St David, Barbados Feast of Christ the King 26.11.23

After a ceremony in the British Houses of Parliament in London the splendidly robed Lord Hailsham entered a corridor crowded with tourists and spotted his friend the Member of Parliament Neil Marten. ‘Neil’ he shouted and every tourist in the corridor dropped to their knees!

The story captures how intimacy and awe can come together with amusing consequences. 

A couple of years ago I solemnly consecrated a vessel containing altar bread that turned out to be empty. Under the old COVID rules in the UK priests were not allowed to breathe over vessels containing the host so they stayed covered until Communion. I wrongly assumed the covered ciborium placed on the altar by the warden was filled. What a surprise when I genuflected before it, took off the lid ready to distribute Holy Communion and found it empty. I had to say Jesus’ words ‘This is my body’ again over the bread box so we could share Communion.

Merriment is a hallmark of Christ’s kingdom. Archbishop Ramsey described a characteristic of hell as being the absence of laughter. Where there’s laughter there’s lack of self-importance. One imagines hell as being an array of tragically disconnected self important beings unable to reach out to God or one another.

We kneel to no British Lord Chancellor this morning - and Barbados kneels no longer to a British Monarch - but we kneel today to the Blessed Sacrament, to Our Lord on this great Feast of Jesus Christ the Universal King. 

The Lord Chancellor incidentally is the one who still walks backwards before the King having presented him with the text of his Speech at the opening of our Parliament. We saw that ancient ceremony only a fortnight ago. As you may know the King’s Speech is read but not written by him. You could almost see his teeth gritted as he read that his Government ‘will support the future licensing of new oil and gas fields’. Like your Prime Minister Mia Mottley, King Charles has an international reputation as an environmental spokesperson.

Outward ceremonies can lose their meaning and eventually fall out of use. My stories about kneeling recall a controversial diocesan news in my Diocese in which an assistant Bishop berated the lack of kneeling in Church nowadays questioning whether Chichester Diocese was going Methodist in that the only time many kneel is for Communion! He forgot that as we get older kneeling has to be more from the heart.

This morning we kneel in our hearts before Christ the King. As a beautiful eucharistic preface used today within the Church of England affirms: ‘As king [Christ] claims dominion over all your creatures, that he may bring before your infinite majesty a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace’. Truth, life, holiness, grace, justice, love and peace, all these are fully found in God. Through his Son and his Spirit our almighty Father is establishing those qualities upon earth so that ‘the kingdom of this world may become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ’ Revelation 11:15. Our Gospel reading reminds us how care for the hungry and thirsty, the sick and those in prison extends Christ’s rule towards the day when, in the words of the Collect, ‘the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin, may be freed and brought together under [Christ’s] most gracious rule’.

In the last fortnight the Church of England General Synod made a move, to my mind unfortunate, towards blessing same sex unions paving the way to changing age-old belief in marriage as heterosexual. G.K.Chesterton remarked that only belonging to the Church sets one free from the slavery of being a child of one’s time. As Christians we kneel before God in Christ and not before majority opinion in a post-Christian culture. It isn’t easy for Christians in the west though we are still far from the reality in the east where Crosses are being taken from church roofs. 

The Feast of Christ the King is no feast of an idea. It is the feast of a reality we kneel before, the reality of Christ’s kingship - that Jesus is Lord.

Jesus is Lord – three words sum up our Creed.  

Jesus is Lord.  The carpenter born in Nazareth who shows the world the love, truth and power of God – he is Lord. It is his name that brings heaven to earth and earth to heaven. 

Secondly Jesus is Lord.  A human life of 33 years lived at the start of our era continues the same yesterday, today and for ever through the power of an indestructible life (Hebrews 7v16b).  

Thirdly Jesus is Lord which means he is right above all that is or has been or will be.  Jesus is God’s final word to humankind. He is also to be the very last word over all each one of us as we shall contemplate next week on Advent Sunday.   

In Jesus a human being lives over all things in God.  Nothing gives us more hope for the human race than this. Here is the place heaven and earth come together. As Pascal said Jesus Christ is the centre of all, and the goal to which all tends. 

So we kneel before him this morning. 

This Sunday Mass is the hour of Jesus, a time given to him by us together that reminds us all our time belongs to him. 

Our daily prayer is submission to him as Lord of our life, as is the private confession to him of ours sins. 

Our reading of the Bible teaches us to put faith in the constancy of God’s word and not in the multitude of human words that make up public opinion. 

Our service given to other people is a submission to Christ present in all people and things. 

Worship, prayer, bible study, service - these are our kneeling before Christ the King as individual members of his body to be underlined and refreshed this morning. 

Christ is King, Jesus is Lord - and he is our king, our Lord, with the Father and the Holy Spirit to whom be all might, majesty, dominion and power henceforth and for evermore. Amen.

 

St David, Barbados Christ the King 24 November 2019

It’s good to be back in the Caribbean from the UK once again. 30 years ago I helped train the second batch of Amerindian priests in Guyana at the former Alan Knight Training Centre on a three year USPG secondment. That was when I first met Fr Noel. Our friendship built up, along with Hazel and the girls, around the time of the 1998 Lambeth Conference when we exchanged Vicarages, St Patrick, Barbados for St Saviour, Alexandra Palace in London. That’s when our family discovered Miami Beach where we’re currently staying with our other Bajan friends, Bishop Wilfred and Ina Wood.

Over the years I’ve returned to visit Codrington College and Guyana on Sabbatical. I live now in Haywards Heath, halfway between London and Brighton, surrounded by Sussex countryside. That’s not been my experience most of my time with parishes or diocesan work based in Doncaster, Coventry and London. To visit Barbados has always been a privilege, besides the warmth of environment - and people - to take time away from air polluted Britain. Living on an island like this, so close to paradise, isn’t without its ecological challenges, but it seems a long way from the environmentally challenged world I live in most of the time.

I visit London often, just a 45 minute train ride away. In recent months traffic there’s been halted by hundreds of young people under the banner ‘Extinction Rebellion’ making a strong point about the need for action on climate change. In consequence the current UK election campaign has strong focus on better care for the environment. It’s also got another key element, Brexit - a move, which if successful - I’m a cynic - will at least lead the UK more into engagement with the Caribbean - if you want us, of course! Anyway it's the environment I want to speak to this morning from a Christian perspective.

My doctorate was on the forces between the chains in polythene and Teflon. I wrote it years ago when I was involved in Chemical research. It’s won me the nickname ‘non-stick-vicar’. I wish that were true!  From that scientific work on what holds polymers together I’ve now moved forward to another concern - what holds the universe together, what’s at the heart of our environment as mortal beings. We’re here this morning to celebrate the One who does just that – Jesus Christ. He holds all things in being we heard in the reading from Colossians and he’s bringing all things together in himself. 

My mission as a priest is to help people know Jesus and the truth that’s in Him, truth that’s married to the wider body of human truth that’s emerging day by day as the world evolves.

The gentle reign of Christ the King is over hearts and minds. In my life time no one has been a better teacher on ecology than the French priest scientist and mystic Teilhard de Chardin.   

For Teilhard the Jesus whose reign today’s second reading announces is the one who holds all things together and who leads us forward to a fulfilment that will coincide with his majestic return.

The whole cosmos is like an inverted cone with the movements within it converging upon Jesus as the apex or omega point. Our individual futures, the future development of St. David’s and of the whole church and the future of Barbados and the whole created order rests in Jesus and is to end in Jesus.

‘You have so filled the universe in every direction, Jesus’ wrote Fr. Teilhard, ‘that from now on it is blessedly impossible for us to escape you…Neither life, whose progress reinforces the hold you have on me; nor death which throws me into your hands, nor the good or bad spiritual powers which are your living instruments; nor the energies of matter, into which you are plunged;…nor the unfathomable abysses of space, which are the measure of your greatness;…none of these things will be able to separate me from your substantial love, because they are only the veil, the “species”, under which you hold me so that I can hold you’ (Le Milieu Divin 1957).

His last reference draws an analogy that as Jesus is hidden under the species of bread in the Holy Eucharist so that he can come to us and change us into himself, so Jesus is hid in the creation itself as the binding force, as joy and sorrow visible to the eye of faith.

Teilhard teaches me that when I as a priest in his name - and your name - say ‘This is my body…’ over bread and ‘This is my blood’ over wine, something spills out from the altar mystically across the church and its surrounds. ‘This priestly act extends even beyond the transubstantiated host to the cosmos itself’ Teilhard writes.

Wondrous stuff – but Christianity is exactly such! Jesus holds you together. He holds Barbados together – or he would hold Barbados together, not overriding free will but by compelling love. All we need is to see Jesus mystically in the sacrament and in all the people and things in our lives as one who beckons us forward into ever greater audacity for him. The audacity of young people in the Extinction Rebellion and counter climate change movement across the world calling for action is inextricably linked to what we are about here in St David’s every Sunday, and day by day beyond that, in the celebration of the Holy Eucharist.

Blessed art thou, Lord God of all creation…this is your body…this is your blood…this bread and wine, our lives and potentially the lives of all those linked to ours in the marvel of the created order. 

Jesus whose reign today’s Feast announces is the one who holds all things together and who leads us forward to a fulfilment that will coincide with his majestic return. 

Jesus remember me when you come into your kingdom! the penitent thief cried. It was a last minute cry but it was effective. What many are about at this time is a similar last minute cry but, inasmuch as it is linked to the bringing of all things together in Christ, it will be an effective cry.

God loves all that is just because it is - his love for you and I who bear his image is no less than his love for this troubled earth we stand on, where, in him, ‘we live and move and have our being’.

Above the altar in London’s Westminster Abbey where we crown Kings and Queens there’s this text from Revelation: ‘the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ’. It’s a text reminding those preparing to lead of the greater leadership we celebrate today. 

At every Eucharist we plead his Sacrifice with an anticipation of the renewal of all things by the Spirit of Christ, whose work at this altar both mirrors and effects the healing of the universe. As we offer ourselves as a living sacrifice this morning, we do so in union with Christ our King and his aspiration to change us, to change Barbados, to change the environment as God desires, to whom, Father, Son and Holy Spirit be ascribed, as is most justly due, all might majesty dominion and power henceforth and for evermore. Amen.