St Mary, Balcombe Advent 3 God’s invisibility 12th December 2021

 

You can’t see God but there are pointers and John the Baptist is one of them.

God’s unseen-ness is a major stumbling block to Christian belief in a materialistic world. People too often believe in, or rather value, only what they can see.

Anne and I recently had time with our friends in Barbados, Bishop Wilfred and Ina Wood. I had to worry Ali about the delay on our return in getting a negative COVID result but it came and here I am. Wilfred, first black Bishop in the Church of England, retired early from being Bishop of Croydon when he became blind. The couple went back to Barbados where we visit them annually. 

Wilfred can’t see Ina but I don’t need to ask him if he believes in Ina’s love for him, or indeed ask Ina about Wilfred’s for her. Similarly it’s possible to experience God’s presence and love without seeing him with our eyes. That’s what we’re about in Church this morning in fact. God making himself real to us through the words of a book and through bread and wine.

Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.  Jesus once said.

There are many unseen things in life that are really important. People who complain at God’s invisibility don’t complain they can’t see electricity or the air around them. 

We see the effect of the wind even if we can’t see it directly. Similarly though God is unseen he can be experienced by faith. 

I’ve strayed a little from John the Baptist. He is a historical pointer to God.

He pointed to Jesus. As one in the great succession of prophets he also pointed to injustice. Like Zephaniah in our first reading he shared God’s heart to save the lame and gather the outcast.

John pointed to human wrongs but first he pointed to divine goodness.

Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world he said, pointing to his cousin.

When God landed on the earth he came into a specific place and time and culture for which St John the Baptist was herald. He didn’t land out of the blue.

Christianity is well thought out. It’s well thought out because it’s from the mind of God no less! You can’t rubbish Christianity as an unthinking faith because it’s a faith that’s rooted in history. There are few faith traditions so rooted in unambiguous historical events.

Listen again to the historical details provided by St Luke in introducing the third chapter of his gospel which we heard last Sunday and which prefaces today’s reading: 

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip, ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.

No wonder historians of all ages have applauded St Luke, whose gospel we’re reading in Year C of the Sunday Lectionary, as being one of them. You can check his historical facts. We can consequently be 95% certain John the Baptist and Jesus Christ met in the River Jordan where the first baptised the second. Because the ancient dating schemes slipped forward about 6 years we’re pretty certain that the baptism of Jesus in his 30th year by St John occurred in 24AD just as the first Christmas was probably 6BC.

When John baptised Jesus we read in several New Testament accounts that the Holy Spirit was seen to come down on him. There was also a voice from above, said to be from God the Father, saying You are my Son.

Jesus came into his own as Son of God at his baptism. He was conceived of the Spirit from Our Lady but the Spirit came upon him in power in a second anointing that occurred in the River Jordan at the hand of St John the Baptist. In today’s Gospel we read: As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, ‘I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. St John in a parallel to this passage in Luke Chapter 3 writes: He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit. And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God (1.33b-34).

You can’t see God but at one point in history you could because God became one of us. John the Baptist was sent as the pointer to this. More than that, a pointer to the one who’d help everyone who wanted to know God to know God and share God’s life for ever. 

To be a Christian is to share the baptism or anointing of the Holy Spirit who makes the invisible God known as surely as the wind makes the air known.

It’s implied in the Bible that God is invisible to protect us from his glory. This invisibility serves our freedom to love without being manipulated. If he were visible that would dramatically affect our freedom to grow in pure love. By being invisible God can be with us without overwhelming us. He can stand at a distance to grant us freedom to make our own decisions including the decision to love him and our neighbour and ourselves. 

A God we could see would actually be less wonderful than the God Christians believe in. We’d be able to contain him in our minds! Instead the Christian vision of God is one that expands continually from our limited dimensions to his unlimited ones. If you want a magnificent God the price you pay seems to be that of worshipping a God that’s invisible to mortal eyes.

The magnificence of God is shown to us by St John when he points to Jesus. The Jesus he points to goes on to demonstrate God’s magnificence by 3 years of teaching, a voluntary death, a glorious resurrection and Pentecost, the sending of the Holy Spirit upon believers which is the way the Church finds God made real to her.

How can I believe in a God I can't see? I’m tempted to answer ‘you wouldn’t need to believe in someone if you could actually see them!’ Faith, as the letter to the Hebrews puts it, is conviction of things unseen (11:1).

The question ‘How can I believe in a God I can't see?’ is really the question ‘how can I find faith?’ 

A quick answer is ‘you should ask God for it, ask him to open your inner eyes to his all powerful yet invisible presence’. 

I remember once my faith going right into the doldrums. It really burned low, so low I went back to the monastery at Mirfield where I trained as a priest and asked for help.

Maybe it’s not God who’s gone but your vision of him, the monks said. Pray for a vision of God more to his dimensions and less to your own they said. For three days I prayed a prayer rather like God, if you’re there, show yourself! He did – I survive to tell the tale – he spoke to me through a leaf on a tree.

I made you. He said. I love you. I want to fill you with my Spirit. That he did, though I’ve leaked since.

Asking God for a vision of himself more to his dimensions and less to your own seems always to bear fruit. Faith grows – it enlarges, especially if it is enriched by prayerful reading of the Bible and celebration of the sacraments.  

You can’t expect great things of God if you don’t believe he’s capable of them. The wonder of Christmas is its magnification of the Lord. The very thought that he who contains all that is could come to Mary’s womb, could come to this altar in bread and wine – could come into this heart and that heart and that heart! It’s an astounding thought really.

It’s faith that opens up such a vision. Now let’s be clear, faith isn’t a feeling you can work up or enlarge. It’s our capacity to compass God through an ongoing decision to reach towards him and be energised by him.  

Christian mystics write of faith as a practical commitment. In the medieval Cloud of Unknowing the anonymous medieval author describes faith as an ‘eager dart of longing love’ that reaches out to touch God and release his possibilities into our situation.

John the Baptist pointed to God so that we too could be drawn to reach out to God ourselves.

Faith always takes us out of ourselves towards God and neighbour.

When C.S.Lewis asked himself ‘Do I believe?’ he said his belief seemed to go - just like when he asked himself in the midst of pleasure, ‘am I enjoying myself’ his enjoyment seemed to go. Both actions, he said, are like taking one’s eyes out instead of keeping them in the right place and seeing with them. Faith like enjoyment has its focus outside of self. 

How can I believe in a God I can't see? You need to make a decision. That’s what faith is – a decision to act as if God were there and to be energised by a power quite outside and beyond oneself. 

To have faith is to go beyond and not against reason. As John Donne wrote Reason is our soul’s left hand, faith his right, by these we reach divinity.

Both faith and reason lift us to God and in Jesus God himself reaches down to us revealing himself to both our reason and our faith. In St Luke’s record of history of John the Baptist and Jesus Christ we should see a reasonable case for the Incarnation, the coming of God upon the earth. 

Here, in the coming of Jesus that Advent centres upon, what we believe and what we see come together. 

As St John writes No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known (John 1:18)

You can see him now with your mind and heart’s eye - in his word, in the breaking of bread, in our Christian fellowship.

St John the Baptist invites you again, for his words are true today as they were yesterday and will be tomorrow: Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world. 

Look at Jesus with both your faith and your reason. Look at him! Look at him and welcome him this morning in word and sacrament!

St Bartholomew, Brighton St Gregory the Great Fri 3rd Sept 2021

 

‘The same God that said, ‘Let there be light shining out of darkness’, has shone in our minds to radiate the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Christ’ 2 Corinthians 4

In an earlier existence as a research Chemist I was involved in CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research and its particle accelerator which has in recent years done so much to reveal the origins of the Universe by recreating the aftermath of the Big Bang that science now assumes started all things.

Faith in the Big Bang among scientists happily coincides with the Bible’s affirmation that God himself acted in creation saying ‘Let there be light shining out of darkness’. 

In our special reading from 2 Corinthians for the feast of the missionary Pope Gregory the apostle Paul tells his readers of not one but two Big Bangs.

‘The same God that said, ‘Let there be light shining out of darkness’, has shone in our minds to radiate the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Christ’

Christians believe there are two major explosions that make history. The radiant energy that flows from creation and that which flows from the coming of Jesus and the Spirit.

When Gregory sent us Augustine with the news of Jesus he was carried forward in that purpose by the momentum of mission that flows back to Lady Day, the day Jesus came into Our Lady’s womb.

Just as the first Big Bang gave out light, heat and physical energy so the radiant power of the Spirit of Jesus makes a tremendous difference to the world lightening minds, warming hearts and galvanising wills. 

In this Eucharist we are caught up into that radiant power of Jesus, the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Christ. As we lift our hearts we are ourselves lifted into the same momentum of mission that Gregory was lifted into when God said ‘send Augustine to Britain’.

‘The same God that said, ‘Let there be light shining out of darkness’, has shone in our minds to radiate the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Christ’

We bless the Lord God of all creation at every Eucharist for the bread and wine that earth has given. We go on to bless him for his second great act in sending Jesus and the Spirit. We go on to plead that the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Christ will irradiate us this very day as we hear his word and celebrate his sacrifice.

Irradiate our minds with Christ’s light, driving away the negative thinking that so often defeats our witness.

Irradiate our hearts with the Spirits’ fire so that all we do today we may do in love and not just because it has to be done.

Irradiate our wills to empower them, grasping us and carrying us forward from this altar to be his joyful instruments. 

Yes the Eucharist is – or should be – like having someone – God in this case – putting a rocket under you to get you going. So be it at this altar this day!

St Wilfrid, Haywards Heath & Holy Trinity, Cuckfield Mount Nebo 11.8.21

‘Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho, and the Lord showed him the whole land… The Lord said to him, "This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, "I will give it to your descendants'; I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there." Then Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab, at the Lord's command. He was buried in a valley in the land of Moab… but no one knows his burial place to this day’ (Deuteronomy 34:1-4).

One advantage of visiting the Holy Land is that for the rest of your life scripture passages come alive in a special sense as you recall the geography. Today’s first reading is such a passage for me. In May 2005 I took part in an ecumenical pilgrimage to Jordan, Lebanon and Syria which has placed those troubled lands much on my heart.  The Jordan leg of our pilgrimage led us to Mount Nebo where Moses viewed the Promised Land as recorded in today’s reading from Deuteronomy 34. He is presumed to have died near to this visit and indeed ‘no one knows his burial place to this day’. If they did Jews, Christians and Muslims would flock to it.

Today people talk of Moses’s Promised Land as the ‘over-promised land’ of which you become very aware from Mount Nebo as you look down from Jordan across to Jericho in the State of Israel. At night the lights of Jerusalem are visible. As pilgrims, Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Anglican within the True Life in God network we concelebrated Mass in the excavated basilica on Mount Nebo, an extraordinary privilege allowed on the retreat. I recall being in the midst of scores of priests looking down from the altar across something like a five hundred strong assembly of God’s people towards the west door and the Promised Land beyond. My thoughts and prayers were of how the Lord was to lead us forward from that place as individuals, Christian communities and denominations aspiring for the promised land of heaven. 

As we reflect on our scripture for today we are reminded that we are God’s people in succession to those Israelites and we are more fully so as we look to what God has on the horizon for us as churches and individuals. We attain that in company with one another, looking to the faith of the church through the ages and to one another right across Christian traditions. As we heard in the Gospel from Matthew 18:19-20 ‘Truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them’. 

We are gathered this morning as if on Mount Nebo sensing God’s leading in our lives and in our Christian community, straining forwards to the promise of glory anticipated through the eucharist. ‘O Christ whom now beneath a veil we see may what we thirst for soon our portion be to gaze on thee unveiled and see your face, the vision of your glory and your grace’ (Thomas Aquinas) 

Father we are your people, called by you and destined to inherit your promises. As you kept faith with Moses keep faith with us as trust you for the best future as individuals and as a Christian community. Lord hear us

We pray for Martin our bishop, [the one destined to be our parish priest/Michael our priest] and all Christian leaders especially Justin our Archbishop, Pope Francis, Patriarch Bartholomew and the leaders of the Evangelical Churches that together they may steer your people towards the best provisions on our pilgrim way. Lord hear us

We pray for the Christian communities in [Cuckfield/Haywards Heath] that leaders and members will connect up more so that our joint mission of service and witness to Jesus our Saviour may be the more effective. Lord hear us

Remember, Lord, all those in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness or any other adversity, especially those who have asked our prayers. Lord hear us.

Joining with Our Lady, [St Wilfrid], St Clare and all the saints we commend to you those who have died and all whose anniversaries fall at this time. Lord hear us.   

Merciful Father accept these prayers for the sake of your Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen

St Peter & St John Wivelsfield 2nd before Lent 16th Feb 2020

All we’re about as Christians harnesses energy. It harnesses the energy that presses creation forward. Let no one be deceived into thinking Christianity is a loss of energy, even if tasks in the life of the Church fall heavily on your shoulders!

As we heard in our readings from Genesis and Romans God who brought all that is out of nothing has the creation waiting with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God. 

He brings us moment by moment in Christ the irrepressible power of the Holy Spirit. It is the same energy at work in the Eucharist that is at work bringing sun, rain and storm and pushing the grass and trees upward.

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin Our Lord reflects in the Gospel I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 

The same Lord Jesus Christ is our clue to understanding that energy that has brought not just the lilies but each of us here into being and would carry us forward from this day into a joyful eternity. He whose power rolled out creation acted powerfully upon the Cross to reconcile sinful humanity and is powerfully present with us this morning.  He is both the power that bought all things into being and the one who gives power to all who believe in his name.

To know God in Jesus Christ is not something esoteric but something that touches the wellsprings of human life. You and I are here in this Church this morning, held together in our physical being by God.

God who brought all that is out of nothing brings us moment by moment, in Christ, the power of life. More than that he fills hearts open to him with his own life, the life and power of the Holy Spirit, through word and sacrament.

Our Church tower is fashioned as pointer to this truth: all of life comes from God, is sustained by God and would be directed by God to his praise and service.

I say ‘would be’ because the creation of a world apart from God has led to the necessity of faith for mortal beings to be one with him, to choose intimacy with him, and to overcome the consequences of that apartness from God in the evil consequences of human wrongdoing, made possible by that apartness of the creation from God. 

We name the second person in the Godhead Jesus Christ because the world apart from God began to fall apart through human sin and only through the gift of his Son, revealed in taking nature of a Virgin in Jesus Christ, his death and resurrection could it be brought together again.

The great Anglican theologian Austin Farrer has this summary of how creation links to redemption and the making holy of our lives: We believe in One God, One not only in the unity of his substance but in the unbroken wholeness of his action. All the work of God is one mighty doing from the beginning to the end, and can only be seen in its mind-convincing force when it is so taken. It is One God who calls being out of nothing, and Jesus from a virgin womb, and life from the dead; who revives our languid souls by penitence, and promises to sinful men redeemed by the vision of his face, in Jesus Christ our Lord. 

A Celebration of Faith p62

I am hopeful for the Church because I know there’s a link between the supernaturally revealed truth of Jesus Christ and the truths of the world’s evolution established by science. Not just a link but a dynamic!

Just to illustrate, it is the Lord’s Day. Every Sunday we celebrate three dynamics. The first day of the week is a reminder of God’s creation on the primeval day. It is also the memorial of the new creation given on Easter Sunday. It is thirdly the memorial of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit empowered the Church. This dynamic is encaptured in Victorian Bishop William Walsham How’s hymn for Sunday:

This day, at thy creating Word first o’er the earth the light was poured; 

O Lord, this day upon us shine, and fill our hearts with light divine.

This day the Lord for sinners slain, in might victorious rose again:

O Jesu, may we raisèd be from death of sin to life in thee.

This day the Holy Spirit came with fiery tongues of cloven flame:

O Spirit, fill our hearts this day with grace to hear and grace to pray.

The truth behind Sunday is the same truth behind creation – the truth of a God who, in Farrer’s words calls being out of nothing...Jesus from a virgin womb, and life from the dead; who revives our languid souls.

A last thought on how we better lay hold on this truth.

Imagine yourself up a ladder replacing a light bulb. You are concentrating your attention on loosening the bulb and suddenly your mind switches to ponder how securely you’re placed on the ladder (no doubt if in Church your two named ladder holders will be down below you).

Your inner questioning ‘how securely am I placed’ undermines the operation until you pull yourself together and get on with the job.

Do you get the analogy? When we try to analyse our faith it feels shaky. When we attend to God it is convinced. 

Believing in God is a practical matter beyond human analysis.

As Austin Farrer says elsewhere: God can convince us of God, nothing else and no one else can: attend the eucharist well, make a good communion, pray for the grace you need, and you will know that you are not dealing with empty air.

Let’s do just that - attend the eucharist well and make a good communion!

St Richard, Haywards Heath 6th of Year (C) 17.2.19

How can we be the Church better?

Both Fr Chris and I started our priesthood in Sheffield Diocese and I recall from my days a diocesan theme of that name which was very successful: Being the church better. It was a challenge to do no more but to put more into what we were doing.

As a somewhat repentant former mission adviser I’m aware of how diocesan initiatives can sap energy by putting extra burdens on busy priests and people. That being said I rejoice in our diocesan year of vocation because our calling or vocation flows straight from what we are in Christ so it is timely to open God’s word with that in mind.

How can we be the Church better and better fulfil our Christian calling?

We’re human beings not human doings. Even if, like me, a lot of what you do is pottering around as a retiree you can still forget to ‘take time to stand and stare’ as the saying goes. Jeremiah and the Psalmist draw an analogy between the life of faith and trees sinking roots into subterranean water. When I was a Curate in Doncaster I woke up one summer morning to find a crack right across my bedroom wall. Four thirsty plane trees in the garden had drunk the water under the Clergy House in a drought such that the House came to subside! Such is the power behind a tree - or four trees.

How much more power there is in a trustful life! Happy the one who has placed his trust in the Lord… yielding fruit in due season… all they do shall prosper. Being the church better is about putting roots into the word of God, savouring for example this week’s readings from Jeremiah 17 and the first Psalm day by day, being reminded whenever you pass a tree - and we are much more blessed with trees to remind us in Chichester Diocese than we were in Sheffield Diocese!

We’re two weeks or so from Lent. Not all of us can make extra groups or services though I hope to and hope you will also try to, when you can. Being the church better for many of us might be less about coming to extra things as putting extra heart into our Sunday celebration of the eucharist. Being a regular Mass attender I wrote an article about this in February's New Directions. It's a reminder to myself and the readership of the awesome reality of Mass. Here’s a bit from that article:

‘It is the perception of the eucharist as the God-given transformative action it is that draws me day by day into its orbit.  As often as we celebrate the eucharist we advance the work of salvation through no simple transaction but a showing of Christ crucified which helps bring the world into what he wants it to be. So many times I have been able to look back days or weeks later at the fulfilment of intentions I have taken to the eucharist even concerning world crises.

Day by day we have an invitation to participate in a blessing and distribution of bread and wine that impacts the cosmos through the eucharistic sacrifice of Jesus who died in our place and comes here and now, there and then, to be in our place and that of the whole world before our Father. His institution of the eucharist calls forth obedience - ‘do this in remembrance of me’ - but more profoundly obedient self-offering in his own for our salvation and that of the whole world. ‘See, God, I have come to do your will, O God’ (Hebrews 10:7)’.

How can we be the Church better?

Talk to your priests or fellow church members about the meaning and power of the eucharist. Get a book to read or some guidance on what terms to Google so you can get more rooted in the faith of the church through the ages.

After last autumn’s week of guided prayer there was quite a ripple of God talk around at St Richard’s. When we as individuals deepen our prayer the joy of that ripples out compensating less joyous demands of church life like seeing to the challenge of the electrics. Rewiring will make for a better and safer church, yes, but need I say a membership more lit up with the light of the Lord will best serve the Beacon aspiration Fr Chris sets before us.

In the second reading we’re challenged to a fuller sense of the Church as God’s never-ending family. Saying farewell to Tony and Frank is reminder of those words we just heard from St Paul: ‘If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied… Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died’. As we prepare through Lent for Easter what better preparation than aim to share with our circle how in the last resort there are only two alternatives: either to have God, and in Him everything, or to have nothing but yourself. The hope of heaven needs strengthening in us if we’re to be effective witnesses in such a materialistic culture. We don’t need to do extra things to strengthen that hope, just pray for the Holy Spirit to guide us to books and individuals that thrill with such hope.

How can we be the Church better?

The Gospel has the Beatitudes abbreviated from nine in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount to four here in Luke’s sermon on the plain with four woes all with something of a sociological take compared to Matthew who has Our Lord declaring the ‘poor in spirit’ blessed rather than the ‘poor’.

You could read and compare the two versions in your own time to help you take the Beatitudes more to heart, especially Matthew’s call to poverty of spirit, purity of heart, hunger for righteousness and so on. When we read Christ’s Beatitudes they’re a tall order but to be the church better we need to spiritually ‘stand up straight with our shoulders back’. As Jordan Peterson summarises their challenge: ‘Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong. Start stopping today. Don’t waste time questioning how you know what you’re doing is wrong, if you are certain that it is’.

To be the church better we need individually to take the shock-treatment of the Holy Spirit without running away. Sinking our roots more in the promises of Scripture may we prosper like healthy trees people look up to. Rewired in spirit through using our imagination more about the way we pray may we discover afresh the meaning and power of the eucharist. I end with a description of the anticipation of heaven we are thankfully about this morning from the Orthodox priest Alexander Schmemann:

‘When man stands before the throne of God, when he has fulfilled all that God has given him to fulfil, when all sins are forgiven, all joy restored, then there is nothing else for him to do but give thanks. Eucharist (thanksgiving) is the state of perfect man. Eucharist is the life of paradise. Eucharist is the only full and real response of man to God's creation, redemption and gift of heaven. But this perfect man who stands before God is Christ. In him alone all that God has given man was fulfilled and brought back to heaven. He alone is the perfect eucharistic being. He is the eucharist of the world. In and through this eucharist the whole creation becomes what it always was to be and yet failed to be.’

Behold the Lamb of God this morning - the risen Lord coming to be present in bread and wine - blessed are those called to his supper both here and in the age to come!

Ascension Sunday at St Richard Haywards Heath 13 May 2018

The liturgical year is one of our greatest teachers.

We believe as Christians that God made and loves all that is including each and everyone of us sitting in Church this morning.

God loves us so much he sent his Son down to be born as one of us – which is Christmas.

God loves us so much he allowed Jesus to suffer what human beings suffer, to live and die as one of us yet without sin – which is Lent

God loves us so much he wants us to know death isn’t the end of us in his sight – which is Easter

God loves us so much he brought Jesus up to heaven and sent the Holy Spirit down into any heart that will welcome him – which is Pentecost.

That’s Christianity in four lines – Christmas, Lent, Easter and Pentecost.

On Ascension Feast in Eastertide we recall how God loves  each and everyone of us and those gone before us on earth no less than ourselves.

The great Easter Candle stands before us today as a sign to each and everyone of the truth that Jesus and Jesus alone towers over death.

The incense burned before God rising upwards today is also a liturgical teacher suited to this week of prayer before Pentecost for which we’ll be joined on Tuesday by Bishop Richard.

The age old symbolism of incense is that of rising prayer.

The incense grains are an expensive source of fragrance.

On Ascension Feast we celebrate how the fragrance of Jesus spreads through space and time only through his passion, death and resurrection. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. (John 12:24)

The costly incense grains, formed over centuries in the extraordinary sap of Arabian trees, die on the charcoal to rise yielding pleasant fragrance which scripture associates with the world beyond this world. In the vision of St John the Divine, Revelation 8 verse 4 he tells us the smoke of [the] incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of an [the] angel.

On Ascension Feast we celebrate the completion of Christ’s earthly work and its being taken up to heaven. This is well expressed in the fourth verse of George Bourne’s ascension hymn, Lord, enthroned in heavenly splendour where we read these rich words:

Paschal Lamb, thine off’ring finished

once for all when thou wast slain,

in its fullness undiminished

shall for evermore remain.

Alleluia, alleluia,

Cleansing souls from ev’ry stain

In the Feasts of Christ spread across the liturgical year we read, mark and inwardly digest truths that are ‘once for all’ and yet evermore inspire and cleanse our souls. Christ, as Bourne’s hymn concludes, is risen, ascended, glorified so that we can be raised from the works of the flesh, ascend in prayer and anticipate the glory that is to be ours.

The Chinese writer Watchman Nee wrote a short commentary on the letter to the Ephesians entitled Sit, Walk, Stand to remind Christians that as Christ is ascended and seated at God’s right hand, so are we. We are to keep seated with Christ above sin, to keep walking in the Spirit and keep standing fast against the devil.

The incense we use at worship is symbol of rising prayer, of costly sacrifice, and lastly of our living in the court of heaven seated with its Monarch. God raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, we read in Ephesians and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

As Christ is risen, ascended, glorified so are we, which is why St Nicodemus could write man is the macrocosm and the whole universe is the microcosm. Because we bear God’s image we stand over and above the universe, a truth confirmed by the ascension of Christ which raises and sets humanity in the highest place of all.

For, as Paul says to the Corinthians we are the incense of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing. (2 Corinthians 2:15). Our prayer is to be one with the ascended Christ, our lives united with his sacrifice in the eucharist and the fragrance in our worship is to be mirrored in the fragrance of lives lived to the praise and service of God!

In this service we take, we bless, we break, we share bread and wine and show forth God’s very great love for us and for all that is – especially recalling how Jesus was taken by God the Father on Good Friday and his body was broken on the Cross to show God’s love for us, love shared with the whole world ever since by the pouring out of the Holy Spirit.

At the eucharist we also see our lives taken by God. When we put the bread on the plate and the wine in the cup we think of ourselves placed there before God, our congregation, our town, our county, our nation, our world, its joys and sorrows, its strengths and all being placed on the altar of God which is the eucharist table to ascend to him.

In the eucharist we take, bless, break and share bread and wine

In the eucharist we see Jesus taken, blessed, broken and shared.

In the eucharist our lives also ascend to God and are made a blessing to others.  

So let’s offer ourselves in union with the ascended Christ this morning so that all that we are may be consecrated afresh to God’s praise and service with, in and through Jesus our high priest!

Blessed, praised and hallowed be our Lord Jesus Christ upon his throne in glory, in the most holy sacrament of the altar and in the hearts of all his faithful people now and ever and to the ages of ages. Amen.