St John, Burgess Hill Trinity Sunday 30.5.21

Shortly after I was ordained priest I had a crisis of faith. I went back to where I had trained. It was a chance to work out what should happen next since I hardly believed in the reality of God anymore. While there I was taken under the wing of Fr. Daniel, one of the Mirfield monks. He gave me this advice: ‘Maybe, John, it is not God who's gone but your vision of him. Why not pray an honest prayer, like, ‘God, if you're there, show yourself. Give me a vision of yourself that's to your dimensions and not mine’. With nothing to lose I prayed Fr. Daniel’s prayer over two cliff-hanging days. Then God answered. He chose a leaf on a tree in the monastery garden. I was walking along with no particular thought in my head when my eyes fell on the leaf and it was as if it spoke to me. ‘He made you’, the leaf seemed to say. I was bowled over. As I moved forward I saw the great Crucifix that stands in the garden. ‘I made you. I love you’, the figure of Jesus seemed to say. ‘Father, Son...what about the Holy Spirit?’, my mind was spinning. The Father was saying ‘I made you’, the Son ‘I love you’. Could it be that the Spirit was saying ‘I want to fill you’? A group of monks prayed for me to be filled afresh with the Holy Spirit and from that day forward God has seemed closer to me in people and nature as well as in church. 

This experience has helped me understand what it means to pray ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen’. It was as if my vision of God had grown too ‘samey’ and needed to get ‘different’ and only God could do that, the living God who speaks to anyone prepared to lend an ear to him. In reminding me ‘I made you’ God used a leaf to speak to me – a leaf out of his book of nature!

God is different from us and yet the same as us. We humans are individual persons but God is three persons in one God which goes beyond reason. That is the great thing about God - his frontiers are beyond ours so he can invite us into new territories by what he chooses to reveal to us. The supreme territory is the life of the resurrection. Because of its core historical events, in Christianity talk of God is inseparable from a vision of him beyond this world. Austin Farrer makes this plain in one of his sermons: ‘You can equivocate for ever on God's very existence... but a God who reverses nature, a God who undoes death, that those in whom the likeness of his glory has faintly and fitfully shone may be drawn everlastingly into the heart of light, and know him as he is: this is a God indeed, a God almighty, a God to be trusted, loved and adored’. The Bible says ‘God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them’ and the gift of reason is seen as the mark of that image within us. By reason we can evaluate the goodness, truth and beauty around us as pointing to God as being more of the same. Yet there are things our minds cannot grasp like suffering and death, people who forgive one another and the immensity of space. Such realities reveal themselves to us as being bigger than our minds or beyond reason.

God has sameness to us and difference from us. Since God is one in himself and one with us in Jesus Christ we can experience his sameness. He is our loving source and ending, our Father. We are the children he loves and wants to be with him for ever. God’s sameness appeals to us as reasonable beings. Since God is revealed in history as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons in one God, he is gloriously different from us, with space and power to bring all other persons into communion with himself. This space and power was revealed upon earth in a human life of 33 years. God’s space, power and holiness is so different from ours it needed bringing to focus, so we could see it, through God becoming a human being in the person of Jesus. ‘As a magnifying glass concentrates the rays of the sun into a little burning knot of heat that can set fire to a dry leaf or a piece of paper, so the mystery of Christ in the Gospel concentrates the rays of God’s light and fire to a point that sets fire to the spirit of man’. So wrote the great Christian mystic and writer Thomas Merton.

I got into a conversation at Sainsbury’s. The young man at the till didn’t go to Church but I’ll not forget what he said: ‘God’s all powerful but they make him to be a wimping wimp!’ This observation brought back to me a frequent complaint made by the great explorer Laurens Van der Post about the Church’s domestication of God which might be behind non-attendance of folk like my friend at the till. The explorer wrote: ‘One of the strangest ideas ever conceived is the idea that religion is the opium of the people, because religion is a call to battle.. human beings in their rational selves.. shy like frightened horses away from a God who is not the source of opium for people but a reawakening of creation and a transcending of the forces and nuclear energies in the human soul’.

Van der Post was imprisoned by the Japanese during World War Two and lived under the threat of execution. A date was set. The night before he records experiencing a tremendous thunderstorm outside his prison. He saw in this storm a strengthening as if from the awesome truth of a God so different he can raise the dead. The Japanese were not ultimately in control. The storm witnessed a greater than human power which in the end would decide all. He was spared execution. God’s all powerful - may he forgive us for making him ‘a wimping wimp’! 

May God also forgive those of us who put him into words and make him seem neat and tidy. Theology is putting together human words about a reality beyond words. It is necessary because God in Christ, so different from us, has made himself the same as us by taking flesh and bidding us write words about him. Scripture takes precedence over all such words, a library of inspired documents, presenting God as awesome yet accessible in Christ. 

All religions claim some sort of revelation of God. Hindus see many gods expressing affinity or sameness with ordinary life. Muslims see one God above and beyond us whose utter difference from us seems to exclude any sameness. Christians are in the middle with three persons in one God, a God who is personal like ourselves but also beyond us as the ground of our being. 

God for Christians is different from us not just because of what he says about himself through scripture - or to put it inclusively what God says about Godself - but on account of our experience of that difference as believers as I found in the monastery garden and the supermarket and Van der Post discovered in prison.

Engagement with God is a calling forth both of the light of reason and the light of faith which together lift us beyond ourselves into his praise. As the word of God written in the prophet Isaiah states: ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9).

St Wilfrid, Haywards Heath on mystic Richard Rolle 20.1.21

Introduction

The church’s lesser saints days are what you make of them but for many Anglicans they are alas a hidden treasure. Today’s optional commemoration of St Richard Rolle is important to me because he’s a rare Yorkshire saint - so no apologies! Rolle died as far as we know in the Black Death of 1349 along with a third of the population, an unimaginable catastrophe we are averting mercifully with our own pandemic. Though most church records were lost from those days the impact of this plain speaking Yorkshire Saint lives on through his writings. In recent years I read his life and writings published by Francis Comper in 1928, an inspirational volume (picture) which picks up on Rolle’s desire to experience Christ. As we begin the eucharist this morning we seek such an experience in word and sacrament and through our online fellowship extended by Zoom afterwards. St Richard Rolle had a craving to feel the love of God in return for the great love he himself felt for God. He did so, as I will touch on later on in the eucharist. Let us prepare for this celebration by calling to mind and confessing our failure to love God with all our heart and our neighbour as ourselves. 

Sermon

When I served as priest in Doncaster I suffered a faith crisis which led me to pray for a fresh vision of God. The consequence was a sense of filling by the Holy Spirit or charismatic renewal experience. While thankful for the experience I found myself seeking counsel to see how this resonated with the faith of the church through the ages, which is when I first discovered Richard Rolle who had lived so close to my parish. I recall reading this passage from ‘Fire of Love’ recording his own prayer experience: ‘It is said that the nightingale will sing her melody all night long to please him to whom she is united. How much more ought I to sing, and as sweetly as I can, to my Jesus Christ, my soul’s spouse, through the whole of this present life.. Flute-like, I shall pour out melodious, fervent devotion, raising from the heart songs of praise to God Most High’. Michael Fleming reflects on Rolle’s description of his prayer:  ‘The most marked features in his writings are his evocation of the calor, dulcor, and canor (heat, sweetness, and song) he experienced in the rapture of contemplation, and his most persistent theme, the love of God. The word ‘love’ itself appears almost innumerably in Rolle’s writings, and the message is always the same: ‘[we have] no higher calling than utter devotion to God, and the reward to the purest and most ardent lovers is the indescribably sweetness of burning in the soul with the melodies of heaven.’ Could it be that Rolle describes in that burning and those melodies the experience of release of the Holy Spirit common through the Pentecostal movement associated with heart-warming and both speaking and singing in a heavenly language?

How do you see the experience of God? Do you seek it? Saint Richard Rolle confirms that inasmuch as we open our hearts to God and welcome the Holy Spirit we can receive a felt return for our love for God which brings encouragement. Though some people speaking of their experience of God ring false, many more ring true and the saints are among them. Not that we live for religious experience, just God who loves us knows our need of encouragement, and provides periodic reassurance. Richard Rolle was kept going spiritually through the pandemic of the Black Death and we should expect the same encouragement as we live through a similar trial.  

What I find so attractive in Richard Rolle is how the mystic in him makes servant of his intellect. He went down to Oxford from Yorkshire to return learned yet devout with determination to seek Christ more fully and make Christ more fully loved. It appears he reacted against the dryness of the theology school at Oxford whilst falling there under the influence of the Franciscans. In her ‘Life and Lyrics of Richard Rolle’ Frances Comper notes that while at Oxford, he ‘was imbued with their love for God, and their delight in poverty and simplicity; and was instrumental in spreading the doctrines of St. Francis in the north, since he became the most widely read of all religious writers.’ 

Rolle’s spiritual teachings endure though his tomb is lost. Here is advice given to a nun that captures the heart of his counsel: ‘The Commandment of God is that we love Our Lord with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our thought. With all our heart, that is with all our understanding, without erring. With all our soul, that is with all our will, without gain saying. With all our thought, that is that we think on Him, without forgetting. In this manner is very love and true, that is the work of man‘s will. For love is a deliberate stirring of our thought towards God, so that it receive nothing that is against the love of Jesus Christ, and that thereby it is enduring in sweetness of devotion’. The mystic’s devotion to Jesus is evident in many poems which centre on the crucifixion as graphic evidence of God’s love for each one of us. We owe much to him the resurgence of devotion to the name of Jesus in the 14th and 15th century which links in with the age old practice of the Jesus Prayer in the eastern church. 

Today we commemorate a Yorkshireman, straight-talking about Jesus Christ, whose inspiration, teaching and prayer remains with us, part of the faith and worship of the church through the ages. If you want to find out more about Richard Rolle, and also the Jesus Prayer, you can find it on my personal website www.twisleton.co.uk referred to in the Churchwardens’ weekly briefing. May his prayers surround us and help us feel God’s presence in the trial of this pandemic. May the love Rolle wrote about be in our hearts as, to quote today’s saint, ‘[we have] no higher calling than utter devotion to God, and the reward to the purest and most ardent lovers is the indescribably sweetness of burning in the soul with the melodies of heaven.’ 

All Saints, Roffey Pentecost 9 June 2019

How do you experience God?

As Christians we see him as the source of all that is, as the one who redeems our failings and as the fount of love: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

God is the One who is - the fount of being - and being fully alive is about living close to him.

The world makes us defensive about such belief because its blind to what’s beyond the physical order but God needs no defence. He is the One who is - the ground of being and as such beyond our grasp. That violent wind on Pentecost Sunday touched the disciples directly, personally, so they became aware of the closeness of the God who is the ground of all being.

Cutting my hedge last week I was very aware of the wind, working round it as it came and went. The hedge cuttings got carried across the road. Bees sheltering from the wind in the hedge didn’t like the hedge cutter and flew out at me. It was quite an experience! When the wind’s blowing you really know it, your skin gets refreshed and you breathe more freely but you’re reminded of your little place on earth compared to the elements. Who can tell where the wind comes from, where it starts or where it will end? We can only experience it, be in the midst of it, be touched as it blows, and work with it's consequences as I did with the hedge cuttings and the bees.

How do you experience God?

Like the wind, as Our Lord said to Nicodemus, the wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. (John 3:8). Seeing God, engaging with God, is as here and now as experiencing the air around you. As the Psalmist writes Be still and know that I am God (Psalm 46:10).

To be at home with God we need regular silence to be at home with ourselves. We live alas in an age full of artificial noise distracting us from this vital task. In today’s Gospel Our Lord says the Holy Spirit… will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you a the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. (John 14:26-27). How can we experience the Holy Spirit who is peace and balm for troubled hearts without opening ourselves to the present moment?

The Holy Spirit is God in the present moment. To experience God we must discipline ourselves to attend less to past regrets or future anxieties but to what’s here and now. In that discipline of prayerful attendance to God we experience again and again what the Gospel promises my peace I give to you… do not let your heart be troubled.

On Pentecost Sunday we end the liturgical cycle which started six months ago with Advent, a cycle that displays year by year the God who loves us so much he gives us himself, his Son and his Spirit. The Son of God became Son of man so children of men could become children of God! The God who made us loves us through and through so much so that he sent his Son to die and rise for us. Together on the Day of Pentecost they sent the Holy Spirit, to dwell with us, in us and among us in the Church. As we heard in the Romans reading: all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God… when we cry, ‘Abba! Father! it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. (Romans 8:14, 15b-17a)

How do you experience God?

Stop the flow of your life! Pray, Come, Holy Spirit! Be present to God - pray, read the bible, examine yourself, come to Mass, look to the needs of others!

God addresses you in the present moment, here at All Saints this 9th day of June at 11 o’clock! Then God in the present moment tomorrow morning at work or wherever - be still and know that I am God - this is the Holy Spirit’s invitation day after day, wherever, whenever!

Like the wind we can’t contain God but we can experience him. To secure us in the experience of his love God’s Son gives us bread and wine as living memorial of his saving work. By the Holy Spirit bread and wine are changed so we can be changed and the world can be changed through us. Today’s Feast recalls the outward flowing dynamic captured at every Mass that started with the wind of the Spirit at Pentecost and has blown the good news of Jesus worldwide. It challenges us to hoist our sails to the wind of Spirit so we can be taken where God wants us to be taken, as Bishop Mark said on Monday, bringing love wherever he knows there’s need of it.

‘I ask not to see. I ask not to know. I ask simply to be used’ wrote Cardinal Newman. Whilst its good to ask ‘How do you experience God?’ we shouldn’t expect to understand God so much as to place ourselves at his disposal and pray ‘Come, Holy Spirit’ to be empowered to travel on the best forward course. This we do now offering ourselves as a living sacrifice with Christ, welcoming the experience of his close presence in the Holy Sacrament, God in his Spirit, in the present moment, the radiance of his love calling us to make him loved in the world on 9th June 2019.