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^{Trinity 1   2021      Mark 3 : 20-35}

^{Let us pray: without you my table is empty, make haste O Lord and do not delay. Amen}

              ^{(a prayer  from the inexhaustible treasury of the Imitation of Christ)}

^{The Collect for today, the 1st Sunday after Trinity, asks God to grant us the help of His grace; and our New Testament reading  speaks of  grace, as it extends to more and more people, increasing thanksgiving to the glory of God.}

^{God’s Grace – we  can recognise it straight away when we see it in others; we are only too aware when we lack it ourselves.}

^{This morning we stand mid-way between 2 great  feasts of the grace of God in Jesus Christ our Lord: Corpus Christi, and the Sacred Heart which both point to God’s  love, poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit  who has been given us.  And John in the opening chapter of his gospel points to this great generosity of God: “from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace”  (John 1:16)}

^{our collect prays :}  “because through the weakness of our mortal nature we can do no good thing without you, grant us the help of your grace, that in the keeping of your commandments

we may please you both in will and deed.”

Far be it for me to sit in judgement, but our gospel has some disturbing portrayals of people who (probably) lack grace : a family setting out to restrain one of their own number (in this case Jesus);  a kingdom and  a house divided against itself.

Our Lady Mary obviously  has grace, the one who is full of grace; the one above all who does the will of God, who hears the word of God and keeps it.  Ponders it, treasures it and lives it.

      ^{Without you my table is empty; make haste O Lord and do not delay.}

^{What is grace? I thought I would look it up in a dictionary of Christian theology, and discovered that it is a most complex thing which would keep us here all morning if we were to  spell it all out!  So instead I offer just a few glimpses of  grace, this wonderful fact of the Christian life. We recognise it straight away when we see it or experience it.}

^{Recovering members of AA joyfully proclaim that God has done for them what they could not do for themselves.}

^{We can recall the wonderful words of Paul from his 2nd Letter to the Corinthians :}

             “ my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

                                        Most of can say Amen to that.

Brother Lawrence, of the Practice of the Presence of God, used to pray this prayer when faced with a difficult or impossible task :   “Lord, I will not be able to do this unless you enable me to do it”.

He  would then just  get  on with the tasks at hand,  and found that unexpected  help and strength came from Above.

Our New Testament   reading suggests that grace  increases thanksgiving, to the glory of God, and St Thomas a Kempis  celebrates this link between thanksgiving and grace in the Imitation, in a marvellous chapter entitled “gratitude for the grace of God” :

“God does well in giving the grace of consolation, but people do ill in not returning it to God with thanksgiving. And this is why the gifts of grace do not flow in us – because we are ungrateful to the Giver, nor do we return all to the fountain-head. For grace is ever the reward of the one who returns thanks, and that shall be taken away from the proud which is wont to be given to the humble.”  Bk 2:10

Let us pray that the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ will flood our hearts, and extend to more and more people, and  that in the keeping of his commandments, we may please him in both  in will and deed.  That what begins with us individually, will fill our cup to overflowing, and  spill out and over for others……… …………….this is surely part of mission.

         ^{Without you my table is empty; make haste O Lord and do not delay.   Amen}

Trinity Sunday 2021. Isaiah 6.1 ‘holy, holy, holy..’

The vision of Isaiah is one we deeply familiar with; ‘holy. Holy, holy is the Lord’, the Lord of hosts; in every Eucharistic prayer it is sung, and often we use it to acclaim God, holy God, holy and strong, holy and almighty have mercy on us. Perhaps we may think of the way composers have set it to music, that wonderful setting Bach does in the B minor mass, where you can sense the swinging of the thuribles from side to side as the words are sung. It is a vision which comes unbidden,through the silky curtain of the divine train, cascading down from fifty metres above, all around him; and though there is no account of what of God he saw, we know that the seraphim were up there, two winged creatures with three sets of wings. One set of wings covered the face; one set of wings covered the feet; and the other set of wings were used to fly. Incense everywhere

      It is still, however far our familiarity goes, an amazing account. It is quite hard to imagine– how do you get an exalted throne, the top of an altar, angels, incense and flowing silk into one frame? Yet this is a glimpse of the one God, the One to whom no image or likeness can be made; no-one can see, can know God and indeed as we know, traditionally according to Hebrews Isaiah is killed, by Manasseh for saying that he saw God (Hebrews 11.37-8) and according to John 12.41 Isaiah saw Jesus’ glory.

      Yet of course it is far from clear, far from clear that Isaiah does any such thing. He is blessed with a vision, but what we take away is the image of the seraphim singing holy holy holy, the trisagion of Christian worship and our worship is of the one God   to whom no image or likeness can be made.

      Yet these three holies, have been taken to indicate that Isaiah, howsoever dimly, howsoever haltingly, is given insight into the three of the one, the one of the three; it is not the only view but  certainly this one has much to be said for it, for the God of Isaiah is the same as the God of Oor Lord and Saviour; the one source, the one reconciling and the one holy- and peace-making God, three focuses of the one God in Old and New Testaments.

      I do not use the word ‘person’ as it is hard to use the word without thinking of an individual and the last thing the God of JS is, is three individuals. The God who is the source of all, who is the source of Jesus is the one God to be sure, but as Jesus way of living and worshipping with God shews us, there is in Jesus a way of living and dying which communicates the message of God, that what is lived by Jesus is such a resource of life and meaning, that it calls to be seen as being of the same ‘stuff’ as God, the one whom He and we address as Abba, ‘Father’. God communicates to us completely in Jesus Christ, Father who is all Father is because the Son is all who the son is because the Father is all who the Father is. The great glory of the three and one which Isaiah glimpses, that we see in the way from Nazareth to Calvary and Emmaus and to Pentecost.

      (I hope that you are as unsettled as I am by the ease people think that ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ describe God? Can you imagine? God is not male,not female either. God is not gendered, no less the eternal Son; that is counter fashionably time serving, stupidly inapposite, wind and air. It is about as sensible as  to say God is a drag superstar.

There is a deep focus which is source of all, a focus or communication, word and that is two; but it is three which we sing, ‘holy, holy, holy…’ There are three; the Spirit is not just an afterthought. The Spirit is where we start after all; we would not be remotely interested in the Trinity if the Spirit had not already touched us, As St Paul teaches us: ‘When we cry, “Abba! Father!” ¹⁶it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God’. As Christians we are already involved with God, the Spirit has already got inside us.

      The Spirit lacks a special name; the Father, the Son are also Spirit and holy but they are who they are because of the other. This cannot be said of the third. Theologians wrestle with this and happily not without good result. (when you hear something like that you know that the preacher is going to mention St Thomas Aquinas). St Thomas thought that gift was marked the relation of the Spirit to Father and Son,full gift;  gift of the giver, the giveness of God, God as donation, something which far exceeds our weakness for binaries or for getting things too fixed

      The Spirit is called gift without reserve, wholly and without remainder, the sending of the Father-Son, utterly irreducible to either, not a gift, but gift fullstop. That same Spirit which is between the angels, which pours out the gifts and which teaches and nurtures, world-mothering and glory-templed, the Spirit  which may also sinks to the deepest of dark depths and holds at once the peace and joy of fulfilment together with the groaning of what God has created; The Spirit, perhaps that place holder where God seems absent and seriously so.

 The Spirit Creator of course, of all things, diversity and unity, all of it, not just things that are natural but all the things which have something of the human in them – towns, societies, cultures the lot. God is as much the creator of Maghull,Takeley or Romford of toothpaste or the B minor Mass as of mountain ranges, of Mars or of Betelgeuse.

It is in that context that we confess the One in Three, the One God who is indeed personal and whom we recognise in three focusses,  of God’s working in old and new testament; they are as one as one can get and in that same, unfathomable love, that mystery which is so universe dwarfingly vast – that is what love is -, we will give thanks for God and all God is and does and we join from where the seraphim sing and join in their everlasting praise; we will receive its real signs, of source, word and gift, ‘holy. Holy, holy…’

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”

*****

“When the day of Pentecost had come …”: – it’s a completion.

We’ve ceased singing the psalms at a sprint. We’re about to put away our special booklets. We won’t be sprinkling our praise and conversation so liberally with Alleluias.

As the name implies, it’s been 50 days since Easter, 50 days of seeing all in the light of the Resurrection, of re-reading this life through the lens of God’s overturning of human judgement.

And to say this is the fiftieth day means it comes after seven weeks of seven days. This completion is one not of ending, of privation, but of fullness – of harvest and its first fruits, of the law complete and given through Moses. The fulfilment of God’s promise. It is not surprising that when Paul writes of the Spirit, he writes not only of gift but of fruit. Fruit we are to offer.

As today coincides with the last Sunday of the College’s year, we can ask, are we at an ending or somewhere else?

Today’s Whitsunday gospel comes from John, from the discourse of Jesus at the Last Supper. When Fr John preached here 3 weeks ago he said these words cannot have sounded reassuring in the ears of Jesus’ disciples that fateful night. Talk of going away and of another one coming, a shadowy figure, whom they did not know, would not have been welcome at the feast.

Going away – finally going away – may be much on our minds.

But when Jesus says, “It is to your advantage that I go away,” can this be true?

Well, we’ve had several more weeks, the Ascension, days of prayer and pondering of scripture and the fathers to get to know the Spirit better and, today, the recollection of the gift given – we’ve had time to reflect.

The Spirit of God, of course, is never absent from anything God sustains in being. The Spirit imbues continuously all physical energies with their force.

The Spirit imbues continuously all matter with its form. This uninterrupted cosmic interplay of being and becoming is a dance that God forever choreographs. God allows no coming or going to end that, until time itself runs out.

The going away of Christ, then, and the coming of the Spirit which we contemplate today, are of a different order – not a stop, a cessation, but a transformation, a new significance. The disciples, from being servants surrounding a master, become, yes friends but even closer – those who know instinctively what Jesus is about.

Ezekiel has reminded us twice this past week that God puts a new spirit within us. Or, as Jeremiah explains, no longer shall they teach one another saying know me, for they shall all know me.

 On the day of Pentecost Jesus’ own Spirit finds home in human hearts, in our hearts.

Can this really be right? If there is no need to teach one another, why have you been studying at the College these past 2 or 3 years?

Well, the transformation that God effects in us is a little more subtle, a little more human, a little more loving than that.

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”

“All the truth” – there’s fullness! 7 by 7.

It is an utterly unstinting promise from the One who is the Word, the One through whom all things came into being, and without whom not one thing exists.

For myself, I am one thing. And all the truth? – that’s beyond me; it’s meant to be beyond me. For my understanding to be illuminated so comprehensively, I need others’ eyes with which to see, others’ minds with which to think.

The Spirit, who gave the diversity of languages at Babel, also gives the ability to hear and understand within such diversity.

And it takes time – the time of the Church’s existence – we can’t bear it all at once. And it takes a fellowship, a new fellowship ever more diverse, ever increasing across the regions of the earth and across time. Each has our glint of the fullness of truth; the same Spirit illuminates each of our minds.

And so God chooses to bring forth his assembly, his church, at Pentecost, an assembly animated by the one Spirit.

This is good news.

Not least for those due to be ordained.

When the Bishop calls down the gift of the Spirit on you at your ordination, like an epiclesis on the host, this is not so that you can go into the parish filled with all knowledge, all truth, a fail-safe vision and plan-of-action.

No.

But you can go with a fresh heart, a new spirit, an expectant listening to hear of God’s deeds, renewed day by day, believing that the Spirit sets the pace, goes before,

and encompasses you in one universal fellowship, a fellowship that has power from on high to discern truth well.

You don’t have to do it.

You don’t have to achieve the parish Mission Action Plan.

You just have to welcome the Spirit, day by day, breath by breath.

Perhaps the Retreat Association’s icon in this church today, of the Woman of Samaria with Jesus at the well, can offer a picture of this welcome.

She comes with a pitcher on a long rope.

Jesus asks her for water.

But the hospitality is mutual.

For already that well is full to the brim with water and his hand is dipped in it for blessing.

The same blessing which we meet in other Christians imbued with the Spirit.

As St Paul puts it in Romans, just after writing of the Eucharist: “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.”

Our lives, our understanding of truth, our voices of praise blend in our common welcome of the coming of the Spirit.

To finish: if I were not afraid you would think it an advertisement, I would say:

the Spirit is poured out on all flesh that all may sing Songs of Praise.

Amen.

(1 John 5:9-13; John 17: 6-19)

          This period in the Church’s year can seem rather strange – our Lord has ascended to sit at the right hand of the Father, yet we are waiting for the Spirit to come down at Pentecost and settle upon the disciples; so that the Church can begin to grow and go out into the world. It can seem like a time of hiatus – perhaps somehow similar to that curious passage in Revelation, where we are told that after the Lamb opened the 7^th Seal, there was silence in heaven for half an hour. Perhaps this is another time of silence, as though for this week or so until Pentecost, God has absented Himself from the world. Yet if we believe in the God who is Emmanuel, the God who is with us, then we know that cannot be the case.

          If we look to today’s readings for guidance on the significance of this time, it doesn’t seem immediately apparent that we have much of an answer. The reading from the letter of John tells us that we have ‘the testimony of God’, and that for those who believe in His Son, this testimony is in our hearts; and that perhaps rather circuitously, this testimony is that ‘God gave us eternal life, and this life is in the Son. Whoever has the Son has life, whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.’ The choice of this passage at this time implies that we are to see this ‘Testimony’ as the Holy Spirit, that we have the Spirit working in our hearts, giving us life. This implication would have been clearer if the compilers of the lectionary had made this passage from the letter of John slightly larger. Because the verses we have had today are preceded by those proclaiming that our ‘testimony’ is Jesus Christ, who ‘came by water and blood, and the Spirit is the one that testifies, for the Spirit is Truth.’

          I was struck by this because quite by chance this week I had been reminded that in earlier times these verses were greatly expanded by a text that had been interpolated here into John’s letter. The verses, which are now considered to be a pious fraud, were used for centuries as a Biblical proof for the doctrine of the Trinity. That is, until the revival of classical learning, together with better understanding of what were the oldest Biblical texts, led scholars, beginning with Erasmus, to come to the uncomfortable realization that this verse didn’t exist in the oldest surviving texts of the New Testament. We can now usually find these expanded verses in the footnotes of modern editions of the Bible, and I may be deluding myself but I couldn’t help but think that perhaps they can help us understand what this apparent time of hiatus for God really means.

          What verses 7 and 8 of the 5^th chapter of John’s letter formerly said was this – ‘There are three that testify in heaven, the Father, the Word , and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. And there are three that testify on earth – the Spirit and the water and the blood, and these three agree.’ It is after this that we have the words we heard today about the ‘Testimony of God’ being greater than that that of humankind. These verses may help us understand what this time can mean for the Church, because perhaps not too surprisingly, given when these words most likely begin to appear in the New Testament, they seem to echo what the Fathers of the early Church said about the Ascension. They seem to echo what they understood about the role that our Lord returning to the right hand of the Father had in the economy of our salvation.

          For instance, Cyril of Alexandria believed that in the Ascension, the Christ opened for us ‘a new and living way’ into God’s presence – Christ has now gone up not for his own benefit, because ‘He was, and is, and always will be in the Father.’ Instead the significance of the Feast of the Ascension is that on it, the Word, in Cyril’s words, ascended as a human being, revealing himself in a new and unfamiliar way.’ This is so that ‘being like us…and hearing the command to ‘Sit at my right hand’, he might transmit to fellow members of the human race, the glory of being children of God.’ For Cyril, the great mystery here is that the Christ became man, so that it could be ‘as one of us that he sits at the right hand of God the Father, though in truth he is above all creation and is one in being with his Father.’ In Cyril’s scheme of things, Jesus appeared as a human being before the Father at this time, so as ‘to enable those who had been cast out from the Father’s presence because of sin to once again behold the face of God.’

          This didn’t mean that for Cyril or the other Fathers that they thought it took God a week or more to sort this out, before he was able to send the Spirit out on his people. But that this was the time when we could again reflect on what God has done for us in Christ, and on this part of his plan of salvation. In the words of another Father, Pope Leo the Great, Cyril’s near contemporary, the significance for us of the Ascension is that the Son of Man is ‘revealed as Son of God in a more perfect and transcendent way once he (has) entered into the Father’s glory.’ He has now become in Leo’s words, ‘indescribably more perfect in divinity to those from whom he was further removed in humanity.’ This enables us to have ‘a more mature faith’, whereby we can stretch our minds upward ‘to the Son in his equality with the Father’, as our faith is summoned to the heights where the Son now sits with the Father.

          I hope that it is not too much of a stretch to see the glory Leo and Cyril are talking about as being the same as that which we heard Jesus talking about in the passages we heard today from John’s Gospel. As Jesus said there to his Father, ‘All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I have been glorified in them.’ And we are glorified, because he has given us the Word, because of which ‘the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world.’ Here we have one of the paradoxes of John’s Gospel, a paradox which gives this gospel its Gnostic air of despising the world, so seemingly despising the creation that the Bible also tells us is good. In this same discourse, Jesus says that we are not to be taken out of the world, and he asks his Father here and now to sanctify us in the truth, so that just as the Father sent his Son into the world, so Jesus can now send us into the world. This seems to mean that Christ is glorified in us if we are prepared to do what he did – if we are prepared to witness to the Truth, the Truth of God’s Word, which is of course also paradoxically Jesus the Christ.

          The truth that there is always something greater than this world, the truth revealed in Jesus that not only sustains and upholds the world, but which loved it enough to send its Word to it, as John’s Gospel also proclaims. The kind of love that led Jesus to the way of the cross, which of course begins in the following chapter of John’s Gospel from the one we have heard today. The way of the cross that finds its completion in Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension, so revealing that Jesus’ return to the glory of the Father’s right hand is through the cross, through his suffering love for our world; a love that we are called upon to share and which will glorify us.

          Earlier on, I shoehorned into this sermon the old Trinitarian proof text from the 1^st letter of John, and I will return to it again, because in its witness to the Trinity, it reminds us of what can sustain us in our discipleship, as we face up to a world indifferent or hostile to Christ, and whose understanding of love can now be very different from ours. It can sustain us, when being willing to suffer in witnessing to God’s love to the world can seem futile or foolish. In the first part of the old 7^th verse, we have the heavenly testimony to God, Father, Word and Spirit. The testimony revealed in this Word coming into creation, joining itself to us completely, being willing to suffer and die for our sakes, and to take our humanity and creatureliness back to the Father, so that it can ultimately be what God has always intended it to be when we were created.

          As we heard in John’s Gospel, Jesus had said that we are to be in the world, but he prayed to protect us from the evil one, and asked his Father to protect us in his name, so that we may be one in love, as he and his Father are one. To that end, the old 7^th verse tells us that we are to look to the three that testify to God on earth – the Holy Spirit moving among us who brings together the testimonies of Heaven and Earth; the waters of repentance which cleanse us from our sins and enable us to hear the Word, and which gives us admittance to Christ’s body. And perhaps most importantly of all for us, as we try to navigate our way through this world, the Blood. The Blood outpoured that witnesses to God’s love for our world, and for each of us – the love and the paradoxical glory revealed in the sacrament that we are about to share. In the Eucharistic mystery, we share as the Body of Christ, we come face to face with the Word, with the Bread of Life, we encounter that Word in the fragility and seeming insignificance of the bread that will be broken, and the wine that would normally be poured out for us in other times, to be the blood that we would share. The Eucharist is the supreme reminder that we can always call upon the Spirit, the water and the blood as we navigate our way through this world, and remember that we are called not just to be one body as the Church, but we are called to be one with Jesus, as he is one with the Father.           As we look to Pentecost, may God, Father, Son and Spirit, give us the strength, wisdom and faith to live up to the glory he has called us to, and to show the glory of his love to our suffering world. Amen.

In last week’s Economist there was a photograph of a huge robot in the shape of a human being, and where its head should be there was a driving-cab with a real man inside operating the controls. That’s how we tend to think about our minds and our bodies. Our mind is the most important thing about us – our body belongs to a lower order of things and the mind controls it. This picture of the little man in the robot is a deep image within each of us, a deep image of our culture. So you get the view very dominant in our society that each person should be free to make themselves, to express what is within them rather than follow what is outside them. This gives us the revised Brownie promise introduced not long ago, that “I promise that I will do my best, to be true to myself and develop my beliefs …”. God has gone, and instead there is myself. You can’t criticise the guiding Association – what else can you say in a society like ours? There is a deep link between the Brownies here and German 19th-century philosophy. The German thinker Wilhelm Humboldt for instance believed that the individual ought to be free to determine themselves and develop themselves, and any restraints or influences outside ourselves were to be seen as a challenge to be overcome.

These assumptions are deeply ingrained in the modern mindset – but they are in fact outdated. Science, anthropology and philosophy are all now telling us that this image is mistaken – we are all in fact intertwined with each other. Because we are so used to it we don’t notice it, but all our life, even if we live relatively alone, is woven through this intertwining with one another. We have been learning a thing or two about that during lockdown. And not only that – our intertwining with the physical world goes right down to the deepest hidden parts of our minds. Even if you look at a cup and saucer for a few moments and try to think of all the thoughts that it conjures up, you realise that cups and saucers in your lifetime have laid down all sorts of things in your depths. The physical world is all the time contributing to our make-up. In the same edition of the Economist another article described how Tesla self-drive cars need a great multitude of sensors of all sorts. We are the same without realising it – we unconsciously take in masses of information from all around us.

St John in today’s gospel shows us Jesus saying, “love one another”. You could say that love is the perfecting of this intertwining. You can’t do what love does and be what love is without making yourself vulnerable, without loosening some of your control. You have to come out of the driving-cab, leaving behind its protection.

What is this love that Jesus talks about? It isn’t at all something you can simply turn on. If we make a great effort to love, we can end up with something debased. Love for others can be patronising, it can be manipulative, it can be deaf to what they want to tell us. Love can be erotic and even destructive, love can distort things. We are never in a position to reckon that something we are doing is love. If that’s the case, doesn’t this paralyse us? It only paralyses us if we see ourselves as a driver in a cab. In our gospel passage Jesus in fact says this: “as the father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.” This love is outside us. Wilhelm Humboldt, following his principles, will never find it because he is sufficient to himself, and any influence outside himself is something to be challenged. If we are to love, we have to go out from ourselves. The message of the gospel is that there is something, someone greater than us, and that we will find ourselves by sitting under this Mystery. Following Christ is paideia – that’s Greek for being a learner, an apprentice. “You have not chosen me; I have chosen you”. Kierkegaard said about St Paul that “the call to be an apostle is a paradoxical occurrence, lying always beyond Paul’s personal self-identity.” Beyond our personal self-identity. My sense of myself, and my picture of the world, will grow and change as I am taken outside of myself. Towards the divine Other. God is love, and Christ is the face of that love. Love is not something we do; love is being in Christ. It’s because of this that St Augustine could advise us to love God and do what we want.

In this Eucharist we are 2 communities: a religious community and a theological college. And there is another community intertwining with us, everyone present with us over the Internet. The Eucharist which brings us together is a place of abiding in that love which is Christ. Lord, you are in the midst of us, and we are called by your name. The Holy Spirit calls us constantly to wake up and be aware of the Lord in the midst of us. One way of being a learner in the School of love is simply to be awake and stay awake. Karl Barth, although belonging to the Swiss Reformed Church, was a great admirer of monastic life – despite all its failings he thought that over the centuries monastic life had repeatedly modelled what the Church is called to be. He wrote to the Abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Montserrat in Spain that renewal in monastic life cannot be something that happens every now and again. It’s every day. Monks and nuns, and the whole Church, stand and fall by the fact that our Lord… orders us anew at every moment. So for Karl Barth every moment of our Christian life is an event; monastic life is an event, triggered by the living God. To love as we were meant to love, is to be in Christ, in the Christian community, and for others, open to the world.

If associations like the Brownies are like a canary in a coal mine, having to reflect reflect what is in the atmosphere, then we must pray for our contemporary society to be transformed in such a way that the promise will need to be revised again, to refer to a desire to go out of ourselves, outside of our selves to find that love which is beyond all understanding.

Fr George CR