Feast of the Holy Family 27 December 2009

A seemingly devout couple who spent hours bowed before a statue of the Virgin Mary were actually waiting for their mobile to charge. The priests in a Milan Church found the pair had been plugging the phone into a socket used to light up the statue!

Well this morning we also bow before Jesus, Mary and Joseph but to draw a greater power into service. I mean the power of love at the centre of the Holy Family.

This morning the liturgy moves from Bethlehem via Jerusalem to Nazareth. On Friday we celebrated the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. Today we celebrate his childhood in Nazareth. As we heard at the end of the holy gospel, following the incident in the Temple: Jesus went down with Mary and Joseph and came to Nazareth. Or in Matthew’s account of his infancy his home (was) in a town called Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, ‘He will be called a Nazarene’

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. Giles’ 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 stranger alike. We catch something of the extended life of the Holy Family in today’s Gospel story of Jesus getting lost in the Temple when the three of them travel in a large extended family. To enter the story of Jesus, Mary and Joseph is to find yourself welcomed into that great hospitable procession of the people of God into the heavenly Temple. Mary and Joseph remind us that we can never have Jesus to ourselves. To be a Christian is to be one with Mary and Joseph and Paul and Augustine and Francis and Giles – 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 in Horsted Keynes. Welcome one another says the Apostle as God in Christ has welcomed you.

In Nazareth we see also 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 need to go to Nazareth, so to speak, and to learn there how to be more present to one another.

This quality of mutual presence and attention is part of the welcome families are all about, the welcome of open ears and hearts, of people putting aside their own agenda in loving service of one another. What greater gift can you give to anyone than total, undivided attention?

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. The infancy narratives in the Gospel give 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, a Child was born and the Child was God.

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.

I wouldn’t be here this morning if I hadn’t been bowled over by the awesome rites of a church I visited in Oxford over 35 years ago, a saint of a priest and many apparently humble, holy and humorous folk who gathered day by day to go unto the altar of God, the God of their joy and gladness.

This morning we go to Nazareth to learn 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 (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 that 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.

Blessed Virgin Mary 16th August 2009

Glory! This is my subject this morning and nothing less - glory!
I want to say to you in the words of St Paul in Romans 5v2: let us rejoice in hope of the glory of God!

Glory - this is our subject and the feast days of August make it so.

This month, usually so glorious weather-wise in the English climate, is set apart for two great Feasts of glory, August 6th The Transfiguration of Our Lord and August 15th the Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary translated to Sunday, as is allowed for a major Feast.

Today we celebrate the passing into glory of the Mother of the Lord just as 11 days ago we recalled how the glory of God shone from Jesus her Son in the miracle of his Transfiguration.

The message of Christianity is a message of glory.

The Bible says in Romans 8v18 that we are to reckon the sufferings of this present time as nothing to be compared with the glory that is to come.

It says in Colossians 3v4 that when Jesus Christ is revealed at his second coming we too, we Christians, will appear with him in glory.

What is this glory?

Glory means honour in one sense. For example, the trouble with human beings, scripture says, is that they seek their own honour, their own glory, and not that of God.

Yet glory means far more than honour, in the sense the Bible teaches. When Paul for example saw God's glory on the Damascus road he saw a light from heaven above the brightness of the sun.

Light, glorious light, radiance, resplendent beauty - these are the sort of words, all too feeble, we can use, or rather, scripture uses, to describe this glory that is with God and which we are destined to enter with blessed Mary, first of the redeemed, and all God's faithful people.

We come to church 'to be uplifted', for Jesus to lift us up into his loving sacrifice in the Eucharist. Lift up your hearts – we lift them to the Lord.

The final destination of such uplift is beyond this world. To use a Salvation Army term the Christian hope is 'to be promoted to glory'.

Today’s first reading from Revelation 11 hints at the destiny of Mary: A great portent appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. This rather isolated text has been used much in Christian tradition and symbolism.

The image has been stripped down to the crown of stars in the emblem of the European Union for example. The stars are no longer twelve because of the expansion of the Union but there remains a Christian significance in the European Union flag linked to the glorification of the Mother of Jesus clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.

Mary’s passing to glory, sometimes called the Assumption, is a matter of debate among Christian denominations. It might never gain a mention in the Salvation Army’s newspaper, War Cry! Yet the obituary column of that Salvation Army newspaper makes the same witness as today's feast when it speaks of the "promotion into glory" of the Christian departed.

If only people knew what we Christians know from one who never lies! We are made for glory!

This glorification isn’t automatic. God seeks our consent as he sought Mary’s. People call Mary Our Lady because, as we heard in the second reading when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman…so that we might receive adoption as children (Galatians 4:4).

Celebrating the feasts of the Blessed Virgin Mary – feasts of her Conception, Birth, Annunciation, Visitation, Sorrows and Passing into Glory - always brings to mind and heart more of the deep truths of Jesus.

Such a mother had to be very special. Mary is the culmination of God’s education of His chosen race, the Jews. We honour her today and at every Eucharist not because of her merits but because of who her Son was to be. She is Our Lady because Jesus is Our Lord. As Bishop Ken wrote in what we know as the Mother’s Union hymn shall we not love thee, Mother dear, whom Jesus loved so well?

Like Jesus Mary is marked out by God as one who would instinctively say, as she did when approached by the Angel Gabriel, Behold the servant of the Lord be it unto me according to God’s will.

Whereas you and I are more inclined to say ‘no’ to God, or ‘not just now, Lord, if you don’t mind’ Mary’s sinless tendency, like that of her Son, is to say ‘yes’ to God.

It is such heartfelt obedience that we seek from the Lord, obedience that can carry us to glory.

There’s a link between Mary’s humble obedience and the belief in the eastern and western church that she was given a path to glory that avoided the physical corruption of death like the greatest Old Testament prophet, Elijah who was assumed into heaven.

C.S.Lewis used to reflect on how day by day people are crossing our paths whose final destination will be either promotion to heavenly glory or demotion to eternal darkness in the company of the prince of darkness.

Is Jesus Christ lifting me, promoting me to his glory?

Am I on the move, on the move upwards, welcoming what Paul calls in Philippians the upward call of God in Christ Jesus 3v14?

Am I on the move, welcoming the uplift Jesus gives or am I saying 'leave me alone God!' or worse!? Remember Jesus promises such uplift only to those who will sincerely entrust their lives to him. He said very clearly though in John 17v24 that he desires people to be with him where he is and to behold his glory. We shall see him as he is, John says elsewhere, and we shall be made like him.

Those people we meet day by day. They are on the way up or they are on the way down. As C.S.Lewis said in 100 years time the people we bump into in the shops, at the leisure centre, in our office, these people will be transformed. Either they will be creatures resplendent in beauty shining with Our Lady Mary in the reflected glory of their Lord Jesus Christ - or - they will be pitiable creatures of the darkness.

After death comes judgement and the final destiny of people is determined by their acceptance or rejection of Jesus Christ who is our only one given to open wide the gate of heaven to all believers.

Scripture makes clear the brilliance promised to shine from the sons and daughters of God.
As Jesus says in Matthew 13v43 then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.

By his resurrection from the dead Jesus Christ has become the first fruits of a wonderful harvest. He is the first fruits, we, with Mary, are destined to be in that final harvest when death is finally destroyed and everything is put under the feet of Christ the universal king.

In her Magnificat in today's gospel from Luke chapter 1 Our Lady magnifies the Lord but goes on to predicts her own glorification and that of all who humbly trust in the Lord. He has brought own the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly.

In keeping this feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary the Church has for 15 centuries marked this day as the fulfilment of the Magnificat. God has indeed promoted the lowly to glory, and will so do to all those who will but admit their neediness. Notice too though the prophecy concerning the lofty and self-sufficient - they are to be pulled down to the pit of darkness.

Glory is our theme this morning. Glory will, pray God, be our eternal end. As Frederick Faber wrote a century ago for this feast:

How wonderful creation is, the work which thou didst bless,
But oh, what then must thou be like, eternal loveliness!
In wonder lost the highest heavens Mary their queen may see;
If Mary is so beautiful, what must her maker be?

And what, I might add, might be your beauty and my beauty, your glory and my glory, as we experience the fulfilment of our desires, to look upon the face of God, no less!

Glory! All we, Paul says, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another.

Let Jesus uplift you this morning as you come to his altar! Let him change you from one degree of glory to another until you see him face to face in heavenly glory in the company of his Mother and all the saints!