St Bartholomew, Brighton Trinity 5 (Wk 14) 9.7.23

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

When we hear the readings read on Sunday we examine what we’ve heard. In St Bartholomew’s we then look up, as you’re doing now, an awesome 15 feet to the preacher for understanding. Today’s Gospel invites us to look up a lot further, beyond Edmund Scott’s 45 foot baldacchino or 135 foot ceiling of allegedly the tallest parish church in Europe, to imagine how God sees the revelation we’re seeking.

‘Jesus exclaimed, “I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for hiding these things from the learned and clever and revealing them to mere children. Yes, Father, for that is what it pleased you to do’ Matthew 11:25.

Our Blessed Lord rejoices at the start of this passage which helps him convey a wonderful truth about God above and beyond us. This is the joy he shares with his Father in revealing himself to those who seek him. If you are here in St Bartholomew’s to seek God this morning be assured God is seeking you and more than seeking you - God delights in this very moment at our attention towards him! God the Son continually, moment by moment, chooses to reveal his eternal Father in the Holy Spirit. God’s joy is ours at a revelation, an opening of the inner eye of faith, so that today’s words of Zechariah in the first reading, used months back on Palm Sunday, have a special resonance with the Gospel: ‘The Lord says this: Rejoice heart and soul, daughter of Zion! Shout with gladness, daughter of Jerusalem! See now, your king comes to you’ Zechariah 9:9.

God comes to us this morning and this truth is more powerful than the simpler truth we have come to Mass in St Bartholomew’s. Of course there are many times we come to Church, look up to God, hear the Bible read and join in the Eucharist without feeling a thing. Today’s Gospel gives us a fresh perspective in its reminder of how worship begins and ends beyond us in the life of the Trinity and the communion of saints. God’s joy at our attention to God this morning and openness to what God might reveal to us is a given. By pondering Our Lord’s announcing that truth in today’s Gospel we can be infected with joy as our second reading suggests. ‘If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, then he who raised Jesus from the dead will give life to your own mortal bodies through his Spirit living in you’ Romans 8:11.

Sometimes we need grace to see things the other way round - as God says he sees things - in the words of scripture. Yes it's the case that we Christians are one with the rest of a large part of our society in seeking the truth but unlike the rest we know the Truth is continually seeking us and revealing himself less to the learned and clever and more to the humble who believe. Like many we are appalled at how the war against Ukraine shows truth being lost particularly in the Russian media. George Orwell in his novel 1984, published in 1949, portrayed the world we now see in which a government declares war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. When it comes to the state of the world the abandonment of truth telling is tragic but it doesn’t negate the work of the Holy Spirit who is always bringing truth to bear and working especially through those humble before God to establish justice, love and peace. As believers we have the privilege of seeing things the other way round, so to speak, as God would have us see things.

If that’s so for politics, seeing things from the God-perspective scripture encourages can also help our prayer as the great 16th century Saint Teresa of Avila taught. She was, it should be said first, a very down to earth lady. When her horse threw her in the mud she famously shook her fist at heaven and said, ‘God, if that's how you treat your friends, it's not surprising you have so few’. The same Teresa taught people to pray in this way. ‘Imagine’, she said, ‘that you see Jesus standing before you. He is looking at you lovingly and humbly. Prayer comes as you notice he is looking at you lovingly and humbly’. This insight is one with today’s Gospel which celebrates God’s joy at revealing himself to all who persist in coming before God in prayer and worship. Not only, says Teresa, does God look upon us with love, he looks upon us humbly. That means he thinks of himself as less than us! 

‘Jesus exclaimed, “I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for hiding these things from the learned and clever and revealing them to mere children. Yes, Father, for that is what it pleased you to do’ Matthew 11:25

God is pleased to reveal God-self and that is basic Christianity working itself out in prayer and politics. As we come forward for Holy Communion this morning let us come with an expectation that God’s life and joy will be deepened within us for ‘if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, then he who raised Jesus from the dead will give life to your own mortal bodies through his Spirit living in you’ Romans 8:11. So be it.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Baptism of the Lord (translated) St Bartholomew, Brighton 14.1.18

Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers? Acts 19:2

The Feast of the Baptism of the Lord is a shade neglected in the western compared to the eastern Church. Today’s commemoration in the Eastern Orthodox community is the apex of Christmas known in Greek as Theophany, God’s revelation, with outdoor ceremonies literally chilling the blood, folk diving into pools made in the ice and the like. We’ll not go there - but we will go rather this morning to something or Someone who warms the heart: the Holy Spirit.

Today by the Holy Spirit Jesus was revealed as God’s Son, the Christ, the Anointed One so as to share with us Holy Spirit anointing and there’s nothing more warming to the heart than the Holy Spirit for none can guess its grace, till he become the place wherein the Holy Spirit makes his dwelling.

On this Feast of Christ’ Baptism we sing come down, O Love divine, seek thou this soul of mine and visit it with thine own ardour glowing! May we, like those disciples in Ephesus who hadn’t heard of the Holy Spirit gain ardour (Acts 19:6). May we, like our Lord, anointed by the Spirit, hear God’s voice saying to us individually at this Mass, : ‘You are my Son, my daughter, with you I am well pleased’ (Mark 1:11).

What me? You might ask. How could I be worthy of that? Of God filling my life, of the empowerment in love, joy and peace that Our Lord knew? Well he knew it in his flesh so you could know it! He was anointed so you could be anointed as John the Baptist said in the Gospel: I have baptised you with water; but he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit.

Today we’re talking not just a one-off Theophany, or manifestation of God, but of the choice of and manifestation of God to you and I represented in our Christian allegiance and our sealing by the Spirit at our baptism, confirmation, and our welcoming Christ Sunday by Sunday in Holy Communion that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.

The Son of God became Son of Man so children of men could be children of God. That’s our good news which though in the providence of God, remains mighty strange!

Both Our Lord’s earthly origins and our own Christian origins thrill with paradox! As the preacher in All Saints, Margaret Street told us the other Sunday Christianity has an ‘extraordinary particularity’. Incidentally I told him afterwards I was helping here and he commented, you’ve got a bigger place to fill than we have! Very true - but the same Catholic religion in London-by-the sea as there at Brighton-in-land!

I’ve distracted you - that phrase ‘extraordinary particularity’ is a good one and is worth examining. Just as the wise men found there own way to Jerusalem but needed special revelation to find Bethlehem so the universal instinct for God needs revelation of where in particular we can find Him.

Christianity’s no man-made religion. It’s nothing made up - its revealed! God so loved the world he revealed - he gave - himself. That revelation unlike that of other faiths is rooted in well evidenced historical events, those we mark at Easter, and in the choice and call the Holy Spirit brings to individuals in every age.

It is as outrageous to logic that you and I welcome the Holy Spirit at this Mass as it is that the Founder of Christianity should appear in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the King. That though is the recipe for salvation planned before the foundation of the world.

On this feast we ponder something given to us that goes beyond but not against reason - the privilege Christ shares with us as his sisters and brothers, children of God, who hear again with him those awesome words: ‘You are my Son, with you I am well pleased’.

The Son of God became Son of Man so children of men could be children of God. 

Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers? Yes, you did, but you need to truly believe it! Believe as surely as Our Lord Jesus is the particular Theophany or revelation of God that you in particular are, through the Spirit’s calling, in words spoken of you at your baptism, a child of God and inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.

You have that grace - even if like sugar put in tea it needs stirring to sweeten the drink.
God sweeten our lives by stirring up the Spirit he’s put within us. May he bless us as we welcome his coming afresh by his Spirit into our lives in the most holy Sacrament. This is my body given for you.. this is my blood shed for you…  O Christian, recall your nobility! God has chosen you, made you his child and fills you with his Spirit!