St. John, Burgess Hill All Saints 31.10.21

Introduction

There’s a culture clash keeping All Saints on Hallowe’en. As the world around parades spiders and witches the Church of Jesus Christ celebrates ‘the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting’. 

As that faith has waned around us pagan New Year’s Eve has revived. When Christianity came here the Celtic Festival of Samhain (pronounced Sow-in) celebrated new year 1 November linked to the start of winter cold associated with the increase of human death. On their New Year’s Eve Celts believed the worlds of the living and dead got blurred with ghosts returning to earth. 

As we keep the Solemnity of All Saints we go beyond that blurring into the actual identification of living and dead, the ‘knitting together of God’s elect in one death-defying communion and fellowship in the mystical body of Christ’ (Collect). 

This morning we celebrate our fellowship beyond death with the saints and faithful departed blurring heaven and earth as expressed in our second reading: ‘the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his people’ (Revelation 21:3). 

Such is our faith, forward looking, death-defying and in solidarity with all those ‘upon another shore, and in a greater light, that multitude which no one can number, whose hope was in Jesus and with whom in the Lord Jesus we are for ever one’.

Sermon

In the end we face one of two alternatives: to have God, and in him everything, or to have nothing but ourselves. Such is Christian faith and it has never changed. The Feast of All Saints and Tuesday’s Commemoration of All Souls are the annual reminder of the call to selflessness foundational to the universe. 

God who gave life to all things including you and I has offered us his life the humble welcoming of which is the remedy for mortality. ‘To all who receive him, who believe in his name, he gives power to become children of God… born… of God’ (John 1:12-13).

All Saints Feast is a reminder of the death defying dignity implied in today’s Gospel of the raising of Lazarus in which Our Lord, having promised to be our life and resurrection, goes on to demonstrate the same by raising his friend from death. 

Those committed to a relationship with God in Christ can never be lost. Death cannot steal them from the One whose glorious resurrection establishes him as our ‘Alpha and Omega, (our) beginning and (our) end’ (Revelation 21:6a). ‘The souls of the righteous’ - right related to God - ‘are in his hands’ we heard in our first reading from the book of Wisdom. ‘In the eyes of the foolish’ that is materialists who deny the supernatural ‘they seemed to have died… but they are at peace… their hope is full of immortality’ (Wisdom 3:1-4). Such is Christian faith, grounded in the risen Lord Jesus, who gives us a purpose for living and a reason for dying.

The Solemnity of All Saints sets our sights upon the Christian distinctive. This isn’t doing good to others - how patronising to see Christians as unique in that realm! Our Christian distinctive, stated in Ephesians 1:10, is the invitation to be part of the aspiration and accomplishment of ‘gathering up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth’. The gathering of people into the communion of saints is itself part of God’s overarching plan for a wider gathering that brings all things in the cosmos or, as we might say, multiverses, into universal love as shared by the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit with all the saints.

Today’s Feast reminds us we are never ‘in it on our own’ as Christians. Just as the social engagement of St John’s is teamwork - and we always need more hands on deck for outreach - the work we do for others as individuals is part of something beyond us but absolutely beside us. That is the work alongside us of the invisible fellowship of the saints in light towards bringing the universe together in Christ. Each day I invoke the prayers of my own favourites. Our Lady for trust in God. St Francis for joy. St Vincent de Paul for love for the needy. St. John Vianney inspiring me to be  a listening priest. St Therese of Lisieux warming my heart to God. St. John Henry Newman helping me give answers to questions I get about Faith - and so on. 

Contemplating God alongside the saints is a welcome school of selflessness. Anglican teacher, Eric Mascall expresses this well in his book ‘Grace & Glory’: ‘It is by becoming progressively more self-forgetful, and not by becoming more self-analytic, that our love of God grows in strength and depth. And perhaps the most effective way of imitating the saints is the indirect way of thanking God for the fact that they have served Him so much better than we. For in the Body of Christ we are not simply concerned with achieving our individual perfection but with making our own small contribution to the perfection of the whole body. And in its organic union with the holiness of our fellow-members and, above all, with the supreme and spotless holiness of Christ who is the Body’s Head, our own feeble essays in holiness are clothed with a glory and stamped with a value of which in isolation they would be utterly incapable’. Mascall goes on to quote Thomas Merton on the challenge to self-forgetfulness behind today’s Feast, a quotation which will be followed by a short time of reflection on the word of God. ‘The saints are glad to be saints, not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everybody else’. 

St Wilfrid & Presentation, Haywards Heath Trinity 14 (23B) Poverty of spirit 5 September 2021

Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?  James 2:5

There’s an obvious link between today’s Old Testament and Gospel reading about the unsealing of the ears of the deaf – it’s about Our Lord fulfilling the Old Testament as Messiah, the promised one who comes to help people hear the word of God.

I felt God lead me though to the reading that stands rather on its own – the epistle of James Chapter 2 which speaks of the blessings of poverty. It seems as if James’ church had rather forgotten what Jesus said about the poor since the rich were getting the best seats in church! At any rate the apostle makes a striking point that it’s those who are poor according to the world…God chose to be rich in faith.

What do we make of this? Or for that matter of the blessing Jesus himself announces upon the ‘poor in spirit’ in his Sermon on the Mount.

Seeing all those refugees and would be refugees from Afghanistan puts in your mind’s eye how, faced with the need to flee, what would you take with you, or even, less emotively, faced as we often are with short breaks what not to take!  That sort of review touches on a key feature of spiritual poverty, the call to detachment which goes alongside confidence we should have as children of God in Our Father to provide for us in all circumstances. God bless the many migrants across the world who are fellow believers and victims of international unrest with such confidence and provision.

There’s a school of Christian faith that speaks of abandonment to providence. Jesus is said by St. Paul to have ‘emptied himself, taking the form of a slave’ in his abandonment to God’s will. It is this sort of poverty that’s in Christ himself that’s spurred on his Saints all through the ages. St Francis of Assisi is the great example, casting even his clothes to one side to belong wholly to the church as servant of God! There’s a story of how the Bishop of Assisi one day said to Francis: ‘Your way of life without possessions of any kind seems to me very harsh and difficult’. ‘My Lord’, Francis answered, ‘If we had possessions we should need arms for their defence. They are a source of quarrels and lawsuits, and are usually a great obstacle to the love of God and one’s neighbour. That is why we have no desire for temporal goods’. There’s wisdom there! The migrants on TV again speak of this!

The wealth of the rich is their strong city we read in Proverbs 18:11-12, in their imagination it is like a high wall…but humility goes before honour. The ‘high wall’ riches can literally raise up can all too easily put worldly honour before humility. This ‘honour’ is also the false lure of materialism into which we are brainwashed day by day – the valuing of people for what they possess rather than for who they are as those loved by God bearing his image!  

What does it mean to be ‘poor in Spirit’? It means to have a true knowledge of God for who he is and of ourselves as who we are. To know God in his infinite grandeur is to know oneself as a child of God yet materially nothing and less than nothing through sin. 

We all want progress writes C.S.Lewis but if you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back on the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive. To be poor in spirit is to be progressive in that you go further when you’re travelling light. When you repent of ‘seemingly little sins’ and turn back from an alluring path you’re not regressing on your spiritual journey but progressing. You’re seeing all sins are great and you’re moving forward in the knowledge of God as the great God he is and as his beloved daughter or son.

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements – surely you know! Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place? Job 38:4,5,12 Words from God provided through the poetry of the book of Job. If you’re ever feeling self-satisfied pick up your Bible and turn to Job 38 – it puts you in your place more than any other passage I know and moves progress for you in the sense we’re examining! What must he be like who made the earth, who provides the dawn new every morning? Who stretches out the stars above? 

From our town we enjoy splendid views of the South Downs and have ready access to the beauty of Mid Sussex which motivated my ‘Fifty Walks from Haywards Heath’ with its quotes from scripture and the Sussex poets. What must he be like who designed the grandeur of the Downs? 

When James warns being ‘rich in faith’ means poverty according to the world this must be at the heart of his concern – that a true knowledge of God in his infinite grandeur brings with it humbling recognition of one’s inadequacy! Our capacity to do harm is a deadly quality even though balanced by capacity to do good things.

As someone put it, our poverty is like that of a song compared to the singer. We are like a song of the Lord – he is the singer, we are the song. How can the ‘song’ compare itself to the singer?

Yet it is our privilege to be able to live in the praise of God! Here at the Eucharist, the great thanksgiving sacrifice of the Church we can admit this truth – all things come of God and of his own do we give him… through, with and in Jesus Christ!

If poverty of spirit is about detachment, abandonment to providence and humility it is also a whole sphere where we find Christ in this world. In Matthew 25 Our Lord’s picture of the Last Judgement portrays the poor as manifesting his own hidden presence. As C.S.Lewis again wrote, next to the Blessed Sacrament your neighbour should be to you the most sacred object on the earth. 

We are to welcome Jesus in a moment in the Blessed Sacrament. God in the material order, hidden in bread and wine. As we welcome him here, may he open our eyes to see him elsewhere in the material order - particularly in the run of our lives in the coming week - that we may encounter him in the needy - those who are enduring personal ordeals in need of attention - our attention, our time, our money if needs be, especially to serve Afghan refugees. 

God free us to travel lighter in our Christian pilgrimage more detached from material things, abandoned more to his purposes. The Lord deepen our humility, strengthen confidence in his provision and set our hearts more into the praise of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion and power now and henceforth and to the end of the ages. Amen.

St Bartholomew, Brighton Feast of Transfiguration 6.8.21

 

The whole Christian world rejoices, East and West, in the Feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ we anticipate today.

We mark the ascent of Jesus with Peter, James and John up a high mountain. While praying there the Lord’s face glowed with the brightness of the sun and his garments became white as snow.

The splendour of Christ’s divinity penetrated through his human body as the Son of God appeared in his splendour and glory.

This Feast is especially dear to the eastern Church. Whereas holiness in the west in saints like Francis links to the passion marks called stigmata in the east holiness is more linked to luminosity. 

St Symeon who lived in 10th century Constantinople describes a day at work in the emperor’s court in Constantinople and going to his lodgings for prayers at home when he poured out tears and prostrated. He was saying the Jesus Prayer but with mind more than heart, and then had a bright light shining at him on every side and was wholly united with non material light and felt greatly exalted. In another light close at hand there appeared a holy old man equal to the angels teaching him. When he came to himself he was filled with joy and wept with all his heart and his tears were filled with joy. The Constantinople bells rang for morning office so he turns to say psalms which means he has ended up praying through the night. 

One of St Symeon's hymns expressing devotion to the divine light of God in Christ runs: ‘O light in three persons non can name, with many names at work in all things, light one in will and thought, strange energy dissolving rocks and hills by your very sight - how do you mingle yourself with grass (humanity) in a union without confusion transfigured yet unchanged?

In the Feast we’re keeping, the disciples were shown as much glory as they could bear. Saints like Symeon build the expectancy of experiencing God as light yet in a way that builds our faith. 

Just as in a transit of Venus across the sun years back people were warned to view the event indirectly so it is when God shone in Jesus on the earth and as he sometimes shines in holy lives. Disciples fall to the ground and hide their faces.

At the heart of Christianity is a yearning to see God as he is. This has sprung up from the days Jesus walked and shone on earth with the promise we could see God. 

Not with mortal eyes but in the resurrection.

The Transfiguration of Our Lord anticipates both his Resurrection and our own. As children of God we are heading for the full, glorious sight of God and we gain glimpses of that radiance on earth..

Beloved we are God’s children now; what we will be has not been revealed Saint John writes. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is (1 John 3:2)

Lord may we see you glory, become like you and praise you for ever. Amen.