St Mary, Balcombe Trinity 18(27A) Suffering and the Supernatural 8 October 2023

There are two main ways God manifests himself. 

These are through the supernatural and through suffering.

These two ways are the trademark of Jesus Christ who both suffered and rose again.

In today’s Gospel Our Lord speaks of both, coupling his retelling of Isaiah’s parable of the vineyard we heard as the Old Testament reading to predict his sufferings, to a quote from Psalm 118:22 to predict the supernatural intervention of God which would effect his resurrection: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord's doing, and it is amazing in our eyes'?’

As Christians we have the same dual trademark so St Paul writes in our second lesson from Philippians in Chapter 3 verse 10: ‘I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings’.

When we were baptised we gained that trademark with the cross on our forehead and the promise of resurrection - Holy Spirit - empowerment. For us, bearing suffering makes sense on account of Jesus as he again and again opens up a forward vision in our lives.  

Christianity is less a moral code than supernatural empowerment through faith in Jesus Christ, ‘the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings’. Once our faith gets woken up - and that happens repeatedly - we find ourselves loosened from the pains of life into achieving wondrous things through the supernatural working within us of the God who raises the dead.

There’s a lot of pain involved for any family afflicted by Alzheimer’s. You are dealing with relentless frustrations as domestic routines falter through increasing forgetfulness. These hardships bring people down. I observe, though, that where there is faith in Christ the sufferings that bring you down bend you like grass in the wind which is capable of springing up again. The truth of Easter comes real in life through sufferings born in faith, through spiritual perseverance. Christians are Jesus-shaped, J shaped irrepressible folk – you know if you press an I down it becomes a J - and a springy, irrepressible J springs back again. To be J-shaped, to be Christian, is to be on the winning side of life through the inner spring of perseverance.

‘I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings’.

In today’s Gospel Our Lord spoke of his suffering and resurrection in the parable of the wicked vineyard workers who killed the owner’s son. That great poet and priest, Fr. Raneiro Cantalamessa writes of the Cross in these words: ‘In the Alps in summer, when a mass of cold air from the North clashes with hot air from the South, frightful storms break out disturbing the atmosphere; dark clouds move around, the wind whistles, lightning rends the sky from one end to the other and the thunder makes the mountains tremble. Something similar took place in the Redeemer’s soul where the extreme evil of sin clashed with the supreme holiness of God disturbing it to the point that it caused Him to sweat blood and forced the cry from Him, ‘My soul is sorrowful to the point of death...nevertheless Father, not My will but Yours be done’

‘O generous love!’ wrote John Henry Newman, ‘That he who smote in man for man the foe, the double agony in man (that is of body and soul) for man should undergo, and that he should do this, ‘in the garden secretly, and on the Cross on high.  Praise to the holiest in the height!’

Suffering is close to the supernatural action of God - this is Christ’s experience and ours. 

I remember my parish priest when I was an Oxford student evoking the victory of the Redemption in these sorts of words. Imagine, he would say, the immense pressure on a point in space which had the whole force and weight of the universe upon it.  Then imagine the moral universe and the weight of sin from the creation of the world up to now and beyond to the completion of things.  Then imagine that moral weight pressed to one point upon the heart of Jesus in Gethsemane.  Then see the value of the sweated blood and the victory it attains through a disposition of one human heart totally transparent to the love and power of God. It attains the resurrection.

I was once a Missionary in Guyana, South America where I worked among the native Amerindians. These indigenous people believe in many evil spirits, above all what they call ‘kenaima’. A youth around 18 was fishing one day and felt kenaima attack him from behind. The evil spirit is said to go up the rectum. Whether it was a physical attack by the demon or psychological I do not know. What I can tell you is that when I came to his hammock the life was literally ebbing away from him and his family were planning where his grave should be. To be attacked by kenaima was a death sentence without respite in the old village religion.

Praise God for the new religion and for the Cross of Jesus and his Sacraments that take their force from him! 

We encouraged the youth as we prepared him for Anointing and Holy Communion in words from St. John’s first letter: ‘Jesus in you is greater than kenaima’. Most of the village gathered into Church  for a prayer vigil for the boy during which a priest took Holy Communion to him. A vigil of prayer and praise to God continued all night as the boy’s strength returned. The next Sunday he was with the Music group playing the guitar at Mass.

I am convinced his right understanding of Holy Communion as bringing the power and presence of Jesus right into him saved his life. We saw a remarkable testimony to the victory of Our Lord over evil powers. Those words from St. John’s first letter chapter 4 verse 4 have never lost their power over me: ‘He who is in us - Jesus - is greater than he who is in the world - the devil’.

‘I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings’.

Do you want that - to know Jesus? His resurrection power is here among us as the Lord’s people on the Lord’s day gathered around the Lord’s table - and - here’s the rub - in your individual life and mine, in our sufferings, not resented but born cheerfully with the Holy Spirit’s assistance. 

As you share the joys and griefs of your circle and carry their sufferings to Our Lord in prayer you will bear the irrepressible trademark of Jesus, J-shaped and on the winning side of life through him who ‘was sorrowful unto death’ and rose to make this day ‘the day of resurrection’. Alleluia!

 

St Wilfrid & St Richard, Haywards Heath Masses 1.2.23

A few thoughts on today’s epistle. Since Christmas we’ve been reading the letter to the Hebrews at weekday eucharists full of wise counsel to struggling believers. Today’s reading from Chapter 12 starts with the reminder of who we are as baptised believers. Last month we celebrated how the Son of God became the Son of Man so children of men could become children of God. The clue to Christian life is owning that dignity of being a child of God granted us by the incarnation. Today’s Gospel narrates how Our Lord struggled to establish his credentials in his hometown of Nazareth, a struggle that brought him to Mount Calvary and the revelation of his own Sonship. ‘Truly this man was the Son of God’ said the Centurion in Matthew 27:54.

Today’s epistle centres on our own sonship established by Christ’s dying and rising. ‘Have you forgotten that encouraging text in which you are addressed as sons? My son, when the Lord corrects you, do not treat it lightly; but do not get discouraged when he reprimands you. For the Lord trains the ones that he loves and he punishes all those that he acknowledges as his sons. Suffering is part of your training; God is treating you as his sons. Has there ever been any son whose father did not train him? Of course, any punishment is most painful at the time, and far from pleasant; but later, in those on whom it has been used, it bears fruit in peace and goodness’. Being sons and daughters of God brings the responsibility to reinterpret positively the harshest of circumstances because our Father is Lord of all and ‘works all things for good for those who love him’ (Romans 8:28). 

After a reminder to take a positive slant on hardship the writer of Hebrews gives this brusque invitation to pull up our socks and press on with life: ‘So hold up your limp arms and steady your trembling knees and smooth out the path you tread; then the injured limb will not be wrenched, it will grow strong again’. This is the beauty of scripture, the way it both encourages and chides us. The last chapter of Hebrews promises God will never fail us or desert us quoting the Psalms to that effect. Meanwhile the conclusion of today’s passage from Chapter 12 has this advice: ‘Always be wanting peace with all people, and the holiness without which no one can ever see the Lord. Be careful that no one is deprived of the grace of God and that no root of bitterness should begin to grow and make trouble; this can poison a whole community’. In other words, as we struggle with things, holiness will be built up in us as we keep cheerful in our trials. Often this requires us to keep grief to ourselves and refrain from blaming others. If we want to see the Lord in heaven that vision will be shared with the communion of saints so ‘wanting peace with all people’ is a vital aspiration to cultivate. In the end we will be invited to lose our lives to others, to God and neighbour, for which invitation earthly struggles like getting over differences with other people, are God sent preparation. As we read in the first letter of St John Chapter 3, picking up the same theme: ‘Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure’. So be it!

 

St Richard, Haywards Heath Feast of the Holy Cross 14th September 2022

Today is kept as the Patronal Feast of the Society of the Holy Cross to which Fr Chris, and Fr David and Fr Ian before him belong as do Fr Gordon and Fr Clay as well as Fr David King our parish priest designate.  

In a profound sense though all Christians are part of such a Society. We come together this evening as a community defined as a society of the holy cross.

In words from a passiontide hymn: The Cross! It takes our guilt away; it holds the fainting spirit up; it cheers with hope the gloomy day, and sweetens every bitter cup.

Jesus crucified is in our midst – the source of forgiveness, upholding, good cheer and transformation that the hymn speaks of. We are the dying and rising people of a dying and rising Lord.

“J shaped people” as someone put it – and if you see a J as an “I” pushed down ready to spring up you’ll get the idea of that. To live as a Christian is to live with the sanctification of passion, of pain and suffering. You can’t put a Christian down because the things that bring people down are endured with Jesus who cheers with hope the gloomy day, and sweetens every bitter cup.

The making of a woman or man is suffering and how we bear it. Is it taken fearfully or as part of sanctification? The Cross makes the coward spirit brave, and nerves the feeble arm for fight; It takes its terror from the grave, and gilds the bed of death with light.

What a fruitful thing it is to be one with Jesus crucified who promises Come unto me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest (Matthew 11:28). It’s a countercultural thing to be one with Jesus who is one with suffering humanity but it is also something freeing since by his cross he lifts our burdens day by day!

Holy Cross Day celebrates the symbol of our faith. It is a reminder to honour that symbol by living it as a society that’s one with the holy cross. One with Jesus crucified and risen. The history of this Feast is associated with the establishment of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire under Emperor Constantine. It was his mother, Helena that uncovered the True Cross and lifted it up for the veneration of the faithful.

So must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life we heard in the gospel (John 3v14-15). 

To live as the church is to live as the society that lifts up Jesus: in his word, in the Blessed Sacrament and in the hearts of all his faithful people. In the eucharist we lift up the consecrated Bread and Wine and we lift up the Gospel book. Such liftings place us with Mary and John looking up from the foot of the Cross to the breadth and length and height and depth and … the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge (Ephesians 3v18b).

The church as the society of the holy cross is also the society of the resurrection for the two cannot be separated. “J shaped people” with the “I” pushed down ready to spring up as surely as Christ is risen! For if we have been united with Jesus in a death like his Paul writes to the Romans (6v5, 8) we will certainly be united in a resurrection like his…if we have died with Christ we believe we will also live with him. 

My friends, sisters - and brothers - of the society of the holy cross Jesus does not ask us more than to come close to him in his passion so that our service of and our dependence on others becomes invested with his presence, the presence that draws the whole world. 

Into that presence we now enter in this Holy Mass.

St Wilfrid & St Richard, Haywards Heath Eucharist Psalm 23 Wed 17 August 2022

We cannot see God. He makes himself known through life experience, the Bible and worship. Of all Bible texts the 23rd Psalm used today is most used in worship both Christian and Jewish. Its alleged author is David the shepherd boy who became King of Israel a thousand years before Christ.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters;

This Psalm or poem compares the shepherd’s love for their sheep to God’s for us as guide and protector through life’s troubles. The last section of the poem switches from the image of God as shepherd to that of God as host, in his house at a banquet. What I like about the poem is how it touches on the journey of life starting with that peaceful image of green pastures and still waters. That peace links to a sense of lifelong guidance with fresh start after fresh start:

He restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.

The mention of God’s name is a reminder of how when you get to know someone first of all you get to know their name. Though God was real to David the shepherd poet it was Christ, actually his descendant, who made the poem come true putting a name and even a face on God, Jesus the Good Shepherd. As we look to his Cross the next verse of the poem lights up for us.

Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff - they comfort me

On our life’s journey nothing can bring us right down when Christ is guide and protector. God expects nothing of us he’s not been through before. The darkness of his sufferings are told us so we see God, who raised Christ from death, as not aloof but as one who sympathises with our pains. As good shepherd God knows his sheep through and through. The poem continues.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.

Looking back on the journey of life the poet recalls being provided for despite having to bear with trouble and the troublesome. Life is hospitable, made so by God and by friendship. There is balm - oil - to heal our hurts. ‘My cup overflows’. With the eye of faith the poet counts the surprises, the blessings of life.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.

What a poem and what a climax! David saw goodness and mercy surrounding him to his last breath. Christ’s resurrection takes us further than that last breath as it opens up God’s unending life to all who will seize upon it in faith. And ‘the house of the Lord’? That is beyond David’s Temple in Jerusalem or any church building - it is an intimate, unbroken fellowship with God’s never ending family beyond this world. 

St John, Burgess Hill Easter 2 Hope 24th April 2022

There’s a lot around to trouble us. Warfare in Europe we never imagined would return to our continent. COVID hitting more widely now though mercifully in a less deadly fashion. The rise in energy costs and the associated fall in living standards linked to it. These are three things that trouble almost everyone and they provoke a variety of responses including more talk about the essential meaning of life.

In the midst of widespread pessimism our religion shapes and gives meaning to our lives but some of our peers are saying ‘no wonder people turn to religion to escape this awful scenario’. The assumption widely held is that religious belief provides an escape from reality – and yet the realities we live through seem to demand such an escape, however irrational. Without faith people are entering deep pessimism as they face the troubles we all share at this season.  

What does Easter have to say to such pessimism? Is what I’m about as a Christian just otherworldly escapism? How does the Easter good news engage with the reality of human suffering and how can it best impact the loss of hope around us?

As I reflect with you on this Octave Day of the Easter Feast I look back eight days to our blessing of the Paschal Candle when five pins were stuck in it to represent the wounds of Christ, commemorating today’s Gospel reading. Jesus said to Thomas, 'Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.' Thomas answered him, 'My Lord and my God!'

How did Our Lord deal with Thomas’ pessimism? He pointed him to those very same wounds the Risen Christ carried from his crucifixion. In other words ‘you can be sure it is I, Thomas, and you can lay hold of sure and certain hope in the face of all in your world that would confound you’.

As Peter and the apostles answered the high priest in our first reading from Acts Chapter 5: The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. The Jesus raised up at Easter is the same Jesus killed by hanging … on a tree in other words the Cross. That’s why the Church decorates, if that is the right word, its Easter candle symbol with the wounds. As the priest says piercing the candle with the five studs at the Easter Vigil: By his holy and glorious wounds may Christ our Lord guard and keep us. 

The Paschal Candle is a triumphant witness, standing tall, that says God is above death. It also reminds us he’s not above suffering. That is so very, very important to us as witnesses to Christ in a world that’s losing hope. God, the God and Father of Jesus, expects nothing of us he’s not prepared to go through himself. This is the main ground of hope we cling to as Christians, a hope that isn’t just out of this world - though the resurrection is all of that - but a hope rooted in human reality. What I am about as a Christian IS an engagement with otherworldly consolation, it’s absolutely true. Christianity is a metaphysical religion, it’s beyond (meta) the physical because of Christ’s resurrection. Yet it’s rooted in the most basic and painful human reality.

God revealed the resurrection by sending his Son to die for us. The five wounds of Christ on his arms, legs and side are the great symbol of this and as such they engage with our sorrows for he is and he remains for us as Isaiah prophesied a man of sorrows acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53v3). 

If I am talking about Christian hope this morning I am talking not about a shallow optimism but resurrection faith firmly rooted in Christ as the suffering Saviour from all eternity. Second century Bishop Melito of Sardis in an Easter sermon wrote of how Christ’s sufferings should be seen in the suffering of holy people right back through the Old Testament: He is the Passover of our salvation. He was present in many so as to endure many things. In Abel he was slain; in Isaac bound; in Jacob a stranger; in Joseph sold; in Moses exposed; in David persecuted; in the prophets dishonoured. He became incarnate of the Virgin…buried in the earth, but he rose from the dead, and was lifted up to the height of heaven. He is the silent lamb, the slain lamb, who was born of Mary the fair ewe. He was seized from the flock and dragged away to slaughter.  

In Christ’s sufferings we see human suffering in a new light. I can’t speak too well myself, my sufferings have been slight, but I’ve been close to women and men of God who say so, who say God in Christ comes close in suffering. I think of people I’ve visited in great pain telling me of the grace they’d experienced grasping a holding cross. I think of instances where my marking the cross in holy oil on the foreheads and palms of the sick, commemorating Christ’s wounds, lifts their spirits. Péguy said a Christian is a sad man saved from despair by the Cross of Christ. 

In the book of Revelation we read of how grace… and peace come from Jesus Christ… the firstborn of the dead, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood. St John goes on to predict the risen Christ’s return Look! He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him. The wounds of Christ are source of hope to believers, though they will be troublesome to those who pierced him and that includes you and I through unrepented sins. 

Easter is incomplete until the Lord’s Return. Charles Wesley’s Advent hymn Lo he comes enters imaginatively into the sight of the risen Christ coming to be judge of the world:

Those dear tokens of his passion still his dazzling body bears; 
cause of endless exultation to his ransomed worshipers; 
with what rapture gaze we on those glorious scars!

Indeed it will be, and that is our sure and certain hope, which should help us bring all pessimists to Christ’s Cross. 

We Christians are saddened by suffering but our sadness is saved from despair by that very Cross and by the out of this world resurrection truth we’re celebrating in these great days of Eastertide which will be fully revealed at the Lord’s return! 

Alleluia Christ is risen - he is risen indeed, alleluia!

St John the Evangelist, Burgess Hill Pre-Lent Sunday 27 February 2022

And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white…(and) a cloud came and overshadowed them Luke 9 

Years back when I was a student at Oxford a coach taking pilgrims from my church, St Mary Magdalene’s, to the Shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham crashed and someone died. The Sunday afterwards the parish priest preached his sermon with reference to this Gospel and I will never forget Fr Hooper’s sermon.

He presented to us, as I now present to you, how the mystery of the glorious Transfiguration is set under the dark cloud.  After Our Lord’s clothes became dazzling white… St Luke records a cloud came and overshadowed them.

As we gathered in St Mary Mags that Sunday we were reminded how God’s glory can shine brightest of all through the cloud of bereavement. We gather Sunday by Sunday to celebrate the glory of the risen Lord with pain, the pains of the church and its divisions, of the world in its godforsakenness, especially with the invasion of Ukraine and the pains of those of in our circle which are most inscribed on our hearts. Then - the glory of the Lord shines over us as we take, bless, break and share bread!

Christianity is about suffering and the supernatural - these are the two things that keep us close to Christ - the two things Lent reminds us of.

We the baptised are a dying and rising people of a dying and rising Lord.

We are a people losing ourselves to gain the Holy Spirit.

Paul expresses this beautifully in the second reading: ‘All of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit’ (2 Corinthians 3:18)

Made in his image we are being transformed into his selfless likeness …from glory to glory.

Made to know ourselves, love ourselves and forget ourselves - a good motto for Lent! Know yourself, love yourself, forget yourself’ 

Know yourself - for that is the other side of the coin to knowing God. 

Love yourself - as you recognise again and again how much you are loved by God who made you. Then - and here is the struggle - forget yourself as Christ forgot himself on Calvary so he could die and rise and give us the Holy Spirit!

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people unprepared to forget themselves, people wanting instead to be important as seems the case with President Putin. 

As Raniero Cantalamessa writes: ‘70% of the human body is made up of water, but perhaps even more than 70% of man’s spirit is made up of pride...We all long to be noticed. If we could visualise the whole of humankind as it appears in the eyes of God, we would see the spectacle of an immense crowd of people all standing on tiptoe, all pushing one another in the attempt to make themselves seen and all shouting, ‘I’m here too, I’m here in the world too!’. All this pride is, of course, just smoke that death dissipates day by day. ‘Vanity of vanities’...but its consequences are...dreadful’.

There is so much wastage in life and that does not exclude the Christian life. So much of our energy, even though we be Christians, gets dissipated in the instinctive serving of our desires or attending to our fears. The energy we put into this subtracts from all we are able to offer the Lord for building his kingdom. Our Lord needs more of our energies directed to his ends and not our own, our wills more and more directing our lives to his praise and his service.

Self-forgetfulness is a real gift of God which balances self-worth and self knowledge. I find that juggling around with these three is what the deepening of spirituality is all about. The supernatural and suffering play their part as well from God’s side…

Sometimes we need to know ourselves better, sometimes to pay attention, to be kind and loving to ourselves. There are times to concentrate and affirm the self. There are many other times when we are best off getting to work on forgetting ourselves.

As we approach Lent the Church presents to us in today’s scripture the radiant and transfigured humanity of Christ illuminated and filled right through with the life of God coupled to the invitation to be transformed likewise into a heavenly new creation. 

The Transfiguration of Christ preceding his death and resurrection provides disciples then and now insight into the beauty, glory and wondrous life of the world to come and courage to keep heading there. We are not there yet but rather in the vale of tears yet sufferings in that vale are destined to be lost in the ultimate praise and glory of heaven. 

We are the dying and rising people of a dying and rising Lord, a people losing ourselves to gain the Holy Spirit, made in his image to be transformed into his selfless likeness …from glory to glory, made to know ourselves, love ourselves and forget ourselves…so Christ may shine in us now and always! 

A happy and holy Lent!

St Mary, Balcombe Baptism of the Lord 9.1.22

You can be baptised but have little experience of the Holy Spirit. We know you can be baptised and have little experience of the church - compare the numbers in our baptism registers with those in our service registers!  Yet those of us who come to Church still need encouragement to welcome the Holy Spirit and today’s Feast of the Baptism of the Lord is such an encouragement.

In the second reading we heard of the predicament of the Samarian Christians. ‘Peter and John… prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit (for as yet the Spirit had not come upon any of them; they had only been baptised in the name of the Lord Jesus). They laid their hands on them and they received the Holy Spirit’ (Acts 8:15-17).This passage is often read at confirmation services where the Bishop does what Peter and John did - lay hands on those baptised invoking the Spirit. We receive special anointing of the Spirit at baptism, confirmation and ordination but need to experience what God has given us.  

How do we wake up to the Holy Spirit?

Scripture gives us two answers – by looking outside of ourselves and inside of ourselves. 

Our Lord welcomed the Holy Spirit from above as in today’s Gospel. Elsewhere he speaks of the Holy Spirit flowing from within as in John 7:38:  ‘Out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water’.

Scripture records how Moses’s faith lit up when God kindled a flame in the burning bush and yet Paul advised Timothy to ‘rekindle the gift of God which is within’ (2 Timothy 1:6).

Sometimes we need to ask God to give us a vision of himself outside of ourselves so we get humbled into receiving his love. Other times we seek a release from the stuff within us that’s blocking the flow of that love.

If we have been baptised God is already at work within us. In Timothy’s case Paul reminded him that he’d laid hands on him for the Holy Spirit to come years ago. Wake up, he said, to what God has given you. Stir up the gift – in another translation. 

I always think of sugar in the bottom of an unstirred cup of tea. Does that fit your life this morning? God’s inside of you but your life needs sweetening by a bit of a stir? Or, to use another image, that of a gas fire, is it a matter of recognising the pilot light is lit within you but you need to turn the gas on and let the Holy Spirit really take hold of you?

Come, Holy Spirit, and awaken us! You are God in the present moment, make God more present to us, stir us up within, ignite our faith and our prayer on this Feast!

Today Jesus was anointed by the Holy Spirit as the Christ which means the Anointed One. To be a Christian is to share in the anointing of the Anointed One. As we heard in the Gospel: ‘Jesus Christ will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire’ (Luke 3:16).

How do we wake up to the Holy Spirit?

I remember as a student meeting a special priest who had holiness and integrity. Just a few choice words now and then from him were like commands from God - the Holy Spirit zapped me through those words and got me praying - and you know, the more you pray the more you want to pray! Then the more the Spirit burns within us, the more others around us are drawn to the fire of God’s love. Our thirst for God - and the Spirit gives you a thirst for God - infects others. When we pray ‘Come, Holy Spirit’ - and I recommend doing that as part of offering your life to God first thing every morning - we see spiritual needs and opportunities and the hand of God working in our lives hour by hour.

Brother Roger of Taize once said something that’s at the heart of church growth and revitalisation by the Spirit. He said: ‘When the church becomes a house of prayer the whole world will come running!’. It is so. As another Frenchman, Blaise Pascal, said three centuries before him: ‘Holiness is the church’s greatest influence’.  The Holy Spirit who works through scripture and the pulpit works to make the bread and wine extraordinary so that you and I can be extraordinary - the Holy Spirit makes us so. That extraordinariness links to both suffering and the supernatural. 

When I see joy on the faces of Christians near to death - I think of my friend Eve - it is the Spirit. When I hear people speaking in tongues, I recognise a supernatural gift of the Holy Spirit. Speaking in tongues is a love language commended as an aid for private prayer by St Paul though its public use can have extraordinary impact. I commend praying for this gift if your prayer life is in the doldrums.

An awakening to the Spirit, a releasing of the Spirit, an unblocking of his flow – this is the invitation and challenge of today’s Feast which links in with suffering and experience of the supernatural. There is ‘one baptism for the forgiveness of sins’ and it confers the Holy Spirit. A gift though when given needs to be received. For Christians to seek the renewing power of the Spirit – we do so as we receive Holy Communion every Sunday - is a matter of seeking to be more fully what we are meant to be in Christ in terms of spiritual empowerment and nothing less! 

We want to be people who know their need for such empowerment! Meanwhile the Spirit is waiting to confirm to us the same words spoken to Our Lord at his baptism: ‘You are my Son, [my Daughter], the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’ (Luke 3:22). Come, Holy Spirit! 

Holy Trinity, Cuckfield Easter 2 with commemoration of Prince Philip RIP 11th April 2021

Introduction to eucharist

On Classic FM yesterday Alan Titchmarsh said the room lit up when Prince Philip entered. Despite his sharp side the Duke of Edinburgh had a great spirit and possessed deep Christian faith. In yesterday’s Times obituary there is this quote from him: ‘Religious conviction is the strongest and probably the only factor in sustaining the dignity and integrity of the individual’. On this last of the eight days of Easter Octave we will be making a solemn commemoration of his passing at the end of the eucharist, standing in silence for a minute then listening to the National Anthem. As we begin this Easter eucharist we recall our own sharp side - no one of us is free from sin - and take a moment to entreat God’s mercy, so we also may better light up the lives around us.

Sermon

‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe’ (John 20:25). 

Thomas’s question chimes deep into lockdown experience. Refusal to believe in the face of tragic circumstances. For us those circumstances are parallel with the death of close friends through COVID and a wave of depression deadening those we love. All of us share this morning to some degree the sadness of the Queen and Royal Family. Though I rejoice to stand with you in Holy Trinity for the first time in months to celebrate Easter my joy is qualified by that reality akin to that of Thomas, bereaved and in that upper room lockdown. 

Yes, it is heartening to read evidence of people turning to religion to give shape and meaning to their empty lives. As the Duke of Edinburgh said, faith sustains our dignity and integrity. By contrast cynics see the current turning to faith as evidencing desperation to find escape from an awful scenario. The assumption is that religion is about escape from reality – and, yes, the brutal realities we’re living through seem to demand escape. 

What does Easter have to say to cynics and pessimists? Is what I’m about as a Christian otherworldly escapism? How does the Easter good news engage with the reality of human suffering and how can it best impact the loss of hope around us? We celebrate the eucharist this morning alongside the Paschal Candle into which five pins are pressed to represent the wounds of Christ in commemoration of today’s Gospel. ‘Jesus said to Thomas, 'Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.' Thomas answered him, 'My Lord and my God!' (John 20:27-28) 

How did the risen Lord deal with Thomas’ pessimism? He pointed him to the wounds he still carried from his crucifixion. In other words ‘you can be sure it is I, Thomas, and you can lay hold of sure and certain hope in the face of all in your world that would confound you’. The Jesus raised at Easter is the same Jesus killed through awful suffering upon the Cross. That’s why the Church adorns its Easter candle with nails. As the priest says, piercing the candle with five studs at the Easter Vigil: ‘By his holy and glorious wounds may Christ our Lord guard and keep us’. 

The Paschal Candle is a triumphant witness, standing tall, that says God is above death. It is also a reminder that God is not above suffering. That should be very important to us as witnesses to Christ in a world so lacking hope. The God and Father of Jesus, expects nothing of us he’s not prepared to go through himself. This is the ground of hope we cling to as Christians, hope that isn’t just out of this world – though the resurrection is all of that - but hope rooted in human reality. Again following the media coverage of Prince Philip’s death I recall Nicholas Witchell’s observation of how the Queen’s Christian faith would be an important consolation in her loss.

What we are about as Christians IS an engagement with otherworldly consolation, that’s absolutely true. Christianity is a metaphysical religion, it’s beyond (meta) the physical because of Christ’s resurrection. Yet it’s rooted in human reality for God revealed the resurrection by sending his Son to die for us. The five wounds of Christ on his arms, legs and side are the great symbol of this human reality. They engage with our sorrows, for he is and he remains for us, as Isaiah prophesied, ‘a man of sorrows acquainted with grief’ (Isaiah 53v3). 

If I am talking about Christian hope this morning I am talking not about a shallow optimism but resurrection faith firmly rooted in Christ as the suffering Saviour from all eternity. Second century Bishop Melito of Sardis in an Easter sermon wrote of how Christ’s sufferings should be seen in the suffering of holy people right back through the Old Testament: ‘He is the Passover of our salvation. He was present in many so as to endure many things. In Abel he was slain; in Isaac bound; in Jacob a stranger; in Joseph sold; in Moses exposed; in David persecuted; in the prophets dishonoured. He became incarnate of the Virgin…buried in the earth, but he rose from the dead, and was lifted up to the height of heaven. He is the silent lamb, the slain lamb, who was born of Mary the fair ewe. He was seized from the flock and dragged away to slaughter’.  

In Christ’s sufferings we see human suffering in a new light. I can’t speak too well myself, my sufferings have been slight in life so far, but I’ve been close to women and men of God who say so, who say God in Christ comes close in suffering. I think of Ursilla telling me how important and helpful the holding cross was she’d been given at the Hospice. Or when, the day before he died, as he lay on his bed, Colin welcomed anointing on his head and hands by sitting up and stretching his arms right out, as if on the Cross with Jesus. I think of Tom, of marking the cross in holy oil on him before he died marking this Easter week, like the Easter Candle, with a sorrowful Cross for his family.  No wonder Péguy said a Christian is a sad man saved from despair by the Cross of Christ. Life is a vale of tears.

In our second reading Saint John the evangelist ‘declares to us the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us in Jesus Christ… who is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world’ (1 John 1:2, 2:2). Elsewhere in Revelation the evangelist predicts the risen Christ’s return ‘Look! He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him’ (Revelation 1:7). The wounds of Christ are a source of hope to believers, though they will be troublesome to those who pierced him and that includes you and I through unrepented sins. That scripture is the basis of Charles Wesley’s Advent hymn ‘Lo he comes’ that enters imaginatively into the sight of the risen Christ coming to be judge of the world: 

Those dear tokens of his passion still his dazzling body bears;

cause of endless exultation to his ransomed worshipers;

with what rapture gaze we on those glorious scars! 

Indeed it will be - that is our sure and certain hope, which should help us bring all pessimists to Christ’s Cross. We Christians are saddened by suffering but our sadness is saved from despair by that very Cross and by the out of this world resurrection truth we’re celebrating in these great days of Eastertide!