St John the Evangelist, Burgess Hill Candlemas 30.1.22

We come to Church to worship and to be enlightened. Jesus came first to the Temple on this day with those two ends of self offering and edification.

His parents made an offering on his behalf and they heard Simeon's prophecy of their Son becoming 'a light to lighten the nations'.

Candlemas gives us an opportunity to pause and reflect about what we do when we come to this Temple Sunday by Sunday. It is a Temple before it is a preaching house, a place of teaching, yes, but primarily not a place of edification but a place of worship. 

In this Church the worship of the eucharist has been offered day by day with a few breaks since 1863. People in their thousands have joined here to offer the unbloody sacrifice initiated by Jesus Christ we call the eucharist. They've come 'to offer themselves, their souls and bodies as a living sacrifice' with, in and through Jesus Christ.

The West Window, subject of our appeal, has two smaller windows at the bottom designed to emphasise the eucharist in this context. One has the sacrifice of the Cross. The other has the priest at the altar pleading the same sacrifice on our behalf with the text ‘ye do show the Lord's death until he comes’. Praying as we do ‘that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God the Father almighty’. Our response, especially true to this Feast, is ‘may the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands to the praise and glory of his name, for our good and the good of all his holy church’. 

Today on Candlemas, Feast of his Presentation, on his first visit to the one earthly Temple of his day, Our Lord anticipated his eternal sacrifice. The turtle doves sacrificed on his behalf in that Temple gave way, with all animal sacrifices, to his once for all offering made on a repeat visit to Jerusalem in his 33rd year. They took then no doves but an innocent Lamb, and as they did so the prophecy about his mother Mary in today's Gospel was fulfilled. 'A  sword will pierce your heart'. In St Martin’s Brighton, a Church I know well, that very image of Our Lady is provided at the foot of the Cross, graphically in black and with a sword stuck into her heart.

There is deep continuity between the sacrifices of the Old Testament, the offering of Jesus the Lamb of God, the Eucharistic Sacrifice and our own sacrificial living as Christians. They all hang together. In a culture full of self-interest what we are about this morning is powerfully counter-cultural. Here, in union with Christ, we are offering our souls and bodies to be a living sacrifice.  Sacrifice is at heart about voluntary choice about how we direct our lives - it is about love before it is about death.  It is about joyous living just as sure as ‘God loves a cheerful giver’. It is not so much about forgoing what we desire but of binding our energies to what God desires. 

In this context it is an excellent practice, helping prepare for the eucharist, to start each day with what’s called the Morning Offering. The idea is to sit on your bed as soon as you get up and, whilst letting the blood reach your head, get into gear spiritually by praying something like, ‘Lord, I thank you for who you are and your love for me and all that is. I give myself to you. Take me and use me for your praise and service and the building up of the body of Christ. Come, Holy Spirit'. When you have made such a prayer at the start of the day you recognise spiritual needs and opportunities around you and the hand of God working in your life in the hours that follow. I know this from when I forget to pray it - my day turns rather useless! The Morning Offering is linked to Christ’s Offering and invitation to join in it at Mass where we pray, ‘May he make of us an eternal offering to you’.

We come to Church to worship and to be enlightened.

Part of that enlightenment, as Mary and Joseph found, is the bringing of understanding and hence more creative involvement with the dark times of our life.

We all live with these - bereavement, chronic illness or the necessity to live with unresolved situations where there may be conflict. With Mary and Joseph this morning we welcome holy Simeon's words with gratitude since they speak of peace coming, as it does again and again, through heavenly illumination.

Jesus Christ is the light who lightens all nations and all ages.

May his light shine on us and into our various life situations this morning as we come to worship 'offering ourselves, our souls and bodies as a living sacrifice' with in and through Jesus Christ.

Like Simeon we see in Jesus one who removes the fear of death and promises perpetual light to his family as they travel forward in his light to their fulfilment in the house of the Lord together and forever.

We come to Church to worship and to be enlightened. Our Lord came first to the Temple on this day with those two ends of self offering and edification.

I end with a beautiful prayer of John Donne, sixteenth century Dean of St Paul’s which captures that aspiration: 

Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening into the house and gate of heaven to enter into that gate and dwell in that house, where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light; no noise nor silence, but one equal music; no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession; no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity; in the habitations of thy glory and dominion, world without end. Amen.

St Barnabas, Hove St Agnes Feast 21.1.22

Our thoughts determine our lives.

Be they self-centred, neighbour-centred or God-centred - and they’re bound to be a mixture of all three for believers.

Controlling our thoughts is difficult. We can’t easily do it because they’re a river flowing through our minds. The danger is seizing a wrong one and implementing it on impulse. Our more measured thoughts help life flow well. Our best thoughts are the making of us and of the world. 

So flowed my own thoughts looking at the martyrdom of St Agnes, a 12 year old girl we know little about save her paying the highest price for chaste thoughts and, being named after Jesus Lamb of God, becoming an icon of self offering. Her story is of a Christian girl resolved to stay single for the sake of the Gospel, who, threatened by an aggressive suitor, is forced into a legal conflict. Agnes’ faith went on trial during the Diocletian persecutions of 304 AD. Her name, mentioned in the oldest eucharistic prayer, means chaste in Greek and lamb in Latin hence our two themes of purity and self-sacrifice.

Being a retired priest gives me more time for relaxation and conversation and - thank you Fr John - attending and leading worship. The other day I got into a conversation with a 21 year old lad who confided in me his decision to turn away from the pornography so many of his friends were getting immersed in. ‘I don’t want my future relationships spoiled’ he said with telling wisdom. 

Our thoughts determine our lives. St Augustine captured the damage done in his lustful youth when he talked of memory being ‘a sad privilege’. Many of us know first hand the truth he speaks of. Thoughts of things from the past intrude the flow of our thinking and fuel action destructive of our relationships. The Feast of St Agnes is a call to purity of thought, word and deed including custody of the eyes and the avoidance of salacious television and reading material.

Secondly, today’s Saint calls us to think on her namesake Jesus Agnus dei. This image may be familiar to some of us - show book ‘The Bound Lamb’ by Francisco de Zurbarin who lived in the 17th century.  It’s an image that often appears on Nativity scenes, the Shepherds’ offering which anticipates Christ’s sacrifice. As Jeremy Paxman wrote in the Church Times of this painting: ‘no image I know so perfectly captures the astonishing force of the Christian story’. Jesus fulfils the sacrifice of the Old Testament Passover Lamb whose blood daubed on doors  protected the households of believers. Unlike the Old Testament lambs, Our Lord’s sacrifice is voluntary and as such takes away sin.  Our Lord on Calvary takes the full force of sin and death for us at the cost of his life. 

Today on our patronal feast we make the memorial of the Offering of Jesus and enter into that Self-Offering. It is through the sacrificial Lamb of God that we can make a perfect offering to the Father, our sinful bodies made clean by his body..our souls washed through his most precious blood. There is a deep continuity between the sacrifices of the Old Testament - Abel, Abraham and Melchizedek - the offering of Jesus the Lamb of God, the Eucharistic Sacrifice and our own sacrificial living as Christians. They all hang together. In a culture full of self-interest what we are about this evening is powerfully counter-cultural. Here, in union with Christ, we are offering our souls and bodies to be a living sacrifice 

As St Agnes teaches, sacrifice is at heart about voluntary choice about how we direct our lives - it is about love before it is about death.  It is about joyous living just as sure as ‘God loves a cheerful giver’. It is not so much about forgoing what we desire but of binding our energies to what God desires. 

Our thoughts determine our lives - be they indulgent or geared to purity and sacrifice.

A couple of practical suggestions to help order our thinking and action more into those two qualities of St Agnes captured in her name, one about using the Jesus Prayer and another about making a Morning Offering. 

Repeating under our breath the Jesus Prayer of Eastern Orthodoxy, ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner’ is very powerful, as people have found praying it for 1500 years. It's a succinct summary of faith with capacity to empower us against useless and harmful thoughts. The power in the name of Jesus is such that, when we are tempted by base thoughts, repetition of this prayer sees them fly away. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner’. We need the will to pray, but knowing and using this prayer is a key aid to purity. 

Secondly the Morning Offering. The idea is to sit on your bed as soon as you get up and, whilst letting the blood reach your head, get into gear spiritually by praying something like, ‘Lord, I thank you for who you are and your love for me and all that is. I give myself to you. Take me and use me for your praise and service and the building up of the body of Christ. Come, Holy Spirit'. When you have made such a prayer at the start of the day you recognise spiritual needs and opportunities around you and the hand of God working in your life in the hours that follow. I know this from when I forget to pray it - my day turns rather useless! The Morning Offering is linked to Christ’s Offering and invitation to join in it at Mass where we pray, ‘May he make of us an eternal offering to you’.

Our thoughts determine our lives. May the prayer of St Agnes inspire us to take continual battle against bad thoughts and make of our lives an ever more complete offering to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to whom be all might, majesty, dominion and power now and henceforth and to the ages of ages. Amen.

St Wilfrid & Presentation, Haywards Heath Discernment Acts 12:24-13:5a

 

The Holy Spirit is evident again in this morning’s eucharistic reading from Acts Chapter 12 as the guiding light and force of the early Church. So much is he the agent that the Acts of the Apostles might be better named the Acts of the Holy Spirit. In today’s reading we hear about the gift of discernment granted from the Spirit as a group of leading Christians were offering worship to the Lord and keeping a fast. We read how the Holy Spirit said, ‘I want Barnabas and Saul set apart for the work to which I have called them’. After prayer and laying on of hands the two were, we read, ‘sent on their mission by the Holy Spirit… to Cyprus’.

God has not changed 2000 years on. Our faith and expectation of God is something of the variation from the apostolic era. To give an example of how the Spirit’s gift of discernment remains in operation among Christians here is the story of how a significant community ministry was born in a south London parish. A young man was going to Church Sunday by Sunday and stepping over the tramps that slept in the Churchyard. It was a part of London with a good number of street folk who'd come to see the Churchyard as a safe haven. As this Church member passed these men and women week by week God eventually gave him a burden of prayer for them, which he carried into Church and offered up at the Eucharist. One Sunday he had the idea of running a lunch club for the vagrants and he persuaded his fellow worshippers.  This ran for some months.  Then the organisers advertised for helpers in the local community and received hundreds of enquiries. One man's vision discerned from God got accepted by his Church and became the instrument for Christians and non-Christians working together in the service of a local need.  Many of the non-Church folk got drawn into the life of the Church in the process. It all started from one man's discernment - isn't that encouraging?

How often we sense the Holy Spirit ourselves when we go out of our way to help others, joy in the midst of empathising with and maybe alleviating hardship being endured by others. Such joy provides evidence of the presence of God in the midst for, as the Psalmist writes, in God’s presence there is the fullness of joy. (Psalm 16:11) It’s not how much we do that matters so much as how much love we put into the action. To live in the love of God is the clue to discerning the best form of service to others. Each day I look back at what I’ve done or failed to do and confess to God. Very often the sins I confess are opportunities I’ve lost because my attention’s been elsewhere and very often on myself. Discernment is a gift of the Holy Spirit whom we welcome day by day, hour by hour - God’s love pouring into our hearts - but do we? Or do we get so filled with a self-serving agenda that God’s love gets blocked out?

A practical suggestion. Start making a morning offering to the Holy Spirit. Sit on your bed and say ‘God I thank you for the gift of this new day and give myself to you. Send your Holy Spirit to use my gifts to God’s praise and service’. 

I find that such a prayer sweeps the day up into God’s hands so that, as I keep my attention on him, I discern what’s important and get on with it. Living with Holy Spirit discernment and empowerment is actually very simple if we set our hearts upon the Lord. 

We live in one place and time relatively ignorant of where and when to serve. God sees all space and time and the needs that cry out. 

The Holy Spirit rejoices to enlist those who give themselves day by day to his service and helps them discern where they can make a significant difference. 

Give yourself to God and he will give you to others!