St Richard, Haywards Heath Trinity 11(22C) Humility 28.8.22

‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.’ Luke 14:11

There’s a great deception that humility is something passive. It’s not, it's the most active tendency there is if you’re truly in the business of countering the strength of self-will and we all need more of that.

In case I get praise for this sermon - some of you are very kind to me - the words of Thomas More are at the back of my mind: ‘whoever bids others to do right, but gives an evil example by acting the opposite way is like a foolish weaver who weaves with one hand and unravels the cloth just as quickly with the other’.

Yes, humility is the Christian distinctive and it’s far from making yourself a doormat it's the day by day struggle for holiness commended by Our Lord in the Gospel as a taking of the lower place where we can and by our first reading from Ecclesiasticus as refusal to forsake the Lord. ‘The beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord; the heart has withdrawn from its Maker’.

When people live without God they’re bound to centre themselves on themselves though many I know who live without God show immense kindness to others. I put that down to God giving them a better start than I! As a believer I don’t see myself as the centre of the world in principle but in practice to my dying day I’ll be actively countering touchiness, resentfulness against criticism, impatience when I don’t get my own way, eagerness for fame, anxiety lest I miss being thanked and praised and so on.

‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.’

Our Lord mixed with everybody. Today’s Gospel shows him mixing at the upper end of the society of his day at the home of a prominent Pharisee. He felt the need to address people trying to get places near the most famous. It’s a bit like when the Bishop visits - as hopefully he will do soon to inaugurate a new parish priest - when you struggle at the buffet to get near him, sometimes on account of the clergy around him!  

What is it about the human condition that makes us so celebrity conscious, wanting celebrity for ourselves and delighting on occasions we meet real live celebrities? 

I met Edwina Currie on the train a year or two back which got my mind thinking about eggs and other things. What really struck me in this face to face encounter though was the caring way she saw onto and off a busy train a frail man I took to be her husband. ‘Judge not and you will not be judged’. How hard it must be to serve in government nowadays with the relentless unforgiving gaze of 24-7 media upon you!

The deception we live under that humility is something passive links very much to the way our media school us unconsciously or consciously in deriding the weak. We need sermons, retreats, books to read that help undeceive us about the truly active virtue of humility. This sermon links a little to a retreat I took in Lisieux three years ago where I stayed a few days close to the Shrine of St Therese whose life in many ways was quite unremarkable. Born in 1873 she lived just 24 years, the last nine in a convent. When she contracted TB the Convent superior was concerned to get some obituary together and asked her to write it for herself - it became a bestseller - ‘Story of a Soul’ (show) . The rest is history - do read it! Yes, Therese in a way was herself victim of church celebrity cultus, being made a saint so soon after her death, but many are the wiser through her teaching as a Doctor of the Church.

Engaging with Thérèse I find to be primarily engagement with self-acceptance, something built in her by the Lord and her acceptance by a loving family and the community she joined at 15. ‘Story of a Soul’ captures this struggle to welcome God’s love and accept ourselves within its embrace. Thérèse inspires us to talk with the Lord about our difficulties in self-acceptance and how such failings can become happy pretext for looking to him. To know this, to accept ourselves and our life circumstances, helps divert us from these towards the addressing of our deeper needs and aspirations especially the best use of our gifts in God’s praise and service. 

It IS an effort to gain humility even if it's also a grace. We need to ask for it again and again as a grace from God. Secondly, we need to accept the humiliations of life though recognising the world of difference between being humble and being humiliated. How many times do we say the wrong thing and feel the hurt to our pride more acutely than the hurt we did to the person we spoke to or spoke about?

The school of humility is a school of self-acceptance impossible without confidence in God. We live as Christians with knowledge of God loving us through and through and his invitation to recentre our lives on him and our neighbour. Putting that wisdom into practice is the action of humility. 

One day when Therese was nearing the end of her life and feeling absolutely bereft and forsaken by God, she was in the Convent garden, walking very slowly because of her weakness and constant pain. Suddenly she saw a hen at the side of the path, hustling her newborn chicks out of the nun’s way, protecting them with outstretched wings. Therese writes how she immediately thought how God had loved and protected her all through her life and how God wants to envelope everyone with the tender protectiveness of that mother hen. She writes how she was so moved her eyes filled up with tears and had to look away from the scene. 

THAT’S HOW GOD LOVES US TOO - no matter what we feel like, no matter what kind of personal history we have. If we want holiness we build our foundation on this rock of God’s love and acting with humility is the master builder. We may be strong willed but such strength is a perilous gift since it links to the desire for the self to triumph over others including God. In holiness the will yields first place to love by always seeking a lower place so as to put no unnecessary obstacles in love’s way.

‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.’

To be a saint - and we should all aspire to be saints - is to keep in tune with our deepest needs and aspirations by actively countering our lower impulses, that  attention-seeking insecurity, touchiness, impatience or whatever. We're the ones who block our way to holiness, to the joy of becoming what God made us to be, by remaining slaves to these lower impulses.

With me, I invite you to pray for humility, not to be a doormat people walk over but to have active determination to counter self-centredness and get better centring of our lives upon God and neighbour, whose eternal fellowship in the communion of saints we anticipate at this Mass, with angels, archangels and all the company of heaven. 

Holy Trinity, Cuckfield Wed 6 July Eucharist SS Thomas More & John Fisher

In 2004 during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity I went to the Tower of London for Evensong in the Chapel Royal during which a framed description of the life of Bishop John Fisher was dedicated to hang close to his tomb there.

It was a homecoming. On 22 June 1535 after 14 months imprisonment John Fisher left his prison to be executed - I quote - ‘glad to die for the truth of Christ’s Catholic Faith’. Earlier he had been made a Cardinal, something that did not help his cause. Henry VIII scornfully commented ‘let the Pope send him a hat – I will so provide that whoever wears it shall soon have no head to set it on’. 

Five centuries later we witnessed the solemn act of welcoming a Cardinal back to the Tower. A congregation of 200 packed into the Chapel Royal at The Tower saw Richard Chartres, Bishop of London embrace the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster over the tomb of the martyr Cardinal after the two bishops had jointly dedicated the memorial.

Bishop Chartres went on to remind us that true ecumenical dialogue involves facing up to the different perceptions of history. Addressing a largely Roman Catholic congregation he admitted the ‘fascinating yet terrifying’ reality of King Henry VIII whilst affirming the continuity of the Church in England through the troubled period that included Fisher’s courageous martyrdom along with that of Thomas More with whom he shares today’s commemoration. 

Richard Chartres praised both the courage and discernment of Fisher ‘miscast as an unbending champion of an old order’ though himself a vigorous reformer as Bishop of Rochester. Saint John Fisher had no time for externals and peripherals. He discerned and concentrated on what were to him and to many essential issues. This led him to witness the parallel between the incarnation and the real presence in the Eucharist as expounded in John 6 and also to champion the ecumenical role of the Papacy. On account of these convictions held so courageously Fisher was unable to accept the Act of Supremacy for which he was sentenced to death.

I remember the then Cardinal, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, praising the generosity of spirit exemplified by the ecumenical hospitality of that day. The forces bringing about disunity in the 16th Century, as today, reflect sin and pride as well as the failure to witness to the truth by living it out. Nevertheless the road of ecumenism whose end is unity, is one way – there is no exit, only completion. The Cardinal warned us against letting perfection become the enemy of that of which we are capable, a comment exemplifying an almost Anglican way of thinking. As Holy Trinity knows well we are schooled in live and let live, be our formative influence sacramental or evangelical, catholic or sacramental, liberal or conservative in churchmanship.

As we look towards the Lambeth Conference later in the month St John Fisher and St Thomas More are a reminder of how the well being of Christianity rests on a generous response to the movement of the Holy Spirit - as shown in that service - and upon the courage of those in dialogue to speak the truth. Bishop Chartres invited us to reflect ourselves on the question ‘what are we as Christians prepared to die for?’ and went on to say that answering this question involves discerning occasions when we need the courage to say ‘No’ as both men did faced with the bullying of King Henry. That courage is now celebrated by their place in the Calendar of Saints of both the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches.

Today’s saints are an unfashionable reminder of the Church’s most powerful resource which is holiness, the courage associated with it and its foundation in truth. Our days are different to those of John Fisher, our stresses and strains as Christians, real as they are, seem a long way from those experienced by a martyr saint in the Tower of London. Nevertheless the issues of keeping our nerve and the courage of our convictions whilst remaining gracious seem as real for Christians in England today as they have ever been. They are also issues that demonstrate how much we need one another as Christians and as ecclesial communities – the power of apathy and unbelief around us seem too strong for our churches to tackle alone. 

Father, we pray for the visible unity of Christ’s Church. Mindful of past sin and division we pray with your Son, ‘that we may all be one. As you, Father, are in your Son and he is in you, may we also be in you, so that the world may believe that you have sent your Son, Jesus Christ’. Give wisdom to Justin our Archbishop and the Lambeth Conference, Pope Francis, Patriarch Bartholomew and leaders of the Evangelical Churches. Lord, hear us…

We echo, Lord, the prayer and aspiration of the book of Revelation, that ‘the kingdom of this world become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ’ as we recall the varies troubles the world faces, especially in Eastern Europe. Give world leaders courage, prudence and integrity at the prayer of John Fisher and Thomas More. Lord, hear us…

Lord we pray for our Church in its pastoral vacancy, especially for the Churchwardens and priests helping out. Grant heavenly wisdom to Bishop Martin and all involved in the appointment of a faithful priest to serve here in Holy Trinity in succession to Fr Michael. Lord, hear us…

Giggleswick School evening service 26 June 2022

I’m so pleased to be back in Chapel as an OG. 

If Giggleswick helped make me what I am, Chapel and the Chaplain - in my day Mr Curtis - were key. I’m grateful to Mr Womack and the Head for renewing the invitation to share with you all this evening.

First I want to hear from you. Put your hand up if you are involved in or saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?

What do you think was the moral of the story? Have a think about it. 

Put your hand up if you’ve got thoughts to share. Feedback

Roald Dahl’s novel and its adaptations - the film, play and musical - contain truth found in folktales from across the world. Charlie - poor, unlucky yet kind and likable - is rewarded, whilst other children who represent vices are punished. The message is “Don’t be like them, be like Charlie.”  Another is “Bad parenting makes bad children”.

The moral I picked up from Roald Dahl’s tale full of delicious chocolate is: ‘Be good’.

‘Be good’ - this familiar parental greeting is the strap line of our scripture and my message this evening. ‘The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good’ (Luke 6:45).

I’m a writer and broadcaster. Over lockdown I prepared a book called Pointers to Heaven and a radio series of the same name. Both start with Mrs Foster, the lady across the road from our family home who stepped in to care for my brother and I when my parents were hard pressed. She exuded goodness and that fascinated me.

I remember the warmth of her smile. Through it her face became a pointer beyond herself to something more enduring. Allied as it was to her practical help offered to us seemingly at the drop of a hat, Mrs Foster pointed to a reason and purpose beyond herself. 

Her self-forgetfulness was my first spiritual teacher. Her visits underlined goodness to me in such a way that I couldn’t see it as other than a gift much to be desired. 

When she smiled down at me in my mishaps I felt uplifted. Facing her, to own up to wrongdoing, seared my soul because I was made aware of my own lack of goodness and how that hurted her.

People don’t get on in the world without people to look up to, and - with my parents and teachers - Mrs Foster was such a lady. 

As I reflect on her with you, I judge her goodness to have been a pointer beyond herself to the world beyond this world our Dome points to, the world we call heaven, a place thrilling with the goodness of God so evident in this lady.

Pointers to heaven like the goodness of Mrs Foster have a ripple effect. Thanks to her and many good people including teachers, chaplains and former pupils of Giggleswick I keep up with - and my own crucial opening up to God himself - I stand before you this evening where I sat as pupil half a century ago.

‘The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good’. Seeking goodness for Christians is inseparable from seeking God and the purification he grants. Goodness as a moral quality builds through life experience but it can also diminish depending on where your heart is set. It is my conviction that the vision of God is transformative of the heart and its fullness will be at the heart of heaven. Conversely the heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart. As Thomas More wrote: ‘whoever bids others to do right, but gives an evil example by acting the opposite way is like a foolish weaver who weaves with one hand and unravels the cloth just as quickly with the other’. Standing here - talking, writing and broadcasting about heaven - would be presumptuous unless my own heart were set in that direction and its problems being alleviated by the Holy Spirit.

As St John writes in his first letter: ‘Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.’ (1 John 3:2-3) 

On my visits here I take time to look up into the Chapel Dome, filled with angels, to renew that hope and purification, when it's as if God says to me what I now say to you: Be good!