Birth of St John the Baptist June 24th 2012

Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, ‘Here is your God!’

In today’s Old Testament passage we have a strengthening word and talk of a herald.

When John the Baptist was miraculously born, as the Gospel narrates, his birth was talked about throughout the entire hill country of Judea. He came to be seen as that herald, a voice crying out: In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.


The passage from Acts puts John to the centre of salvation history, which is why his Feast is one of a select few to eclipse the Sunday of the Year. Paul’s speech in Acts 13 talks about God’s choice of Israel and how God has brought to Israel a Saviour, Jesus, as he promised; before his coming John had already proclaimed a baptism of repentance to all the people of Israel. And as John was finishing his work, he said, “What do you suppose that I am? I am not he. No, but one is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of the sandals on his feet.


St John the Baptist, next to the Blessed Virgin Mary, is of all mortals most blessed. He beheld the Lamb of God and got others to see the same. His words are with us, enshrined in the liturgy. Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.


The collect or special prayer for today speaks of God’s providence behind John’s birth and his witness to Christ adding lead us to repent according to his preaching and, after his example, constantly to speak the truth, boldly to rebuke vice, and patiently to suffer for the truth's sake.


As I read these phrases I recalled last week’s thoughtful and challenging sermon by Cavan Wood with those three points about a dedicated Christian life – obedience, care for the vulnerable and readiness to suffer. I also recalled the current national debate about same-sex marriage and it is that which I want to speak to as part of this morning’s address.

Speaking the truth is costly as John the Baptist discovered when he crossed King Herod. We keep the lesser Feast of John’s beheading by Herod on 29th August!

I hope what I share this morning won’t lead to Father John’s beheading!

Sexual ethics is a minefield for any preacher.

Christians believe sexual intercourse between husband and wife to be a sign of faithfulness and self-giving that mirrors Christ’s love. Sex is about life-giving love. It is about the irrevocable gift of self. Procreation, the associated gift of children, flows ideally from such life-giving love.

Our sexuality is given to joyfully unite husband and wife and generate new life. Just as glue-sniffing distorts the good use of glue, promiscuous sexual activity is a misuse of this great gift for bonding and creating human beings.

Like all God’s gifts sex can be misused. Our Lord spoke to this when he taught that if we look at someone lustfully we’ve already committed adultery. That’s a levelling teaching if ever there was one!

So what about same-sex marriage?

First we should lament uncaring comments about homosexuals made seemingly in the name of Christianity during the current national debate. It’s bad enough to be in a minority without being kicked by those who profess a loving God.

The good news of God’s love is for all people, gay or straight. That truth is basic, so that my main concern as a priest is about orientation towards God rather than sexual orientation.

When people privilege me in seeking spiritual direction – how they can come closer to God – I counsel marriage or celibacy as biblical ideals and warn against cohabitation since, lacking Christian authority, it may quench the Holy Spirit.

At the same time I recognize so much of moral decision making isn’t black or white but the choice between shades of grey. I sympathise as one who shares the confidences of folk struggling towards the ideal. Many of those who so struggle are opposed to dropping the ideal.

In the last fifty years the prevalence of contraception means the so-called ‘unitive’ and ‘procreative’ aspects of sexual intercourse are largely separated so most sex is unitive. It seems unjust in this respect to challenge homosexual sex. It too isn’t procreative but it does unite people, even if it falls short of the two Christian ideals.

Like many I accept the positive value of civil partnerships in providing just protection for same-sex faithful unions before the law.

What I and the Church as a whole can’t accept – and like St John the Baptist I must ‘speak the truth’ – is redefining marriage, changing a sacrament, so as to make a minority group more comfortable. There is far more at stake than gay rights in changing a sacrament.

A same-sex marriage would indeed have two of the three essentials of marriage – permanence and fidelity – but the third, offspring, would be artificial. I recently met a lesbian couple having twins by intervention of a male friend. I assured them of my prayers for their children’s welfare and they assured me they’d be looking for male role models for them to compensate their female parenting.

Many of you may have similar acquaintances. The Christian and widely held view of marriage as between a man and a woman is being challenged across the western world by such developments. The official Church of England response to the government plans to legalise same-sex marriage defends the inherited understanding of marriage and opposes the new idea that men and women are simply interchangeable individuals.

The Church of England as ‘the ancient church of this land, catholic and reformed’ seems to have set its face against reform of the sacrament of marriage to suit homosexuals, holding rather to catholic and universal practice. That is my own position, as with the sacrament of holy orders, that the Church of England lacks authority to change a sacrament unilaterally without the consent of the universal church i.e. Roman Catholic and Orthodox as well as Reformed. Others disagree – not all Anglicans see marriage and ordination as sacraments – and they view Anglicans as Spirit-led pioneers. Time will tell who was on the right side of these church debates.

The atheist gay columnist Matthew Parris who is opposed to same-sex marriage gives me encouragement. He recognizes the basic family-orientation of marriage and the damage that could be done to this by encouraging a solely ‘unitive’ understanding.

The debate will continue. The disestablishment of the Church of England might be a consequence if Church and State end up with different definitions of marriage.

Last Sunday Cavan identified three aspects of a dedicated Christian life – obedience, care for the vulnerable and readiness to suffer. We have the same reminder in today’s Saint who points us to constantly speak the truth, boldly rebuke vice, and patiently suffer for the truth's sake.

Affirming the truth of marriage certainly involves us today in patiently suffering for the truth's sake. In the Same-sex marriage debate our tone is so important though. Rebuking the vice of promiscuity, heterosexual and homosexual has its place, but the vice of homophobia also needs rebuking as part of our care for the vulnerable.

Christianity’s a way of life and it’s one way. There are other ways and we need to have the deepest respect for those who chose other options. Sometimes the most powerful truth we can share is that of our failure to live up to what we see as true and our sense that God accepts us just the same. As we shall say shortly in response to John the Baptist’s words of invitation, ‘Behold the Lamb of God’: Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.

Corpus Christi June 10th 2012

Do this in remembrance of me!

"Was ever command so obeyed?

For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth"
.

Do this in remembrance of me!

"Men have found no better thing to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness that my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetishes because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gate of Vienna;

Do this in remembrance of me!

"..for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so, wounded and a prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the Church;

Was ever another command so obeyed as this?

"Tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a (Russian) prison camp; gorgeously, for the canonisation of (a Saint) - one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell the hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the holy common people of God".

Do this in remembrance of me!

Was ever another command so obeyed as this?

In these immortal words the Anglican monk, Dom Gregory Dix celebrates the awe and wonder of the Holy Eucharist we thank God for this day.

It is primarily an action, "do this"..and it has been done for 2000 years at a million altars. This is a day for standing still and taking stock of this great wonder we celebrate week by week, day by day in St. Giles lest we presume upon the grace we celebrate and receive.

As Dix puts it in his book The Shape of the Liturgy still used in Anglican Theological Colleges "the eucharistic action (is) inextricably woven into the public history of the Western world...the eucharist (has the) power of laying hold of human life, of grasping it...in the particular concrete realities of it..laying hold of them and translating them into something beyond time".

I find great depths in the words of Dom Gregory Dix. Forgive me for reading them at such length. They seemed to me to do as much as any preacher could to set the scene on the Feast of Corpus Christi.

Our Lord Jesus ordained the sacrament of the Eucharist in order that we might be able to join on earth in the pleading of His eternal sacrifice before the face of God the Father.

Then, secondly, that He might feed our souls with His sacred Body and Blood and unite us into One Body, the Church, the Body of Christ, Corpus Christi.

I wonder how many of us would remember or believe or continue to hold fresh in our memories from Confirmation training those facts - I mean: Our Lord giving us the eucharist first to allow us to plead His Memorial Sacrifice and offer our lives with Him to be consecrated lives and then second, second, note, to give us heavenly Food and make us One Bread, One Body?

Or do we rather tend to make our default  the second purpose of the Eucharist? Do we come to Church like we go to Sainsbury’s to get "tanked up" with goodies, so to speak, and to meet our friends?

That should come second. We come first to offer the eucharist - to plead Christ's Sacrifice for the needs of the living and the dead, for others as well as for ourselves.

That long list from Dom Gregory Dix reminded me how all through my life the Eucharist has been a powerful means of sanctifying the lives I minister to, of taking, blessing, breaking sometimes a situation brought on my heart or the people's hearts to the Altar for Christ to carry in Sacrifice to His Father.

As I just quoted from Dix "the eucharist (has the ) power of laying hold of human life, of grasping it...in the particular concrete realities of it..laying hold of them and translating them into something beyond time".

"Laying hold...and translating into something beyond time".

When the Eucharist has been offered for a particular intention there is a profound guarantee that it is "over to the Lord" from there. I felt this recently with Stephen & Victoria Fretten marking their marriage at the parish eucharist, with Alice Batsford last month as we celebrated a eucharist for the dying at the Hospice or as we celebrated that eucharist around Daphne Seidler’s coffin in the Lady Chapel. Last weekend’s Coronation re-enactment included Boy Bishop play acting the Archbishop giving bread and wine to the Queen and Duke at the Coronation eucharist. All are examples of the making holy of life at this service.

Each Eucharist, majestic or simple, pleads Calvary.  Pleads, note, not repeats. Christ died once for all. His death cannot be repeated but his Sacrifice abides for ever. It is that sacrifice he renews before us as he blesses bread and wine through the priest.

"This is my Body...this is my Blood" offered for you to the Father, given to you in Communion. It is a good practice to bow or bend the knee as we come into Church or leave Church, or as we approach or leave the Altar – for there is a special Eucharistic presence. Outside the eucharist, Christ is present, truly present, under the veil of the Aumbry. Even when the altar lights are blown out the light by the Aumbry burns on where the Sacrament is reserved for Communion of the housebound or for our corporate devotion as in the Benediction or blessing given from the consecrated Host at times during evensong. On Monday we were reminded of this symbol of God’s perpetual presence with his people in Horsted Keynes when the Jubilee Beacon was lit from the everlasting Aumbry light.

Incidentally to honour that perpetual presence by bowing or bending the knee when coming and going from before the Aumbry does not deny that presence elsewhere through the reading of Scripture, in Christian Fellowship, in the beauty of nature, in holy people and so on.

Yet mindful of Christ's Presence let us never forget its vital link to the first purpose of every Eucharist, which is action, sacrificial action. The Eucharist is about giving, giving to God. Jesus the Son gives himself in loving Sacrifice. We are to give our lives, our souls and bodies, our needs, our joys, our sorrows, our hopes, our fears, in union with his perfect Offering. Lives so given are lives consecrated, lives transformed by the Gift of the consecrated elements, "The Body of Christ", "Amen", "The Blood of Christ", "Amen".

Through Him, with Him and in Him, then, let us give glory to God the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit this Corpus Christi Day, confident that God will accept our self offering and as ever give us more than we can ask or imagine in this most Holy Sacrament.

Queen’s Diamond Jubilee 8am 3rd June 2012

Well today’s a special day and we’ve got a special visitor.

After all the prayers we’ve said in this Church for the Queen over 60 years we’ve got her exact likeness before us as part of today’s celebration.

Over 60 years Queen Elizabeth is said to have been seen by more people than any other person in the history of the world.

It’s because she’s lived long – God save her – and that over her reign the world’s mass media has mushroomed.

The image of the Queen has gone all round the world.

But what lies behind it?

From a Christian vantage point it’s the coronation or crowning ceremony which for her happened on Tuesday 2nd June 1953 in Westminster Abbey

On this her diamond Jubilee weekend we’re mindful of that occasion just short of 60 years ago when Elizabeth received a special blessing in the Holy Spirit through being anointed with holy oil at a Christian eucharist.

On her coronation morning a gold ornamental flask, the Ampulla, was filled with aromatic oil and placed on the high altar of Westminster Abbey. The eagle shaped Ampulla (show) and its accompanying gold spoon had been brought with the rest of the Crown Jewels from safekeeping in the Tower of London.

During the Coronation eucharist the Archbishop of Canterbury blessed the oil and placed it in the form of a cross on the Queen’s hands, chest and head saying Be thy head anointed with holy oil: as kings, priests, and prophets were anointed. And as Solomon was anointed king by Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet, so be thou anointed, blessed, and consecrated Queen over the peoples.

The British monarchy is a Christian ministry of service and leadership that starts at the eucharist. It builds on the anointing of Old Testament rulers that signalled their function as people set apart for the protection and service of God’s people.

We’ve answered what makes the Queen the Queen, now another question:

What makes a Christian a Christian?

The clue – the answer - was given us last week at Pentecost.

It’s to be anointed with the Holy Spirit.

God sent his Son Jesus Christ to earth to die for us, to be raised and to pour out God’s Holy Spirit so that the whole world could one day share in his anointing.
Jesus is called Christ, which means the One anointed by the Spirit, and Jesus Christ was anointed so we could share in the Holy Spirit that he has.

A Christian is someone who shares in the anointing of the Anointed One.

In being anointed and crowned the Queen was set apart by God among other things to protect the poor and bring justice to the oppressed at home or abroad. The Queen’s anointing and coronation prepared her for national service in a great succession of Christian and Jewish leaders. Old Testament Kings were crowned after their anointing with a simple gold band. British monarchs have had some of the most splendid crowns in the world.

This week the children of our School made crowns for themselves. This has a message for us this morning. If God is our King and we are his children that makes us princes and princesses in God’s royal court. When you were baptised you were given a great dignity. The Bible says Christians are a kingly people, a royal priesthood.
Just as the Queen will for her whole life be our anointed ruler so we who’ve been anointed in baptism walk tall – we’re God’s children, king’s children.

The Crown marks out the monarch but in a profound sense every Christian is marked out by God’s love. A saintly thirteenth century King of France wrote: I think more of the place where I was baptised than of the Cathedral where I was crowned, for the dignity of a child of God which was bestowed upon me at baptism is greater than that of a ruler of a kingdom. The latter I shall lose at death, the other shall be my passport to everlasting glory.

A good thought to end on. Meanwhile - God save the Queen!

Pentecost 27th May 2012

On Pentecost Sunday we celebrate the Holy Spirit’s vital and vitalising role.

He is God in the present moment bringing all that Jesus has done for us into play here and now. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability This was so that right there in Jerusalem and right now in Horsted Keynes the love of God might be communicated mind to mind and heart to heart.

Christianity is a seizing with exhilaration upon the wonder of God seen as never seen before in the coming, dying and rising of Jesus Christ.

It means if God had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it. If God had a wallet, your photo would be in it.

God loves us so much that though he can live anywhere in the universe he seeks to live in a place only you can allow him to live – in your open heart.

When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth Saint John writes. That truth is of our making by God, our redeeming by the Son of God and our being made holy by the Spirit of God.

As Pascal said, holiness is the church’s greatest influence. When God gets into people’s lives it makes them holy enlarging their hearts and it shows. It brings our humanity into its right mind as the Holy Spirit rights what’s wrong in us.

God, who gave us life, loves us so much, with all our shortcomings, he wants to give us his life, to dwell deep within us, for that is why we were made.

The truth of God and of ourselves is this – God loves us and loves us just as we are – but he loves us too much to leave us that way and so he offers us the Holy Spirit to dwell with us and in us.

Pentecost as Feast of the Spirit is a Feast of truth-telling as we heard in the reading from the Acts. The Holy Spirit brought the truth of God’s love into all those national groups, Parthians, Medes, Elamites and so on by his miraculous translation through the gift of tongues.

Holiness and truth communicated with love and power.

This truth of God’s desire to fill every human heart with holy love, according to St Paul, already infects the universe, as he writes in Romans 8 verse 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.

I have seen and met on occasion people whose godliness contained a force it was hard to resist. There’s something of this around in St Giles – would there were more - since holiness is indeed the church’s greatest influence.

So today, and always, our prayer should be Come Holy Spirit and kindle in us the fire of your love! Or, as in the Psalm set for today, Psalm 104: Send forth your Spirit, O Lord, and renew the face of the earth.

The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth and holiness. He’s also the power of God. At the eucharist we speak in the Creed of Christ’s incarnation being accomplished from the Holy Spirit. We pray that by the power of your Holy Spirit the gifts of bread and wine may be changed. Send the Holy Spirit on your people we pray. And lastly send us out in the power of your Spirit to live and work to your praise and glory.

The Holy Spirit is into application – making God take flesh, making bread and wine God’s vehicles, taking us out into the world as those first disciples went so that in [their] own languages [they] hear [us] speaking about God’s deeds of power.

So how can we make Pentecost more applicable in our own lives this morning?

Each eucharist is meant to be a mini-Pentecost, each Holy Communion an individual Pentecost, set within the Spirit sealed communion of the Church whose birthday we mark today.

I end with a vivid illustration of the application of the Holy Spirit to life from a book entitled ‘Triumphs of the Spirit in Russia’ by Donald Nicholl. The tale, from the Second World War, is of how the Holy Spirit moved a group of women to show compassion towards German war prisoners. Here it is.

‘In ‘41 Mama took me back to Moscow. There I saw our enemies for the first time...nearly 20,000 German war prisoners were to be marched in a single column through the streets...The pavements swarmed with onlookers, cordoned off by soldiers and police. The crowd was mostly women - Russian women with hands roughened by hard work, lips untouched by lipstick, and thin hunched shoulders which had borne half the burden of the war. Every one of them must have a father or a husband, a brother or a son killed by the Germans. They gazed with hatred in the direction which the column was to appear. At last we saw it. The general marched at the head, massive chins stuck out, lips folded disdainfully, their whole demeanour meant to show superiority over their plebian victors.

‘They smell of eau de Cologne, the bastards’, someone in the crowd said with hatred. The women were clenching their fists. The soldiers and policemen had all they could do to hold them back. All at once something happened to them. They saw German soldiers, thin, unshaven, wearing dirty blood-stained bandages, hobbling on crutches or leaning on the shoulder of their comrades: the soldiers walked with their heads down. The street became dead silent - the only sound was the shuffling of boots and the thumping of crutches.

‘Then I saw an elderly woman in broken-down boots push herself forward and touch a policeman’s shoulder, saying, “Let me through”. There must have been something about her that made him step aside. She went up to the column, took from inside her coat something wrapped in a coloured handkerchief and unfolded it. It was a crust of black bread. She pushed it awkwardly into the pocket of the soldier, so exhausted that he was tottering on his feet. And then suddenly from every side women were running towards the soldiers, pushing into their hands bread, cigarettes, whatever they had. The soldiers were no longer enemies. They were people’.

‘Triumphs of the Spirit in Russia’ - that was the title of the book containing this impressive tale.

‘Triumphs of the Spirit in Horsted Keynes - this is what this Sermon is angling for as God’s People at St. Giles take Pentecost literally to heart.

The moral of the story we heard is, whatever grand spiritual aspirations we make the Holy Spirit is closest to us when we are about our neighbours, sorting out our destructive attitudes, putting love in where there is none, recognising the humanity of those who are somewhat blind to ours.

This is the humble work of Jesus’ redemption being applied to our lives and through our lives to others. It starts in us here as by the power of the Holy Spirit the gifts of bread and wine are taken and given so that sent out in the power of the Spirit we might live and work to God’s praise and glory.

Living in his holiness and truth communicating his love through his empowerment!

Come Holy Spirit and kindle in us the fire of your love! Send forth your Spirit, O Lord, and renew the face of the earth – starting with me!

Easter 7 eucharist with marriage blessing and baptism 20 May 2012

Our congratulations to Stephen and Victoria on their marriage.

With Michael and Annabelle they are forming a building block of the Church - a Christian family.

They've known each other 13 years. Victoria's roots are in the village and Stephen's in Burgess Hill. Victoria's a beauty therapist and Stephen an electrician.

Today they pledge to inner beauty and connect to a power beyond this world.

Stephen has had an adrenalin rush or two caused when someone says a wire's dead and it isn't!

Today through their marriage blessing and their daughter's baptism they're connecting with a live line.

This morning they with Annabelle connect to Holy Spirit power as they receive a special anointing from God.

It's the week before Pentecost so we're all due a reminder of the power of the Holy Spirit.

Many think Christmas is the greatest Christian feast but it's not. Easter is. Christmas isn't even in second place. Pentecost - alias Whitsun - is, so Christmas comes third.

The birth of Jesus is famous because he died and rose at Easter.  He's also the one who sent the Holy Spirit on the Church at Pentecost so his resurrection power could be with her to the end of time.

Christianity is the full revelation of God. You can find traces of that revelation in other religions but the full picture is the Trinity. We bless Stephen, Victoria and Annabelle today in the name of the Father who made the world, of the Son who was send to overcome our sins and of the Holy Spirit who brings the whole of God into each moment.

The Holy Spirit is the God in the present moment bringing God’s love, power and joyful goodness to play in our lives.

Of course when one person of the Trinity acts all act. We can’t say the Son and the Spirit were absent at the creation, or that the Father and the Spirit were absent when the Son came on the earth or that when we experience the Holy Spirit this morning the Father and the Son are not in tow.

When God acts, the whole of God acts. Bear this in mind as I continue.

Our first reading tells how the Holy Spirit led the apostles at the beginning in the choice of St Matthias to replace Judas Iscariot as one of the Twelve. The same Spirit will guide Stephen and Victoria in the important decisions of their life.

Jesus says to his Father in today's Gospel reading 'the words you gave to me I have given to them'. The Christian good news is given to be handed on and the Holy Spirit is our God sent motivator. Stephen, Victoria and all of us know good news of a God who loves us and that's the most precious thing we could share with anyone.

Of course God can't be seen. Like the air around us he's invisible until the wind blows. Breathe on me breath of God we just sang. Breathe on Stephen, Victoria, Michael, Annabelle and all of us.

No one has ever seen God the Bible says but Jesus Christ made him known by a 33 year life, a cruel death, a glorious resurrection and by plugging us into the power of this at Pentecost.

Marriage and baptism, like the other five sacraments, are personal Pentecost’s. They plug us in to Holy Spirit living full of the surprises of God.

Last Sunday one of the cancer patients we prayed for in Church texted us catching the notices slot to tell us God saved his life through prayer. We were all reminded that God is God of the present moment ready to speak into it where there’s faith to welcome his gifts.

May Stephen, Victoria and all of us have eyes to see and engage in joy with the surprises of God.

Today is a new beginning for the Frettens but every day is a new beginning for all of us. It’s the first day of the rest of our lives.

May the Holy Spirit come upon us this day to make it his own so we live to see his possibilities opening up in our lives, possibilities that are richer than our widest imagining.

This Church building is made up of hundreds of stones quarried 900 years ago in West Hoathly. Here's a slab from that quarry.

The Frettens are themselves today made a building block in our Church since the real building blocks of the Church are families called into Christian fellowship.

May God pave the way for this in making St Giles attractive to all four of them, and may he make them a blessing to him, to St Giles and to all who share their lives in years to come.

Easter 6 13th May 2012

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 sloth 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 speak to us in The Crown, The Horsted, The Green Man as powerfully as in St Giles. There are people in his image there and 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. This morning we come before God with sorrow that yet another priest, one who ministered as near as Burgess Hill, has been accused of an unthinkable, unspeakable crime.

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 sloth sin, 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.

So, brothers and sisters, may the eucharist be a tonic to you this morning, a fresh immersion in the love that come 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 spiritual sloth and seek a vision of God that’s ever more magnificent, built more and more to his dimensions and less to ours!

Easter 5 8am 6th May 2012

A vine in the broader sense refers to any climbing or trailing plant though the narrower and original meaning is the grapevine.

When Jesus is said by St John to describe himself as the true vine the evangelist provides a dynamic vision, one of climbing, spreading and fruiting. It is one of scripture’s great images of revitalisation that touches on a receipe for our fruitfulness as a church and as individual Christians that is from the Lord himself.

Alone of the four Gospels St John omits the account of the institution of the eucharist. He more than compensates by this passage and the earlier passage on the Bread of Life. If we could think that participation in the eucharist was secondary to St John we would be brought up short by Chapter 6 verse 53: Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.

John 15 in many interpretations was originally the follow on from the account of the Last Supper and foot washing in John 13, an alternative last discourse chapter 14. Such a connection would explain the Eucharistic symbolism of union with Christ to death. The fruit of the vine is the means by which believers right up to this hour are made sharers in the sacrificial death of the Lord Jesus Christ in anticipation of the life of the world to come.

I am the vine, you are the branches.

Our participation in the holy eucharist is captured here as surely as in the words of St Paul in 1 Corinthians 10.17 Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread. To be Christian is to attend to God in union with Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit. The eucharistic bread makes us one with Christ through the Spirit and through the unbroken apostolic succession of bishops and priests. We are branches grafted onto the true vine which is Christ inseparable from his church.

The eucharist is the great source of the church’s revitalisation. The church makes the eucharist and the eucharist makes the church. I am the vine, you are the branches. As often as we attend to God with wine and bread the work of redemption that centres on Calvary is set forth and the fruitfulness of the church, Christ our Vine, is increased.

Our dwelling together in the church as branches of Christ the Vine is most perfectly expressed in Sunday obligation to the eucharist. ‘The Lord’s people gather on the Lord’s Day the Lord’s House around the Lord’s table’. In this ordered gathering is both the image and the reality of Christ‘s body, head and limbs as Paul puts it or vine and branches a in St John. From the bread and wine offered and consecrated the Lord’s people draw revitalisation from the Lord week by week.

If only we believed it! The secret of church revitalisation is to see ourselves and believe ourselves to be what God is nurturing us to be.

If John 15 is indirectly a reminder of corporate worship it is directly a call to the prayerful discipleship of individuals. We attend to God in worship but also in personal prayer and the conscious stewardship of our lives. 4Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.

Just as a natural branch carries the life giving sap through itself to serve the fruit so by divine power and consent of our wills we see God providing in us and through us to give life to the world around us.

John 15 has impact because it is full of commands. Abide in me what a wake up call! There are enormous implications. If our Christianity is self serving, if it focuses our selfish spiritual preoccupations, there will be little fruitfulness because we won’t be conduit branches but parasitical branches sucking in the experience of the Holy Spirit or Holy Communion or whatever grace comes our way. Abiding in the vine, in Christ, is a wake up call. It’s saying self reliance is out, or rather self reliance will get you so far, but not as far as the things that really impact this world and have significance in the next. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.

A little branch of the vine can bear an enormous cluster of grapes because it is a conduit of life giving sap. A little faithfulness to Christ in scripture and eucharist and prayer can be enormously vitalising if it expresses a desire to be rooted in absolute dependence upon Our Lord and undoubting confidence in him. Part of the fruit this passage speaks of is prayer that cannot be misdirected because it is prayer that comes from obedient union with Jesus.  7If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.

The church’s mission is weak because her prayer is weak – which is my prayer and your prayer.

Church revitalisation isn’t about finding new techniques but investing the disciplines of worship and prayer with renewed expectancy of faith.

If your prayer is rooted in the Vine that is Jesus you know that you can ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.

So be it – as we reflect for a moment and anticipate sharing once more in the offering of and communion imparted by the fruit of the Vine which will become our spiritual drink.