All Souls Day 2014

All Souls Day is about names written on hearts.

Each year the Church encourages us to name aloud those who remain in our hearts but have passed beyond this world.

So in a minute or two we’ll read the list of our dear dead naming them aloud before God.

This year thanks to J Gumbrill and Freeman Brothers who employ Kevin Scott of Chapel Lane our war memorial has been renovated free of charge and we’re to bless that renovation at the end of this service.

The 33 names of those who died in World War One whose centenary we’re now marking shine out afresh on our village war memorial.

They are in black set on grey granite.

That blackness, like the blackness of the vestments on this day of the departed, reflects the sadness of lives sometimes wrenched from the earth and the many broken hearts our loved ones passed from this world have left behind.

In the first passage of scripture chosen for this memorial eucharist St Paul speaks tenderly of people on his heart, the absent friends he has in the Church he founded in Corinth.

Surely we do not need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you or from you, do we? He writes. You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all; and you show that you are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.

This afternoon we too have tablets of stone in mind, the graves of loved ones and the village memorial stone. We come also with names written on tablets of human hearts. Surely our dear dead live on in our hearts, and those of the war dead live on in the hearts of our community for which they laid down their lives.

Paul goes on to speak of the confidence we should place in God. Such is the confidence that we have through Christ towards God. Not that we are competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

Christianity isn’t having all the answers. It’s having the humility to admit you don’t have answers over things like death but you do have confidence in One who does. That lends you a solid competence.

A Christian is a far sighted one. Someone adventurous. One whose confidence in the victory of Jesus over death spurs them on. One who presses competently through the false boundaries of unbelief, sin, apathy, fear, sickness and, last of all, death, towards the gift of God in Jesus Christ.

To be a Christian is to be opposed to nostalgia in the sense of wanting to stop the flow of time and change. Christian faith is a forward journey with an eternal perspective that welcomes the challenges and surprises of life with Spirit given creativity since Jesus Christ is ever new.

If you live your life not content with a boring sameness but with what is other than, or apart from, yourself, this fascination draws you forward day by day into the possibilities of God which exceed your imagining.

If you centre in love on what is other than yourself you get prepared to face what is the ultimate strange ‘other’ – I mean death. We come to see death as nothing more than the frame of our earthly life.

A frame is the picture’s friend. It shows it off. Without the defining of our life’s duration in time the span of our life would stretch into an infinite void. Without being born and dying we would be ageless beings. No one would be older or younger than anyone or anyone’s parent or child – we would be no one at all!

Who I am in my inner self is what matters ultimately. This is a product not just of heredity and environment but of my own free choices - to love or not to love. By growing love in my life I make of myself, with the Lord’s help, a being stronger than death.

Paul reminds us, returning to the passage, and his words reach beyond the first century Corinthians to twenty first century Sussex, that something has indeed happened to change the way we see death, and its something linked to the coming, the teaching, the suffering, the death and the rising of Jesus now ever present by his Spirit

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.  

That freedom came first from the stone rolled away from Christ’s tomb and it flows down the centuries and across the continents into hearts that welcome the risen Lord Jesus.

It is the name of Jesus that makes sense of all other names from history including those held in our hearts today we will shortly be commending. Lifting them to the Lord at All Souls Day’s memorial eucharist will be transformative for them and for us.

As the large Easter Candle brought into the sanctuary for the day of the departed reminds us, there is one human alone who is immortal and his invitation stands as much before us as it does before our dear dead.

It is the invitation to move nearer to him.

As our passage concludes And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.

As part of our prayer today we have opportunity to light candles for our departed loved ones from the Easter Candle and place them in the sand tray. As we do so we are saying Jesus from your risen glory give your light to my loved one who has passed into death’s dark vale.

Give them eternal rest, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.

The Lord who welcomes them welcomes us this afternoon, as we heard in the brief yet eloquent invitation he gives us in our Gospel reading which I make my last word to you:

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.  Matthew 11:28-30

Trinity 18 19th October 2014

What’s good about being a Christian?

Share things that are valuable including significant answers to prayer in recent weeks

Christianity is good for the soul! The Gospel is good! This Church is a place of purpose in a confused world, a place of belonging in a lonely world.

If this good news is going to get around some more the church has got to grow and draw in the next generation.

Do you think we at St. Giles have something that the friends we care for are missing out on?

We need to believe this if our prayer and our invitations for them to join us are to be wholehearted.

How can we help the church grow?

A question we do well to ask ourselves is how we would feel if our best friend came with us to Church? Would we feel embarrassed about what and who they encountered? If so, why should we feel so?

What wisdom is there so far as the revitalisation of faith and our need to work for church growth in today’s Gospel?

Behind the questions and answers lies a trap set for Our Lord which touches on the relation of the believing community to its surrounds.

In the story we see the Pharisees making common cause with the Herodians who supported paying tribute to Rome against the Zealots who didn’t, hoping to put Jesus in the wrong with one side or the other. They ask ‘Is it permissible to pay taxes to Caesar or not?’ 

Our Lord’s reply does not actually make a choice between the two parties.  It accepts the reality of Caesar’s rule, without touching on the question of its validity. Give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar – and to God what belongs to God.

Keep responding to God’s claim, Jesus says, whilst never forgetting the claim of the world around you. 

To be effective in our mission as his Church we need an ever-deepening confidence in God allied to an ever-deepening humility before both God and neighbour.

We can’t escape those dual obligations – to God and to Caesar. It’s up to each individual and each religious community to balance these obligations. To ignore God denies us our distinctive of godliness. To ignore Caesar – read the human community to put it into today’s language – is to make our religion sectarian and destructive.

We live as Jesus did in a culturally diverse society.  As such we can’t avoid speaking two languages.  Our Christian Faith is the language of ‘identity’ – it makes us what we are as God’s people seeking godliness through word, sacrament and fellowship. Our shared citizenship demands we speak the language of our community.

If religious communities don’t engage with their wider communities and seek to speak their language they become sectarian.

To paraphrase Our Lord with a slant to St. Giles, we need to give society its just service, throwing ourselves as a Christian community into the fray of Horsted Keynes and its surrounds, whilst giving God his due by building up our confidence as a distinctively Christian community.

As your parish priest I need to encourage you to work on both aspects.

For St Giles to grow we need an eye to both God and the community. We need to firm up our confidence in God by getting ourselves deeper into our worship and schooled more in the Scriptures. However bad a name religion has got we cannot escape the call we have to be better and firmer Christians. 

To be a Christian is to have confidence in God – and humility before him and before people.

A Christian who’s humble without confidence in God has no missionary potential.

A Christian who’s every confidence in God yet lacks humility before other people and their view of things is a danger to our cause!

In particular failure to be sensitive to the needs of our community and speak its language will show us up to be less than Christian in the sense of working for human and social flourishing.

Today’s Gospel makes clear the separate demands of God and man upon us as Christians but those demands flow together. Our Lord brought these conflicting demands together in his own body in his sacrificial death for us upon the Cross.

Through what he has done for us, which we recall at every eucharist, he builds our confidence in God and lends us his own humble love for people.

In this Eucharist he is waiting to touch us in our heart of hearts, so we can touch others for him!

May the Sacrament we share refresh in us the purpose for living and the reason for dying given to us in our risen Lord.

As God makes himself so near to us may he make himself near to the people of this community.

The Gospel is good! This Church is a place of purpose in a confused world, a place of belonging in a lonely world.

May more belong here with us to Jesus so that God’s world may be enriched by the growth of his Church

Harvest Festival 12th October 2014

For all things come from you, and of your own have we given you.  

1 Chronicles 29.14                            

In those words King David captures the invitation we welcome annually at Harvest Festival.

Our Lord speaks in Matthew 6.33  of how the earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head…. when the grain is ripe… the harvest has come.

In my first parish of St Wilfrith, Moorends in Doncaster we took coal to the altar and its remarkable for me today, Yorkshireman come south, to be welcoming grapes later this morning from our own Bluebell Vineyard.

Whether coal or grapes, or just, as we’ll be singing, our life, our health, our food this morning we’re talking and thinking about the sentiment of gratitude.

We come together after our Prayer Novena, nine days of prayer during which we’ve given thanks and prayed for Horsted Keynes and St Giles. I’m pleased to announce also that we’ve given as well to the mission of God’s Church a total of £890.  

The Christian faith calls for inner eyes of faith that remain open in gratitude.

We come from God. We belong to God. We go to God.  This means, as creatures made and loved by God, we live in gratitude towards the one who made us and provides for us.

What a wonderful privilege it is for us to live in mid Sussex in a place as beautiful as Horsted Keynes!

I was reminded of this when two weeks ago a dozen or so of us went up to the Vineyard which extends just into Horsted Keynes parish. We were invited by the proprietors Barry and Joyce Tay who’re no strangers to us here at St Giles. They share a deep sense of gratitude to God for his guidance and sense of being his stewards and instruments as people of faith.

The wine they offer this morning is sparkling wine, an image of joy that’s flowed from the soil of Horsted Keynes and its surrounds.

We give thanks today, as we do at every eucharist, for God’s gift of wine ‘fruit of the vine and work of human hands’.

This weekend sees that very work as the grape harvest  commences leading on to pressing and storing. Though we have a gift of wine it isn’t appropriate for the eucharist as it’ sparkling wine, even if it is a powerful symbol of harvest joy.

All things come from you, and of your own have we given you.

This is the sense of the prayers I’m going to offer for you now. First we take bread and say a thank you prayer. Then we take wine, mix in a little water and offer it to God.

Thanksgiving, joy, gladness are the Christian distinctive and they centre on what the Psalm writer calls the altar of our God of joy and gladness.

The gifts of bread and wine are offered as a glad expression of our submission of our lives to God this morning. Their transformation to Christ’s body and blood and our receiving of these is the instrument of our own ongoing transformation into thankful living.

Such living is a counting of blessings. As the old chorus puts it so simply and beautifully: count your blessings, name them one by one, and it will surprise you what the Lord has done.

For all things come from him, and of his own shall we give him.

Baptism of Jasmine Pike 21st September 2014

To live is Christ – or living is Christ in today’s translation of Philippians 1:21 – what does that mean?

What does it mean to 1st century Paul and 21^st century you and I?

To Jasmine whose happy day of Christian initiation this is?

To live is Christ. It’s a mystical saying, four words that sum up the life philosophy of Christianity’s greatest teacher. After a blinding light of revelation on the road to Damascus Paul had carried resurrection news of Jesus to the four corners of his world and now he is in prison. The words we read today are a letter from one under sentence of death who writes to me, living is Christ and dying is gain.

What assurance! Assurance linked to personal knowledge of our risen Saviour Jesus Christ. The Lord who had said to him what he would say to us this morning:  Your way leads to a hopeless end. My way leads to an endless hope!

To live without Christ is to live towards a hopeless end. To live with Christ is to live towards an endless hope, for dying Jesus broke the power of death and rising opened joyous eternity to all who’ll live in him.

To live is Christ. What does that mean? It means to live your life with the gift of faith, rooted and grounded in the Christian community, walking with them in the way of Christ and the worship of his Church. So says the baptism service!

This is the way Harry, Milly, Anthia, Anicia and Jasmine want to follow and its lovely for Anthia and Anicia, baptised and confirmed last year, to be standing by their little sister this morning as the family commit her to God’s family of which they’ve made themselves part.

To live is Christ. Making an analogy with classic figures from ancient history St Alphonsus Liguori who lived in the 18^th century wrote: Diogenes went about seeking a man upon earth: hominem quaero; but God seems to be seeking a Christian among the many faithful: Christianum quaero. For very few are they who have the works, the greater part have only the name; but to these should be said what Alexander said to that cowardly soldier who was also named Alexander: change either your name or your conduct: Aut nomen, aut mores muta. But as written elsewhere it would be better if these miserable creatures were put in confinement as madmen, believing as they do, that a happy eternity is prepared for him who lives well, and unhappy eternity for him who lives ill, and yet living as if they do not believe this.

We cannot say with Paul to live is Christ unless we not only believe in and pray in Christ’s name but also act in Christ’s name, act as if we believe.

Ten days ago I attended the Chichester diocesan clergy conference at the University of Kent. 300 priests and deacons worshipped, prayed and learned together gaining a new sense of purpose and collaboration under the leadership of our diocesan Bishop Martin Warner and his assistant Bishops Mark Sowerby of Horsham and Richard Jackson of Lewes. We were privileged to stay in freshly restored rooms at the University, to be fed like kings and to worship with Archbishops, so to speak, down the road in Canterbury Cathedral.

In his closing address Bishop Martin, who is like me a Latinist, took an ancient motto lex orandi lex credendi which means ‘the law of praying is the law of believing’ and added lex agendi, the law of action. The bishop wants seamless connection between Christian worship, the Christian creed and Christian action. What we pray is to be more fully linked to both what we believe and what we do with our lives and in our churches.

To live is Christ and to be rooted in Christian prayer, teaching and action.  Bishop Martin extended this challenge to us as fellow priests and diocesan leaders to form up a diocese that’s younger, financially solvent and better at risk-taking.  He wants tighter and more immediate communication across the church in Sussex and many more gifted laity operating in the counsels of the diocese, especially in finance, property and liaison with the political world.

Above all he applauded the virtue of kindness as a key quality of life in Christ. If to live is Christ that is to live kindly, literally in kindred, related to one another, to those whose nature, whose humanity we share. All of which is counter to the depersonalising commodification of the person that afflicts our culture.

The German philosopher Nietzche was no friend of Christianity and famously said: Show me that you are redeemed and then I will believe in your redeemer. He had a point. St Augustine was fully aware of that point 1500 years before him when he said No fragrance can be more pleasing to God than that of his own Son. May all the faithful breathe out the same perfume. If to live is Christ it is to be Christ to others through kindness.

To live is Christ which means not as mean-spirited, narrow-mind sour pusses lacking in mercy but as those who know forgiveness from God and who show it to others.

I know that my redeemer lives said Job in words prophesying Christ’s resurrection. To know that redeemer and his redemption from the tendency within to harm others is the work of the Holy Spirit. It is also the basis of hope in the face of death, as Paul adds, after saying to live is Christ, to die is gain. We are in life if we’re in Christ, life that can never die, eternal life.

Your way leads to a hopeless end. My way leads to an endless hope!

God’s nothing to do with death he’s our life and hope for ever!

To live is Christ is to know that life, to know that your redeemer lives, that he is your redeemer and that he lives in you by the grace and the fruit of baptism.

It’s to be the fragrance of Christ, giving people opportunity to breath in the perfume of his Spirit’s work in our lives.

To the joyless we bring joy, to the loveless we bring love to the unforgiving we bring forgiveness.

May such grace be ours through the eucharist we celebrate this morning.

St Giles Festival Finding Sanctuary 8am 14th September 2014

For a thousand years from the reign of King Ethelbert in 600 to that of King James 1 those fleeing persecution could make for the nearest assigned church and sit down on the sanctuary stool to be home and dry.  St Giles was one of twenty churches in the diocese of Chichester designated a sanctuary for fugitives. This meant individuals being pursued by lynch mobs could enter church and once there, made subject to royal adjudication, be spared rough justice whilst tempers cooled. The idea of sanctuary links to the holiness people associate with church buildings so any violence within them is seen as sacrilege, an affront to God the source of holiness punishable by excommunication from his church.

Today we keep the festival of St Giles who’s a saint linked to giving sanctuary to beggars and cripples. Our statue - and our wooden medallion of St Giles besides the organ - shows him stuck with an arrow in the company of a deer. The story runs that Giles (c650-c710) lived for a time in southern France as a hermit in the forest near Nîmes with the sole company of a deer who sustained him on her milk. His retreat is rudely broken by royal hunters bent on pursuing the deer back to the King. They shoot an arrow that wounds the saint instead of the deer so, paradoxically Giles became patron of both cripples and hunters.

The medallion shows the saint protecting the deer whilst impaled by the arrow, so Giles is made a symbol of Christ whose sufferings are borne on our behalf.  According to the legend, Giles’s Christ-like humility so impressed the king he built him the monastery at Saint-Gilles-du-Gard, where his community lived under the rule of St Benedict. The saint died there around 710 with a reputation for holiness and miracles.

In the Middle Ages people saved their lives by running into St Giles to find sanctuary. As St Giles rescued the deer his Church in Horsted Keynes has been a safe place for thousands over as many years.

I want to think for a bit about what it is to find sanctuary.

The Oxford dictionary has these four definitions: Refuge or safety from pursuit, persecution, or other danger: A place where injured or unwanted animals of a specified kind are cared for: A holy place; a temple: The inmost recess or holiest part of a temple: The part of the chancel of a church containing the high altar.

Elsewhere I found these synonyms: refuge, haven, harbour, port in a storm, oasis, shelter, retreat, bolt hole, foxhole, hideout, hiding place, hideaway, den, asylum, safe house, fastness.

Today people find sanctuary in St Giles Church as they flee not from lynch mobs but from the pressures of 21^st century living.

We have evidence for this at the back of Church in the visitors book.

Here are some comments. Read comments from visitors’ book.

I have here a book by a monk from Worth Abbey, Fr Christopher Jamison, itself entitled Finding Sanctuary. Show Finding Sanctuary and read inside flap

I lend this book to spiritual seekers looking for ways ‘to find spiritual space and peace in the busy, and often confusing modern world’. It speaks of the value of finding sanctuary both in silent contemplative prayer and in the warmth of a Christian community.

The book’s first chapter is entitled ‘How did I get this busy. Reading p13-14 of Finding Sanctuary

The book goes on to commend the pursuit of holiness rather than busyness and it proved an inspiration to me when I read it 8 years ago. It was the basis of the TV series called the Monastery and has a sequel called Finding Happiness.

 As a new term starts in many senses, not just next door, we have opportunity to start as we mean to go on finding sanctuary in the basic spiritual disciplines of our Christian faith.

Last week I was sharing about these disciplines and I’ll list them again in a moment before we have a time of quiet reflection.

They’re paralleled by our Muslim sisters and brothers whose Five Pillars consist of knowing their creed,  praying five times each day, giving to the poor and needy, fasting during the month of Ramadan and making pilgrimage to Mecca.

Here are five pillars for Christians that are listed on the news sheet:

Pray every day. Read your bible. Attend eucharist every Sunday wherever you are unless very seriously hindered. Confess your sins. Give your money to serve God’s work.

Just as people have found sanctuary for centuries in St Giles we can find sanctuary in God at all times and in all places.

Let’s pray now, mindful of the challenge of our patronal feast to fresh spiritual discipline, as we find sanctuary once more in the silence of this building that’s given sanctuary to so many over its thousand year existence.

Trinity 12 (23rd of Year A) Discipline 7th September 2014

At my ordination as a priest 37 years ago the Bishop asked me this question in Sheffield Cathedral: Will you give your faithful diligence … to minister the Doctrine and Sacraments, and the Discipline of Christ, as the Lord hath commanded?

I replied with the others: I will so do, by the help of the Lord.

This commitment came back to me as I looked through the readings for Trinity 12 that focus on church discipline.  The reading from Ezekiel Chapter 33 reminds the prophet of his watchman role which connects with the gospel passage from Matthew 18 with its instruction about fraternal correction in the Church.

The reformed Christian tradition of which the Church of England is part emphasizes discipline alongside word and sacrament as foundational to church life. At their ordination therefore priests and bishops commit themselves to teach, lead worship and pastor the flocks committed to them.

Among other words from the ordination service that stick with me – I read them every year before the renewal of priestly vows at the Chrism eucharist with the diocesan Bishop in Holy Week – are these: Have always… printed in your remembrance how great a treasure is committed to your charge. For they are the sheep of Christ, which he bought with his death, and for whom he shed his blood. The Church and Congregation whom you must serve is his Spouse, and his Body. And if it shall happen the same Church, or any Member thereof, to take any hurt or hindrance by reason of your negligence, ye know the greatness of the fault, and also the horrible punishment that will ensue.

As we heard warning in the first reading to the sentinel priest Ezekiel their blood I will require at your hand. Neglect of Christ’s flock purchased at the price of his own blood is as serious a thing as you can imagine. It has made me a priest more concerned to feed the sheep than entertain the goats. Not that it’s easy to do so, to teach Christianity, let alone to minister the discipline of Christ. It would be more attractive to prop up the bar at the Green Man, not that goats are only found in pubs! And, if I’m honest, the Green Man has no Harvey’s!

What is the discipline of Christ? How do I teach it?

Pray every day. Read your bible. Attend eucharist every Sunday wherever you are unless very seriously hindered. Confess your sins. Give your money to serve God’s work.

These five Christian duties are the basic disciplines Christians are under which I announce to you irregularly. I also announce Feast Days but rarely do I encourage you to fast on Fridays though I do so now. As Sunday’s meal is resurrection festive Friday’s  simple fare honours Jesus who died for us.

We need these disciplines. They’re paralleled by our Muslim sisters and brothers whose Five Pillars consist of knowing their creed,  praying five times each day, giving to the poor and needy, fasting during the month of Ramadan and making pilgrimage to Mecca.

Oh that you and I had the fervour and discipline of Islam!

Back to the scriptures! The Gospel reading makes clear that discipline in the Church isn’t just from the church pastor but fraternal, that is carried and promoted by all church members. If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. We are all involved in church discipline and not just the priest. He of course is under a special discipline himself being accountable to God through the Bishop. At St Giles we have a Churchwarden, David Lamb, a lay officer of the Bishop, with me, sharing leadership and oversight of our congregation.

If there are sick needing visiting, grieved needing counsel, church members who’ve fallen away or whatever we all share responsibility for them, according to the Gospel. However, according to the first reading and the ordination service, there is a special responsibility that lies with the priest and to a lesser extent the Churchwarden.

At my ordination the Bishop said these words from St John’s Gospel Chapter 20 echoed at the end of today’s Gospel from Matthew 18: Receive the holy Ghost for the office and work of a priest in the Church of God, now committed unto thee by the imposition of our hands. Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thou dost retain, they are retained. And be thou a faithful dispenser of the Word of God, and of his holy Sacraments; In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Awesome words – what dignity, what responsibility! Also behind my preference to be called Father John since to imagine John Twisleton could do what a priest does is fanciful and irreverent for I can change no bread and wine or penitent heart.

Tomorrow I go to the University of Kent with the 300 licensed priests of our diocese for our clergy conference. Please pray for us, for me and for all who minister the Doctrine and Sacraments, and the Discipline of Christ. Pray that we may believe in our priesthood and love our people.

May we truly believe Christ’s doctrine, enter more fully into the awe of the sacraments and live more fully under the discipline of Christ so we priests who minister in God’s temple…may say and sing with our lips [what] we believe in our hearts, and show [that faith] forth in our lives.

Today’s  Gospel ends with a promise to all Christians which has echoes of the ordination rite. Our Lord says whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.

Where Christians are united, where they accept a mutual discipline of prayer, devotion to God’s word, attendance at the eucharist, mutual forgiveness and sacrificial giving the Holy Spirit can come in power among them. Part of that unity is obedience to our leaders in all things lawful and honest, you to me and me to the bishop. As St Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 5:12-13 we appeal to you, brothers and sisters, to respect those who labour among you, and have charge of you in the Lord and admonish you; esteem them very highly in love because of their work. Be at peace among yourselves. 

Indeed may peace be with us, respect for one another, priest and people, and agreement together in a common discipline so that where two or three are gathered in Christ’s name, he may be among us. We have heard his word and approach the sacrament but let’s now take a moment to think of and renew commitment to the five Christian  disciplines I mentioned:  daily prayer, reading our bible, Sunday eucharist, confession of our sins and giving money to serve God’s work. 

Trinity 11 (22A) Archbishop Justin Welby 31st August 2014

Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep Paul says in the continuation of Romans 12 set for today. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.

As I read these words I recall with you what I shared last week about Romans 12-15 being Paul’s ethical application of the doctrine of Christ set forth in Romans 1-11. I also recall how a book I recently read chimes in well as a topical illustration of this teaching. Anne and I have both profitably read the newly published work of Andrew Atherstone with title Archbishop Justin Welby Risk-taker and Reconciler.

If ever there was a job to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep it’s that of a priest and even more so that of a bishop. As we all know leading Anglicans is no plain sailing whether you’re Rector of Horsted Keynes or Archbishop of Canterbury. Leading the Church of England is as easy as taking your cat for a walk!

Justin Welby is an impressive figure. From a successful career in the oil industry he was appointed among other reasons because he was easy in his own skin which seems rare among clerics. The lack of ease of his job is such that his predecessor as Archbishop talked of needing ‘the constitution of an ox and the skin of a rhinoceros’. Like many impressive figures he has shown great bravery working with Canon Andrew White now in Baghdad but formerly in Coventry where I briefly knew him and Justin when we were priests in a Diocese famous for its ministry of reconciliation. The Archbishop wears around his neck a cross built from nails found in the ruins of the bombed Cathedral which burned to the ground in September 1941. Before his appointment his work on international reconciliation brought him like Canon White on occasion within an inch of his life.  A year into the job as Archbishop  that track record for reconciliation has been extended through his establishing a settlement for women bishops, charting a way forward re same sex unions and setting forth an agenda for prayer, monasticism, church growth and kingdom-oriented social engagement that sees Churches reconciled with the Pope as a leading partner.

On the night of the women bishops vote he appeared on Newsnight literally to Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep. Our Archbishop spoke directly to those found in deep pain that July night He has shared life sufficiently with people like me and my ecclesiastical neighbour Lisa Barnett at Scaynes Hill to be equipped to make what was bad disagreement into good disagreement. My ‘two cheers for women bishops’ in P&P has Lisa very much in mind and takes a leaf out of Justin Welby’s book.

When you share life with people, as we do here at St Giles, you grow through tolerance of difference to respect of difference. You really can rejoice when they rejoice even if what they’re rejoicing in is painful to you. Paul knew and taught this. So does our Archbishop and so should we! For example it’s not good enough to tolerate Muslims – we need to respect them, which means have the capacity to imagine ourselves in their shoes, something friendship can achieve.

Andrew Atherstone’s book on Welby is peppered with joyous life, growth and change far more typical of the Church of England than letters to Church Times would have you believe.  Sympathy with our Eton educated subject is won by tale of a broken home which sent him to boarding school and no doubt skills him in dealing with dysfunction in his Anglican family.

Intellectual brilliance made him a fast riser in the oil industry and the church as ‘risk-taker and reconciler…able…to synthesise a lot of information quickly and under pressure’ be that linked to collapse of oil prices or Anglican affairs. 

Throughout the book there are quotes of how Jesus on the Cross impacts him: ‘The cross is the moment of deepest encounter and most radical change. God is crucified – my Friend died – in some way, for me. ... A person caught by the implications of the cross will be a person who has found the fullness of the life which is the gift of God through him…  The cross is the great pointer where the suffering, and the sorrow, and torture, and trial, and sin, and yuck of the world ends up on God’s shoulders, out of love for us’. 

This profound sense of redemption underlies his strong sense of the church. Again I quote: ‘Because God has brought us together [as his Church] we are stuck with each other and we had better learn to do it the way God wants us to. That means in practice that we need to learn diversity without enmity, to love not only those with whom we agree but especially those with whom we do not agree’.  This sort of sentiment echoes that of Paul before us this morning in Romans 12. As Archbishop he says he isn’t trying to get everyone to agree but to transform bad disagreement into good disagreement, working for unity not unanimity. I quote: ‘Reconciliation among Christians does not have unanimity at its heart, or tolerance, but the capacity to love despite disagreement, and to differ and be diverse without breaking fellowship. The difficulty is where to draw the boundaries and decide that a difference is of such fundamental importance that a breakdown of fellowship is necessary’.

Speaking last year at a commemoration of the great 17th century Anglican writer Jeremy Taylor he describes our Anglican scenario in these words: ‘Like a drunk man walking near the edge of a cliff, we trip and totter and slip and wander, ever nearer to the edge of the precipice. It is a dangerous place, a narrow path we walk as Anglicans at present. On one side is the steep fall into an absence of any core beliefs, a chasm where we lose touch with God, and thus we rely only on ourselves and our own message. On the other side there is a vast fall into a ravine of intolerance and cruel exclusion. It is for those who claim all truth, and exclude any who question. When we fall into this place, we lose touch with human beings and create a small church, or rather many small churches – divided, ineffective in serving the poor, the hungry and the suffering, incapable of living with each other, and incomprehensible to those outside the church’.

This description brought me back to today’s section of St Paul. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; Paul says. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Our own readiness to accept and respect fellow Christians of different belief or, as with Islam or militant atheism, those far from our own conviction, will invest love which always brings a return.  Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honour. 

I close repeating one of the Archbishop’s quotations:  A person caught by the implications of the cross will be a person who has found the fullness of the life which is the gift of God through him... It is out of that fullness brought us here in the eucharist that we gain courage to say, and not just of fellow Christians, because God has brought us together we are stuck with each other and we had better learn to do it the way God wants us to.  So be it! Let’s apply it!