St Mary, Balcombe Easter 4 Friendship 8th May 2022

 

We live as ‘the connected generation’ and we live as Christians. When we make our communion we network with all those in this Church and with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven. It’s great to be just a small part of such a wonderful whole that’s going to be revealed in its fullness beyond death. It’s great to have faith in the Risen Lord who connects us with one another, with the whole church and the risen Christ’s transformation of the cosmos. 

The great priest and thinker Teilhard de Chardin saw the pathway of creation moving from inanimate being to the animation which is life, then from life to self-consciousness as in human beings made in God’s image. He saw that the next obvious stage would be the connecting up of human consciousness globally, which we now see in the internet. Teilhard de Chardin prophesied almost a century ago the connecting up of conscious beings into the collective consciousness we call the World Wide Web.  The picture that came out of his thought and prayer is of the whole cosmos resembling a cone with the movements within it converging upon Jesus as the apex or omega point. Our individual futures, that of the universal church and the whole created order rests in Jesus and is to end in Jesus. As we heard in the Gospel, his gift to us is eternal life. This is the ultimate vision of what it is to ‘be connected’ and to be Christian and it is based on the truth of the risen Lord Jesus Christ underlined to us year by year in the Easter season.

The internet and the growth of high speed electronic communication seems to me, to be part of a God planned connecting, but, it inevitably has a downside. Electronic communications have facilitated ever tighter personal and work schedules that seem to be squeezing out family and village engagement, though of course they can and do serve these. There are many people living in the village deprived of time to stand and stare which is harsh for them and for us. Villages lose heart when people haven't time for one another.

Connecting is different nowadays. There is ‘e-anxiety’, the feeling that comes on as soon as you’re unable to check your email or take a look on social media.

How many of your children or grandchildren will sit with you this Sunday lunchtime with their phone on the table? Of course they’re only doing what human beings have always done – polyphasing, keeping in with different networks, only simultaneously – simultaneously, there’s the rub. You can’t be with someone truly if you’re on the phone as well!

To bring ourselves back to the sorts of connecting that gel with the Christian vision, that rests and ends in Jesus, we need to be reminded about the nature of friendship and how it is rooted in friends being fully present to one another in space as well as time.

Living in a village, worshipping at a parish Church, provides the opportunity for making lifelong friendships through being regularly present to one another. 

You can have friends on Facebook and Instagram – I have and I tweet them – but the friends that really matter are those you’ve lived close to over time. Through the common life of village and church we build friends who can help rub off our rough corners and make us better instruments of bringing all things together in Christ.

They say a dog can be your best friend (picture). More profoundly, friendship’s a spiritual reality. We see our inner selves, as if in a mirror, through our friends, with their honesty about us, something we can best bear from a friend.

Friendship holds us to principle. It’s also empowering to know someone who’ll be on your side through thick and thin. In the first reading Dorcas seems to have had many friends who grieved at her passing and no doubt rejoiced at her return to them.

A year or so back I bumped into a young man at the gym with an eight digit number tattoed on the inside of one arm. Curiosity got the better of me. Jokingly I asked him which jail he’d been in. ‘No jail’ he said. ‘It’s the military number of my best friend. He died in Afghanistan’. I praised him for keeping his friend’s memory and sacrifice alive. It got me thinking.

Christianity’s a religion of friendship.

God made us for friendship. Sin came in as a barrier. By his dying and rising Jesus Christ removes that barrier making us friends with God.

Just as that young man had his friend’s number tattoed on his arm so Our Lord has got your name and mine written on him.

‘See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands’ the Lord says in Isaiah 49 verse 16.

In this Church, through its worship and supremely through the eucharist, the memory and sacrifice of our friend Jesus are kept alive.  Christianity builds beyond earthly friends and networks towards a communion with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven. Through friendships with Our Lord built up as we engage with scripture and sacrament it populates heaven, no less! As we heard in the Gospel: ‘My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.  I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand’ (John 10:27-28).

May our hearts burn as we reflect now upon Jesus our Good Shepherd as he speaks his word to us this morning and may our eyes be opened as he makes himself known to us afresh in the awesome encounter ahead which is Holy Communion in his Body and Blood, Christ in us the hope of glory.

St Gabriel, Pimlico Trinity 2 (11B) 13.6.21

 

With the G7 summit we have been following thinking and resolutions about the future of the world linked to countering COVID by vaccination and addressing the environmental crisis. Sometimes people see Christianity apart from such forward thinking and that is sadly mistaken. The worship of Jesus Christ is inseparable from an aspiration that ‘the kingdom of this world become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ’, a scripture emblazoned behind the altar in Westminster Abbey, Revelation 11:15.

Today’s readings touch on the future - the future of the world, the church and each one of us as individuals chosen and loved by God. The Gospel reading from St Mark, Chapter 4 touches on the nature of God’s kingdom and can be read in relation to his ultimate plan for the world. The first reading from Ezekiel Chapter 17 illuminates God’s forward plan for the church and the second reading from 2 Corinthians 5 the best future he has for us as individuals. I wasn’t at the zoom meeting to look at these readings on Thursday but I picked up from Jack how people saw in them those three lines of thought: the key role of God in inspiring mission, that whether a Church thrives or not is up to him as also to the carrying of responsibilities by individuals like us called to execute his will in Pimlico in 2021.

Three readings then, and three aspects of mission, all of which we can engage with further after Mass over lunch. The process we are in at Heaven’s Gate is true to the Gospel where ‘using many parables … Jesus spoke the word to them, so far as they were capable of understanding… and he explained everything to his disciples when they were alone’. Lockdown has been a set back to us here but what we are about is set within a longer term process and that should help us gain heart.

'This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man throws seed on the land. Night and day, while he sleeps, when he is awake, the seed is sprouting and growing; how, he does not know. Of its own accord the land produces first the shoot, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. And when the crop is ready, he loses no time; he starts to reap because the harvest has come.' I love that image - ‘first the shoot, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear’. Though in terms of numbers we feel set back if there is sowing going on reaping will come about. My task as a visitor is to encourage our keeping faith in that big picture and using what resources we have to bless and go with what God is accomplishing in Churchill Gardens stage by stage.

When the kingdom of God is preached and lived the church grows.

Anne and I spent a couple of nights in Hastings last week. A century ago this was home to one of Christianity’s most forward thinkers, the French priest scientist Teilhard de Chardin who trained there because of the anti-clericalism of his day in France. As a geologist he climbed the cliffs. As a seminarian he trained as a priest. Teilhard said his first Mass in Our Lady, Star of the Sea Church at Hastings (bottom left). On Friday’s feast I walked under the cliffs and recalled Teilhard’s devotion to the Sacred Heart, to Christ who promised to ‘cast fire upon the earth’ (Luke 12:49) seeing the fire of divine love as parallel to the fiery lava in the heart of the earth. When Christ’s heart was pierced at his death stones were heard breaking in the earth beneath. This groaning of the earth anticipated the transformation and gathering together in Christ of the whole creation. When we lift up host and chalice at the eucharist, transformed material, Teilhard taught, we anticipate the transformation of all things starting in this room and rippling out through this estate, across London, the world and the cosmos! Rich stuff, which came back to me walking by the sea in Hastings. What we sow through prayer and the celebration of the eucharist is preparing a kingdom harvest, that is, it anticipates Jesus Christ being made the be all and end all. 

Our first reading from Ezekiel with its image of grafting has a bearing on how we see the Church in this bigger picture of God’s kingdom forming up in Christ. The Lord is ‘the one who stunts tall trees and makes the withered green’. This small gathering is green at different levels - we might like to explore that over lunch - maybe a green-ness that is naive, we hope not, or one that sees lockdown as a passing winter that will be followed by church growth. Ezekiel’s image of green fruitful branches that give shade is a precious one as we gather today in a place as needy as this estate. Lastly, making the withered green is a work of the Holy Spirit in the individuals associated with St Gabriel’s committed to Heaven’s Gate mission, which brings us to the second reading.

‘We are always full of confidence’ Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5 verse 6 going on to affirm how that confidence is linked to faith and not sight, to the hope of heaven more than to earthly appearances. As ‘Heaven’s Gate’ it is that sort of faith we are to instil but it must start with each one of us as individuals keeping their faith green. How do we do that? It is more than receiving the love of God in Jesus Christ which we will do shortly in Holy Communion. I mean, if you want to build that faith, that love, the recipe is to give it away. The only way to keep yourself in the love of Jesus is to be forever sharing it with others. Heaven’s Gate is made so by you and I being always ready to hand on the love of Christ. Remember the Magic Penny song sung for years at primary school - it never loses its force - ‘Love is something if you give it away, give it away, give it away. Love is something if you give it away, you end up having more. So be it in Churchill Gardens starting at Heaven’s Gate.

Today’s scripture has as much relevance to the future of the world as the G7 meeting but like that meeting it needs practical application through you and I in generous living woven together within this pioneer Christian community. The Lord who ‘makes the withered green’ is at work among us and in this Garden Estate as part of a greater work impacting the future of the world in which the kingdom of this world is giving way to ‘a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace’ (Preface of Christ the King).

St John, Burgess Hill Lent 5 Chalice Bearers 21 March 2021

Some Greeks…came to Philip…and said to him, ‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus.’

That phrase, ‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus.’ is written around many a pulpit. In some pulpits the crucifix faces the preacher as a reminder to present the Cross and not their own thinking.

Here in St John’s our central feature is the crucifix above the altar.

Carving a figure of Jesus to present to people is the preacher’s labour of love and not least in Passiontide. 

It is as if the literal veiling of the Cross calls urgent attention to the central mystery of the faith.

Today’s Old Testament reading from Jeremiah Chapter 31 speaks of a promised new covenant when instead of commandments written on stone God will write his law on human hearts by the gift of the Spirit. This covenant is founded on the blood of Christ, This is my blood of the new covenant which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins we hear daily at the altar.

The second reading from Hebrews Chapter 5 speaks of God’s choice of his Son to take high priesthood on behalf of humanity so as to be able to become the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him. That choice is proved, according to the author of Hebrews, by Christ’s own evident reluctance shown in the Garden of Gethsemane. In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission.  Our Lord did not want honour for himself but made submission to his Father, dedicating his whole life and humanity unreservedly to the will of God.

That renunciation of will in Gethsemane is summarised in the Gospel passage from St John Chapter 12 ‘Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—“Father, save me from this hour”? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.’

Self-offering that wins glory is built into the life of God himself.

The great French priest scientist Teilhard de Chardin speaks of how that principle applies to our best development as the human race: To allow God, when it so pleases him, to grow within us, and, by death, to substitute himself for us: that is now our duty; that, if one may use the word, is our opportunity; and that is the only attitude that can finally bring salvation. 

Teilhard is struck by the liturgical repetition in Passiontide of the refrain from Philippians ‘Christus factus est’ – Christ was obedient unto death. Commenting on this refrain he writes: That is obviously the exact and profound significance of the cross: obedience, submission to the law of life – and to accept everything, in a spirit of love, including death, there you have the essence of Christianity.

Our Lord lived to die a death for the life of the world. We too are called as Christians to lose our lives, all that is governed by wrong self-interest and self-concern, so that his life may flow in us to bring glory to God.

‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus.’ 

Our best response to that request happens many a time unwittingly as people see us being carried along by the Lord as we carry something of a cup of sufferings, cheerfully and obediently, with faith in Jesus who is become the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.

Passiontide reminds us in this pandemic that no sorrow on earth need be wasted. 

By being taken up into the mystery of Christ’s love, in his passion and in the eucharist, there is transformation. This comes as we gain grace to accept with serenity the things that can’t be changed or courage to change the things that should be changed in our lives. To accept everything, in a spirit of love, including death, there you have the essence of Christianity.

On account of the pandemic there are no Chalice bearers at the eucharist. In a profound sense we are they. In this harsh season we carry the cup of hardship with as good cheer as we can muster through the grace of God. This is a powerful witness. As another French writer, Charles Peguy, wrote: ‘A Christian is a sad man saved from despair by the Cross of Christ’. We are sad at what we are carrying, so many deaths, so much bereavement, frustration, depression, loneliness, anxiety and confusion. As Chalice bearers we intercede for others to be saved from despair and brought with us to the altar of God. That altar is a place of joy and a place of sadness just as surely as our risen Lord went through his passion. In the coming fortnight we have an opportunity to see ourselves on that journey with him as we prayerfully carry the hurts of Burgess Hill and its surrounds in the chalice of intercessory prayer.

‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus.’

I end with Teilhard’s great meditation on the hands of our Saviour:

Into your hands I commend my spirit. To the hands that broke and gave life to the bread, that blessed and caressed, and were pierced – to the hands that are as our hands, of which we can never say what they will do with the objects they hold, whether shatter them or care for them, but whose whims, we may be sure, are full of kindness and will never do more than hold us in a jealous grasp – to the kindly and mighty hands that reach down to the very marrow of the soul – that mould and create – to the hands through which so great a love is transmitted – it is to these that it is good to surrender our soul.

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

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.

Trinity 9 (20C) ‘Holy Fire’ Presentation Church, Haywards Heath & St Peter & St John, Wivelsfield 18.8.19

I came to bring fire to the earth… is not my word like fire, says the Lord. Luke 12:49a & Jeremiah 23:29a

Holy fire is an unfashionable image of God.

We are warned though in the letter to the Hebrews to offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; for indeed our God is a consuming fire. (Hebrews 12:28a-29)

Just as God fashioned earth out of the fire of the lava that lies below he is fashioning heaven through the holy fire from above whose first appearance came in tongues of flame upon the disciples at Pentecost.

Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit we pray at the eucharist. May we whom the Spirit lights give light to the world.

Were not our hearts burning within us while he was… opening the scriptures to us?  the disciples said of Our Lord in their Easter experience on the Emmaus Road (Luke 24:32). The good news of Jesus comes like fire, like dynamite flashing out, bringing light for the mind, kindling of the heart and power to live a holy life.

I was talking the other day to a young man whose wife had been unfaithful. His Christian faith was affronted by her unholy deed. As we talked he recognised his own unholiness in neglecting her. He saw his need of cleansing as well as hers which brought me hope for reconciliation for their good and the good of their children.

Holy fire is an unfashionable image of God yet it is thoroughly biblical and we need its reality in our age and in our lives as much as any believer in any age!

There are several Old Testament incidents in which God’s anger, judgment, holiness or power are displayed in fire from heaven bringing cleansing and a new start. Moses speaks of God as a devouring fire going ahead of the Israelites into the Promised Land destroying their enemies. He receives the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai through fire and thunder. Elijah confronts the false prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel calling down fire from heaven to make his sacrifice acceptable. 

In the eucharist priests sometimes pray these words, silently recalling Elijah’s offering, as they arrange the gifts at the altar: Come thou fount of holiness eternal God and bless this sacrifice made ready for thy holy name. 

We make ourselves one today with the sacrificial gifts of bread and wine, work of human hands, in asking the fire of the Holy Spirit to descend upon us to cleanse the thoughts of our hearts and make the self offering made in worship a holy offering.

God is God - different and more powerful than us - but also having sameness to us in Christ. Through the gift of his Son God can work to overcome the evil within us and fit us for eternal company with himself. Our love for God and people matters most in this world because that alone survives into the next world in the communion of Saints… the resurrection of the body and the life eternal. 

God’s holiness burns up anything unholy including our lack of love for him and for our neighbour. His holiness is part of his nature holding him apart from us as the sinners that we are. Who among us can live with the devouring fire? Who among us can live with everlasting flames? Isaiah complains in Chapter 33v14 and he gives the following answer in v15 Those who walk righteously and speak uprightly, who despise the gain of oppression… and shut their eyes from looking on evil. 

I heard someone speak of how God’s holy fire cleanses them from looking at pornography. When I see the pictures or texts I imagine the Holy Spirit as like a fire extinguisher they said. I ask him to fire on me, quench the lust within me, and take me from the situation as quickly as possible. Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit. 

In the passage I read from Isaiah Chapter 33 we heard how only the righteous can withstand the consuming fire of God’s wrath against sin, because sin is an offense to God’s holiness he needs to overcome. Later in Chapter 64 Isaiah troubles his readers by questioning whether anyone can actually be righteous by God’s standards. We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth he writes. Such pessimism prepares the world for the coming of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

I came to bring fire to the earth… is not my word like fire, says the Lord. 

Out of the great love with which he loves us God provided the cleansing righteousness we need by sending Jesus Christ to us.  On the Cross, as Paul says to the Corinthians, God made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21). The hatred of God for sin was engaged with by Jesus whose crucifixion both demonstrates this and provides God’s loving remedy of the forgiveness of sins. Jesus died in our place so he might live in our place, live within us bringing the holy fire of his Spirit, a consuming fire indeed, one that cleanses us from the deadliness of pride, anger, lust, envy, gluttony, avarice and sloth.

The French priest, geologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin, who lived in the last century had a great love for the eucharist. His vision of its cosmic implications has enriched and given purpose to my own engagement with the Sacrament. Like the best theologians his writings evidence a rooting in prayer and worship, as in his great ‘Mass on the World’, one of my favourite spiritual texts. In the invocation of the Holy Spirit at the eucharist I referred to earlier he sees an echo both of Our Lord's desire to 'cast fire upon the earth' in today's Gospel and the stellar fires and molten lava that energise the earth's development. In the elevation of the Host in the eucharist Teilhard sees earth and heaven coming together. The consecrated bread and wine show nature transformed in anticipation of the ultimate transformation of all things on the return of Christ, what he calls the 'Omega Point', a point anticipated in our service when the Bread and Wine are lifted up for adoration.

I came to bring fire to the earth… is not my word like fire, says the Lord. 

Teilhard was aware of that fire both as a geologist and as a Christian. God fashioned our planet by the fire of lava but sent his Son to refashion things through casting down upon earth the holy fire of the Spirit. This he does by entering human hearts especially at this service as we seek cleansing and empowering for ourselves, those on our hearts and for the whole created order.

Come down, then, 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…. cast out our sin and enter in through the eucharist we celebrate! 

St Bartholomew, Brighton Christ the King Mass & Blessed Sacrament Procession 25 November 2018

What is the biggest challenge Christianity faces?

I believe it's the need to heal the schism between the supernatural truth of Christ’s reign and the reign of the evolving body of human truth in people’s minds.

A few years back we celebrated the double centenary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the sesquicentenary of his book The Origin of Species published in 1859. There was a book published entitled Creation or Evolution – do we have to choose? which posed the gravity of this split.

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

Does our kneeling to Christ as King require a surrender of intellectual integrity in the face of evolutionary theory? If the truth of Christ is an anchor that holds us, has it any affinity with the forward movement of the universe? Is Christianity a brake on the world or a spur to world transformation?

Well we need fidelity to Christ which sets us in some ways against the world but we also need audacity for Christ – indeed Our Lord summons it from us!

We need more intellectual audacity to overcome the taunts of the Darwinians. It is Catholic Faith that both reason and faith lift us to God. If you want to be a Catholic Christian you can no more be a mindless fundamentalist than a Richard Dawkins rationalist!

As a former scientist I have a good investment in this collaboration of reason and faith. That’s why I’ve been meeting with a group on Wednesdays this month in the parish room to engage together in the reasoned defence of Catholic faith, so called apologetics. That’s not apologising for faith by the way, but making an ‘apologia’, a reasoned defence of faith.

My doctorate was on the forces between the chains in polythene and Teflon. I wrote it years ago. 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.

We’re here this morning to celebrate the One who does just that – Jesus Christ. He holds all things in being scripture says and he’s bringing all things together in himself.

My mission now 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. As Our Lord says to Pilate in the Gospel: All who are on the side of truth listen to my voice.

The gentle reign of Christ the King is over hearts and minds. Being subject to that reign, living with Jesus as Lord, entails audacity as well as fidelity. Its having confidence that the world around us is his, that his reign is there in its unfolding truth and so are his mission opportunities.

Mission is God’s business. Jesus Christ our King is there in front of us awaiting our faith in him.

All we need is the Holy Spirit to transform our fear into courage.

The Lord is ahead of us if we attend to him.

Earlier this year I did a series of posts on social media about the French priest scientist and mystic Teilhard de Chardin.   

For Teilhard the Jesus whose reign today’s readings announce 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 a cone with the movements within it converging upon Jesus as the apex or omega point. Our individual futures, the future development of St. Bartholomew’s and of the whole church and the future of Brighton 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 and the dynamic that urges it forward are wondrous stuff!

The best encouragement I can provide for our mission here at St. Bartholomew’s is to point to Jesus before you and within you in the Blessed Sacrament, building our faith towards seizing his possibilities.

Jesus Christ holds you and I together. He holds Brighton together – or he would hold Brighton together, not overriding free will but by compelling love. St Paul says of Our Lord in Colossians ‘He…is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

As we heard in today’s first reading: I am the Alpha and the Omega...God who is, who was and is to come, the Almighty.

Mission is God’s business. Our Lord is there in front of us awaiting our faith in him.

All we need is to see Jesus mystically in all the people and things in our lives as one beckoning us forward into ever greater audacity for him.

In his book Mass on the World Teilhard addresses directly this apparent schism between Christianity and the world. Reflecting there on the Eucharist and how we seek here both purity and charity he says: The true meaning of purity is not a debilitating separation from all created reality but an impulse carrying one through all forms of created beauty…the true nature of charity is not a sterile fear of doing wrong but a vigorous determination that all of us together should break open the doors of life.

Jesus is saying the same to us today as his great purpose weaves forward incorporating our lives and those on our hearts and the whole community of Brighton to break open the doors of life as we consecrate ourselves to God in this Eucharist.

Can you see with Teilhard that when the priest lifts the paten, the holy plate with bread to offer what is offered is the whole cosmos including our little part as it is the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands? When he offers the chalice of wine to God it is a chalice containing the pressing out not just of grapes but of lives and communities under pressure to become for us the chalice of salvation?

Blessed are you, 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. Open our spiritual eyes to your leading and your resourcing through this Mass!

Grant us fidelity and audacity in service of Our Lord Jesus Christ who is before all things, and in whom all things hold together…. the Alpha and the Omega...God who is, who was and is to come… to whom with the Father and the Holy Spirit be all might, majesty dominion and power henceforth and forevermore. Amen.