.

In 1938 excavations in Herculaneum, like Pompeii covered by lava, uncovered a small cross imbedded in a wall on the second floor of a tenement. This is among the earliest evidence for the spread of Christianity from Jerusalem to the centre of the Roman Empire.

In this tiny room the words I read from Peter and Paul, martyred 13 years before in nearby Rome, would console an early believer facing death by suffocation. Hope does not disappoint us because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us…. the God who has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

What is hope?

Wikipedia – the internet dictionary says it is the state which promotes the desire of positive outcomes related to events and circumstances in one's life or in the world at large. This state Wikipedia describes of desiring positive outcomes is less than the Christian vision about obtaining the ultimate good things of God. As Wikipedia itself narrates: Hope in the Holy Bible means a strong and confident expectation and it goes on to quote St Paul in Romans 8:24-25: For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for why does one also hope for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it.

According to the Holman Bible Dictionary, hope is a "trustful expectation, particularly with reference to the fulfilment of God's promises. Hope is the anticipation of a favourable outcome under God's guidance... the confidence that what God has done for us in the past guarantees our participation in what God will do in the future.

There are three key or theological virtues in Christianity, faith, hope and love and it’s the neglect of the centre one that’s got me to address hope this morning as a fundamental element of our Christianity.

Hope in Christianity is no shallow optimism. This Sunday marks our entry into 2014 and a year’s commemoration of the First World War which did more than anything else to shatter the Victorian optimism that stemmed from the industrial revolution and the progress it brought. The Great War was at the start of a century of wars that ended with the Cold War, a century which saw loss of Christian hope and rise of totalitarian ideologies and cynical indifference to religion.

This Epiphany Sunday is a reminder of how Christianity stands or falls on vision, and the communication of vision, vision of God allied to a hopeful vision of humanity, and how the last century in the western world has seen a failure in this communication. A century ago you would only just squeeze folk in to St Giles even with the Victorian extension. Today, need I say more? And yet there are some signs of the tide turning the way of Christian faith.

I wonder how many villagers got to thinking at Christmas about the real Christmas, due to the hardships we all shared ten days ago? When you’re cold and hungry it gets you thinking ‘what’s the point?’ and clearly a good number saw a point in climbing the hill to Church. How many I wonder put faith in God here, prayed to him with us in the harsh circumstances we all shared?

This is the day that the Lord has made says the Psalm writer. If faith says today is God’s hope says tomorrow is God’s – that is my simplest definition of hope: faith for the future that’s to be worked out in love, the greatest of the three, because faith and hope steel the nerves to forget self and deliver love today and tomorrow.

A year or two back at Epiphany some of us picked up the second verse of Isaiah Chapter 60 which you heard in our first reading this morning as having a very special resonance for St Giles: For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you.

I wonder if that verse doesn’t still have enormous relevance as a word from him this 5^th January 2014? The loss of hope around us is a thick spiritual darkness. We believers, lit up this morning by the Epiphany star, are called to act and speak and be one with the Lord who rises upon us and whose glory appears over this village symbolised by the nightly illumination of our spire and its daily pointing up to him.

This eucharist brings us to kneel before Jesus Christ, not veiled in flesh, as he was to wise men, but as he is to us this morning, veiled in bread and wine in the Blessed Sacrament of his Body and Blood.

The Lord is here – his Spirit is with us - Hope does not disappoint us because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us…. the God who has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Romans 15:13

Easter 2 Hope 7th April 2013

Easter Monday’s Start the Week on Radio 4 with Tom Sutcliffe, James Lasdun and John Gray got my grey cells going on the myth of progress. Before I went to celebrate the second Eucharist of Easter that Monday morning I received a hefty dose of pessimism. The programme majored on how reversible human progress is and the sort of Julie Andrews’ survival technique we adopt of ‘confidence in confidence’. 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.

Throughout the radio debate it was admitted people need religion to shape and give meaning to their lives. It was an admission that came down though to a sort of ‘no wonder people turn to religion to escape this awful scenario’. The assumption was religious belief provides an escape from reality – and yet the brutal realities we’re living through seem to demand such an escape, however irrational. Another coping mechanism around identified in Monday’s Start the Week 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.

As I went to Church on Easter Monday I thought: 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?

In Church on Easter Monday I celebrated the eucharist, as this morning, alongside the Paschal Candle. As I did so, thinking of the Radio programme, I came to think of the five pins stuck in it which represent the wounds of Christ, commemorated in 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 Ursilla Cook telling me how important and helpful the holding cross was that she’d been given at the Hospice. Or the day before he died, as Colin Griffiths lay on his bed, I explained he’d be anointed on his head, reminder of baptism, and his palms, reminder of Jesus’ death for him. We’d just read the Holy Week Gospel of Christ’s Passion. I’ll never forget Colin sitting up and stretching his arms right out, as if on the Cross with Jesus. It was as if he volunteered himself to suffer with Jesus so he’d die and rise with Jesus. I think of Tom this Easter week, of marking the cross in holy oil on him before he died marking this Easter week, like the Easter Candle, with a sorrowful Cross for Pam and all of us.  No wonder Péguy said a Christian is a sad man saved from despair by the Cross of Christ. Life is a vale of tears.

In our second reading today from the book of Revelation we read of how such 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. This passage is the basis of Charles Wesley’s Advent hymn Lo he comes that 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!