St Bartholomew, Brighton Pentecost Sunday 28.5.23

A tale is told of a monk who became so holy people touching his garments got healed.  

Marvelling at such wonders, especially as the monk seemed outwardly little different to his brothers, his superiors called him to account.  

‘What causes all these miracles?’ they asked. 

‘I am quite mystified’ he replied.  ‘All I do is try hard to will only what God wills.  Prosperity does not lift me up.  Adversity does not cast me down.  I am persuaded that God does all things, or permits all that happens, for his glory and for our greater good; so I am at peace no matter what happens and pray as best I can that God’s will may be done fully in me and through me’.

Now you or I may not be monks but we are certainly called to take a leaf out of this monk’s book.  

We may yearn to be people who heal before they hurt other people, but where is the secret of being such a healer?  

Surely it is in a deep acceptance of our circumstances as being in the will of God?  

How simple – and yet how challenging – is the route to holiness.  

It’s making our wills one with God’s will; as best we can, in all the circumstances of our life, that brings with it anointing in the Holy Spirit.

That anointing first came today, the Day of Pentecost, when ‘the disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit… and the crowd gathered and was bewildered, amazed and astonished’ (Acts 2:4,6-7)

As Pope Francis has said, the Holy Spirit is the best Easter present. This evening the Paschal Candle is removed to signal the end of Eastertide but the risen Christ’s greatest gift remains with us.

What a wondrous gift! Associated with creation itself, ‘breathing on the face of the waters’, associated with the resurrection in today’s Gospel where Christ breathes the gift upon the apostles and, in today’s first reading, associated with fire and power and speaking in strange languages on the Day of Pentecost!

What a wondrous gift - and yet also an everyday gift! One for people who make their wills one with God’s will in every circumstance of their life.

‘Come down, O Love divine, seek thou this soul of mine and kindle it thy holy flame bestowing… for none can guess your grace ‘til they become the place wherein the Holy Spirit makes his dwelling!’

In March I went on retreat to Crawley Down monastery praying, among other things, about the struggle we have at home with a family member diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. 

A remarkable insight came to me linked to the Holy Spirit about how God can work through dementia where there’s faith in him. When memory fades you live more in the present moment. This means being left behind somewhat by family and friends with busy diaries and work and recreational commitments. 

As I prayed on retreat I recalled a book I’d read by the contemporary novelist Santa Montefiore. entitled ‘Here and now’. The key figure, Marigold, spent her life taking care of those around her, juggling family life with the running of the local shop, and being an all-round leader in her community. When she finds herself forgetting things the story underlines how she is blessed to dwell more and more with supportive family and friends in the ‘here and now’ which is the book title. 

Are we not all meant to attend to every moment of life as best we can, to be as present here and now as we can be? I thought. And God - this was my key thought on retreat - God too is found in the here and now. Not so much by pondering the past or the future. 

The Holy Spirit has been defined as ‘God in the present moment’. Living with dementia is therefore potentially about living with God and others close to you through rediscovery of the ‘here and now’ - and the joy of living in God’s presence can often be manifested in those suffering this ailment. 

Hardships of every kind throw us back on God and our friends. The readings today remind us how the anointing of the Holy Spirit comes in shared circumstances. In Acts 2v1 we read how ‘they were all together in one place’. In 1 Corinthians 12v13 ‘in the one Spirit we were all baptised into one body - Jews or Greeks, slaves or free - and we were all made to drink of one Spirit’. The Gospel from John 20 recalls how on Easter Day evening ‘the doors of the house where the disciples had met being locked out of fear, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you… Receive the Holy Spirit”’.

Today is the birthday of the Church. The anointing of the Holy Spirit comes into the day by day circumstances of believers whose faith engages week by week with the meaning and power of scripture, the Breaking of Bread together. Preaching and music at St Bart’s always has an eye to leaving time for fellowship at the end of Mass, and that fellowship, often with conversation about Christian Faith, sometimes continues over food. Thank you, Holy Spirit for your work among us as a congregation, part of God’s never ending family, the holy Catholic Church!

How simple – and yet how challenging – is the route to holiness.  It may be that you are in a trial of one kind or another. I invite you to a deeper acceptance of that trial as being within the will of God. Such acceptance, as the monk said in my story, brings with it the anointing of the Holy Spirit.

Easter season which ends tonight brought me to producing a radio series available on listen again at www.premierchristianradio.com/joy. Finding joy in the Lord relates to our turning in faith and repentance to the risen Lord Jesus and welcoming his Spirit into every circumstance of our life. The joy of the Lord becomes our strength as knowledge of Christ grows. It takes courage though to leave aside regrets about the past and anxieties about the future to attend to the present moment where the Holy Spirit, God’s Easter present, can be found whatever our circumstances.  

I close with the prayer of Saint Paul in Romans 15:13: ‘May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit!’

Churchill Gardens Estate, Pimlico Pentecost 23rd May 2021

 

On Pentecost Sunday we celebrate the Holy Spirit’s vital and vitalising role.

He is God in the present moment bringing all that Jesus has done for us into play here and now. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. This was so that right there in Jerusalem and right now in Pimlico the love of God might be communicated mind to mind and heart to heart.

Christianity is a seizing with exhilaration upon the wonder of God seen as never seen before in the coming, dying and rising of Jesus Christ.

It means if God had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it. If God had a wallet, your photo would be in it.

God loves us so much that though he can live anywhere in the universe he seeks to live in a place only you can allow him to live – in your open heart.

When the Spirit of truth comes, he will lead you into the complete truth Saint John writes. That truth is of our making by God, our redeeming by the Son of God and our being made holy by the Spirit of God.

As Pascal said, holiness is the church’s greatest influence. When God gets into people’s lives it makes them holy enlarging their hearts and it shows. It brings our humanity into its right mind as the Holy Spirit rights what’s wrong in us.

God, who gave us life, loves us so much, with all our shortcomings, he wants to give us his life, to dwell deep within us, for that is why we were made. 

The truth of God and of ourselves is this – God loves us and loves us just as we are – but he loves us too much to leave us that way and so he offers us the Holy Spirit to dwell with us and in us.

Pentecost as Feast of the Spirit is a Feast of truth-telling as we heard in the reading from the Acts. The Holy Spirit brought the truth of God’s love into all those national groups, Parthians, Medes, Elamites and so on by his miraculous translation through the gift of tongues.

Holiness and truth communicated with love and power.

This truth of God’s desire to fill every human heart with holy love, according to St Paul, already infects the universe, as he writes in Romans 8 verse 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.

I have seen and met on occasion people whose godliness contained a force it was hard to resist. There’s something of this around in Churchill Gardens – would there were more - since holiness is indeed the church’s greatest influence. 

So today, and always, our prayer should be Come Holy Spirit and kindle in us the fire of your love! Or, as in the Psalm set for today, Psalm 104: Send forth your Spirit, O Lord, and renew the face of the earth.

The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth and holiness. He’s also the power of God. At the eucharist we speak in the Creed of Christ’s incarnation being accomplished from the Holy Spirit. We pray that by the power of your Holy Spirit the gifts of bread and wine may be changed. Send the Holy Spirit on your people we pray. 

And sometimes send us out in the power of your Spirit to live and work to your praise and glory. The Holy Spirit is into application – making God take flesh, making bread and wine God’s vehicles, taking us out into the world as those first disciples went so that in [their] own languages [they] hear [us] speaking about God’s deeds of power.

So how can we make Pentecost more applicable in our own lives and in our community this morning? 

Each eucharist is meant to be a mini-Pentecost, each Holy Communion an individual Pentecost, set within the Spirit sealed communion of the Church whose birthday we mark today. 

Whatever grand spiritual aspirations we make, the Holy Spirit is closest to us when we are about our neighbours, sorting out our destructive attitudes, putting love in where there is none, recognising the humanity of those who are somewhat blind to ours.

This is the humble work of Jesus’ redemption being applied to our lives and through our lives to others. It starts in us here as by the power of the Holy Spirit the gifts of bread and wine are taken and given so that sent out in the power of the Spirit we might live and work to God’s praise and glory.

Living in his holiness and truth communicating his love through his empowerment!

Come Holy Spirit and kindle in us the fire of your love! Send forth your Spirit, O Lord, and renew the face of the earth – starting with me!

Picture: Ardingly College Crypt Chapel

Wednesday in Eastertide 14.4.21

 

This morning we continue with the Acts of the Apostles, capturing the remarkable dynamic lent to the church in the wake of the resurrection. The apostles are imprisoned ‘but during the night an angel of the Lord opened the prison doors, brought them out, and said, "Go, stand in the temple and tell the people the whole message about this life”. Christ is risen and puts into gear this life - the eternal life he promised Nicodemus in today’s Gospel: ‘for 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). As believers we possess that life, sealed by baptism and confirmation, divine life gifted from out of the tomb, revealed over forty days and from Pentecost sent deep into the hearts of believers by the Holy Spirit.

‘The message about this life’ is rooted in the event we celebrated ten days ago. Christianity takes us beyond this world but it does so from the axis of time, from history, that of Christ and that of our own. In sharing ‘the message about this life’ we begin with the events arguing for their historicity. In weighing up the New Testament accounts one problem is that the references to the tomb are in the Gospel accounts written at least 20 years after the first letters of Paul which give little reference to the tomb save reference to Christ’s burial. Paul’s witness to the resurrection builds from his later encounter with the risen Lord Jesus which he associates with those of the apostles at Easter. So central is the resurrection to Paul’s thought that Acts 17:18 relates ‘he was telling the good news about Jesus and the resurrection’. Just like the angel bidding the apostles in today’s reading Paul hands on a message of divine life. Opponents of Christianity see this preaching as built on Paul’s subjective visionary experiences and not on the history of Jesus. The Christian defence is to point to Paul’s many repeated references to Christ’s dying and rising as the objective side of the personal relationship believers enter into. This is linked to our subjective dying again and again to sin and rising again and again to new life in the Spirit. Death and resurrection is the pattern of Christian experience because it was the experience of Jesus. 

On Easter Sunday we renewed our baptism vows with this in mind, turning afresh to Christ as Saviour and inviting the Holy Spirit into our lives afresh. ‘The message about this life’ which is Christianity is inseparable from the ongoing drowning of our old sinful nature and our ongoing receipt of the new nature given by the Holy Spirit. As we prayed in the Collect, ‘grant us so to put away… malice and wickedness that we may always serve God in pure ness of living and truth’. So be it! More at https://elucidatingcontroversy.blogspot.com/

All Saints, Roffey Pentecost 9 June 2019

How do you experience God?

As Christians we see him as the source of all that is, as the one who redeems our failings and as the fount of love: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

God is the One who is - the fount of being - and being fully alive is about living close to him.

The world makes us defensive about such belief because its blind to what’s beyond the physical order but God needs no defence. He is the One who is - the ground of being and as such beyond our grasp. That violent wind on Pentecost Sunday touched the disciples directly, personally, so they became aware of the closeness of the God who is the ground of all being.

Cutting my hedge last week I was very aware of the wind, working round it as it came and went. The hedge cuttings got carried across the road. Bees sheltering from the wind in the hedge didn’t like the hedge cutter and flew out at me. It was quite an experience! When the wind’s blowing you really know it, your skin gets refreshed and you breathe more freely but you’re reminded of your little place on earth compared to the elements. Who can tell where the wind comes from, where it starts or where it will end? We can only experience it, be in the midst of it, be touched as it blows, and work with it's consequences as I did with the hedge cuttings and the bees.

How do you experience God?

Like the wind, as Our Lord said to Nicodemus, the wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. (John 3:8). Seeing God, engaging with God, is as here and now as experiencing the air around you. As the Psalmist writes Be still and know that I am God (Psalm 46:10).

To be at home with God we need regular silence to be at home with ourselves. We live alas in an age full of artificial noise distracting us from this vital task. In today’s Gospel Our Lord says the Holy Spirit… will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you a the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. (John 14:26-27). How can we experience the Holy Spirit who is peace and balm for troubled hearts without opening ourselves to the present moment?

The Holy Spirit is God in the present moment. To experience God we must discipline ourselves to attend less to past regrets or future anxieties but to what’s here and now. In that discipline of prayerful attendance to God we experience again and again what the Gospel promises my peace I give to you… do not let your heart be troubled.

On Pentecost Sunday we end the liturgical cycle which started six months ago with Advent, a cycle that displays year by year the God who loves us so much he gives us himself, his Son and his Spirit. The Son of God became Son of man so children of men could become children of God! The God who made us loves us through and through so much so that he sent his Son to die and rise for us. Together on the Day of Pentecost they sent the Holy Spirit, to dwell with us, in us and among us in the Church. As we heard in the Romans reading: all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God… when we cry, ‘Abba! Father! it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. (Romans 8:14, 15b-17a)

How do you experience God?

Stop the flow of your life! Pray, Come, Holy Spirit! Be present to God - pray, read the bible, examine yourself, come to Mass, look to the needs of others!

God addresses you in the present moment, here at All Saints this 9th day of June at 11 o’clock! Then God in the present moment tomorrow morning at work or wherever - be still and know that I am God - this is the Holy Spirit’s invitation day after day, wherever, whenever!

Like the wind we can’t contain God but we can experience him. To secure us in the experience of his love God’s Son gives us bread and wine as living memorial of his saving work. By the Holy Spirit bread and wine are changed so we can be changed and the world can be changed through us. Today’s Feast recalls the outward flowing dynamic captured at every Mass that started with the wind of the Spirit at Pentecost and has blown the good news of Jesus worldwide. It challenges us to hoist our sails to the wind of Spirit so we can be taken where God wants us to be taken, as Bishop Mark said on Monday, bringing love wherever he knows there’s need of it.

‘I ask not to see. I ask not to know. I ask simply to be used’ wrote Cardinal Newman. Whilst its good to ask ‘How do you experience God?’ we shouldn’t expect to understand God so much as to place ourselves at his disposal and pray ‘Come, Holy Spirit’ to be empowered to travel on the best forward course. This we do now offering ourselves as a living sacrifice with Christ, welcoming the experience of his close presence in the Holy Sacrament, God in his Spirit, in the present moment, the radiance of his love calling us to make him loved in the world on 9th June 2019.

Ascension Sunday at St Richard Haywards Heath 13 May 2018

The liturgical year is one of our greatest teachers.

We believe as Christians that God made and loves all that is including each and everyone of us sitting in Church this morning.

God loves us so much he sent his Son down to be born as one of us – which is Christmas.

God loves us so much he allowed Jesus to suffer what human beings suffer, to live and die as one of us yet without sin – which is Lent

God loves us so much he wants us to know death isn’t the end of us in his sight – which is Easter

God loves us so much he brought Jesus up to heaven and sent the Holy Spirit down into any heart that will welcome him – which is Pentecost.

That’s Christianity in four lines – Christmas, Lent, Easter and Pentecost.

On Ascension Feast in Eastertide we recall how God loves  each and everyone of us and those gone before us on earth no less than ourselves.

The great Easter Candle stands before us today as a sign to each and everyone of the truth that Jesus and Jesus alone towers over death.

The incense burned before God rising upwards today is also a liturgical teacher suited to this week of prayer before Pentecost for which we’ll be joined on Tuesday by Bishop Richard.

The age old symbolism of incense is that of rising prayer.

The incense grains are an expensive source of fragrance.

On Ascension Feast we celebrate how the fragrance of Jesus spreads through space and time only through his passion, death and resurrection. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. (John 12:24)

The costly incense grains, formed over centuries in the extraordinary sap of Arabian trees, die on the charcoal to rise yielding pleasant fragrance which scripture associates with the world beyond this world. In the vision of St John the Divine, Revelation 8 verse 4 he tells us the smoke of [the] incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of an [the] angel.

On Ascension Feast we celebrate the completion of Christ’s earthly work and its being taken up to heaven. This is well expressed in the fourth verse of George Bourne’s ascension hymn, Lord, enthroned in heavenly splendour where we read these rich words:

Paschal Lamb, thine off’ring finished

once for all when thou wast slain,

in its fullness undiminished

shall for evermore remain.

Alleluia, alleluia,

Cleansing souls from ev’ry stain

In the Feasts of Christ spread across the liturgical year we read, mark and inwardly digest truths that are ‘once for all’ and yet evermore inspire and cleanse our souls. Christ, as Bourne’s hymn concludes, is risen, ascended, glorified so that we can be raised from the works of the flesh, ascend in prayer and anticipate the glory that is to be ours.

The Chinese writer Watchman Nee wrote a short commentary on the letter to the Ephesians entitled Sit, Walk, Stand to remind Christians that as Christ is ascended and seated at God’s right hand, so are we. We are to keep seated with Christ above sin, to keep walking in the Spirit and keep standing fast against the devil.

The incense we use at worship is symbol of rising prayer, of costly sacrifice, and lastly of our living in the court of heaven seated with its Monarch. God raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, we read in Ephesians and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

As Christ is risen, ascended, glorified so are we, which is why St Nicodemus could write man is the macrocosm and the whole universe is the microcosm. Because we bear God’s image we stand over and above the universe, a truth confirmed by the ascension of Christ which raises and sets humanity in the highest place of all.

For, as Paul says to the Corinthians we are the incense of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing. (2 Corinthians 2:15). Our prayer is to be one with the ascended Christ, our lives united with his sacrifice in the eucharist and the fragrance in our worship is to be mirrored in the fragrance of lives lived to the praise and service of God!

In this service we take, we bless, we break, we share bread and wine and show forth God’s very great love for us and for all that is – especially recalling how Jesus was taken by God the Father on Good Friday and his body was broken on the Cross to show God’s love for us, love shared with the whole world ever since by the pouring out of the Holy Spirit.

At the eucharist we also see our lives taken by God. When we put the bread on the plate and the wine in the cup we think of ourselves placed there before God, our congregation, our town, our county, our nation, our world, its joys and sorrows, its strengths and all being placed on the altar of God which is the eucharist table to ascend to him.

In the eucharist we take, bless, break and share bread and wine

In the eucharist we see Jesus taken, blessed, broken and shared.

In the eucharist our lives also ascend to God and are made a blessing to others.  

So let’s offer ourselves in union with the ascended Christ this morning so that all that we are may be consecrated afresh to God’s praise and service with, in and through Jesus our high priest!

Blessed, praised and hallowed be our Lord Jesus Christ upon his throne in glory, in the most holy sacrament of the altar and in the hearts of all his faithful people now and ever and to the ages of ages. Amen.

Pentecost Sunday 24th May 2015

When God is personally present, a living Spirit, nothing between us and him, our faces shine with the brightness of his face, our lives gradually become brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him.    2 Corinthians 3:15-18 paraphrased in The Message

As we keep the second greatest Feast of Christianity we have this morning a theme of light.

At the mid-morning eucharist the community choir will be singing This little light of mine and the Pentecost event in the epistle will be dramatised.

Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them… all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.  Acts 2.3-4

 ‘This little light of mine I’m gonna let it shine’. When the Holy Spirit came on the first believers it lit them up. Jesus himself spoke a lot about light and gave us this invitation in his Sermon on the Mount. Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.   Matthew 5:14-16

I wonder what you make of that? What does it mean for you to let your light shine before others? What sort of good works?

 Today, Pentecost Sunday 2015, is such an important day I’ve got a message from all three Bishops engaging with those questions and a present from them at the end of the service.

Play 3 min video clip with Cathedral chorister, Alexander Dance, Bishop Martin, Bishop Richard, Jules Middleton of the Point Church, Bishop Mark and church member Mary Wardell

I want to invite you to think a bit more about what you just heard as I give you a brief reminder.

After the introduction from chorister Alexander Bishop Martin spoke of Pentecost as the day when the Holy Spirit empowered the church for sharing the good news of Jesus Christ.

Bishop Richard then compared Chichester Diocese’s 20-30,000 church members to Hove Albion spectators rather than players. He suggested we pray day by day ‘Lord please use me today to share something of your love with someone who doesn’t know it’ and mentioned how vital it is we re-engage with the wonder of the Gospel story.

Jules then described her Church seeking to be a transforming presence meeting people where they’re at rather than expecting them to cross a church threshold.

Bishop Mark spoke of servant ministry commending care for the homeless and folk with debt problems.

Mary Wardell lastly picked up on the Prayer of St Richard to know, love and follow Jesus and said without the foundation of prayer anything we attempt for God as Christians is like walking up Mount Everest without the right boots.

Bishop Richard and Mary Wardell mentioned respectively how vital it is we re-engage with the wonder of the Gospel story and that we pray more.

To be woken up to the wonder of God in your life you need to pray and through prayer you also receive more of God in your life.  It’s an extraordinary circle and it’s no circle of delusion.

I remember once feeling God was a long way away and saying to him ‘God if you’re there show yourself’.

I happened to be walking in the garden and I felt a leaf on a tree speak to me: ‘I made you. I love you. I want to fill you with my Spirit’ That was when I first experienced the Holy Spirit in power and it helped me to pray more easily and love other people more.

When you’re thirsty for God and tell him so he gives you his Holy Spirit.

Before Pentecost Mary and the apostles kept a nine day prayer vigil to express their thirst for God which we’ve just imitated and then, we read, Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them… all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit. 

To be filled you need to be empty.

Holy Spirit Sunday is a challenge to all of our self-sufficiency. It’s a reminder that to be filled by the Spirit we need the resolve to empty ourselves in service.

Pentecost is something very personal. It’s something that can happen in our lives if we let it.

It’s about illumination, as we heard in that paraphrase of the 2 Corinthians passage on the back of the eucharist booklet

When God is personally present, a living Spirit, nothing between us and him, our faces shine with the brightness of his face, our lives gradually become brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him.    2 Corinthians 3:15-18 paraphrased in The Message

‘This little light of mine I’m gonna let it shine’.

Come down, O love divine, seek thou this soul of mine,
and visit it with thine own ardour glowing.
O Comforter, draw near, within my heart appear,
and kindle it, thy holy flame bestowing.