Easter 2 (B) 12 April 2015

Last week I attended Easter Mass in a suburb of Dieppe, a joyous occasion with drinks after showing Easter week retains its religious significance among the French.

Highlight was a conversation with Martin a young man just setting out on a three month walk to Santiago de Compostela. Having given up his job in IT he is set for the priesthood. His joy was part of the joy that overflowed from the Mass led by his mentor Père Geoffroy, the Curé of Dieppe, a remarkable priest I also met and to whom I suggested a visit to Saint Giles.

What impacted me in that brief encounter with the French Church was - I ticked this box myself - a priest enjoying Christianity pointing people at Mass to the joy of faith, and, secondly seeds of faith sprouting into vocation and counter-cultural self-sacrifice.

Martin the mid 20s computer guy shared how the last two years have meant his turning tables on how the world sees poverty, celibacy and obedience. What he shared built on impressions I gained in conversation from 15 young people we hosted here in Holy Week and with my own sons that I want to build from this morning.

I tend to see the young as nothing like poor, chaste and obedient but they - some of them - are rejecting the counsel that money, sex and power are all it’s about and, unless you get loads you'll be a loser.

These conversations came back to me as I read that first lesson from Acts which I'd like us to read again as a mighty reminder of the counter-cultural consequences of the resurrection of Jesus: 

The whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.

What a counter to worldly ways of thinking be they 1st or 21st century! 

I think of how first of all the passage counters the fashion of individualism by which each of us does our own thing as something of a default, often with the ready permission of family members - like my trip across the ocean to France which Anne blessed. 

To think of individuals and families so impacted by the truth this world is to be lived in the light of future resurrection they became of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions! Young Martin is losing all to have the church for his family. I of course do live in a church house - but I have my own down the road for later. 

Just landing the thought of sharing life as Christians one lovely feature of St Giles like Sacré Couer is the capacity to share our life together after l'heure de Jesu. As in Dieppe the priest here says a one hour Mass but stays for two hours. 

Back to that passage. It has countercultural obedience as well as poverty. As many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet and it was distributed to each as any had need. 

Martin has wrestled with what it means to surrender your life to those over you in the Lord. He is part of an authoritative local church, under a charismatic pastor but he himself is under no illusions. Christianity is ideally authoritative but practically it's a matter of putting yourself under authority. He won't always have a charismatic over him but he is set to obey whoever will be over him for the next 40 years.

It made me think of 14 Bishops of different hues I've had over my years, three of Bradford, one of Oxford who selected me for training, two of Sheffield, two of Guyana, one of Coventry, two of London and three of Chichester including Bishop Eric who appointed me to the diocese. 

To live as a Christian, let alone as a priest, is to live submissive to the risen Christ and, in bible based ecclesiology, obedient to those over you in the Lord so that, though at times I balk at it, I, we, remain happy to lay our tithe at the apostles’ feet i.e. that of the Bishop and Diocese of Chichester who have oversight of Saint Gilles. 

When I ask you to accept my authority it's that the Bishop shares with me and it's in the context both of Christian obedience and of my own and indeed the Bishop's fallibility. The apostolic office calls forth obedience but, as I was sharing the other week, the office bearing person is as much in need of mercy as the next Christian.

These sorts of question were probably little in the minds of the believers described in Acts 4 whose whole lives had been turned upside down by what God did to death through Jesus as we read in the passage. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.
The Easter season is an opportunity to refresh ourselves as Easter Christians. As such we are or we should be determined to face up to death and other inescapable things in life with an ongoing challenge of the things that deceive us both internal and external. As I listened to Martin I recalled recent conversations with my sons about mortality following their grandmother's death which illustrate one such deceit, namely the one that we'll never die, or that our life in this world should be our only concern.

We have many world views in play and it is the loud voice of so-called relativism that we can believe what we choose. We must answer though for what we choose to believe and a materialistic world view has no answer to a holy God. 

John Henry Newman who's now made Saint in France and England said To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often. He also said  Fear not your life shall come to an end, but rather that it shall never have a beginning. Meeting, sharing with young people recently who have seen that spiritual beginning. I have been heartened by openness to the only creed which both addresses mortality directly and puts humanity right. As Newman again said - I read him on my break - The name of Jesus can raise the dead and transfigure and beautify the living. 

So may this Easter Octave Day eucharist be imbued with great power, grace and freedom as we exalt in the resurrection of Our Lord who transfigures and beautifies us as part of his counter cultural joyous purpose for the world, for France, for the United Kingdom, mid Sussex and Horsted Keynes Saint Giles!

Trinity 17 26th September 10am

Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory says Amos in the first of three hard-hitting scripture readings this morning.

I wonder what went through Harold Macmillan’s mind as he heard those words and the parable of Dives and Lazarus sitting here in St Giles 25 years ago?

I say so because I have just enjoyed reading Supermac his latest and most authoritative biography by Richard Thorpe who I am hoping we can get to our historical society. It’s a great read - in more sense than one!

Macmillan, Prime Minister 1957-1963, died in 1986, was one of those good all-rounders getting all the rarer in our specialised world. He ticked boxes in the worlds of the university, commerce, the military and religion. His politics were liberal yet conservative, rebel yet loyalist. He was a crofter’s great-grandson yet his father-in-law was a Duke. Possessing all these qualities guarantees personal complexity and an interesting biography.

Great men and women are usually people who have suffered. In this way their humanity appeals through the braving of fear. Macmillan’s courage was forged in the trenches of the First World War and a near death experience in the Second World War. His family life was traumatic but he braved humiliation sticking it seems to Christian principle and refusing to contemplate divorce. The courage he possessed made him his own man. He stood alone in cabinet when he told the aged Churchill his days as Prime Minister needed to end. Macmillan even dared to suggest to Pope Pius XII he would serve Christian unity by recognising the orders of Anglican priests – to be received by silence!

Harold Macmillan was a great wit. Interrupted in a speech by Khruschev banging his shoe on the table at the United Nations he looks up and says quietly, ‘Well, I would like it translating if you would.’ Unveiling a bronze of Mrs Thatcher at the Carlton Club he makes an audible stage whisper, ‘Now I must remember that I am unveiling a bust of Margaret Thatcher, not Margaret Thatcher’s bust.’ On a trip to Russia, told ‘dobry den’ means ‘good day’ he regales everyone with the words ‘double gin’!

His brilliant intellect made him too clever for some, including Churchill who saw him as an opinionated subordinate. Macmillan saw his undergraduate reading parties as the very anticipation of heaven. Throughout his life his work was energised by his reading times. His experience at the sharp end of things did something to redeem his cerebral tendency but a negative image persisted. His Labour political opponent Aneurin Bevan saw him as a poseur. Bevan concluded cruelly that having watched the man carefully for years ‘behind that Edwardian countenance there is nothing’.

His fellow Tory rival Butler was kinder and saw two sides to him ‘the soft heart for and the strong determination to help the underdog, and the social habit to associate happily with the overdog’.

It was this phrase that came to mind as I finished reading Macmillan and started reading the scripture set for the 17th Sunday after Trinity in the third of our three year cycle.

Amos thundered against those who like ivory couches. Like Macmillan many of us have a tendency to associate happily with the overdog, like the Rector of Horsted Keynes – I am the Rector of Horsted Keynes. Like my predecessors I have access to people at the top of the academic, political, commercial and military worlds as this goes with the job alongside its more humble pursuits . I know Fr Mark Hill-Tout read to Macmillan in his final illness. A previous Rector allowed Macmillan to change the lectionary reading the Sunday Churchill died to ‘let us now praise famous men’. Dorothy Baxter, now 96, will tell you how Macmillan used to keep the choir in order.

This is not a ‘books I have recently read’ sermon – I am getting to the point, believe me!

Macmillan once said ‘It is thinking about themselves that is really the curse of the younger generation...a curious introspective attitude towards life, the result no doubt of two wars and a dying faith’.

The danger of self-absorption lies behind what prophet Amos, Saint Paul and Our Lord and Saviour are speaking of in this morning’s readings.

Those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction says Paul. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains. Those pains are described in the chilling parable I read chosen for today’s Gospel. Chilling is hardly the word for it describes the fires tormenting Dives – the rich man – on account of his neglect of poor Lazarus. Remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.

It is always chilling to encounter people whose self-absorption with pleasing themselves has made them totally indifferent to the needs of those around them. I think for a start of the people who walk across Victoria station texting away and bumping into everyone else – but I wouldn’t quite wish them hell fire!

Let me go back to Macmillan. He possessed a clear sense of divine providence working through the historical events that propelled his career and the illness that saved his addressing the prime ministerial succession. To his Christian sensibilities we owe the appointment of two of the Church of England’s most famous 20th century clerics, Michael Ramsey to Canterbury and Mervyn Stockwood to Southwark.

What is evident in Richard Thorpe’s biography, which brings out the Christian side, is Macmillan’s own sadness in his later years at the self-preoccupation that seemed to have grown up in the wake of the decline in Christian allegiance. He ends the book quoting his call to ‘restore and strengthen the moral and spiritual as well as the material’ rather countering the materialist ‘you’ve never had it so good’ association people make with Harold Macmillan.

Today’s scripture is a wake-up call. Rather as David Cameron said to the Pope last Sunday Christian faith is something to make us ‘sit up and think’. If we really believe in God this should take us out of ourselves and waken us up to the realities around us, both God and neighbour, whose service brings perfect freedom in this world and the next.

Among these realities are the eight Millennium Development Goals which take us into the global politics Harold Macmillan served for so many years. These eight goals all 192 United Nations member states and at least 23 international organizations have agreed to achieve by the year 2015. They are:

• To eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
• To achieve universal primary education
• To promote gender equality and empower women
• To reduce the child mortality rate
• To improve maternal health
• To combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
• To ensure environmental sustainability
• To develop a global partnership for development

If today’s gospel says anything it is a warning about the failure of partnership and its consequences.

The rich man was guilty not of being rich but of being a bad steward of his possessions. By God’s generosity he possessed, as we possess, an awful lot, and yet he would not imitate that generosity by sharing with those in need, with Lazarus ‘who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table’.

Today’s scripture is hard hitting. The needs of the world are very urgent. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has said ‘World military spending has now risen to over $1.2 trillion dollars. This incredible sum represents 2.5% of Gross Domestic Product. Even if 1% of it were redirected towards development, the world would be much closer to achieving the Millennium Development Goals’.

God raise up new Macmillan’s to work in politics for these ends, and raise up generosity in his people here, not least in our support for St Anne’s Hospital, Tanzania in today’s charitable giving.

God free us from ourselves through the eucharist, the thanksgiving for his love we offer day by day, to be more centred on his heart which encompasses poor and rich, near and far. So be it.