St John the Evangelist, Burgess Hill Pre-Lent Sunday 27 February 2022

And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white…(and) a cloud came and overshadowed them Luke 9 

Years back when I was a student at Oxford a coach taking pilgrims from my church, St Mary Magdalene’s, to the Shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham crashed and someone died. The Sunday afterwards the parish priest preached his sermon with reference to this Gospel and I will never forget Fr Hooper’s sermon.

He presented to us, as I now present to you, how the mystery of the glorious Transfiguration is set under the dark cloud.  After Our Lord’s clothes became dazzling white… St Luke records a cloud came and overshadowed them.

As we gathered in St Mary Mags that Sunday we were reminded how God’s glory can shine brightest of all through the cloud of bereavement. We gather Sunday by Sunday to celebrate the glory of the risen Lord with pain, the pains of the church and its divisions, of the world in its godforsakenness, especially with the invasion of Ukraine and the pains of those of in our circle which are most inscribed on our hearts. Then - the glory of the Lord shines over us as we take, bless, break and share bread!

Christianity is about suffering and the supernatural - these are the two things that keep us close to Christ - the two things Lent reminds us of.

We the baptised are a dying and rising people of a dying and rising Lord.

We are a people losing ourselves to gain the Holy Spirit.

Paul expresses this beautifully in the second reading: ‘All of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit’ (2 Corinthians 3:18)

Made in his image we are being transformed into his selfless likeness …from glory to glory.

Made to know ourselves, love ourselves and forget ourselves - a good motto for Lent! Know yourself, love yourself, forget yourself’ 

Know yourself - for that is the other side of the coin to knowing God. 

Love yourself - as you recognise again and again how much you are loved by God who made you. Then - and here is the struggle - forget yourself as Christ forgot himself on Calvary so he could die and rise and give us the Holy Spirit!

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people unprepared to forget themselves, people wanting instead to be important as seems the case with President Putin. 

As Raniero Cantalamessa writes: ‘70% of the human body is made up of water, but perhaps even more than 70% of man’s spirit is made up of pride...We all long to be noticed. If we could visualise the whole of humankind as it appears in the eyes of God, we would see the spectacle of an immense crowd of people all standing on tiptoe, all pushing one another in the attempt to make themselves seen and all shouting, ‘I’m here too, I’m here in the world too!’. All this pride is, of course, just smoke that death dissipates day by day. ‘Vanity of vanities’...but its consequences are...dreadful’.

There is so much wastage in life and that does not exclude the Christian life. So much of our energy, even though we be Christians, gets dissipated in the instinctive serving of our desires or attending to our fears. The energy we put into this subtracts from all we are able to offer the Lord for building his kingdom. Our Lord needs more of our energies directed to his ends and not our own, our wills more and more directing our lives to his praise and his service.

Self-forgetfulness is a real gift of God which balances self-worth and self knowledge. I find that juggling around with these three is what the deepening of spirituality is all about. The supernatural and suffering play their part as well from God’s side…

Sometimes we need to know ourselves better, sometimes to pay attention, to be kind and loving to ourselves. There are times to concentrate and affirm the self. There are many other times when we are best off getting to work on forgetting ourselves.

As we approach Lent the Church presents to us in today’s scripture the radiant and transfigured humanity of Christ illuminated and filled right through with the life of God coupled to the invitation to be transformed likewise into a heavenly new creation. 

The Transfiguration of Christ preceding his death and resurrection provides disciples then and now insight into the beauty, glory and wondrous life of the world to come and courage to keep heading there. We are not there yet but rather in the vale of tears yet sufferings in that vale are destined to be lost in the ultimate praise and glory of heaven. 

We are the dying and rising people of a dying and rising Lord, a people losing ourselves to gain the Holy Spirit, made in his image to be transformed into his selfless likeness …from glory to glory, made to know ourselves, love ourselves and forget ourselves…so Christ may shine in us now and always! 

A happy and holy Lent!

St Wilfrid & Presentation, Haywards Heath Good Friday 2.4.21

As we prepare to unveil the Cross in the liturgy of Good Friday may the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts unveil the truth of Christ crucified.

Some of you have been following the talks earlier in the week and maybe the social media discussion about God and the Cross which followed posting the sermons online. That discussion has ranged over how God has a sameness to us whilst being profoundly different from us. Love is his sameness, holiness his difference. My Facebook friend Chris put this comment on one of the talks I posted: ‘It is a very challenging question of Christian's when asked..."Why do you worship someone that insisted on a human sacrifice for him to forgive the people. If he was such a divine and noble figure… surely he would have just forgiven them anyway. The lesson that seems to come from this account is that forgiveness will only be given after sacrificial and excruciating punishment’.

This was my answer to Chris: ‘When people outside Christian circles debate with us about the Cross we find common ground in a perception that the world needs putting right by forgiveness. To get beyond the stumbling block of divine love willing suffering requires a vision of God with loving sameness to yet holy difference from us. Attaining such a vision can follow scrutiny of Christian basics where there is readiness to take seriously what God might have said of God, history and the future through scripture and the community of faith. Faith seeming to contradict logic brings an invitation to seek the understanding beyond reason the Holy Spirit supplies seekers’. On the same conversation thread Bishop Lindsey added in a simpler way: ‘The minute you take your eyes off the crib when you gaze on the cross, your doctrine of the atonement becomes mystifying rather than a mystery. ‘God was in Christ...’

It takes God to understand God and God to explain the Cross. I can speak, as I am doing, but no words of mine can provide a reasoned base for Good Friday. God speaks of it in his word today. ‘He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account. Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all’ (Isaiah 53:3-6).

The loving action of God in sending his Son to suffer goes back to the design of creation and its intended redesign in Christ to make eternal friendship with God possible by dealing with what breaks that friendship. 

Jesus died in our place to live in our place. He accepted the just penalty for sin, in the face of God’s holiness, on our behalf. This has become a transformative power in our lives as Christians. When we come repeatedly to the Cross our sinful nature is repeatedly put to death and the life of his Holy Spirit repeatedly gains power within us. That nature will rise again and again to our dying day but the death of Christ reveals its number is up - the decisive victory over sin, death and the devil has been achieved though we remain in a ‘mopping up operation’ in the wake of that victory.

The conflict of those two powers, one life-giving and the other death-dealing, is evident to faith. Priest poet Raneiro Cantalamessa writes: ‘In the Alps in summer, when a mass of cold air from the north clashes with hot air from the south, frightful storms break out disturbing the atmosphere; dark clouds move around, the wind whistles, lightning rends the sky from one end to the other and the thunder makes the mountains tremble. Something similar took place in the Redeemer’s soul where the extreme evil of sin clashed with the supreme holiness of God disturbing it to the point that it caused him to sweat blood and forced the cry from him, “My soul is sorrowful to the point of death… nevertheless Father, not my will but yours be done.”’ 

Holy Week is an invitation to climb down to the level ground at the foot of the Cross where all are on a level due to sin. As we seek forgiveness for our pride, anger, lust, envy, gluttony, avarice and sloth, sin’s power over us is broken. As a priest privileged to hear Confessions I see again and again people coming to that level ground before the Cross and being lifted up by the loving forgiveness shown there for them as individuals. ‘Go in peace, the Lord has put away your sins’. I heard those words for myself earlier in Holy Week. 

The pandemic has opened new dimensions of suffering through bereavement, frustration and depression. On Good Friday we recall how the Cross stands tall for us as Christians in all of this, giving us grace to accept the things we cannot change and help to be witnesses of the love of God in our situation. Our best resource as believers, and indeed as human beings, is the sense we have of our need for mercy. That mercy is displayed from the highest place on this holy day. 

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, because by your holy Cross you have redeemed the world!