Christianity is fire, passion, desire, longing, yearning

Here's the sermon that I shared this morning at St Mary the Virgin, Little Burstead:

What is it that you most desire? How would you answer that question? It could be another person that you desire; your current or a future partner. You might answer in terms of other relationships; time with children or grandchildren, for example. It might be money that you desire; a lottery win would do very nicely and give you wealth to do with as you please. You might answer in terms of opportunity; the chance to travel or to enjoy particular types of experiences. Some might answer in terms of dreams; the chance to make a difference in the world, be famous for 15 minutes or to prove they have the X Factor.

Some years ago I was at a conference on ‘The Holy Spirit in the World Today’ where the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, said that the Holy Spirit is desire in us. He didn’t, of course, mean that the Spirit is any or all desires that animate us but instead a very particular desire; the desire, longing or yearning or passion for Christ and to become Christ-like. The challenge of the Archbishop’s homily was that we should be consumed with desire for that goal. He quoted St Symeon who prayed "Come, you who have become yourself desire in me, who have made me desire you, the absolutely inaccessible one!"

The desire that the Holy Spirit creates in us is a desire to be where Jesus is; in relationship with God the Father, in the stream of healing love which flows from the Father to the Son. In other words to know ourselves to be members of God’s family, brothers and sisters of Jesus, loved and accepted by God as his children and longing to grow up into the likeness of our brother Jesus, who is the image of the invisible God. When we are where Jesus is; in relationship with God the Father then we are able to use the same words and pray the same prayer as Jesus who called God, “Abba” or Daddy. This is the place of intimate relationship with God, this is what it means to be in God and it is the Holy Spirit who stirs up the desire in us to be in that place where we are able rightly and truly to speak intimately with our “Abba” Father.

By stirring up this desire in us, Graham Tomlin has suggested, the Holy Spirit provides the answer to one of the most fundamental questions of existence; the question of identity. We ask ‘Who are we?’ and the Spirit answers, we are beloved sons and daughters of the Father because the spirit has united us to Christ that we might live forever in the love that the Father has for the Son.

That answer to the question of our identity then leads to the question of our vocation – what are we here for? Again, the Holy Spirit is key because the Spirit is given to us as the first fruits of the kingdom of God. The kingdom is still to come but we have the Spirit as the guarantee that the kingdom will come. The Spirit comes from the future to anticipate the kingdom in the present by creating signs of what the kingdom will be like when it comes in full. So, the Spirit initiates the mission of God which is to bring humanity and creation to the completed perfection for which we were originally intended; the time when the whole world will freely return to God, worship him and become like him by living in him. As Colin Gunton has written, “the Spirit is the agent by whom God enables things to become that which they were created to be.”

Our role is to become involved in this work of the Spirit to heal the broken creation, bring it to maturity and reconcile it in Christ. We get involved by creating signs of the coming kingdom here and now in the present. In the conference, as an example, David Ford spoke of being in Rwanda with women whose families had died in the genocide. They spoke in a service about the pain of their loss and then a younger group of women danced. As they danced in praise of God, the older women cried and mourned their loved ones. Joy and grief were combined and both brought simultaneously to God.

Ford also gave the example of the L’Arche Community where those with learning disabilities and their Assistants live and work together. L'Arche is based on Christian principles, welcoming people of all faiths and none. Mutual relationships and trust in God are at the heart of their journey together and the unique value of every person is celebrated and both recognise their need of one another.

At the conference Rowan Williams also told the story of Mother Maria Skobtsova who on Good Friday 1945 changed places with a Jewish woman at the Ravensbruck Concentration Camp and went to her death in the gas chambers. Like L’Arche and the Rwandan women, Mother Maria was a sign of the coming kingdom in her passion and sacrifice. Mother Maria said that "either Christianity is fire or there is no such thing." Christianity is fire, passion, desire, longing, yearning for Christ and Christ’s mission. What is it that you desire?

If the Holy Spirit has stirred that fire, passion and desire in you then, like St Symeon, we need to cry out for the Spirit to come to us. To daily pray, “Come, Holy Spirit.” Come to stir up this desire and longing and yearning and passion in me. Come to make my heart restless till it finds its rest in you. Come to cause me to run into your arms of love. Come, Holy Spirit, come.

Let us pray,

Almighty God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
Together with believers all over the world,
We gather today to glorify Your Name.
Apart from You, we can do nothing.
Transform Your Church into the image of Jesus Christ.
Release Your power to bring healing to the sick,
freedom to the oppressed and comfort to those who mourn.
Pour Your love into our hearts and fill us with compassion
to answer the call of the homeless and the hungry
and to enfold orphans, widows and the elderly in Your care. Amen.

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Victoria Williams - Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is desire in us

Here's the sermon that I shared this morning at St Mary's Runwell and St Chad's Vange:

What is it that you most desire? How would you answer that question? It could be another person that you desire; your current or a future partner. You might answer in terms of other relationships; time with children or grandchildren, for example. It might be money that you desire; a lottery win would do very nicely and give you wealth to do with as you please. You might answer in terms of opportunity; the chance to travel or to enjoy particular types of experiences. Some might answer in terms of dreams; the chance to make a difference in the world, be famous for 15 minutes or to prove they have the X Factor.

Some years ago I was at a conference on ‘The Holy Spirit in the World Today’ where the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, said that the Holy Spirit is desire in us. He didn’t, of course, mean that the Spirit is any or all desires that animate us but instead a very particular desire; the desire, longing or yearning or passion for Christ and to become Christ-like. The challenge of the Archbishop’s homily was that we should be consumed with desire for that goal. He quoted St Symeon who prayed "Come, you who have become yourself desire in me, who have made me desire you, the absolutely inaccessible one!"

The desire that the Holy Spirit creates in us is a desire to be where Jesus is; in relationship with God the Father, in the stream of healing love which flows from the Father to the Son. In other words to know ourselves to be members of God’s family, brothers and sisters of Jesus, loved and accepted by God as his children and longing to grow up into the likeness of our brother Jesus, who is the image of the invisible God. When we are where Jesus is; in relationship with God the Father then we are able to use the same words and pray the same prayer as Jesus who called God, “Abba” or Daddy. This is the place of intimate relationship with God, this is what it means to be in God and it is the Holy Spirit who stirs up the desire in us to be in that place where we are able rightly and truly to speak intimately with our “Abba” Father.

By stirring up this desire in us, Graham Tomlin has suggested, the Holy Spirit provides the answer to one of the most fundamental questions of existence; the question of identity. We ask ‘Who are we?’ and the Spirit answers, we are beloved sons and daughters of the Father because the spirit has united us to Christ that we might live forever in the love that the Father has for the Son.

That answer to the question of our identity then leads to the question of our vocation – what are we here for? Again, the Holy Spirit is key because the Spirit is given to us as the first fruits of the kingdom of God. The kingdom is still to come but we have the Spirit as the guarantee that the kingdom will come. The Spirit comes from the future to anticipate the kingdom in the present by creating signs of what the kingdom will be like when it comes in full. So, the Spirit initiates the mission of God which is to bring humanity and creation to the completed perfection for which we were originally intended; the time when the whole world will freely return to God, worship him and become like him by living in him. As Colin Gunton has written, “the Spirit is the agent by whom God enables things to become that which they were created to be.”

Our role is to become involved in this work of the Spirit to heal the broken creation, bring it to maturity and reconcile it in Christ. We get involved by creating signs of the coming kingdom here and now in the present. In the conference, as an example, David Ford spoke of being in Rwanda with women whose families had died in the genocide. They spoke in a service about the pain of their loss and then a younger group of women danced. As they danced in praise of God, the older women cried and mourned their loved ones. Joy and grief were combined and both brought simultaneously to God.

Ford also gave the example of the L’Arche Community where those with learning disabilities and their Assistants live and work together. L'Arche is based on Christian principles, welcoming people of all faiths and none. Mutual relationships and trust in God are at the heart of their journey together and the unique value of every person is celebrated and both recognise their need of one another.

At the conference Rowan Williams also told the story of Mother Maria Skobtsova who on Good Friday 1945 changed places with a Jewish woman at the Ravensbruck Concentration Camp and went to her death in the gas chambers. Like L’Arche and the Rwandan women, Mother Maria was a sign of the coming kingdom in her passion and sacrifice. Mother Maria said that "either Christianity is fire or there is no such thing." Christianity is fire, passion, desire, longing, yearning for Christ and Christ’s mission. What is it that you desire?

If the Holy Spirit has stirred that fire, passion and desire in you then, like St Symeon, we need to cry out for the Spirit to come to us. To daily pray, “Come, Holy Spirit.” Come to stir up this desire and longing and yearning and passion in me. Come to make my heart restless till it finds its rest in you. Come to cause me to run into your arms of love. Come, Holy Spirit, come.

Let us pray,

Almighty God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
Together with believers all over the world,
We gather today to glorify Your Name.
Apart from You, we can do nothing.
Transform Your Church into the image of Jesus Christ.
Release Your power to bring healing to the sick,
freedom to the oppressed and comfort to those who mourn.
Pour Your love into our hearts and fill us with compassion
to answer the call of the homeless and the hungry
and to enfold orphans, widows and the elderly in Your care. Amen.

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Delirious? - Our God Reigns.

Just As I Am: A weekend of events on Disability and Church

Just As I Am
Saturday 14 October – Sunday 15 October 2017

A weekend of events to mark our 6th annual conference on Disability and Church, a partnership between St Martin-in-the-Fields and Inclusive Church.

Just As I Am: Living Theology
Saturday 14 October, 10.30am – 4.30pm
St Martin’s Hall

What does it mean to be disabled, and what might that say about God? Do our stories tell us something of God’s story? Are we living theology?

Through plenary talks and working in small groups, with a silent space and a marketplace, we explore the ideas arising from our experience and consider how we can resource each other and the Church. Organised by and for disabled people, supporters and those with an interest in disability. Speakers to be announced.

Cost: £20/£10 concessions
Registration: www.inclusive-church.org/disability-conference. Spaces are limited.

Just As I Am: Eucharist and Healing Service
Sunday 15 October, 10.00am – 11.30am

A special liturgy for St Luke’s Day which reflects the weekend’s themes, written by members of St Martin’s Disability Advisory Group and Healing Team. The service includes the laying on of hands and anointing with oil, accompanied by prayers for healing – for yourself, someone else or the wider world. All are welcome.

Just As I Am: Summer in the Forest
Sunday 15 October, 2.00pm – 4.30pm
St Martin’s Hall

A special screening of this feature-length documentary film. Summer in the Forest follows the life of the L’Arche community in Trosly, France, where people with learning difficulties and those who support them have found what it truly means to be human. We are delighted to be joined by filmmakers and others to share their experience, and invite us to consider the ideas raised.

Registration: https://justasiam-summerintheforest.eventbrite.co.uk

Tickets are free with a retiring collection to cover costs – suggested donation £5.

www.summerintheforest.com

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Switchfoot - Where The Light Shines Through.

The inexhaustible, unlimited motherly and fatherly love of God

Here is my sermon from today's Eucharist at St Stephen Walbrook:

Henri Nouwen was a bestselling author and pastor of a L’Arche community in Toronto, a community of people with learning difficulties. One of his best loved books is The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming. The book reflects on the parable of the Prodigal Son by way of a painting; Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son.

In the book Nouwen describes his thoughts as he first saw that image as a large poster pinned to a colleague’s door: “I saw a man in a great red cloak tenderly touching the shoulders of a dishevelled boy kneeling before him. I could not take my eyes away. I felt drawn by the intimacy between the two figures, the warm red of the man’s cloak, the golden yellow of the boy’s tunic, and the mysterious light engulfing them both. But, most of all, it was the hands – the old man’s hands as they touched the boy’s shoulders that reached me in a place where I had never been reached before.”

Through reflection on the painting and through L’Arche, Nouwen became familiar with the home of God within him. That place where, “I am held safe in the embrace of an all-loving Father who calls me by name and says, ‘You are my beloved son, on you my favour rests.’ Looking back he sees that his intense response to the father’s embrace of his son told that he was desperately searching for that inner place where he too could be held as safely as the young man in the painting. It maybe that we are each one searching for that place and embrace.

For Nouwen it all began with the father’s hands: “The two are quite different. The father’s left hand touching the son’s shoulder is strong and muscular … That hand seems not only to touch, but, with its strength, also to hold. Even though there is a gentleness in the way the father’s left hand touches his, it is not without a firm grip. How different is the father’s right hand! This hand does not hold or grasp. It is refined, soft, and very tender … It lies gently upon the son’s shoulder. It wants to caress, to stroke, and to offer consolation and comfort. It is a mother’s hand …As soon as I recognised the difference between the two hands of the father, a new world of meaning opened up for me. The Father is not simply a great patriarch. He is mother as well as father. He touches … with a masculine hand and a feminine hand. He is, indeed God, in whom both manhood and womanhood, fatherhood and motherhood, are fully present.

Then there is the great red cloak. With its warm colour and its arch-like shape, it offers a welcome place where it is good to be. At first, the cloak … looked to be like a tent inviting the tired traveller to find some rest. But as I went on gazing at the red cloak, another image came to me: the sheltering wings of the mother bird. They reminded me of Jesus’ words about God’s maternal love: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem … How often have I longed to gather your children, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.” Day and night God holds me safe, as a hen holds her chicks secure under her wings. Even more than … a tent, the image of a vigilant mother bird’s wings expresses the safety that God offers her children. They express care, protection, a place to rest and feel safe …

For most of my life I have struggled to find God, to know God, to love God. I have tried hard to follow the guidelines of the spiritual life … and to avoid the many temptations to dissipate myself. I have failed many times but always tried again, even when … close to despair. Now I wonder whether I have sufficiently realised that during all this time God has been trying to find me, to know me, and to love me. The question is not “How am I to find God?” but “How am I to let myself be found by him?” The … question is not “How am I to love God? But “How am I to let myself be loved by God?” God is looking into the distance for me, trying to find me, and longing to bring me home … God is the father who watches and waits for his children, runs out to meet them, embraces them, pleads with them, begs and urges them to come home. It might sound strange, but God wants to find me as much as, if not more than, I want to find God …

Many people live their lives never fully sure that they are loved as they are. Many have horrendous stories that offer plausible reasons for their low self-esteem. The parable of the prodigal son is a story that speaks about a love that existed before any rejection was possible and that will still be there after all rejections have taken place. It is the first and everlasting love of a God who is Father as well as Mother. It is the foundation of all true human love, even the most limited. Jesus’ whole life and preaching had only one aim: to reveal this inexhaustible, unlimited motherly and fatherly love of his God and to show the way to let that love guide every part of our daily lives. In his painting of the father, Rembrandt offers us a glimpse of that love. It is the love that always welcomes home and always wants to celebrate.”

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Keith Green - The Prodigal Son Suite.

Light that enables us to see ourselves and our world

Here is yesterday's sermon from the lunchtime Eucharist at St Stephen Walbrook:

In today’s epistle (Ephesians 5. 8 - 14) we are told that we were once darkness, but now we are light in the Lord. So we are called to ‘live as children of light … and find out what pleases the Lord.’ What does this involve?

Jesus, our Lord, is the light of the world. We are given the image of Jesus as light to help us grasp the reality that he is the one by whom we come to see. Light is not something we can see directly but something that enables us to see ourselves and our world. This is what Jesus does for us through the incarnation; he is God fully revealed in human form, so shows us what God is actually like as well as revealing all that we, as humans, can become. For the very first time in the history of the world a human being lives a fully human life.

We come into the light of Christ by comparing our lives to his. As we do so, inevitably we find that we fall short; that our capacity to do what pleases him (by living out all goodness, righteousness and truth) is less than his capacity for these things. Our reality, as our Gospel reading (Luke 11. 14 - 26) makes clear, is that we are divided people. As St Paul states in Romans 7: ‘… what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.’

When we see ourselves and our world in the light of the life of Jesus, what we see is our failure and inability to be the people that we were created to become. In the light of the way that Jesus lived his life, we see our lack of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility, and self-control. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, remain in darkness, and there is no truth in us. But when we live in the light, seeing ourselves as we really are, then we become honest with ourselves and with God. By coming into that honesty we confess our sins and are purified; we make our humble confession to Almighty God truly and earnestly repenting of our sins.

But the light of Christ does not just expose and make visible our fallibilities. When we learn what pleases our Lord (which is all goodness, righteousness and truth; or, as our confession says, intending to lead a new life by following the commandments of God, walking in his holy ways and living in love and charity with our neighbours) we are then illuminated by him and become a light to others. This is what Jesus means when he tells us to let our light shine before others, that they may see our good deeds and glorify our Father in heaven.

In business terms we would call this being transparent. One business dictionary definition of transparency is a “lack of hidden agendas or conditions, accompanied by the availability of full information required for collaboration, cooperation, and collective decision making.” The true purpose of transparency is not simply to appease regulators, to increase profits, or to please shareholders. The true purpose of transparency is authenticity. This is the quality of being genuine, and ultimately of being trusted, which allows our message to be heard and believed. For this to happen – for us to ‘be a real agent for God to connect with [our] neighbour’ – we need self-awareness; ‘each of us needs to know the specific truth about himself or herself.’

Light enables us to see all that is around us. As a result, we can then also see others around us and when we do this, looking around us and see other people, creatures and objects, we can grow in understanding of ourselves by undertaking an exercise in comparing and contrasting; thinking to ourselves I’m similar to this and I’m different from that.

There is a South African word ‘Ubuntu’, which means ‘I am because you are’. It is only as we see others, in the light of Christ, that we truly come to know ourselves. Jean Vanier, creator of the L’Arche communities, also speaks about dependency being at the heart of community and our belonging to one another. 'We do not discover who we are, we do not reach true humanness,' he says, 'in a solitary state; we discover it through mutual dependency, in weakness, in learning through belonging.' Similarly, St Anthony the Great said ‘Our life and our death is with our neighbour’ and, as a result Rowan Williams states that 'only in the relations we have with one another can the love and mercy of God appear and become effective.'

Once we were darkness, but now in the Lord we are light. So, live as children of light—for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true. Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly; but everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says, ‘Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.’ May it be so for each one of us. Amen.

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John Tavener - Darkness Into Light.

In recognition of the beauty and the value of people with intellectual disabilities

Jean Vanier began his remarks at tonight's Templeton Prize ceremony in St Martin-in-the-Fields by saying:

"Thank you for this magnificent award that you have given in recognition of the beauty and the value of people with intellectual disabilities. This beauty has been revealed as we have lived together in L’Arche and accompanied each other in Faith and Light. People with intellectual disabilities are the ones who are the heart of our communities, they are the ones who have revealed to so many people - families, assistants and friends - their human and spiritual gifts, and they are the ones who have inspired the fruitful growth of Faith and Light and L’Arche throughout the world. It is to them this prize will be given, so that many more people with intellectual disabilities throughout the world may grow in greater inner freedom, discover their fundamental value as human beings and children of God. They in turn will be able to help many so-called “normal” people, imprisoned by our cultures orientated towards power, winning, and individual success, to discover what it means to be human."

His remarks can be read in full by clicking here, while the ceremony, including St Martin's Voices and a L'Arche performance and song, can be viewed by clicking here (from 19th May).

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Sydney Carter - I Come Like A Beggar.