One reason a plasma screen in church might help this Sunday

With thanks to anglicanmemes.com

Of Sheep and Annual Meetings

Both our parishes held their Annual Parochial Church Meetings on Sunday. This Homily was intended as part of the "Chairman's Remarks" (as the agenda put it):

We’re still in Easter-tide, the season of Easter. But we’ve now run out of Resurrection appearances by Jesus for use in the Gospel reading. Last Sunday we had the final appearance recorded by St. John as Jesus came to the disciples by the Sea of Galilee - and his last instructions to the disciples… what they should do to live out their faith in the risen Christ when physically he has left them.

But there’s a link between last week’s Gospel reading and this week’s. They both involve sheep. Last week we heard Jesus ask Peter three times, “Do you love me?” And to Peter’s reply, Jesus answers: “Feed my lambs…” “Tend my sheep…” “Feed my sheep…” Love for Jesus is put into action by care for the flock.

Today we hear Jesus on an occasion in his earlier ministry and he says, “My sheep hear my voice.” But there’s also a problem - because he tells the people he is speaking to, “you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep.”

Who are the sheep? Who is in as far as the flock of Christ is concerned? - and who is out? And if Jesus says “Tend my sheep, feed my sheep…” does that mean there are people who don’t need his care or who don’t deserve it?

Today is observed by the Church as a whole as “Vocations Sunday” - a day to think about being called by God. It’s also the day when our parish has its Easter Vestry and Annual Parochial Church Meeting. And our Gospel reading has us think about sheep.

They’re all connected. It’s quite appropriate that all three coincide. A vocation is a calling to do something. It might be a job - and knowing that a particular job is just right for you, and you are just the person to do it. In the Church “vocation” has been particularly associated with a calling to the priesthood in particular - and more generally to other forms of ministry. We need to keep that definition in mind. We need to pray for more priests - and for the right people to test their vocations. That’s not just about the right person to do the job, it’s about the struggle to be the person God is calling. And when we understand this, then we see that really every Christian has a  vocation - every Christian is called to live out their faith on a daily basis, to be who and what God wants. Are we ready to ask each day what God wants of us? Do we seek to know where he is calling us? Do we want to be the people God wants us to be? If we think we are, does God recognise us?... those words of Jesus, “you do not belong to my sheep,” might seem quite judgmental - but they might also be a prompt to take a good look at ourselves and ask how God sees us.

And vocation is not merely something individual. God calls me - but the Church has its part to play in recognising it. That’s why we say that a vocation to the priesthood has to be “tested.” But not just priesthood. Today we have our church’s Annual Meeting. It’s a time to take note of reports on what we’ve been doing over the past year, to check the accounts, to vote for churchwardens and members of the PCC. But not just to look back or to do what is legally required of us. Today’s meeting invites us to ask how close we can come to fulfillment of our calling as God’s people - to be the  Body of Christ; to be a sign of his Kingdom. It’s not just that we are sheep - Christ’s flock who need looking after… We have a calling to look out for other people too - those who are outside the doors of our churches, those who need our help and care, people looking for faith, people who don’t even recognise their need.

Who are the “sheep?” The real question is “who is the shepherd?” Always we are called back to Christ - and when we are called we share in his care for the flock. But Jesus doesn’t only call himself a shepherd to his flock. He also calls himself “the door to the sheepfold.” He’s the way in. If we wonder who are the sheep he calls into his flock, the way forward is not to judge the answer for ourselves. It’s to see that we keep the door open for those who might come in.

There are some well-known words often used at the door of a church - and we might use them as a prayer for ourselves in our vocation and on this day of our Annual Meeting:

O God, make the door of this house

    wide enough to receive all who need human love and fellowship;

    narrow enough to shut out all envy, pride, and strife.

Make its threshold smooth enough

    to be no stumbling-block to children,

    nor to straying feet,

    but rugged enough to turn back the tempter’s power. 

God make the door of this house the gateway to your eternal kingdom.

Can we open our doors to all who are in need? Can we be faithful to our vocation as Christ’s people - and help other people recognise their calling?

“My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me,” says Jesus. On this Vocation Sunday the Church reminds us: "The young are called; the elderly are called. There is no retirement from the Christian pilgrimage. …... Women are called and men are called….. God 'has no favourites' …. We are all called no matter what our occupations may be. There is no special status in the Kingdom for those in 'top jobs' or 'important responsibilities' "   

May that be true for us! May we help other people find it is true for them!

Two Thomases - the 2nd Sunday of Easter

(Gospel Reading: John 20.19–31)

“The man of faith who has never experienced doubt is not a man of faith.”

This is a tale of two Thomases. “Doubting Thomas” is the way one of the disciples in today’s Gospel reading is often unjustly described – as if we think we can write him off for his temerity in questioning the disciples’ account of their Easter meeting with Jesus. The other Thomas is the man who wrote those words with which I began: “The man of faith who has never experienced doubt is not a man of faith.”

This Thomas is a writer I’ve kept going back to throughout the time I’ve been ordained - over 30 years. Thomas Merton was one of the great Christian writers of the 20^th century. Like many people, I first encountered his work in his book “The Seven Storey Mountain.” It’s the account of his vocation – from his childhood upbringing in France and England, through the loss of both his parents, his move to America, and his coming to faith... which led him to become a Trappist monk. He realised, as he says in his book, that his vocation – any Christian’s vocation - was to be a saint, and the book ends on a high note with a great confession of faith and his profession into monastic vows. It’s a tremendous book of 400 pages telling how God has been there all along, seeking him out and calling him on his journey of faith.

But what becomes still more interesting is to see how he went on from that high point. Could he continue living at that level of faith and confidence? There’s a lot to learn from reading his personal journals. Just a few years after the runaway success of “The Seven Storey Mountain”, he finds himself correcting the proofs of the book’s translation into French. It had become one of the religious bestsellers of all time, but he admits that now the book leaves him quite cold – he is no longer the man who wrote that book. Or rather, we might say, he’d moved on. Faith cannot remain static, so a faith which is full of confidence will – if it’s going to be a living faith – have to be challenged, even questioned and doubted.

“The Seven Storey Mountain” remains a classic of Christian spirituality. But it didn’t deal with those parts of Merton’s life that his superiors thought unedifying. A rather wayward year as an undergraduate in Cambridge, for example. And it’s never been established whether during that year he had fathered a child with whom he then had no further contact, a child later killed with its Mother during the Blitz. Whatever the truth behind all the speculation, we know that beneath his desire for holiness, and the zealous faith of his best-selling book, there were private doubts, anxieties, questioning and griefs.

And this is something that comes out clearly for the first time with the publishing of his personal journals. Having renounced the world, taken his vows in a silent order, after getting special permission to live in his own hermitage in the woods, Merton at the age of 50 had to have surgery on his spine which required that he leave the monastery. The operation was a success, and he returned to the abbey just in time for Easter – only for it to dawn upon him in the days that followed that he had fallen in love. It was a student nurse who had cared for him only briefly, but his feelings forced him to conclude, “I will do the only thing possible and risk loving with Christ’s love when there is so obvious a need for it.” He knows that his vows and his security in the religious life require him to break off his contact with the nurse. But everything he felt he had under control is now called into question. Recklessly he calls her from the monastery and arranges meetings with her – and knowing their feelings for each other, he comes to understand himself the more deeply. As he writes in his Journal: “One of the good sane things about this love is seeing myself as I am loved by M. True, she idealizes me impossibly, yet at the same time I am unavoidably known to her as I am. Many of the things she loves in me are things I find humiliating and impossible, but she loves them because they are concretely mine. I love her the same way....”

In a sense it is a hopeless love affair. It’s not something Merton can continue while maintaining the integrity of his vows - nor in fairness to the young woman. But it’s also something deeply moving, something that enables him more than anything in the last years of his life to grow – and that finally allows him to make sense of his vocation.

I tell the story because it shows that faith is not something we can insist upon. We cannot impose our faith upon other people, and we cannot maintain it for ourselves simply by keeping the rules. We can only live out the life of faith by recognising our humanity, by allowing questions and doubts to reach our hearts and minds – and above all by letting love do its work. In the end for Merton there is no conflict between his monastic vocation and the call to love – and to love with all his human being. Because when he is able to accept finally that someone else is loving him as the person he is – rather than as a monk, a priest or a writer – he comes to understand truly what love is.

It’s a lesson which has had to be learned over and over again from the earliest of times by anyone who would be a follower of Christ. The apostle Thomas is not someone to be condemned for his failure to believe that Christ was risen from the dead. Perhaps he was a man of stubbornness, someone who just wouldn’t take other people at their word – he tells us that much himself: “Unless I see.... I will not believe.” But can we not feel for him too? The other disciples have a message they can proclaim with boldness, because they have seen for themselves that first Easter day, when Jesus had come to them through the locked doors. But he had missed it – how is Thomas ever to be able to join with the other apostles in proclaiming their message of the Resurrection when he hasn’t seen it the same way they have?

And I want to ask, isn’t there a message for us all here, when we are trying to bear witness to the faith which keeps us going? We need to be confident in our faith, but we need to see that our experience is not necessarily that of other people. What is convincing to us may mean nothing to other people. Have they been there with us in our experience? Have we gone through the same experiences as them?

Of course St. John’s Gospel gives us a “happy ending” for Thomas despite all his questioning when Jesus comes a week later to stand again in the midst of the disciples. But what strikes me is that though Jesus shows the wounds in his hands and side to Thomas and invites him to touch them, we’re not told that Thomas does in fact do so. “My Lord and my God!” says Thomas to Jesus, but there is no longer the need for him to have tangible proof. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe,” says Jesus. And the truth of Thomas’s conversion is not that he can now reach out and touch the wounds of the risen Christ, but that the risen Christ has reached out and touched him. Jesus comes to Thomas with all his doubts and questions. He lets him ask, he allows for his anxieties, and still he calls him his disciple. Failure to believe is not grounds for condemnation. And the way to faith for Thomas is through the love of God in Christ in accepting him in all the frailty of his humanity.

The other Thomas – Thomas Merton – had embarked upon his Christian journey and his monastic vocation with the highest of goals, but was to discover the true meaning of love only when he found someone who loved him outside the rules and boundaries he’d set himself, someone who loved him as and for himself. That’s the way that God loves us, and the way he calls us into a community where we love one another. As Merton records: “I dreamt I was telling several other monks, ‘I shall be a saint’, and they did not seem to question me. Furthermore, I believed it myself. If I do – I shall – it will be because of the prayers of other people who, though they are better than I am, still want me to pray for them.”

Bonnets on parade

A wonderful display from Easter Day...

... and one of the models

Triduum at St. Cuthbert's - the Great Three Days

Thursday     MAUNDY THURSDAY

28^th March     7.30p.m.         Sung Eucharist of the Last Supper
                                               followed by a Watch of the Passion.

Friday          GOOD FRIDAY

29^th March     10.00a.m.       At the Cross – All-age Service

2.00p.m.         Liturgy of the Day

with Holy Communion.

Sunday            EASTER DAY  -  THE DAY OF RESURRECTION!

31^st March 

10.30a.m.   Sung Parish Eucharist

with Easter Ceremonies

and Renewal of Baptism Vows

 

Please take the opportunity to make the most of Holy Week!

Transfigured humanity - glory in weakness

 

Here’s a verse from today’s Gospel reading (Luke 9.28-36):

Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him.  

It’s only St. Luke who tells us that when the disciples went up a hill for the purpose of prayer, they were really too tired to do the job. But while he is praying, Jesus is transfigured in their midst; the appearance of his face changes and his clothes become dazzling white, and Moses and Elijah appear to bear witness to the glory of God revealed in Christ.

 What do words like “transfigured” or “transfiguration” and “glory” mean to you? Writing in the second century, St. Irenaeus of Lyons declared:

The glory of God is a man fully alive.

 

You can see it in our Gospel reading. Not only Jesus, but Moses and Elijah also, appear before the disciples in “glory.” It’s a dazzling vision which contrasts with the state of the disciples, Peter, James and John. They are “weighed down with sleep.” They try to respond to the vision with that strange offer by Peter to build three dwellings - it’s an inadequate response, an attempt to deal with something beyond their understanding. St. Luke’s Gospel tells us: “Peter did not know what he had said.” It might make us think of our own inadequacy when we say that we are simply lost for words. And then the disciples find themselves reduced to terror as a cloud covers them. The cloud signifies the presence of God - and the disciples hear God speak: “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him.” When the disciples return down the Mount of the Transfiguration they are asked to heal a young boy - and they fail. Where is the effect of God’s glory on them?

We need to go back to those words of St. Irenaeus which I quoted: “The glory of God is a man fully alive.” That’s what we see in Jesus - the Son of God, but at the same time fully human. The glory of his Transfiguration is not something alien coming upon him. The Transfiguration of Christ reveals the true glory, the real nature of a man who some want to write off as “all too human.” Our humanity is a calling to share the glory of God. Our weakness is something to be transfigured. God can use us because we are human.

Glory is not something to escape into from our human condition. Glory is revealed because we are human with all the frailty and frustrations of being what we are. But we wrestle with the frailty and frustration. (Here) at St. Cuthbert’s this morning we can’t help but be conscious of the loss we share by the death of Ian Severs on Friday evening. I wonder what people who didn’t know Ian made of him when they first met him? They’d find him in a wheelchair. With his Parkinson’s the words didn’t always come out right, limbs didn’t always behave properly; and he’d lost a leg - and had an arm that was barely functioning. You needed to get to know Ian a bit to start to know the man - and to recognise just how important he’s been, not only to the members of his family, not only to his friends, but to us as a church, and more widely in showing what it is to be fully alive even in the most extreme conditions of physical weakness and disability. He was with us (here) in church at the Eucharist last Sunday. In the conversations I had with him during the last week he didn’t say that he’d been feeling unwell; he did say he’d had a positive outcome from his last hospital check-up - but mainly he was taken up with tackling problems of fabric we’re having at present in the church and the hall. Problems they are to us - but Ian’s approach was to sort them out.

 There’s much more we need to say about Ian - and to share with one another. His death is a grievous loss. But we see in his approach to prolonged illness an example of how to live. Where should he sit in church, he’d asked, when he couldn’t fit his wheelchair into a pew? For me it’s always been important that he should be at the front. Not just so he could join in the service better - but so he could show us what and who we are.

 “The glory of God is a man fully alive.” That doesn’t mean being fighting fit, intellectually brilliant or the funniest person around. It means being open to what God can do in us.

Today our Diocese of Durham is encouraging us to observe as “Giving Sunday.” It’s up to the parishes as to what they do with the occasion - and it’s not the best time of year, I think, to be trying a stewardship drive… to encourage people to put more money on the plate, or think about increasing  their standing order for the church, or review the Gift Aids they might use to make their giving more tax efficient. Of course we’d be delighted if you do all these things. But perhaps we need first to think of life as a gift - in all that we receive from God, in the extent of God’s mercy, in the generosity to which we are called as Christians to respond, in what we can give back. It’s a time to express gratitude. I and the Church Council need to say thank you to all of you who give to support the work of our church. I don’t need to say how much you should give. I realise that some people get concerned about what they can give. What I’d say now is that our giving is about recognising the gift we have already received. As to the extent of our giving, it’s a strange thing but people who are generous somehow find themselves able to go on being more and more generous. Love itself does not count the cost.

I’m pretty hopeless at thinking of how to conduct so-called “stewardship campaigns” to stimulate giving to the church - I’m not starting a campaign now. But when we’ve had them in the past (at St. Cuthbert’s), I’ve been glad for people who have been practical about what we needed to do and who were ready to take a lead. One of those people was Ian Severs. It was Ian  who was ready to get up in front of other people and tell them what we needed to be doing. He put into practice what we needed as an example. He was down to earth.

And that’s when we see that the “glory of God” is not something unworldly. It’s worked out in the here and now, within the limits of our human capability, but at the same time able to be transformed - transfigured.

For all we have received - in terms of wealth, health (and our weaknesses), material resources, and above all people who show us his grace at work, in whom his glory is revealed, thanks be to God!

Candlemas - light in darkness is more than processions with candles

Here are some words which are perhaps difficult to take in at first hearing, but they bear thinking about:

As we share our lives with the powerless, we are obliged to leave behind our theories about the world, our dreams and our beautiful thoughts about God to become grounded in a reality that can be quite harsh. That is where we meet God, God who is Emmanuel, God-with-us. There God is present, hidden in wounded humanity, hidden in the pain of our own hearts.

The writer of these words is Jean Vanier who founded the community known as L’Arche. He came from a background of privilege. He was born in Geneva while his father was on diplomatic service. His father became Governor General of Canada. He himself served in the Royal Navy for several years from the end of the Second World War, but he left to study philosophy in Paris where he gained his doctorate. Returning to Canada he taught and became a Professor. He had privilege, education, intellect and ability - everything you could want, you might say.

But something was lacking. He became aware of the needs of people with disabilities - especially learning disabilities - people in their thousands who had become institutionalised, the passive recipients of whatever care might be given to them. And he recognised a perception that people with such disabilities had nothing to give - they could only be cared for. It was a perception that Vanier believed needed to be challenged. In 1964 he invited two men with disabilities to join him in sharing his home. In 1969 the first of the communities of L’Arche was established in Canada. The first community in the UK was set up in 1973. And now it exists in over 40 countries. There are 137 communities with over 5,000 members.

L’Arche is more than a success story in terms of its growth and membership. It’s what lies at its heart that is so important: the equal membership of people with and without disabilities; the recognition of what each member might bring; cooperation with individuals and agencies which bring professional expertise; a grounding in Christian faith, but a faith which is respectful of other traditions. And I’m struck by those words with which I began which sum up the whole outlook of its founder: about the sharing of our lives with the powerless; about the need to leave behind our theories of the world; about recognising that faith in God is more than a matter of beautiful thoughts but is grounded in what might often be harsh realities.

The words I’ve quoted come from a book which Jean Vanier has just published. When I checked out his biography I discovered that he was born in September 1928. He’s 84 - just a month older than my mother, 11 months younger than my father. Jean Vanier has dedicated the last 50 years of his life to living and working with people who have disabilities - people who might easily be written off. I think I need to know more of what has sustained him - perhaps to read this latest book and not just the snippet I’ve found and quoted.

I’m encouraged that he’s still going strong at 84. And notice that one of the characters in today’s Gospel reading is 84 - Anna, a “prophet,” who recognises in the child Jesus something special which impels her to praise God and tell everyone about this baby which Mary and Joseph have brought to the Temple. Simeon - another godly man whom we encounter in the same story - is also traditionally thought of as old:

“It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah.”

That’s what St. Luke tells us - it seems that death could not be far away for Simeon, and having looked upon Jesus he says that he is ready to die. A life’s work has been fulfilled because God has revealed his salvation in the Christ-child, so - “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace,” as the prayer book translates Simeon’s words.

I’ve wrestled with this reading for today. Here are old Simeon and Anna - and they are fulfilled. They are elderly, but still about their work, still full of hope, still attuned to God and ready to hear what he is saying.

My mother - at the age of 84 - has just managed to get back to services in her church during the last couple of weeks after some months away. She is a person of faith, sustained throughout her life by that faith, putting it into practice, perhaps rather too dogged in her determination to do the things she thinks are right. She’s back in church because she is free to get there now that she’s no longer able to care for my father at home. We’re praying for my father in our church at present amongst those who are in need of healing - but I know that physically it’s not going to happen. And there is life’s cruelty - my mother able to carry on, like old Simeon in the Gospel story, like Anna and Jean Vanier who are also 84. But it takes two people to get my father out of a chair. A stroke, blindness and deafness have taken their toll over the years, an arm is now quite useless, incontinence and depression are a fact of his life. Everything points to a still further deterioration that could drag on for who knows how long. And I have to ask myself, where is the good news in that? - where is he to find hope? - what sort of meaning does this have?

I’m grateful for those who ask me how my parents are managing. I’m sorry that sometimes I can’t say much more than it’s all quite horrible. It’s a rather inarticulate response. T. S. Eliot puts it rather better in his meditation, “A Song for Simeon:”

My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
Dust in sunlight and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land.

Perhaps Simeon knows all too well his frailty and the nearness of death. For Jean Vanier it is an important thing not to live with false illusions, to recognise harsh reality - but there to find God.

“This is where we meet God…” Vanier realised. In lives shared with people who are quite powerless, who might easily be written off, who are dismissed as having nothing to offer. He’s “hidden in wounded humanity… in the pain of our own hearts.”

And he’s called “Emmanuel,” which means God-with-us. That’s why we celebrate today’s Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. Because these two old people, Simeon and Anna, so near the end of life encounter this family of Mary, Joseph and a 40-day old child who can do nothing for himself. And in this child they see God’s purpose revealed. Jesus himself comes as one who is quite powerless, entirely dependent on the care of others - “the Word without a word,” but one who speaks to us because he is God sharing the fullness of humanity, declaring it in life and joy, affirming it even in brokenness and death.

 

 

This is today's Homily, preached at St. Cuthbert's, Benfieldside and St. John's, Castleside. The Gospel Reading was Luke 2.22-40. The Homily can be found as a download if you click here.