Midnight Mass St Mary, Balcombe 2017

Any preacher at Midnight Mass speaks into a maelstrom of emotion.

Christmas is a milestone in lives and families bringing back memories of past joys and not least those we love but see no longer who’ve passed beyond this world.

It’s a feast of family. Even now I look back at the excitement of finding my Christmas stocking to be emptied before Church, the pillowcase of presents before lunch and an ongoing tradition of listening to the Queen at 3pm.

To enter the spiritual joy of Christmas though we have to go behind and beyond such experience however hard that can be.

To gain the forward looking newness of Jesus which is the spiritual force of tonight, our looking back needs to go further. Instead of looking back at our experience of the Feast, we’ve got to look back a lot further, beyond our lifespan and even the lifespan of Christianity to the Old Testament and make its eager longing for the Lord our own. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness - on them light has shined. For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Those words of Isaiah are fulfilled by God’s speaking to us not just in words but personally through the arrival of his Son onto the earth. Isaiah’s brother prophet Micah, also writing 800 years before Christ, predicts the geography of tonight when he writes in Chapter 5 verse 2: You, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel.

Micah, Isaiah, Hosea, Jeremiah, Zechariah, David and the Psalm writers, all witness to those summary words of expectation in Isaiah Chapter 9 that the day will come when they’ll say The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness - on them light has shined. Israelites held – and Jews still hold by rejecting Jesus - that God will act in the future to redress the darkness in the world by bringing something new – Someone new.

When that newness broke into the world that first Christmas, Easter and Whitsun the writer of our second reading expresses the truth of it in an awesome UIKeyInputDownArrowsentence, Hebrews 1 verse 1: Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds.  Later on in that epistle the writer speaks of God’s appointment of Jesus Christ, the same, yesterday and today and for ever. (Hebrews 13:8). Something new, Someone new who can never grow old, in whom we too find newness tonight.

The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth. Those words from tonight’s Gospel put the Christmas message in a sentence repeated in another way by Saint John two chapters later: For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. (John 3:16)

Tonight we stand with the eager longing of Isaiah, Micah and the prophets before a revelation of God of immense spiritual force and possessing the capacity to turn our lives round tonight.

The one true and loving God planned and made human beings for eternal life with him.

Knowing that once made we’d need renewing again and again on account of the errors we’d make that dull our spirits God came to embrace us face to face. Love needs a body to express itself and in that way to bring renewal to the one who is loved. As God in the child of Bethlehem first embraced his mother he embraces us tonight through the physical elements of bread and wine we call Christmass.

The prophets cried out to God for 1000 years about the errors of the people but into their cries God spoke a promise that would be fulfilled on a time scheme of his own so that as St Matthew says, Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the King. (Matthew 2:1)

God who is love spoke through the prophets and then as the second reading says in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds.

I can point you tonight to the Bible and its witness to God’s speaking to us over 3000 years. I can point you to the Christian revelation of God in Jesus Christ 2000 years back and the building of St Mary’s to homage that truth 1000 years ago.

More powerfully and immediately though, my task as preacher is to point you to Someone outside the pages of history who is here for us right now. Someone new who is waiting to bring something of his unending newness right into your soul tonight in the Blessed Sacrament of his body and blood.

To be a Christian is to be made new, day by day and hour by hour, by welcoming the perpetual newness of God’s love in the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. (2 Corinthians 4:6b)

Christmas isn’t ultimately about nostalgia but about newness gained through the unique reaching out of God to us in Jesus Christ.

May we sense with the prophets that gift of renewal which is ours day by day as we engage with the stupendous fact of God made flesh, made flesh to live in our flesh, Jesus, who came and died and rose, whose Spirit is knocking on the door of our heart tonight.

Jesus who came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God. (John 1:11-12)

Lord Jesus, the same, yesterday, today and for ever, bring your newness to our souls tonight in this sacrament of your body and blood.

O come to my heart, Lord Jesus, there is room in my heart for you!

Advent 4 24th December 2017

How does Jesus come into our lives?

He comes by the Holy Spirit.

He comes by the Sacraments.

He comes by the Word of God.

He comes by holy people as they rub off on us.

He comes by circumstances – which links to a second question:

Why does Jesus come into our lives?

He comes to bring us into his life, death and resurrection – and here’s the rub.

Look, as the Church invites us to do so today, at his Mother.  She was first to welcome Jesus into her life – and where did it lead her?  She was led into hardship, led to a shaming pregnancy and a Cross of sorrows before taking the shine of glory.

I want Jesus in my life.  I want the shine of glory – but, if I am honest, I don’t want hardships!  

This is where Jesus sorts us out because it's by endurance of hardship that salvation is forged.

The great Christian writers speak of the need to gratefully accept most of what comes our way, including suffering and hardship.

Sharing life with Jesus means self-sacrifice.  

Mary gives us the clue.  I am the Lord's servant, she says in today’s Gospel, let it be for me according to the Lord's will and not my own.

Jesus gives us the Holy Spirit, the sacraments and scripture.

He also gives us hardships but we have to decide whether to endure them or quit.

In that decision we bring Jesus closer or we push him further away.

Over the last four months it’s been a privilege to come alongside St Bart’s as part of the team of priests serving our pastoral vacancy. The lay leadership here is impressive in its fortitude.

As someone privileged to minister to the scores who enter our doors day by day I engage with folk enduring hardships directly or alongside a loved one. In listening to and talking with them I’m many a time left feeling I’m a fair weather Christian!

The means by which we grow in holiness aren’t necessarily sermons or books or forms of prayer, the right sort of retreat or spiritual guide.

The means of our sanctification, of our cleansing from sin, healing from hurt and so on lies in the day to day circumstances of our life as we welcome them as the Lord’s gift.

As we read in Psalm 112:6,7 the righteous will not be overthrown by evil circumstances...he does not fear bad news, nor live in dread of what may happen. For he is settled in his mind that the Lord will take care of him.

The spiritual writer De Caussade in his book Self-abandonment to Divine Providence emphasises how our welcoming of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament Sunday by Sunday focuses the welcoming of the Lord in every circumstance that comes our way.

Jesus is as ready to meet us in the circumstances of our life as he is to meet us in the Sacrament of Bread and Wine.

To be glad deep down in your heart in every situation is a grace given by God, a grace we have to seek - just as Mary sought divine help to brave her expressed fear: How can this be?

If we aren't glad at heart it may be because we’re not fully submitted to God’s will revealed in the circumstances of our life. This leads me into a reminder. By a long standing tradition here at St Bart’s priests make themselves available for confession before the Feast of Christmas. You have a last chance to catch one of us over coffee if you desire to welcome from Our Lord the grace of absolution before Christmas Communion.

Jesus comes into our lives – by the Spirit, Sacrament, Scripture or by circumstances - to bring us into his own life, death and resurrection.

He is ready to help us face discomfort so that his resurrection life may grow in us by the Spirit and our old proud and sinful nature is further humiliated and put down.

As we prepare for Christmas may we have our spiritual ears open to hear God speaking into our lives so that we might decrease in self orientation and gain within us the love of Christ that will never fail.

Christ the King Holy Ascension, Settle 26.11.17

The 22nd verse of the first chapter of the letter of St Paul to the Ephesians: God has put all things under Christ’s feet.

Page 84 of Tom Twisleton’s poems (read from Tom’s poem book) in the Craven dialect:

Come unto Jesus, all ye who are weary,

Heavily laden, down-hearted, distress’d,

If the journey be rough, and the pilgrimage dreary,

Then come unto Jesus - He promises rest.

On Life’s rugged path, toil unaided no longer,

With your sorrows untold, and your sins unconfess’d;

Cast the weight of your burden on One who is stronger,

And come unto Jesus - He promises rest.

He debars not the poor, He excludes not the lowly,

All who earnestly seek, He will gladly receive;

He is loving and merciful, truthful and holy;

And His rest is for all who repent and believe.

Amen - I could sit down!  My first cousin twice removed has preached in rhyme as good a sermon as you could preach on the Feast of Christ the King.

I won’t sit down just yet - but the rest of what I say won’t add anything to those deeply Christian sentiments of local bard Tom Twisleton. The sentiments have stayed somewhat hidden so far over this weekend celebration of his Centenary so it's good to quote them in Settle’s pulpit. They were written for a local pulpit, Zion’s most likely, though Tom was friendly with a Vicar of Giggleswick in his day.

He’d been baptised in Giggleswick Church shortly after his birth in 1845 but his funeral in 1917 was conducted by a Free Church minister from his last home in Burley where he’s buried in God’s Acre cemetery. His life story is a reminder of Christian diversity and spur towards repairing fractures within the body of Christ that hinder our mission.

Tom Twisleton’s poems have been at the centre of this weekend in which the parish Church has partnered Settle Stories, the Museum of North Craven at the Folly, Craven District Council and the Heritage Lottery Fund in a celebration of dialect and poetry at the end of a year in which young people have given the lead. We obtained funding through Settle Stories for a heritage project officer in the person of Hazel Richardson. There’s a Centenary book for Tom about to be published which I commend to you, in which I provide the Foreword and, alongside the young people’s poems my own Ode to Tom which centres on the topical subject of Truth-telling. I read it in Church yesterday at Tom’s Memorial Service and there are take away sheets with it on at the back of Church.

I wouldn’t be in this pulpit speaking on Christ the King, not to mention cousin Tom, without the example and prayers of my father, Greg Twisleton, buried in the Churchyard and my mother, Elsie. Greg was born in 1900 above his parents shop near Car and Kitchen in the marketplace and knew Tom when he was a lad. Elsie was born in Hellifield, influenced by the parish priest Christian scholar Ernest Evans, who baptised me, and dedicated his book A Reason for the Faith to Elsie’s family. Later on both Elsie and I were impacted by Ernest’s friend, Hilary’s predecessor as Vicar, Fr Eric Ashby of blessed memory. Formerly a pillar of this Church Elsie, now 95, moved to Sussex in 2010. She lived first with Anne and I at Horsted Keynes and then, since 2013, at St Anne’s Convent home in Burgess Hill near our own retirement home in Haywards Heath. I have a short greeting from her to play for you recorded two weeks ago for the Twisleton family reunion yesterday at the Royal Oak, and for her friends here at Holy Ascension. It will be uploaded later to the Back in Settle Facebook group which now has 2400 members, almost as big as the population! Here she is to speak to you: (Play clip on iPad Pro)

As the oldest of the local Twisleton clan so to speak it is a great pleasure to be able to speak to you all on this Tom Twisleton Centenary weekend with the aid of modern technology. Being part of this community of Settle and Giggleswick was a very good time in my life. Happily married to Greg for nearly 30 years I know the importance of family celebrations and I’ve always valued Tom Twisleton’s poems. I regret not being with you in person but look forward to keeping in touch. May you all have a safe trip home and share future blessings. Elsie Twisleton.

Now back to St Paul and Christ the King. God has put all things under Christ’s feet.

Jesus is Lord – three words sum up the Christian faith.

Jesus is Lord.  The carpenter born in Nazareth who shows the world the love, truth and power of God – he is Lord. It is his name that brings heaven to earth and earth to heaven.

Secondly Jesus is Lord.  A human life of 33 years lived at the start of our era continues the same yesterday, today and for ever through the power of an indestructible life (Hebrews 7v16b).

Thirdly Jesus is Lord which means he is right above all that is or has been or will be.  Jesus is God’s final word to humankind. He is also to be the very last word over all each one of us.
                                                                                                               
This is what it means to believe in Jesus seated at the right hand of the Father who has put all things under the feet of Christ his Son. In Jesus a human being lives over all things in God.  Nothing gives more hope for the human race this. Here is the place heaven and earth come together.
As Pascal said Jesus Christ is the centre of all, and the goal to which all tends.

Or, moving the challenge of Jesus closer to the soul, Thomas Merton writes: As a magnifying glass concentrates the rays of the sun into a little burning knot of heat that can set fire to a dry leaf or a piece of paper, so the mystery of Christ in the Gospel concentrates the ray of God's light and fire to a point that sets fire to the spirit of man.

Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 1v17-19 is mine and yours on this morning’s Feast of Our Lord Jesus Christ the Universal King: I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.

Tom Twisleton again - his ‘Poetical Finish to a Sermon’, verses written at the request of the Preacher based on Matthew 11:28 ‘Come unto me all ye that are weary and heavy-laden and I will give you rest’:

Come unto Jesus, all ye who are weary,

Heavily laden, down-hearted, distress’d,

If the journey be rough, and the pilgrimage dreary,

Then come unto Jesus - He promises rest.

On Life’s rugged path, toil unaided no longer,

With your sorrows untold, and your sins unconfess’d;

Cast the weight of your burden on One who is stronger,

And come unto Jesus - He promises rest.

He debars not the poor, He excludes not the lowly,

All who earnestly seek, He will gladly receive;

He is loving and merciful, truthful and holy;

And His rest is for all who repent and believe.

All Souls Day at St Bartholomew's Brighton 2017

The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live. (John 5:25)

Our Lord is speaking here and now to us and all disciples. As disciples we open our hearts to his presence in word and sacrament and gain life, life in its fullness. That life comes to us here and now, as his free gift, and it sustains a spiritual resurrection only mortal sin can quench.

Moving on in today’s Gospel from the first to the last verses, from John Chapter 5 verse 25 on to verses 28 and 29:  The hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice: and shall come forth, they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life: and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation.

Our Lord is speaking now of what is to come, of the physical resurrection, where his work as Saviour will be completed by his work as Judge.

Human beings will experience two judgements, first an individual judgement at the moment of death and second the general judgement which completes the first. At this Last Judgement on the day of Christ’s Return our individual destinies will be woven into those of all people and of the cosmos itself.

Hope in the face of that judgement is built on both the first and middle verses of today’s Gospel.

If, in the deadness of your soul, you’ve heard the voice of the Son of God you’ve experienced a coming to life in your soul and you don’t need to fear death and judgement. There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1).

Then, reading the middle two verses of the Gospel, as the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself: and hath given him authority to execute judgement also, because he is the Son of Man. You might think God would see his Son’s suitability to judge the world in his being his Son, the Son of God but, no, in a phrase quite astonishing we’re told it’s his being Son of Man that fits him for that task. The Son is equipped to preside at the Last Judgement not because of his divinity but on account of his humanity.

You and I won’t be judged by the unthinkable standard of God but by the standard of humanity seen in Jesus Christ. Hence two beautiful verses that leap out from the awesome text of the Dies Irae of Requiem Mass:

Think, kind Jesus, my salvation caused thy wondrous incarnation:

leave me not to reprobation.

Faint and weary thou hast sought me: on the Cross of suffering bought me:

shall such grace be vainly brought me?

On All Souls Day the Dies Irae together with our black vestments sober us to face up to the enormity of death and judgement. The Epistle and Gospel remind us of grace, that death and favourable judgement for Christians have passed already which is the greatest good news. What could be better news than that we celebrate this evening? The only meaningful thing in life is what conquers death, and not what but Who!

Let the saintly Bishop John Austin Baker have the last word: I rest on God, who will assuredly not allow me to find the meaning of life in his love and forgiveness, to be wholly dependent on him for the gift of myself, and then destroy that meaning, revoke that gift. He who holds me in existence now can and will hold me in it still, through and beyond the dissolution of my mortal frame. For this is the essence of love, to affirm the right of the beloved to exist. And what God affirms, nothing and no-one can contradict.

St Bartholomew, Brighton Trinity 18 (28A) 15th October 2017

The 22nd Chapter of St Matthew’s Gospel and the second verse: The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. God is the king, Jesus is the son and we and the cosmos are part of the preparing of the bride for that banquet. The whole of history is headed towards a wedding banquet where Jesus is Bridegroom and the Church is Bride.

All we’re about this morning at Mass is preparing for the end of all things when God will be everything to everyone at his wedding banquet. Blessed are those who are called to his supper!

Out of the puzzle of today’s Gospel we can distil such joy and hope!

Matthew 22 IS a puzzle. You need bible scholarship to make sense of it. Things like invited guests killing servants who bring their invitations, a man hauled unexpectedly from the streets expected to have a wedding garment! Fortunately we have four Gospels we can look at side by side, as well as knowledge of the circumstances in which St Matthew wrote his edition, especially the Jewish War with Rome that ended with Jerusalem’s destruction in 70AD. If you look at the parallel version in Luke Chapter 14 you see a more life-like parable of people making excuses after being invited to a great dinner. Matthew, writing primarily for Jews who’d rejected and put to death Christian evangelists, shades Our Lord’s original story with an allegory that presents Jerusalem’s loss as judging their rejection of Christ. That expansion explains the un-Jesus-like sound of today’s Gospel. As for the man without a wedding garment, it's a separate parable about the need to be ready for the Lord’s invitations Matthew’s  stitched onto the banquet parable. Also, whereas Luke’s banquet is given by a private person Matthew’s is given by a king for his son, the element I’m picking up on, and that’s an interpretation of Jesus’s original parable in the light of his death and resurrection.

Like St Matthew we read the teaching of Jesus Christ in the light of what followed. The Buddha gave his teaching - there are many Buddhas on sale down the Lanes - but, unlike the Buddha, Christ gave his life. When you leave the Lanes to enter St Bartholomew you see no Buddha but a great Cross above an immense altar. Here Sunday by Sunday, day by day we recall Christ’s parables whilst going on to plead the sacrificial gift revealed upon the Cross. Wagner built this Church as a great place to celebrate this greatest of gifts.

The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. God is the king, Jesus is the son given on Calvary who, by the Holy Spirit, is gathering through history the scattered children of God to his banquet. History is about the purification of God’s children in anticipation of full union with the Blessed Trinity when we shall see God as he is and become like him. In the gift of the eucharist we eat and drink of Christ veiled in the sacrament to anticipate his unveiling when God will be all in all.

In his book Corpus Christi Anglican theologian Eric Mascall writes ‘there is only one Mass, offered by the great high priest, Jesus Christ, at the Last Supper, on Calvary and in heaven… ultimately we do not celebrate masses or attend mass; we celebrate mass and attend mass. For every earthly mass is simply the Church’s participation in the one heavenly Mass… the Eucharist makes accessible to us (human beings), at our different points of space and moments of time, the one extra-spatial and supra-temporal redemptive activity of Christ, ‘who ever lives to make intercession for us’.

As we sing in Bourne’s great hymn: Paschal Lamb, thine Offering finished once for all when thou wast slain, in its fullness undiminished shall for evermore remain, cleansing souls from every stain. Sacrifice is about love and not death, Christ’s once for all death is part of his perpetual love offering seen at Mass. As Thomas Aquinas says of the Mass: O sacred feast in which we partake of Christ, his sufferings are remembered, our minds are filled with his grace and we received a pledge of the glory that is to be ours.

If Brighton’s Buddha’s - though pointers to godly detachment - distract from the unique gift of God in Jesus Christ, her cinemas are more attractive - I speak as a regular customer. To make a more favourable comparison, those clips before the main film give us a preview of forthcoming attractions. What we’re about this morning like a cinema trailer, is a meal that’s a taster of the full thing, the heavenly banquet.

Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world happy are those who are called to his supper - in this meal we see the sacrificial gift of Jesus opening heaven to us under the veil of bread and wine. We eat and drink expressing our hope and our joy, in anticipation of heaven which scripture and sacrament depict as a banquet.

The whole of history is headed towards this banquet at which Jesus is Bridegroom and the Church is Bride. And, yes, we will indeed need garments for this wedding, the garments of humility and confidence in God expressed in that beautiful and challenging prayer of the Eucharist: Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.

Father Peter Nissen’s First Eucharist St Chad, Holt, Wrexham, Wales 1st October 2017

It’s good to be in Holt - well worth the four and a half hour journey from Sussex - to be part of a memorable week for you and Gresford on the occasion of my friend Fr Peter’s ordination. I’m grateful to him - and Fr Tudor especially - for the invitation to speak God’s Word into a robust pastoral scene that owes a lot to inspirational and hard working priests.

Which of the two did the will of his father? Jesus asks in the Gospel. They said, ‘The first.’
Matthew 21:31a

I know a priest who’s got by his desk a tablet inscribed ‘love is not about words spoken but deeds done’. He’s a Jesuit priest and the quotation is from Jesuit founder St Ignatius of Loyola who knew today’s Gospel.

Last time I was in Wales I did what they call an 8 day Ignatian retreat at St Beuno’s in which I followed under guidance the reflections of this Saint especially on creation, helped by the lovely scenery. I was led to see God’s glory shining from the Welsh fields and hedgerows and to make a fresh surrender to the one by whose loving word all that is, including you and I, has come into being.

Jesus knows love isn’t just words spoken but deeds done because he is true God as well as true Man. Our whole existence is a growth into that truth and integrity, into a state where our words are powerful and our deeds extraordinary through the gift of the Holy Spirit we invoke this morning with Father Peter, at this his first celebration of the Eucharist.

Today’s celebration opens a new phase in Peter’s life and ministry in fulfilment of the call he felt quite long ago at the age of 13 and right across the sea in Denmark. It returned to him after he responded to the call of the Holy Spirit and entered the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield in Yorkshire where I first met him. Since then it has been a joy to see Peter’s vocation develop through marriage to Bodil and now through ordination to the priesthood.

Like Peter I’m something of an apologist - one who speaks and writes in defence of Christianity - as well as something of a contemplative. In the time I’ve known him both of us have been involved in challenging the contemporary reshaping of the sacraments of marriage and ordination but Peter over that time has allowed himself to be reshaped by those God-given sacraments. He’s been married and ordained!

To be married is to lose yourself in a loving union with your spouse - all that I am I give to you, all that I have I share with you. To be ordained is to lose yourself in love towards God and people. Let today’s Saint, Therese of Lisieux, be heard briefly in what I share. She had a one-line summary for the purpose of Christian existence, especially that of priests, namely to love God and make him loved.

Marriage and ordination - you have certainly not just talked about these, Fr Peter, you have done the deeds! Thank God for Bodil, and thank God for this loving Christian community gathered to mark your inauguration as a priest.

As you have received not just words but deeds of love from your wife and your congregation so you are to be reminded by today’s Gospel to return to them deeds of love, to pray in a familiar Anglican prayer that as priest ministering in God’s temple…you may say and sing with your lips what you believe in your heart,  and show that faith forth in your life.

Which of the two did the will of his father? Jesus asks. They said, ‘The first.’
Loving Jesus and making him loved as priest or as a Christian is a response to what lies at the heart of the eucharist, namely the cross and resurrection of Jesus which are abiding realities that draw us all into life in its fullness here on earth and there in heaven.

We are each one of us loved by everlasting love. In the eucharist the priest is Jesus’ man setting forth in bread and wine that awesome truth. This is my body… this is my blood… I give myself in sacrifice to you and to my Father so that joining me, offering yourselves with me as a living sacrifice, we may love God and make him loved.

In the sacramental action of the eucharist Christ is present by the Holy Spirit in word and sacrament, in priest and people, to bring his cross and resurrection to bear upon us and upon the world as it in turn bears upon our hearts. As often as we celebrate this mystery - for want of a better word - the kingdom and will of God and the honouring of his name are advanced across the world as we bring its joys and sorrows to him on our hearts. To handle the bread and wine for the Lord and his people is an awesome privilege. As Peter kneels today for the first time as a consequence of words we have given him to speak for us under God may he be the more submitted to the Lord he professes before us!  May his words be inhabited by the Holy Spirit and, since there is no word of God without power, may those words flowing from truth and submission of life, overflow in extraordinary deeds of love and service through the gift of the same Spirit.

The Gospel today is for Peter but also for Bodil without whom Peter’s ministry would, in his own words, be beyond his daring. The Gospel is for each one of us who accompany this inspirational couple as we seek inspiration for ourselves to both love God and make him loved through practical obedience. God grant us ministering in God’s temple…to say and sing with our lips what we believe in our heart, and show that faith forth in our lives.

I would like to invite you to reflect with me in a brief silence upon those words before I close with the well known Prayer of St Ignatius, fitting for both today’s new celebrant and for each one of us as we offer the eucharist with him.

Take, Lord, and receive all that I am: my liberty, my memory, my understanding, my entire life.
Lord, take all I have and call my own. You have given these gifts to me - now I return them.
Take these gifts for all is yours. Dispose of them according to your will.
Because, Lord, all I need is your love and your grace. That is enough for me. Amen

St Mary, Balcombe Trinity 15 24th September 2017

How do you see God?

Has the pastoral vacancy enlarged him for you? Most people pray - if only when a brick falls on their toes - Oh God! Losing Fr Desmond has meant some of you have had not exactly a brick but certainly a load of stuff to deal with. No man of God is a good chance to be more the people of God in one sense, but in another sense it's an unwelcome discontinuity in the pastoral and liturgical scene at St Mary’s. God though is God of the gaps - not philosophically in the sense of being invoked where there's no rational explanation for something - but God of your pastoral gap alias the interregnum. I’m glad to be alongside you as a godly fill in if you like.

How do you see God?

This morning's readings have a lot to say about this. I’m struck by the capacity of scripture to enlarge our vision of God. Years ago I had a faith crisis. I went back to Mirfield where I trained as a priest. I hardly felt God present in my life. I said the same to the monk who took me on as guide. I remember he said to me: ‘It's not God that’s left you, John, but your vision of him. Pray for a vision of God more to his dimensions and less to your own’. I did so, with his help and that of the Bible. Something happened, and here I am years on still working as God’s priest!

Today’s readings are particularly encouraging and challenging in terms of the vision of God they present.

Let’s turn first to our Gospel passage from Matthew Chapter 20:1-16. Look at the God Jesus speaks of and is himself to reveal by dying and rising! He is symbolised in the land owner who goes out no less than five times in a day to hire labourers for his vineyard. They are hired with a promised reward but at the end of the day all who worked, even those who signed on at 5 o’clock, receive the usual daily wage. All hell breaks out as the workers who’d done a whole day complain, ‘you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat’. These workers represent the Pharisees and others who as faithful religious adherents resented how Jesus favoured non-adhering outsiders like tax collectors and prostitutes. Jesus lets the landowner speak for God: are you envious because I am generous?

How do you see God?

I see God as a smiler. He smiles on us, especially when religious people - allegedly his people - frown on the workings of grace. Church life - village life too - is often about working your way up the hierarchy so that newcomers are always suspect. In Horsted Keynes we joked about people only being accepted as villagers after quarter of a century or more, but there was unpalatable truth there to joke about. Maybe it's as true in Balcombe! In Horsted Keynes the pastoral vacancy is surprising in its engaging relatively new worshippers more in leadership within the congregation. May that be true here.

Where people see God as all embracing there are no grounds for discrimination and people very often learn to swim by being thrown in at the deep end!

As I say I see God as a smiler. I’ve just been to Lourdes with its smiling Virgin Mary who very much represents her Son’s humour in this passage! It's patient smiling, but the wounds in the risen Christ’s body born to this day in the heavenlies were made by the narrow thinking that handed over to crucifixion One who taught God as God of all and not just the godly.

Are you envious because I am generous? The Lord says to us this morning and as he says it he is asking us: how do you see me, how do you see God?

If the Gospel reading at this Sunday’s Eucharist encourages us to expand our thinking of God as a God with love for everyone and not just churchgoers the first reading opens another frontier.

Christian faith sees God’s love as all embracing, literally embracing this world and the next. This service is living memorial of Christ’s death and resurrection opening up a vision of God beyond this world, beyond our human imagining. For Saint Paul the experience of Christ’s love was such that, writing most likely from his death cell in Rome to Philippi he is able to say to me living is Christ and dying is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labour for me; and I do not know which I prefer. I am hard pressed between the two: my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better; but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you. For Paul and for all who accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour there is an assurance that God is God of the dead and the living. He is no this worldly construct but a God who reveals the resurrection so that for a thousand years in this building Sunday has been kept as marker of that event.

How do you see God?

The Lord’s people gather in the Lord’s house on the Lord’s day around the Lord’s table because Jesus Christ rose breaking the chains of death and opening the kingdom of heaven to all believers. To live with Christian faith is to live with death domesticated, brought down to our level or rather made able for us to handle it through knowledge of Jesus Christ who has brought death to heel. To me living is Christ and dying gain… my desire is to be with Christ, for that is far better. Only though when we have run our measured earthly course, for us as for Paul, will that thought begin to triumph as I have seen it triumph on many a devout Christian deathbed.

Are you sure in your faith? Is it in a God who’s all embracing, who’s bigger than death?

Pray for assurance, seek it in prayer this morning and this sacrament which is medicine of immortality. Talk to the priest afterwards if you’re not sure.

Meanwhile may God grant us all by his Spirit a vision of himself more and more to his dimensions and less and less to our own!