St Bartholomew, Brighton Trinity 5 (Wk 14) 9.7.23

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

When we hear the readings read on Sunday we examine what we’ve heard. In St Bartholomew’s we then look up, as you’re doing now, an awesome 15 feet to the preacher for understanding. Today’s Gospel invites us to look up a lot further, beyond Edmund Scott’s 45 foot baldacchino or 135 foot ceiling of allegedly the tallest parish church in Europe, to imagine how God sees the revelation we’re seeking.

‘Jesus exclaimed, “I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for hiding these things from the learned and clever and revealing them to mere children. Yes, Father, for that is what it pleased you to do’ Matthew 11:25.

Our Blessed Lord rejoices at the start of this passage which helps him convey a wonderful truth about God above and beyond us. This is the joy he shares with his Father in revealing himself to those who seek him. If you are here in St Bartholomew’s to seek God this morning be assured God is seeking you and more than seeking you - God delights in this very moment at our attention towards him! God the Son continually, moment by moment, chooses to reveal his eternal Father in the Holy Spirit. God’s joy is ours at a revelation, an opening of the inner eye of faith, so that today’s words of Zechariah in the first reading, used months back on Palm Sunday, have a special resonance with the Gospel: ‘The Lord says this: Rejoice heart and soul, daughter of Zion! Shout with gladness, daughter of Jerusalem! See now, your king comes to you’ Zechariah 9:9.

God comes to us this morning and this truth is more powerful than the simpler truth we have come to Mass in St Bartholomew’s. Of course there are many times we come to Church, look up to God, hear the Bible read and join in the Eucharist without feeling a thing. Today’s Gospel gives us a fresh perspective in its reminder of how worship begins and ends beyond us in the life of the Trinity and the communion of saints. God’s joy at our attention to God this morning and openness to what God might reveal to us is a given. By pondering Our Lord’s announcing that truth in today’s Gospel we can be infected with joy as our second reading suggests. ‘If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, then he who raised Jesus from the dead will give life to your own mortal bodies through his Spirit living in you’ Romans 8:11.

Sometimes we need grace to see things the other way round - as God says he sees things - in the words of scripture. Yes it's the case that we Christians are one with the rest of a large part of our society in seeking the truth but unlike the rest we know the Truth is continually seeking us and revealing himself less to the learned and clever and more to the humble who believe. Like many we are appalled at how the war against Ukraine shows truth being lost particularly in the Russian media. George Orwell in his novel 1984, published in 1949, portrayed the world we now see in which a government declares war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. When it comes to the state of the world the abandonment of truth telling is tragic but it doesn’t negate the work of the Holy Spirit who is always bringing truth to bear and working especially through those humble before God to establish justice, love and peace. As believers we have the privilege of seeing things the other way round, so to speak, as God would have us see things.

If that’s so for politics, seeing things from the God-perspective scripture encourages can also help our prayer as the great 16th century Saint Teresa of Avila taught. She was, it should be said first, a very down to earth lady. When her horse threw her in the mud she famously shook her fist at heaven and said, ‘God, if that's how you treat your friends, it's not surprising you have so few’. The same Teresa taught people to pray in this way. ‘Imagine’, she said, ‘that you see Jesus standing before you. He is looking at you lovingly and humbly. Prayer comes as you notice he is looking at you lovingly and humbly’. This insight is one with today’s Gospel which celebrates God’s joy at revealing himself to all who persist in coming before God in prayer and worship. Not only, says Teresa, does God look upon us with love, he looks upon us humbly. That means he thinks of himself as less than us! 

‘Jesus exclaimed, “I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for hiding these things from the learned and clever and revealing them to mere children. Yes, Father, for that is what it pleased you to do’ Matthew 11:25

God is pleased to reveal God-self and that is basic Christianity working itself out in prayer and politics. As we come forward for Holy Communion this morning let us come with an expectation that God’s life and joy will be deepened within us for ‘if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, then he who raised Jesus from the dead will give life to your own mortal bodies through his Spirit living in you’ Romans 8:11. So be it.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

St Richard, Haywards Heath Holy Innocents Feast 28.12.22

Introduction

Our intention at Mass is the repose of the souls of innocent children destroyed in the womb day by day and the worldwide campaign against abortion, infanticide and child abuse.

Though the world clothes Christmas in tinsel the Church’s liturgy and Octave goes in another direction altogether. There is no sentimentality in the day by day recalling of suffering - Stephen, Thomas Becket and today, very troublesome, the mindless slaughter of children by King Herod in his attempt to eliminate the threat to his throne by the King of the Jews announced to him by the wise men. Joy and sorrow are entwined in Christian faith. As we prepare to celebrate this Mass let us call to mind our failure to extend compassion to those who suffer as well as those times when our faith flags before the darkness and evil we see daily on the news.

Sermon

What do we make of the sobbing and loud lament heard in Ramah recorded by Saint Matthew weeks after the birth of Our Lord? Besides its link with the slaughter of the innocent children by King Herod, Ramah has sorrowful association for the Jewish people. Jacob’s wife Rachel died there and in the sixth century before Christ Jews gathered there to set off to exile in Babylon after the Temple was destroyed. What do we make of the Ramah’s set before us today in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Yemen, Nigeria and so on? Last week one of my friends hosting a Ukrainian mother and her children had news that after the recent bombing of their town her husband had escaped to Poland and should soon be with them in Lindfield. We all have stories like that of the horrors around and how they get redeemed to a degree.

‘Time has not softened the sharpness of the impression which is made upon thoughtful spectators by the sight of the sorrows of life’ wrote bible scholar Bishop Westcott. ‘Christ fulfilled man’s destiny, fellowship with God, by the way of sorrow; and the divine voice appeals to us to recognize the fitness of the road. [As Scripture says] ‘It became Him’ - most marvellous phrase - ‘It became Him for whom are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sins unto glory to make the Author of their salvation perfect through sufferings’ (Hebrews 2:10). 

Our Christian faith weaves together suffering and glory. It is convincing because it opens us to the glory of the world to come whilst not devaluing suffering, as in today’s commemoration of the Innocents. It ‘became God’ to be born in poverty, suffer rejection and crucifixion so as to show the possibilities of human nature and Love’s triumph in the resurrection. Christ indeed fulfilled our destiny of eternal fellowship with God by the way of sorrow and invites us to see ‘the fitness of that road’. 

May the Holy Innocents who await fellowship with us beyond the grave implore the grace of God for us that we keep compassion for those who suffer, especially the unborn, whilst having an eye to the glory Christmas opens up to us. Let’s have a moment of reflection enriched by a few verses from St Paul: ‘We are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ - if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him…. The sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies’ (Romans 8:16-23). 

 

St Richard, Haywards Heath Easter 5(C) 15th May 2022

 

 

In dealing firsthand with the hike in the cost of living, with COVID and many of us second hand with Ukraine, not to mention our own contingencies, those words of the apostles in Acts 14 have a resonance ‘We all have to experience many hardships before we enter the kingdom of God’. It's that kingdom in its fullness beyond this world, which we yearn for, which is subject of our second reading from the book of Revelation Chapter 21. John the visionary speaks there of a new earth and heaven and a new Jerusalem. These new things are to be found already in the Church on earth inasmuch as the resurrection of Jesus thrills through her life. That’s why we read Revelation in Eastertide. 

God does indeed dwell with men and women through Jesus veiled in word and sacrament. We’ve got his life in the Christian community. This life is a foretaste, a preview of forthcoming attractions, where ‘mourning and crying and pain will be no more’. Oh yes there’s mourning and crying and pain in the life of the Christian church as much as outside it - but it’s mourning, crying and pain sweetened by the Lord we know who’s with us. 

Just a month ago I was in the sanctuary to hear the priest say, piercing the candle with the five studs at the Easter Vigil: ‘By his holy and glorious wounds may Christ our Lord guard and keep us’. The Paschal Candle is a triumphant witness, standing tall, that says God is above death. It also reminds us he’s not above suffering, as witnessed to all on Good Friday. That is so very, very important to us as witnesses to Christ in a world losing hope. God, the God and Father of Jesus, expects nothing of us he’s not prepared to go through himself. This is the main ground of hope we cling to as Christians as we ourselves experience hardship, hope that isn’t just out of this world - though the resurrection is all of that - but hope rooted in sharp human reality, in blood, sweat and tears. 

Our Blessed Lord has drawn the sting of death and suffering for all who turn to him. The vision of St John in our second reading, the vision of Christianity, is a now and then vision. What is then to be in a transformed universe is now present – this is the gospel and it is particularly expressed in the Paschal Candle and its piercings which towers over the sanctuary for the 50 days of Easter season

I always take heart when I pray before the coronation altar in Westminster Abbey. Above it there’s another quotation from Revelation: ‘The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ’. What does it mean to seek that ‘the kingdom of the world becomes the kingdom of God’? Certainly it is a robust vision of inclusion though that inclusion extends beyond this world into ‘the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting’. Nevertheless at St Richard’s we take very seriously our responsibility to serve the common good in our community evident yesterday at the craft fair and week by week in Ric’s Bench and Memory Moments cafe. With you I pledge to do my bit to help these ventures during the pastoral vacancy - may that be short! May God’s richest blessing follow Fr Chris, Carolyn and Sam and remain with us - ‘give and it will be given to you’ - as we seek a faithful priest to succeed a rich legacy! As we serve here the good of our town we are serving the aspiration for each and every person to be granted opportunity to reach their full potential especially those hardest pressed in the current economic climate.

The kingdom of God is nothing less than his reign. That’s not just for the new heaven and earth but for now. God reigns now where folk will let him in. I am always praying we see more prophetically gifted leadership in public life, not least a Wilberforce or two or three in Parliament! It says in Proverbs 29 verse 18 that ‘where there’s no vision the people perish’. Away from God’s reign there’s ‘mourning and crying and pain’ without consolation. Those who promote a vision of God help keep us faithful to enduring values paving the way to the heavenly Jerusalem descending from God. 

Lastly let’s see what we can glean from today’s Gospel from St John chapter 13. ‘A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you’ (v34). Love makes the world and the church go round. The best sort of evangelism is a community that intrigues people with the love of Jesus. The vision thing centres in Christianity on loving God and your neighbour as yourself. It’s resourced by God’s love poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit as St Paul writes in Romans 5 verse 5. ‘As I have loved you’ – as God loves us – we’re to love one another. This is the Christian call and when it’s applied it brings transformation.

Wise politicians know their need of the voluntary sector. Communities can’t be built and neither can citizens be formed without people who’re prepared to put themselves out for others.

What’s the answer to the abortion rate? To family breakdown? To care for the elderly? To those who wish to legalise mercy killing? The answer doesn’t lie so much in policies as in a spiritual revival bringing a fresh outpouring of love. ‘A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you’.

Just to take one of my list, isn’t the problem of people wishing they were dead and not suffering  linked not just to low pain tolerances but also to the lack of compassion around in our families? If people know they’re loved they can brave pain. You can cope with no end of hardship if you know you’re loved. Values come from vision and we sorely need vision in our society. The Lord send more visionaries into public office, some of Christian conviction with a yearning for the new heaven and the new earth where righteousness dwells.

May the kingdom of this world advance a little towards becoming the kingdom of our God and of his Christ through this eucharist, through our prayer, through fresh concern for the world of politics and through a new wave of the Holy Spirit pouring his love upon us, upon our town, county, nation and world. Amen.

Revd Eve Wiseman College of St Barnabas, Lingfield 1130am 20-2-22

Introduction to Requiem 

We are gathered in Chapel to give thanks to God and to pray for Eve Wiseman. We have come from near and far to salute a friend and priest whose passing leaves us all the poorer. Weeks back I was at the altar with Eve and many of you to pray for Derek Goodrich and months back, again with Eve, for our mutual friend and former resident Allan Buik. Now for this eucharist Eve herself is on the other side in this celebration as her picture by the Paschal Candle reminds us. In penitence and faith therefore let us prepare to celebrate the sacred mysteries central to our life as Christians, central to Eve’s life and ministry, welcoming through them a pledge of the glory which is to come.

Sermon                                                            Romans 8:35-39

I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. Words dear to Eve from Job Chapter 19 verses 25 to 27

In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Eve Wiseman died January 8 a few days after suffering a stroke. My wife Anne prayed with her just before she was taken from College to hospital. Eve is survived by her niece, Helen Clay of Caernarfon, Wales and nephew, Simon Clay of Vancouver.

Eve was born near here in Coulsdon, baptized at St. Francis Church and confirmed at St. Andrew’s Church. As a child, she was awarded a scholarship to Purley County Grammar School for Girls. She studied for her school certificate and higher school certificate at London University, and went on to obtain a Teaching Certificate from Cambridge’s Homerton College. Her main subjects were physical education and educational psychology. Eve taught for four years on Cable Street in Stepney, London, in the school in which “To Sir With Love” was based. 

 

Eve had a distinguished academic career. She obtained a Master of Education from Western Washington State College in Bellingham and a Master of Divinity from the Vancouver School of Theology. She lectured and taught at CF Mott Training College in Liverpool, the University of Birmingham’s Faculty of Education and was an associate professor at Western Washington University. In the 1970s she was considered one of the top ten experts in the field of movement education in the United States. Eve once said that “a child dancing is often worshipping God”. She also coached the women’s field hockey team at Western Washington University as well as being on the Senate there and later at Vancouver School of Theology. Eve spoke at conferences and seminars around the world.

 

She was ordained to the diaconate in 1984, and to the priesthood in 1985 by Archbishop Douglas Hambidge. Prior to ordination she had been active at St. James, Vancouver and St. John, Shaughnessy. In the late 1970s she served as a lay minister at Nooksack Indian United Methodist Church near Bellingham.  

 

As a student, deacon and priest Eve held positions in many parishes in the Canadian Diocese of New Westminster including St. Matthew, Abbotsford; St. Francis in-the-Wood, West Vancouver; St. Richard, Norgate; St. Mary, Galiano Island; St. Christopher, West Vancouver;  St. Thomas, Chilliwack and St. David, Tsawwassen. She was Rector of St. Anne, Steveston from 1988-1992. Eve was deeply involved in Healing Ministry. It was always a joy to pray with her, so warm and so convinced of the power of God.

 

After Eve’s retirement in 1996, she had a number of “House for Duty” appointments including Ullapool (Northwest Scotland) and Scotshouse (Irish Republic) and as interim priest at the Parish of Thurso and Wick in the Scottish Episcopal Church in 2000 and 2001. She then settled more permanently in England where she occasionally presided and preached at St. John the Baptist, Hove, at her local church, St. Peter, Henfield near Terry’s Cross, The Point and here at the College.

 

Eve was generous to many of us including Anne and I who enjoyed visiting her house near Corinth and discussing with her the ins and outs of deacon Phoebe. An avid gardener, a voracious reader, she loved music and loved to sing so it's good we can sing this morning as part of her Christian farewell. 

There is one thing and one alone that is stronger than death - the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. 

As St. Paul wrote in the passage Anne read, 'neither death, nor life...nor things present, nor things to come...nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’.

Christians believe God himself has entered our human condition to live and die, a man like us in all things but sin. 

We believe that by dying Christ destroyed the power of death, and by rising again opened up a new and imperishable life to all believers.

The love of God in Jesus - this and this alone is stronger than death. When the Spirit of Jesus comes into our lives we know this for sure. As the Lord said himself, the very hairs on our head are numbered - God, the very source of life, cares for us all with an infinite love, a love stronger than death.

We commend Eve to God with this faith, faith built upon the Risen Christ. There alone, in the love of Jesus, is a sure foundation that death cannot shake.

Yet we should not presume upon that love. 

As we come to say farewell to Eve purple vestments challenge us to remember our own mortality. As our friend has departed this life, so most certainly must we, and which of us knows the day or the hour the Lord has for them?

Scripture makes plain the need to prepare for that day. The surest preparation comes as we welcome the love of Jesus into our lives. This is the sure way to a purpose for living and a reason for dying.

Gathering with the Lord's people around the Lord's Table fits us to gather in our eternal homeland, in the house of the Lord for ever

Come close to God, scripture says, and he will come close to you!

Today as we come close we have the people of Ukraine on our hearts. Let us not doubt that God sees that concern and through the eucharist will impact that perilous situation as we come to him this morning.

Commit your way to him and he will act for you, in this life and the next!

God immerse you in his endless love through this eucharist, strengthen in you the hope of heaven and grant the soul of Eve Wiseman purification for the vision of himself. 

Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord - and let light perpetual shine upon her!

Prayers

Priest:    For our sister Eve, let us pray to the Lord Christ who said ‘I am the Resurrection and I am Life’.

Reader: Lord, you consoled Martha and Mary in their distress: draw near to us who mourn Eve and dry the tears of those who weep.

All    Hear us, Lord.

You wept at the grave of Lazarus, your friend, comfort us in our sorrow.

All    Hear us, Lord.

You raised the dead to life: raise our sister Eve, to eternal life

All    Hear us, Lord.

You promised paradise to the thief who repented: bring our sister Eve to the joys of heaven

All    Hear us, Lord.

Our sister Eve was washed in baptism and anointed with the Holy Spirit. Give her fellowship with all your saints.

All    Hear us, Lord.

Eve celebrated your mysteries and was nourished with your body and blood. Grant her a place at the table in your heavenly kingdom.

All    Hear us, Lord.

We pray your blessing upon the churches and communities dear to Eve: St. Francis and St. Andrew, Coulsdon; St. James, Vancouver and St. John, Shaughnessy; Nooksack Indian United Methodist Church; St. Matthew, Abbotsford; St. Francis in-the-Wood, West Vancouver; St. Richard, Norgate; St. Mary, Galiano Island; St. Christopher, West Vancouver;  St. Thomas, Chilliwack and St. David, Tsawwassen; St. Anne, Steveston;  Ullapool in Scotland and Scotshouse in the Irish Republic, the Parish of Thurso and Wick in Scotland; St. John the Baptist, Hove; St. Peter, Henfield; Terry’s Cross; The Point and we pray a blessing upon our life together here at the College.

All    Hear us, Lord

Let us commend Eve to the prayers of the holy Mother of God, St Barnabas, deacon Phoebe and all the saints as we pray in our own words keeping silence: 

Reader: Merciful Father,  

All        accept these prayers for the sake of your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen