I’m speaking to you from Haywards Heath, a town in between London and Brighton, where I have permission to officiate as a priest across Sussex and London. I also have permission to officiate in the Diocese of Guyana because I have a stall at St George’s having been made a Canon by Bishop Moss in 2013. Some of you know me as a Bible Reading Fellowship author and as a broadcaster on UK’s Premier Christian Radio. Some of my series have been broadcast on Church Calling. My wife Anne and I were married by Fr Edwin Rogers at St Mary’s Yupukari in 1988. My Canonry marked service training Amerindian priests between 1987 and 1990 at the Alan Knight Training Centre, as well as my role for many years as the Bishop of Guyana’s Commissary in the United Kingdom. This year we say farewell to the UK’s Guyana Diocesan Association of which I am acting Secretary. We’re looking forward to a Mass of Thanksgiving for its 90 years of service led by the Bishops of Guyana and Kamarang in July before their attendance at the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury. This broadcast, along with last week’s from Fr Amos, indicate how engagement between the Church of England and the Diocese of Guyana will survive GDA through many personal links, like my own and his, between the two through the friendship and invitation of Fr Ayo.
How did I get involved in Guyana? Through the late Canon John Dorman who died 18 July 1998 whose ashes are buried in Kamarang and whose name some are thinking of submitting for inclusion in the Calendar of the Church in the Province of the West Indies. Though Fr John was awarded an MBE by Queen Elizabeth his distinction is in another league, that of holiness which the writer Pascal describes as ‘the most powerful influence in the world’. In 1976 I joined the UK Company of Mission Priests of which John Dorman was a founder member, someone we looked up to as a veteran missionary full of tales of the beauty and peril of Guyana’s interior, though as with all ‘saints’ some found his enthusiasm disconcerting. In social gatherings Canon Dorman was a striking figure with a direct gaze that seemed to go to the heart of each one of us in his company. His evangelical fervour linked to the prayerful anglocatholic faith typical of CMP. His own mission had been fuelled by encountering another holy man of robust faith, Archbishop Alan Knight, who did so much to establish our Diocese.
In 1985 Canon Dorman wrote to me to share how the Holy Spirit had laid on his heart to write from Guyana asking me to consider continuing the running of a theological college for Amerindian priests, The Alan Knight Training Centre at Yupukari. It was a job for two single priests and married priests were not under consideration. The problem was that though I was in CMP, who make annual promises to stay single, I had been praying about marriage! So it was with some reluctance that I came to see Fr John’s letter as the voice of the Holy Spirit. How could I see the hinterland of Guyana deprived of the eucharist because I wouldn’t leave my comfort zone!
I needed to go. I went and as I went, in God’s loving kindness, I met Anne, a widow with two young boys. She was at the USPG - United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel’s - College of Ascension in Birmingham where Fr Allan Buik and I went to train before going to Guyana. Though Anne was going to Argentina to serve in the Anglican diocesan office after she’d served a year there the Bishop of Argentina intervened as he felt the buoys needed a dad. Bishop Randolph, of blessed memory, agreed to our marriage, as did Fr Allan, who I helped Fr Rogers celebrate it on Pentecost Sunday 1988 at St Mary, Yupukari by the Alan Knight Training Centre of which I was Principal.
It was a great Pentecost Day. The whole village came to the celebration which began with the slaughter of a cow at dawn and cost me a bag of rice, sugar and flour! A Hindu business man I played squash with at Georgetown Club provided a plane to fly in our parents. The Holy Spirit was there working to smooth the logistics of marriage in the jungle! I’m telling you all this because I know the Holy Spirit is the soul of the Church. He is all powerful. He also writes straight through crooked lines as Anne and I have discovered. After the ordinations in 1990 we returned to the UK with the boys where James, our 32 year old youngest son, conceived in Guyana, was born. Since 1990 I have visited the Diocese on six or seven occasions helping training here under the auspices of the Guyana Diocesan Association though I haven’t been over since attending Bishop Davidson’s consecration and enthronement six years ago in March 2016. Since then I’ve been working on a book called ‘Guyana Venture - A Church of England Mission’ commemorating Guyana Diocesan Association framed by my service in the Diocese whilst addressing two centuries of missionary enterprise especially Alan Knight, John Dorman and Derek Goodrich also of blessed memory. Mindful of past failures I’m sharing pride in the Church of England’s venture I have been part of, especially helping raise up priests to serve Guyana’s vast interior, crowned in 2021 by the consecration of Bishop Alfred David.
Jesus said to his disciples: ‘This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many’. Mark 14:24 [12-26]
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
My involvement with Guyana links to loving Jesus and desiring to make him loved across the world. In particular loving him through the Eucharist in which we are caught up into his eternal sacrifice of Christ and the profound challenge of that to our self-interest. I could not stand by and miss an invitation to help provide the Eucharist more fully across Guyana’s interior.
This gathering across the world for evensong is part of an eternal gathering stretching back to Abraham and beyond and stretching forward to the consummation of all things.
Through this evening’s scripture we are touching reality - we are drawn to recall the events represented at the altar Sunday by Sunday, day by day, which institute God’s covenant with us, drawn into a love which touches every concern upon the earth.
To the outward eye we are a small gathering of religious people doing their own thing at evensong or Mass. To the eye of faith we are Christians, caught up once more, on behalf of the whole creation, into the eternal sacrifice of Jesus Christ, most fully at Mass, ‘through whom,and with whom and in whom in the unity of the Holy Spirit, we give glory to our Father in heaven’.
The Old Testament reading from Genesis 15:1-18 describes an awesome encounter between Abraham and the Lord. In the holy eucharist we too should be in awe as we approach the same Lord in the Eucharistic sacrifice. This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, happy are those who are called to his supper.
One role of a preacher is to awaken, sensitise and draw God’s people afresh into this great mystery of the Christian religion centring upon the Lamb of God our Saviour truly present in the sacrifice and sacrament of the altar. A Lenten evensong is an excellent opportunity to deepen our appreciation of this staple of our Christian lives Sunday by Sunday. The Lord’s people gather on the Lord’s day in the Lord’s house around the Lord’s table. If we more fully realised what was going on in this rite our amazement would better infect others to join in the most significant happening any day on West Bank, Demerara!
Jesus, St John says, is ‘the lamb slain from the foundation of the world’ (Revelation 13:8). The sacrifice once offered on Calvary and made present at this altar is rooted in the history of God’s people and the eternal covenant.
Genesis Chapter 15 describes the institution of that covenant with Abraham by the shedding of blood, an agreement between man and God pledging loyalty even unto death. In the ancient world, when a covenant was ‘cut’ with the slaughter of lambs its breaking could be punishable by death. It also symbolised a death to independent living and the coming alive of a relationship or covenant. In the covenant God made with Abraham there was a special sign. The sacrificed animals were consumed by a supernatural intervention interpreted as an anticipation of the new covenant.
As the animal sacrifice was consumed by fire from heaven, so Jesus is to see his body and blood separated in death and then transformed by power from heaven in the glory of the resurrection. So it is that in the Eucharist we witness the separate consecration of Christ’s body and blood. We pause devotionally on two occasions - bells ring, incense is offered - to recall and honour the sacrificial sundering of the Lamb of God - ‘this is my body...this is my blood...of the new covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins’
This picture Lamb of God is a copy of an oil painting completed between 1635 and 1640 by the Spanish Baroque artist Francisco de Zurbarán. It’s housed in the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain. It is an image that often appears on Nativity scenes, the Shepherds’ offering which anticipates Christ’s sacrifice. Seasoned BBC broadcaster Jeremy Paxman once wrote of it in the Church Times: ‘no image I know so perfectly captures the astonishing force of the Christian story’.The sacrificial imagery in our Old Testament reading links to this symbol of Christ as Lamb of God so familiar to us from the liturgy of the Eucharist - familiar and yet often rather empty of meaning to many of us until we examine the Old Testament roots as we are doing this evening.
How often do we hear those words ‘Lamb of God’, linked of course to the Old Testament sacrificial system, illuminated through Abraham in our reading and more especially in the Passover ritual instituted later on by Moses? How much we need to ‘inhabit the words’ of our prayer and liturgy and not be empty ritualists!
There is a Church in Norway, I’m told, which has the image of a sheep sculpted half way up its tower. Only when people enter that Church and hear something of its history do they discover the full Christian significance of the sculpted sheep.
Years before the sculpture was erected some renovation work was occurring on the Church steeple in this rural community. One day a workman slipped from the steeple to almost certain death. At the same time by a remarkable twist of providence a flock of sheep was being driven past the Church.
The steeplejack fell on a sheep and his fall was cushioned. The sheep died to save him - an awesome happening! The workers expressed their gratitude to God by adorning that Church tower with a sculpted sheep.
Jesus is the Lamb of God whose voluntary sacrifice takes away our sin. Our Lord on Calvary takes the full impact of sin and death for us at the cost of his life.
Our Lord has soaked up all the evil that would defeat me and offered me life to the full - life that cancels sin with forgiveness, sickness with healing, bondage with deliverance and even doubt with the gift of faith through the mighty Redemption he has won.
All of this is powerfully present to me in every celebration of the Eucharist.
I cannot understand it but I will accept it. I cannot understand the way electricity works but that does not stop me switching on the lights. I take both on authority and it works to do so.
Jesus died in my place so that he might live in my place. Jesus died in my place to carry off the impact of evil upon me, through the gift of the Eucharist.
Jesus lives in my place, cooperating with my will by his Spirit, as I welcome him again and again into my heart in this Sacrament!
At Mass we make the memorial of the Offering of Jesus and enter into that Self-Offering! It is through the sacrificial Lamb of God that we can make a perfect offering to the Father, ‘our sinful bodies made clean by his body..our souls washed through his most precious blood’.
There is a deep continuity between the sacrifices of Abraham and Moses, the offering of Jesus the Lamb of God, the Eucharistic Sacrifice and our own sacrificial living as Christians. They all hang together. In a culture so full of self-interest what we are about in Christianity is powerfully counter-cultural. Sunday by Sunday, in union with Christ, we offer ‘our souls and bodies to be a living sacrifice’.
No wonder the eucharist has been described as ‘a meeting of rebels in a mammon-oriented society’. Sacrifice goes against the grain of our contemporary culture in many ways, especially voluntary sacrifice. People can make sacrifice when absolutely necessary - I did when I came to Guyana years ago - but to choose to give your life away Sunday by Sunday - well that’s heavily counter-cultural! Faithful attendance and active participation in the eucharist is our great reminder day by day of God’s call for us to direct our energies more and more away from the service of self and more and more towards his service. This self-offering is, in the words of the Eucharistic Prayer both ‘right’ and also ‘a good and joyful thing’.
Sacrifice is at heart about this voluntary choice about how we direct our lives - it is about love before it is about death. It is about ‘joyous living’ just as sure as ‘God loves a cheerful giver’. It is not so much about forgoing what we desire but of binding our energies to what God desires.
In the Eucharist week by week we’re drawn into such a school of sacrifice, into a love which touches every human concern upon the earth. We are caught up again and again into the loving sacrifice of Christ and its profound challenge to our self-interest. In offering our lives we entrust them afresh into the hands of God, renewing our covenant with him, so as to be employed to his praise and service in every situation we shall face in the coming week.
May such thoughts inspire us as we keep Lent so that our participation in Sunday and weekday Masses comes from hearts aflame with generous love.
Jesus died in our place so he might live in our place. Jesus died in our place to carry off the impact of evil upon us, through the gift of the Eucharist.
Jesus would live in our place, cooperating with us by his Spirit, as we welcome him again and again into our heart in the Most Holy Sacrament!
‘This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many’.
Father, calling to mind the death your Son endured for our salvation.. look with favour on your church's offering.. may your Son make of us a perpetual offering to you and enable us to share with all who stand before you in earth and heaven in songs of everlasting praise: Blessing and honour and glory and power be yours for ever and ever. Amen.
Canon Dr John Twisleton
Diocese of Chichester, Church of England
Former UK Commissary of the Bishop of Guyana and Principal of the Alan Knight Training Centre
