St Bartholomew, Brighton Midnight Mass 2019

‘Glory to God in the highest and peace to his people on earth’

You’ve come to Midnight Mass, to glorify God, welcome him into your heart and be made a channel of his peace. This day is set apart from all other days to begin with Holy Communion, Christmas is Christ Mass nothing less. 

We’re glorifying God, led by choir and orchestra, in Brighton’s greatest Church. We’re prepared for Our Lord to enter our hearts in the Blessed Sacrament. We’re expecting the peace promised ‘to his people on earth’ to flow in and through us.

St John of the Cross describes the soul prepared for God as like a house grown still and silent. Centred on God we leave the inner chatter of self behind to welcome and be absorbed by the presence of the Prince of Peace. From such inward stillness flows the outward peace the world longs for.

In this great Church, in this great city there’s a miracle gift tonight which is ‘the peace of God which passes all understanding filling our hearts and minds with the knowledge and love of God and of his Son Jesus Christ’.

‘Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.’

If the soul is like a house it’s openness to God floods it with peace so beyond understanding it intrigues it’s neighbours. St Seraphim of Sarov says famously, ‘acquire peace in your heart and thousands around you will find salvation.’

My son works at Brandwatch on Middle Street and when we meet up there I pass the Brighton Buddhist Centre round the corner. Hundreds enrol there on a quest for peace through meditation. I quote a comment on their website: ‘A wonderful location for Sunday morning yoga and meditation with great teachers, calm atmosphere and welcoming environment’. Thousands more, including this congregation, engage with Christianity to be made instruments of peace. That peace for us is less an end in itself - God as the genie in your lamp - but more part of life lived glorifying God in heaven and building peace on earth. 

‘Rejoice in the Lord always’ the apostle Paul writes from prison ‘and the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus’ (Philippians 4:4,7). As we look to praise God tonight may that peace descend to us and through us to all in our circle. It’s peace beyond understanding as Paul knew in prison and many other hard-pressed believers have discovered.

Walter Ciszek spent 23 years in Soviet prisons and Siberian labour camps. Over those years he lived with brief respite between four walls, yet he writes these words in his autobiography ‘He leadeth me’ : ‘No one can know greater peace… no one can achieve a greater sense of fulfilment in their life than the one who believes in this truth of the faith… to accept every moment of every day as a gift from the hands of God and strive always to do his will… it’s to know a peace, to discover a meaning in life, that surpasses all understanding’.

Our trials aren’t prison walls - for now! They’re real enough though - family strains, living alone, unemployment, bereavement or depression. Keeping in God’s peace links to ‘accepting every moment of every day as a gift from the hands of God’. How did you feel 10 o’clock on 12 December? Were you able to accept the exit poll and its consequences? Maybe you rejoiced, maybe you lost peace for a day or two? Acceptance of what God sends day by day, hour by hour is pivotal to Christianity, even if we have to work at times to change those circumstances in accordance with his will. That the process is finally in hand to leave the European Union is a relief to many. It’s a sad outcome for others. Christians fall on both sides but we shouldn’t lose peace over it.

‘Glory to God in the highest and peace to his people on earth’

Tonight we entrust earth’s peace and justice to God, including the needs of our nation, as we give him glory and welcome his presence in Holy Communion. Christmas Communion is a sign we own Christianity and the reason and purpose it gives to life. In an age of anxiety, with mental health high on the social agenda, the message of the angels is as ever timely. It’s as ever timely as Our Lord is ever new, ‘the same yesterday and today and for ever’ (Hebrews 13:8). Living in that perpetual newness is the gift above all gifts since it brings peace beyond understanding.

Bless the Buddhists for their witness to detachment and mindfulness but what the world needs is not mindfulness but thoughtfulness, the overflow from knowing you’re loved forever by the almighty love revealed at Bethlehem. To live close to God is to welcome that love and gain a peace that prevails through earthly trials. Practically, as Walter Ciszek reminds us, that peace flows from acceptance of both the Lord and our circumstances as in some way his gift.

As you start Christmas with this hour be inspired to start each Sunday with it and each day with prayer so the Lord’s peace may fill your life and make you his channel to intrigue those in your circle. ‘Acquire peace in your heart and thousands around you will find salvation’ wrote Seraphim. Let your soul be made Bethlehem, the house of bread, in Christmas Communion so your soul be made a still, house with outflowing peace: ‘Glory to God in the highest and peace to his people on earth’

Easter vigil and 8am eucharist 27th March 2016

Joy isn’t just a component of Christianity it’s the key.

How can you believe in God without sensing joy?

Today/tonight we see God writ large, God to the dimensions of God and not to ours, showing his grandeur as taking human form he breaks through death and reveals eternal life to us and for us.

On the third day he rose again in accordance with the scriptures.

We gain joy as we gain God and that’s in the present moment. This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.  Psalm 118:24

What the resurrection effects is twofold. It delivers us from the prison of our mental constructs of past and future.

To know Christ is risen is to know God’s unalterable newness, the same yesterday, today and tomorrow – to know it and live in it is joy.

This is eternal life, to know God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent. John 17:3

In that knowledge of what God in Christ has done for us we gain two benefits.

First we’re freed by forgiving both wrongs we've suffered from others and by welcoming forgiveness for the wrongs we ourselves have done.

Second we’re relieved of fear for the future. Tomorrow also is God’s and his love is stronger than the worst power we’ll ever encounter – and that includes death.

You will be with me always, he says, nothing can separate us, enter my joy, as the Psalmist writes: You show me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy; in your right hand are pleasures forevermore. Psalm 16:11

Absence of joy links to self-sufficiency and pride, imprisonment in past regrets, future anxiety all of which cut us off from the living God.

Today/tonight we affirm God for who he is, and his opening to our intuition of death’s diminishment.

The only meaningful thing in life is what conquers death, not what but who, Jesus Christ, true God and true Man.

Since April 33AD, or maybe 27AD with a six year slippage, humanity has the full picture of God in his grandeur and humans in their immense potential as those in his image destined for the glorious liberty of the children of God (Romans 8:21).

The hope of this glory is cause of our joy.

Our intellects balk at death and wrestle with its reality 20 centuries on from Easter. How has the world changed, we ask, with the reality of evil this week in Brussels and the genocide committed by Radovan Karadzic?

There are no rational knockdown arguments here but when your heart is touched by the risen Christ its enough.

We are joyful in spirit today/tonight and always as Christians for we know deep down God is God and he always will be God and we have fellowship with him that’ll never end.

Joy isn’t just a component of Christianity it’s the key.

We can’t believe in God as he truly is without sensing joy and today/tonight we see him as he really is, God writ large, God to the dimensions of God, showing his grandeur, taking human form, breaking through death and revealing eternal life to us and for us.

This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.  

May the unalterable newness of Jesus be our joy today, tomorrow, to the last syllable of recorded time, and beyond that to eternal ages! Alleluia!

Living a simpler Christian life (4) A four part sermon series looking at the Jesus Prayer

The Jesus Prayer in your mind keeps before your every circumstance that key question: ‘What would Jesus do?’

As I stand by people: the farmer frustrated by the weather, the lady with so much to say it’s hard to get a word in, the sullen youth, the burdened church officer, the lonely old lady - all of these I engage with, while trying to let the Jesus Prayer run in me, and not my own thoughts, so any words I utter will have the Lord’s weight. 

The formal use of the Jesus Prayer in the first hour of the day effects something of a cleansing of my psyche. It sets me going for continuous use of the Prayer and, as a tithe of my day time, puts my later hours more fully in the Lord’s hands. When I fail to commit to that early prayer I seem set up later to confuse what's most important for me with what’s merely pressing upon me as urgent.

The future is, like the past, a mental construct which besieges our spirit in the form of anxiety. Of course I am bound to be concerned so as to best provide for things ahead of me, my family or the work of my church but Jesus makes clear in the Gospels that those who follow him are to live without anxiety. Repeating the Jesus Prayer brings me into his joyful freedom, which exists hour by hour and refuses to be locked down by useless fears.

The Jesus Prayer has woven itself through me, around me and into me so that I cannot but witness to it as a timely device from the Lord that centres, simplifies and energises his disciples. There’s a sense in me that I did not choose this Prayer but that it chose me and did so as part of the Lord’s call for me to work towards a life of unceasing prayer.

I cannot be the ultimate judge but the decision to accept God’s invitation given through prayer, people and circumstances to use the Jesus Prayer seems to have indeed centred and so simplified and energised my life.

Thoroughly biblical, carried forward by the faith of the Church through the centuries, the Jesus Prayer stands as unique gift and task. Its attractiveness lies in the way it states simple Christianity and seems to carry within it the momentum of the Spirit, as well as the way it serves believers struggling to integrate minds and hearts, so that their will can be enfolded by that of Jesus Christ.

In suggesting that the Prayer has the momentum of the Spirit I am thinking of St Paul’s advice that ‘No one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit’. (1 Corinthians 12:3b).  Another evidence for the momentum of the Spirit is my experience, and that of others, in seeing how the discipline of repetition is accompanied by many occasions when the Prayer keeps going even when, as in sleep, the human will to pray has failed. As with the Holy Spirit, who prays within believers, it could be said of the Jesus Prayer that it ‘helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought’. (Cf Romans 8:26)

All prayer is through, with and in Jesus Christ, Son of God and the world’s merciful Saviour. Praying the Jesus Prayer is about being caught up with all things, as well as yourself lifting up all things, into God’s merciful love. Just as in the Eucharist we offer Christ’s Sacrifice as well as our own since our life is hidden in him (Colossians 3:3b), when we pray the Jesus Prayer it is the whole Christ, head and members, offering the whole Christ for the glory of God and the transformation of the universe.

Prayer and Eucharist, individual and Christian community, locality and cosmos, will and Holy Spirit inspiration, past and future - all find a centre in the discipline and gift of the Jesus Prayer.