Midnight Mass 2018 at St Bartholomew, Brighton

Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. Luke 2:10

Fear not - trust! Trust God - he is above all to be trusted!

There is great tumult in our nation. As 2018 ends no one knows how 2019 will shape Britain’s future in relation to the rest of the world. The credibility of Parliamentary democracy has taken a tumble with that of ministers, politicians and the media leaving many bewildered not knowing who to trust.

Fear not - trust! Trust God - he is above all to be trusted!

His are truth, goodness and beauty and those qualities remain evident among us. Such is the crisis in truth telling that the second and third qualities are becoming preferable pointers to him, beauty especially.

As we gather to celebrate Midnight Mass we owe much to our choir and orchestra and the composer Joseph Haydn for the beautiful music these words interrupt to speak of truth. In his Credo there is no mistaking his witness to Christian truth in the incarnation and resurrection as we shall see.

Haydn like us knew tumult. Whilst he lay dying in the Vienna of 1809 Napoleon was bombarding his neighbourhood. Such was his international reputation as a composer that Emperor Napoleon sent guards to his house to protect him.

The score of the St Nicholas Mass is marked ‘in nomine deo’ as were all Joseph Haydn’s works. With all his flaws Haydn put trust in God seeking the Holy Spirit to make him his conduit of beautiful composition, musical beauty we are being fully immersed in this Christmas night.

Fear not - trust! Trust God - he is above all to be trusted!

In the tumult of an earlier age, as the Roman Empire fell apart in the 5th century, St Augustine of Hippo preached these words in his Christmas sermon on the same text I gave you from Luke 2:10: Fear not the coming of your God: fear not his friendship. He will not straighten you when he comes, rather he will enlarge you...You see then, if you love, how much room he gives you. Fear is a suffering that oppresses us. But look at the immensity of love.

I was taken by his image of Christianity as enlarging. It’s so against people’s perception of what we’re about.

Yet the Babe of Bethlehem accepted those swaddling bands to give us the glorious liberty of the children of God.

God got straightened, bound up, so we could find new spaciousness and be granted power to become his children.

To be a Christian is to have a capacity to rise through natural fear into the glorious liberty of the children of God.

You see then, if you love, how much room he gives you. Fear is a suffering that oppresses us. But look at the immensity of love.

To know you are loved, that God’s Spirit has been poured into your heart, is to connect through trust in God with the centre of the universe and see his perfect love casting out your fear and its oppression over you.

One of the saddest caricatures of Christianity is that it’s narrow minded, a sort of strait laced morality. That Christians are ‘holier than thou’s’ sent as moral policemen to keep the world in order.

A priest once had the privilege of speaking to the comedian Groucho Marx. ‘I’d like to thank you, Mr. Marx’ the priest said, ‘for all the joy you’ve brought into the world.’ Quick witted as ever Groucho replied And let me thank you, Father, for all the joy you’ve taken out!

God forgive us Christians for making our religion seem so constricting.

Tonight Jesus was bound in swaddling bands to expand us out of fear into the joyful immensity of divine love!

When people look at a Church door they might think of it as a way to narrow down your existence. Jesus did say enter by the narrow gate!

Once you come through the Church door – and I mean really come through into day by day discipleship and week by week worship - it’s more like the door of Doctor Who’s Tardis. You enter another dimension, the very dimension opened up tonight.

God became man in Palestine and lives today in bread and wine – so he can live in you and me, opening up our horizons to his and widening our human possibilities into his.

Fear not - trust! Trust God - he is above all to be trusted!

There are people in Brighton this Christmas struggling through cancer, unemployment and family breakdown. Where there’s faith in the Christ Child these circumstances aren’t able to bind and restrict Christian joy – I’ve seen it for myself in many I’ve been privileged to minister to here at St Bartholomew’s.

When the One ‘born to raise the sons of earth’ comes into our lives he enlarges us so we can embrace the world around us in all its frailty and tumult.

Tonight we celebrate God’s investment in humanity giving us new value through a new creation started in the Virgin Mary’s womb. We celebrate the Child of Bethlehem bound in swaddling clothes who went on to be bound on the Cross so we could expand into a whole new dimension of life.

St Augustine once again: Fear not the coming of your God: fear not his friendship. He will not straighten you when he comes, rather he will enlarge you...You see then, if you love, how much room he gives you. Fear is a suffering that oppresses us. But look at the immensity of love.

Look indeed, on this most holy night, and see in the Crib that immense love which enlarges you!

As you welcome Christmas Communion pray for yourself, and for all of us, to live as God made us to live - with greater trust in him!

Harvest Festival 8am 11th October 2015

This Sunday our theme is one of thanks for the fruits of the earth – our harvest festival.

We’re showing our gratitude to God by giving to others. As we gather round the Lord’s table this morning we do so with produce that will support families in need across Sussex and address, by financial gifts in the orange envelopes, the food shortages in East and West Africa.

Do not worry about your life says the harvest gospel reading from Matthew 6.25.

This morning on Harvest Festival the Church reminds us that our whole life, past, present and future is in God's hands. To be truly grateful is to believe that God is in control of our lives and the life of the world.

A Christian is someone who at the best of times is able to see the hand of God behind everything. We have faith to see that we come from God, belong to God, go to God.

25 years ago I served as Theological College Principal training up Amerindian priests. In the indigenous communities of Guyana parishioners live ‘around the cooking pot’.  Money is in use, but much of the economy relies on age-old barter from hunting, fishing and handicraft. Harvest festival was the main source of income for the church.

Anne and I well remember the harvest festivals in the church at Yupukari where we were married in and in which we first worshipped together. I recall one where a sheep was tethered to the altar and was slaughtered afterwards so that the village ate meat afterwards for the first time in weeks.

Do not worry about your life the Lord says.

In the deep rain forest of Guyana the natives may have less possessions but they have few worries. When I was planning a week’s trip up river to a remote mission I could ask my boatman to take me at very short notice. It took him five minutes to pack - a toothbrush, a bar of soap and a spare pair of underpants was all he needed with his hammock. I took far longer to gather my tackle - mosquito net, insect repellent, books to read, torches, toilet paper (they used leaves), tins of food, sun hat, mass kit, vestments, short wave radio for the BBC World Service..the list could go on!

The Indians tell a tale of the Amazon a few hundred miles south of Guyana. There was a shipwreck off the Brazilian Coast and some of the men managed to survive on a life raft. They drifted for two weeks by which time they were pretty well dying of thirst. Eventually they encountered a boat and were hauled aboard. The crew were surprised the men were thirsty. You see they were drifting by then across the mouth of the Amazon River, the largest fresh water source upon the earth.

Sometimes we are literally resting like those sailors upon the answer to our problems.

Do not worry about your life the Lord says.

God’s Spirit is always with us like streams of fresh water welling up within us. When worry dries us up the Holy Spirit is at hand to refresh us and here is the place above all places to welcome the Spirit through God’s word and through the body of Jesus given to us in the sacrament.

Only our unbelief stops us acting as if God were with us, just as the ignorance of those sailors kept them thirsty when they were floating on fresh water.

Let’s keep silence as we prepare at this Eucharist to entrust ourselves, our souls and bodies, as a living sacrifice through Christ to the Father.

Baptism of Phoebe Betts Gaudete (Joy) Sunday 16th December 2012

Words Ed read from Philippians 4 verse 4: Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.

Where do people find joy?

We seek happiness and it often eludes us - but joy, joy is something quite apart from, above and beyond happiness.  

As a child I remember the great joy of watching the Coronation with the whole street on my father's new TV.  Today we flip restlessly through the TV channels with a dulled sensation.

The options for pleasure are multiplied but they often fail to give joy.

We may live comfortably at a material level yet boredom and depression remain the lot of many. 

Even the multitude of choices we have before us steal away our happiness at having a choice.  We feel bereaved of the other 99 options when we choose the one! There’s only joy if you keep your mind on what you’ve decided and forget the 99 you’ve forsaken.

Perhaps those who prefer a ‘keeping your options open’ cohabitation to marriage are in risk of losing the joy that lies in permanent commitment to one path and one person?

This morning it’s a great pleasure to have Ed and Charlotte back in front of the altar where we celebrated their marriage three years ago. On that occasion I voiced how they see themselves as a team and how teamwork requires trust and clarity of purpose. Such agreed clarity of purpose has brought them once again to the Christian Church with their families and friends for they’ve been team building! We rejoice with you both on the birth last year of Phoebe Isla Betts and her baptism this morning.

She is, like any infant, a joy- giver.

How is it that children give us such joy?

They are humble, simple and trustful.

I was reflecting on this during the week and went back to the journal of one of my favourite Christian writers, Alexander Schmemann, an Orthodox priest who lived and taught in New York in the late 20^th century. Something he wrote about the ‘I’ passion of pride rang a bell. It’s reproduced on the back of the service booklet:

‘Anything, one way or the other, even in microscopic dose, connected with pride, is connected with the devil and with the diabolical. Religion also is a ready-made field of action for the devil’s forces. Everything, absolutely everything in religion is ambiguous, and this ambiguity can be cleared only by humility, so that the whole spiritual life is or must be directed to seeking humility.

‘The signs of humility: joy! Pride excludes joy. Then: simplicity, i.e., the absence of any turn into one’s self. Finally, trust, as the main directive in life, applied to everything (purity of heart, when man can see God). The signs of pride are: the absence of joy; complexity and fear. All this can be verified every day, every hour, by watching one’s self and contemplating life around.

‘It is frightening to think that in some sense, the Church also lives with pride – ‘the rights of the churches’…and a flood of joyless complicated and fearful spirituality’. It is a continuous self-destruction. We try to protect the “Truth”, we fight with something and for something without understanding that Truth appears and conquers only when it is alive: “humble yourself, be like a slave”, and you will have a liberating joy and simplicity, where humility is radiant in its divine beauty; where God is revealed in creation and salvation. How can I live by this? How can I convince others?’

How indeed! These are rich, dense words but in them I saw an underlining of three qualities in Phoebe and all children that are the cause of their and our joy – humility, simplicity and trust.

Where do people find joy?

Through deepening those childlike qualities of humility, simplicity and trust. We don’t want to stay childish but we do need to stay child-like if the Christian thing is to mean anything at all. Indeed, As Schmemann says many of the Church’s troubles are in a loss of joy through making things over complicated – and God forgive me if bringing this passage to you has had that effect! It’s not simple, but I love the challenge of it:

‘“Humble yourself, be like a slave”, and you will have a liberating joy and simplicity, where humility is radiant in its divine beauty.’

Joy is something beyond us.  It’s the radiant, beautiful infectious presence of God alongside us and within us.

To live a life close to God is what baptism is all about.  As we come close to God he comes close to us and in his presence is the fullness of joy.  This is our prayer for Phoebe and her family this mid-Advent Gaudete (Joy) Sunday – that they live continually in joy, which is a gift of the Holy Spirit obtained by coming to God in repentance and faith.

Phoebe’s parents and godparents will shortly express this coming to God by saying I turn to Christ, I repent of my sins, I renounce evil.

To remain joyful they will have to hold themselves close to God by continual repentance. 

 God may hold our lives but we also have to hold ourselves close to Him.  The will is all-important here.

When we come to Church week by week we show a determination towards God. We affirm to ourselves that it is the invisible and inner realities of life that transcend our outer and peripheral concerns.

Joy is the anointing of the Holy Spirit upon those who seek God with their whole heart.

May this holy season of Advent renew our spiritual determination so that St. Giles can be made a beacon of joy, its building and its people, overflowing with the Spirit of God!

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.