Wivelsfield & St Richard, Haywards Heath Death 25.10.23

‘You must stand ready, because the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect’ (Luke 12:40)

Today’s Gospel invites us to keep prepared for the Lord’s coming. Historically this has been seen as an invitation to keep prepared both for Christ’s return and for our own death as both will take us into his closer presence.

As Christians we fear neither because as the letter to the Romans makes clear a few verses before today’s section ‘there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus’ (Romans 8:1). Our well prepared participation in Holy Communion renews that belonging in Christ day by day. Our death will be a passing from one part of the Church to the next. Devout preparation for Holy Communion, living in humble sorrow for sin with confidence in God guarantees a good death.

Alas post-Christian culture is far from this coming to terms with death. Our society is saturated with the adult themes of sex and sexuality but it runs a mile from another adult theme that of death. I was talking to someone the other day who had been engaging with their grandson on the meaning of life and she asked him whether he had thought a lot about what will happen when we die. That’s a good levelling platform for debate about the truth of Christianity.

As a priest I am privileged to have free access to St Paul’s Cathedral besides the privilege we all have of daily choral evensong in that splendid building. I often walk round. One of the most striking images on the ground floor so to speak is the memorial of former Dean John Donne, body veiled in a shroud with only his head visible. He is responsible for the beautiful saying about the funeral bell Ernest Hemingway took up in his book about the Spanish Civil War, ‘For whom the bell tolls’. Donne’s quotation on death tallies with his desire to have a memorial which will graphically preach it for all time. He died in 1631 and his memorial survived the destruction of the Cathedral in the greater fire of London 30 years later with just a scorch mark. This to me makes his memorial all the more telling. Here is his poem:   ‘No man is an island, entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were. As well as if a manor of thine own or of thine friend's were. Each man's death diminishes me, For I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee’.

‘You must stand ready, because the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect’ 

In last week’s Times there was a fine obituary of another priest, a Jesuit, Michael Campbell-Johnston who died last month. I copied the last paragraph about his last days and leave you with it: ‘Surrounded by photographs taken from across his life, he would gaze out of the window and wonder how many leaves were on the tree outside. He was reconciled to his end. "How can I be afraid of my death?" he wrote on a scrap of paper. "It marks the last amen of my life and the first alleluia of my eternity."

Giggleswick School Remembrance Sunday 14.11.21

Eternity intersects time.

When Walter Morrison built Chapel he planned a reminder of such an intersection, placing the dome, symbol of eternity, on the Craven landscape, with seasons governed by the changes and chances of time. Over my lifetime the dome itself has seen such changes and chances, losing its green coat of verdigris, growing less striking but no less majestic. Within the dome, the interlaced angels are better lit up than when they first appeared, and shine, as they’ve shone upon five generations of Giggleswickians, a reminder of the eternal God above who is our refuge.

Eternity intersects time.

We’ve had a reminder of that truth as time stopped for two minutes and eyes and hearts lifted to the Dome and beyond it. The ritual of Remembrance Sunday is slightly younger than Chapel. Year by year it brings people across our nation to look up from time to eternity and engage thankfully with the selflessness of service. Reflection upon those who gave their lives in warfare is focussed for Christians upon the verse in John’s Gospel, subject of our anthem, capturing the moral significance of eternity’s intersection with time: ‘No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends’ (John 15:13). 

Recognising that love found in Jesus Christ, true God and true man, I knelt years back under the Dome to be confirmed. I set my passion for Chemistry in an eternal context thanks to the inspiration of masters like Bill Brocklebank, John Dean and The Reverend Philip Curtis. Off I went to Oxford and the nuclear reactor at Harwell down the road to continue experiments I’d begun at Giggleswick, and in our garden shed, to search out the forces that bind polymers. 

As scientist I see faith as a form of wisdom that goes beyond but not against knowledge accessible to our minds. How can I believe in a God I cannot see? I’ve made a well weighed decision. That is what faith is – a careful decision to act as if God were there and be energised by a power beyond oneself. Some things in life can’t be tied down rationally. God is one such thing, and so is much of chemistry. Contrary to popular perception the revelation of truth in chemistry relies on the subjective imagination of the scientist as well as the objective truth awaiting discovery. Similarly, theological pursuit of truth, especially in Christianity, relies on stubborn historical research as well as philosophical speculation. Science by definition excludes the supernatural but does not deny it or the associated realm of metaphysics we are invited into by Christ’s resurrection. Both faith and reason lead us up to God, so Christian revelation is partner with and not rival to scientific knowledge, as the witness of so many believing scientists makes clear. To have faith is to go beyond not against reason. As John Donne wrote ‘Reason is our soul’s left hand, faith his right, by these we reach divinity’. Faith and reason lift us to God and in Jesus God himself reaches down to us revealing himself to both our reason and our faith.

Eternity intersects time.

A few years after I left Giggleswick the angels in the Dome came real for me. I was heading on my Lambretta from Harwell up the A34 to my Oxford College when the front tyre burst and I went across the road to slide under a lorry. I was heading to keep the feast of St Michael & All Angels at my church of St Mary Magdalene in Oxford. The good news is I passed under the lorry though I missed that service and ended up in the Radcliffe Infirmary. I remain convinced St Michael and his angels were sent by God to protect my life for a purpose. A few years later that purpose was revealed. I left my work at Oxford University and the nuclear power station at Harwell to train as a priest. The angels who shifted the lorry, or my scooter, helped shift my career their way. I say ‘their way’ because angels and priests have the same mission: to bring God’s love to people and people to God’s love. I am here to preach this morning because of a direct experience of eternity intersecting time on the A34.

‘No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends’. 

This Remembrance Sunday we have recalled the self sacrifice of many in an eternal context, that of the death of Jesus on the Cross. As evangelist Oswald Chambers (1874-1917), who died during World War One, wrote:  ‘The Cross is the point where God and sinful man merge with a crash and the way to life is opened - but the crash is on the heart of God’. The overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God chases us down through our years with the provision attained by his sacrifice, his crash with wickedness on the Cross and the gift of the Spirit that burst out of Christ’s tomb on Easter Day.

Eternity intersects time.

Your troubles, my troubles, seem slight compared to those on a battlefield. As we take time to put troubles before God in prayer, as did many of those we remember  today, eternity intersects time, our time, to strengthen the important things in our life and shake off what is peripheral.  

For many of us the silence we kept was a reaching out towards the eternal God to care for those gone before us and help us gain peace of heart to bless our circle. Keeping silence regularly before the Lord, the silence we call prayer, is a means of becoming a channel for eternal love and peace passing understanding to intersect with time and flow into our troubled world including the environment. It affirms another world we are now to sing of, the eternal country whose ways are ways of gentleness and paths are peace. God’s kingdom come - his will be done, on earth as it is in heaven!

St Richard, Haywards Heath Candlemas 2020

We come to Church to worship and to be enlightened.

Jesus came first to the Temple on this day with those two ends of self offering and edification.

His parents made an offering on his behalf and they heard Simeon's prophecy of their Son becoming 'a light to lighten the nations'.

Candlemas gives us an opportunity to pause and reflect about what we do when we come to this Temple Sunday by Sunday.

It is a Temple before it is a preaching house, a place of teaching, yes, but primarily not a place of edification but a place of worship.

In this Chapel the worship of the eucharist has been offered day by day for over 80 years. People in their thousands have joined here to offer the unbloody sacrifice initiated by Jesus Christ we call the eucharist.

They've come 'to offer themselves, their souls and bodies as a living sacrifice' with, in and through Jesus Christ.

Today, his first visit to the one earthly Temple of his day, we recall that event as a prefiguring of Christ's eternal sacrifice. The turtle doves sacrificed on his behalf in that Temple gave way, with all animal sacrifices, to his once for all offering made on a repeat visit to Jerusalem in his 33rd year.

The priests and people then took no doves but an innocent Lamb, and as they did so the prophecy about his mother Mary in today's Gospel was fulfilled. 'A  sword will pierce your heart'. In St Martin’s Brighton, a Church I know well, that very image of Our Lady is provided at the foot of the Cross, graphically in black and with a sword stuck into her heart.

We come to Church to worship and to be enlightened.

Part of that enlightenment, as Mary and Joseph found, is the bringing of understanding and hence more creative involvement with the dark times of our life.

We all live with these - bereavement, chronic illness or the necessity to live with unresolved situations where there may be conflict. With Mary and Joseph this morning we welcome holy Simeon's words with gratitude since they speak of peace coming, as it does again and again, through heavenly illumination.

Jesus Christ is the light who lightens all nations and all ages.

May his light shine on us and into our various life situations this morning as we come to worship 'offering ourselves, our souls and bodies as a living sacrifice' with in and through Jesus Christ.

Like Simeon we see in Jesus one who removes the fear of death and promises perpetual light to his family as they travel forward in his light to their fulfilment in the house of the Lord together and forever.

I end with a beautiful prayer of John Donne, sixteenth century Dean of St Paul’s which captures that aspiration: 

Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening into the house and gate of heaven to enter into that gate and dwell in that house, where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light; no noise nor silence, but one equal music; no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession; no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity; in the habitations of thy glory and dominion, world without end. Amen

Giggleswick School OG Day 29.6.19 Isaiah 40:21-31

Life is full of goodbyes and that’s no bad thing.

We’ve just said goodbye to the Upper Sixth who’ve finished exams and left Giggleswick. Goodbye’s been said also to Year 11 already on Summer break after GCSEs and there’ll be more goodbyes next week when term ends.

The influx of OG’s today, including myself, who’ve been saying hello and goodbye to one another for years, demonstrates the truth of my proposal - goodbyes aren’t the end of the world, though sometimes they feel like it.

The etymology of goodbye is a help as well - it’s a shortened form of ‘God be with you’. We’re none of us apart from God the fount of life and love so when we say goodbye we stay with one another in a bigger context.

In 1966 (3) I said goodbye to Blewitt, Haygarth, Miller and Ormerod. We went our separate ways to pathology, teaching, finance and, in my case, research into Teflon then the Church - I’m known as the non-stick Vicar! Those men - we were all men then alas - those men stayed on my heart and we keep in touch. Our lives are intertwined - I’m godfather to some of their children - since that day half a century back when we struggled up Chapel Hill for leavers’ service.

As we leave Chapel today my prayer for you is that Chapel - especially the Dome - will stay in your mind and heart as a symbol of that truth of goodbye - God be with you. As we heard Isaiah reflecting just now: Have you not known? …. It is he who sits above the circle of the earth… who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in… Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted… but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

Giggleswick School is proud owner of William Morrison’s God symbol bequest in which we gather this morning under the angels in Thomas Jackson’s octagonal dome. The combination of squares and circles in a dome symbolise union of earth and heaven. In ancient understanding the skies were a dome. Domed tents were associated with earthly rulers representing God who sits above the circle of the earth… stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in.  Under Chapel dome this morning there’s connection with one another beyond that of pupils, teachers and OGs. Though we periodically say goodbye to one another we remain on one another’s hearts and our prayer for one another seals that union.

A priest associated with a dome more famous even than Giggleswick’s said No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As an aside I find it fascinating that post Reformation Dean of St Paul’s John Donne saw human solidarity crossing the English Channel seeing our land as one with Europe. If and when we say goodbye to membership of the European Union may that sentiment continue. More than that, as Morrison built Chapel to point us east, may our mother Church of England keep solidarity with the holy, catholic church east of Dover. In both Brexits, Reformation and current, we shouldn’t see goodbye as a bad thing.

No man is an island Donne wrote. All of us connect, women and men, through the centuries and across the world. That connection is built from God as fount of life and love whether we acknowledge it or not. Those who do capture the further truth stated by Isaiah: Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted… but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

The Chapel Dome has a symbolism rather lost in a materialistic culture, lost as much as the deep meaning hidden in our saying ‘goodbye’ to one another. Last month we were in Venice attending worship in its 5 domed Cathedral when naturally I got thinking about this morning’s worship. Like Francis Jackson the architect of San Marco brought east west in designing Venice’s Basilica. As Latin chant echoed in the main Dome there we sensed God with us, just as today’s Anglican chant rising into this Dome lifts our hearts. Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

Life is full of goodbyes and that’s no bad thing.

It’s no bad thing to pray God be with you. Next month rather than looking forward from Venice to being in Chapel I’ll be looking back from our home in Haywards Heath at the experience of OG Day. As I do so Blewitt, Haygarth, Miller, Ormerod and all of you will be on my heart as I continue to pray God be with you for you all. I dare to hope you too look back and pray for me and for us all.

As we reflect back day by day on those we’ve said hello and goodbye to we get  reminded they’re on our hearts and that those on our hearts are on the heart of God in whom we live and move and have our being.

Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted… but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles. Goodbye for now - God be with you!

Advent 2 8am 6th December 2015

Christianity is well thought out. It’s well thought out because it’s from the mind of God no less! You can’t rubbish Christianity as a blind faith because it’s a reasonable faith. There are few faith traditions so rooted in unambiguous historical events.

Listen again to that very specific account that introduces the third chapter of St Luke’s gospel which is today’s gospel reading: In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip, ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.

No wonder historians of all ages have applauded St Luke, whose gospel we’re now reading in Year C of the Sunday Lectionary, as being one of them. You can check his historical facts. We can consequently be 95% certain John the Baptist and Jesus Christ met in the River Jordan where the first baptised the second.

You can’t see God but at one point in history you could because God became one of us. John the Baptist was sent as the pointer to this. More than that, a pointer to the one who’d help everyone who wanted to know God to know God and share God’s life for ever.

To be a Christian is to share the baptism St John the Baptist came to speak of, the anointing in the Holy Spirit that makes the invisible God known as surely as the wind makes the air known.

A God we could see would actually be less wonderful than the God Christians believe in. We’d be able to contain him in our minds! Instead the Christian vision of God is one that expands continually from our limited dimensions to his unlimited ones. If you want a magnificent God the price you pay seems to be that of worshipping a God that’s invisible to mortal eyes.

How can I believe in a God I can't see? People ask us. I’m tempted to answer ‘you wouldn’t need to believe in someone if you could actually see them!’ Faith, as the letter to the Hebrews puts it, is conviction of things unseen (11:1).

The question ‘How can I believe in a God I can't see?’ is really the question ‘how can I find faith?’

A quick answer is ‘you should ask God for it, ask him to open your inner eyes to his all powerful yet invisible presence’.

I remember once my faith going right into the doldrums. It really burned low, so low I went back to the monastery at Mirfield where I trained as a priest and asked for help.

Maybe it’s not God who’s gone but your vision of him, the monks said. Pray for a vision of God more to his dimensions and less to your own they said. For three days I prayed a prayer rather like God, if you’re there, show yourself! He did – I survive to tell the tale – he spoke to me through a leaf on a tree.

I made you. He said. I love you. I want to fill you with my Spirit. That he did, though I’ve leaked since.

Asking God for a vision of himself more to his dimensions and less to your own seems always to bear fruit. Faith grows – it enlarges, especially if it is enriched by prayerful reading of the Bible and celebration of the sacraments. 

Christian mystics write of faith as a practical commitment.

In the medieval Cloud of Unknowing the anonymous mystical author describes faith as an ‘eager dart of longing love’ that reaches out to touch God and release his possibilities into our situation.

John the Baptist pointed to God so that we too could be drawn to reach out to God ourselves.

How can I believe in a God I can't see? You need to make a decision. That’s what faith is – an ongoing decision to go beyond and not against reason. As John Donne wrote Reason is our soul’s left hand, faith his right, by these we reach divinity.

Both faith and reason lift us to God and in Jesus God himself reaches down to us revealing himself to both our reason and our faith. In St Luke’s record of history of John the Baptist and Jesus Christ we should see a reasonable case for the Incarnation, the coming of God upon the earth.

Here, in the coming of Jesus that Advent centres upon, what we believe and what we see come together.

As St John the Evangelist writes No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known (John 1:18)

You can see him now with your mind and heart’s eye - in his word, in the breaking of bread, in our Christian fellowship.

St John the Baptist tells us so for his words echo on through history in our liturgy of the eucharist. John gives us the very words that speak of Christ’s presence:

Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world.

Candlemas 8am 27.1.13

Today we anticipate for pastoral reasons, linked to Education Sunday, what the Prayer Book calls the Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin or the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. This festival which we are allowed to transfer from its set day of 2^nd February, celebrates the baby Jesus being taken to the  Temple  in  Jerusalem forty days after his birth to complete Mary's ritual purification after childbirth, and to perform the redemption of the firstborn, in obedience to the Law of Moses which indicates this should take place forty days after birth for a male child, hence the Presentation is properly celebrated forty days after Christmas.

Upon bringing Jesus into the temple, the family encounter Simeon. The Gospel records Simeon had been promised "he should not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ" (Luke 2:26). Simeon prays the prayer we now use at evensong or compline that’s known as the Nunc Dimittis, or Canticle of Simeon, prophesying the redemption of the world by Jesus:

Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace; according to Thy word: for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation, which Thou hast prepared before the face of all people: to be a light to lighten the gentiles and to be the glory of Thy people Israel (Luke 2:29-32).

In addition to being known as the Purification of Mary or Presentation of Christ another traditional name for today is Candlemas referring to the practice whereby later on this morning the priest blesses candles in a  place apart from Church – the school in our case - for a re-enactment of Christ’s entry into the Temple, symbolised by our Church building.

As we bless the candles we’ll be singing the Nunc Dimittis which contains Simeon’s prophecy that Christ’s salvations is to be a light to lighten the gentiles and to be the glory of Thy people Israel.

All celebrations of the events which have brought us salvation through the life, death and resurrection of Christ are given so we may apply them to our lives.  Just as each eucharist recalls Christ’s death and resurrection so we die further to sin and rise more to the life of the Spirit so the church’s calendar of feasts is given us to engage with the historical events to find truth to imitate and fresh hope.

As one ancient prayer used in contemplating today’s mystery of the Presentation puts it grant that we may imitate what it contains and obtain what it promises.

What truth is there to imitate in this morning’s celebration? We find a well expressed truth to take to heart in the Collect which prayed: as thy only-begotten Son was this day presented in the temple in substance of our flesh, so (may we) be presented unto thee with pure and clean hearts. In other words help us to be presentable. Just as on Friday night I searched out a bit of tartan to make me presentable at our Burns Night so our being presentable before God requires a discipline of self-examination to make sure we come to his altar with pure and clean hearts.

What promise is there for us to obtain in this celebration? I would say that the ceremonial entry into Church we’ll enact later on anticipates our entry through the gates of heaven into paradise, into the house of the Lord. Our Anglican funeral liturgy encourages the recitation of those words of the Nunc Dimittis in today’s Gospel: Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace; according to Thy word: for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation.

Like Simeon we see in Jesus one who removes the fear of death and promises perpetual light to his family as they travel forward in his light to their fulfilment in the house of the Lord together and forever.

I end with a beautiful prayer of John Donne, sixteenth century Dean of St Paul’s some of you may know: Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening into the house and gate of heaven to enter into that gate and dwell in that house, where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light; no noise nor silence, but one equal music; no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession; no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity; in the habitations of thy glory and dominion, world without end. 

Advent 3 Faith & Reason 13th December 2009

You can’t see God but there are pointers and John the Baptist is one of them.

God’s unseen-ness is a major stumbling block to Christian belief in a materialistic world. People too often believe in, or rather value, only what they can see.

Ask a married blind person though if they believe in the love their spouse has for them. Not only can they not see their wife but they doubly can’t see intangible love. All the same in my experience of blind people they know the love their spouse has for them.

Similarly it’s possible to experience God’s presence and love without seeing him with our eyes. That’s what we’re about in Church this morning in fact. God making himself real to us through the words of a book, through bread and wine and human touch.

Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe. Jesus once said.

There are many unseen things in life that are really important. People who complain at God’s invisibility don’t complain they can’t see electricity or the air around them.

We see the effect of the wind even if we can’t see it directly. Similarly though God is unseen he can be experienced by faith.

I’ve strayed a little from John the Baptist. He is a historical pointer to God.

He pointed to Jesus. As one in the great succession of prophets he also pointed to injustice. Like Zephaniah in our first reading he shared God’s heart to save the lame and gather the outcast.

John pointed to human wrongs but first he pointed to divine goodness.

Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world he said, pointing to his cousin.

When God landed on the earth he came into a specific place and time and culture for which St John the Baptist was herald. He didn’t land out of the blue.

Christianity is well thought out. It’s well thought out because it’s from the mind of God no less! You can’t rubbish Christianity as a blind faith because it’s a faith that’s rooted in history. There are few faith traditions so rooted in unambiguous historical events.

Listen again to that very specific account that introduces the third chapter of St Luke’s gospel which is today’s gospel reading: In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip, ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.

No wonder historians of all ages have applauded St Luke, whose gospel we’re reading in Year C of the Sunday Lectionary, as being one of them. You can check his historical facts. We can consequently be 95% certain John the Baptist and Jesus Christ met in the River Jordan where the first baptised the second. Because the ancient dating schemes slipped forward about 6 years we’re pretty certain that the baptism of Jesus in his 30th year by St John occurred in 24AD just as the first Christmas was probably 6BC.

When John baptised Jesus we read in several New Testament accounts that the Holy Spirit was seen to come down on him. There was also a voice from above, said to be from God the Father, saying You are my Son.

Jesus came into his own as Son of God at his baptism. He was conceived of the Spirit from Our Lady but the Spirit came upon him in power in a second anointing that occurred in the River Jordan at the hand of St John the Baptist. In today’s Gospel we read: As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, ‘I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. St John in a parallel to this passage in Luke Chapter 3 writes: He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit. And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God (1.33b-34).

You can’t see God but at one point in history you could because God became one of us. John the Baptist was sent as the pointer to this. More than that, a pointer to the one who’d help everyone who wanted to know God to know God and share God’s life for ever.

To be a Christian is to share the baptism or anointing of the Holy Spirit who makes the invisible God known as surely as the wind makes the air known.

It’s implied in the Bible that God is invisible to protect us from his glory. This invisibility serves our freedom to love without being manipulated. If he were visible that would dramatically affect our freedom to grow in pure love. By being invisible God can be with us without overwhelming us. He can stand at a distance to grant us freedom to make our own decisions including the decision to love him and our neighbour and ourselves.

A God we could see would actually be less wonderful than the God Christians believe in. We’d be able to contain him in our minds! Instead the Christian vision of God is one that expands continually from our limited dimensions to his unlimited ones. If you want a magnificent God the price you pay seems to be that of worshipping a God that’s invisible to mortal eyes.

The magnificence of God is shown to us by St John when he points to Jesus. The Jesus he points to goes on to demonstrate God’s magnificence by 3 years of teaching, a voluntary death, a glorious resurrection and Pentecost, the sending of the Holy Spirit upon believers which is the way the Church finds God made real to her.

How can I believe in a God I can't see? I’m tempted to answer ‘you wouldn’t need to believe in someone if you could actually see them!’ Faith, as the letter to the Hebrews puts it, is conviction of things unseen (11:1).

The question ‘How can I believe in a God I can't see?’ is really the question ‘how can I find faith?’

A quick answer is ‘you should ask God for it, ask him to open your inner eyes to his all powerful yet invisible presence’.

I remember once my faith going right into the doldrums. It really burned low, so low I went back to the monastery at Mirfield where I trained as a priest and asked for help.

Maybe it’s not God who’s gone but your vision of him, the monks said. Pray for a vision of God more to his dimensions and less to your own they said. For three days I prayed a prayer rather like God, if you’re there, show yourself! He did – I survive to tell the tale – he spoke to me through a leaf on a tree.

I made you. He said. I love you. I want to fill you with my Spirit. That he did, though I’ve leaked since.

Asking God for a vision of himself more to his dimensions and less to your own seems always to bear fruit. Faith grows – it enlarges, especially if it is enriched by prayerful reading of the Bible and celebration of the sacraments.

You can’t expect great things of God if you don’t believe he’s capable of them. The wonder of Christmas is its magnification of the Lord. The very thought that he who contains all that is could come to Mary’s womb, could come to this altar in bread and wine – could come into this heart and that heart and that heart! It’s an astounding thought really.

It’s faith that opens up such a vision. Now let’s be clear, faith isn’t a feeling you can work up or enlarge. It’s our capacity to compass God through an ongoing decision to reach towards him and be energised by him.

Christian mystics write of faith as a practical commitment. In the medieval Cloud of Unknowing the anonymous medieval author describes faith as an ‘eager dart of longing love’ that reaches out to touch God and release his possibilities into our situation.

John the Baptist pointed to God so that we too could be drawn to reach out to God ourselves.

Faith always takes us out of ourselves towards God and neighbour.

When C.S.Lewis asked himself ‘Do I believe?’ he said his belief seemed to go - just like when he asked himself in the midst of pleasure, ‘am I enjoying myself’ his enjoyment seemed to go. Both actions, he said, are like taking one’s eyes out instead of keeping them in the right place and seeing with them. Faith like enjoyment has its focus outside of self.

How can I believe in a God I can't see? You need to make a decision. That’s what faith is – a decision to act as if God were there and to be energised by a power quite outside and beyond oneself.

To have faith is to go beyond and not against reason. As John Donne wrote Reason is our soul’s left hand, faith his right, by these we reach divinity.

Both faith and reason lift us to God and in Jesus God himself reaches down to us revealing himself to both our reason and our faith. In St Luke’s record of history of John the Baptist and Jesus Christ we should see a reasonable case for the Incarnation, the coming of God upon the earth.

Here, in the coming of Jesus that Advent centres upon, what we believe and what we see come together.

As St John writes No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known (John 1:18)

You can see him now with your mind and heart’s eye - in his word, in the breaking of bread, in our Christian fellowship.

St John the Baptist invites you again, for his words are true today as they were yesterday and will be tomorrow: Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world.

Look at Jesus with both your faith and your reason. Look at him! Look at him and welcome him this morning in word and sacrament!