St Bartholomew, Brighton 14C 3rd July 2022

 

The harvest is rich but the labourers are few, so ask the Lord of the harvest to send labourers to his harvest Luke 10:2

The French have a military saying ‘reculer pour mieux sauter’ – retreat, coil up, draw back in order to better jump forwards.

Each Sunday St. Bartholomew’s has work ahead, Gospel work, and she needs our labour – so we need to prepare, to get ready. 

The Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them out ahead of him in pairs..

There’s work ahead. We need to prepare, ‘reculer’, to draw back somewhat into ourselves, to retreat before attempting an advance for God in our community

Two thoughts first on ‘reculer’, on retreat – and they are about seeking deeper humility and confidence in God.

Then two thoughts on ‘sauter’, on jumping forwards – the need to work at prayer and invitation as joint scissor blades that will cut a way ahead for us.

First then thoughts about how we might need to ‘coil up’ in readiness for effective outreach. St Francis de Sales taught two essential virtues for Christians which we are always in need of deepening.  They are humility and confidence in God.

1. Humility

To go into ourselves, ‘reculer’ must be about deepening our humility as individuals and as a Church.

Don’t you feel humbled at the very idea of mission?  Who are we to commend Almighty God to folk at a time when religion to many people is more source of evil than good?

Who are we to tell Brighton it needs Our Lord? 

Good thinking – our greatest resource for mission as Christians must be humility, a sense of our own inadequacy.

The more we’re aware of God’s mercy to us in all humility, the more we’re able to reflect it towards others – and the more affinity we have with our fellow human beings.

Just as our flesh literally weighs us down there’s a gravitational field of self-centredness that makes human life without God the burden it is. When we discover mercy we discover our nothingness and our less than nothingness through sin. [Picture from ‘Gravity’ film promotion]

It is precisely in owning that nothingness in the virtue of humility that we grow wings that lift us away from self towards God and neighbour.

Freed more and more from taking ourselves so seriously we take flight. Here supremely at Mass, week by week, is a school of humility. We’re humbled by an ever-fuller vision of God in his magnificence and mercy – and we indeed take flight.

2. Confidence in God

A second virtue for us to work on is confidence.

By confidence I mean confidence in God and not self-confidence. To ‘coil up’ and gain energy as Christians preparing to spring forwards we need to renew a different sort of confidence – confidence in God.

God, Almighty God, is far worthier of our trust than we will ever believe on this earth. 

Through our occasional study groups, through our forthcoming pilgrimage, through our own reading about the faith or through conversations with one another including our priests we build confidence in Our Lord, his promises and his possibilities so as to be in a better position to bring in the new Church members we hope to see in St. Bartholomew’s.

We need confidence in God coupled to humility – it is this combination that resources us for outreach. Our admission we’re nothing before God saves us from being presumptuous in witnessing to others. Our confidence that God desires to be everything to us and to everyone balances this and helps put spring in our steps as we commend Christian Faith.

Lastly two thoughts on ‘sauter’, on jumping forwards – the need to work at prayer and invitation.

3.  Prayer

These two things - prayer and invitation are like two powerful blades in a scissor action lying ahead for St. Bartholomew’s as we work for yet more effective outreach.

As Hallesly wrote: ‘It is by prayer that we couple the powers of heaven to our helplessness ...the powers which can awaken those who sleep in sin and raise the dead, the power which can capture strongholds and make the impossible possible’.

Thousands around us are living and dying without Christ and we want them to discover a purpose for living and a reason for dying - the very purpose and reason we have as Christians here at St. Bartholomew’s. As today’s Gospel implies we’re called to act - you are called to act.

I am asking you each day to pray for the growth of the Church mentioning particular individuals known to you upon whom you desire God’s richest blessing. It may be a matter of praying the Our Father slowly, ‘Thy Kingdom come in Brighton, in Sussex, in the life of my friends, or of taking up afresh the parish monthly intention sheet, or of saying a prayer of our own like, ‘Lord Jesus draw her to Yourself with a special intention for particular friends.

We have an ongoing Mission -  and you and I are on its executive Committee - we are to act - by the prayer we offer day by day and by the invitations we give out to our friends for special events, especially special events at Church like next month’s patronal festival - I’m making a phone call to someone who’s lapsed about that.

4.  Invitation

Invitations for people to join in some of our events requires forethought.  The idea of inviting folk must be around as we make new friends or as we relate to our existing friends and family members. We need a whole attitude of ‘invitation’, to make ourselves, or let the Holy Spirit make us more and more a living ‘invitation’ to meet with Our Lord and his Church

Both our prayer and our invitation require a right attitude, one of wholeheartedness.

So we move back from ‘sauter’ to ‘reculer’, from planning our advance to planning the right sort of preparation. 

Do you think it is the will of Our Lord for his Church to grow? Today’s Gospel says yes, it is!

Do you think we at St. Bartholomew’s have something the friends we are called to pray for are missing out on?

We need to believe this if our prayer and our invitations are to be wholehearted.

Let me put it the other way around. How will you feel when the friend or neighbour you are going to pray for comes with you to Church? Will you feel embarrassed? If so, why should you feel so? 

Is the celebration of your own faith helpful to your human and social flourishing? How good is the gospel to you - good enough to be worth sharing? Or is your faith something private, something weird and wonderful, special for Sundays but nothing you would dare to trouble your friends and neighbours with?

May the Lord touch us this morning as we welcome Him in the Blessed Sacrament - touch us in our heart of hearts, so we can touch others for him! God refresh in us the purpose for living and the reason for dying given to us in our Risen Lord. As God is so near to us may he make himself near to all whom we entrust to him in the weeks ahead. 

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!

Giggleswick School evening service 26 June 2022

I’m so pleased to be back in Chapel as an OG. 

If Giggleswick helped make me what I am, Chapel and the Chaplain - in my day Mr Curtis - were key. I’m grateful to Mr Womack and the Head for renewing the invitation to share with you all this evening.

First I want to hear from you. Put your hand up if you are involved in or saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?

What do you think was the moral of the story? Have a think about it. 

Put your hand up if you’ve got thoughts to share. Feedback

Roald Dahl’s novel and its adaptations - the film, play and musical - contain truth found in folktales from across the world. Charlie - poor, unlucky yet kind and likable - is rewarded, whilst other children who represent vices are punished. The message is “Don’t be like them, be like Charlie.”  Another is “Bad parenting makes bad children”.

The moral I picked up from Roald Dahl’s tale full of delicious chocolate is: ‘Be good’.

‘Be good’ - this familiar parental greeting is the strap line of our scripture and my message this evening. ‘The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good’ (Luke 6:45).

I’m a writer and broadcaster. Over lockdown I prepared a book called Pointers to Heaven and a radio series of the same name. Both start with Mrs Foster, the lady across the road from our family home who stepped in to care for my brother and I when my parents were hard pressed. She exuded goodness and that fascinated me.

I remember the warmth of her smile. Through it her face became a pointer beyond herself to something more enduring. Allied as it was to her practical help offered to us seemingly at the drop of a hat, Mrs Foster pointed to a reason and purpose beyond herself. 

Her self-forgetfulness was my first spiritual teacher. Her visits underlined goodness to me in such a way that I couldn’t see it as other than a gift much to be desired. 

When she smiled down at me in my mishaps I felt uplifted. Facing her, to own up to wrongdoing, seared my soul because I was made aware of my own lack of goodness and how that hurted her.

People don’t get on in the world without people to look up to, and - with my parents and teachers - Mrs Foster was such a lady. 

As I reflect on her with you, I judge her goodness to have been a pointer beyond herself to the world beyond this world our Dome points to, the world we call heaven, a place thrilling with the goodness of God so evident in this lady.

Pointers to heaven like the goodness of Mrs Foster have a ripple effect. Thanks to her and many good people including teachers, chaplains and former pupils of Giggleswick I keep up with - and my own crucial opening up to God himself - I stand before you this evening where I sat as pupil half a century ago.

‘The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good’. Seeking goodness for Christians is inseparable from seeking God and the purification he grants. Goodness as a moral quality builds through life experience but it can also diminish depending on where your heart is set. It is my conviction that the vision of God is transformative of the heart and its fullness will be at the heart of heaven. Conversely the heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart. As Thomas More wrote: ‘whoever bids others to do right, but gives an evil example by acting the opposite way is like a foolish weaver who weaves with one hand and unravels the cloth just as quickly with the other’. Standing here - talking, writing and broadcasting about heaven - would be presumptuous unless my own heart were set in that direction and its problems being alleviated by the Holy Spirit.

As St John writes in his first letter: ‘Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.’ (1 John 3:2-3) 

On my visits here I take time to look up into the Chapel Dome, filled with angels, to renew that hope and purification, when it's as if God says to me what I now say to you: Be good!

St Mary, Balcombe Trinity Sunday 12th June 2022

 

Today we celebrate the revelation of God as an eternal fellowship of love, three persons equal in majesty, undivided in splendour, yet one God.

The doctrine of the most holy and undivided Trinity is challenging, relevant, intriguing and essential – four headings to steer our delving this morning into foundational truth and life.

Firstly it’s a challenge. Reason takes you so far in Christianity. We could never have invented God in three persons, its revealed truth. Then you have the question of weighing other revelations – Islam and Hinduism besides the Judaism from which the Trinitarian revelation came. 

Preachers go on leave this Sunday for fear of a seemingly cold, calculated, mathematical doctrine. Three in one and one in three. Why three? Why not one, says Islam, why not more says Hinduism, why not none says the atheist mocking our feeble attempts to get our mind round God three in one.

There’s the challenge set before us in Trinitarian faith but that challenge is based on historical events. These clearly reveal the nature of God in the coming of Jesus, whose death and resurrection we’ve been following up to Ascension Day, and the coming of the Spirit on Pentecost Day. It’s a challenge that might lead you to the library or the internet so you can better answer for your faith to those who believe in one God, no God or many gods as opposed to one God in three persons.

Secondly the doctrine of the Trinity is utterly relevant. I’ve been busy preparing couples for marriage recently and how good that’s been, yes, how countercultural even given the falling away in this commitment. Marriage as a union of life-giving love points us to the Trinity, because human beings are in the image of God who is himself a union of life-giving love. Keeping true to ourselves as human beings, and true to the life-giving nature of marriage is keeping true to God as he has revealed himself to us.  God as love within himself. How could God be so without the distinction of persons within him? 

Challenging, relevant – thirdly the doctrine of God should be intriguing. The eternal fellowship of love that is God draws us into himself. What after all is the Church for other than to serve God’s purpose to bring as many souls on earth as possible into fellowship with him? 

The doctrine of the Trinity is revealed first of all in Our Lord’s coming into a human family with Mary and Joseph, into village life in Nazareth, then into the missionary partnership of the disciples. That divine society continues after his resurrection and the gift of the Spirit as one, holy catholic and apostolic church which is God’s never-ending family!

How intriguing God is, and we are. If you want evidence for God look in the mirror and read Psalm 8 You have made (us) little lower than the angels and crown (us) with glory and honour. More than that, a human being in isolation isn’t a true human for, in John Donne’s words, no man is an island. What’s intriguing about God as divine society mirrors what we find intriguing about ourselves, namely our desire for society and friendship. This desire will be fully satisfied only in the communion of saints who can be thought of as standing near God as a corona or crown around the sun.

Challenging, relevant, intriguing – lastly the Trinitarian doctrine of God is essential.

It is essential because Christianity is a religion of salvation and that salvation stands or falls on the divinity of Jesus Christ. We read Jesus words in today’s Gospel all that the Father has is mine…the Spirit will take what is mine and declare it to you (John 16:15). 

Does my eternal destiny depend on my own good works, lacking as they are, or on a relationship freely offered me by God in his Son? 

In Jesus do we really meet with God himself? 

These, as they say, are the twenty four thousand dollar questions hidden behind keeping a feast day for the Blessed Trinity. 

The doctrine might sound cold and mathematical but it follows a logic of love, love beyond all measure, extravagant, unconditional love for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son Jesus Christ so that all who believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)

To believe this is to believe God isn’t One but One God in three persons. 

It’s challenging to so believe – God is God and has revealed himself in this way and not another way.

It’s relevant - the way we see God affects the way we see ourselves and steers us from unworthy pursuits.

It’s intriguing because the loving fellowship of God in three persons chimes in with our sociable nature and draws it to joyful completion in the communion of saints

It’s essential doctrine because without it the divinity of Christ falls, the word of God is emptied of power and the sacraments become empty ritual as God’s coming to us in Jesus and the Spirit is denied.

May all I have shared enrich the eucharist we now offer through, with and in Jesus Christ, to whom, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, be all might, majesty, dominion and power now and for evermore. Amen.

St Bartholomew, Brighton Visitation of Our Lady 31 May 2022

 

In today’s Gospel of the Visitation Mary in her pregnancy visits her cousin Elizabeth, also pregnant with the Lord’s forerunner, St. John the Baptist.  As the holy women meet the children in their wombs greet one another.  Their joy expands and bursts out as Mary expresses it in the great canticle we call Magnificat which the Church uses daily at Evening Prayer – My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord.

The shared joy starts with the greeting of Mary.  We read: Now as soon as Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leapt in her womb and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.

Mary is the first evangelist. It is by her voice that John the Baptist and Elizabeth recognise the presence of Jesus.

I say Mary is the first Christian evangelist.  By that I mean her words communicated from her depths and her integrity the mystery of the Nativity soon to be revealed.  

As baby John heard Our Lady’s voice it was as if one depth sounded across to another, the joy in one being excited joy in another.

In his book ‘The Soul of the Apostolate’ (picture), Dom Chautard appeals to his readers to live with God in order to be able to speak of Him, with the best results; the active life (of a Christian)…should be…the overflow of its interior life.

Mary’s words in today’s Gospel made an impact because of what was interior to her. Our Lady is the model Christian – she models the indwelling of Christ and the priority of the interior life.

We have here in this place a beautiful Church in a prominent place. It is a place we promote not least by opening our doors day by day. When people draw near to this building, which is so prominent, we should take care that they will be drawn by all they hear and see of those who worship here: Christ in us.

We can build lovely buildings in prominent places to honour God, but they only become instruments of his kingdom as the Lord’s presence sanctifies them through the Eucharist and through the indwelling of Christ in his people.

The subtitle of my book ‘Soul of the Apostolate’ is ‘Jesus must be the Life of my work. Otherwise…’ we are left to complete the otherwise.

There is no ‘quick fix’ for getting more of Jesus in your life. It requires dedication and determination, even if it is a grace from above.

Dom Chautard’s wisdom is timely.  Our apostolate, our sense of being ‘sent’ as Christians, will be utterly ineffective unless it comes as an overflow from what is being cultivated within.

What are we doing, here at St Bartholomew’s, to cultivate the interior life? 

We welcome Jesus day by day in word and sacrament.  How are we savouring that gift in our daily prayer?  In our discipline of bible reading, Confession or of generous service to those in need?

Where people are meeting deep down with Jesus, the joy of  Jesus is taking hold of them so that all that they say and do will be permeated by that joy.

Jesus living in Mary - crown of this feast - live in us!

St John the Evangelist, Burgess Hill Unity 29th May 2022

‘May they all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.’ John 17:21 

It seems to me Our Lord’s invitation reaches us as a church at three levels, local, national and universal.

First local. It has always been a privilege for me to serve St John’s, starting 21 years ago as diocesan mission & renewal adviser working with Fr Clay and Fr Kevin and more recently in your pastoral vacancy. With no parish priest our Churchwardens with Deacon Stephen have worked hard through thick and thin to build our collaboration as we seek to promote Christianity in Burgess Hill and we salute that work as the vacancy draws thankfully to a close. 

Fr David comes among us with welcome oversight to develop the life of St John’s with an eye to renewing worship, engaging youth and families and enhancing our buildings for better Christian service and outreach. He will need our support and prayers from day one as he presides over the coalition of catholic, evangelical and liberal Christians here at St John’s, keeping us united and outwardly focussed.

Our Lord’s invitation to be one as he is one within the Godhead reaches us as a church at a second level, nationally. 

Through the Five Guiding Principles the Church of England is fully committed to all orders of ministry being open equally to all, without reference to gender. It also remains committed to ensuring those who cannot receive the ministry of women priests or bishops are able to flourish, continuing their witness to the Church of England’s claim to hold the faith and practice of the universal church. The majority decision to ordain women in 1992 failed to take the minority with it. There’s a majority but no consensus. This is a slow burner made more complicated by the ordination of women to the episcopate in 2015 which was effected under the understanding spelled out in the Five Guiding Principles. 

St John’s members have given exemplary patience in bearing with the national division over views of the ordained ministry. It isn’t sexist to hold to the Bible and the practice of the worldwide church, Catholic and Orthodox over 20 centuries. Neither is it a betrayal of Christian principle to seek the ordination of women. It’s just that changing holy orders, one of the seven sacraments, is like changing the heating system in a church. There’s an upheaval and a chilling effect – and the national church remains in the middle of it! No easy answers here, just patience. The Holy Spirit is saying one thing to part of the church and another thing to the rest. We must wait and see and avoid knee jerk reactions, seeking to maximise unity as a national church which believes its part of the ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic church’.

Thirdly let’s look at how Our Lord’s invitation to be one with one another gels with the international level of the universal church. In first century Corinth there were Chloe’s and Apollos’ and Cephas’ groups. In the world of the 21st century there are not three but 45,000 Christian denominations! Reversing this astonishing, alarming disunity seems impossible - but with God nothing is impossible! 

Today’s second reading, looking to the Lord’s return, reminds us that the joy of Easter season is incomplete. ‘Surely, I am coming soon. Amen, come Lord Jesus’ (Revelation 22:20). Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again! As we move next week to Pentecost, the end of Easter season, we also move towards Advent. In the letter to the Ephesians scripture likens Christ our risen and ascended Lord to a heavenly Bridegroom preparing to gather his Bride the Church after her purification from sin, including her divisions, is ended and her holiness is made complete. The world will not be ready for this until the church is ready - that is, made one and holy - which is an astonishing thought! What we are celebrating this morning, our being made one bread, one body, is an anticipation of what is to come, of the Christ who is to come in his fullness. 

The divisions of the world at this moment, linked to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, are linked to Christian divisions, a reminder of how we fail to serve the overarching plan of God to gather a people to himself through his church from every people and nation. Part of the tragedy is the failure of Orthodox Church leaders to present that vision, keep their flock united, condemn the killing of church members by other church members or even call for a ceasefire. The Pope’s intervention has been striking in condemning Patriarch Kirill. This sets back ecumenical relations though it makes clear that the cause of the kingdom of God, of justice, love and peace comes first and church unity rides on the back of that aspiration.

Only as the different churches come together to the foot of Christ’s Cross and admit their need of his forgiveness are they ever going to be made one, as he desires. This happens worldwide whenever Christians opt to maximise holiness and cooperation with their sister churches. As Edward Pusey said ‘it is what is unholy on both sides that keeps us apart’. I am aware that the Jesus Prayer I pray hour by hour - ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’ - is a gift from Russian orthodoxy. Though much harm flows from Russia at this time there is also holiness in  many new monastic communities and that holiness is overflowing across the world 

Christian unity grows – locally, nationally or internationally - as Christians grow together in both holiness and love. Let’s make that our priority as much as we can as a new partnership of priests and people emerges here from June 9th. 

‘May they all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.’

St Richard, Haywards Heath Easter 5(C) 15th May 2022

 

 

In dealing firsthand with the hike in the cost of living, with COVID and many of us second hand with Ukraine, not to mention our own contingencies, those words of the apostles in Acts 14 have a resonance ‘We all have to experience many hardships before we enter the kingdom of God’. It's that kingdom in its fullness beyond this world, which we yearn for, which is subject of our second reading from the book of Revelation Chapter 21. John the visionary speaks there of a new earth and heaven and a new Jerusalem. These new things are to be found already in the Church on earth inasmuch as the resurrection of Jesus thrills through her life. That’s why we read Revelation in Eastertide. 

God does indeed dwell with men and women through Jesus veiled in word and sacrament. We’ve got his life in the Christian community. This life is a foretaste, a preview of forthcoming attractions, where ‘mourning and crying and pain will be no more’. Oh yes there’s mourning and crying and pain in the life of the Christian church as much as outside it - but it’s mourning, crying and pain sweetened by the Lord we know who’s with us. 

Just a month ago I was in the sanctuary to hear the priest say, piercing the candle with the five studs at the Easter Vigil: ‘By his holy and glorious wounds may Christ our Lord guard and keep us’. The Paschal Candle is a triumphant witness, standing tall, that says God is above death. It also reminds us he’s not above suffering, as witnessed to all on Good Friday. That is so very, very important to us as witnesses to Christ in a world losing hope. God, the God and Father of Jesus, expects nothing of us he’s not prepared to go through himself. This is the main ground of hope we cling to as Christians as we ourselves experience hardship, hope that isn’t just out of this world - though the resurrection is all of that - but hope rooted in sharp human reality, in blood, sweat and tears. 

Our Blessed Lord has drawn the sting of death and suffering for all who turn to him. The vision of St John in our second reading, the vision of Christianity, is a now and then vision. What is then to be in a transformed universe is now present – this is the gospel and it is particularly expressed in the Paschal Candle and its piercings which towers over the sanctuary for the 50 days of Easter season

I always take heart when I pray before the coronation altar in Westminster Abbey. Above it there’s another quotation from Revelation: ‘The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ’. What does it mean to seek that ‘the kingdom of the world becomes the kingdom of God’? Certainly it is a robust vision of inclusion though that inclusion extends beyond this world into ‘the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting’. Nevertheless at St Richard’s we take very seriously our responsibility to serve the common good in our community evident yesterday at the craft fair and week by week in Ric’s Bench and Memory Moments cafe. With you I pledge to do my bit to help these ventures during the pastoral vacancy - may that be short! May God’s richest blessing follow Fr Chris, Carolyn and Sam and remain with us - ‘give and it will be given to you’ - as we seek a faithful priest to succeed a rich legacy! As we serve here the good of our town we are serving the aspiration for each and every person to be granted opportunity to reach their full potential especially those hardest pressed in the current economic climate.

The kingdom of God is nothing less than his reign. That’s not just for the new heaven and earth but for now. God reigns now where folk will let him in. I am always praying we see more prophetically gifted leadership in public life, not least a Wilberforce or two or three in Parliament! It says in Proverbs 29 verse 18 that ‘where there’s no vision the people perish’. Away from God’s reign there’s ‘mourning and crying and pain’ without consolation. Those who promote a vision of God help keep us faithful to enduring values paving the way to the heavenly Jerusalem descending from God. 

Lastly let’s see what we can glean from today’s Gospel from St John chapter 13. ‘A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you’ (v34). Love makes the world and the church go round. The best sort of evangelism is a community that intrigues people with the love of Jesus. The vision thing centres in Christianity on loving God and your neighbour as yourself. It’s resourced by God’s love poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit as St Paul writes in Romans 5 verse 5. ‘As I have loved you’ – as God loves us – we’re to love one another. This is the Christian call and when it’s applied it brings transformation.

Wise politicians know their need of the voluntary sector. Communities can’t be built and neither can citizens be formed without people who’re prepared to put themselves out for others.

What’s the answer to the abortion rate? To family breakdown? To care for the elderly? To those who wish to legalise mercy killing? The answer doesn’t lie so much in policies as in a spiritual revival bringing a fresh outpouring of love. ‘A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you’.

Just to take one of my list, isn’t the problem of people wishing they were dead and not suffering  linked not just to low pain tolerances but also to the lack of compassion around in our families? If people know they’re loved they can brave pain. You can cope with no end of hardship if you know you’re loved. Values come from vision and we sorely need vision in our society. The Lord send more visionaries into public office, some of Christian conviction with a yearning for the new heaven and the new earth where righteousness dwells.

May the kingdom of this world advance a little towards becoming the kingdom of our God and of his Christ through this eucharist, through our prayer, through fresh concern for the world of politics and through a new wave of the Holy Spirit pouring his love upon us, upon our town, county, nation and world. Amen.