St Wilfrid & Presentation Church, Haywards Heath St Patrick 17.3.21

Today the Christian world honours St. Patrick, Apostle of Ireland. As we do so our prayers join his for peace with justice in the land he first evangelised back in the 5th century especially in the wake of the ongoing Brexit settlement.

We can have no better thought, on St Patrick's Day, than his own famous invocation: Christ be beside me, Christ be before me, Christ be behind me, King of my heart.  Christ be within me, Christ be below me, Christ be above me, never to part.

St Patrick's breastplate, so called, is dear to both Catholics and Protestants in the Emerald Isle. Today's Saint helps us rise above denominationalism and sectarianism to Christ who is above all and in all.  

Jesus Christ is more real than any other reality in the world.  By his resurrection he is all present and all powerful.  "He is before us and behind us", as Patrick affirmed, "below us and above us".  In Christ all things were made and hold together.  By his blood, that of "an eternal Covenant", he is become "the Great Shepherd of the sheep" (Hebrews 13:20), desiring to bring us all into one fold.

With St Patrick today we magnify Christ knowing that it is the very purpose of the universe to be brought together in Jesus.  Christ is the centre of all things and he is drawing humankind into that centre we call the Communion of Saints.  

There is through another force and with that comes a tendency to division and separation. One of many endearing features of this great missionary Saint is his awareness of his sins. We forget that saints are sinners. Their great grace is the awareness of their sin. In the case of Patrick the awareness of God’s mercy in covering his sin made him the saint he was. He was all the better able to tell people of the Lord’s goodness.

I wonder what Patrick would make of our situation today? He’d rejoice that Jesus Christ is still a reality to so many in our land. He’d lament the divisions of both church and society. Perhaps above all he’d want to remind people to seek the Lord’s mercy.

The God who covers our individual sins when we seek him can also cover the sins of his church. No church or Christian anywhere exists without the grace and mercy of God. We all need mercy for the ways we’ve failed the Lord. The level playing field we must find is the ground at the foot of the Cross. To take up Patrick's breastplate, to make his prayer, is to put faith in the power of Christ following from there which overcomes the evil of sin within us. 

Take Christ, then, on your right hand, Christ on your left hand, Christ all around you, shield in the strife … light of your life. So be it!

[Image from Missionaries of the Sacred Heart website]

St Wilfrid & Presentation, Haywards Heath 10.3.21

In 2020 I visited the William Blake exhibition at Tate Britain in London and among the exhibitions was this sketch of Moses receiving the Law made around 1780.  Blake, famous as author of the poem Jerusalem our unofficial English anthem, captures the contrast between Christ and Moses in his poem ‘The Everlasting Gospel’:

"Jesus was sitting in Moses Chair/They brought the trembling Woman There 

Moses commands she be stoned to Death/What was the sound of Jesus breath

He laid his hand on Moses Law/The Ancient Heavens in Silent Awe

Writ with Curses from Pole to Pole/All away began to roll" 

In today’s eucharistic readings we focus on the gift of God’s Law through Moses fulfilled in Christ. In Deuteronomy 4 we heard how keeping the Law among Jews would lead to other nations applauding them as a godly people. Our Lord in the Gospel passage from Matthew 5 insists he has not come ‘to abolish but to complete’ the Law and the Prophets. He goes on to say the one ‘who infringes even one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be considered the least in the kingdom of heaven’. 

It is important to see the severity of this Gospel passage in context. It follows the key teaching of the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount which summarises the Law of Moses in the commandment to love God and to love your neighbour as yourself. St Matthew’s Gospel is addressed to Jewish Christians so it emphasises the continuity between Moses and Christ with both going up a mountain to teach. Blake’s impressive figure of Moses receiving the Law up in the clouds of Mount Sinai is fulfilled by Christ both on the Mount of Beatitudes and Mount Calvary. ‘The curses roll from pole to pole’ on account of Our Lord’s conquest upon the Cross of the power of sin which defeated the Law of Moses again and again in the experience of God’s people. When they brought a woman caught in adultery Jesus in Blake’s words ‘laid his hand on Moses Law’ as he breathed in the Spirit and asked who would cast the first stone. Such a radical challenge to the religious authorities condemning sin but loving the sinner prepared the way for Our Lord’s execution. His death and resurrection overcame sin through the power of God as well as useless condemnation of powerless sinners. We are saved by that gracious power not by dutiful allegiance to Law.

The good news of Christianity does not abolish the Ten Commandments but goes to the heart of what it means to obey them. When we see our obedience to what is right as a response to God’s love shown to us in Christ it flows in a new way empowered by the Holy Spirit. That tenth commandment - you shall not covet - is against a transgression of the heart impossible to counter without the grace of the Holy Spirit. In the Sermon on the Mount Our Lord reveals the heart of human disobedience rests in the human heart with its envy, greed and lust. After teaching this Our Lord released the grace for us to cleanse and mould our hearts so as to more perfectly love God and neighbour. This grace comes at immense cost to himself, dying in our place as sinners so as to live in our place by the Holy Spirit. This is the centre of Lenten devotion.

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, because by your holy Cross you have redeemed the world.

St Wilfrid & The Presentation, Haywards Heath 3 March 2021

Our scripture today is full of conflict relating to the conflict of Christ and the sort of conflict Christians should be about.

In the first reading we read of the conflict surrounding the prophet Jeremiah. ‘They said, "Come, let us make plots against Jeremiah - for instruction shall not perish from the priest, nor counsel from the wise, nor the word from the prophet. Come, let us bring charges against him, and let us not heed any of his words.’ (Jeremiah 18:18). The prophet Jeremiah is a pointer to Our Lord in his speaking truth to power. The foes of the prophet rationalised that they could do without him! The priests, the wise and the other prophets would give totally adequate instruction without him, they said. Seven centuries before Christ Jeremiah conflicted with a religious establishment responsible for widespread unfaithfulness to God which he prophesied as being responsible for the destruction of the original Jewish Temple by the Babylonians in 587BC. The people had been warned again and again not to make plans discounting God and his covenant.

In the gospel reading from Matthew Chapter 20 Our Lord speaks of the conflict he will have like his forbear Jeremiah with the religious authorities: ‘We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified; and on the third day he will be raised. (Matthew 20:18-19). The death and resurrection of Jesus link also to his prophecy of the destruction of the second Jewish Temple by the Romans in 70AD.

Then, in the Gospel, we hear of a more personal conflict involving James and John and their mother who want Jesus to push down the other ten apostles. This gives Our Lord opportunity to open up the heart of these conflicts, the heart of the human problem, a problem we all face, rooted in the heart itself, namely pride. ‘You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many." (Matthew 20:26-28)

In Lent many of our readings, hymns and prayers address this basic conflict, the toppling of pride by humility. The teaching of Jeremiah and Jesus coincided with the toppling of the Temple and its religious establishment but the toppling of pride requires more deep seated action, for which the self giving love of Calvary is eternal instrument. Examining our conscience before the Cross in Lent shows up the idolatry of pride of which James and John were guilty, indulging in thoughts of superiority out of obstinacy and a domineering attitude. They were to learn, as we have to learn, to conflict pride by the cultivation of humility. 

A good Lenten discipline is to ask Our Lord to help us in our struggle against pride by a gift of humility from the Holy Spirit. May the Lord help us deepen this gift, enabling us to ascribe more genuinely to him all the good talents and abilities we possess. More than that, to see our nothingness apart from God and actually less than nothingness through our sins of thought, word, deed and omission. Our Lord asks us, as he asked the mother of Zebedee and her sons, ‘Can you drink the cup that I am going to drink?’ Praise God, we do not need to drink the Chalice he drank for us save at the eucharist as memorial of his redeeming love. God help us, though, to follow his lead in conflicting with pride, with wrong self-assertion including making important plans without reference to him. Also, as James and John learned, to embrace our humiliations after his example and hide our talents and virtues with Christ in God. 

‘Whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave’. It is a struggle, our Lenten conflict, but we are on the winning side on account of the life of Christ poured out for us in Holy Week. That life is ours through the Holy Spirit given at Pentecost. Through our baptism and confirmation the Spirit of humility is in us but, to our dying day, alongside our pride. Christ is in us and so is sin. May these weeks of Lent help us do down pride and raise up humility and love some more. In that way we can be made greater Christians.

St Wilfrid & Presentation Eucharist 24 February 2021

As is common in Lent and Advent the first reading is chosen from the Old Testament to illuminate the Gospel passage.

Today Jonah is the link. The story of Jonah connects with Christianity in two ways. He is seen first as a symbol of Christ dying and rising through his being swallowed by a whale for three days and then reappearing. He is like Christ secondly as one who preaches and causes people to repent. He gets a response.

Jonah, when you read the book – it can be read in 5 minutes – is seen to be a reluctant evangelist. God tells him to go to Nineveh but he goes the other way at first. God has to put him right.

Aren’t we all reluctant evangelists? Who wants to be the messenger of an uncomfortable message? Who likes putting people right when they’re in the wrong?

Actually only God can really and effectively put people right. If we speak for God with discernment, at the time and in the place he clearly suggests to us, then things happen. They happened in Nineveh and they can happen in Haywards Heath.

The clue is our getting attuned to God’s leading. If we’re living hour by hour with God it should work out. Coming to share in the Eucharist effects a deep work of tuning. Something happens to shape us up when we hearing the word and share the body of Christ.

When I take my guitar out I’ve usually got to tune it before it will make a melodious noise. So it is with you and I as we attempt to play out our lives for God. Like Jonah we need treatment so to speak, attuning – and that can mean getting stretched a little.

What’s at issue in today’s Gospel is our role in the spread of the faith. The world needs Jonahs, evangelists who can swallow their reluctance to speak out for Jesus.

Some see the tide turning for the church. We’ve been salt more than light for long enough. Especially in the Church of England our people have been proud to be salt savouring the life of the nation but hesitant to stand against it as light that lightens darkness. 

We’ve made Christianity less than what it is. Now is the time to change gear and to be bold and to let our light shine. In this increasingly secular nation people are only going to hear of a purpose for living and a reason for dying if we gain boldness to open our mouths and declare however hesitantly the mystery of Christ. 

Pray for me St Paul says to the Ephesians that utterance may be given me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel. We might pray the same!

Ash Wednesday 21st February 2021

In Lent we are called to discover afresh the power of Christ’s Cross.

This is why at the centre of Ash Wednesday eucharist we have the signing of the cross on our foreheads even if we must do it ourselves today.

It seems a long time since we were in Tenerife walking in the mountains.

We visited the small town of Santiago del Teide perched on the lower slopes of Mount Teide which towers almost 4000 metres above sea level, the highest point above sea level of any island in the Atlantic Ocean, and third highest volcano on any volcanic island in the world.

The volcano last erupted in 1909. When it did so the inhabitants of Santiago del Teide were faced with the prospect of their town’s obliteration. 

It’s a deeply Christian place, Tenerife. When they saw the volcano erupt the villagers didn’t hesitate to act. 

They took the cross from the altar and went up the hill to meet the lava. The flow stopped where they met and each year since there’s been a thanksgiving procession. 

I walked to the place where the lava stopped and said a prayer by the Cross there and before the original cross that’s in the beautiful church there.

The people saw burning lava halt before the Cross and the victory of their Christian faith. 

In my own experience the Cross is as sure a weapon against no less fiery assaults against my spirit. 

To believe in the Cross is to believe in the risen Lord Jesus Christ who stands behind it and beside each one of us. His power in us, by his Spirit, is greater than the power of any enemy, however powerful.

From today Christians are paying special attention to the Cross of our Saviour and how it engages with our personal struggle against sin.

You may struggle with lack of faith in yourself – the Cross says God loves you, turn from such disbelief.

You may struggle with lack of faith in other people – the Cross says God loves them as well as you and much more, so forgive those who upset you or who seem to be against you.

You may struggle with lack of faith in God – the Cross tells you God loves you enough to die for you.

When we take the ashes we take them on our heads because Jesus said God loves us so much he numbers every hair on our head.

When we make the cross on our foreheads today we’re invited to say the words Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ. These words can be paraphrased as ‘God loves you. Turn from sin’.

‘God forbid that we should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ’ Saint Paul once wrote (Galatians 6:14) and he goes on to invite us to let the Cross bring God's grace into our lives. 

We’re now to seek such grace for the empowerment of our lives, grace that comes from the foot of the Cross.

Let’s turn there now as we think in a moment of silence of our forgetfulness of God, times we’ve let people down and times we’ve let ourselves down through not doing our best.

Photo by Budkov Denis

St Wilfrid, Haywards Heath eucharist 10.2.21

Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile… it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come… evil things come from within, and they defile a person. Mark 7:18, 21, 23

As a priest committed to the Daily Office I am regularly brought up short when I am able to go to the monastery at Crawley Down since they say the Psalms much slower than I do in my private devotions. Through sharing their Office I recognise how much I say prayers ‘to get through them’ rather than to be fully present to God. I slow down on my return!

Left to myself my prayer easily goes off the rails and becomes self oriented. In his earthly ministry Jesus made a point of challenging self-satisfied religion as in this incident in Mark Chapter 7 following accusations that his disciples hadn’t washed before dinner as the purity laws required. Mark is handing on the story to Gentile Christians who in his day were engaged in a similar conflict over the degree they should take on Jewish practice. 

It’s not the food going into us that matters so much as the words and deeds that come out of us. How brilliant a capacity Jesus has of turning things on their head!

Jesus knew our nature through and through. His challenge to ritual law doesn’t extend to the core commandments of God but gives a reminder to examine spiritual practices lest they get disassociated from the call to obey God and become ends in themselves, and that can be true of joining in a streamed weekday eucharist!

Our Lord saw the heart of the human problem as being the human heart. Our relationship with God is from the heart, from deep within, or else it is a formality.

Melvyn Bragg once asked Rowan Williams what God meant to him. Here’s the answer he gave: ‘God is first and foremost that depth around all things and beyond all things into which, when I pray, I try to sink. But God is also the activity that comes to me out of that depth, tells me I’m loved, that opens up a future for me, that offers transformation I can’t imagine. Very much a mystery but also very much a presence. Very much a person’.

Seeking God is a business of committing trustfully to him as the depth beyond all things, to see the world as no longer a flat surface but to descend to the goodness at the heart of all things and be impacted. To be caught up into something utterly mysterious and countercultural which is divine reality. 

Saying our prayers, attending the eucharist, reading our Bibles, serving our neighbour and reflecting regularly upon our need for God are expressions of that quest.

St Wilfrid, Haywards Heath talk on perseverance 3.2.21

I think the letter to the Hebrews is a Godsend at this time. We’ve been reading it as first lesson at the eucharist for the last month. It was written to help Jewish Christians make sense of a time of tumult that included the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70AD [sculpture from Titus Arch in Rome]. 

This brought to climax the divisions between Christianity and Judaism with the loss of the sacrificial cult. The author of Hebrews explains the coming of the Messiah as being not that of a ruler but that of a priest, fulfilling Temple worship, whose rule will come later. As Jews turned to synagogues in place of the Temple there was a parting of the ways between the first Christians, who continued to worship in the Temple until its destruction but were rejected from synagogues by fellow Jews. This division occurred parallel to the mission to the Gentiles initiated by God from Jerusalem across the world through Saint Paul.

In today’s passage we have wisdom about making something of suffering linked to the first believers' sense of loss at the destruction of the Temple and the hardship of being shunned by fellow Jews. ‘Suffering is part of your training; God is treating you as his sons. Has there ever been any son whose father did not train him?.... hold up your limp arms and steady your trembling knees and smooth out the path you tread… always be wanting peace with all people, and the holiness without which no one can ever see the Lord. Be careful… that no root of bitterness should begin to grow and make trouble; this can poison a whole community’ (Hebrews 12)

What wisdom and implications for us! Our lives have a lot of suffering at present as the coronavirus pandemic locks us down, weighs us with concern for those we love and the heavy media preoccupation with it dampens our spirits. According to Hebrews we are to see these privations as a spiritual discipline allowed by our loving Heavenly Father. ‘The Lord trains the ones that he loves and he punishes all those he acknowledges as his sons’. The letter to the Hebrews encourages us to see Our Lord alongside us in our sufferings, working things for good, inasmuch as we put faith in God. Here is the rub. Are we able to see life’s circumstances, however hard they may be, as willed by God. Just as Our Lord saw his crucifixion, wrong as it was at a human and legal and moral level, as a saving event.

To accept the hand of God in suffering is not fatalism. In the case of coronavirus we are minimising our sufferings and the sufferings of others by costly precautions and vaccination. One day we will look back at the pandemic, as our parents looked back at the World War, or those first Jewish Christians looked back at the Temple’s destruction. We will look back like them and see the good that grew out of the hardship. For us in February 2021 the letter to the Hebrews resonates with a perspective that sees God at work. Protecting that work in us is our prime concern, less the business of interpreting his hand working through coronavirus, though that will one day be made clear to us. Seeing our trials as part of building patience in us, precious gift from a Father patient beyond limit, seeking to build peace, uprooting bitterness - all of this is the gift of Christian faith which will bring its reward.

To accept the hand of God in suffering is not fatalism. In the case of coronavirus we are minimising our sufferings and the sufferings of others by costly precautions and vaccination. One day we will look back at the pandemic, as our parents looked back at the World War, or the first Jewish Christians looked back at the Temple’s destruction. We will look back like them and see the good that grew out of the hardship. For us in February 2021 the letter to the Hebrews (12:4-7, 11-15) resonates with a perspective that sees God at work. Protecting that work in us is our prime concern, less the business of interpreting his hand working through coronavirus overall. Seeing our trials as part of building patience in us, gift from a Father patient beyond limit, seeking to build peace, uprooting bitterness - all of this is the gift of Christian faith which will bring its reward.