St Mary, Balcombe Trinity 8 (17A) Hidden Treasure 30.6.23

 

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Matthew 13.44

One Sunday in January 1927 this passage from Matthew 13 was the subject of a sermon by a predecessor of mine as Rector of Horsted Keynes, The Revd Frank Stenton-Eardley. It was an exceptionally profitable sermon. One of the congregation from nearby Broadhurst Manor went home, dug in a field there and unearthed a hoard of sixty-four gold nobles. This gold, deposited 500 years before, is now in the British Museum.

How profitable will this sermon be? Indeed how profitable is any sermon? Did you know you can engage with the sermon not only by grabbing the preacher over coffee but also by going on his blog? I was at the Eucharist on Friday and before the service I was putting £5 in the online donor box when I bumped into the celebrant, who is a friend. ‘I’m putting in a fiver’ I said ‘It’d better be a good sermon’. Fr Vlad promised me my money back! It was a good sermon.

There is no word of God without power. The preacher’s role is to read and study it and read and study his people and their context and make connections in a 10-15 minute talk that will help such an engagement with Our Lord that it will echo on in their lives in the coming week.

The guy who found the treasure remembered the preacher’s sermon when his spade clinked the treasure. What does today’s preacher suggest you might find memorable about the same Scripture?

I don’t know enough about the circumstances of the finding of the sixty-four gold nobles to say whether the finder gained, though I guess he did, or was it the then owner of the Manor? 

What I think you and I can gain a century on is the reminder to renew our spiritual alertness and determination. These are the clue to an ongoing welcome of treasure that’ll never be shipped off from us to the British Museum!

The two parables of the treasure and the pearl remind Christians of the need to put supreme value on building our longing for God and his kingdom.

It is not what you are or have been that God looks at with his merciful eyes but what you would be wrote the mystic author of that Medieval classic, The Cloud of Unknowing.

What would you be? Where’s your heart set? 

In our first reading from the book of Kings we heard of Solomon’s being approached by God in a dream with a similar question: Ask what I should give you. He answers with a prayer for wisdom and is praised accordingly. God said to him, ‘Because you have asked this, and have not asked for yourself long life or riches, or for the life of your enemies, but have asked for yourself understanding to discern what is right, I now do according to your word. Indeed I give you a wise and discerning mind; no one like you has been before you and no one like you shall arise after you. 

God wants aspirations towards him to be of supreme value to us and we can’t attain these without alertness and determination, two virtues that come out of the parables of the treasure and the pearl in our gospel reading from the end of Matthew Chapter 13. Like the Broadhurst Manor labourer, if we live our lives attending to every moment we don’t have to go far to find God and his riches. The purpose of scripture, of sermons and bible study, is to school us to be alert to the possibilities of God breaking into our situation, as the clink of the spade on the gold alerted the farm worker schooled by the Sunday sermon preached from the pulpit.

Speaking personally I always find the number of God-incidences in a day linked to the fervour or length of my morning prayer. The more something of God’s eternal wisdom has touched my heart the more alert I am to the need to give ear to the person I meet on the street, phone or e mail.  Treasured encounters come to me inasmuch as my heart is set to evaluate everyone I meet as if they were Christ, to see my diary as containing what’s ultimately important as well as what’s merely pressing upon me.

The treasure parable of God’s kingdom is a reminder to recognize the treasure that’s already there in our lives and the joy its discovery brings. Over the summer we’ve got great opportunities to rediscover the joy of family and friends as the demands of work lift from many of us. 

If this parable is a reminder to be alert to God’s moments the parable of the merchant is a reminder to be spiritually determined. The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it. Jesus emphasises in this parable how being his follower takes you on a determined spiritual search. The cost of this will be eclipsed by the outcome but there is a cost.

To be better disciples of Jesus we need opportunities to discipline ourselves so our personal agendas give way more and more to his. This cannot occur, Jesus cannot reach into our lives, without prayer, scripture and the eucharist. 

It is not what you are or have been or are that God looks at with his merciful eyes but what you would be. Saint Seraphim, a great Russian spiritual teacher, was asked what was the secret that lay behind people who appear to have more of the Holy Spirit than others. Just their determination was his reply.

May the Lord build that determination for him as well as the day by day, hour by hour alertness to the treasure we don’t need to go on holiday to find since it lies buried and awaiting us in Balcombe.

St Bartholomew, Brighton Trinity 5 (Wk 14) 9.7.23

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

When we hear the readings read on Sunday we examine what we’ve heard. In St Bartholomew’s we then look up, as you’re doing now, an awesome 15 feet to the preacher for understanding. Today’s Gospel invites us to look up a lot further, beyond Edmund Scott’s 45 foot baldacchino or 135 foot ceiling of allegedly the tallest parish church in Europe, to imagine how God sees the revelation we’re seeking.

‘Jesus exclaimed, “I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for hiding these things from the learned and clever and revealing them to mere children. Yes, Father, for that is what it pleased you to do’ Matthew 11:25.

Our Blessed Lord rejoices at the start of this passage which helps him convey a wonderful truth about God above and beyond us. This is the joy he shares with his Father in revealing himself to those who seek him. If you are here in St Bartholomew’s to seek God this morning be assured God is seeking you and more than seeking you - God delights in this very moment at our attention towards him! God the Son continually, moment by moment, chooses to reveal his eternal Father in the Holy Spirit. God’s joy is ours at a revelation, an opening of the inner eye of faith, so that today’s words of Zechariah in the first reading, used months back on Palm Sunday, have a special resonance with the Gospel: ‘The Lord says this: Rejoice heart and soul, daughter of Zion! Shout with gladness, daughter of Jerusalem! See now, your king comes to you’ Zechariah 9:9.

God comes to us this morning and this truth is more powerful than the simpler truth we have come to Mass in St Bartholomew’s. Of course there are many times we come to Church, look up to God, hear the Bible read and join in the Eucharist without feeling a thing. Today’s Gospel gives us a fresh perspective in its reminder of how worship begins and ends beyond us in the life of the Trinity and the communion of saints. God’s joy at our attention to God this morning and openness to what God might reveal to us is a given. By pondering Our Lord’s announcing that truth in today’s Gospel we can be infected with joy as our second reading suggests. ‘If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, then he who raised Jesus from the dead will give life to your own mortal bodies through his Spirit living in you’ Romans 8:11.

Sometimes we need grace to see things the other way round - as God says he sees things - in the words of scripture. Yes it's the case that we Christians are one with the rest of a large part of our society in seeking the truth but unlike the rest we know the Truth is continually seeking us and revealing himself less to the learned and clever and more to the humble who believe. Like many we are appalled at how the war against Ukraine shows truth being lost particularly in the Russian media. George Orwell in his novel 1984, published in 1949, portrayed the world we now see in which a government declares war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. When it comes to the state of the world the abandonment of truth telling is tragic but it doesn’t negate the work of the Holy Spirit who is always bringing truth to bear and working especially through those humble before God to establish justice, love and peace. As believers we have the privilege of seeing things the other way round, so to speak, as God would have us see things.

If that’s so for politics, seeing things from the God-perspective scripture encourages can also help our prayer as the great 16th century Saint Teresa of Avila taught. She was, it should be said first, a very down to earth lady. When her horse threw her in the mud she famously shook her fist at heaven and said, ‘God, if that's how you treat your friends, it's not surprising you have so few’. The same Teresa taught people to pray in this way. ‘Imagine’, she said, ‘that you see Jesus standing before you. He is looking at you lovingly and humbly. Prayer comes as you notice he is looking at you lovingly and humbly’. This insight is one with today’s Gospel which celebrates God’s joy at revealing himself to all who persist in coming before God in prayer and worship. Not only, says Teresa, does God look upon us with love, he looks upon us humbly. That means he thinks of himself as less than us! 

‘Jesus exclaimed, “I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for hiding these things from the learned and clever and revealing them to mere children. Yes, Father, for that is what it pleased you to do’ Matthew 11:25

God is pleased to reveal God-self and that is basic Christianity working itself out in prayer and politics. As we come forward for Holy Communion this morning let us come with an expectation that God’s life and joy will be deepened within us for ‘if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, then he who raised Jesus from the dead will give life to your own mortal bodies through his Spirit living in you’ Romans 8:11. So be it.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

St John the Evangelist, Burgess Hill Trinity 4 (Wk 13) Eucharistic Sacrifice 2.7.23

Sunday by Sunday we have an invitation to participate in a blessing and distribution of bread and wine that impacts the cosmos through the eucharistic sacrifice of Jesus who died in our place and comes here and now, there and then, to be in our place and that of the whole world before our Father. His institution of the eucharist calls forth obedience - ‘do this in remembrance of me’ - but more profoundly obedient self-offering by ourselves into his own Offering for our salvation and that of the whole world.

When I participate in the eucharist it is like getting on a celestial lift. Though its a brief journey timewise, a few minutes when it comes to specifically pleading Christ’s Sacrifice, I am aware that people and needs already on my heart get lifted to God with powerful consequences. With our patron Saint John I see the lifting of Christ in bread and wine drawing the cosmos to him ‘the bread of God which (also) comes down from heaven and gives life to the world (John 6:33). With Saint Paul I am lifted with Christ through separate consecration and display of bread and wine imagining a showing, a piercing through the Church walls, of divine love to irradiate our suffering world. Our striking west windows expand on Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 11 verse 26, one with a picture of the Crucifixion and the other of the priest at the altar enfolded by the second half of that verse ‘Ye do show the Lord’s death until He comes’. Those who built St John’s were intent it should be less a preaching house and more a temple of God so that what we do this morning is the movement to heaven of Christ’s self offering into which we are drawn, ‘our souls and bodies as a living sacrifice’.

The Old Testament reading today from Genesis 22 is profound and difficult. It is the one used on Good Friday to illuminate the offering of the Son of God upon the Cross. Abraham’s offering of his son, Isaac mirrors God the Father’s sacrifice. It is a difficult passage to read mindful as we are of contemporary abuse and even killing of children by parents and quasi-mentors. The story of how in obedience to God Abraham takes his beloved son and prepares to sacrifice him is graphic. An angel calls back his hand with the knife as it prepares to descend on little Isaac. A ram caught by its horns in a thicket is revealed to replace Isaac as a sacrifice to God. On Good Friday this scripture of a father prepared to offer his son but spared doing so is a pointer to One who actually does so. The profound action of that Day is put into a sentence by Paul two chapters on from today’s second reading: ‘God did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us’ (Romans 8:32).

For that reason we show the Lord’s death day by day at the altar, as our church windows illustrate. Unlike Abraham God did not withhold his Son for us. Rather, through God's Offering of Christ there is made as the Articles of Religion describe ‘once for all, perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction, for all the sins of the whole world’ (Article 31). God who created the world and human beings in his image, seeing the havoc caused by humans through misuse of free will, provided the remedy once for all. Though that havoc continues it is countered day by day as people come to the Cross for forgiveness, healing and to offer themselves in love to God’s praise and service. This is picked up in our second reading from Romans Chapter 6 where Saint Paul reminds his readers that since they have welcomed the living Christ who has freed them from the power of sin they should live accordingly. Like us, those Roman Christians needed reminding that through Christ’s sacrifice the power of sin had been potentially countered in our lives but our own grateful sacrifice is needed to release the potential of that saving gift. ‘Just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification… now you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Romans 6:19, 22-23).

At every Eucharist in St John’s we plead Christ’s Sacrifice on Calvary made present among us in Bread and Wine and join to it the sacrifice of ourselves. ‘Pray, my brothers and sisters’ the priest invites ‘that this, my sacrifice and yours, may be acceptable to God, the almighty Father’. ‘May the Lord accept this sacrifice at your hands’ we respond ‘for the praise and glory of his name, for our good, and the good of all his holy Church’. We go on later in the service to offer ‘our souls and bodies as a living sacrifice’. 

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday today and always, across the timespan of creation, the glorious redemption effected upon the Cross displayed in the resurrection, moving on through our own engagement and that of billions, towards the end of history ‘when he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead’ and make God everything to everyone who accepts his love. To effect today’s Gospel, which presents believers as Christ’s instruments, we need an eye to the once for all Sacrifice of Christ, its renewal in the Eucharist and our own response in self offering. ‘Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me… and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple - truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward’ (Matthew 10:40, 42) 

Though you’ve been listening to me, I hope, and maybe feel encouraged, St John’s, as our windows warn, is built not as a preaching house but, with its heavenward-pointing spire, as a temple for the worship of God in Burgess Hill. Going to the Eucharist can sometimes be reduced to the spiritual equivalent of going to Waitrose. Whilst I hope you’ll be encouraged by your attendance this morning, it's not what you feel that matters but how real the worship of God has been to you over this hour.  In our church window - do look at it afterwards - the priest faces east to lead the people Godwards. A Waitrose type consumerist approach to the sacred mysteries is suggested by recent liturgical changes - Mass in the round - as well as the obligation to listen and reflect upon the homily or keep quiet after Communion. These helpful elements are geared more to serve our own needs than to what is historically central to the eucharist - the worship of God through pleading the Sacrifice of Christ for the suffering and triumph of the cosmos into which our own renewed self-offering Sunday by Sunday has a key part.

Seeing such profundity beyond the brief action of this hour with scripture and bread and wine has been for me a gift from teaching received and engagement with holy priests and people. Over the course of my life they have lifted for me the veil covering the sacred mysteries, not least my own mother Elsie, who, as my son John is now, was a regular attender at our Wednesday Eucharist. In recognising the power of Christ’s Sacrificial Prayer to which my intentions are joined day by day I have gained confidence in a transformative dynamic summarised in Our Lord’s promise that ‘I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself’ (John 12:32). All people, but also all things as St Paul writes of all things being ultimately put ‘in subjection under Christ, so that God may be all in all’ (1 Corinthians 15:28). Such ultimately is the power of the eucharist which draws us up to God and out into service of what the Gospel calls ‘the little ones’ of Burgess Hill.

‘May the Lord accept the sacrifice which is yours and mine for the praise and glory of his name, for our good, and the good of all his holy Church’.

St Mary Balcombe Trinity 2 (11th of Year A) 18.6.23

 

One scheme of preaching is to hold the bible in one hand (show) and the newspaper (show) in the other and see how they come together. 

I followed this scheme on Wednesday after Alison sent me our scripture readings and, as I did, I noted first a verse from each of today’s three readings touching on the unconditional love of God. 

Here they are: ‘I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself’. Exodus 19:4b

‘God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us’. Romans 5:8

‘Jesus had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless’. Matthew 9:36a.

Inspired by these texts I picked up The Times and this passage leaped out at me under the pictures of two fine looking young people, Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar (show): 

‘The residents of Ilkeston Road, a built-up and busy student area of Nottingham, were used to the raucous night-time sounds of drunken revellers and police sirens. But the scream that cut through the heavy summer air in the early hours yesterday was clearly more sinister. Two university students, set upon and stabbed as they returned to their digs after a night out, were the first victims of a 90-minute rampage that resulted in a third killing elsewhere, three more people injured in a vehicle ramming attack, and a city in shock.

‘Ilkeston Road was relatively quiet at 4am when there was a “blood-curdling” scream and the two young victims, who attended the University of Nottingham, were seen tussling with a black man dressed in dark clothing and wearing a hood. Barnaby Webber, 19, a cricketer who previously attended Taunton School, was stabbed multiple times before he died in the street. His female companion, named locally as Grace O’Malley-Kumar, also 19, screamed “help” before staggering to a nearby house and collapsed at the front door. They had been returning from an end of term party and were just a few minutes walk from their homes’.

The tragic loss of two lovely young people of immense potential vexed my spirit. I found myself praying for Barnaby and Grace and another older victim, Ian Coates, with prayer fuelled by the scripture passages for Trinity 2 that had just impacted me, part of the three passages we have just heard in St Mary’s as preparation for pleading Christ’s Sacrifice at the parish eucharist. 

‘That blood curdling scream, Lord, echoes in my heart’ I prayed. ‘That loud cry you made upon the Cross out of fear and pain, may it avail for Barnaby and Grace, ‘My God, my God, why have you deserted me?’ You prove your love for us in dying for us. Jesus have compassion on them and their families and Nottingham and all impacted by this news report for we feel harassed and helpless in the face of this event. You, Lord, are mightier than the eagles so bear their souls as on eagles’ wings to bring them to yourself. Amen’.

That prayer flowed out of my immersion in both scripture and Wednesday’s news and it is a privilege to pray it with you. Maybe it will inspire your own prayer in the challenging situations you meet day by day not least through news media. Scripture, because it has a particular authority as 'the Word of God' is a particularly 'graced' servant of prayer. The very existence of Scripture is evidence of dialogue between human beings and God. To pray with Scripture can be, quite simply, an entering into that conversation, as demonstrated in the Book of Psalms. 

As Our Lord voiced the dereliction he felt upon the Cross using the opening verse of Psalm 22 so we can use bible passages we identify with to lead us into dialogue with God, engaging him with our circumstances and the circumstances of others, be they uplifting and joyous or sorrowful and challenging such as those of Barnaby, Grace and Ian recorded in Wednesday’s paper.

We all benefit when we’re told we are loved and the Scriptures act as a wonderful reminder of God's love for us as we find especially in today’s readings.

St. Teresa of Avila taught people to pray in this way. "Imagine", she said, "that you see Jesus standing before you. He is looking at you lovingly and humbly. Prayer comes as you notice he is looking at you lovingly and humbly". The circumstances on the front of Wednesday’s paper seemed to me initially a long way from that loving gaze of God until they took me to the horrendous killing of his Son and that scream on Mount Calvary which is one with that of Barney, Grace and the cries of so many down the ages. ‘That loud cry you made upon the Cross out of fear and pain, Lord, may it avail for Barnaby and Grace, ‘My God, my God, why have you deserted me?’

Peter Abelard, controversial 11th century theologian, is the subject of a brilliant novel by Helen Waddell. One scene from her book has the theologian living in disgrace in a forest with his young friend Thibault. Abelard and Thibault hear a terrible cry in the woods.  At first they think it is a child in agony, but they discover this terrible cry comes from a rabbit caught in a cruel trap. I quote from the book: ‘Thibault held the teeth of the trap apart, and Abelard gathered up the little creature in his hands. It lay for a moment breathing quickly, then in some blind recognition of the kindness that had met it at the last, the small head thrust and nestled against his arm, and it died. It was that last confiding thrust that broke Abelard’s heart. He looked down at the little bedraggled body, his mouth shaking.’  ‘Thibault,’ he said, ‘do you think there is a God at all?  Whatever has come to me, I earned it. But what did this one do?’ Thibault nodded. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Only - I think God is in it too.’ Abelard looked up sharply. ‘In it?   Do you mean that it makes Him suffer, the way it does us?’ Again Thibault nodded. ‘Thibault, do you mean Calvary?’ Thibault shook his head.  ‘That was only a piece of it – the piece that we saw – in time. Like that.’  He pointed to a fallen tree beside them, sawn through the middle. ‘That dark ring there, it goes up and down the whole length of the tree. But you only see it where it is cut across. That is what Christ’s life was;  the bit of God that we saw.’ ‘Then, Thibault,’ said Abelard slowly, ‘you think that all this,’ he looked down at the little quiet body in his arms, ‘all the pain of the world, was Christ’s cross?’ ‘God’s cross,’ said Thibault.  ‘And it goes on.’

‘I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself… God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us… Jesus had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless’ we read in today’s scripture pointing back to the cry of the Saviour on the Cross. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and always. With us he hears the death cries we hear or read of. ‘This is my body which is given for you… this is my blood which is shed for you’. As we take broken Bread and Wine from crushed grapes we take with them the invitation to be alongside the agonies of those in our circle and reported to us in the newspapers. 

Let us take the preacher’s lesson holding the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, putting faith in a God whose love exceeds all we can imagine, whose ears are never deafened to human anguish and who expects nothing of us that he has not been prepared to endure himself.

Giggleswick school address 11 June 2023

It's good to be back under the Dome where I was confirmed into the Church years back as a 15 year old and where some of you may one day kneel, like me, before the Bishop.

I was standing under another sort of Dome in London’s Science Museum two weeks ago. It was a spaceship taking me on a virtual journey. The new Science Fiction exhibition open until 20 August has the sub title ‘Voyage to the edge of the Imagination’ and I commend it to you.

Giggleswick science first got my imagination on the move through Mr Brocklebank and Mr Burgon. It took me to Oxford and a Chemistry doctorate linked to producing lightweight materials that would conduct electricity at room temperature, the components of today’s smartphones. 

In our virtual spaceship journey we were encouraged to reflect on human imagination let loose in research and what a difference it can make. 

Years back science fiction imagined alien worlds. Now human imagination and endeavour have achieved discovery of 5,000 planets beyond our Solar System, the so-called exo-planets. 

The Science Fiction exhibition gets you thinking about Artificial Intelligence and I thought I’d get some of your views on AI this evening. 

I’d like you to start thinking of one benefit of Artificial Intelligence and one concern you have about it.  While you’re thinking I wonder whether you’ve talked online to Digital Einstein? To quote ‘[he or it]  is a taste of what experiential AI offers people today – a friendly face, a deep conversation and an interaction offering… real human connection’. AI brings Einstein to life again!

Put your hand up if you’ve got those two thoughts, a benefit and a concern about AI, to share.

Feedback

Help to learning - don’t need teachers! Phone diaries - can easily fit more into our lives! Yet we know more but don’t apply it - look at addressing climate change… We can send drones rather than manned planes to bomb places - but what if AI decides to turn military drones on its human creators.  AI is on the global political agenda because human imagination has created a wonderful yet fearful intelligence.

Well - let’s move our imagination back from the spaceship dome of the Science Museum and land it here again under the Dome of Giggleswick School Chapel.

The Dome is itself the fruit of human imagination built to be a beacon of faith. Our Chaplain has recently been helping us think through the inscriptions inside it. Since Walter Morrison imagined it and Thomas Jackson laid the foundation stone in 1897 and built it, Chapel’s been a sight of the Dales. In my youth it stood out more, with its blue copper verdigris, and that, we’re told, will slowly return after its 1997 refurbishment.

Imagination is the capacity to see what is unseen and sometimes bring it about. 

It influences everything we do and it's linked to faith which the Bible describes, in our reading from the Letter to the Hebrews this evening, as ‘the conviction of things not seen’. 

The gift of faith provides us with inner eyes that discern what life is really about. The intelligence that built this Chapel and our smartphones is GI not AI - it's lent from God. 

We come from God, we belong to God, we go to God. ‘Do not abandon that confidence’ our reading pleads ‘it brings a great reward’. 

As a scientist I see faith as a form of wisdom that goes beyond but not against the knowledge accessible to the human mind. 

How can I believe in a God I can’t see? I have made a well thought out decision based on the evidence for Christ’s existence, death and resurrection as supreme demonstration of Love in the universe. That is what faith is – a careful decision to act as if God were there and be energised by the power outside and beyond myself leading us to glory. 

Some things in life can’t be tied down rationally. God is one such thing, and so, to choose just one area, is quantum physics. Contrary to popular perception the revelation of truth in physics relies on the subjective imagination of the scientist as well as the objective truth awaiting discovery. Similarly pursuit of truth in Christianity relies on stubborn historical research to weigh it against other worldviews as well as imaginative thinking and praying. There are analogies - such as the elements of surprise in both fields. Superconductivity in metals at low temperatures breaks Ohm’s law of electrical resistance as surely as Christ’s resurrection breaks the universal law of mortality. The moral in imaginative truth seeking is a healthy distrust of popular belief that what usually happens is what always happens. We come to Chapel on Sunday because Someone rose from the dead!

By faith we welcome moment by moment the evidence of God the Creator's love and truth in the disarming warmth of a smile or in learning something exciting. To have faith is the greatest privilege in the world enabling us to see beyond what meets the eye.

As we leave worship in Chapel for a last time this school year may our imagination and faith continue to reach out in study and prayer. ‘Remember your creator in the days of your youth’ the Dome says and it's a privilege as an Old Giggleswickian to hand on that reminder. 

Picture from the Science Fiction Exhibition at London’s Science Museum open to 20 August 2023

St Richard, Haywards Heath Visitation of Our Lady 31 May 2023

 Why do we share our faith? 

Because of who we are – we are Christians, members of the body of Christ and so Jesus Christ is in our life.

You can’t share about Jesus unless you realise this and get yourself reminded regularly about it – which is why we pray, read the bible, come to church and keep our feasts.

In the Church calendar the last day of May is set apart as the Feast of the Visit of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Elizabeth. 

When Jesus first came to earth he lived in the womb of Mary (Luke 1:35). Weeks after she became pregnant Mary visited her cousin Elizabeth. Even as she greeted her cousin, Elizabeth felt a touch of the Holy Spirit as Mary spoke, so that her own unborn son, John, leapt inside her. 

The words of Mary gained power from the depth of her being, where Christ dwelt. 

In the story of the Visitation which ends with her Magnificat song (Luke 1:46-55) we see an exuberant overflow of faith.

If Jesus is in our life we are like Mary joyous ‘Christ bearers’. 

We are gripped by a vision of truth, a purpose for living and a reason for dying. 

We hold inside us a boundless source of love lending us compassion in the face of human need. 

We gain enthusiasm, a spiritual power which serves to help us both in witnessing to the truth that is in Jesus and in demonstrating his love for the needy.

We share our faith because if Jesus is in your life it’s the way things go.

Let us reflect for a moment on Christ within us whose presence will shortly be renewed in his gift to us of Holy Communion.

Picture Abbey Church of Guîtres 12th century of Mary embracing Elizabeth with passion.

St Bartholomew, Brighton Pentecost Sunday 28.5.23

A tale is told of a monk who became so holy people touching his garments got healed.  

Marvelling at such wonders, especially as the monk seemed outwardly little different to his brothers, his superiors called him to account.  

‘What causes all these miracles?’ they asked. 

‘I am quite mystified’ he replied.  ‘All I do is try hard to will only what God wills.  Prosperity does not lift me up.  Adversity does not cast me down.  I am persuaded that God does all things, or permits all that happens, for his glory and for our greater good; so I am at peace no matter what happens and pray as best I can that God’s will may be done fully in me and through me’.

Now you or I may not be monks but we are certainly called to take a leaf out of this monk’s book.  

We may yearn to be people who heal before they hurt other people, but where is the secret of being such a healer?  

Surely it is in a deep acceptance of our circumstances as being in the will of God?  

How simple – and yet how challenging – is the route to holiness.  

It’s making our wills one with God’s will; as best we can, in all the circumstances of our life, that brings with it anointing in the Holy Spirit.

That anointing first came today, the Day of Pentecost, when ‘the disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit… and the crowd gathered and was bewildered, amazed and astonished’ (Acts 2:4,6-7)

As Pope Francis has said, the Holy Spirit is the best Easter present. This evening the Paschal Candle is removed to signal the end of Eastertide but the risen Christ’s greatest gift remains with us.

What a wondrous gift! Associated with creation itself, ‘breathing on the face of the waters’, associated with the resurrection in today’s Gospel where Christ breathes the gift upon the apostles and, in today’s first reading, associated with fire and power and speaking in strange languages on the Day of Pentecost!

What a wondrous gift - and yet also an everyday gift! One for people who make their wills one with God’s will in every circumstance of their life.

‘Come down, O Love divine, seek thou this soul of mine and kindle it thy holy flame bestowing… for none can guess your grace ‘til they become the place wherein the Holy Spirit makes his dwelling!’

In March I went on retreat to Crawley Down monastery praying, among other things, about the struggle we have at home with a family member diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. 

A remarkable insight came to me linked to the Holy Spirit about how God can work through dementia where there’s faith in him. When memory fades you live more in the present moment. This means being left behind somewhat by family and friends with busy diaries and work and recreational commitments. 

As I prayed on retreat I recalled a book I’d read by the contemporary novelist Santa Montefiore. entitled ‘Here and now’. The key figure, Marigold, spent her life taking care of those around her, juggling family life with the running of the local shop, and being an all-round leader in her community. When she finds herself forgetting things the story underlines how she is blessed to dwell more and more with supportive family and friends in the ‘here and now’ which is the book title. 

Are we not all meant to attend to every moment of life as best we can, to be as present here and now as we can be? I thought. And God - this was my key thought on retreat - God too is found in the here and now. Not so much by pondering the past or the future. 

The Holy Spirit has been defined as ‘God in the present moment’. Living with dementia is therefore potentially about living with God and others close to you through rediscovery of the ‘here and now’ - and the joy of living in God’s presence can often be manifested in those suffering this ailment. 

Hardships of every kind throw us back on God and our friends. The readings today remind us how the anointing of the Holy Spirit comes in shared circumstances. In Acts 2v1 we read how ‘they were all together in one place’. In 1 Corinthians 12v13 ‘in the one Spirit we were all baptised into one body - Jews or Greeks, slaves or free - and we were all made to drink of one Spirit’. The Gospel from John 20 recalls how on Easter Day evening ‘the doors of the house where the disciples had met being locked out of fear, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you… Receive the Holy Spirit”’.

Today is the birthday of the Church. The anointing of the Holy Spirit comes into the day by day circumstances of believers whose faith engages week by week with the meaning and power of scripture, the Breaking of Bread together. Preaching and music at St Bart’s always has an eye to leaving time for fellowship at the end of Mass, and that fellowship, often with conversation about Christian Faith, sometimes continues over food. Thank you, Holy Spirit for your work among us as a congregation, part of God’s never ending family, the holy Catholic Church!

How simple – and yet how challenging – is the route to holiness.  It may be that you are in a trial of one kind or another. I invite you to a deeper acceptance of that trial as being within the will of God. Such acceptance, as the monk said in my story, brings with it the anointing of the Holy Spirit.

Easter season which ends tonight brought me to producing a radio series available on listen again at www.premierchristianradio.com/joy. Finding joy in the Lord relates to our turning in faith and repentance to the risen Lord Jesus and welcoming his Spirit into every circumstance of our life. The joy of the Lord becomes our strength as knowledge of Christ grows. It takes courage though to leave aside regrets about the past and anxieties about the future to attend to the present moment where the Holy Spirit, God’s Easter present, can be found whatever our circumstances.  

I close with the prayer of Saint Paul in Romans 15:13: ‘May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit!’