St Mary, Balcombe Easter 6 9th May 2021

Of those to whom much is given much is required. Because we’re people who see God we’ve got responsibility to seek him more and to see him more fully as he is and not in the image we make of him.

I find a root sin of mine is negligence in that sense. I neglect to ponder the picture that scripture and Christian tradition give of God and to make that more my own.

I am called, we are called, to think of God ever more magnificently. The scripture set for the sixth Sunday of Easter opens up something of God’s magnificent power and love.

In the first reading Peter’s Jewish friends were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God. 

Two astounding things. Speaking in tongues, a supernatural prayer language of love, sign of the difference the Holy Spirit can make to folk. Then God, God of the Jewish Covenant, giving evidence of his acceptance of non-Jews.

Miracles, miraculous talk, shake the control we think we’ve got over life. From time to time God shakes our comfort and complacency and does His own thing. If we were really in love with God we’d welcome such surprises of the Spirit and not dismiss them as religious hysteria. St Francis, the Curé D’Ars, Pope John 23rd all spoke in tongues and many do so today.

Then secondly in that reading we’re awoken to God proving himself a God to whom no one, Gentile or Jew, is an outsider. Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have? 

How many times do we get humbled by the generosity and spiritual wisdom of our non-Church friends? God can and does speak to us through them since he is not just God of our lives but God of the whole of life. People in God’s image can speak God’s word even if they don’t know who God is and that he’s made them godlike.

Sometimes the Church gets woken up to God’s truth by outsiders, as, sad to say, is happening over child protection. The Holy Spirit has been powerfully at work outside the community of the Church from the beginning, speaking truth and holiness into her, keeping her humble and on her toes. This is because God is God not just of the Church but God of the whole world. 

Then, as our second reading from 1 John 5 and Gospel from John 15 remind us God is love. As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. The Holy Spirit, Saint Paul says, is God’s love outpoured into our hearts.

By his dying and rising Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has overcome all that separates us from God to make us his friends. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. Because of this friendship we Christians live in friendship with one another: This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

The second reading speaks similarly of how our awakening to the love of God awakens us to the love of God’s children: Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. The writer’s logic in the First Letter of St John is sometimes confusing. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. I would suggest, coming back to my sin of negligence, that failure to seek after and recognise the love of God shown in Jesus bears fruit in failure to obtain the love that covers a multitude of sins so far as our neighbour goes. Failure also to attain to the promise of Jesus at the end of today’s Gospel where he says I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.

The clue is to think of God ever more magnificently. When God shrinks in our thinking and praying you can be sure, I can be sure, that other people’s faults will loom higher and a critical spirit emerges that’s counter to love of my neighbour.

Victory over that critical spirit might be what St John is touching on when he speaks of a spiritual battle in the second reading. And his commandments are not burdensome, for whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith. Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?

To have faith in a God who’s magnificently a God of love and forgiveness helps us conquer the tendency to do down our neighbour. To know how God treats us is the best tonic towards treating others well, in other words, as better than they are. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith (1 John 5:4).

So, brothers and sisters, may the eucharist be a tonic to you this morning, a fresh immersion in the love that comes to you through scripture and fellowship, through celebration and the offering and receiving of bread and wine. No one has greater love than this, Jesus says, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. 

So be it! May we wake out of our negligence and seek a vision of God that’s ever more magnificent, built more and more to his dimensions and less to ours!

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.’