Feast of the Most Holy Trinity 26th May 2013

Today we celebrate the revelation of God as an eternal fellowship of love, three persons equal in majesty, undivided in splendour, yet one God.

The doctrine of the most holy and undivided Trinity is challenging, relevant, intriguing and essential – four headings to steer our delving this morning into foundational truth and life.

Firstly it’s a challenge. Reason takes you so far in Christianity. We could never have invented God in three persons, it’s revealed truth. Then you have the question of weighing other revelations – Islam and Hinduism besides the Judaism from which the Trinitarian revelation came.

Preachers go on leave this Sunday for fear of a seemingly cold, calculated, mathematical doctrine. Three in one and one in three. Why three? Why not one, says Islam, why not more says Hinduism, why not none says the atheist mocking our feeble attempts to get our mind round God three in one.

There’s the challenge set before us in Trinitarian faith but that challenge comes from historical events. These clearly reveal the nature of God in the coming of Jesus, whose death and resurrection we've been following up to Ascension Day, and the coming of the Spirit on Pentecost day. It’s a challenge that might lead you to the church library so you can better answer for your faith to those who believe in one God, no God or many gods as opposed to one God in three persons.

Secondly the doctrine of the Trinity is utterly relevant. I was thinking this week as Parliament moved us towards same-sex marriage that marriage is a union of life-giving love because human beings are in the image of God who is himself a union of life-giving love. Keeping true to ourselves as human beings, and true to the life-giving nature of marriage is keeping true to God no less, God as he has revealed himself to us.

The world, all of life sprang from him – notice we talk of God with a single pronoun despite his three persons, also with a male pronoun on account of Jesus. The feminist rewriting of God as the Mother, the Daughter and the Holy Spirit may be attractive to some but is actually an irreverent rewriting of how God speaks of himself in revelation. Rewriting the Trinity as creator, saviour and sanctifier achieves inclusive speech but at the cost of depersonalising God.

God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is supremely personal. At our beginning and at our end there is God and there is love because God is love within himself. How could God be so without the distinction of persons within him? How do we know all of this – we do so from Christian experience as our second reading reminded us. St Paul writes we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ through whom we have gained access by faith…God…who has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit (Romans 5) The doctrine of the Trinity is true and relevant to our experience by which the coming of Jesus and the Spirit help us know God as loving Father.

Challenging, relevant – thirdly the doctrine of God should be intriguing. The eternal fellowship of love that is God draws us in to himself. What after all is the Church for other than to serve God’s purpose to bring as many souls on earth as possible into fellowship with him?

The doctrine of the Trinity is revealed first of all in Our Lord’s coming into a human family with Mary and Joseph, into village life in Nazareth, then into the missionary partnership of the disciples. That divine society continues after his resurrection and the gift of the Spirit as one, holy catholic and apostolic church which is God’s never-ending family! Joy is its characteristic, out-of-this-world joy, that’s the most intriguing of all qualities. In the presence of the Lord there is joy for evermore writes the Psalmist.

How intriguing God is, and we are. If you want evidence for God look in the mirror and read Psalm 8 what are mortals that you should be mindful of them, mere human beings, that you should seek them out?

St Nicodemus writes of each human as being the macrocosm compared to the microcosm of the cosmos. In mind and spirit like God we can contain the universe. Being in God’s image we too are intriguing – we point beyond ourselves. O Lord our governor, how glorious is your name in all the world. You have made (us) little lower than the angels and crown (us) with glory and honour. (Psalm 8)

A human being in isolation isn't a true human for, in John Donne’s words, no man is an island. What’s intriguing about God as divine society mirrors what we find intriguing about ourselves, namely our desire for society and friendship. This desire will be fully satisfied only in the communion of saints who can be thought of as standing near God as a corona or crown around the sun.

Challenging, relevant, intriguing – lastly the Trinitarian doctrine of God is essential.

It is essential because Christianity is a religion of salvation and that salvation stands or falls on the divinity of Jesus Christ. We read Jesus words in the Gospel all that belongs to the Father is mine…the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you (John 16:15) Does my eternal destiny depend on my own good works, lacking as they are, or on a relationship freely offered me by God in his Son? In Jesus do we really meet with God himself? That, as they say, is the twenty four thousand dollar question hidden behind keeping a feast day for the Blessed Trinity.

This doctrine might sound cold and mathematical but it follows a logic of love, love beyond all measure, extravagant, unconditional love for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son Jesus Christ so that all who believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life. (John 3:16) To believe this is to believe God isn’t One but One God in three persons.

The essential truth behind today’s Feast has been told from Advent to Pentecost to reach its summary on Trinity Sunday.

It’s challenging, of course – God is God and has revealed himself this way and not another way.

It’s relevant - the way we see God affects the way we see ourselves and steers us from unworthy pursuits.

It’s intriguing because the loving fellowship of God in three persons chimes in with our sociable nature and would draw it to joyful completion in the communion of saints

It’s an essential doctrine because without it the divinity of Christ falls, the word of God is emptied of power and the sacraments become empty ritual for God’s coming to us in Jesus and the Spirit is denied.

Truth and life and worship are all thrown together in Christian religion so if we would live our lives best we should always take heed of revealed truth, however hard to grasp, and to worship which is our real grasp of it.

As Michael Ramsey wrote The Church’s perilous office of teaching is inseparable from the Church’s worship of the mystery whereby it exists.

May all I have shared serve that worship of God we now enter at the eucharist through Jesus Christ, to whom, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, be all might, majesty, dominion and power now and for evermore. Amen.

Pentecost Sunday  8am                                19^th May 2013

Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, “Out of the believers heart shall flow rivers of living water.” Now this he said about the Spirit.

Thirst for God is a gift of God.

It’s the one who is thirsty who comes to drink of him and that thirst, the exercise of our faith, is his gift even if it’s something we have to exercise or act upon.

The writer of Psalm 42 says As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God Psalm 42v1

At Pentecost we are led to think from that sort of physical thirst towards deepening the spiritual thirst which will keep God and all he has done for us in Jesus Christ central to our life.

St Bernadette was a shepherdess who lived in the Pyrenee mountains in the south of France over 150 years ago. She had something of a thirst for God.

One day she had a vision of Jesus’ Mother who told her to lift some stones in the ground and a stream of water slowly emerged.

That stream is well known today. It is in Lourdes where many people who’re thirsty for God go and find healing and refreshment. I’ve been there, drunk the water and bathed in it for healing.

Here’s some of the water (Lourdes water). I’ve put some in the porch holy water this morning so you could take some on the way out.

I said people who’re thirsty for God go to Lourdes and find healing and refreshment but you don’t need to go to Lourdes.

The stone you need to lift is here. By that I mean the things that weight upon your heart and quench the flow of the Holy Spirit in your life.

 What does it mean to be thirsty for God?

It means to know your need of him and to be actively addressing that need through prayer, reading scripture, and receiving the sacraments.

Our Lord taught in Matthew 5: blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness sake for they shall be satisfied. If you’re not actually hungering this morning are you at least hungering to hunger, or hungering to hunger to hunger?

To want more of God in your life we need to pray and through prayer you also receive more of God in your life.  It’s an extraordinary circle and it’s no circle of delusion.

I remember once feeling God was a long way away and saying to him ‘God if you’re there show yourself’. I happened to be walking in the garden and I felt a leaf on a tree speak to me: ‘I made you. I love you. I want to fill you with my Spirit’ That was when I first experienced the Holy Spirit in power and it helped me to pray more easily and love other people more.

When you’re thirsty for God and tell him so he gives you his Holy Spirit.

Before Pentecost Mary and the apostles kept a nine day prayer vigil to express their thirst for God and then we read how At Pentecost as we just heard they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind…and all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.

To be filled you need to be empty.

Holy Spirit Sunday is a challenge to all of our self-sufficiency. It’s a reminder that to be filled by the Spirit we need the resolve to empty ourselves in service.

Christians, to continue the water image of today’s Gospel, are made like fresh water pools. These need both an inlet and an outlet.

Water goes stagnant when it lacks either an inlet or an outlet. So it is with our souls. They go stagnant unless they both receive from God and give to God.

Pentecost is something very personal. It’s something that can happen in our lives today as either we lift the stones that block the inlet or increase our outgoings in venturesome love and service.

Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, “Out of the believers heart shall flow rivers of living water.” Now this he said about the Spirit.

Come down, O love divine, seek thou this soul of mine,
and visit it with thine own ardour glowing.
O Comforter, draw near, within my heart appear,
and kindle it, thy holy flame bestowing.

Rogation eucharist 5th May 2013

What we do in Church on a Sunday isn't just for us it's for everyone and everything.

I mean our reaching up to God in prayer with his church has an impact on us, on the church and on the whole world.

This morning we’re reinstating Rogation Sunday, at the request of the liturgy and worship advisory group, so we’ll be going across the churchyard saying prayers for the earth and blessing a field.

Rogation Sunday means asking Sunday. In past centuries asking God's protection over the crops in May was seen as an urgent need in an agricultural community. In restoring that tradition we’re extending it into prayer for the world of work and good stewardship of the world's resources including human labour whether in office, factory or field.

'Whatsoever you shall ask for in my name, that will I do' Jesus said in John 14 verse 13.

This Sunday is a challenge to our self sufficiency, a reminder of a hurting world needing care and prayer and an eye opener into how every eucharist lifts the world to God.

A little thought on each.

First that to ask God challenges self-sufficiency. To believe in God does that in any case and prayer is just an affirmation of that faith. I mean faith that our life and everyone's life and everything in creation exists through him and for him.

In our daily prayers don't we say 'Lord bless everyone in the world and, as you have occasion, bless me and mine that our lives may be better directed to your praise and service'?
Asking God makes him real in our thoughts, purifies those thoughts and through the gift of his loving presence fills our hearts with love for all around us. We become part of the answer to our prayers.

How many times have you prayed to God for someone and been left with a practical action to accomplish. I was praying for my oldest son and his family on Tuesday and afterwards felt I needed to go on Facebook and invite them down from London for the day - and this fitted their thoughts. God knew, but he needed my active love.

Doing what we shall do this morning is writing prayer large as the challenge it is to our self sufficiency. It is secondly a reminder of a hurting world in need of prayer and care. Saying those litanies may sound like reading God a shopping list but it’s more our taking responsibility with him for the way the world is.

Prayer, asking God for things, changes things. It does so through expressing and rekindling our love for the world and its sorrows and joys. It does so also by the direct intervention of God.

'Whatsoever you shall ask for in my name, that will I do'. Note that Jesus says 'in my name' so asking to win the lottery may have a qualification!  To win it so church can have an amenities annex with toilets may be more in his name than to win it so we can have a helicopter to hop to France.

To pray in the name of Jesus is to pray for what he would want in any situation and the prayers we offer on Rogation Sunday cover a tremendous range on that account. And no, they don't include a church loo but it's pretty obvious we'd get more people praying here and praying here longer if we had one.

Today's Rogation procession takes us out of our own concerns and challenges our self sufficiency as it gives us a reminder of the needs of the hurting world around us.

Thirdly and lastly it’s an eye opener into how every eucharist lifts the world to God. 

It does so through Our Lord's choice of bread and wine to be instruments of his love since each material incorporates the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands.

The collection we make at Sunday eucharist allied to our standing orders to St Giles  is presented alongside the bread and wine. It actually pays for the elements. Bread, wine, money are symbols of our life, of everyone's life as well as that of the whole creation. Life that comes from God to be taken, blessed, broken and shared by God who not only gives us life but gives us his life on the Cross and in the elements that are to us his body and blood.

There's something pretty awesome about Rogation Sunday. We pray for the fields and this makes a difference to them and to us. We’re reminded that the fields and the church go together for, as John Wesley taught, ‘God does nothing save in answer to prayer’. Without prayer God's hands are bound - so a prosperous community must also be in some sense a prayerful community.

The action at this altar on any Sunday is Rogation, is ‘an asking’. It's an asking for the Holy Spirit to bless the fruit of the earth and the labour of human hands, through their offering in the sacrifice of the eucharist and through our Communion with them when blessed that gives us new vision and fresh love to serve the world we’re both in and of.

'Whatsoever you shall ask for in my name, that will I do'.

So be it!

Baptism of Ruby Fuller & BCP Easter 5 James 1.17-21 28th April 2013

Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. James 1.17

Spring has sprung. When St James speaks of gifts from above we are very aware at this time of a flowering of life and vitality that comes in Christian understanding from God the giver of every perfect gift.

As I look out of the Rectory window I can watch the lambs running joyfully in the field below. They’re an uplifting image of freedom that touches a spring inside of me. Their excitement at life is evident as they go leaping and bounding around, blissfully unaware of the commercial aspect of their life, nor of its brevity.

In this moment they are an image of joyful abandonment that refreshes my spirit. Their seeming carelessness goes as soon as their mothers lift themselves from the ground and they dart underneath them for milk. They are driven as all animals are, including myself, by the need for food.

As I watch them I am uplifted and as I am lifted I become aware of how unlike a carefree lamb my life is running. I am regretful of past faults, mindful of a load of administration pressing upon me and I am somewhat anxious about all the tasks that fall on me as a parish priest.

Unlike the lambs I am aware of the weight of care that pulls my spirit down. For the lambs each moment stands alone – no past regrets or future anxieties – indeed no real sense of past or future accomplishment. They prosper without repentance, just following the law of nature, since they are incapable of the disobedience that is mine. Their capacity to skip down the field shows a mastery over gravity that, whilst warming my heart, challenges my sinful weight of self preoccupation. 

I think Stewart and Alison, with all their cares as parents, must feel the same when they look at Ruby and thrill at her joyful carelessness. It is so good to have you here following your marriage almost two years ago. We are delighted – me especially as Cricket Club Chaplain – to further join your family to God’s family here at St Giles.

That image of gravitational pull can be a way of thinking about the things that matter in life. You could think of the gravitational pull up of divine love as competing with the gravitational pull down of the evil in the world and that in our souls we call sin. The one gravitational field of the spirit draws us into God’s love and the other field drags us down.

When the astronauts trod on the moon they found themselves able to leap and jump with ease because gravity on the moon is a sixth that on earth. If they had been able to visit Jupiter they would have crawled on the surface so strong is the downward gravity.

You and I get pulled down all the time. Our bodies, thankfully, get pulled down to stay on earth. But our spirits – they get pulled down too and can feel very heavy.

Human beings are pulled down in the gravitational field of what our first lesson describes as sordidness and rank growth of wickedness. The downward gravity of sin affects us all. When we try to rise above it by our own efforts we feel like the man in the gym trying to lift weights that are beyond his capacity. The more we try to lift ourselves the heavier life feels. The gravitational field of God’s love that lifts our lives can’t be felt through our own efforts.  It reaches down to offer us a hand up in Jesus and all he has done for us by his life, death and resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit.

As we struggle with our relationships, insecurities and spiritual emptiness we find ourselves caught by the gravitational lure of sin as if in a quicksand. The more we struggle in our own strength to release ourselves the deeper we go down. I remember someone driving his father’s land rover onto a beach south of Morecambe Bay where it sank hopelessly into quick sand there before they could get a purchase on it. He had some answering to do to his dad! It is a sad truth of life that so many of our attempts to better ourselves prove counter-productive. People caught in quicksand sink faster through gravity the more they struggle to get out of it. They need an upward pull from outside themselves.

Jesus does that for us when we make him our choice as we do in baptism. Through Christ’s resurrection from cruel death the gravitational pull of God’s love has proved itself more powerful than the quicksands of sin, death and the devil.

The sinful human condition is something we can’t escape from unaided. We can’t become godlike. We can’t elevate ourselves beyond the quicksand that drags us down however hard we try. Jesus can, though - he can make us godlike. He will - if we will let him - provide us with the upward pulls we need hour by hour to rise above the heaviness of our human condition into the glorious liberty of the children of God.

Look to him my friends – not least in this Holy Eucharist!

Easter 4 8am Sunday 21st April 2013

My sheep hear my voice. I know them and they follow me.

We’re still taking in Tom Irlam’s death.

The good shepherd theme leads me to reiterate what I shared at his funeral on Wednesday about  Lieutenant – sorry I said 'lootenant' on the day – Lieutenant Irlam’s days of active military service. He was evidently a leader who knew his men, and, I said, that encouraged me to be a shepherd who knows his sheep.

By that analogy I said he was my sheep dog at this service! We’re filling in the gaps for coordinating and serving and let’s work together on that.

We miss that voice, raised with its melodious Welsh flow. I’m afraid we 8 o’clockers have to be sheep not only who hear Jesus’ voice but sheep whose voices are heard by Jesus – and the priest his under shepherd. I’m sure Tom would back me in giving you this reminder – turn up the volume in your responses, brothers and sisters! Without his stentorian tones that marshalled voices in liturgy we now have an uncertain feel.

It couldn’t be as bad a feel as the description of St Giles’ worship 100 years ago from Land of hope and glory author Arthur Benson whose home was at Tremains with the Archbishop, his father’s widow Mary. Mary Benson’s biographer Rodney Bolt has a couple of strange anecdotes. One is the absent-minded Truro parson whose sister had to secure him to the altar rail with a dog chain and padlock to prevent him wandering off before the service was over. The second amusing story is of Mary’s attempts to get Arthur to church here at St Giles. In expressing his disdain Arthur described our worship here as ‘people penned in rows like sheep intermittently crying out together like ducks in a pool’. How very unkind!

My sheep hear my voice. I know them and they follow me.

I must change gear into the substance of today’s scripture from which Tom’s demise has made for a sad but necessary diversion.

How do we hear God’s voice?

Reading the Bible, of course. I commend the new website resources mentioned in the news sheet, especially Bible Alive show as a means of getting insight into the readings used in the Lectionary for weekday eucharists. Systematic bible reading helps us more fully lay hold of the word of God as we give time to it and to trying to make sense of the difficult bits.

Besides Bible Alive I would commend New Daylight show from Bible Reading Fellowship, not least because they’ve recently commissioned me to write for them.

We can hear God’s voice speaking to us as parts of scripture light up as if they were written for us individually.

We can also hear God’s voice speaking through the preacher, yes, and also through people we know as they encourage or challenge us.

Then he speaks direct, yes, he does, and for that to happen we need a disposition to silent reflection. Be still and know that I am God says the Psalmist. Maybe a few minutes a day, to stop what we’re doing, sit and listen, perhaps after reading the Bible, maybe even after reading the paper. What would you like me to pray for from this morning’s Telegraph, or whatever?

My sheep hear my voice. I know them and they follow me.

We serve a living God who is always present with us, always close to us, who loves us through and through, so we shouldn’t doubt he will speak to us when we ask him to.   Let’s use the silence now to listen to him as best we can.

Annual parochial church meeting eucharist 14th April 2013 8am/10am

The annual parochial church meeting is an opportunity to be reminded of our vision as a church, of how it’s being implemented and who’s involved. It’s about challenge, affirmation and communication as well as refreshing leadership in some areas as the Holy Spirit prompts people to commit to new work as part of St Giles.

Our mission is stated on the news sheet. It is to grow in faith, love and numbers. That task is being addressed by some 60 of us involved day by day in church activities and another 60 either retired from an active role, save Sunday worship, or currently too stretched by work or family commitments or health considerations to be up front. This is a remarkable achievement for a village with population under 2,000.

The growth we seek has three dimensions – towards God in faith, towards the community in love and in the number that gather Sunday by Sunday and who work with us for Christian outreach. That growth is a work of invitation as Stuart Townend’s new hymn written out in the news sheet reminds us:

Come, people of the risen King, who delight to bring him praise. Come, all and tune your hearts to sing to the Morning Star of grace. From the shifting shadows of the earth we will lift our eyes to him, where steady arms of mercy reach to gather children in. Come, young and old from every land, men and women of the faith. Come, those with full or empty hands, find the riches of his grace.

Growth comes from the Lord’s invitation through us to seekers. It’s happening through the quality of our worship and friendliness as new attenders testify. Sacraments don’t need to be mechanical rituals. Preaching doesn’t need to be finger wagging moralism. Christian fellowship doesn't need to be holier than thou superiority. At St Giles there’s awesome warmth in the eucharist, gracious inspiration we trust in the range of preaching and preachers and a fellowship that sees its Christianity as about getting your head screwed on the right way.

The Gospel reading set for today addresses the issue of discernment that’s so essential as we look forward as a church with limited personnel and energies. The news sheet boat and fish logo capture its essence. The disciples fish unfruitfully until they get discerning advice from the Lord. Look with me at the last five lines of the passage from the beginning of St John Chapter 21:

Jesus said to them, ‘Children, you have no fish, have you?’ They answered him, ‘No.’ He said to them, ‘Cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some.’ So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so many fish.

Over the last year we've prayed discernment as a Church - and we've received it!

A year ago we were fishing fabric-wise on the left side of the boat as our PCC gave attention to best provision of amenities including a toilet at St Giles. The Lord turned our attention during 2012 to the right hand side, so to speak, as he opened up the Martindale refurbishment as a possibility through the Martindale Committee’s identifying and seeking the Verity Waterlow funding. That hasn't meant the church toilet being forgotten, just that Jesus gave us discernment through circumstances  to shift priorities as we sought to enhance our buildings overall to better serve growth in faith, love and numbers.

Faithful to that leading, and the call to fish for or rather engage with new people we’ve set out at the end of the PCC report a major challenge for 2013 as making the Martindale a more effective mission focus serving to bring new folk into the orbit of God’s love. If that is to happen we need people on board, people well formed in Christian faith to help build outreach.

Over the last two years several of us have been fishing to get connections with the youth. We sense, as if from the Lord, we need his discernment to fish elsewhere for them or for whoever the Lord has up his sleeve to lead the youth. That’s why we've written down another 2013 challenge as involving more young adults in church leadership.

In finance again discernment is being given and sought. For the third year running we've been unable to pay our parish share in full. It’s clear that of recent years we've only managed to pay it from the reserves we had then that are now pretty well emptied. I would like to see fresh transparency over our finances which will serve corporate discernment and demonstrate more fully the generosity of St Giles membership and how the Lord is repaying it. God indeed loves a cheerful giver as St Paul writes to the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 9.7) and also encourages them, as I would encourage you, in these words: On the first day of every week, each of you is to put aside and save whatever extra you earn (1 Corinthians 16.2). In other words put your giving to God’s work top of the list and make it a proportion of your income.

The 23 group reports for 2012 are full of encouragement, though I ask myself as a church with 50 weekly communicants is our fishing like that I saw on Dieppe pier last week, too many people throwing their own lines? Most fish landed in Dieppe is caught in nets by fishing teams. Can a small church like ours really keep up 23 realms of engagement? How can we team up more?

That being said I’m a bit of a loner myself and that may need addressing. As the group reports show I’m responsible for two new initiatives, electronic discipleship and meditation group both, near to my heart, but which I see as experimental.

The First Steps and village lunch reports remind us how much the Martindale serves our mission. Now the Martindale looks a more attractive venue commercially we will have to watch and guard its use so that it serves our aim as a church which isn't raising money so much as growing Christians in faith, love and numbers.

That vision is best implemented by a strategy founded on prayerful discernment. As I said at Epiphany when we launched the new Mission Action Plan with my pair of scissors Show Each one reach one may be a good motto for 2013. Our main challenge is one of reaching out, cutting into spiritual apathy with the two scissor blades of prayer and invitation.

Through intercessory prayer for the spreading of the gift of faith we open ourselves to Our Lord’s invitation to fish in the right place. There are a good number of folk who’d come to Church if someone would ask them. The best way to identify who in your acquaintance, or down your street, may be open to an invitation from you to attend St Giles is to commit daily in prayer to the spread of faith.

Our spire points up to a God whose possibilities, exceeding our imagining, are released on earth through prayer.

'The future of the world lies with the intercessors and connectors.' Someone wrote. Will you help change the future of the world through St Giles by being the intercessors and connectors we so badly need to see the body of Christ built up in this place?

Each one reach one – by scissor blades of prayer and invitation – so that we anticipate in Horsted Keynes John’s Revelation, part of which we heard as our first reading, where every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, sing, ‘To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honour and glory and might for ever and ever! Amen!

Easter 2 Hope 7th April 2013

Easter Monday’s Start the Week on Radio 4 with Tom Sutcliffe, James Lasdun and John Gray got my grey cells going on the myth of progress. Before I went to celebrate the second Eucharist of Easter that Monday morning I received a hefty dose of pessimism. The programme majored on how reversible human progress is and the sort of Julie Andrews’ survival technique we adopt of ‘confidence in confidence’. False optimism protects us from voicing overmuch falling living standards, the poor unemployment prospects of our children, empty pension pots let alone our approaching death, harsh reality that it is.

Throughout the radio debate it was admitted people need religion to shape and give meaning to their lives. It was an admission that came down though to a sort of ‘no wonder people turn to religion to escape this awful scenario’. The assumption was religious belief provides an escape from reality – and yet the brutal realities we’re living through seem to demand such an escape, however irrational. Another coping mechanism around identified in Monday’s Start the Week is denial so that when you ask people how they’re getting on they come up with more and more bullish American style answers than the historic English pessimism that’s worked to date for the weather upwards.

As I went to Church on Easter Monday I thought: 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?

In Church on Easter Monday I celebrated the eucharist, as this morning, alongside the Paschal Candle. As I did so, thinking of the Radio programme, I came to think of the five pins stuck in it which represent the wounds of Christ, commemorated in 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 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 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 the 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 Cook telling me how important and helpful the holding cross was that she’d been given at the Hospice. Or the day before he died, as Colin Griffiths lay on his bed, I explained he’d be anointed on his head, reminder of baptism, and his palms, reminder of Jesus’ death for him. We’d just read the Holy Week Gospel of Christ’s Passion. I’ll never forget Colin sitting up and stretching his arms right out, as if on the Cross with Jesus. It was as if he volunteered himself to suffer with Jesus so he’d die and rise with Jesus. I think of Tom this Easter week, 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 Pam and all of us.  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 today from the book of Revelation we read of how such 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. This passage 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, 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!