St Gabriel, Pimlico Churchill Gardens Assumption 15th August 2021

 

When we look at human origins we enter troubled waters for those who stick to biblical literalism. Sometime back I read Douglas Palmer’s book Origins – human evolution which provides a fascinating summary of the 20 million year evolution of the human family going from the Proconsul plant-eating monkey to chimpanzee-like descendants up to 2 million years back. Then homo habilis, erectus, neanderthalensis and sapiens. Here above is an illustration capturing the sense of this.

The issue of creation versus evolution has been a consuming issue for some but the main flow of Christian biblical interpretation goes hand in hand with God’s other reference book, the book of nature. We expect truth from both sources, God’s written word and the study of the creation we call science. The truth about salvation is, of course, only in one of those books. Christians believe the Bible can’t be mistaken as it presents the good news of Jesus to honest seekers but we don’t claim its infallibility as a science text book.

When we look back at human origins we’re bound to the biblical doctrine of our being created in the image of God and human beings’ fall expressed in the poem of Adam and Eve and in the doctrine of original sin. ‘All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’ we read in the letter to the Romans 3v23. How we see the emergence of consciousness, the soul and its capacity to be both one with God and to sin is an important question that needs setting in perspective and the best perspective is to look forward from our origins to our destiny. Today’s Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary provokes above all days the thought of human destiny as we ponder the first of the redeemed.

God gave us life through the great chain of being described both by science and by Genesis. This chain started with one cell organisms and moved through multicellular organisms to plants, reptiles then mammals climaxing in the human family. 

God gave us life so he could give us his life. It is a difficult question to answer, exactly when the human soul first emerged, exactly when a human being first welcomed, worshipped and sinned against God.

If the supposed 4.6 billion year history of the earth is crammed into a single day, the whole of recorded history is compressed into one fifth of the second before midnight, a blink of an eyelid. 

In that blink we have the emergence of the soul and human sin.

In the same blink we have the emergence of a soul perfectly open to God.

When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman… so that we might receive adoption as children. (Galatians 4v4)

The process of creation, the evolution of the human race, led to the woman ‘fairest of that race’ whose soul opened to welcome the life of God and its consequences so that we might receive adoption as children of God.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God...(who) for us and for salvation came down from heaven, was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and was made man. (Nicene Creed)

Through Mary the Son of God became the Son of Man so that children of men could become children of God.

God came into the soul and body of the Blessed Virgin forever. It was a new creation as important as the first. God, who made all out of nothing, who set up and steers the chain of evolution, went deeper with the world. 

Having established by his grace perfect obedience in a human heart he entered the depths of that heart and opened up a new chain of being that we’re part of, the communion of saints.

In Christian tradition we look backwards to Eve. We look forwards to Mary.  The greeting of Gabriel, Hail, in Latin Ave can be written backwards, Eva, Eve. Mary is the new Eve as Christ is the new Adam. The great Anglican hymn writer Bishop Ken’s hymn speaks of this:

As Eve, when she her fontal sin reviewed, wept for herself and all she should include,

Blest Mary, with man’s Saviour in embrace, joyed for herself and for all human race.

Then speaking of today of Mary’s heavenly birthday the hymn goes on:

Heaven with transcendent joys her entrance graced, near to his throne her Son his Mother placed;

And here below, now she’s of heaven possest, all generations are to call her blest.

We see the exaltation of Mary in all our scripture readings today. It’s an exaltation to be the lot of all who welcome Our Lord as she did. Mary is first redeemed and first fruits of the harvest of souls God planned when he made the world and re-made it through her.

This feast of Mary, Mother of the Lord, centres on human destiny.

We came to this day through the animation of the material world, the evolutionary process from cells to plants and animals to monkeys to homo sapiens.

We can head from this day towards the fulfilment of the new creation beyond this world in heaven for God who gave us life has given us his life which is immortal.

That life first planted in Mary is open to all who’ll direct their attention away from self-indulgence and self-centredness to let Jesus make them members of his family of redeemed humans we call the church.

We were made, however that may be, in God’s image.

We are destined, however that might be, for God’s glory.

The ‘how’ of our creation is beyond us.  Not so the ‘how’ of our redemption. 

Just as Mary cooperated with God, so must we. This is the only way for human nature to flourish as it’s meant to. 

Salvation is human flourishing in this world and the next. It’s  communal, being one with the church in this world and the next. 

God gave us Jesus through Mary and with Mary he gave us a new destiny that we need to choose and own. 

It’s not what you have been or what you are that God looks at with his merciful love but what you would be. So wrote the author of the medieval book, The Cloud of Unknowing.

God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly says Mary in today’s Gospel.

God lifts those who’ll let him lift them - like Mary herself, those with a heart for God’s future.

Mary stands close to us and to the whole church as an example and as one who prays with the company of the saints that surrounds us for all of us to reach the destiny God has for those who’ll be uplifted.

We can’t save ourselves. God can but without us he cannot. Without our permission God can’t get his life into ours nor join us to the company of the redeemed.

Getting that Christ-life into our hearts is what Christianity is all about, what the bible’s all about, what the eucharist’s all about, what Mary’s all about and what the church is all about.

That all comes down to obedience and discipline, as it did for Our Lady, Blessed Mary. 

She was supremely anointed by the Spirit and she was supremely obedient. There’s no anointing, no heavenly joy without earthly devotion.

God grant us such devotion, with and to the Blessed Virgin, and grant, that we who are redeemed by his blood may share with her in the glory of his eternal kingdom. Amen.

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.

Lent 1 17th February 2013: I believe in God

The Apostles' Creed 

• Lent is being used to helps us examine our faith afresh
• ‘I believe in God and the spiritual but not dogma’ is current and we need to be informed to counter this eg What sort of God? New Age impersonal force?
• Easter baptismal renewal involves Apostles’ Creed – hence value and origin of Lent in preparing for this renewal
• The Apostles' Creed sets forth Christianity as someone put it "in sublime simplicity, in unsurpassable brevity, in beautiful order, and with liturgical solemnity." It’s a Godsend to teach the Christian Faith as we seek to make simple, clear, direct and above all effective communication of the truth that is in Jesus (Eph 4:21).

First official mention at the Council of Milan in 390AD. Most scholars trace it back to an old Roman Creed from the turn of the first century and the three baptismal questions of the early church. Memorised then by the faithful, as it is today, hard copies were probably less at a premium in the early centuries explaining the lateness of the first 4^th century documentation. As Anglicans we encounter the Apostles’ Creed at BCP Morning and Evening Prayer. Baptism and confirmation rites. There are actually three creeds in use. The Apostles is simplest, then Nicene, then Athanasian. The other two creeds originate more in the eastern church and are more developed in their theology.

I believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth   

     

• What’s the evidence God exists?

 The cosmological argument of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274):

1                      Whatever begins to exist has a cause

2                      The universe began to exist

3                      Therefore, the universe must have had a cause.  We call that cause God.    NB Big Bang seems to fit this

The design argument eg. William Paley (1743-1805) who argued that the complexity, order, and purpose of a watch indicate intelligent design, as do the complexity, order, and purpose of the universe.  The moral argument based on conscience. The existence of morality is a pointer to its author – God.  This is sometimes expressed as the view that there could be no right and wrong unless God existed. More subjective is the personal experience argument Friedrich Schleiermach (1768-1834) God’s existence cannot be demonstrated rationally but only perceived by one’s feelings.

• Why believe in a personal God?

There are reasonable evidences for God’s existence but Christianity goes beyond reason. To catch the full beauty of Christianity you need to engage with the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. God has sameness with us as a loving Father yet is different – an almighty God, three persons in one Godhead. Christian faith thrills to that awesome difference yet rejoices in the sameness Jesus reveals.

• How can God be almighty with all the suffering in the world?

Love needs free will etc. The Cross of Jesus is key. An interesting thought on earthquakes - without tectonic plates life would be denied the invigoration of the minerals inside the earth, even if the plates move at a cost to life itself.

• How can belief in a Creator be squared with evolution?

God is creator now as then, holding us in being as we, unlike God, do not possess being in itself. Darwin, the father of evolution allegedly lost his faith not through his research but through the loss of his daughter. Darwin's colleague Kingsley saw evolution revealing God as cleverer than ever seen before in his giving us potentiality to make ourselves. This potentiality, linked to genetic mutation producing new forms of life, has 'ragged edges' eg cancer and 'blind alleys'.

The Blessed Virgin Mary 15th August 2010

Last year was the double centenary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the sesquicentenary of his book The Origin of Species published in 1859.

Many see the wane of Christian allegiance in Britain as stemming from the creation-evolution debate that began in those days and which continues to reveal a lack of intellectual rigour in Christian circles.

When we look at human origins we enter troubled waters for those who stick to biblical literalism. I was reminded of this when David Lamb gave me a copy hot from Mitchell Beazley publishers of this book Origins – human evolution revealed by Douglas Palmer. It’s a fascinating summary of the 20 million year evolution of the human family involving 20 separate species and illustrated.

Thomas Huxley’s famous skeleton illustration of 1863 showed the evolution of humans from apes. Helped by a so-called paleo-artist, John Gurche, this new book gives us life like reconstructions from fossils of the faces of 12 iconic members of the extended human family who lived and died out over the last 20 million years. They range over three pages entitled ‘Meet the Family’ and going from the Proconsul plant-eating monkey to chimpanzee-like descendants up to 2 million years back. Then homo habilis, erectus, neanderthalensis and sapiens.

The issue of creation versus evolution is a consuming issue among some Evangelicals struggling with a self-contained Christian authority. If you take the Bible literally you run the risk of defending it against other interpretations of human origins and you narrow down Christianity. If you go with the main flow of Christianity biblical interpretation you go hand in hand with God’s other reference book, the book of nature. We expect truth from both sources, God’s written word and the study of the creation we call science. The truth about salvation is, of course, only in one of those books.

Christians believe the Bible can’t be mistaken as it presents the good news of Jesus to honest seekers but we don’t claim its infallibility as a science text book.

When we look back at human origins we’re bound to the biblical doctrine of our being created in the image of God and human beings’ fall expressed in the poem of Adam and Eve and in the doctrine of original sin. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God we read in the letter to the Romans 3v23.

How we see the emergence of consciousness, the soul and its capacity to be both one with God and to sin is an important question that’s worthwhile wrestling with but one that needs setting in perspective.

Whether the world came into existence over 4.6 billion years or 4004 as Archbishop Usher taught fades into a little less significance when you turn your mind towards the world’s destiny.

Being given a book on human origins last week connected, in my mind, with preaching this Sunday on the Blessed Virgin Mary who is the great reminder of human destiny as the first of the redeemed.

God gave us life through the great chain of being described both by science and by Genesis. This chain started with one cell organisms and moved through multicellular organisms to plants, reptiles then mammals climaxing in the human family.

God gave us life so he could give us his life. It is a difficult question to answer, exactly when the human soul first emerged, exactly when a human being first welcomed, worshipped and sinned against God.

If the supposed 4.6 billion year history of the earth is crammed into a single day, the whole of recorded history is compressed into one fifth of the second before midnight, a blink of an eyelid.

In that blink we have the emergence of the soul and human sin.

In the same blink we have the emergence of a soul perfectly open to God.

When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. (Galatians 4v4)

The process of creation, the evolution of the human race, led to the woman ‘fairest of that race’ whose soul opened to welcome the life of God and its consequences so that we might receive adoption as children of God.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God...(who) for us and for salvation came down from heaven, was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and was made man. (Nicene Creed)

Through Mary the Son of God became the Son of Man so that children of men could become children of God.

God came into the soul and body of the Blessed Virgin forever. It was a new creation as important as the first. God, who made all out of nothing, who set up and steers the chain of evolution, went deeper with the world.

Having established by his grace perfect obedience in a human heart he entered the depths of that heart and opened up a new chain of being that we’re part of, the communion of saints.

In Christian tradition we look backwards to Eve. We look forwards to Mary. The greeting of Gabriel, Hail, in Latin Ave can be written backwards, Eva, Eve. Mary is the new Eve as Christ is the new Adam.

The great Anglican hymn writer Bishop Ken’s hymn speaks of this:

As Eve, when she her fontal sin reviewed,
wept for herself and all she should include,
Blest Mary, with man’s Saviour in embrace,
Joyed for herself and for all human race.

Then speaking of today of Mary’s heavenly birthday the hymn goes on:

Heaven with transcendent joys her entrance graced,
Near to his throne her Son his Mother placed;
And here below, now she’s of heaven possest,
All generations are to call her blest.

We see the exaltation of Mary in all our scripture readings today. It’s an exaltation to be the lot of all who welcome Our Lord as she did. Mary is first redeemed and first fruits of the harvest of souls God planned when he made the world and re-made it through her.

This feast of Mary, Mother of the Lord, centres on human destiny.

We came to this day through the animation of the material world, the evolutionary process from cells to plants and animals to monkeys to homo sapiens.

We can head from this day towards the fulfilment of the new creation beyond this world in heaven for God who gave us life has given us his life which is immortal.

That life first planted in Mary is open to all who’ll direct their attention away from self-indulgence and self-centredness to let Jesus make them members of his family of redeemed humans we call the church.

We were made, however that may be, in God’s image.

We are destined, however that might be, for God’s glory.

The ‘how’ of our creation is beyond us. Not so the ‘how’ of our redemption.

Just as Mary cooperated with God so must we. This is the only way for human nature to flourish as it’s meant to.

Salvation is human flourishing in this world and the next. It’s communal, being one with the church in this world and the next.

God gave us Jesus through Mary and with Mary he gave us a new destiny that we need to choose and own.

It’s not what you have been or what you are that God looks at with his merciful love but what you would be. So wrote the author of the medieval book, The Cloud of Unknowing.

God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly says Mary in today’s Gospel.

God lifts those who’ll let him lift them - like Mary herself, those with a heart for God’s future.

Mary stands close to us and to the whole church as an example and as one who prays with the company of the saints that surrounds us for all of us to reach the destiny God has for those who’ll be uplifted.

We can’t save ourselves. God can but without us he cannot. Without our permission God can’t get his life into ours nor join us to the company of the redeemed.

Getting that Christ-life into our hearts is what Christianity is all about, what the bible’s all about, what the eucharist’s all about, what Mary’s all about and what the church is all about.

That all comes down to obedience and discipline, as it did for Our Lady, Blessed Mary. She was supremely anointed by the Spirit and she was supremely obedient. There’s no anointing, no heavenly joy without earthly devotion.

God grant us such devotion, with and to the Blessed Virgin, and grant, as we have already prayed, that we who are redeemed by his blood may share with her in the glory of his eternal kingdom. Amen.