Sunday 17 March 2024

Night Prayer for use in Passion-tide


Night Prayer for use in Passion-tide. Use any time up to Easter - but having been prayed first on 17 March, there's also something about St. Patrick...

Tuesday 27 February 2024

Night Prayer for Lent


It's been some time since we went "live" - but here we are with the service of Compline for Lent, and celebrating the priest & poet George Herbert.

Holy Seasons – Holy Time…

Look towards the final pages of the March issue of our Parish Magazine and you’ll see that we are carrying two short articles about Good Friday and Easter. I was interested to read how Sir Isaac Newton had tried to calculate the date of the first Easter – was he right? What we do know is that the date of Easter as we celebrate it now moves around. This year it’s quite early on 31st March – though only for western Christians; most Eastern Orthodox Churches won’t celebrate Easter until 5th May this year, which is almost as late as they can do so! It all depends on the moon and how it corresponds to the calendars which are in use today.

How many people notice these things? Well, schools are having to this year since it’s making the current teaching term very short! And most people will be looking forward to an extended Bank Holiday Weekend, regardless of their faith. Another season has been mentioned in the News over the last few days – Ramadan – not simply because it’s a season observed with great seriousness by millions of Muslims, but also because it begins on the date of the deadline which the Israeli government has given to Hamas for the release of hostages if there is to be any cessation or pause in the hostilities in Gaza. For a month from the evening of 10th March, faithful Muslims will fast and pray. It’s a time which will coincide with the second half of the Christian observance of Lent.

How will we all use that time? I’d just like to point out that the whole of the month of March should be special to us as Christian. If you feel you haven’t got started on Lent – here’s your opportunity to use it as we seek to come closer to God in Christ. Every day but one  during March is a day of Lent with the final week coinciding exactly with Holy Week; and the final day of the month will be Easter Day – the culmination of our Lenten journey as we celebrate Christ’s Resurrection to new life. So every day of the month can be put to good use – if only we have the will.

If anyone would be my disciple let him take up his / her Cross every day and follow me, says Jesus. It’s an invitation to an everyday faith – let’s take it seriously every day in this month of March. Let us find, at its end, the Risen Lord waiting for us.

Martin Jackson


Monday 26 February 2024

Take up your cross and follow him...



2nd Sunday of Lent – Eucharist – 25.ii.2024

(Genesis 17.1-7, 15-16; Romans 4.13-25; Mark 8.31-38)


Here’s a story from America:

There is a gravestone back near Kearney, Nebraska which has on it the name, Susan Hale.  As a young bride, Susan and her husband were part of the gold rush on the Oregon Trail, but she drank some contaminated water, came down with a high fever, and died before they reached Fort Kearney. Her husband made a coffin for her body using the wood of their wagon. He buried his wife on the highest ground he could find, and marked the grave with wooden stakes so that he would be able to find the place again after he had gone on West and made his fortune.  But he changed his mind.  Instead of going west, he retraced his steps back eastward to St. Joe, Missouri, which was the closest outpost of European life. There he had a stonecutter cut into granite his wife’s name and the date of her death.  Then he tried to get someone to haul it westward, but no one would.  They didn't have time or space; their wagons were loaded, and they were impatient to get to the gold fields.  So he bought a wheelbarrow, put the stone on it, and pushed it all those miles to Kearney and set it up over her grave.


That’s the story of the grave. There is no indication as to whether the husband ever made it to Oregon or California or found his fortune.  You can only reflect on what might seem like a foolish thing, a costly gesture pushing the barrow all that way.  Why did he do it?  Perhaps it was because he knew that there are some things that we cannot easily and conveniently walk away from; he knew that there are some values in this life that are too important to neglect.  The easy thing to do would have been to dig a shallow grave and leave the body there.  But he did the hard thing.  He chose a road few would take and made a journey out of love.  That is the road, Jesus says, that leads to life – the costly path which is the path of love.

Today’s Gospel reading shows us Jesus on the road with the disciples. And as they go he begins to speak of his approaching death, ‘that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected.... and be killed, and after three days rise again.’ The disciple Peter immediately takes him to task. Surely this isn’t the way God works, he says. It is hard to believe. What does this Gospel reading concerning Jesus’ death have in common with today’s other readings. Our Old and New Testament readings are concerned with Abraham, a man given a promise by God that the generations descended from him will know the fullness of God’s blessing. For Abraham the hope is of continuity, of descendants in their millions, one generation after another. Talk of Jesus’ death, on the other hand, speaks of disruption and the denial of all that his followers might hope for – who will they follow if Jesus is taken from them?

Perhaps the problem is that we don’t see the whole picture. The story of Abraham is a long story which we rarely read in its entirety. It involves him in a long journey. He hears the call of God, he leaves behind his homeland to strike out across the desert, believing, but not knowing, that God will be faithful to his promise. He is brought into the land of Canaan, but he never comes to a land that he will possess. At best he can live amongst other peoples as a guest, always on the move grazing his flocks where he can. For the sake of responding to God’s call, he puts himself at risk of famine, in danger from feuding kings... When in his old age his wife finally bears him a son, his faith is tested most sorely as God seems to ask him to be ready to give up that son as a sacrifice. It’s a sacrifice which is not in the end required, but throughout Abraham is a man for whom the easy road is not an option. And in all his travelling, he has no more than a promise to go on – no fulfilment for himself, only the belief that God will work through the people who follow, because of his faithfulness to God’s call.

And Peter, the disciple who has had the faith to leave his livelihood behind and to follow Jesus, the one who has recognised  Jesus as the Christ, God’s chosen one,.... like us he can’t see the whole picture. Can Peter be expected to see how Jesus’ death will play a part in fulfilling his purpose? No one can. Jesus himself says it’s beyond our understanding when he tells Peter, ‘you are setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things.’ But what else should Peter think about? The human is where we are, and what we are called to be.

Except that the way of Christ is to show us what is truly human by bringing God into our human picture – by entering even into human suffering and death. The invitation Jesus extends to his disciples is not one to be accepted lightly: ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’ We can’t think that anyone who heard Jesus say this when he said it could possibly have understood what he meant. Only after Jesus’ death and resurrection, only after they had begun to live the Christian life for themselves could it possibly make sense. Like the husband of Susan Hale who buried her body, meaning to carry on and make his fortune before returning to her grave – it was only when he’d buried her that he could understand the different road he had to take, the burden he must bear out of love.

What does it all mean for us as Christians? – to take up the cross and follow Jesus? In his great book, ‘The Cost of Discipleship’, Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes the distinction between ‘cheap grace’ and ‘costly grace.’ Grace is the gift of God, freely given for our sake, without any price. It can’t be earned – because it’s a gift! But do we give it any real value? 

‘Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church,’ writes Bonhoeffer. ‘We are fighting today for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjack’s wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices... Grace without price; grace without cost!... Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian “conception” of God.... Cheap grace... amounts to a denial of the living Word of God, ... (it is) grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

(But) costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has.... Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. 

Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ....’

These are words which Bonhoeffer wrote in the years after Hitler had come to power in Germany. They are remembered because Bonhoeffer himself was to live them out so fully. Arrested by the Nazis, he spent the last two years of his life in prison. His last words were recorded by an English officer held in the same jail who attended a service he took on April 8th 1945. Scarcely had the service ended when two men in civilian dress ordered him, ‘get ready to come with us.’ That officer, Payne Best, records: “Those words ‘come with us’ – for all prisoners had come to mean one thing only – the scaffold. We bade him goodbye – he drew me aside – ‘This is the end,’ he said. ‘For me the beginning of life.’.... Next day at Flossenburg he was hanged.”

Bonhoeffer had recognised that the way of Christ was the way of the Cross – putting faith into practice, he lived out his own conviction, ‘When Christ calls a man he bids him come and die.’ Is this the road on which we are called? Perhaps most shocking is the fact that round the world Sunday by Sunday, hundreds of millions of Christians can hear the story of Christ’s passion and death repeated – and that’s it!.... We just hear it. So much more honest is the response of Peter who tells Jesus off, who cannot grasp what Jesus is saying and tells him so.

Each Sunday in Lent the blessing at the end of the service is given: “Christ give you grace to deny yourselves, take up your cross and follow him....” But do we want that sort of grace? Are we ready to follow? Are we ready to put ourselves out just a little from our established routines? What choices do you face today?  What roads are before you in your life? Which one will you choose?  The well-travelled path?  Or the path of least resistance?  Will you choose that way which leads you in the footsteps of Christ?  We need to remember that God is with us in our choosing.  God is with us as we travel.  By the way of the Cross, God is calling us to life. 


Panto Season - in Lent!

 


Thursday 8 February 2024

Lent is coming

 


Wednesday 27 December 2023

In the darkness - light

Sermon for Christmas Night – Eucharist – 24.xii.2023

 

(Isaiah 9.2-7; Titus 2.11-14; Luke 2.1-20)

 


The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light;

those who lived in a land of deep darkness – on them light has shined.

This is the Christian hope – and the hope at the heart of Christmas – the hope to which we need to hold. Light entering into the darkness; light shining in and through the darkness. The words are those of Isaiah who wrote several centuries before the birth of Jesus. But we hear them at Christmas because he looks to the coming of a Messiah – a Saviour for his people. And those words about light resonate perhaps because we think of the birth of Jesus being at night: 

O holy night, the stars are brightly shining,
It is the night of the dear Saviour’s birth;
Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
'Till he appeared and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn…

In the darkness of the night, the Christ-child comes to bring light. In the darkness of a stable, his is the light that shines from the manger.


I began with those words of Isaiah:

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light;

those who lived in a land of deep darkness – on them light has shined.

These are the first words of our first reading in this Eucharist. But in fact I find myself struck still more by the words which follow on in these words of prophecy:


You have multiplied the nation, you have increased its joy;

they rejoice before you as with joy at the harvest,

as people exult when dividing plunder.

For the yoke of their burden, and the bar across their shoulders,

the rod of their oppressor, you have broken as on the day of Midian.

For all the boots of the tramping warriors

and all the garments rolled in blood shall be burned as fuel for the fire.


Isaiah is writing about the hope of his people – that after all their sufferings there will come a time of joy and release from all that has burdened them. Isaiah had written about the failings of kings and other rulers. He knew the failures of his own people and the desire of their neighbours to raid, pillage and conquer. Much of his writing is a foretelling of his nation’s fate, to be defeated in war, to have their cities and towns laid waste, for so many of their people to be displaced and deported to a land which is not theirs. You read Isaiah and you realise that there is nothing new in the sufferings of our world today. His oracles prophesy devastation for the nations who bring war upon Israel – and amongst them the cities of Damascus, southern Lebanon, Babylon and Philistia. Isaiah looks to the time when the Israelites will put aside their own differences and instead, “they shall swoop down on the backs of the Philistines in the west” (Isaiah 11.14). There is violence through and through – and this is a particular vengeance directed at those very people, the Philistines, who lived roughly in the area of the modern Gaza Strip. Remember that Philistine is the word from which the modern term Palestine / Palestinian derives.  We switch on the news and what we see is a warfare and enmity known all too well to Isaiah, writing over two and a half thousand years ago.

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” We can be only too aware of the continuing darkness of war, oppression, injustice and fear, hostage-taking, hunger and the longing for deliverance. But Isaiah does give us some hope in the midst of his grim survey of a world he knew to be like ours:


For all the boots of the tramping warriors

and all the garments rolled in blood shall be burned as fuel for the fire.

It must be our prayer that this should be so – the yoke of burdens lifted and the rebuilding of homes and nations to be places of peace.


In the darkness we pray that God’s light may shine.

 

I first visited Bethlehem, the place of Christ’s birth, in the darkness. I’d lived so near – in Jerusalem – for several months, but I’d never made that short journey of only six or seven miles. When finally I went there it was Christmas Eve 1977. Normally you could simply take the Arab bus from Damascus Gate to get there. But at Christmas there were extra security precautions in place. Applications to travel had to be made in advance, passports produced and tickets for special buses purchased. On Christmas Eve itself those special buses stopped short of Manger Square. We had to show our passes and passports, go through one security checkpoint and then another. There were soldiers and border police in abundance. As it happened people considered the journey worth it, and there were crowds out in the square with a festival of choirs, a huge tree and lots of decorations, the Post Office open to stamp letters and cards with Christmas Eve, Manger Square, Bethlehem. That was light in the darkness – and lots of noise. We made our way to the Church of the Nativity. You might have expected more crowds there – but the big congregation on 24 December is in the Roman Catholic Church next door. The Church of the Nativity itself is shared by the Greek Orthodox and Armenian Churches which celebrate Christmas on a different date. But they had given permission to a few western pilgrims – amongst them our group of Anglicans from Jerusalem – to visit the shrine. I remember standing in the cold and dark waiting to go in. I remember hearing an explosion and wondering if it was a firework or something worse. And then the descent to the chapel which marks Christ’s birth. In the dim interior there was a group of sisters in silent prayer. And then we made our way to the silver star set in the floor which is said to mark the place of the manger.


The next day I was up early to play the piano for the 8am service of Holy Communion in our church – Christ Church, Jerusalem. I remember sitting there, thinking how incredible it was to try to mark the actual place of Jesus’ birth with a star, as if we could say exactly here in this subterranean chapel was the exact position of Mary at the time she brought her son into the world. Round the corner and up the street – aptly named Milk Grotto Street – there’s a church which is built where milk from Mary’s breast is said to have spilt and turned the stone floor white. How could that be true?

But the truth of the Incarnation, the mystery of Christmas, is that God’s Son is born into this world in a particular place at a particular time. Somewhere, at some actual precise point, Mary gives birth to Jesus. Heaven touches earth. Is it true?

That’s what the poet John Betjeman asked:

And is it true?  And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?

When we tell the story in stained glass, we are telling a story which is real – of the muck and blood and sweat of childbirth – a reality in that place which is Bethlehem 2,000 years ago. We need to remember not only the pain and toil and tears of that moment but also the joy which comes with birth, and the love which made it possible – the loving purpose of God, the love of Mary and Joseph for this new-born child.

I visited Bethlehem again in January 2020. I actually wanted to visit the monastery of Mar Saba, out in the Judaean desert, and thought that going to Bethlehem would give me the best chance of finding my way there (it was, thanks to a Palestinian taxi driver we found in Bethlehem). But when I asked advice on the journey from an American nun in Jerusalem, she immediately said, “You can’t go to Bethlehem. It’s on the West Bank and too dangerous to go there.” Such are the fears we can carry. There can be truth in our fears: it's actually illegal for Israeli citizens to visit Bethlehem and other West Bank cities – very much for their own safety. But we simply got on the Arab bus which took us there without any trouble. Again we visited the chapel of Christ’s birth – this time alongside a large group of Armenian pilgrims. You might think how just a few months ago Armenia was in the news with its ongoing fight with its neighbour Azerbaijan and the expulsion of most of the Armenian population of Nagorno Karabakh. It’s no longer news – for us at least. But it says something about the troubles of this world – and what we think deserves our attention.

Wherever we find people we can find cause for falling out, divisions, fear, hatred and violence. It’s there in the news. Between Israeli and Palestinian, in Ukraine, in so many countries of Africa that news coverage is barely possible. It’s in our fear of boat people and other migrants. It’s on our own streets and even in our own families.

It's when it strikes home that we may want to avoid Christmas. But the message of Christ’s birth is something we need to return to again and again. This year there are no festive lights, decorations or Christmas trees in Bethlehem. But there the true light has been born into our world. We need to pray that that light may be born again in our hearts – and his love shine out through our lives.