Remembrance Sunday Sermon 2020

“…and so we will be with the Lord for ever”. 1 Thessalonians 4.12

Remembrance Sunday occupies a sea of human experience which spans life and death and suffering and loss with the promise of the life that yet awaits us. It is in this vein that St Paul promises, no matter how challenging are the demands of the present time, that “we will be with the Lord for ever”.  He echoes the phrase that Jesus uses so often of the life that has been transformed by God’s indwelling presence. He calls it ‘eternal life’. And this ‘eternal life’ is to be found in the present time. 

Now is eternal life

If risen with Christ we stand

In him to life reborn

And holden in his hand

No more we fear death’s ancient dread

If Christ arisen from the dead.

GW Briggs (1875-1959) NEH Hymn 114.

Like many other sons and daughters of Second World War veterans, I could never, as an inquisitive child, get my father to speak about his war experiences. I only later learnt that, on demobilisation, as it was called, the combatants were firmly told not to share them. And so my father collected his de-mob suit and a small payment and as the old war song went “packed up his troubles in his own kit bag”. I have felt since that the medals he won were medals for a war experience which was very difficult to assimilate. But he had made what was the necessary sacrifice of his young manhood on behalf of his country and had been tested to the uttermost. I have honoured him in my own heart and mind for all that could never be expressed, but for much I hazard a guess, that was very significant.

The Christian Faith is predicated on sacrifice - the reaching out beyond the life here to the life beyond in the giving of oneself for the sake of the other without recourse to obvious personal reward. The many war memorials across the world with the seemingly endless rows of names, with each name a whole life, a life of hopes and dreams and cares and joys and pains. And as the poppy petals fall down into the Albert Hall each year at the Festival of Remembrance each petal represents one life given. Each one counts; each one was significant; each one gathered up and made present to us in the falling of the red petals. Each one will always matter, for each one gave their life for the greater good.

In our own time the offering of our lives as a sacrifice for the good of the other and the good of the whole society and even for the good of the world, still holds true. As we begin another period of Covid ‘lockdown’ we are being challenged to respond to this emergency with love and imagination. The Christian churches are determined that this period should not take us back to the lockdown of March to August. We are determined that our churches should remain open for prayer. The leaders of our church have inaugurated this month of November as one of prayer, and you will see topics for prayer on our news sheet and signposting to the relevant websites. The Archbishop of York has called the doing of prayer a “letting God into the room of our consciousness’. When we are at prayer we make ourselves open to God’s inhabitation and the transformation of our minds. When we establish a pattern of prayer, however simple, we invite spiritual resilience. Prayer will be the bedrock upon which acts of Christian generosity both on behalf of ourselves and others. At a time of grave crisis, prayer is the place of deep wisdom, described in our first reading this morning. 

To fix one’s thought on her is perfect understanding,

And one who is vigilant on her account will soon be free from care.

Wisdom 6.14

 The proper demand, when we are under the pressure of events, is to move away from our own anxiety and into a place of strong peace which is God. That is not to say we run away from the place of testing and trial nor is it to say that we belittle the trials and tests that are demanded of us. But it is to embrace another way, another route through which we may be spiritually renewed in joy and in hope. The practical compliment to the recourse to prayer is the life of self-sacrificial giving for the sake of the other; for the greater good. The prevalence of anxiety and the threat of despair are counteracted by the trust in our humanity and the capacity we all have to attain to eternal life in the present.

Sometimes large amounts of sacrifice have had be given for the sake of the good, and for the peace of the world. This day reminds us that the self-sacrifice of the many in the past may lead us to an understanding of the power of human self-sacrifice in the present and in this and every age. Christ has shown us the Way and in Him our hope remains, in the words of the Wisdom writer, ‘rich in immortality’. As Dylan Thomas poem ‘And Death Shall have No Dominion’ promises:

They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.

‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’ - Dylan Thomas

Written between the wars in 1933, Thomas's poem takes on a broad theme of remembrance and the hope that resides in the human spirit.

Remembrance Sunday Sermon 2020

“…and so we will be with the Lord for ever”. 1 Thessalonians 4.12

Remembrance Sunday occupies a sea of human experience which spans life and death and suffering and loss with the promise of the life that yet awaits us. It is in this vein that St Paul promises, no matter how challenging are the demands of the present time, that “we will be with the Lord for ever”.  He echoes the phrase that Jesus uses so often of the life that has been transformed by God’s indwelling presence. He calls it ‘eternal life’. And this ‘eternal life’ is to be found in the present time. 

Now is eternal life

If risen with Christ we stand

In him to life reborn

And holden in his hand

No more we fear death’s ancient dread

If Christ arisen from the dead.

GW Briggs (1875-1959) NEH Hymn 114.

Like many other sons and daughters of Second World War veterans, I could never, as an inquisitive child, get my father to speak about his war experiences. I only later learnt that, on demobilisation, as it was called, the combatants were firmly told not to share them. And so my father collected his de-mob suit and a small payment and as the old war song went “packed up his troubles in his own kit bag”. I have felt since that the medals he won were medals for a war experience which was very difficult to assimilate. But he had made what was the necessary sacrifice of his young manhood on behalf of his country and had been tested to the uttermost. I have honoured him in my own heart and mind for all that could never be expressed, but for much I hazard a guess, that was very significant.

The Christian Faith is predicated on sacrifice - the reaching out beyond the life here to the life beyond in the giving of oneself for the sake of the other without recourse to obvious personal reward. The many war memorials across the world with the seemingly endless rows of names, with each name a whole life, a life of hopes and dreams and cares and joys and pains. And as the poppy petals fall down into the Albert Hall each year at the Festival of Remembrance each petal represents one life given. Each one counts; each one was significant; each one gathered up and made present to us in the falling of the red petals. Each one will always matter, for each one gave their life for the greater good.

In our own time the offering of our lives as a sacrifice for the good of the other and the good of the whole society and even for the good of the world, still holds true. As we begin another period of Covid ‘lockdown’ we are being challenged to respond to this emergency with love and imagination. The Christian churches are determined that this period should not take us back to the lockdown of March to August. We are determined that our churches should remain open for prayer. The leaders of our church have inaugurated this month of November as one of prayer, and you will see topics for prayer on our news sheet and signposting to the relevant websites. The Archbishop of York has called the doing of prayer a “letting God into the room of our consciousness’. When we are at prayer we make ourselves open to God’s inhabitation and the transformation of our minds. When we establish a pattern of prayer, however simple, we invite spiritual resilience. Prayer will be the bedrock upon which acts of Christian generosity both on behalf of ourselves and others. At a time of grave crisis, prayer is the place of deep wisdom, described in our first reading this morning. 

To fix one’s thought on her is perfect understanding,

And one who is vigilant on her account will soon be free from care.

Wisdom 6.14

The proper demand, when we are under the pressure of events, is to move away from our own anxiety and into a place of strong peace which is God. That is not to say we run away from the place of testing and trial nor is it to say that we belittle the trials and tests that are demanded of us. But it is to embrace another way, another route through which we may be spiritually renewed in joy and in hope. The practical compliment to the recourse to prayer is the life of self-sacrificial giving for the sake of the other; for the greater good. The prevalence of anxiety and the threat of despair are counteracted by the trust in our humanity and the capacity we all have to attain to eternal life in the present.

Sometimes large amounts of sacrifice have had be given for the sake of the good, and for the peace of the world. This day reminds us that the self-sacrifice of the many in the past may lead us to an understanding of the power of human self-sacrifice in the present and in this and every age. Christ has shown us the Way and in Him our hope remains, in the words of the Wisdom writer, ‘rich in immortality’. As Dylan Thomas poem ‘And Death Shall have No Dominion’ promises:

They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.

‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’ - Dylan Thomas

Written between the wars in 1933, Thomas's poem takes on a broad theme of remembrance and the hope that resides in the human spirit.

A Sermon for All Saints 2020

Luke 6.20-31.

The Feast of All Saints is one of the most important of the Church’s year. It is what is called a ‘moveable’ feast, and can be ‘moved’ to the nearest Sunday, where it can be given its due honour. And as we honour the Christian saints so we honour the Christian calling, which is to a life consecrated and dedicated in the service of Jesus Christ.

The other day I was staying in the Cathedral Close in Salisbury, from where you can see the tallest spire in England. The Cathedral is a stunning sight, and walking around the west front, you see before you hundreds of saints, each contained within their own apse, and all looking vaguely alike. And perhaps this is the image we have of the saints, mostly bearded men, gazing down at us from their isolated places and lost in time. In the south east corner of our church we have a statue of St Jude, who was rarely prayed to on account of his unfortunate name. But because of this he became known as ‘the patron saint of lost causes’. And he gives us the clue we need to fathom something of the meaning of the lives of the saints in everyday life in all its many facets.

The saints remind us that the Christian Faith belongs neither to a ‘goodness religion’ nor to a religion for super humans. Sanctity issues out of lives which have been marked by doubt, disillusion, suffering and struggle. The saints remind us that the Christian journey is real and loaded both with possibility and perplexity. These were never ‘plaster’ saints but real human beings. They remind us of lives lived in a very real and challenging circumstances. In the film “Nixon”, Anthony Hopkins plays the former president as a tortured and ruthless power maniac. In one scene, Nixon gazes up at a painting of John F Kennedy. He speaks to the painting thus  “When people look at you they see themselves as they want to be, when they look at me they see themselves as they are”. Perhaps our working definition of a saint must combine both these observations?

The idea of the saint came from a tradition of venerating the mortal remains of Christians who had left their mark on the memory of the Christian community. The first of these were the early Christian martyrs who died in Rome, including St Peter and St Paul. Once churches were built they were called after saint’s names, and in Cornwall there are strange names like St Ennodock and St Neot who are known to us only in legend. The most famous English saint, St Thomas à Becket was made a saint only four years after his death. RS Thomas the poet reminds us as he looks upon his old church in remote West Wales that ‘the parish has a saint’s name that time cannot unfrock’.

The saints remind us that the Christian Faith may not be an easy faith to live out but it is an essentially human way and not a conveyor belt for the turning out of plaster saints. It is a way which can be tough because it expresses itself counter-culturally. Do not believe the certain kind of Christianity that makes faith seem guaranteed and easy; it is not. I do not find being Christian easy at all. The Church teaches, however, that we are here not for short-term spiritual gain but for the long haul, in faith terms ‘till death us do part’. Christian witness is about the sanctification, the blessing and dedication of lives that seek and find God over years and years as a single act of witness in Jesus Christ. The expression of this consecrated life have been many and various: displaying the kind of faith that came to St Augustine as the guilt over the enforced separation after 16 years from the partner he never married and the later death of their sixteen year old son. Then there was St Benedict, who wrote a rule for the community we call the Benedictines and it has long been valued as a Christian model for its understanding of human limitations and its love of unity in the Christian fellowship. Nonetheless his basic rulings on human behavior are forthright:

Your way of acting should be different from the world’s way: the love of Christ must come before all else. You are not to act in anger or nurse a grudge. Rid your heart of deceit. Never give a hollow greeting of peace or turn away when someone needs your love.

The saints are human, just like us. The call to Christian sanctity is the call to live lives which are generous and loving and which reveal the Christian Faith to be transformative of the human condition because they are God immersed and God-led. But they rely, importantly, not on their strength alone, but in the mercy, forgiveness and healing they receive at God’s hands. Of course talking of sainthood and sanctity is always difficult. Holiness is a quality of experience we sense strongly and intuitively. Perhaps, as well as the saints of Christian history, there have been people you have known who have revealed in their lives something of that holiness and that strong purposefulness and selflessness which are the signs of the sanctified life. Or perhaps you have found sanctification in the love of another, or in an experience of God’s love in a place or within a community of prayer, like this church.

I never enter this building without feeling a sense of awe. I always feel my heart miss a beat. This is a place, a sanctified space, where I have, maybe like you, found and re-found a sense of belonging in the love of God, and a true sense of spiritual refreshment. The holiness of this place reveals itself apart from the matter of its architecture or of furniture, light or proportion. It is something felt to exist beyond the sum total of its parts. It lies in the prayers that have been made in this place for well over a hundred years, the prayers of many thousands of lives for which this place has been a house of God, a sanctuary, and a place of encounter with the God who has speaks and who calls. The outpouring of so many hopes and fears in this place, the human activity and the worship go to make up the strong sense of this place as a holy place, a place of truth. The presence of God in this place which seems saturated in the bricks. The saints and the idea of the sanctified life is a reminder that here we participate in that which is holy, and we hope that this holiness becomes folded into our everyday lives as the influence for our own healing and transformation. St Paul called his church members ‘saints’ as a way of encouraging them more fully to live the life to which they were being called and to establish, once and for the fact of the holiness of the Church.

The following great prayer, simply called ‘The Sanctus’ or ‘Prayer of Holiness’, embedded in the Eucharist, is one which tells us that our worship of God is a participation in that which is holy. For God is holy, and the worship we offer Him is for the sanctification, the transformation, the making holy of the ordinary stuff of our lives. And so we say:

Holy, Holy, Holy is our Lord God,

Who was, and is and is to come!

Amen.

THE BLOOMSBURY FESTIVAL 2020

WE ARE HIGHLIGHTING THE FOLLOWING CONCERT:

'ROSSINI AND FRIENDS'

DIRECTOR ; MR JONATHAN LOUTH

SATURDAY 17TH OCTOBER 2020 AT 7 30 PM

WE EXPEVCT A SMALL AUDIENCE - THIS CONCERT WILL BE LIVE STREAMED.

TICKETS AVAILABLE FROM THE BLOOMSBURY FESTIVAL WEBSITE.

Sermon for the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity Year A

Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God which passes all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Philippians 4.5,6

It is a commonplace for us to hear of ‘St Pauls’ Letter to the Philippians’ or to the Colossians or the Corinthians. The second Reading of the Parish Eucharist is often called the ‘Epistle’ or ‘Letter’. We have to imagine St Paul communicating to the far flung early Christian community as he dictates long letters via a secretary, companion or scribe like Timothy.  His letters contain formal teaching, warning, moral instruction. They contain exhortation and greeting. We read Paul’s letters, even after two thousand years and their words leap out of the pages with passion and love. He begins his letter with a greeting : ‘My brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for’. It is so interesting that the kind and intimate letter greeting ‘Dear so and so’ has now been replaced with the impersonal and screechy ‘Hi!’ ‘Yours Faithfully’ with an emoji. Paul is ready always to convey the sense the there is such a thing as the Christian character, whose stamp and mark is mutual love, both of God and neighbour, and perseverance and bravery in the commitment to the life of Christian faith.

With the advent of the PC and the laptop, of Emails and of countless other instant message types, all characterised by their brevity, it has become a rare joy to receive a hand written letter. I remember our Post Office when I was a boy. It was a large modern and airy building, but along one bank of its long walls lay a whole row of ink pots set into the wipe-able Formica surfaces upon which were large framed mats of neat blotting paper. People would patiently dip pen to ink many times before a few lines had been written, but here was a kind of patient ceremony which is now lost to us.

I have here my grandmother’ Parker Pen. The fountain pen is at least 60 years old and it was used to write countless neat letters written in real ink on thick laid paper. The letter of course had to be stamped, enveloped and then hand posted. On applying for a university place, our headmaster gave us two pieces of advice – “Always write your letters in ink and not biro, and when at interview, always thank you interviewers for taking the time to see you! The giving and receiving of letters becomes an important part of the plot in old films and novels, and somehow an Email doesn’t quite measure up in terms of the quality and the beauty of these former communications. It is so pleasing to see a hand written letter as it raises its head above the junk mail.

St Paul’s letters are known for their beautiful greetings, which in this morning’s letter take up 29 lines of prose. From his letters we get a very real sense of St Paul as communicator and we realise that only twenty or so years after the death and resurrection of Christ, Paul’s Church is one in which mutual love abounds, in which there is a sense of real joy and confidence in believing, but equally the struggle and the determination to prevail. There is, too an abiding sense of the reality of God in Jesus Christ, and that he is ‘very near’. Then there is Paul’s fearless and powerful self-confidence and strength of leadership as he urges his followers to cast all worries aside and instead to offer prayers and supplications to God. This is echoed in the words of Teresa of Avila, whose saint’s day we commemorate today:

Let nothing disturb you,

Let nothing frighten you,

All things are passing away:

God never changes.

Patience obtains all things

Whoever has God lacks nothing;

God alone suffices.

The same intimate connection with St Paul’s followers is to be the intimate connection they are to maintain with their God. This is to be their strength. Above all they are to persevere and to prevail in and with what he calls ‘the peace of God which passes all understanding’, that strong inner peace which is the evidence of their personal connectedness with God rather than with the ‘passing’ things of this ‘fleeting’ world.

Of course it only human to find yourself preoccupied or worried about things. We are sometimes confronted with what seem like strong tests to our usual feeling that everything is more or less OK. This coronavirus has tested us very much and last week’s mental health week was all the more significant for the realities that coronavirus has brought, not least the strain it has placed on our capacity to cope. Shakespeare termed the famous phrase ‘the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to’, which is the legacy of pain and worry, whether by reason of ill health, loss, the disappointment of our hopes or the painful challenge to our complacencies, or of past sorrows. To all this we may admit, but for Paul’s corresponding call to ‘the higher Way’ where God is the peace which ‘passes  human understanding’. The move away from our own anxiety and into God’s peace. It’s all very tough, and not easy or consoling. But our correspondent Paul has been through it; is going through it in his cell in Philippi. His letter is known as a letter of exhortation, urging us all on to find our security in that which has already been established in us, the love of God, meted out through his humanity and the gathered church. In his gentle and beautiful cadences, every bit as mellifluous as Shakespeare’s, Paul’s final words of our letter section from Philippians reach their moving crescendo:

Finally, my beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is  pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and is there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of Peace be with you.

So much better than the very English ‘Yours sincerely!’

A similar prayer was gifted to me by an old Australian priest friend, long since dead and former Director of the Anglican Centre in Rome. It is simply a prayer to the loveliness and awesomeness of God. God is, in this prayer, as God is in the Letters of Paul, our truest and most loving correspondent.

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O MYSTERY MOST BLESSED MOST HOLY

MOST MERCIFUL MOST LOVING MOST MIGHTY

MOST TRUE MOST HONOURABLE MOST BEAUTIFUL

UNFATHOMABLE ABYSS OF PEACE

UNUTTERABLE OCEAN OF LOVE

FOUNT OF BLESSING

GIVER OF AFFECTION

HOLY JOY

FATHER SON HOLY GHOST

ONE GOD IN THREE PERSONS

EVER TO BE WORSHIPPED AND ADORED

BE THOU TO US

RECTITUDE FORTITUDE BEATITUDE

REFRESHMENT LIGHT PEACE

THROUGH JESUS CHRIST OUR LORD.

AMEN.

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