St Bartholomew, Brighton Trinity Sunday 16th June 2019

Theology – the science of God – is vital because the God you attend to will change you. Attend to a wishy washy God and you’ll go wishy washy. Attend to a moral policeman and you’ll get censorious. To an indulgent God and you’ll enjoy yourself at the expense of others. Worship God as the genie in your lamp and he’ll never change you. Worship God as a distant Father figure and you’ll project bad life experience and make it ultimate.

Attend to the Trinity and you’ll become a child of God and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.

The Christian religion calls us to attend to a God who’s revealed in holy scripture and affirmed by the catholic creeds and the church’s liturgy. Today’s collect affirms that the confession of a true faith is to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity and in the power of the divine majesty to worship the Unity.

What does this mean? That God’s shown us through Jesus he’s Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Trinity Sunday’s slotted in at the end of six months when readings in church have followed the life of Our Lord up to his death and resurrection and the sending of the Spirit at Pentecost.

This Sunday we sum up Christianity as we affirm God to be three persons in one God. Why? Because that’s what he says he is. We’d never work this out for ourselves. It’s revealed from the action of God in history.

There are various illustrations. Take the water one - ice, water and steam are one substance with three forms – or take the love one - If God is love how could he be love before the world was made other than by being love within himself?

Or take that of a trellis supporting a vine. The word trellis means ‘woven with three threads’. God who is three is like a trellis supporting a fruitful vine, the church of Jesus Christ we’re part of. Unlike the trellis supporting a vine, the Trinity’s a living trellis. Without his life giving support the vine that’s the church would be a fruitless enterprise.

How you see God - theology - is vital because the God you attend to will change you.

In the eucharist we draw life from the living and true God through Christ who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit. It’s the way things are. God’s a fact - Father, Son and Spirit - though people have a million ideas about him. If people turn their backs on the Trinity they regress into muddled ideas of God which take you nowhere.

Not only ideas, spiritual experiences alleged to be of God mislead if they’re not seen in the light of the grace of Our Lord, the love of God the Father and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes people say to me ‘I feel God’s presence daily and don’t need your dogmas’. C.S.Lewis had a good answer to such a person: ‘I quite agreed with that man… he had probably had a real experience of God... and when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds… he… was turning from something real to something less real… if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he will also be turning from something real to something less real: turning from real waves to a bit of coloured paper. But here comes the point. The map is… only coloured paper, but… it's based on what… thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic...it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single isolated glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you’re content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America’.

The doctrine of the Trinity is a God-given map to the world opened up by the resurrection, a world you can’t reach by your own insight or efforts but, as the Gospel says, through the Spirit of truth who leads you into all truth. (John 16:13) As we heard in the passage from Romans we have hope of sharing the glory of God through faith that brings us the peace of Christ and God’s love [being] poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. (Romans 5:1,2,5). This is the wherewithal, the map if you like, to get to glory.

We come from God, we belong to God, we go to God.

Attending to God is our calling from all eternity. We were each of us made to see the King, the Lord of hosts, in his beauty. We began as babies attending very much to ourselves and end, or should end, by attending to God. What changes isn’t self love so much as the self that we love. As our lives expand in relationships into maturity we see that our self interest is one with that of the whole human community and of God three in one who made and makes it. This is how the Trinity saves us.

So to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, be ascribed as is most justly due all might majesty dominion and power, now and for ever and to the ages of ages. Amen.

All Saints, Roffey Pentecost 9 June 2019

How do you experience God?

As Christians we see him as the source of all that is, as the one who redeems our failings and as the fount of love: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

God is the One who is - the fount of being - and being fully alive is about living close to him.

The world makes us defensive about such belief because its blind to what’s beyond the physical order but God needs no defence. He is the One who is - the ground of being and as such beyond our grasp. That violent wind on Pentecost Sunday touched the disciples directly, personally, so they became aware of the closeness of the God who is the ground of all being.

Cutting my hedge last week I was very aware of the wind, working round it as it came and went. The hedge cuttings got carried across the road. Bees sheltering from the wind in the hedge didn’t like the hedge cutter and flew out at me. It was quite an experience! When the wind’s blowing you really know it, your skin gets refreshed and you breathe more freely but you’re reminded of your little place on earth compared to the elements. Who can tell where the wind comes from, where it starts or where it will end? We can only experience it, be in the midst of it, be touched as it blows, and work with it's consequences as I did with the hedge cuttings and the bees.

How do you experience God?

Like the wind, as Our Lord said to Nicodemus, the wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. (John 3:8). Seeing God, engaging with God, is as here and now as experiencing the air around you. As the Psalmist writes Be still and know that I am God (Psalm 46:10).

To be at home with God we need regular silence to be at home with ourselves. We live alas in an age full of artificial noise distracting us from this vital task. In today’s Gospel Our Lord says the Holy Spirit… will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you a the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. (John 14:26-27). How can we experience the Holy Spirit who is peace and balm for troubled hearts without opening ourselves to the present moment?

The Holy Spirit is God in the present moment. To experience God we must discipline ourselves to attend less to past regrets or future anxieties but to what’s here and now. In that discipline of prayerful attendance to God we experience again and again what the Gospel promises my peace I give to you… do not let your heart be troubled.

On Pentecost Sunday we end the liturgical cycle which started six months ago with Advent, a cycle that displays year by year the God who loves us so much he gives us himself, his Son and his Spirit. The Son of God became Son of man so children of men could become children of God! The God who made us loves us through and through so much so that he sent his Son to die and rise for us. Together on the Day of Pentecost they sent the Holy Spirit, to dwell with us, in us and among us in the Church. As we heard in the Romans reading: all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God… when we cry, ‘Abba! Father! it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. (Romans 8:14, 15b-17a)

How do you experience God?

Stop the flow of your life! Pray, Come, Holy Spirit! Be present to God - pray, read the bible, examine yourself, come to Mass, look to the needs of others!

God addresses you in the present moment, here at All Saints this 9th day of June at 11 o’clock! Then God in the present moment tomorrow morning at work or wherever - be still and know that I am God - this is the Holy Spirit’s invitation day after day, wherever, whenever!

Like the wind we can’t contain God but we can experience him. To secure us in the experience of his love God’s Son gives us bread and wine as living memorial of his saving work. By the Holy Spirit bread and wine are changed so we can be changed and the world can be changed through us. Today’s Feast recalls the outward flowing dynamic captured at every Mass that started with the wind of the Spirit at Pentecost and has blown the good news of Jesus worldwide. It challenges us to hoist our sails to the wind of Spirit so we can be taken where God wants us to be taken, as Bishop Mark said on Monday, bringing love wherever he knows there’s need of it.

‘I ask not to see. I ask not to know. I ask simply to be used’ wrote Cardinal Newman. Whilst its good to ask ‘How do you experience God?’ we shouldn’t expect to understand God so much as to place ourselves at his disposal and pray ‘Come, Holy Spirit’ to be empowered to travel on the best forward course. This we do now offering ourselves as a living sacrifice with Christ, welcoming the experience of his close presence in the Holy Sacrament, God in his Spirit, in the present moment, the radiance of his love calling us to make him loved in the world on 9th June 2019.

St Richard, Haywards Heath Listening to God 12.5.19

The sheep that belong to me listen to my voice. John 10:27

We hear three voices - those from God, our neighbourhood and our self. Even when we’re speaking, those voices engage with us. We have two ears - I often need reminding - and one mouth! But we also have inner ears gifted by the Holy Spirit to listen from the heart and see our hearts touched, melted and enthused towards others. Building capacity to listen is about building awareness of those three voices.

We might not have ears like rabbits but our inner ears can grow !

As I look back on my life I think it's the people who’ve listened to me who’ve changed me most. I think of my mum and dad, my friends and teachers, my wife, my children and people who’ve lent an ear to my desire to follow God in the best way. As you’re listening to me now I also spend time listening in Church where I gain inspiration. I listen to God, to his word in the Bible, to the words of the Eucharist, sermons, to people who cross my path day by day and of course to myself. By listening to others I serve them and others serve me as they listen to my aspirations.

Priests do a lot of listening and bishops more so. I remember a conversation with Archbishop Rowan Williams who’d just come back from going round classes in a school. ‘I felt great sympathy with the children in their struggle to listen’ he said as one used to listening to the woes of priests. It’s one of the big challenges we have, the shorter attention spans of our children and grandchildren, which affects the classroom and among other things impacts church attendance. Children expect excitement in church. Wise children expect to be awed and intrigued - we have to cater for both!

This reminds me - I have a butterfly mind easily distracted - of a story about paying attention. It's about a shocked visitor to Crete who tackled a farmer she saw bashing his donkey on the side of his head with some sort of mallet. ‘How can you treat your donkey like that’ shouted the lady. ‘Simple’ the peasant replied. ‘I’ve got to get his attention’.

We should have sympathy. Life can feel donkey-like at times, like being on a treadmill, somewhat thankless. It's the same with the spiritual life at times. How many memorable sermons can I recall, let alone sermons that have really changed my life! One I must mention was on Jeremiah 31:17 ‘There is hope in thine end’. It was by a holy monk called Cedma Mack in the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield where I trained as a priest. ‘There is hope in thine end’ Fr Cedma announced as his text and dropped dead! Never forget it - you couldn’t lay on something like that! They carried him out.

The Creed was said not sung that day but otherwise the Community Mass proceeded as normal! Cedma was a much loved man - I held the holy water bucket at the grave and can tell you more tears flowed than holy water at his funeral!

The sheep that belong to me listen to my voice.

I found God speaking to me as I read St Richard’s annual report last week. To read the description of the seven core areas of our life was very stimulating. More of us are leading so more is being achieved. I was pleased to do my bit in the Churchyard and through the Week of Guided Prayer. I’m aware of more God talk among us which might evidence more listening to God. It’s good we feel able to share with our peers and our priests about our journey of faith because that’s our Christian distinctive.

Listening to God and to one another is packaged with the costly virtue of self-forgetfulness. I try to remember that ultimately I will be with God and people in the communion of saints so my longing for him and for my neighbour is pivotal. My life - my eternal life - depends upon it.

A few weeks back I had a really difficult phone call from someone so full of emotional pain they were hardly able to let me get a word in to say I had a train to catch! In this experience I was trying to listen to her, to myself - an impatient inner voice saying ‘end this call asap’ - and to God saying ‘be kind’. By the grace of God I got my train! Reflecting back on the conversation I was fast to judge the poorly lady’s demanding tone as it rattled my own self-will. None of us can be in two places at once but the capacity to listen to others in or out of a crisis is a servant gift I keep seeking - and with it the gift of self-forgetfulness.

A practical suggestion. Pray for two gifts - to forget yourself and never to forget God. Ask the Lord first to steer you from self-love in every guise or disguise since that above all else blocks your capacity to listen to others. Then, secondly, offer God the aspirations of your soul and the health and ability of your body and open your heart to his love, maybe in a prayer like this.

A prayer of Eric MIlner-White: ‘Let your love, O Lord, pass into the depth of my heart, into the heart of my prayer, into the prayer of my whole being; so that I desert myself and dwell more and more in you, in peace, now and evermore’

St Bartholomew, Brighton Easter 3 5 May 2019

‘Do you love me?’ John 20:16

Our Lord’s question to Peter extends to us all through the last chapter of the Gospel of St John read on this third Sunday of Eastertide.

The question comes three times: ‘Simon, son of John, do you love me?’. Three times to counter Peter’s three denials before Easter. The exchange ends with an affirmation we’re invited to make our own: ‘Lord, you know everything, you know that I love you’.

Our love for the Lord represents our capacity for the infinite. It’s the most important thing in our lives.

Saint Catherine of Siena wrote as if from the Lord: ‘I who am infinite God want you to serve me with what is infinite, and you have nothing infinite except your soul’s and love’s desire’. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing puts it similarly. ‘It's not what you are or have been that God looks at with his merciful eyes but what you would be’.

Our love for God is our infinite tendency so it’s cultivation is pivotal. We all bear God’s image but an image isn’t reality. The reality of God’s life builds in us as our longing for him reaches out towards him, often like Peter in deep penitence for our practical atheism. We recall how Peter says three times of Our Lord I do not know him. How many times do we act in denial of the presence of God?

We profess our belief Sunday by Sunday in ‘the maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible’ but day by day, hour by hour we act in denial. We do not practice the presence of God to the best of our ability. We affirm our belief in a God who loves us, all people and all things through and through but lack transparency to that love which we profess reaches down to us from this altar.

In awesome reflections on the Eucharist Aloysius Roche writes these words of prayer to Our Lord: ‘Would that all earth-bound minds and hearts might know the truth, and break their bonds and fly to him through thee!  Would that all whose souls are cold and dead might draw near thy fires and warm them back to life, that so the divine Love which stretched out its arms to all on Calvary and holds them open hourly in the Mass may at last be satisfied’.

‘Do you love me?’ Our Lord asks us this morning. How deep and strong is your longing for me? How earth-bound are you?

From his sick bed the Abbe de Tourville wrote this guidance to an earth-bound soul: ‘Say to yourself very often about everything that happens, ‘God loves me! What joy!’ And reply boldly, ‘And I love him too!’ Then go quite simply about all you have to do and do not philosophize any more. For these two phrases are beyond all thought and do more for us than any thought could do; they are all sufficing’.

One of the blessings of sickness is space granted to reflect on life and see more fully the things that matter which will be ours in that place where ‘mourning and crying and pain will be no more’ (Revelation 21:4). What matters is the infinite God of infinite love who calls all in his image into the reality of holiness with all the saints.

God and people - they alone last forever - with our longing love for them in the communion of saints!

It's all invitation! No one’s compelled to love God or neighbour but all are invited. ‘I who am infinite God want you to serve me with what is infinite, and you have nothing infinite except your soul’s and love’s desire’.

When the tide of death sweeps over us it will remove useless self regard and leave us with the thing that lasts – love for God and people. That can’t be swept aside. It stands for ever as a component of the communion of saints. When death’s tide sweeps over the sandcastle of our lives it will reveal how much substance there is within us, sorting that from what is sandy and ephemeral. That solid residue will be the outgoing concern that draws us out of ourselves into generous communion with others. Our Christian belief and longing is for that communion, that one thing stronger than death central to this eucharist which is the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

How then can we love God more?

We build that love as we reflect on his love whose ‘fires warm us back to life… the divine Love which stretched out its arms to all on Calvary and holds them open hourly in the Mass’. As we reflect on scripture which also warms our hearts, seek spiritual guidance from our peers and priests, confess our sins, pray, worship and serve the needy. Above all our love for God grows from determination. St Seraphim asked why certain people who strive for holiness really get transformed while others hardly make progress answered why this is in two words: ‘Just determination’.

‘Do you love me?’ Our Lord asks Peter at the end of the Gospel of St John.

At the end of our lives the only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy will be not to become a saint. In other words not to have fuelled the infinite longing within us represented in our love for God. To be anything less than holy is to remain unactualized in the spiritual world like the millions of seeds unactualized in the natural world.

We are being actualised - we are reaching our potential - as we build love for Our Lord who at this season opens up to us an infinite horizon through his resurrection. As we commit afresh to him this morning we stand determined, seeking love for him, aspiring to holiness suited for a happy eternity.

Our Lord asks us this morning, ‘Do you love me?’ With Peter in the Gospel we affirm:  ‘Lord, you know everything, you know that I love you’.

Picture - re-enactment of Christ’s crucifixion in Trafalgar Square on Good Friday 2019

St Bartholomew, Brighton Easter 2 Hope 28th April 2019

There’s a lot around to remind us how reversible human progress is. 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.

Though it’s widely admitted people need religion to shape and give meaning to their lives this often comes down to a sort of ‘no wonder people turn to religion to escape this awful scenario’. The assumption widely held is that religious belief provides an escape from reality – and the realities we live through seem to demand such an escape, however irrational. Another coping mechanism we might identify 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.

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

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

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

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

The Paschal Candle is a triumphant witness, standing tall that says God is above death. It also reminds us he’s not above suffering. That is so very, very important to us as witnesses to Christ in a world that’s losing hope. God, the God and Father of Jesus, expects nothing of us he’s not prepared to go through himself. This is the main ground of hope we cling to as Christians, a hope that isn’t just out of this world – though the resurrection is all of that - but a hope rooted in human reality.

What I am about as a Christian IS an engagement with otherworldly consolation, it’s absolutely true. Christianity is a metaphysical religion, it’s beyond (meta) the physical because of Christ’s resurrection. Yet it’s rooted in 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 a dying priest I’m visiting telling me how important and helpful the holding cross was that he’d been given. I think of many such instances where marking the cross in holy oil on the foreheads and palms of the sick, an action in itself a memorial of Christ’s wounds, lifts their spirits. Péguy said a Christian is a sad man saved from despair by the Cross of Christ.

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

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

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

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

We Christians are saddened by suffering but our sadness is saved from despair by that very Cross and by the out of this world resurrection truth we’re celebrating in these great days of Eastertide!

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

St Bartholomew, Brighton Easter Vigil Mass 20 April 2019

Tonight the full visual stops of the Liturgy are pulled out. Light and darkness, candles, the sprinkling of water – all go beyond words.

Christ is Risen - and as no tomb could contain him, no words can fathom the wonder of  the Resurrection - we rely on symbols. This annual reminder of the foundation of our Faith gives exuberance to our spirits. O truly blessed night, worthy alone to know Christ’s rising…let Mother Church rejoice, arrayed with the lightning of his glory, let this holy building shake with joy… let the trumpet of salvation sound our mighty King’s triumph!

Archbishop Anthony Bloom preached once on the story in the Acts where the miracles of the Apostles led them to be mistaken as living gods. ‘Look statues have become living men’ they said of them. We are all in a sense like statues, said the Archbishop, but as an Easter People we have become in a profound sense a living people. He went on: ‘Meeting us – me and you – can people say, ‘Yes, it is true. Christ is risen, because this woman, this child, this man is alive with a life of which I had no suspicion, a life I couldn’t even imagine’.

All of this is coming about in our lives because of the historical event we commemorate this evening. In four slightly different accounts we have the record of how, when the disciples went to the tomb of Christ, they found his grave clothes folded and no sign of the dead. In the next six weeks the Resurrected Christ was seen, according to Paul, by over 550 people on 11 different occasions. The disciples’ lives were transformed and the Church grew at an astonishing rate surviving 20 centuries to this day. Over these centuries, particularly the last two highly sceptical centuries, critical investigation has failed to overturn the historical base of the resurrection.

To capture the exuberance of Easter we have to let the historical facts and their implications take full hold of us by open-ness to the Holy Spirit. Over the centuries Spirit-given exuberance has led missionaries to the four corners of the earth. Thousands of martyrs have cheerfully faced death in the hope of the eternal kingdom opened up to the eye of faith this Easter Night!

Christ is raised – and look – so are the people here in St Bartholomew’s – they too are raised. ‘Statues have become living men’.

Those of you who follow social media may have seen an inconclusive  discussion about the timing of this service in St Bartholomew’s. When I was at Theological College this Vigil was kept at dawn at the end of an arduous week of prayer, study, fasting and community work. As the sun broke through the East window of the Community Church at Mirfield the Gloria was intoned. Grown men broke down into tears through the emotion of that moment.

Our exuberance continued throughout this Great Easter Day as gin bottles opened after 40 days! I have a good supply for later today!

Drink is good to ‘cheer the heart of man’ as Scripture says. It can also make statues of living men, as my encounter with a paralytically drunk Irish Man on St. Patrick’s Day once showed me. Years back I found a man lying as if dead on the street and got a friend to help me carry him to the nearby hospital where he was diagnosed merely paralytic!

If drink can make us as if we were dead, the Risen Christ is in the opposite business. In Anthony Bloom’s words, he’s in the business of making living men out of statues.

His joy and delight is to see people brought fully alive as the One who came to bring ‘life to the full’, the indestructible life of the resurrection gifted to us  this most holy night.

‘Meeting us – me and you –  may people say, ‘Yes, it is true. Christ is risen, because this woman, this child, this man is alive with a life of which I had no suspicion, a life I couldn’t even imagine’.

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

St Bartholomew, Brighton Maundy Thursday 18 April 2019

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".

"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;

“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 a command so obeyed?

In these striking words Anglican monk, Gregory Dix celebrates the awe and wonder of the Holy Eucharist instituted on this most sacred night. In his book The Shape of the Liturgy still used in Anglican Theological Colleges Fr Dix writes "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".

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 sealed in his blood 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.

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 tend to make our default the second purpose of the Eucharist? Do we come to Church like we go to Sainsbury’s to get supplied for ourselves 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 Gregory Dix reminds me how all through my life the Eucharist has been means of sanctifying the lives I minister to, of taking, blessing, breaking sometimes a situation brought on my heart to the Altar for Christ to carry in Sacrifice to his Father.

Each Eucharist, majestic or simple, pleads Calvary.  Pleads, note, not repeats. Christ died once for all. His death can’t be repeated but his Sacrifice abides for ever. It is that sacrifice being solemnly renewed before us this evening as he blesses bread and wine through his priest."This is my Body...this is my Blood" offered for you to the Father, given to you in Communion. It's a good Anglican practice to bow or bend the knee as we come into Church or leave Church, or as we approach or leave the Altar, a practice saluting the Real Presence of Christ. Outside the eucharist, Christ is present, truly present, under the veil of the Tabernacle. To honour that perpetual presence by bowing or bending the knee does not deny that presence elsewhere through the reading of Scripture, in Christian Fellowship, in 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, announced by Our Lord on this Eve of his passion, which is action, sacrificial action. 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 most holy night, 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.