St Mary, Balcombe Palm Sunday 10 April 2022

 

Why did Jesus die?

The Creed answers he was crucified for us.

It does so after it names Jesus God from God, light from light, true God from true God.

The link between Jesus in April 33AD and us in April 2022AD is in the AD – anno Domino.

Because of who Jesus is as Lord what he suffered on Good Friday carries forward to all times in a way only God can achieve.

When these lowly hands take bread and wine in a moment, what Jesus did then will become a living reality for us now. 

This is the Church’s faith, that the death of Jesus impacts us today, but where is this impact on my life?

How you see Jesus is inseparable from how you see his death and what difference it makes for you.

There’s a plaque in Aldersgate near the Museum of London commemorating an event in the life of Methodist pioneer John Wesley. Wesley, an Anglican priest, had always said the Creed we say. To him though, Jesus as God from God, light from light, true God from true God was more known by his head than his heart. 

That evening of 24 May 1738 he reluctantly attended a Christian meeting at Aldersgate. There he felt his heart ‘strangely warmed’ and received an assurance that the death of Jesus all those years ago was a gift of forgiveness and assurance for him personally. From that day he set off on an itinerant preaching ministry covering 20,000 miles a year which touched thousands of lives with the reality of Jesus Christ now alive in him. 

'Faith is the amen of the intelligence and the will to divine revelation.'

When we say the Creed or hear the annual account of Christ’s passion our ‘Amen’ is often more notional than passionate.

As educationalists say in their motto: We hear and forget, we see and remember, we do and we understand.

Hearing about the Cross, seeing the Cross, is nothing compared to acting upon it and the love that lies behind it.

For what Jesus has done for us in Holy Week to come real to us we need to put our lives on the line, to act as if he were alongside us still – then we understand. 

You see, we can hear about Jesus, we can even believe notionally - in our heads - that he is God incarnate - but it may make no difference to our lives.

I believe Mongolia is north of China but that belief makes very little difference to my life. I have prayed once or twice for Mongolia but I have never been there and have no friends from there.

Yet I believe also in the resurrection of the dead. I have not experienced that either, but it has come real to me through One whom I trust, who has himself experienced resurrection and who has promised me a share as well when I die!

It is the Jesus we are talking of who has promised me this!

'Christ is as great as your faith makes him' said the evangelist D.L.Moody.

Why did Jesus die?

He died for us, say the Bible and the Creed. When you approach the crucifixion with faith in Christ’s divinity you see it as an action demonstrating this truth, that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. John 3.16

It is an awesome act of substitution in which Jesus dies in our place so as to live in our place. All that suffering just recounted in the passion account was borne by Jesus on your account and mine

The holiness of God, affronted by sin, demands a penalty which he himself provided. 

It is like the pauper woman in court charged with theft faced with a judge who sentences her to fine or imprisonment. She has no money for the fine so the judge sentences her to imprisonment. When the court finishes the judge goes and gives her the fine she can’t afford, satisfying both mercy and justice.

To believe in the crucifixion of Jesus is to commit to a God who loves us and who is holy, who reaches out to us in love even though we are sinners.  

In his holiness he cannot be reconciled to sin, but through the sacrifice of Jesus upon the Cross the horror of sin is overcome and we are credited with God’s own love and holiness.  

The power of evil over humankind is overcome by the Cross.  Only when we see that power being overcome in our own lives through it does the Cross make sense. When we find ourselves living more by faith in God than self-sufficiency, living more by submission to God than by self-will.

Through coming to the Cross we see benevolence flowing where there was self-seeking before and humility where there was cold self-righteousness.

Only when we see those sinful tendencies and find the merciful therapy of God in Jesus Christ can we know how wonderful a thing the Cross is, what awesome yet living and practical truth it contains. 

We know deep down how flawed our lives are but we hide that truth from others and even from ourselves. Just like when you’re preparing a meal like scrambled eggs, and a bad egg slips in to make the meal unacceptable for human consumption, the sin in our lives makes us unacceptable to a God who, in the words of the prophet Habakkuk, is too holy to behold evil. Yet Jesus died. By God’s Son going to his death and through death to resurrection we can call upon him in April 2022 to make our stinking lives fragrant and acceptable to God.

As St Paul writes in the first chapter of Ephesians God has made us acceptable in the beloved. By the death of his beloved Son God has made all who abide in Christ acceptable to himself. May that joy of seeing the barriers set up between ourselves and God lowered be ours this Holy Week. 

God seeks intimacy with us. To achieve this, in an awesome mechanism far beyond human understanding, Jesus was crucified for us. This is good news to all who will face both the truth of it and the truth about themselves as sinners in need of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Palm Sunday 2016 20th March 2016

3 readings in Church linked to God's promise, gift and task.

Isaiah promises the gift, Luke tells of it and Philippians speaks of its implications.

Time frame 800BC, 30-50AD so back 2800 years to...

1 THE PROMISE. Isaiah 50:6  'I gave my back to those who struck me,  and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting. The Lord God helps me;  therefore I have not been disgraced'.

For 800 years the identity of this speaker, the mysterious so-called servant of God, who 'listens to God as those who are taught' and promises to bear suffering for all, was hidden. It's a real one-off Old Testament passage looking to a Saviour figure that still puzzles the Jews.

I've just seen in a new Bishop of Guyana. Last Sunday I was in our Cathedral, the largest wooden building in the world, twice. At 630am to offer the Cathedral Mass and 4pm for Evensong which saw Bishop Charles Davidson enthroned as 8th Bishop of Guyana. He gave a sermon based on another Old Testament passage from Exodus 18:17 in which Jethro advises Moses he'll work himself to death unless he appoints collaborators to serve God's people. In doing so he paid tribute to our late friend Bishop Cornell Moss.

The bit of his sermon that struck and challenged me wasn't scriptural but this quote 'blessed are the flexible because they're not bent out of shape easily' (repeat). Message for the Diocese, I thought, for me, for St Giles I thought. In this passage from Isaiah we see a prophecy of one to be pulled from pillar to post whilst going with the flow, bent but not out of shape. We Christians are J shaped for a J can be seen as an I pressed down to spring up again.

What's pressing on you this morning? You'd hardly be human or self-aware without a sense of bearing pressure! Are you like Isaiah's mystery sufferer listening to God in this? Is your ear attuned? Your spirit teachable so what you're going through will work out well?

Let's move on 800 years from the promise to the gift.

2 THE GIFT Luke 23:1-49. 'The chief priest and scribes stood by,   vehemently accusing Jesus. Even Herod with his soldiers treated him with contempt and mocked him, and sent him back to Pilate... Then Jesus, crying in a loud voice, said, "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit’. Having said this, he breathed his last. When the centurion saw what had  taken place he praised God.

Luke speaks of the arrival of the promise - the gift of the promised Saviour awaited 800 years and from the foundation of the earth.

Human history follows the course of creation then fall then redemption then glorification.

God made us for friendship (demonstration) - sin came in as a barrier - by his dying and rising Jesus broke the barrier - making us friends of God. 

In the Cathedral last Sunday Bishop Charles invited us to dedicate ourselves not to him but to Jesus who died for our sins, rose from the dead and gives us the Holy Spirit to help us become the best we can be. 

Pointing to Jesus, whose forgiveness for his torturers is stated in verse 34 of today's Gospel, he engaged with the temptation to criticise. There's a no such thing as constructive criticism he warned. What, not even Donald Trump I thought? No, the question he put was when someone says or does something wrong do you first want to voice it, or do you first want to pray for them? 'Bless her, Jesus!' 'Save him, Jesus!' I know I'm on a learning curve here - how about you? The church brings us liturgically, through the lectionary, to the foot of the Cross today and Friday. It's very level ground.

 Remember the story of two men watching someone go to the scaffold. One says to the other 'There but for the grace of God go I'. We're on level ground today faced within the awesome gift of Jesus. My self righteousness or lack of it compared to yours puts me on the top of bottom of the carpet, no higher or lower.

The promise from Isaiah, the gift from Luke and now let's move 30 years or so from the Gospel account to Paul's letter from prison, Philippians 2:5

3 THE TASK  'Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself'

We are J shaped people seeking to be capable of his humility, something we prayed for in the Holy Week Collect where we asked God 'in your tender love towards the human race you sent your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ to take upon him our flesh and to suffer death upon the cross: grant that we may follow the example of his patience and humility, and also be made partakers of his resurrection'

Paul in Philippians, and all through his writings, speaks of Jesus' death and resurrection as the source of spiritual renewal. We heard these words from Philippians 3:10-11 last week in Church: 'I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead'. That's our aspiration as we follow this week, the seven days that changed the world. Dying to selfish ambition, rising to enter the possibilities of the Holy Spirit.

When I sat down with Bishop Charles and fixed up his UK visit in July I said if just 10% of what he'd set before us in his enthronement address came true it would be fantastic. He reminded me of the core challenge he stands under, and would have us all stand under, namely 'Jesus expects us to do our best and better'. This agreement to do our best for the Lord is here this morning. It's much before us as we contemplate his death for us. Because of that death and its sequel we are becoming Christians by the power of the Holy Spirit.

As we experience Christ's love in worship, prayer, study, service and reflection we come to know him more clearly, love him more dearly and follow him more nearly day by day.

Worship - extra opportunities this week when we've effectively got 3 extra Sunday's with Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday.

Prayer - which we can be much more flexible about, popping into church alone if we've time, looking round the Stations of the Cross which will be removed as the altars are stripped on Thursday night.

Study - 'read your bible, pray every day' was a chorus I sang in Guyana. Read the end of a Gospel, take away your service booklet and use it day by day to think of the promise, gift and task of Jesus in Isaiah 50, Luke 23 and Philippians 2

Service - in Holy Week we recognise especially our individual need of mercy. This sensitises us to others in their need and to engaging with our neighbour, not forgetting the best gift they could ever find, which we have in Jesus Christ, nor possibilities to invite friends to the powerful services next weekend.

Reflection - we love God with our heart in worship, soul in prayer, mind in study, our neighbour in service and last but not least ourselves in reflection which is a theme of this afternoon's healing service. Holy Week's a time to examine ourselves. There are confession times this afternoon at 4pm and Good Friday 3pmand you're welcome to arrange times for counsel or confession with the clergy convenient to yourself. 

We've heard the promise of Jesus in Isaiah. We've welcome the gift of Jesus in the Gospel to be sealed in Holy Communion. We're now primed afresh for the task of loving God and making him loved.

'Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself'

Palm Sunday Descending to true greatness 29th March 2015

Detectives with evidence of child abuse against an MP who died some years back and a member of the intelligence services were threatened with the Official Secrets Act if they did not drop the case, a police whistleblower has claimed. 

Police officers questioned the MP during the inquiry in the early 1980s, which targeted properties in south London where it was suspected sex parties were hosted involving teenage boys, but he was released within hours of being taken to a police station, it is said.

The MP and others were caught abusing children, but officers were ordered to hand over all their evidence – including notebooks and video footage – and warned to keep quiet about the investigation or face prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. 

If this is proved 10% true, as the abuse of power it is at the heart of our nation, that’s bad enough, but even worse are unanswered questions about the disappearance and possible murder of some of the teenage boys.

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. 

In the world - and the church is part of the world - in the world, people rise to the heights so they gain power not just to do good.  Abusing, murdering children, for selfish satisfaction seems an unthinkable use of power but that's what's coming out at us, day by day, as this wicked episode in our nation comes to the surface.

Today is the start of Holy Week and we get a window into what's ultimately the case concerning the God of power and might.

When God shows his power it’s in a downward and not upward movement as the Philippians reading makes clear.

God in Christ emptied himself taking the form of a slave being born in human likeness. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death - even death on a cross.

So it was that Jesus Christ disappointed many on Palm Sunday.

As Messiah, he entered Jerusalem with no trappings of earthly power save a donkey. We know Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Jesus most likely linked to his involvement with the Zealots who’d hoped Jesus would use his divine power to free Israel from Roman rule. Lest we be too hard on Judas we should recall James and John once tried a bid for power among the twelve disciples and how Peter like Judas forsook Jesus at his last hour.

Our Lord Jesus was the most countercultural being who ever trod the earth. He retains influence to this day because he shunned power in the dog eat dog sense but emptied, humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death.

Jesus descended into true greatness - and that's the invitation he brings our way.

Those MPs and establishment figures, whose greed and lust did so much damage, also did good through the 1980s as Britain's leaders. Some of their peers were famous in a quite different way. I think of Frank Longford whose prison visits to infamous figures like Myra Hindley signalled a different use of power, symbolic of humility and servanthood.

It’s quite dreadful that a police officer, given notice of a crime, should be told in the name of a big name to keep quiet and hand over his records, but that is the way of a world in thrall to evil.

In Christianity there are no big names, God alone, and no lesser names. He values each of us the same, precious yet flawed beings that we are.

There is no one so flawed Jesus is beyond them if they seek him, and I’m thinking of those implicit in the alleged wickedness I've described which serves our nation ill.

This is so because Jesus, once he came to Bethlehem, never stopped descending.

The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head we read. He who is the source of truth is made a blasphemer.

In the account we just heard he’s spit upon by the creatures he brought to life.

God in Christ is stripped. The hands that stretched out the heavens are nailed to a cross. God the Son is innocent victim of human wickedness

In Holy Week the One who possesses everything is made nothing in our eyes alongside two criminals, but in God's eyes he is the greatest of the great, so that, at the name of Jesus every knee should bend in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

This is our God, and we are his people. We move in the same direction descending into greatness as best we can. Greatness to us, as to Jesus, isn't the achievement of self-will but of self-abandonment.

I attended the funeral of a great lady last month. She was 91 but 250 people came to mourn her. Her preoccupation was to serve God and other people, and the people knew it and couldn't let her be taken to the grave without signalling they knew it.

As priest I attend many funerals where a smaller group attends to a deceased relative with narrower, less unselfish preoccupation. I can tell you these occasions barely become celebrations however hard and imaginatively we work at them.

In Holy Week we make time to reflect on death and resurrection. As you reflect take time to imagine your own funeral, who'll be there, what they'll have to say about you.

You've got the rest of your life to change that and you might get more on that case after Easter.

We live in three spheres, physical, intellectual and spiritual. Whether you're physically great or not isn't eternally significant. Neither whether or not you wrote a book. Jesus didn’t!

True greatness is greatness of spirit and its attained as Jesus shows us this week.

We work our way to greatness by surrendering our egos day by day to be worn down by circumstances that cross our self-interest

Like Christ we descend to ascend into a fulfilment beyond this world of which joy is a taster.

I end with a story from World War II appropriate in the run up to VE Day.  It’s of a bishop imprisoned and beaten by an SS officer to extract a confession about his accomplices in the resistance.

‘Don’t you know I can kill you?’ screamed the officer.

The bishop looked into the eyes of his torturer. ‘Yes, I know - do what you want - but I have already died.’

Instantly, as though paralysed, the officer couldn’t raise his arm. Power over this man of God had been taken from him.

All his cruelties had been based on the assumption the bishop's physical life was his most precious possession so that he’d do anything to save it.

With such grounds for violence gone, torture was futile

Such is true greatness, the capacity to look death in the face with Jesus at your side

May he draw closer to your side this Holy Week and build in you and around you his death defying perspective!

Palm Sunday I’ll say Yes, Lord 13th April 2014

I’ll say yes to celebration, yes to sorrow, yes to today, yes to tomorrow.

It’s the third heading – yes to today – that I want to major on as part of our preparation for Easter when I hope a good few of us will be moved to write a letter of self offering to God for consumption in the flame of the Easter Candle, symbol of our Risen Lord.

On the suggested framework we've got four headings linked to giving God things we’re grateful for, sorry for, needful of and concerned about. Today’s third theme is about identifying our exact needs for today to give to God.

Give us this day our daily bread we pray. In this last week of Lent we have an opportunity to seek just what those words might mean for you and I in this third week of April 2014.

This is the day that the Lord has made writes the Psalmist (Psalm 118.24). Today is the day of salvation writes Paul (2 Corinthians 6.2).

Just for today, what does it matter, O Lord, if the future is dark? wrote St Therese of Lisieux. To pray now for tomorrow – I am not able. Keep my heart only for today, give me your protection today, grant me your light – just for today.

Our Lord promised us daily bread, bread for today. When God gave bread from heaven to the Israelites in the desert it went off at the end of each day as he was intent his people should seek him day by day. O that today you would listen to his voice: harden not your hearts wrote the Psalmist picking up on this Exodus story (Psalm 95.7-8a)

That reading of the Passion is for today. It’s set annually for Palm Sunday, the only Sunday in the year the Passion of Christ is read, designed to catch those who can’t make Good Friday, but it’s a word from God for this hour, this day.

The Son of God loved me and gave himself for me, as Paul puts it to the Galatians in Chapter 2.20b

God’s love is here for me today, at this mid morning hour on the 13^th April 2014 and I am called to welcome the good news of it.

If we endeavour to live with that love in the present moment we see a number of things getting sorted out in our lives.

What’s important gets underlined from among all that’s pressing upon us. Our wants are sifted through so that we establish our needs.

Under the heading Yes to celebration we thought how we live  as eucharistic people giving God thanks for all he’s given us.  Last week as Passiontide began we considered our need to say Yes to sorrow in the sense of owning up to our sin and seeking the remedy Christ provides for all upon the Cross.

Lord I thank you, Lord I’m sorry – and now our third prayer: Lord I am needful.

In these days of Holy Week we have a privileged time to look at our lives in the light of that Love, which over and around us lies, that finds its focus in the story we just heard from St Matthew’s Gospel.

Thomas Merton described this focussing as like that of the sun shining through a magnifying glass. Just as a magnifying glass concentrates the rays of the sun into a little burning knot of heat that can set things on fire, so the passion of Christ concentrates the ray of God's light and fire to such a point that it sets fire to the human spirit .

The Son of God loved me and gave himself for me.

In the light of his love we see ourselves most clearly - our wants are purified so what we need is made most clear to us - and among our greatest needs is to enter the vulnerability of God in the passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

I end with a story about finding that, and in it, finding our needs, from a passage called Wounded Healers in Elizabeth Basset’s Anthology Beyond the Blue Mountain.

I met him on the train, and before long, I felt I knew him. I felt I could trust him. He was in education: ‘Learning for Life’, he called it.

I said I was interested in education too, so he invited me to come with him to where he taught and learned. It was off the main road, near the fire station.  It didn’t look like a school. You walked in the door of a second-hand shop, and going through the back, you came into a big room, with a lot of people in it.

We stood and looked around.

In the corner was an old man with a white stick. Beside him sat a girl reading him a newspaper. ‘Nice to see young folk helping the blind’, I said. ‘Oh’, he replied, ‘he’s actually teaching her how to see.’

Across the floor in the direction of the toilets came a wheelchair. A palsied boy of eighteen sat in it and a boy of the same age pushed it. ‘It’s great when friends help each other’, I said. ‘Yes, it is…’ he replied. ‘The boy in the chair is teaching the other how to walk.’

An old woman lay in a bed at the bottom of the room. She was covered with open sores. A woman much her junior was bathing her and dressing her wounds. ‘Is she a nurse?’ I asked. ‘Yes’, he replied. ‘The older woman is a nurse. She’s teaching the other how to care.’

Seated round a table were a group of young couples. A doctor in a white coat was talking to them about childbirth. He spoke slowly and used sign language with his hands. ‘I think it is only fair that deaf people should know about these things’, I said. ‘But they do know about these things’, my friend replied. ‘They are teaching the doctor how to listen.’

And then I saw a woman on a respirator breathing slowly. These were her last breaths. And around her were her friends soothing her brow, holding her hands. ‘It’s not good to die alone’, I said. ‘That’s right’, he replied. ‘But she is not dying alone. She is teaching the others how to live.’

Confused and not knowing what to say I suggested we sat down.

After a while, I felt I could speak. ‘Seeing all this’, I said, ‘I want to pray. I want to thank God that I have all my faculties. I now realise how much I can do to help.’

Before I could say more, he looked me straight in the face and said: ‘I don’t want to upset your devotional life – but I hope you will also pray to know your own need, and not to be afraid to be touched by the needy’.