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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

St John, Burgess Hill Advent 4 22.12.19

This morning we see God’s great choice of Our Lady to be mother of Our Lord. 

When we look closely at Mary’s story, especially in Luke’s account, we see how she struggled before saying Yes to God’s choice of her to be the mother of his Son.

In our own lives we also struggle many a time to conform our lives to what God would have us do. 

This morning in Mary the church invites us to ponder the choices of God and to think about how much our lives are faithful to God’s choice of us.

One of the advantages of being a semi-retired priest is that you get a choice of where to go to Church or indeed, as today, of where to celebrate the Eucharist. I’m learning to get family weekends in the diary well in advance so I can respond to vacancy calls such as that from St John’s and St Bartholomew, Brighton. I’m to be a monthly visitor to each over the next three months from my base in Haywards Heath.

Before I left Horsted Keynes two and a half years ago I totted up some of the pastoral involvements from the baptism, marriage and burial registers. Over 8 years I helped celebrate 39 baptisms and 40 marriages with double that number so far as funerals go. That doubling is significant. Birth and marriage today are seen much less in terms of faith than funerals as these reflect Christian formation three generations back.

Nowadays the choice to baptise your child is less about fitting in with the norm in a Christian country but a decided act to own the Christian church with its particular vision and values as an extension of your family. 

Similarly to commit to your partner before God with the understanding of life-long irrevocable union is counter cultural. Aspiring to a gift of self that will not be called back, mirroring God’s love given on Calvary in blood, sweat and tears, goes against the grain today. 

I love you so often means I love me and want you rather than I love you and want to give to you now and for ever.

Life choices make or break us.  So much moral decision making is about choosing the least bad option. This is where the Holy Spirit, prayer ministry and the sacrament of confession are so precious to us as church members seeking what God most wants of us in the different crises of life.

Some of us are thinking about a change of job. Others making the most of a redundancy. One or two may feel they have done a voluntary task for long enough and are seeking new possibilities.

Just a few thoughts, returning to Our Lady, on the process of guidance.  You might have spotted the connection between the Isaiah 7 passage and the Gospel from Matthew 1:18-25 with the prophecy of the virginal conception: the young woman – the Virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him ‘Emmanuel’, which means ‘God is with us’. For Mary and Joseph their choice of one another was set within a bigger choice of God to which they deferred to in facing indignity. As we profess Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord, was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary 

Christianity is a faith that holds disparate truths together – God is one yet three, Jesus is God yet man – and God has chosen us yet we have to decide how to live our lives.

It seems to me that Christians are at two ends when it comes to divine guidance. Some see God‘s choice as starting us off and then leaving us with common sense – sanctified common sense – to get going on our own. 

Others, if you ask them to do something, will say they need to pray about it, and they talk of God’s guidance as very immediate and direct.

I’m not coming down on one side or the other. What matters is to recognise the hand of God in our lives, as Mary and Joseph did, and to cast aside the things that draw us away from his leadings.

The sanctified common sense sort of guidance needs supplementing by openness to God’s surprises in the form of obvious divine intervention. Those who sense something of a hotline to God need to work harder to check their leadings by arguing the case at times with other experienced believers. Both reason and faith are God’s gift and they shouldn’t contradict each other.

If we want our lives, including our decision making, to go where they’re meant to go, it means developing what Paul in our second reading from the opening verses of the letter to the Romans calls the obedience of faith.  

This obedience is more than avoiding deadly sins. It is the best directing of our energies. It’s about knowing we’re in the right employment or state of life, be that married or single. It’s readiness to ask ourselves whether where we’re at is truly in God’s will or whether it’s actually at variance with it, if only we’d take courage to open our ears to him.

If you are on the rails God gives us, living close to Jesus, you move more peaceably than if your life is off the rails. A lack of inner peace can be a helpful warning from God to take stock of your life. 

Christmas and New Year bring us such an opportunity to reflect. 

Some of us will use the sacrament of reconciliation or take opportunity to talk to the priest or another experienced Christian. Please do so after the service. Others may want to find a spiritual director or prayer guide. 

All of us can ask God directly: ‘Show me the needs that are deeper than my wants. Place my energies more to your service and less to aimless self interest’.

God’s hand on our lives, God’s choice of us, is a wonderful and a costly thing. We have a lifespan to exercise our faith in that choice. The penitent thief who turned to Jesus as he died shows us it’s never too late to seek God’s leading. 

God has chosen you and I and yet we have to decide how to live our lives. 

In making this decision the clue is WWJW – maybe you have seen the Christian bracelet – WWJW – What would Jesus want?

The eucharist is all about WWJW. We offer our souls and bodies with Christ to the Father so that our lives are put back on the rails Sunday by Sunday.

With Mary we say: I am God’s servant. Let it be to me as God wills!

Take my energies and use them for good since there is work for those God has chosen. 

There’s a harvest to gather and the labourers are few.

St Mary, Balcombe patronal September 9th 2018

An elderly lady told me of an incident at the death of her mother. With the family gathered at her bedside, mother uttered her last words: ‘Thy will be done’ and immediately the blind fell of its own accord! Mother spoke her last words and died and all went black in the room as the blind came down.

I remember the tale because those words - thy will be done - are too often uttered as passive resignation to God as fate, as in the dramatic circumstances of that death which spoke of the darkness of the beyond.

Hold that image and I’ll give you another, the grave of the priest who helped bring me to Christian faith and that has another clause of the Lord’s Prayer upon it - ‘Thy kingdom come’. This priest, seeing his death with active resignation, wanted a statement placed on his grave for the cause that would outlast him, namely the ongoing, death-defying work of God to bring ‘the kingdom of this world to become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ’ (Revelation 11:15)

What a different feeling there is to those two stories, all the difference between passive and active resignation and its the latter I’m commending on our Patronal feast, the active resignation we see so notably in our Patron the Most Blessed Virgin Mary.

Faced not with death but with virginal conception - pregnancy outside marriage and its consequences as God-bearer - Mary says in this morning’s Gospel: Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word. Luke 1:38

Her bow to Gabriel celebrated in art for a thousand years is no passive bow to fate but the active acceptance stated in the Creed For us and for our salvation [the only Son of God] was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and was made man.

We magnify Mary our Patron on account of that collaboration in service of God’s kingdom. Through her ‘Yes’ to God, given to Gabriel, salvation is ours. Through that ‘Yes’ confirmed in the hardships she bore Mary models to us active obedience. Simeon prophesied her heart would be ‘pierced with a sword’ in Luke 2:35 and we see this fulfilled in Mary’s presence at the foot of the Cross, obediently following her Son in his sufferings. She is model Christian, one with us, modelling active resignation to God’s will in sorrow and in joy. At the Marriage of Cana she gives advice to the servants we take for ourselves: ‘Do whatever [Jesus] tells you!’ John 2:5.

What is the Lord telling us here at St Mary’s Balcombe on our Patronal Festival?

I asked the church officers and this was their reply: ‘we need a priest, someone who loves Word and Spirit, but also the colourful tapestry of village life, and wants to lead us to Jesus and communicate in that environment.  Someone who keeps things transforming, who’ll help us be part of the subversive work of the kingdom of God’.

I sensed the Holy Spirit behind that perception and thought it important to repeat it to us all this morning as we mark a full year of our pastoral vacancy. As that vacancy continues - and all the evidence is that vacancies can continue and continue and continue - good will come as God’s people draw close to God and with Mary make the most of the divinely appointed challenge.

Yes, we should see the interregnum in that positive light. The lights didn’t go out in Balcombe when Fr Desmond left to carry his light elsewhere. Each one of us has in blessed Mary an upbeat reminder of how facing hardship, as in the vacancy, can bring faith aflame. This little light of mine I’m gonna make it shine!

Ten days ago I was in the congregation at a midweek eucharist and after Communion I sensed there was a sort of cobweb in my right eye. Off I went to A&E and the next morning A&E at Brighton Eye Hospital. I arrived mid-morning and left before lunch having received laser treatment for a retinal tear. Alongside that miracle I was given assurance that my brain will find its way through the cobweb, which I can still see when I chose to focus on it, and that it should fade away in the weeks and months ahead.

It's a challenge to set the Lord before me, as Psalm 34 verse 5 invites me, look to the Lord and be radiant. Active resignation is a gift but it's also a struggle, a challenge to get on with what God wants, looking away from myself to the needs of others and the agenda of the kingdom of God.

This morning as a congregation gathered on its Patronal Festival we have a similar challenge to see ourselves preparing the way not just for a new priest - so we can then sit back - but for the agenda God has in Balcombe and its surrounds. Remember Our Lady’s counsel: ‘Do whatever [Jesus] tells you!’.

As individuals we also have our struggles in which the gift of discernment is so very important. Sometimes it's a clear invitation, as in my eye floaters, to look forward in faith. Two men looked through prison bars. One saw mud and one saw stars.

Other times we need to pray for the Holy Spirit to show us what’s most important in our predicament. That knowledge when acted upon can have very large consequences as our lives move more towards what’s good, an upward trajectory which can take us out of darkness more rapidly than we’d ever think could occur.

Life can’t be lived without suffering but as believers we can see hardship as God’s megaphone, his way of showing us what’s most important. Where we catch on to this,  see things we need to put right in our lives and circumstances, good things always come our way. We just need to fix the things we know need fixing that we also know are within our power to fix. Something easier said than done though it's good to say it in the pulpit - there’s no word of God without power!

As we offer this eucharist may our prayer be that of blessed Mary: Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.

Here we are at St Mary’s, actively resigned to seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness for ourselves and for the people in our village.

Here we are each one of us, prepared to offer God our souls and bodies to be a living sacrifice actively resigned to his will, to his praise and service, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to whom be praise with blessed Mary, saints in heaven and saints on earth!

Advent 4 24th December 2017

How does Jesus come into our lives?

He comes by the Holy Spirit.

He comes by the Sacraments.

He comes by the Word of God.

He comes by holy people as they rub off on us.

He comes by circumstances – which links to a second question:

Why does Jesus come into our lives?

He comes to bring us into his life, death and resurrection – and here’s the rub.

Look, as the Church invites us to do so today, at his Mother.  She was first to welcome Jesus into her life – and where did it lead her?  She was led into hardship, led to a shaming pregnancy and a Cross of sorrows before taking the shine of glory.

I want Jesus in my life.  I want the shine of glory – but, if I am honest, I don’t want hardships!  

This is where Jesus sorts us out because it's by endurance of hardship that salvation is forged.

The great Christian writers speak of the need to gratefully accept most of what comes our way, including suffering and hardship.

Sharing life with Jesus means self-sacrifice.  

Mary gives us the clue.  I am the Lord's servant, she says in today’s Gospel, let it be for me according to the Lord's will and not my own.

Jesus gives us the Holy Spirit, the sacraments and scripture.

He also gives us hardships but we have to decide whether to endure them or quit.

In that decision we bring Jesus closer or we push him further away.

Over the last four months it’s been a privilege to come alongside St Bart’s as part of the team of priests serving our pastoral vacancy. The lay leadership here is impressive in its fortitude.

As someone privileged to minister to the scores who enter our doors day by day I engage with folk enduring hardships directly or alongside a loved one. In listening to and talking with them I’m many a time left feeling I’m a fair weather Christian!

The means by which we grow in holiness aren’t necessarily sermons or books or forms of prayer, the right sort of retreat or spiritual guide.

The means of our sanctification, of our cleansing from sin, healing from hurt and so on lies in the day to day circumstances of our life as we welcome them as the Lord’s gift.

As we read in Psalm 112:6,7 the righteous will not be overthrown by evil circumstances...he does not fear bad news, nor live in dread of what may happen. For he is settled in his mind that the Lord will take care of him.

The spiritual writer De Caussade in his book Self-abandonment to Divine Providence emphasises how our welcoming of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament Sunday by Sunday focuses the welcoming of the Lord in every circumstance that comes our way.

Jesus is as ready to meet us in the circumstances of our life as he is to meet us in the Sacrament of Bread and Wine.

To be glad deep down in your heart in every situation is a grace given by God, a grace we have to seek - just as Mary sought divine help to brave her expressed fear: How can this be?

If we aren't glad at heart it may be because we’re not fully submitted to God’s will revealed in the circumstances of our life. This leads me into a reminder. By a long standing tradition here at St Bart’s priests make themselves available for confession before the Feast of Christmas. You have a last chance to catch one of us over coffee if you desire to welcome from Our Lord the grace of absolution before Christmas Communion.

Jesus comes into our lives – by the Spirit, Sacrament, Scripture or by circumstances - to bring us into his own life, death and resurrection.

He is ready to help us face discomfort so that his resurrection life may grow in us by the Spirit and our old proud and sinful nature is further humiliated and put down.

As we prepare for Christmas may we have our spiritual ears open to hear God speaking into our lives so that we might decrease in self orientation and gain within us the love of Christ that will never fail.

Advent 4 The choices of God 18.12.16

This morning we see God’s great choice of Our Lady to be mother of Our Lord. When we look closely at Mary’s story, especially in Luke’s account, we see how she struggled before saying Yes to God’s choice of her to be the mother of his Son.

In our own lives we also struggle many a time to conform our lives to what God would have us do.

This morning in Mary the church invites us to ponder the choices of God and to think about how much our lives are faithful to God’s choice of us.

Over the years Anne and I have both made important choices one of which brought us to Horsted Keynes 8 years ago. Over that period we’ve been involved with many of you in your own decision making.

I was totting up some of the pastoral involvements from the baptism, marriage and burial registers looking back over the 39 baptisms and 40 marriages I’ve helped celebrate with double that number so far as funerals go. That doubling is significant. Birth and marriage today are seen much less in terms of faith than funerals as these reflect Christian formation three generations back.

Nowadays the choice to baptise your child is less about fitting in with the norm in a Christian country but a decided act to own the Christian church with its particular vision and values as an extension of your family.

Similarly to commit to your partner before God with the understanding of life-long heterosexual irrevocable union is counter cultural. Aspiring to a gift of self that will not be called back, mirroring God’s love given on Calvary in blood, sweat and tears, goes against the grain today.

I love you so often means I love me and want you rather than I love you and want to give to you now and for ever.

Life choices make or break us - as I was writing this sermon I broke off to pray with a divorced parent over a custody battle. So much moral decision making is about choosing the least bad option. This is where the Holy Spirit, prayer ministry and the sacrament of confession are so precious to us as church members seeking what God most wants of us in the different crises of life.

Some of us have been thinking about a change of job. Others have been making the most of a redundancy. One or two have felt they have done a task in the village or the church for long enough and have been seeking new possibilities which have connected with my own agenda as parish priest for ever seeking volunteers!

Just a few more thoughts, returning to Our Lady, on the process of guidance.  You might have spotted the connection between the Isaiah 7 passage and the Gospel from Matthew 1:18-25 with the prophecy of the virginal conception: the young woman – the Virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him ‘Emmanuel’, which means ‘God is with us’. For Mary and Joseph their choice of one another was set within a bigger choice of God that they deferred to facing indignity. As we shall say in a moment:  I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary

Christianity is a faith that holds disparate truths together – God is one and three, Jesus is God and man – and one of these mysteries is that God has chosen you and I and yet we have to decide how to live our lives.

It seems to me that Christians are at two ends when it comes to divine guidance. Some see God‘s choice as starting us off and then leaving us with common sense – sanctified common sense – to get going on our own.

Others, if you ask them to do something, will say they need to pray about it, and they talk of God’s guidance as very immediate and direct.

I am not coming down on one side or the other. What matters is to recognise the hand of God in our lives, as Mary and Joseph did, and to cast aside the things that draw us away from his leadings.

The sanctified common sense sort of guidance needs supplementing by openness to God’s surprises in the form of obvious divine intervention. Those who sense something of a hotline to God need to work harder to check their leadings by arguing the case at times with other experienced believers. Both reason and faith are God’s gift and they shouldn’t contradict each other.

If we want our lives, including our decision making, to go where they’re meant to go, it means developing what Paul in our second reading from the opening verses of the letter to the Romans calls the obedience of faith. 

This obedience is more than avoiding deadly sins. It is the best directing of our energies. It’s about knowing we’re in the right employment or state of life, be that married or single. It’s readiness to ask ourselves whether where we’re at is truly in God’s will or whether it’s actually at variance with it, if only we’d take courage to open our ears to him.

If you are on the rails God gives us, living close to Jesus, you move more peaceably than if your life is off the rails. A lack of inner peace can be a helpful warning from God to take stock of your life.

Christmas and New Year bring us such an opportunity to reflect. Some of us will use the sacrament of reconciliation or take opportunity to talk to the priest or another experienced Christian. Others may appreciate being put in touch with a spiritual director. All of us can ask God directly:

‘Show me the needs that are deeper than my wants. Place my energies more and more to your service and less and less to aimless self interest’.

God’s hand on our lives, God’s choice of us, is a wonderful and a costly thing. We have a lifespan to exercise our faith in that choice. The penitent thief who turned to Jesus as he died shows us it’s never too late to seek God’s leading.

God has chosen you and I and yet we have to decide how to live our lives.

In making this decision the clue is WWJW – maybe you have seen the Christian bracelet – WWJW – What would Jesus want?

The eucharist is all about WWJW. We offer our souls and bodies with Christ to the Father so that our lives are put back on the rails Sunday by Sunday.

With Mary we say: I am God’s servant. Let it be to me as God wills!

Take my energies and use them for good since there is work for those God has chosen.

There is a harvest to gather and labourers are few.

Blessed Virgin Mary 14th August 2016

There are five windows dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary in St Giles that trace her involvement in the saving work of her Son.

In the Lady Chapel we have the representation of the Annunciation, the Angel Gabriel’s visit, and the Visitation, when Mary was praised by her cousin Elizabeth and herself praised God in her Magnificat.

In the south aisle she is there at the birth of our Saviour in the Benson Window. At the west end Mary is depicted with Joseph presenting Jesus in the Temple in the beautiful Kempe window.

This evening on the Feast of the Blessed Virgin, our eyes lift to the east window which shows her at the foot of the Cross.

Then they are lowered to view the Bread on the altar which is the representation of her Son’s Body, crucified yet risen, given to us from the altar in Holy Communion, tonight enthroned for Mary’s feast.

We come this evening with Mary to the foot of the Cross.

We come, as at the eucharist, to plead with Mary her Son’s Sacrifice for a broken world.

This Church was built for that purpose, shaped initially like a Cross, so that the people of Horsted Keynes could bring their joys and sorrows to God with, through and in the offering of Christ’s body and blood.

Within these walls people gathered to celebrate Magna Carta, to mourn the Black Death, to hear the scriptures read in English for the first time, to mourn the fire of London, to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo and to mourn the death of Queen Victoria.

In November 1963 Harold MacMillan suggested the Rector change the Sunday readings after President Kennedy’s assassination.

I wonder what MacMillan would have made of the times we are living through and the best Christian response? Our prayers must surely be with his successor as Prime Minister as she serves Britain’s best engagement with the world crisis of our own day.

I was at my window last month completing my tax return when I saw a car leaping across Station Road and crashing upside down. Two ladies from Thursday’s coffee group were pulled out relatively unscathed.

We gave thanks to God in St Giles the following Sunday.

Two days later the murder of a priest at the altar in Normandy shocked us all, and most especially this small group that worships with me in our own parish Church day by day.

We lamented before God in St Giles the following Sunday.

Faith’s an intuition that attempts, day by day, week by week, to make sense of events as disparate as these.

It’s the basis of hope, which is faith for the future where what happens tomorrow, good or ill, is seen to be in the hand of the God who in the words of the Psalmist turns the wrath of man to his praise. (Psalm 76v10)

We have placed the Holy Sacrament tonight beneath the most eloquent sight in Horsted Keynes: St Giles’ spire. 

It’s a silent witness inviting all around to gather beneath it, to give thanks and pray to God.

As we, the faithful, obey its call to Sunday worship, we don’t always see answers to life’s upsets such as the two contrasting ones I’ve just shared, but we do regain our balance to be better equipped to love and serve.

We come to church this evening with the sorrow and confusion of our Holy Mother Mary on Good Friday. Like her we’re looking at a crucifixion but ours is a crucifixion of the world  by forces of anarchy.

Like her we look up to Jesus on the east window cross and then down to the light of the risen Lord, before us in Communion, and also resident in our hearts by faith - for whenever believers look at a crucifix they see their risen Lord standing beside.

The challenge of the world’s crises puts a particular responsibility on Christian people to stand with St Mary by the Cross of her Son and pray with Jesus and Mary to the Father: Our Father - in this situation - hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done...deliver us from evil.

We Christians are salt and light because like Mary we can ask Jesus, by the sufferings he has borne uniquely, once and for all, to soak up the evil around us and turn the tables on it.

Our prayers and eucharists bring the potential of the Cross, which is like a mighty engine out of gear, into gear so the love of God floods into this aching world.

Paul says God’s love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. It was true of Mary at her Annunciation and it is equally true of us in our baptism and confirmation. That love is poured upon us so that, at our prayer, it may cascade extravagantly upon all whom we bring to the foot of the Cross.

So with Mary, before the risen Lord present in this Holy Sacrament, we keep silence before the Lord this evening, with joy at that presence and with sorrow at the troubled world that is far more on his heart than ours.

Jesus living in Mary live in us might be our prayer.

Jesus living in Mary live in them might be our prayer of intercession.

Let’s voice our prayer in silence for two minutes.

Mary at the Cross, Our Lady of Sorrows, pray with us and for us!