Sermons 2024

The Rector

29th September 2024

Animal Blessing Service

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Here we are again! 

Every year at the Blessing of the Animals, I always begin by reassuring you that what I want to say to you today is short and sweet…. The animals are not going to be listening to me and won’t be at all impressed by my words so I’ll keep it very short.

All these animals gathered here today mean so much to us.

They bring such joy into our lives.

They can also teach us gratefulness, teach us the art of being in the moment.

The moment when you stop still to look at the bird, or the crouching cat, or the panting dog…. Or the cheeky monkies in Fota… or the gloriously clumsy yet graceful giraffes… we are so lucky to have Fota at our doorstep.

Animals can teach us to be fully present in the moment.

And through their unconditional acceptance of each moment,

they draw US into it.

Each year, the churches across the world celebrate the ‘Season of Creation’   which is from 1^st September until 4^th October

We sometimes forget that we are all part of creation.  We sometimes think that creation is something out there, not in here….

During this season of Creation, we do well to remember that we are creation!

It’s great to see more animals than ever here…. And for the second year, we have the outside pen as well for farmyard animals, thanks so much to Jill and Lilian for organizing this.

I would also like to give a shout out to all the pets that couldn’t come here today,

Becks and Polly are over in Spain, tuned in to the Livestream!

And I know some of your pets were too sick or old to come, and I’d like to particularly remember Smokey in that category…..

A couple of you have animals that are too young to come along…..

and some of you think that your  dogs was too bold to come!

But anyway whether we think they are old or bold – the important thing to remember when we look at our animals is that our animals love us unconditionally

And because of this love,

We get a glimpse of the way God has told us that he loves us….without conditions….. just as we are.

Every single breathing living creature in this church today is part of God’s wonderful creation.

As the words of the lovely hymn we just sang said

All things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made us all.

Or indeed as our second hymn reminds us..

All created things, bless the Lord!

But it is truly lovely today to be part of this blessing and as always I would like to thank the Church Wardens of St. Mary’s Church for welcoming every single one of us , two or four legged…

And as always we should remember to thank them by making sure that when we are leaving the church, we are not leaving any bits and bobs behind!

I’m sure that if everyone will tidy up after their own animal, and then there won’t be too much of a burden on the churchwardens.

Finally I would like to thank you all for being such good sports and bringing along your animals.

During the blessing a little later we will be asking God to help us to look after our little friends.

But first we will turn back to the Service Sheet for some special prayers about animals…

    

The Rector

22nd September 2024

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

In the Gospel today, we have the second prediction of the Passion….

In Mark’s gospel, there are three of these predictions altogether,

the third and last prediction is in the next chapter, chapter 10.

Mind you, also typical for Mark’s gospel is that once again the disciples don’t understand. 

Remember in Mark’s gospel accounts, who Jesus really is, is kind of a secret…. Only the Reader knows from the beginning that Jesus is the Messiah…. The others are gradually learning… or not!

This time they are too busy arguing about which of them is the greatest.

Like most of us (and I spoke about this last week) they are motivated by their own plans and ideas, in this case their selfish ambition, busy jockeying for position ,

The kind of ambition that is condemned by Jesus in the gospel reading and also by James in our second reading this morning when he speaks about ‘bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts’.

But it’s important to remember that it is not that ambition itself is condemned, but the kind of ambition that involves a desire to rule others.

The kind of ambition that creates conflict and division and is of course damaging to any community.

We just have to look at the turmoil in the world to get that!

There is a right kind of ambition – that is when the ambition is to desire to serve others, to enable others, to involve others, the sort of service that we give to ‘the little ones’, that is to say , the sort of service that we are called on to give to the least significant persons in the community.

And it is, of course,  a good thing to be ambitious, to have goals , to want to be good at what one does and to succeed in it.

But, as we are all only too aware, ambition can get out of hand.

It can cause us to forget everything and everyone while we chase success in business or in a career.

‘I wished I had spent more time with the family’

is apparently a familiar refrain of successful business people on their death beds.

How sad for them – and for their families.

We have to be careful what we are sacrificing in the pursuit of our goals.

In the gospel, we see the apostles fighting over who would be first in Jesus’ Kingdom.

The scene is not an edifying one at all!

The fact that they are still driven by selfishness and false ambition shows how little they had being taking in Jesus’ radical message.

Their value system was still firmly grounded on the principles of Dog eat Dog.

Jesus used the little child as an object lesson.

Look, he was saying, Look at this child.  

Those who receive such a little one receive ME and not only me but the ONE who send ME.

He was telling them that being his disciple has little to do with greatness as defined by others but everything to do with being God’s child and welcoming God’s children.

Actually, when you think about it Jesus has given the first ‘Children’s Sermon’

Children’s Sermons or Assemblies in School usually involve boiling the gospel down to the absolute essentials…   

So this was what Jesus was doing.

He used the example of the child to hammer home to his deluded feuding competitive apostles just what his kingdom was really about.

That the first would be last , that the last would be first.

But he was there for all, whether you are last or first.

Jesus didn’t abolish ambition, he just re-defined it.

For the ambition to rule OVER others, he substituted the ambition to SERVE others.

The greatness we should seek is the greatness that we find when we put away our self interest, our greed and our ambition to lord it over others.

Jesus had set the example himself.

Just think about how he washed the feet of the others that last night in the Upper Room.

A task that only the lowliest servant would baulk at.

He did this for others (and was to do so much more!)

And by doing it, he gave it a grace, a sacramental quality.

That’s what I was talking about last week when I mentioned the picture I’d seen on facebook saying ‘Love like Jesus – it’s hard to throw stones when you’re washing feet’

Those able bodied people who live in communities like L’Arche will always tell you that they are the ones who are gaining something from the lived experience.

It is hard to believe this I find, but I can’t deny that this is their actual experience – that in giving they are receiving.

Its almost like a mystery and sometimes hard to understand.

I usually have to think about how I feel when a present I have bought someone gives them so much pleasure that I , in turn, am delighted, genuinely delighted, for them.

I suppose this is how Mother Teresa , or Alice Leahy, or any of those people who give their lives for others feel.

Any of those who devote their lives to enriching the lives of other, less fortunate people, are the really great ones in our society.

Their ambition is truly fulfilled in the words of Jesus ‘As long as you did it to one of these, the least of my brethren , you did it to me’ 

Children were the least valued members of the community Jesus was a part of, and his disciples would have expected to be the MOST valued in Jesus’ eyes

So by telling his own disciples that they must turn and serve these little ones if they wanted to truly follow him…. Well that must have been some shock!

Maybe they heeded him,

or maybe this was just one more thing that they chose to misunderstand….

But we can’t get away from the facts as presented to us in today’s gospel…

If we follow Christ, we are expected to be as servants to one another.

To put the other first and to give rather than receive.

Amen.

I’d like to say a few words about Peace….

Yesterday, 21^st September marked the day of the International Day of Peace.

Every year, on that day , we are encouraged to remember that Peace is something that we need to work at.

We live in a world that seems at this moment to be filled with violence and conflict.

We look at the Middle East or Ukraine or the Sudan or Mali or Bangladesh or Venzuela and we can see what happens when peaceful methods and systems break down …

(Look at our lovely blue banner….)  

Blue has become the universal colour for Peace….

The United Nations (UN) started using the colour blue as their official colour in 1945, the year the organization was founded, the year that World War II ended.

The UN is an organisation made up of many different countries from all around the world…. It’s main goal is to promote peace, cooperation and understanding among these countries. 

They chose Blue very deliberately …. because of its association with peace, stability, and calmness and this is exactly what the UN wants to promote throughout the world.

They chose blue as a symbol of its mission to promote peace, security, and cooperation among nations.

The blue helmets worn by UN peacekeeping forces, for example, are meant to signify the UN’s role as a neutral and impartial peacekeeper in any conflict zones, helping the situation from escalating into full-scale war.

UN peacekeepers work to maintain peace and security in areas of conflict, monitor ceasefires and borders, and protect civilians from violence.  

But it has had a major role in helping to bring peace to many warring countries since then….

At the United Nations, there have been 191 resolutions on Palestine and Israel, yet a solution to long-term conflict remains to be seen.

Resolution 2735 of 10 June 2024 backed a hostage and ceasefire proposal in the Hamas-Israel war and reiterated support for a two-state solution.

This gave hope for an end to the bloodshed but also failed in practice of implementation.

With so many UN resolutions and ways of trying to settle the issue, one might ask: Why, even now, is there no solution? How come things are only getting worse?!

Unfortunately peace is an ongoing work… for all of us.

Peace is not something that you can say… there, done that. Finished.

Even looking at ourselves here in Ireland, when the Civil War ended in 1923, all of the people, from both sides of the war, all people had to commit to peace….

Look at all the steps back and then gradually crawling forward since the Good Friday Agreement…..

Peace is something that we all have to keep working on, in our lives, in our world.

But we can make a difference by promoting peace in our own lives and in the lives of those around us.

Peace starts with us.  We can choose to be peaceful in our words and actions.

We can choose to resolve conflicts peacefully, instead of resorting to violence.

We can choose to show kindness and understanding to others, instead of judging or fighting with them.

We can stand up for peace , if we see someone being bullied or mistreated, we can speak up for them and stand with them.

Not to be simply bystanders.

We can all work to build bridges between different groups of people, instead of always thinking about what is different between us.

Peace is important because it helps us to live better lives.

We can be the change that we want to see in the world.

The World Council of Churches developed prayer resources and material for use by churches worldwide during the last week, which was designated ‘World Week for Peace in Palestine and Israel’ 

They highlighted that in January 2024 the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take all measures to prevent a genocide in Gaza, yet in the following months at least another 5,000 lives were lost.

The International Criminal Court also had a ruling over war crimes being committed by Israeli leaders during this cycle. Measures are yet to be seen in this respect.

Here is a prayer from the resources

The Holy Land should be protected for all people, irrespective of religious or national identity.

May church leaders and elected representatives worldwide pray for peace, take meaningful action to advocate for human rights and dignity to be upheld, and support work for an end to violence and towards a just peace for all people in the region.

Have mercy, dear Lord.

There is war and death, and children are crying.

You have said, Lord Jesus, “Let the children come to me.”

Here are the children in the Gaza Strip, in Rafah, and throughout Palestine and Israel, they are crushed by war leaders like they are nothing.

Have mercy on the little ones, dear Lord, on their cries and agony.

Please hear our prayers.

Let your hand be upon the hand of the Son of Man whom you have supported.

Almighty God, show us the path, provide us with the light and salvation.

Have mercy, dear Lord.  Amen.

The Rector

15^th September 2024 

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The first reading, the canticle which took the place of the Psalm, speaks to us of the concept of Wisdom…. In the Hebrew Scriptures, Wisdom is not merely intellectual knowledge or cleverness but a deeper, spiritual understanding that aligns our life with God’s will and the moral order of the universe.

wisdom is personified as a woman calling out to all of us, to humanity to embrace her ways. This feminine embodiment of wisdom portrays her as eternal, present from the creation of the world, and actively participating in shaping the cosmos, which is why early Christianity often aligned Jesus Christ to the idea of ‘Wisdom’… there from the creation of the world…

She, Wisdom,  invites us to a life of virtue, guiding us toward righteousness, justice, and harmony with God’s design.  And our first reading outlines what will happen in our world if we don’t embrace wisdom.

And really that is what the 2nd reading is getting at too , James warns us about how, if we are being witnesses to Christ, teaching others , then our lives are to be, must be, an example…. And in particular warns us about how our tongue can run away with us!

If we want to lead others to Christ, we have to walk in his footsteps, walk in the way of the Cross…. which brings us to the Gospel today

The disciples have been with Jesus a fair while now and are getting to know him better – his healing power, his teaching skills and his authority.

In today’s gospel reading from Mark, we are told that Jesus and the disciples making their way towards Caesarea Philippi.

They speak together as they walk and Jesus is using the time to try and gently teach his disciples what is to happen.

He begins by asking them what the general opinion about him is. ‘Who do people say that I am?’

They answer what they have been hearing around the place…John the Baptist, Elijah and so on

Then he gets personal and asks them directly

‘Who do YOU say I am?’

Mark tells us that Peter answers, presumably answering for all of the disciples and he tells Jesus that ‘You are the Messiah’

Now, with our hindsight, we know that Peter was spot on!

But really what Peter meant by the Messiah was not what Jesus was actually about.

Peter and the other disciples were men of their generation.

Their idea of the messiah was of a conquering King,

one anointed by God to free them from foreign oppression,

Indeed the word Messiah – and also the word Christ – literally means the anointed one.

But we know, looking back across 2000 years of Christianity that wasn’t what Jesus was about at all.

In our Gospel we hear Jesus trying to explain what his messianic mission was really about, that he will suffer greatly, that he will be rejected by the leaders of his own people , that he will be executed as a criminal BUT that on the third day he will rise to life.

This, obviously, comes as a great shock to Peter and the disciples.

It just doesn’t make sense.

This is definitely not the Messiah they had been taught to expect.

But we know what will happen to Jesus, and when we hear these words, we think of Jesus’ humiliation and execution at the hands of the Roman and Jewish authorities

We know, but of course the disciples would never have dreamt in a million years that this could happen to their long awaited Messiah!

Peter steps forward, again surely speaking for all of them, and insists that this couldn’t happen to Jesus.

And Jesus , knowing that Peter has become a real stumbling block in the way of his mission and life  says those famous lines

‘Get behind me Satan, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things’

To soften what seems very harsh, we have to remember that at that time, Satan meant adversary, an opponent rather than the full blown devil we think of nowadays tempting us to evil but indeed, at that time, Peter’s attitude must have seemed like a real temptation to Jesus.

Jesus goes on to tell the disciples

and indeed to tell anyone who reads this gospel and has ears to listen …. That not only will he, Jesus, go the way of suffering and death to life but that anyone who wants to be a follower of Jesus must also go the same way.

Heavy duty stuff!

How many of us are following a double standard?

Setting our minds totally on human things and ignoring divine things.

We want to be morally good people but our values in life are often indistinguishable from the rest of society – what is it about us that makes us stand out as followers of Christ? Anything at all? Can people look at us and think of Christ?

Most of us are get totally caught up with day to day living,

concerned with material wealth, worrying about professional success ,  caught up with the business of saving our lives

not losing them as Jesus instructed us.

He told us to let go

To stop clinging – To be really free

To give and not to grab

To share and not to hoard

To see others as sisters and brothers not as rivals and competitors.

We live in a world that we are meant to reach out to rather than to guard against.

Yet we all suffer with a ghetto mentality

An ‘I’m all right Jack’ attitude,

To be a Christian disciple is not primarily to ‘save my soul’

or to ‘go to heaven’ but to enter fully into the mainstream of human living and human concerns

To become part of that mainstream by loving and sharing and building up others.

The US Jesuit Fr Richard Rohr , whom I am always quoting , put it like this

‘Christianity is a lifestyle – a way of being in the world that is simple, non-violent, shared , and loving.  However, we made it into an established ‘Religion’ (and all that goes with that!) and avoided the lifestyle change itself.

One could be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain in most of Christian history, and still believe that Jesus is one’s ‘personal Lord and Savior’   The world has no time for such silliness anymore.  The suffering on Earth is too great.’

It is not a matter of everyone for themselves

But each for the other , one for all and all for one!

In our current approach to life, there are only a few winners and many, many losers… an Us and Them approach…

Jesus is proposing a subversion of that worldview,

His good news proposes that we all let go and live our lives for others

And if we all lived like that , can you imagine what our society would look like!

But this is not just idealistic dreams… this is what Jesus, in our Gospel reading,  is telling us we must do

‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’

We know, deep in ourselves, what we need to do.

I read a thing on facebook the other day which said all this very succinctly …

‘It’s hard to throw stones when you’re busy washing feet….. Love like Jesus’

Amen

Revd Richard Dring

8th September, 2024

Mark 7 24-37

As we read through Mark’s Gospel, we are increasingly observing how Jesus ministry is on a collision course with the Jewish authorities. Today we read that Jesus is travelling out of Galilee into the region of Tyre and Sidon, today it is part of Lebanon. Jesus was likely looking for some quiet time with his Disciples. At this stage of his ministry His reputation precedes him wherever he goes.

In this case he has left the state of Israel to go to another land, a land of Gentiles where he most likely wanted to be alone. That was not to be the case as even here he is recognised by a very knowledgeable woman. At the time of Jesus very few were educated and particularly in the case of a women even less likely to be educated. Here was a woman who was well versed and more than able to debate with Jesus. She was able to challenge Jesus reference to dogs and challenge him on this statement. This use of dogs was most likely used in the derogatory sense where the Jews saw the Gentiles as Dogs and were viewed with contempt. It should also be noted that dogs in the time of Jesus were not the loveable pets we see dogs as today.

The woman debates with Jesus that even the dogs have to be fed, and this could be interpreted as the widening of the message of Jesus to include the Gentiles. This was a defining moment as to this point Jesus ministry has been very much directed to the Jews and encouraging the Jews to see the message of Jesus as the next stage of God’s message to them on earth. Jesus message is already developing into a very divisive message and to open the message further would certainly result in a very problematic situation arising. The widening of the message of Jesus to the Gentiles was for a later stage and Jesus was not ready for that step at this stage. Jesus priority was the Jews.

All of this makes life very complicated for Jesus and what comes later, particularly when we add this to the events earlier where the Koher laws of “clean vs unclean” were discussed. These events are leading to the inevitability of the cross. This is a very clear path and Jesus is trying not to stray from this path. The added complication in reaching out to the Gentiles has the potential to complicate the path to the cross. We know that the expansion of Jesus ministry to the Gentiles (Us) was inevitable for the growth of the Christian faith. It was too early to make this step, however it is yet another incident where Jesus has overstepped the rules. Here he is talking to a Gentile who also happened to be a Woman. He has broken at least two of the rules governing association with Gentiles and would have been required to go through ritual purification. We can only assume that Jesus shared a meal with the Gentiles so had pushed this boundary further.

There is one aspect to this visit to Tyre and Sidon that had the potential to complicate the issue. This area would be seen by some Orthodox Jews as part of Israel. This area was allocated to the tribe of Asher. This tribe had been unable to evict the Phoenician people so had never settled this land. It could be symbolic that Jesus was in a way sending a message to say the love of Jesus Christ was able to join with the people. An interesting thought.

This Biblical division of Israel between the tribes is proving extremely divisive in our world today. The far right in the Jewish Government of Israel is using the Biblical granting of land to the tribes of Israel to justify the seizing of Palestinian land in the West Bank today. A situation that no matter what we may think has no legal basis in today’s world and leaves us all considering where will this end? In our history we have direct experience of land grabs by plantation settlers and others who were granted land in Ireland by foreign powers.

Jesus now departs from Tyre to go back to Israel, he takes a very puzzling route as he initially travels North to Sidon before travelling South to Galilee. It has been suggested that Jesus took time out on this journey as He prepared for what he knew lay ahead and the inevitability of the Cross.

Finally Jesus is back in Galilee and the intensity of Jesus ministry carries on unrelenting. A key part of this story for us to take away is the dignity with which Jesus treats the deaf man. Jesus takes the deaf man aside from the crowd and performs the miracle in private. This shows us clearly the respect Jesus has for each of us as individuals. No matter how Jesus may have been feeling with the intensity of his ministry, Jesus still had the time to take the man to one side and carry out the healing. This demonstrates to us the need to have time for each other to listen and care for one another and take the time as shown by Jesus to listen and understand.

In our busy and intense world in which we live this is an important lesson for us all to take away.

Revd Richard Dring

1st September , 2024

Mark 7 1-8

The passage today is a complex message as it appears that in one move the laws and guidelines from the book of Leviticus concerning the Rituals surrounding food and cleanliness are dismissed in one step. This direction did not concern what we would in today’s terms is good food hygiene but is actually the rituals concerning food preparation and what is clean or unclean. These were ceremonial quantities of water deemed  to cleanse anything seen as unclean that the individual may have come in contact with. There were very detailed directions concerning how the water was to be stored and how the ritual washing was to take place.

The Jews of Jesus time under the direction of the Pharisees and others took this ritual seriously and in many ways were governed by the ritual and did not see what we would call the “bigger picture”. They were so focused on the ritual and every little oversight. This was their world, they were well versed in taking these rituals and working within the guidelines to interpret the laws to their advantage.

In all this Jesus is challenging that the Pharisees are only looking at these laws having interpreted them as human custom rather than divine teaching. Jesus is challenging this “Has the teaching become restricted”? and are why are we not looking at the spiritual / divine message in what we have interpreted. This can still be very much a challenge for all of us today, are we falling into this same trap? There is a difference in our denominational interpretation as Catholic teaching is to place emphasis on the traditions of the church and what is the basis for the teaching, whereas the Protestant tradition places a very high value on scripture. All of this does have relevance still as by placing the high value on scripture also means we must not disregard the parts of scripture we find hard or a challenge to follow. The Kosher laws are scripture based, so where does that leave us.

Jesus is interpreting the scripture in a very different way to the Pharisees. The Pharisees had spent the previous 200 years building a picture that was both political and spiritual and in so doing had devised a system that was open to challenge by Jesus but would also be very challenging to change. Here comes Jesus who states that the text leads to the coming kingdom which was open to all. This and allowed feasting with Gentiles and the overall rolling back of the darkness by making the kingdom inclusive and not exclusive. The way of Jesus includes the scripture unlike the Pharisees way where scripture was seen as the basis for the tradition so in many ways undermined the purpose.

The next section concerns the purity of animals and what we eat and how that can impact. Jesus is very clear that it is not what we eat defiles us but what we say. The early church struggled with the purity laws and how these should be applied. The early church was moving out to the gentiles from its earl base with the Jews. This is where the minor conflict was stirring however it was a number of years before this was fully resolved. What Jesus is saying is that we can have all the purity laws saying what we should eat and how we should eat it, yet this will have no effect on human nature. What we say, do or think is not governed by the food we eat but by what we say and do.

In all of this as Tom Wright explains is the Scriptures point the way and lead us to Jesus. In all we can not set aside the bits we don’t like and simply go with the limited text we do like. We need to see the scriptures are leading us forward to Jesus. It will always be a challenge of interpretation to help us understand the scriptures are pointing us to Jesus.

The rector of the Anglican church I attended in Rochester is just finishing a 6 month sabbatical today. In his absence the Rector standing in for this time wrote in the current weekly newsletter a very relevant short opinion concerning Bullying. This prompted me to consider that there was an element of bullying in the Gospel reading today. Would we consider the actions of the Pharisees a form of bullying? Rev Gayle highlighted three incidents she had witnessed in the past weeks, one concerning Ageism, one concerning the daughter of a migrant friend who was called out for wearing “old” clothes and not new designer gear. The final incident many of us may have read about concerning Gov Tim Walz’s son and his reaction to his father’s selection to stand in the forthcoming US elections. He was overjoyed and showed his emotion publicly. Many political commentators jumped in with criticism without knowing the facts, Tim Walz’s son has learning difficulties and did not deserve the criticism which was another form of public bullying.

Rev Gayle goes on to remind us of the jingle:

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”?

She goes on to say this is a lie, and this is very much the case in our world today where so much is set in print with the everlasting consequence of that action. It is very much a reminder that what comes out of our mouth can not be taken back, which is the same when written words are posted publicly where once released can’t be removed completely. It will be shared widely. She then reminds us we need to think before we speak, and I quote her as follows:

“Pay attention when someone is judged inferior or suspicions implied about those who appear “different”. On the surface we may seem different, yet race, ethnicity, age, able-ness, occupations, social class, faith, gender, sexual orientation and political perspectives need not divide us. We share a common desire to enjoy a safe world with clean air and water a place of wholesome food and respectful love. We have more in common than what separates us. Life is created in beauty by a God who delights in diversity and smiles upon our unique giftedness and “packaging” as my nephew calls it.”

Plenty for us to think about here and the relevance of the text we have read in today’s world.

The Rector

25^th August 2024     13^th Sunday > Trinity

In the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

In the last few weeks, while I was sunning myself! we have left our Year B progress through the Gospel of Mark and have read from the Gospel of John for a five-week reflection on the Bread of Life.  I’m sure Richard spoke well!

Today is the 5^th and final part of the series.

Mark in his Gospel tells the story of a very human Jesus who has a messianic secret.  No one knows Jesus’ true identity until after his crucifixion.

John, however, relates the story of a superhuman Jesus. There is no mistaking who Jesus is for John and his readers.

These five weeks of the 6^th Chapter of John centre on Jesus’ proclamation of being the Bread of Life and the Bread of Heaven.

A couple of things to keep in mind when we are hearing and thinking about the Gospel today : John is not Mark. We encounter an entirely different type of gospel account with John.

There is no Messianic Secret, Jesus is the Son of God and reveals himself consistently as such through his words and actions.

If Mark has a low Christology then John has a high Christology, in my head I always think of John as a Cathedral and Mark as a small Church (perhaps like here!)

Anyway, in our Gospel today, we are still in the aftermath of what Biblical scholars commonly refer to as a  ‘Feeding Story’ , and the feeding stories are very significant in the Gospels.

Using the imagery of Bread, Jesus is desperately trying to make the listeners (and us!) understand that there are two types of hunger……

and while the listeners had earlier enjoyed the free meal of the bread and fishes

Ultimately this is not what Jesus was about.

He had come to show us the way, the truth, the life.

He had come to tell us that he would be with us always, through all of our trials and troubles.

He was here to tackle our spiritual hunger, not our physical hunger.

Jesus had said ‘You are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves’

But Jesus wasn’t just a superhuman food producer,

His miracle or sign of the loaves and fishes was a sign pointing to the Father,

Just as a sign on the road says Cork means that Cork is so many miles or kilometres in that direction….

Not that the sign itself is Cork!

The same can be said for the sign of the Loaves and Fishes which began this Chapter 6 of John’s Gospel.

In that miracle, which we know so well, Jesus had fed the people with ordinary food, and had done so with great generosity, John tells us that there had been no less than 12 baskets of leftovers, 12 being very significant, the number of the tribes of Israel.

After they ate and tidied up the scraps,  Jesus and his disciples had crossed the lake, but the people followed them.

Jesus knew that they followed him in the hope of receiving more of the same kind of food.

But then Jesus refuses to give it to them. He was a spiritual teacher not a Caterer. Part of his task was to challenge people to go beyond their immediate tastes and needs.

It was like the first temptation in the desert all over again, when Jesus had been tempted to turn the stones into bread…now the temptation was to use his special powers to give people the material things that they so obviously wanted,

But Jesus knew that material things by themselves could never satisfy the people.

Food is only the beginning.

We eat in order to live…….we don’t live just to eat.

Jesus made it clear that the Son of Man had not come down from above to merely satisfy people’s physical hunger,

He came to give them heavenly bread that people will eat and never again become hungry.

He challenged them to go deeper.

He said ‘do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, food that the Son of Man will give you’

If Jesus had given in to the temptation and given the people more loaves and fishes, he would have made himself very popular …..in the short term,

But in the long term,

to give priority to physical needs would be to diminish humanity, to make us no higher than beasts.

Jesus challenged them and he challenges us

to face up to our deeper hunger, our spiritual hunger,

Last week he told us that HE is the living bread.

That he would provide for all of our real needs, our spiritual hunger….

our longing for something that we don’t even understand.

St Augustine famously put it

 ‘our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you’

And in today’s reading we hear Jesus telling his listeners that those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me.

They were shocked…..

who was this local man to claim that he was the living bread….

He was only the son of Joseph after all. How could he possibly be the bread of life!

And now he is telling them that ‘whoever eats me will live because of me..’

No wonder the disciples found this teaching difficult!

No wonder they found it offensive…

but as Peter says at the end of our reading,

they knew that Jesus had the words of eternal life and so they had come to believe and had come to know that he is the Holy One of God.

Over the last five weeks, we have heard John telling us these eternal truths but using the simple imagery of bread, of eating and drinking…

What is it about bread that it is so useful for illustrating these awesome truths.

Well I suppose bread is such a social thing.

Parents work to ‘put bread on the table’ ,

we ‘break bread’ with people..

Actually, the word ‘companion’ comes from the word for bread….

Panis the Latin for bread …. Like the hymn Panis Angelicus!

and the Latin for the word ‘with’ is ‘cum’

so ‘cum’panis’ , which is where we get the word ‘compassion’ literally means ‘with bread’

and companionship is the unity,

the feeling for other people that comes when we share bread together.

So when we have services of Holy Communion, Eucharist, the bread that we share has a social dimension too,

Its not just my communion with Christ,

Its our communion with each other IN Christ.

We don’t just go to communion as individuals.

We receive and share together as a community….bread for everyone.

And the bread that we share challenges us to build up community during the rest of the week….to make our companionship real in our daily life.

As St. Paul said and as we say each Sunday when we gather for a Eucharist

The bread which we break is a sharing in the body of Christ.

We being many are one body  – For we all share in the one bread.

What it boils down to is that while it only takes a moment to receive communion on a Sunday, it takes the whole rest of the week to digest it.

It takes all week to live it

To live it in the way that we relate to other people

As you know we all can lose our temper, speak harshly to others….usually the people closest to us in fact!

We need to remember our companionship when we are tempted to hold grudges ,

or become unwilling to forgive others though we look for forgiveness for ourselves.

Our communion with one another should remind us to think about our relationships with one another.

We being many are one body –  For we all share in the one bread

We say the words and we also need to think about them too.

The bread which we share is a symbol of forgiveness,

a challenge to forgiveness.

‘Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.’

Forgiveness is never easy but if we hold up the example of Christ, who on his cross, asked his father to forgive the people who had done this to him,

If we hold up this example,

we know what we need to imitate, 

we know how to live in love,

We are God’s people, journeying in faith towards the promised land of eternal life.

Of course we will encounter doubts and difficulties along the way.

But the Lord in whose name we gather, is not only the goal of our journey, but our companion on the way.

After all, the bread which we break is a sharing in the body of Christ.

Amen

Síle Hunt, Diocesan Lay Reader

28th July 2024

John 6: 1-21 – the feeding of the 5,000

We all remember the pandemic and sliced pans being as rare as hen’s teeth as we scanned empty supermarket shelves as people panic brought. I remember standing puzzled in a local supermarket as a lady had 16 sliced pans in her trolley afraid she would run out. My husband used to be a baker by trade and encouraged me to bake with what oddments we had in the baking cupboard to learn a new skill, did I embrace sourdough? No, that would be way too easy! – so I decided to do home-made macarons in blue and pink as a surprise when he came home from work in the supermarket. The temperature of the oven was too hot and the sugar in the macarons made them explode in the side oven…he spent weeks cleaning the cooker so home-made baked things were no longer on the menu!

Today’s gospel reading concerns the feeding of the 5,000 with five barley loaves and two fish, leaving 12 baskets of left-overs it is the most famous and iconic of Jesus’ miracles and it is the only miracle that appears in all four gospels. To put things in context we must understand that Jesus was a Palestinian Jew and the bread was viewed as a central gift from God and a blessing was conducted to give thanks each time bread was shared. To eat bread in Hebrew meant to have a meal. Barley loaves were classed as the food of the poor at that time and it was forbidden to throw any scraps away, nothing was wasted.

Jesus at this time is at the height of his ministry. We learn that Jesus is intent on feeding this large crowd by the sea of Tiberius in Gaillee. The miracle was performed near Passover, a time when Jews remembered the Exodus. They remembered how God led them through the Red Sea into the wilderness and performed wonderful signs such as providing them with bread or manna from heaven. To their forefront of their minds was when was the Prophet Moses promised due to arrive?, where is our Messiah? You can feel the energy of the crowd. The crowd followed him for over 16 kilometres as they had witnessed the miracles of his healing work. Jn 6:2 “A large crowd kept following him because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick”. The crowd were following him, not because he was the Messiah or to listen to his instruction and teaching, they wanted to see first-hand more miracles! Jesus asks a rhetorical question and wonders how the crowd would be fed, Knowing well that the Lord would provide for them. John 6:5 “Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” ⁶ He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do”. He uses this situation as a test, an instrument of teaching his disciples and the crowd at large.

Philip, being local to the area from Betsida, was asked by Jesus how much it would cost to feed the crowd and after doing a quick calculation realised that 6 months average wages, 200 denarii would not even put a dent in the food bill. We can feel Philip’s anxiety obligation and worry and can immediately identify with his emotions. We can also see Jesus’ pastoral care for a crowd that are there for all the wrong reasons, yet regardless of this, Jesus is intent on feeding them all. Jesus asked Philip, not for information. He asked for his trust and understanding. God is not interested in what we know. He’s interested in how much we trust him. He wants us to take what we know and yet learn to follow Him through what seems to be impossible situations so as we growth in faith.

Andrew, another of the disciples notices a young boy with a humble offering of five barley loaves and two fish. The young boy, poor, freely offered what he had, he had probably intended to sell what he had to support his own family but without a thought for himself handed over his basket. Andrew and the other disciples in spite of seeing Jesus perform previous miracles knew what was offered was not to be enough. They are focused on the negative, what they don’t have, instead of what they do have. They are looking at the world through the lens of scarcity and in doing so they can only see that there will never be enough of anything. They needed to realise what they do have is Jesus. He is their resource, the bread of life and he is enough.

Jesus took the offering, gave thanks and fed the crowd ensuring all were full and the crowd were amazed at the miracle they witnessed first-hand. We can learn a lot from the young boy here. We also have gifts that we can offer the Lord and no talent is insignificant when placed in His hands. We shouldn’t doubt that what we have is not enough. Whatever we give out of our small resources, be it money, time, or talents they will be multiplied by the Lord. We all work together to place our jigsaw piece in building the pathway to the kingdom of God here on earth. We should not feel inadequate, we all come from different backgrounds and different economic circumstances and we all have unique gifts and talents that we should not dismiss. Upon witnessing the miracle, the crowd wanted to take Jesus by force and make him king. Jn: 6:15 “When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself”. Jesus feed their physical and spiritual hunger but he refused to feed their desire for domination.

The most unlikely, heartwarming story, a modern day feeding of the 5,000 took place on 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland, Canada. A town of 12,000 people with an international airport, remote, edged by mountains where you were more likely to meet a moose on your local walk than a person. Aviation ground to an immediate halt and 38 planes bound for America were grounded in this obscure place. People were left sitting on the tarmac for hours in fear, not knowing if they were also at risk. However at the same time, aware of the attacks on the twin towers, the town rallied into action to support 7,000 stranded strangers. Mayor Elliott and the people of Gander began to frantically prepare food, shelter and hospitality for the displaced people about to descend on their town. Texan Kevin Tuerff was on board an Air France flight from Paris to New York and he gave a first hand account of what happened that day. “We were exhausted. But after we got through security, it was as if we walked into a surprise party, there were hundreds of people inside with food set up on tables. Everywhere you can imagine, people just offering you food and drink.”. People from 80 different countries were put up in local’s homes, fed, clothed and looked after. They had limited resources but all were catered for as long as needed. Over the space of a week, the town’s population doubled.

We always seem to have a worry that we won’t have enough for unexpected guests or what things we have to offer, depending on our means may not be enough. Today’s gospel reading shows us that Jesus is the bread of life and will sustain us. Jesus invites us to look at the world in a different way, through the lens of abundance and not scarcity and when we do, the way in which we see the world is different. As Paul Williams states “with Jesus as the resource, the bread of the poor is seen to be enough to satisfy the hunger of so many people. In the hands of Jesus, shortage becomes abundance, deficiency becomes plenty and nothing is lost which has been given to him”.

The Rector

21^st July 2024

In the name of God , Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

In today’s gospel ,  we see the care of Christ for his apostles as well as his compassion for the ordinary people.

The story is told of a man who went to see his friend who was a professor at a large university.

As they sat chatting in the professor’s office, there was constant interruptions….students were continually interrupting the professor  by knocking on his door.

Each time , the professor would get up and speak with the student and answer the query, or somehow deal with the student’s problem.

Eventually the friend asked the professor how he ever got any real work done in such circumstances.

The professor replied to his friend that indeed he used to resent the interruptions until one day it dawned on him that the interruptions WAS his real work……

The professor could have locked himself away and devoted his time to his own private work.

He certainly would have had a quieter life.

But instead he made his work consist in being available to his students.

It was no coincidence that he was the most successful and best loved professors on the campus.

Unselfishness is not easy.

At times it can seem easy

We plan what we are going to do that is ‘good’

Then we make time for it and fit it into our lives,

And it really doesn’t involve any extra pain or effort.

But at other times, we are called upon when we least expect it

When we haven’t got the time,

when we don’t feel in the mood.

At times like these we have to forget ourselves,

Set aside our feelings and plans.

Then a real sacrifice is involved.

It’s a consolation to us to know that Jesus too had to cope with interruptions.

He too had his plans upset.

Today’s gospel tells us that he was in such demand that he and his apostles hardly had time to eat.

Jesus had decided to take some quiet time, both for himself and for his disciples.

He knew that they were tired after their mission,

remember last week’s gospel…..how he had sent them out ‘two by two’

and now we are told that he decided that they all needed to go somewhere quiet, to recharge their batteries.

But it was not to be.

The people followed them.

How did Jesus react?

Did he get all hot and bothered and talk about quality time with his disciples?

No….quite the opposite

Far from getting annoyed, he felt for the people

He understood that they were leaderless, he knew how much they needed him.

Caring is never easy.

Some people are willing to care a little, provided they are in the mood.

But to care as Jesus did

When it upsets our plans  …. That’s the real test.

Parents do it all the time…..how many times do we get out of bed at night to see to a sick child?

And all of us are capable of that kind of caring.

We know that the need for caring is so great…we just have to look around us to see that need.

People are crying out for lack of someone to care about them.

Societies are being devasted because of a lack of caring.

When we truly care for others , we are actually living the gospel.

Remember Jesus didn’t see the crowd as a crowd but as individuals, each with their own problems,

Each with their own worries and needs.

He had compassion precisely because they were wounded and in need.

I’ve mentioned to some of you before that I follow certain people from Gaza on Instagram.   There is one young boy of 10 , two lads of about 17/18, a young female journalist, a doctor, a poet… all very different people with two things in common. .. they live in Gaza and they record their experiences on their mobile phones and upload to the internet on Instagram.

I follow these people because I am trying not to see the people of Gaza as a crowd…. An impersonal mass of victims… I’m trying to feel some empathy with individuals who are living in that hell as I am going through my comfortable life.

Sometimes it is almost impossible to watch the content. I feel so powerless… but then I remember stories like today’s gospels…

Jesus didn’t see the crowd as a crowd but as individuals, each with their own problems, worries and needs.

He had compassion.  He cared.

Caring is a matter of the heart….think about the doctors and nurses you have known that really stood out..

They are always the ones who seemed to really care about you as a person.

Strangely those who give themselves, somehow , with the grace of God, find that they recharge themselves at the same time.

Remember too that good can come out of interruptions.

Interruptions can prevent us from becoming preoccupied with ourselves.

Our selfishness can become a kind of prison

Love for others, on the other hand, can and does set us free.

As the south American Bishop, Helder Camara said

‘Accept surprises that upset your plans, shatter your dreams

give a completely different turn to your day

and – who knows? – To your life … Its not chance   …  Leave God free to weave the pattern of your days.’

Amen.

14th July 2024

The Rector

In the name of God,  Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Last week I was speaking about how we are all called, the gospel then spoke of Jesus sending us out in pairs, it also warned us that this message wouldn’t necessarily be a welcome one. 

Jesus hadn’t even been understood and appreciated in his own town…

we were to shake the dust off our feet and move on if our message wasn’t taken on board.

John the Baptist didn’t get a chance to shake the dust off his feet.

His message to Herod had been very clear.

Herod was in error. He had married his sister-in-law in direct contradiction of the law and he was in sin.

This message quite naturally didn’t go down well with either Herod and his Wife/sister and it was poor John the Baptist’s undoing.

In the story we hear today, the blame is all put on Herodias, Herod’s wife, but this is par for the course in a lot of the Hebrew Scriptures, our Old Testament.

It is usually the woman , especially the foreign woman, who is to blame. As if the Men were clueless idiots who were always duped into behaving exactly the way the women wanted.

It was Herod who had John executed.

It was Adam who ate the fruit,

It was King Ahab who behaved badly, no doubt with his wife Jezebel’s connivance but why is it Jezebel we remember with abhorrence and not Ahab?

I am not taking away the responsibility from Herodias, or her daughter come to that

but it was King Herod  , ‘deeply grieved’ or not, who had the Head of John the Baptist removed and served on a platter.

If you remember an earlier reading this month from Samuel had predicted the way Kings would act….

but the people of Israel had still called for a King.

Anyway I digress slightly…..

The meaning of this reading directly following on from last weeks’s gospel is underlining that the job of a prophet is not an easy one,

to speak truth into any situation is to invite approbation on your head.

Unlike John the Baptist, we will not be losing our physical head in 21^st century Ireland

but we still have to have courage to stand up for and speak up for what we believe.

At the moment, I am in shock that the atrocities in Gaza are not top of each news bulletin… I’m oversharing on social media I know but I can’t believe that we , as individuals and as churches, have ignored what is going on…..

Some of my friends are thinking I’ve lost the plot and I know that to speak up for what we believe in is not to obnoxiously shove our beliefs down other’s throats

But some things, like the US providing arms to a right wing government in Israel to decimate a trapped civilian population , is not just a ‘belief’ to be delicately discussed.

So I make no apology for bringing  up the situation again and again….because human rights issues need to be shouted out again and again and again….

But in general, in order to have an impact on those around us, we need to live our beliefs in every detail of our lives.

Other people see how we live and this is the witness we are called to……..

We are not to be the ones who cheat others,

we are not to be the ones who gossip,

we are not to be the ones who enjoy the downfall of  anyone else, regardless of what THEY have done in their lives.

We are to be the living sacrifices that we say we will be when we say the words of the post communion prayer.

We are meant to be the living witnesses to the living truth,

……that God loved us so much that he sent his only son to die for us

…..that we might have life and have it abundantly.

The Gospel today is saying two things to us:

It’s reminding us that each one of us, if we are calling ourselves Christian,  is called not only to be a disciple but also to be an apostle. …  

These are two different sorts of creatures…

If we think about the word disciple first though, it comes from the verb discere, to learn,

A disciple is one who hears, who accepts and who carries out the teaching of Jesus in his/her life.

A disciple follows & imitates Jesus.

All this is about what we do for ourselves,

in other words we COULD consider ourselves be a disciple and no one would necessarily notice.

But an apostle is something more…  not only a follower but also an evangeliser, witnessing, reaching out to others. 

This is to go public with our convictions….if we consider ourselves Apostles, people will definitely notice!  

Unfortunately the word ‘Evangelising’ has less than healthy connotations in our world today…. We tend to think of the more extreme models of Evangelisation….

but again, if we look at the word itself we find it comes from a verb which means to be sent on a mission with a message , like an ambassador or an envoy.

And every person who has been baptised has this mission and this calling – to actively to share their faith with others.

We can’t let this word be hijacked by people whose version of Christianity is so narrow that it would turn you off!….. Because we too are evangelists…

We evangelise when we help other people to find him who is the source of all.

And we do this by showing others,

by the way we live,

demonstrating that our experience of knowing Jesus has changed our lives.

As Paul says in our second reading

‘We are marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit’….. ‘

‘In Christ we have obtained an inheritance… that we might live for the praise of his glory’

….. that we might live for the praise of his glory…..

Christians , in their daily living, in their giving of themselves, show praise of his glory.

This is witnessing. This is evanglising, this is being an Apostle.

And the only way that we can witness is by living our witness.

As poor old Thomas Aquinas said at the end of an extraordinarily long theologically productive life,

‘it is all but straw’ –

meaning simply that we can talk all we like but the essence of who God is, in us and through us,

is in our lived experience.

This is what the Reformers like Luther, and Melanchton and Cranmer were trying to get back to.

The lived experience of the Living God….

all else is Straw.

Philippe Melanchton, who is referred to as Martin Luther’s Theologian, said

To know Christ is to know his benefits

Faith is a living and saving knowledge of Christ and it is this REAL experience that we share.

As someone once said ‘No one ever got drunk on the  description of a glass of wine’ 

But our Gospel text today warns us that its not going to be easy, we may not lose our actual heads but we may risk ridicule or scorn, and this is not just now, it was always the case.

but as I said earlier we are to shake the dust from our sandals and move on….

So as we live our witness,

Share not just words, or ideas, or doctrines

Share your actual experience of God

by the way you live,

the way you shop,

the way you accept others,

the way you speak,

the way you love……

This is what we are actually asking God to do each week in our post communion prayer,  We ask God to make US living sacrifices…….

 Amen.

7th July 2024

The Rector

St. John’s only (Baptism in St Mary’s)

In the name of God,  Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Our gospel reading has one very familiar sentence in it which we tend to paraphrase as

‘A prophet is never appreciated in their own hometown’

I think I’ve told you about the bishop interviewing someone about to be ordained, and he asked him where he thought he would like to be assigned as a deacon.

The ordinand said quickly 

“Oh, bishop, anywhere but Cork!”

“Why not Cork?,” the bishop asked

The new chap replied “Because that’s where I come from , my hometown — and we all know that a prophet cannot be honoured in his hometown.”

The bishop then said “Don’t worry my son, nobody is ever going to confuse you with a prophet!.”

Obviously it’s meant as a humorous story but like all stories, there is some meaning behind it…..

It is always going to be difficult to grow from the boy next door to the one standing in the pulpit – wherever you came from and wherever you go to.

A prophet, from the Greek, (pro + ph-e t -e s) literally means one who speaks on behalf of.

A prophet speaks on behalf of God, speaking as God’s messenger and also speaking on behalf of those who have no one to speak for them, giving a voice to the voiceless.

Its often explained that a prophet is not primarily a fore-teller, pointing out what is going to happen in the future

but a forth-teller, someone who has insight into the present, telling it like it really is.

and we all know how popular that would make you!

The reason his own people did not believe in Jesus was that they thought they knew him so well.

“Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and so on?”

It was inconceivable to them that God could be at work in the commonplace

In one of their own! Not a High placed King like David in our first reading, with everyone bowing before him, but a mere Carpenter from Nazareth….

The community of that time were well used to the idea of prophets, Isaiah, Elijah and so on but perhaps they felt that these difficult exacting prophets are best when they are both far away and long ago!

Jesus’ words and actions were tough and rough to a certain extent, abrasive even,

His close followers who were open and received him didn’t notice this roughness, they allowed their reality be reshaped by his message and good news

Jesus’ followers knew that life had been strangely and inexplicably changed.

In fact it was not roughness at all to them, they didn’t take it personally.

They understood it as abrasiveness against the old order, against the establishment which they knew was not answering the needs of their community!

Mark is sensitive to the fact that ‘hardness of heart’ can stop Jesus’ work

He describes Jesus’ return to his home territory and underlines the point that where there is no belief Jesus could not galvanize.

So it was possible to resist the new revitalizing.

Free will and all that!

And it could so easily happen to the best of us

it could well be written of us,

“He could do no deed of power there.”

Not because God doesn’t have the power,

but because our own fear can prevent us from believing in it, from accepting it, in our lives and in the life of the church.

How sad it would be if it were ever said of us,

“He was amazed at their unbelief.” …..

In our gospel today, the response of those who valued what is old, resisted…..They wanted none of it!

But the others who were open became aware of a fantastic making anew of what they had previously understood to be unchangeable…

What had been written in stone you might say!

In his work and teachings – especially his healing work ,

Jesus had contradicted the norms of society concerning “clean” and “unclean”, deserving and undeserving.

Remember last weeks Gospel?  

Last week we were told that Jesus had spoken openly to the woman who had been hemorrhaging for 12 years and been touched by her even…

and then had held the hand of Jairus’ daughter, even though she was thought to be dead and ritually verboden…..

These examples of Jesus breaking societal norms are well documented in our gospels….….

Talking in open sight to the Samaritan woman,

The curing on the Sabbath

Telling people their sins were forgiven!

Consider also his amazing parables which challenged the listeners to think outside of their cultural boxes…..

Just think about the shock felt when the depised Samaritan is revealed as the goody in the story!

Or that the Father had ran lovingly to his son BEFORE the son had publicly repented…

It wasn’t appreciated by the authorities that Jesus was causing such a radical rethinking about these fundamental characteristics of Hebrew tradition.

After all he was calling in question all the moral distinctions upon which Hebrew religion and society was based.

If these foundation beliefs were questioned , it then  jeopardized all those rules that justify political and economic inequality.

When Jesus sends them out two by two , he says that they need nothing else but the power that he will give them.

Interestingly , a few years ago I saw a program about  Women Disciples  when it was pointed out that these two by two must have been mixed couples – men & women, sent out side by side to minister …

as when you think about it, only a woman disciple could reach out in that society to another woman, so two men could never have reached everyone.

I must say I never thought about that before but it makes perfect sense… especially as the program pointed out that the same Hebrew words for ‘two by two’ echoes directly back to the words used for the animals going into Noah’s Ark – two by two….

But again getting back to prophets,

unfortunately we tend to reject not only the prophets around us but the prophet within us too!

We have to trust ourselves to be the bearers of the Good News…

At our baptism , we were each commissioned to do just that!

We are all involved in this great commission….

We just have to start acting like prophets,

and that doesn’t mean that we need to grow beards and start eating locusts

But it does mean that we need to take seriously the fact that we are all called…..

not just the ones wearing collars!

But all of us.

The “job” of the church is not to convert the world, but to love and serve the world as Jesus did.

Which would mean that our “job” is not primarily to “get new members,” but to love and care for people in our current communities. 

The church should be about not only meeting my needs but also about re-prioritizing my needs,

In fact, maybe even giving me new needs that perhaps I would never have had had I not come to church in the first place!

But Jesus doesn’t say it will be easy…..

Up to now, Mark’s Gospel has given us great shows of power, from stilling storms to returning people to life.

You would have thought that this was enough to  persuade people, and you would have thought that at least his own family would buy in!

However, not even the family was behind Jesus.

Despite the impressive shows he is rejected and looked down upon especially in his own home town. People couldn’t see beyond the Carpenter.

This is the way of it for Jesus himself and he uses this opportunity to speak about the difficulty in proclaiming the Good News when he tells his disciples to expect more of the same.

The jist of the text today is that it offers a shape to the whole ministry of God’s People.

This is not something in which you shall find fame and fortune. If you do, then you are doing something wrong!

The marks of the faithful are sandals and staff and that is about it.

That in itself speaks volumes against the traditional power bases of family and religion and land.

Jesus is telling us that his is not a gospel of prosperity.

but a gospel on and for the breadline, for those on the margins.

Gordon Linney . a retired Archdeacon of Dublin, and a man I greatly admire, has said that in the future the Christian cause in Ireland will be best served not by those who seek to impose their views or control people’s lives

but by those who can convince others by the integrity of their lives …. that what they represent is worth having.

I hope that you and I will think new thoughts and see new possibilities when we leave this building ….

Remember ….

A prophet speaks on behalf of God,

as God’s messenger

and on behalf of those who have no one to speak for them, giving a voice to the voiceless.

I hope and I pray and I know that we can all be prophets for our times!

Amen.

30th June 2024

The Rector

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Today we have two of the most vivid miracle stories of Mark’s  Gospel.

These two stories are not put together by accident by Mark but because each one of the stories informs the other

The two stories show Mark’s habit of ‘bracketing’ one story within another. What he is trying to achieve, by doing this, is to have the meaning of each of the stories enlighten the meaning of the other.

It’s a literary technique called  “sandwiching,” 

The stories are interwoven in a way that enriches both.

The narrative begins with Jairus, a synagogue official who throws himself at the feet of Jesus, begging him to heal his daughter, who is near death.

Jesus goes off with Jairus,

and the second story begins.

In the crowd is a woman, whose suffering Mark vividly describes.

She has been afflicted for 12 years “with a hemorrhage,” She has spent all she had on doctors without any improvement (sounds very modern and familiar!) and is growing worse.

We need to remember that in first century Judaism, women with uncontrollable bleeding were considered unclean. 

The town gossips would have defined her as a sinner, who was in some way morally responsible for her illness. 

Her illness not only alienated her from her husband, if she had one, and polite society, but also from God, whose stern hand of punishment, it was believed,  had been visited upon her.

Yet she is a woman of faith and courage and moves through the crowd to touch Jesus.

And don’t forget this woman was unclean and everything she touched was unclean so by deliberately touching Jesus , she is making HIM unclean!

When she touches him, she is “immediately” healed,  but then she hears Jesus asking , “Who touched me?”

I’m sure she was terrified as when she touched him, she couldn’t have known that he would cop that she’d touched him so afraid of being told off so she comes “in fear and trembling,” but Jesus just says to her  “Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace.”

Her encounter brought her both Salvation and peace  – she broke all the taboos but her faith was rewarded and she was healed.

When I was in Palestine last year, I visited Magdala and in a church there, there was a marvelous mural depicting this miracle. It was called ‘The Encounter’ and painted by an artist called Daniel Cariola.  It was so moving.  Check out the Parish Facebook page for it.. or google it! 

The first story then resumes with the report of the death of Jairus’ daughter

and Jesus tells them  “Do not be afraid; just have faith,”

reminding us of the faith shown by the woman who has just been healed.

After a short and vivid description of the wailing mourners,

And at this terrible time of history we can fully visualize that scene whether from Gaza or Israel …..

Where the mourners are all swaying together holding the body of their loved one aloft.

And into this sort of scenario Jesus enters the house and shockingly tells them that she has not died but is asleep,

And as you would expect really …..the mourning turns to ridicule.

Jesus ignores the laughter and with great tenderness Jesus then takes the dead child by the hand and says simply, “Little girl, I say to you arise.”

She “arose immediately and walked around.”

Jairus’ daughter was 12 years old,

this is what provides the key to the linking of the two stories,

since the woman in the crowd had suffered for 12 years.

In the culture of that time 12 was thought to be the marriageable age.

The “little girl,” then, has died just before she could become a wife and mother.

The woman had suffered an illness that prevented her from being a wife and mother.

Jesus not only rescues these women from death,

but restores to them their life-giving capacity.

Both can now bring forth life from their bodies,

one who had been racked with disease,

the other who had lost life itself.

At that time and in the culture of Judaism , bringing forth children was seen as an imitation of the life-giving power of God and a fulfillment of the command to make the earth fruitful.

The Jesus who emerges from these stories is one who is compassionate in the face of human suffering

one who makes the needs of these sufferers foremost in his actions,

and remember he was breaking all of the social taboos and conventions.

He talks to a woman in public , an unclean woman who touched him and therefore has made him unclean

and then he goes and violates the stringent taboo against touching a corpse.

These are two more illustrations of the power of the Word to bring abundance of life where no life seemed possible:

In the few last weeks of Mark’s Gospels we heard parables of growing huge trees from mustard seeds, then the amazing calming of the storm and now today, healing….

Jesus’ miracles are perhaps best understood as acted-out parables,

living sermon illustrations

– bringing his words home to us in a concrete way.

Like the Parables , the miracles are all ways of saying something important about Jesus and about the Kingdom of God.

In today’s gospel we realize that God’s power is greater even than the power of death,

and that Jesus has authority over both life and death

Reminding us yet again of his gift of eternal life to all who believe in him.

Amen.

16th June 2024

The Rector

Today’s reading from the gospel of Mark contains more of Jesus’ famous  parables….comparing his Kingdom to seeds, growing from nothing into something enormous, universal.

Jesus really was a master storyteller

He shaped parables to provide rich food for the human mind.

He sat on a hillside and taught crowds of learned and unlearned, rich and poor, downtrodden and powerful, using the power of story as an effective way to preach something as hard to describe, let alone define, as the kingdom of God

The parables were simple yet complex, trying to help us to understand what the Kingdom of God was to be…. A difficult enough concept but one that was made a little bit more understandable in a homespun parable.

I’m reading a book about Parables at the minute, written by the wonderful Dr Paula Gooder, who led the retreat I went on in Israel/Palestine this time last year.

Anyway, one paragraph jumped out at me, she says that the Parables were ‘stories that would have been easily recognizable vignettes of everyday living in the first century’ but that they are now, to us, ‘strange narratives that require mental effort to understand’

And it not just us , 2000 years later, the disciples never seem to get what Jesus is saying either!

Mark is fond of portraying the followers as just not getting it…. I don’t know whether this is a literary device to allow the Gospel writer to go into more detail or if they were just thick….

but I do know that our understanding is shaped by our hindsight AND our mental effort….

We know what Jesus is talking about

himself, his kingdom….

In both the parables today, its about the growth of the Kingdom…. In the first parable, the seed would sprout and grow… in the second parable its about something so small growing from its parochial beginnings in Palestine to encompass the whole world.

I love that one,  the Kingdom of God being compared to the tiniest of seeds…a mustard seed. 

And how something can grow from this almost invisible seed to an enormous tree. 

These words though would have been so comforting to those early disciples hearing this gospel as I’m sure that they felt so small, so insignificant, so worried about what was to come…..

Hearing that Jesus promised that the Kingdom would grow exponentially would have given them hope for the future.

Hearing that the kingdom would grow even without their input must have also helped them to relax!… ‘The earth produces of itself’  and ‘it grows up and becomes the greatest of all scrubs’

In earlier verses of this same chapter, there is the parable about the seed being scattered on rocky soil and on good soil.

Now , in this parable, Jesus is warning them and us about underestimating the power and potential of little beginnings.

The parables’ central point is that God’s Kingdom grows gradually and naturally, instead of suddenly and dramatically, and it grows with or without us!

As Jesus always does in his parables, he uses an example of a plant that would have been well known to his listeners.  He uses something known to point to the unknown!

The unimpressive first beginnings of the mustard seed,  and yet this was capable of growing into something impressive enough to provide shelter for others.

This was a truth that the disciples knew to be a fact…

Unlike a lot of what their leader said – which let’s face it was often hard to fathom, this idea of the seed into the tree must have made sense to them, for this they had actually experienced….they had seen this phenomenal growth actually happen.

The parable reminds us that once this seed is sown, no matter how small and insignificant it is now, God will cause his word to grow into his ultimate global kingdom embracing all  peoples of the world.

We are only encouraged to be witnesses,

to just quietly continue Jesus’ preaching and teaching of this word or seed of the Gospel of God’s Kingdom.

And we are to be patient….

We often can learn patience from watching nature.

Things take time to grow….and they take time to ripen.

Nature doesn’t take shortcuts, all the seasons are needed.

great undertakings begin with one small thing..

A building begins with one brick on another

A book begins with one word on a page

A journey with a single step.

We are all born with the potential for greatness,

we may disagree about the definition of ‘greatness’ but it is certain that we all have within us the seeds for growth.

Our actions and our life choices determine whether we use what we have been given to help grow the Kingdom of God.

And while our seemingly insignificant actions can have repercussions for good and unfortunately also for evil,

….It’s as I always say….  its not just down to us……

There’s so much around us today, as there always has been,

that may depress us in spirit.

We see war and hatred, prejudice and injustice, hunger and violence, the everyday grind of so many lives, the apparent hopelessness and intractability of some problems and conditions.

It’s sometimes very difficult to know the ways of God, so often hidden from view or not detected or noticed by us.

Nonetheless God is at work always and everywhere,

bringing about God’s will in unexpected and marvelous ways, like the amazing things that can grow from the tiniest of seeds

The first of the parables in our Gospel reading today is key.

‘The Kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how’

…the building of the kingdom is God’s work.  It goes on whether we are working with it or not; whether we are aware of it or not. 

It will not be frustrated by any opposition or passivity on our part but we can help in God’s work, as that lovely prayer from St Theresa of Avila says ‘We are his hands on Earth’.

And of course, prayer is so important in our growth and in the lives of our community.

I’m not just talking about our corporate prayer, what we experience when we gather on Sundays

but the daily, often hurried prayers that we include in our day to day lives.

I read once that helps us get the power of prayer across….

‘Our prayers may be awkward, our attempts may be feeble. But since the power of prayer is in the One who hears it and not in the one who says it, our prayers DO make a difference’

Our prayers do make a difference…. Karl Barth, that amazing super intelligent Theologian once said that ‘to clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world’

Never underestimate the power of a small beginning…

That’s what the Mustard Seed parable teaches us.

God is the one who helps us to take those first mustard-seed sized steps ,

It is God who remains with us, guiding us,

It is God who is helping us to grow those seeds of faith into a tree big enough for others to take shelter under.

We just have to trust in God and wait.  Amen.

9th June 2024

The Revd Richard Dring

Mark 3.20-35

Our Gospel reading today presents a situation that has arisen where the Scribes and Pharisees are aiming to discredit Jesus and aim to reduce the numbers following to hear the message Jesus is delivering.

They aim to do this is ways that should not be distant from what is happening around us today. We have I trust all exercised our constitutional right to vote, a right very hard won almost 100 years ago by half of our population. I am referring to the Suffragette movement.

How did the Scribes and Pharisees set about to undermine Jesus ministry:

1. They tried to discredit his family unit and Jesus place there.
2. They spread disinformation, propaganda or fake news. Do these sound familiar?
3. They used their lack of understanding of what Jesus was saying and teaching.
4. Finally look at how Jesus responds.

Family life was very different in the time of Jesus compared to typical family life in Europe. In middle eastern culture the family unit is a very strong unit and the family through generations will stay together and support each other. Jesus did not fit into this structure as he was out and about spreading and teaching the word of God.

Tom Wright quotes the following: “John the Baptist has already said that Jesus was someone stronger than me (John the Baptist) Jesus talks about tying up the stronger man and plundering his house, we are meant to understand that Jesus is the stronger one who has won the initial struggle and now able to make inroads into his territory.” All of this is to help us understand who Jesus really was and that it was not unexpected that Jesus left his family unit to spread the “good news”. At first his family did not understand so this was used by the Scribes and Pharisees to their advantage. They are making use of the information deficit and playing on this to their advantage.

The second point was the spread of fake news, this passage shows us that the issues we face today particularly over the last weeks as we try to discern the candidates message and extract fact from fiction. This we can see is nothing new and Propaganda has been repeatedly used through the centuries to further the aims of those spreading the Propaganda. In the last week there have been commemorations to remember the events of D Day over 80 years ago. This military undertaking as helped by the spread of false information so that the German line was spread thin from Calais to Normandy so through the false information the precise location was unknown.

In all of this we can think that Fake news is a modern phenomenon yet here in the Gospel reading today we have the scribes using fake news to discredit Jesus. The scribes were saying Jesus was Satan and as the ruler of demons he was casting out demons. A very dubious accusation.

How did Jesus respond, as we read further Jesus refutes the accusation in a calm and reasoned way, probably not what the Scribes expected. What did Jesus do, he refuted the argument in a way that many people around the world would fully understand by pointing out the flaw. A divide family will not survive.

We only need to look at history to see what happens to a divided kingdom, civil war breaks out and in many cases the outcome will change life forever. In many divided families following such events the bitterness will survive for many generations. Jesus was using this knowledge in a calm and collected way to refute the message of the Scribes and thereby ridiculing such an accusation. This way he is gaining the upper hand by not fuelling the division but merely pointing out the inconsistencies and gaining the upper hand.

Jesus is showing his strength by his teaching and in doing so helping to strengthen and combine with the teaching of John the Baptist. Many of Jesus followers would also have been familiar with and likely followers of John the Baptist. All these points will have helped Jesus reassure his followers that what they were hearing from the scribes was fake news. It would not have been described as such in Jesus time. We have put new names on what happens around us however we can find similarities in the past that help to show us that so often little has changed!

The final paragraph of todays reading brings us back to the family unit I mentioned earlier. The paragraph shows us clearly that many people including his family did not understand what Jesus was doing. We have to remember that Jesus remained with his family until he was on older person maybe 30 to 40 years of age. He was familiar of the demands of family life yet at this late stage he has done something that was not familiar, he left home and the steady family set up for the life of a wandering preacher. Mary his mother did not understand at this early stage the significance of this. We have the benefit of hindsight and know that Mary his mother became one of his loyal followers and was with him right to the end. Verse 34 and 35 would have been deeply shocking as here Jesus was saying that all those gathered were his brothers and sisters, and those who stuck with Jesus did not have it easy. It shows us that there can be a cost to following Jesus but also it can be rewarding as well. As I have said many times consider why we are gathered here today and realise the power of Jesus in equipping the Disciples for what lay ahead. The reward is the fact we are gathered here today still living the message of Jesus.

2^nd June 2024

The Rector

In the name of God, Father, Son & Holy Spirit

In our gospel today, Jesus heals someone on the Sabbath and gives the outraged leaders of the synagogue an excuse to plot to destroy him.

Jesus did many ‘No no’s’:

He talked to women, touched women, included tax collectors and other such sinners as his friends and now here he was – healing on the sabbath, 

Jesus calls the religious leaders out as the hypocrites they are….. We think of a hypocrite as someone who says one thing and does another.

The actual Greek word used in the Bible is translated “hypocrite” but it could also be translated as “pretender.” It came from a word used about Actors on a stage….

So Jesus was saying that the religious leaders pretended to honour God but they were really just serving the law.

Jesus quotes to them from Scripture that the much admired David hadn’t worried about the Sabbath when he was faced with the hunger of his companions… David had taken the bread from the temple, the ‘show bread’  and had eaten it for the nourishment it was – rather than leave it as an adornment for the temple.

This definitely didn’t go down well… bad enough to be plucking heads of grain on the Sabbath but to quote Scripture to justify it!

By the time that Mark wrote this Gospel, the temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed, and the synagogues were now the heart of Jewish religious life.

The synagogue leader holds a responsible position, and is trying to uphold what he understands to be holy.

But what he fails to understand is that acts of compassion are holy in themselves!
 

Compassion is the key to the message Jesus is trying to get across in this story.

We can be in church each and every Sunday and still not be followers of Christ.

Remember that the people who would have considered themselves holy in this story actually attack Jesus for helping someone!

Richard often quotes William Barclay in his sermons and I too am a great fan of his…..

Barclay was a Scottish Presbyterian Minister and a New Testament Scholar and his books are just wonderful… I highly recommend them

In his Daily Study Bible guide , William Barclay speaks about the tragedy of systems becoming more important than people and this is what had happened with the law.

It had become more than a law for people to live by,

it had become a law in itself!

The context suggests that sabbath is the key.

Jesus is messing with sabbath rules, and the religious leaders can’t handle it.

The observance of the Sabbath was one of the crucial markers of Jewish identity, one of the things intrinsic to being the chosen people of God. In that era, it was what made them distinctive. No other people had the Sabbath. It was important to their understanding of themselves.

Sabbath is not just what they do—it is who they are because of what God has done. 

?

But in the light of Jesus, we know that it is Love rather than the concept of Sabbath that is the crucial marker of our Christian identity, the thing intrinsic to being the chosen people of God….

Our own Jonathan Swift once said that we have just enough religion to make us hate but not enough to make us love.

People should look at us and see how we love others…

Years ago I say a bumper sticker that said

 ‘Jesus, please save me from your followers!” 

Isn’t that terrible!

That someone thinks so little of Christians that they have put such a statement on their cars!

Mind you, some of the extreme Christian views I have heard from the USA would terrify you!

And it has to be said, some of that extreme right wing Christian attitude is seeping into Ireland too… look at that recent debate at General Synod…

We can all think of examples from our everyday life that perfectly illustrates what Jesus was trying to tell us in today’s gospel.

People who just don’t see beyond the job, the procedure, the system …. and so many of us are guilty of that.

To the Pharisees, being the people of God meant that you looked and behaved a certain way

obeying God meant obeying the law in all its minutia.

The religious leaders watching Jesus are ready to enforce all these Sabbath rules, yet they are blind to the present suffering of the man right in front of them

Jesus didn’t represent their idea of what God’s law was supposed to be about, and I think they were genuinely convinced that he was a bad person, a corrupting influence, a heretic that needed to be contained.

They thought they had figured it out, thought they knew what God had asked of them.

God is not confined by our rules about God or our way of perceiving God.

Jesus reconfigures everything.

Jesus is proclaiming in word and deed a new way of understanding who God is and a new way of being part of God’s covenant people

different from the ideas that had been constructed by tradition, which is really threatening to those who have staked their whole lives on that tradition. 

In our reading today , it is very plain that Jesus saw the man’s pain which trumped any law, any sabbath.

But Jesus saw a man in need.

And he cannot remain unmoved in the face of suffering.

To Jesus, people matter far more than systems and are far more important than rituals.

There is no question here—of course Jesus will heal this man on the Sabbath, that’s the entire God-designed point. 

Jesus works differently from the societal norms and the expectations of the religious leaders and their interpretation of the law.

His allegiance is exclusively to the good news of God, directed to needy and alienated people. 

?No one stands outside of God’s love,

and that’s the bottom line.

That is the Good News…. All the rest is window dressing!

Amen. 

Sunday 26th May Trinity Sunday

The Rector

In the name of God, Father , Son and Holy Spirit.

Today is Trinity Sunday.

And just like last week at Pentecost, I’m having a bit of a Déjà vu experience….

Because on the Sunday after Pentecost each year, we especially remember the Trinity.

And every year, like at Pentecost, I tend to say the same thing….

What can you say !

You all know that I always begin my sermons in the name of the Trinity,   God:  Father , Son and Holy Spirit.

And I’ve told you all before that interestingly enough, Trinity as a word, does not appear anywhere in the Bible,

But we all know that the Bible is FULL of accounts of the Trinity, the  Creator, the  Redeemer and the Comforter.

Each year, on this day, in celebrating Trinity Sunday, we are encouraged to think about what the Trinity means to us

We are brought face to face with the mystery of God…. And it is very much a mystery.

Far cleverer theologians than me have been known to quake at preaching on the subject of the Trinity.

Famously, St Augustine, back in the 4^th Century, said that if we are asked to define the Trinity we can only say that it is not this or it is not that…

The Father is NOT the Son, the Son is NOT the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is NOT the Father etc. … you get the picture.

I saw a really funny cartoon on the internet last week about the Trinity.

It showed a man saying to a clergyman ‘I just can’t understand the Holy Trinity Reverend… I find it hard to believe it’

The Priest answers by asking the Man if he understands how Black Holes work… and the man replies ‘No’

The Priest then asks him if he believes that Black Holes exist… to which the man replies ‘Yes’

The Priest then says ‘So… you’re telling me that you’re willing to believe in something complex, so long as it isn’t God’

It’s funny but you know it is so true….. we take so much on trust and then demand proof for God!

The doctrine of the Trinity may seem difficult, but it’s really only about what we all know anyway.

For all it sounds forbidding Theology is nothing more that what you think and say about God.

Trinity Sunday has really only been celebrated in the Christian Church since the middle ages,

It had an interesting origin…. The famous Thomas Becket (1118–70) was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury on the Sunday after Pentecost (Whitsun), and his first act was to ordain that the day of his consecration should be held as a new festival in honour of the Holy Trinity. This observance spread from Canterbury throughout the whole of western Christendom.….

and so on this day, in pulpits all over the world, we try to address the mysterious and difficult subject of what constitutes the Triune God.

One important thing to remember is that the doctrine of the Trinity doesn’t attempt to totally explain God

It only begins to put in a very simple way what God has revealed about himself so far.

A good example might be to think about the tip of an iceberg, the bit above the water is not to attempt to get across the enormity of the whole iceberg.

So when we Christians affirm our belief in the Trinity,

we do it not as an explanation as such but as a way of describing what we know from experience about God.

As I said earlier, Trinity is not clearly stated as a doctrine in the Bible but it is stated, by implication, many many times.

Just think about the baptism of Jesus

The spirit descending on him as a dove

And the voice of God ‘This is my Son, the beloved’

All three involved.

The post resurrection disciples soon discovered that they couldn’t speak of God without speaking of the three ways in which God had been revealed to them.

God, the Father, who created us

God, the Son, the incarnation , who lived among us

God, the Holy Spirit, the comforter, who enables and encourages us.

We understand that this doesn’t mean that there are three Gods, but one God,

Who has been shown to us in three different ways

Whom we have experienced in three different ways ….

Down through the years, different theologians have used different metaphors to get the paradoxical nature of this mystery across.

Of course , the fable of St Patrick’s Shamrock is a famous one here in Ireland, three leaves but one stem, one actual flower.

Or one I have often used at school assemblies is the example of Water, Ice and Steam

The Ice of the Father, the running Water of the Son and the otherworldly yet real Steam of the Spirit.

All are of water but all are completely different manifestations of water.

But these are all only illustrations.

All are human attempts to get across what we know of God and how we experience him in our lives.

In our real lives, within the idea or concept of the Trinity,

our minds are brought into loving contact with the complexity and wonder of God.

We could look to the documented life and ministry of Jesus to give us an insight into the mind and being of God

and there we find compassion and understanding,

a commitment to truth and justice,

and the assurance that every single person matters irrespective of race, religion or colour…..

The three Persons of the Trinity,

the role of each person in that trinity in our salvation.

Through Christ we are able to overcome hostility and alienation and enter into relationship with the Father

As Paul reminds us in our epistle today

‘ When we cry, ‘Abba! Father! It is the very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God….’

Because of Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, God’s love is able to pour into our hearts and we become his children, made in his image, sisters and brothers with his son.

We have been hearing extensively from the Acts of the Apostles throughout Eastertide,

and no better place to hear all about the role of the Spirit – enabling the small community – the Church – to continue the work of Jesus after Jesus has departed to the Father.

The role of the Spirit continues to be to spell out to each generation the significance of what Jesus said and did

and to spell it out in ways that that specific generation can understand!

In 21^st Century Ireland, the Spirit perhaps uses different methods than was appropriate in the early church era or in the time of St. Patrick’s.

Perhaps the Holy Spirit uses Facebook or Instragram now too – maybe even Tik Tok!

But we shouldn’t be surprised at this…. For that is what we have been promised….

Our gospel said that.

‘The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do now know where it comes from or where it goes….’

The Trinity is not meant to be off-putting abstract theological conundrum.

It is meant to be an invitation into relationship.

Even though he said we should define the Trinity as what it isn’t , even St Augustine found it helpful to depict the Trinity as a triangle,

each in relationship with each other.

all three inviting us into relationship with Love.

The 15^th century Russian Icon painter Andrei Rublev most famous Icon is called ‘The Trinity’.  In this icon, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are depicted as people, sitting around a triangular table, all looking in the same direction,

All looking at the person who is looking at the painting.

All inviting and welcoming us into relationship .

All three are inviting us into a relationship with Love itself.

And all we have to do is say Yes!

So , on this Trinity Sunday,

Instead of wrecking our heads trying to understand what really can’t be fully understood, be it the Trinity or even a Black Hole!

Just accept that it is….

And just hold onto the simpler understanding

that God is with us,  

that he is still active among us,

that he is still continuing his work of building his kingdom here in our troubled messy world.

Father, Son and Holy Spirit – still giving meaning and purpose in our lives.

and that is something we CAN understand!   

Amen.

Sunday 19th May Pentecost

The Rector

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place….. and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit.

I have been preaching at Pentecost for almost 2 decades now… and it’s getting harder to think of gimmicks to get across the immensity of the day!

I have tried many tricks in the past to get us engaged with Pentecost….

I usually try to do something gimmicky at Pentecost…

one year we had tongues of flame……

Remember that ?

Or another year I had little hearts that we could put in our shoes and remember that the Holy Spirit is with us each step of the way…..

Another year I organised Red Balloons to come floating down from the galleries….

The year we were locked down for Pentecost and I blew up loads of red heart shaped balloons and tied them to the railings of our two churches for people to take away….

who could forget the waving of the red cheerleader pom poms!

And then last year I threw out loads of red petals from the Pulpit!

But I’m kinda running out of ideas by this stage!

Nonetheless, it is SO important that we don’t take today for granted.  Pentecost is not an ordinary day in our church years…. Because it really is an extra ordinary day.

The account of the first disciples told to us in Acts of the Apostles

And I know that I have told you before that we are obliged to read this on Pentecost… its not an option.

I think this is the only day of the year where we have no wriggle room in the lectionary….. one of the readings today MUST be from the 2^nd chapter of the Acts of the Apostles… it’s that important….

Nor, as most of you know,  is Holy Communion an option… Christmas, Easter and Pentecost must be a Eucharistic Service.

These are the ‘High Holy Days’ …

As I said, each year we have that same reading from Acts and while I try not to say the exact same thing every year,  it really isn’t easy !  

Each year at Pentecost , I seem to want to say the very same thing!  That’s why I try and use a gimmick….

Because it is just so dramatic isn’t it!!

Such a gripping story…..

How the leaderless disciples were enabled to be strong enough to get out and do what they had been commissioned to do…..

How strong they were to become.

How sure they were about what they were doing

How they were able to go into the world as witnesses to what Jesus had achieved for us.

How they were able to somehow enable others to see past the ordinary life to the extraordinary love God holds for each of us.

What is it about the Holy Spirit that they received that day that enabled these ordinary people to become so extraordinary? 

When I was thinking about how the apostles could even understand what people were saying in different languages it  made me think of what is different today… technology is very different for many of us… and so one thought led to another and that is why I asked the AI program ChatGPT to write out the Pentecost story for me… and I have to say I really liked the way it was written….. it brought out new aspects for me anyway.

Because the Holy Spirit didn’t just descend on those gathered that day and disappear forever….

Today the Spirit is still outpouring on us….

And it blows in some very strange and unexpected places.

For me, this is what the Holy Spirit does to our lives and understanding….

The spirit pours love on top of all of our human failings…..enabling us to see others as worthy of our love and remember this love is the love that recognises that the other is just as valuable as person in the eyes of God.

Everything interpreted by love…

I believe that this is what the Holy Spirit is saying to us

We just have to hear….

Hear that the cries for Justice from economic and political

oppression are cries of the Spirit

Hear the Spirit speaking to us in the cry of the World’s hungry

The Spirit is speaking in our world… speaking to all who open their hearts and minds to listen.

Jesus told his disciples that the Spirit would come and remain with them…

We have just today moved the Pascal Candle to the Baptismal Font where it will remain except for Baptisms and Funerals until it is replaced at the next Easter Vigil.

This is symbolic of Jesus having returned to his father in Heaven at Ascension and having ‘organised’ the Holy Spirit to come to us….

We understand this Advocate, which is what the Spirit is called in today’s gospel,  is known also as  ‘the Comforter’, ‘the Strengthener’, ‘the Helper’  the one who nerves and steels us for Life’s tough battles.

Jesus never promised his disciples that they would always be safe, but he DID promise them that they should not be alone….so it is for us, the Spirit is always with us, strengthening and helping us to become what Jesus knows we can become.

The Spirit is not there just for extraordinary people like the first disciples,  For people like Paul as he journeyed on his missions across the Roman world,

For people like Augustine or Aquinas as they helped define our doctrines and theology,

Or even for people like Luther or Wesley as they reinvigorated our church.

The Holy Spirit is also there for ordinary people like you and me, to make US extra-ordinary by the spirit.

Those early Christians in Jerusalem probably felt just as ordinary as we do today

and look at what they, with the power of the Spirit,

were able to achieve.

The Spirit came to them and shook them out of their lethargy and warmed them up for their task.

Filled them with a burning desire to get up and do something.

The Spirit gave them a thirst for the work of evangelism.

Filled them with energy for Jesus whom they had loved, helped them to realise that they had to be out there on the streets, among the people, making the name of Jesus known.

The Spirit put energy into their feet and into their voices, gave them confidence, made them feel that their cause was worth every ounce of energy they could give it.

The disciples threw themselves into their task,

They pleaded and argued for Jesus,

They explained to the people in the street what Jesus stood for.

Can we even imagine this in our time?

or do we secretly believe that this was a once-only event in history which couldn’t possible happen outside of Palestine in the 1^st Century,  never mind 21 centuries later in Cork?

But luckily for us, regardless of our fears, or indeed our low expectations – the Holy Spirit still continues to burst out in every generation of believers……and this is where I could have waved PomPoms if I had of had PomPoms!

I know mention it almost every year but I always feel a powerful connection to Pentecost as it was at Pentecost 1996 that I first went back to Church after many years of a gap.

I was back from Holland a couple of months and was living in Wicklow,

One Sunday I just wandered into the local ordinary Church of Ireland parish church,

to an ordinary service celebrating Pentecost

and found that an extraordinary God was waiting there for me…..

The Holy Spirit was to make a huge difference in my life (how huge I didn’t get for a year or so!)

and I always remember that the Archdeacon, Edgar Swann, had little bars of chocolates for ‘everyone in the audience’ that day…

he said we were celebrating the Birthday of our Church! 

And thinking back, maybe it was the chocolate that first drew me in!

At Pentecost we celebrate the gifts that the Holy Spirit, the enabler, comforter, strengthener gives us all…

That is why Jesus was reassuring his disciples before he ascended to his Father that the Holy Spirit would come to them….

So they would never be alone…

Now I know I said no gimmicks this Pentecost , well apart from the AI, but as I was writing my sermon I remembered how thrilled I had been with my little bar of chocolate back in 1996 so there will be one of these for everyone on the way out the door today…

Happy Birthday Church!

Amen.

Sunday 5th May

The Rector

In the name of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

First of all I’d like to also welcome Juvenalia Choir and thank them for coming and enhancing our music today. I hope to get to chat with some of you after the Service.

Tervetuloa  (Terr Vet Two La)  Finnish

Välkommen  (Vell Com In)  Swedish

Last year, I only welcomed the choir in Finnish and they told me that they mainly spoke Swedish so I prepared both today!

And of course in Irish, it is Cead Mile Failte!

So you are welcome in four different languages this morning!

Now… getting back to the Sermon itself!

I once read about this usually narky parishioner who is said to have tackled the rector after church one Sunday morning.

“I’m so glad you preached an historical sermon,” she said.

The rector, shocked by this unusual praise was delighted but the parishioner then continued,

“Yes, because I am sick and tired of hearing you talking about love all the time.”

Well if there are people here who are sick of hearing about love, then the news isn’t good for them this morning!

Because yet again, our readings are shouting about love …

You might remember last week I told you about the time my training rector , Dean Lynas, had told me to dial back on preaching about Love – only to find that the reading had an enormous amount of references to love in it!

So here we are again, Love, love & more love.

And to mark this… I have one of these little wooden hearts with the word ‘LOVE’ on it for everyone in the audience!  You can put it in your purse or wallet and everytime you see it, it can remind you that you are loved by God….

I’ll pass them out at the end of the Service.

I know I’m preaching to the converted today… you’re actually sitting here in Church (or joining in from home) but in general society today, many people ask ‘Why should I go to church? Why can’t I just worship God in my own way? Surely being a Christian is all about my own personal relationship with God?’

But from the earliest times, following Jesus was never just a private, personal matter.

Christians came together to live in community,

to profess their faith in Jesus Christ,

To witness to his resurrection

To live by his teachings.

The profound reason for this is given to us by Christ himself , when in our gospel last week he said, I am the vine, you are the branches. The vine and its branches are one.

There is of course a mutual interdependence of branch to vine

and branch to branch!

To say ‘I will follow Jesus but not his Church’ is to separate Jesus from the Church, to cut off the branches from the vine.

So how do we love as Christians?

When we look at the earliest Christian communities we can get some ideas….. and we find details in Acts of the Apostle and in the Epistles.

Those first disciples of Jesus has seen him, eaten with him, and spoken with him after his resurrection and as a consequence they had a deep sense of connectedness with him.

A connectedness from which they drew great strength.

They abided in him.

If we abide in Christ, our faith will deepen, evoke love,

and our love will bear witness to our faith, in a kind of circular movement…..

Jesus had chosen the disciples.

He had made them his friends, taught them, loved them  and sent them out to bear fruit, the fruit of love.

It is the same for us, albeit one step removed.

And it is only by bearing the fruit of his love will others know that we are living branches of the vine.

Others will only know it by the bond that exists between us and the care that we show for one another.

This is supposed to be how we Christians love, it is supposed to be by our fruit that others know us.

The deepest sign of our discipleship, or friendship, with Christ is that we are enabled to love one another as he has loved us, offering all that we have and are for the sake of others.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus gives us just one commandment. He does not say, “Love Jesus or love God as I have loved you”.

What he says is

“you must love one another, as I have loved you.”

The gospels are consistent in using the word, “agape,” for love meaning a kind of love for people who can’t pay you back.

In Greek, there were many words for love,

Agape was love characterized by concern for the welfare of the other person

whereas Philos was a companionate love (Philadelphia, which means the city of brotherly love, is derived from philos, which means love and adelphos, which means brother)

and finally Eros was romantic or sexual love.

Usually nowadays, when we say the word ‘Love’ we are talking about Eros.

But this “agape love” is like grace, its a free gift for others which is undeserved or unearned or unmerited.

It is a free gift for those in need.

I need to learn to love those God loves (with agape)

and God loves every single person without exception, even the most wicked….. which most of us can’t get our heads around.

In theory that seems doable but in practice, of course, it is not easy.

We need to learn slowly how to love people unconditionally in this way.

To love as God loves ….

For our base instincts and the prevailing culture around us think very differently.

Yet, I truly believe that the way of Jesus is in fact much more in tune with our deeper nature.

It is surely more human to be loving than to be hating

(yet we often excuse our outbursts or anger or hatred as being “only human”).

But deep down, we all want to love people, to love them as we wish ourselves to be loved.

Yesterday I attended a Webinar organized by an American group. There were over 400 people on it…. From all over the world, India, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines … and me from Ireland… I don’t know what time of the day it was in half the places , it was 5:30pm here.

Anyway, the reason I wanted to attend was to hear in person the Revd Munther Isaac, the Palestinian Lutheran Rector of the church in Bethlehem… you may remember that he had put the Baby Jesus in rubble in his Crib in Bethlehem?  Startling images at the time which shocked many who saw it.

Well he didn’t disappoint yesterday. The webinar was called ‘Challenging Christian Silence regarding the Gaza Genocide’ and as you can imagine it was tough listening.  The Palestinian contributors were really putting it up to us Christians in the West, feeling that at best our churches are just looking for the bare minimum of a ceasefire without calling out what is happening on the ground… One man said that it was a bit like saying ‘get your knee off my neck’ but not addressing the issue.

Revd Isaac said that our churches were hiding behind neutrality but that doesn’t work.. Jesus never hid from issues and we must see Jesus’ image in every child buried in the rubble.  To speak out against Israeli government policy is not to speak out against God.

Don’t be afraid to be labelled, call out injustices when you see them. If we are afraid to speak, then there is something wrong with our faith. This is the time.. Gaza is the moral compass of our world, if not now, then when!  Revd Isaac believes that the Gaza Genocide is a theological crisis for our churches – if we are ok with genocide, how can we recover from that?

I read something on facebook during the week which really struck a chord with me… it said that if anything was going to make America Great again, it would be the Students.

Don’t get pulled into the ‘them’ and ‘Us’ scenarios being played out in our Media. This whole ‘Ireland is Full’ debate that is raging on in social media… of all the posts on twitter, the vast majority were coming from the US, Canada and the UK… only about a third were actually from Ireland.

Hating people and the act of hating can do terrible things to our minds and our bodies.

It is our deepest desire as humans to have others be our friends and not our enemies.

Yet, because of our past experiences and the pressures of our society and our traditions, we often don’t know how to love, don’t know how to forgive or how to be reconciled.

The love that Jesus speaks about is very different from the love of the usual pop songs , or much of the love that we see on TV and in the movies.

Loving the poor, the sick, the criminal can be hard to do.

Those of us who have looked after a relative who is close to dying, know that it can be a very painful experience, especially if that patient is difficult or unresponsive to our attentions….. But that is love.

To love is a choice.

It is an internal attitude which influences every single thing we do and say and think.

Because love is not a question of keeping rules and commandments, it is a way of life.

Lets not mistake love the feeling with the action that is actually meant. 

If everytime you see or read the word ‘love’ you replace it with ‘act with kindness’ or ‘charity’ it would be closer to what was intended.

Our love, our Agape Christian love , needs to be unconditional and our love needs to be relentless!

Sometimes people will love us back; sometimes they will not. 

Sometimes, even though we want to love people, they may reject us.  and if they do reject us, we need not necessarily think that we have done wrong.

When people cannot return genuine love, it is they who have the problem.

Don’t give up….people often learn how to love by being loved.

As we are told

We love because He first loved us. (1 John 5:19)

Amen.

Sunday 28th April

The Rector

In the name of God,  Father, Son and Holy Spirit…..

Sometimes when we say familiar words, we forget about exactly what the words mean.

Jesus knew the value of speaking of familiar things but at the same time shocking people into thinking afresh about them.

Jesus always picked stories about something that the people would know…..He wasn’t too complicated.

He looked around him and used something that everyone knew and then said something different that made people look at the familiar with new eyes.

Remember last week he was speaking about the Good Shepherd and used the image of the relationship between sheep and their minder to tell us something about the relationship between God and us.

and now in today’s reading he is talking about vines.

Again, he used something normal… well normal for the people listening to him at the time…. perhaps we are not as familiar with grapevines as they were…  

But in Palestine, where Jesus was speaking , there are loads & loads of grape-vines growing all over the place.

Vines with lots of branches , and on each branch there would be big bunches of grapes…..

Anyway, one of the important things that Jesus was telling us in the story was that we are all connected to one another

That’s actually what I was speaking about in Ardfoyle yesterday… I was asked to be Christianity’s representative at the Interfaith Earth Day…. And my basic point is that we are all in this together and we need to remember that.

There are six fairly famous, I AM, sayings in the Gospel of John e.g.

“I am the bread of life,”  “I am the resurrection and the life,” “I am the way, the truth and the life,” “I am the door,” “I am the good shepherd,” “I am the true vine.”

Jesus tells us that HE is the vine

…..because without the vine, the branches would just wither and die,

They can only grow while they are still stuck onto the vine.

The people he was talking to that day knew this, a lot of them were farmers.

They knew that if one of the branches got broken and fell off the vine,

it just died.

It definitely never grew any fruit!

Just think about those tomatoes in the supermarket that are still attached to a bit of a twig

They are packaged as ‘Vine tomatoes’, because they still have a bit of the vine attached.

The producers pick them like that because it keeps the tomatoes fresh for longer and then they taste so much better to us when we buy them.

Now we all know that branches grow leaves in the spring

and in the summer, fruit starts to grow on the  branches

and then in the autumn, we can pick it and eat it.

But the vine and the branches need each other to produce fruit.

The vine can’t produce fruit without the branches,

after all where would the fruit grow?

And if the branches hadn’t got the vine part,  how would the branch get all of the nutrients it needs to grow the fruit?

This vineyard language describes our relationship to God through Jesus, and makes clear the expectations of discipleship.

In the Hebrew scriptures the land of Israel had often been likened to a vine,

In Isaiah 5, for example, when the prophet speaks of the unfruitful vineyard ……

In a vine, branches are almost completely indistinguishable from one another; it is impossible to determine where one branch stops and another branch starts.

All run together as they grow out of the central vine.

What this vine imagery suggests about community, then, is that there are no free-standing individuals in the community

There is no such thing as a Christian on their own.

We are all linked to  each other…through Jesus.

Jesus didn’t leave behind big buildings or things like that.

He left behind a tiny community.

During this time of the year, in the 50 days after the resurrection and before Pentecost, we really think a lot about that tiny community, huddled together , drawing comfort from one another and their experiences of the resurrected Jesus…. That’s why the first reading during these 50 days is always from Acts of the Apostles… it gives us an insight into that frightened but excited community….

A community which grew and grew…..because it was attached to the true vine….Jesus.

So Jesus was telling us all that we are the branches and Jesus is the vine.

We have to be connected to him if we want to produce any fruit.

And although we are not exactly huddling together at the minute, we are still connected through him to each other.

So what about this fruit that we are meant to grow?

….No grapes growing out of me!

No, obviously its not actual fruit Jesus was talking about.

Paul outlined 9 visible attributes of a true spirit-filled Life in chapter 5 of  his letter to the Galatians.

We used them as the theme for our Flower Festival in this very church a few years ago ,and it is one of the things that our confirmation class learns about each year… in fact the confirmation class last year made a square for our lovely Bicentennial quilt based on those fruits of the Spirit….

I’m sure you all know this off by heart but just to remind you , the fruit of the Spirit were  :

love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control

Interestingly the word Paul used for fruit is singular not plural,

One fruit , many manifestations …

Jesus is telling us that each time that we do a kind thing,

or help someone, or show our love for someone else in any way..

That is our fruit.

We are to be the fruit bearing branch

growing the fruit of love,

The kind of love that we get by being connected to Jesus,  

And this fruit of love couldn’t be grown unless we were attached to the true vine – Jesus.

So that is why during the Pandemic we missed being here together, in church each week, where we feel the togetherness,

The poet W.B. Yeats drew on this imagery when he said

If what I say resonates with you, it’s because we are both branches on the same tree. 

We are all branches

Jesus’ branches

And we feel the connection most strongly when we gather together to worship , even if for some of us, it is via the Live-stream!

 …

Without Jesus as our strength and balance,

our very ability to bear fruit, is nil. 

The gift

and the demand

of our Gospel image today is that we are told to ‘abide’ in Jesus —

that we are to stay connected to the vine.

Actual branches of vines have no choice in the matter, but you and I do.

The Easter season celebrates the abiding presence of the risen Christ which is beautifully symbolized by the lit Pascal Candle in the Sanctuary of the church.

The visible reminder of the presence of Jesus symbolised in that candle, lit at the Easter Vigil and now lighting for each service during these 50 days before Pentecost.

And today’s gospel reminds us that we are all, each one of us 

– his branches.

Branches attached together to Jesus.

If we abide in him, he will give us all we need to grow the most beautiful fruit of all…..Love

Love for God and love for each other.  Amen.

Sunday 21st April

The Rector

In the name of God –  Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

As I mentioned on the front of our Pewsheet, the Fourth Sunday of Easter is always Good Shepherd Sunday.  

We always have Psalm 23 as the appointed Psalm and each year , we have a different part of chapter 10 from John’s Gospel for this ‘Good Shepherd’ theme, each year speaks about a different aspect of viewing Jesus as the Good shepherd.

We are in year B of the three year cycle and the piece of John’s Gospel this year  focuses on Jesus calling himself ‘the good shepherd’ who lays down his life for his sheep, unlike the hired hand, who runs away at the first sign of trouble.

Last year , in year A, Jesus spoke about being the Gate for the sheep, reminding us that he came that we might have life and have it abundantly.

And the year before that, in year C, Jesus spoke about his sheep following him because they recognise his voice.

All three , from the same chapter of John’s Gospel, but all highlighting different aspects of what it means to be a ‘Good Shepherd’

But there is no getting away from the fact that whichever bit we use we do end up doing a lot of talking about sheep !

Never mind the Animal Blessing in September, TODAY would have been the perfect day to have Lillian bring in Shauna the Sheep !

The people listening to Jesus in the 1^st Century totally understood this…. They inhabited a world of sheep and sheep related themes.

It’s a little different now….unless you’re a sheep farmer obviously! Which some of you actually are!

But as is often the case in our biblical texts, the 1^st century based literary references can be difficult for 21^st minds to understand ..  We’ve lost the nuances

but those listening to Jesus then would have completely understood…..

Another difficulty with this week’s reading is that chronologically speaking, we are jumping back in time.

John’s gospel reading this week is like a flashback

The last two weeks, we were talking about the Risen Jesus appearing in the upper room, about how the disciples were finding it difficult to believe that Jesus is actually risen from the dead at all!

And it’s not so long ago, only three weeks ago, when we were talking about the actual resurrection.

But today, we have to bring ourselves back to

BEFORE the crucifixion, BEFORE the resurrection

We know when this scene is set because in the text from a little earlier in John’s Gospel, just before todays reading , John lets us know that he is speaking about the time of the festival of the Dedication, which was months before Passover, when the events of Holy Week took place.

The festival of the dedication – Hanukkah , sometimes called the Festival of Lights.

It was a festival to celebrate the 2^nd Century BCE heroic victory of Judas Maccabaeus over a foreign King. To give the king his proper name – Antiochus IV Epiphanes – who was a Greek Hellenistic king who ruled the Seleucid Empire from 175 BCE until his death in 164 BCE…. Actually during our recent Lenten Bible Studies we were reading these books of the Maccabees. 

Basically , about 170 years before the birth of Jesus, Antiochus had reversed the general policies of the Hellenistic Kings who ruled over Syria and Judea. Up till then, the successors of Alexandra the Great had respected Jewish culture and protected Jewish institutions. This policy was drastically reversed by Antiochus IV and many Jews had died for upholding their faith. Most upsetting for the Jewish people was that their temple had been defiled by this king. He had put an idol of Zeus in the temple which horrified the devout Jews.

There was a general uprising and amazingly and even miraculously ,the Jews won out against the might of the Seleucid empire, and  a mere 6 years after the temple was defiled, Judas Maccabaeus had rescued Jerusalem, and the temple was cleansed and purified again… in other words it was dedicated, hence the term feast of the dedication.

(actually you know the tune for ‘Thine be the Glory’? Well that tune is called Maccabaeus and Handel wrote it for his Oratorio Judas Maccabaeus in 1746)

Anyway to celebrate this day, lamps and candles were lit in every Jewish home as well as in the Temple, a tradition that continues to this day in devout Jewish homes..

So getting back to our gospel, John tells us that it was at the time of the feast of dedication , e.g. winter,  and Jesus was walking in the portico of Solomon, which was a roofed over colonnade in the first court of the Temple precinct.

The people around Jesus were debating as usual.

They were asking Jesus to cut to the chase.

‘How long will you keep us in suspense’ they said

‘If you ARE the Messiah, tell us plainly!’

There would probably have been two main groups within the questioners surrounding him

There would have been some that genuinely wanted to know but in the majority were the ones who just wanted to trap Jesus and accuse him of blasphemy or worse.

Instead of saying, ‘Yes, I am the Messiah’  Jesus replies, in what sounds like a gentle but firm manner ‘I am the Good Shepherd.’

And goes on to detail exactly what makes a shepherd good….

The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, unlike the hired hand, who when the wolves come, runs away.

All the talk about sheep , the flock –

the community,

Jesus understood, that on our human level we have a deep need of community.

He wants his flock, his followers to live in communion with one another, within his fold.

And he wants his flock to grow.

‘I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold, I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice’

I think that the image of Jesus as shepherd of the Father’s flock is one of the most beautiful images we have of him.

And what is especially lovely is that this is no fanciful flight of John (who could be fairly flowery!) or any other theologian’s imagination

This is how Jesus described HIMSELF,

Do you remember how  Jesus told Peter three times to ‘feed my sheep’? Well WE are his sheep.

He is the Good Shepherd, the sheep belong to him.

He told us ‘there will be one flock, one shepherd’

This is why Jesus chose the image of a shepherd

to demonstrate that like a shepherd will guard his flock with his life, he would someday lay down his life for us

In Jesus’ day and time, the shepherd was the ultimate in role models of protection

The shepherd was out on the mountain, looking after the individual animals, putting himself in between the sheep and harm

Guarding against the attacks of wild animals,

Making sure the sheep didn’t fall into deep ravines.

Protecting them from all the dangers they faced.

I know that I always tell you the story about  the pastor in New York who was trying to get across to some socially disadvantaged young people about just how much Jesus loved them? 

Anyway here it is again.

The Pastor was telling these kids the story about the Good Shepherd but they just didn’t get it.

They had no idea of what a shepherd did, the nearest they probably got to a sheep was on the spit of a Kebab shop.

The pastor had the brainwave of substituting the role of shepherd with something that they could understand, so the story of the Good Shepherd became the story of the Good Probation Officer!

Now they got it!   A Probation Officer, A someone in their lives who was actually FOR them!  The Probation Officer looked out for them, minded them, cared for them.

Jesus is our Good Shepherd, he loves us and he wants us to be safe in his fold.   If we follow him,  stay close to him ,

then nothing can come between us.

You all know the words in Paul’s letter to the Romans? 

It is a verse that we say regularly at funerals so it is very familiar to us….

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39)

Nothing will be able to separate us sheep from our loving Shepherd…..    As the Psalmist puts it.

The Lord is my shepherd,  I shall not want…..

Amen.

Sunday 14th April

Diocesan Lay Reader Sile Hunt

Context is everything. I realised this while watching an episode of the BBC quiz programme ‘Only Connect’ on BBC1 this week. Did you know one of the most useful discoveries in the world happened totally by accident and many of the household items you are familiar with today were invented for a totally different purpose? Take the humble slinky spring that slides down the stairs, it started life as a device to stabilise maritime instruments on ships sailing on rough seas until it was accidentally knocked of a shelf and hopped across a desk that it’s inventor Richard James had faith in repurposing it and creating it as a best-selling toy. A theme of renewal underpins today’s readings.

         This leads us on to today’s first reading where it appears this reading has been taken out of context. Initially Peter appears to admonish the Israelites, God’s chosen people who disowned Jesus and condemned him to death, choosing to release the criminal Barabbas instead. Verse 15 “you killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this”.  However Peter uses the terms ‘fellow Israelites’ and ‘my brothers and sisters’ later on which highlights that God is not condemning the Israelites but wants to refresh their souls. Peter appeals to them to turn to God, repent of their sins and cleans their hearts by faith. He highlights that we are redeemed and renewed by Jesus sacrifice on the cross and we are witnesses to this.

Prior to the events of Acts 3:12-19 occurring, we have to look at why Peter addressed the crowd before him. A poor man who could not walk was cured by Peter and John (the first miracle performed by the apostles following the death of Jesus) and the man in jumped up in grateful thanks and left the Temple, thankful for his new lease of life and praising God. The crowd, witnessing the miracle also express joy at the newness of life they witness. They see first hand as witnesses the promise of new life in Christ that was guaranteed through the resurrection and this encourages them to bring others to God. They are refreshed by the newness of life brought forth by the resurrection.

 Peter highlights that we are witnesses to the risen Christ. This is the promise of Easter, that we will have eternal life through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. We are still in the Easter season, it suddenly did not stop when Easter Sunday ended.  Easter is not just one week in the liturgical calendar. If the Easter season teaches us anything it is the changing and powerful promise of hope and redemption through Jesus Christ. We are renewed when we turn to God and confess our sins as we do on Sunday’s when we have a service of Holy Communion with the Collect for Purity at the beginning where we are invited to “cleanse the thoughts of our hearts, by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit”.

We are blessed when we respond to Christ’s invitation. Faith is the cornerstone. As the commentator Liz Schercliff states “Where there is blessing, there is response, where there is response, there is blessing”.

The thread of faith and hope is carried through in Psalm 4 where we are shown that God carries us and our prayers when we at our most empty, raw and vulnerable. We may feel that all hope is dwindling and there is an emptiness and rawness as we manage the condition or illness of a loved one, or of ourselves or are with someone in their final days. God in his strength and through our faith, bolsters us and give us the energy to take one step more, we grow beyond ourselves in a way we never thought possible. To quote the beginning of the psalm, there is a wonderful invocation to God for his comfort “Answer me when I call, O God of my right! You gave me room when I was in distress. Be gracious to me, and hear my prayer”.

Today’s gospel reading Luke 24: 36b-48 builds on the themes of faith, witness and renewal. The risen Jesus in physical form appears to the disciples offering them a gesture of peace and they are shocked thinking they have seen a ghost. You can imagine that they thought their dear friend had gone forever and that they were alone going forward. They cannot get their heads around His physical presence. Even though it had been stated that Jesus would rise from the dead in fulfilment of the scriptures, they cannot believe what they are witnessing until they offer him a piece of grilled fish to eat. “This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, ⁴⁷ and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. ⁴⁸ You are witnesses of these things. They are called to be active witnesses to the risen Christ and the coming of the kingdom throughout the world as we are. In a social media age, we are always asked for actual proof that something occurred, if there is no photographic evidence then it is dismissed.

It is not an easy task as you have seen as physical proof or evidence is often requested. All we have is unconditional faith as we bear witness to Christ.

Just look at the growth outside as you travelled to church today, crocus’, and cherry blossoms bursting forth. When Jesus escaped the confines of the tomb he brought growth forth with him. We should not be afraid to grow spiritually this season. Like the story of the slinky we can use the hope of Easter to re-purpose ourselves for the week ahead. Renew ourselves through action, prayer and reflection this Easter season between now and Pentecost.

Sunday 7th April

The Revd Richard Dring

John 20. 19-31

The gospel reading today has two distinct parts, the first is to verse 23 and the remaining is to verse 31.

The first part is a key passage, and we need to appreciate how significant the motivation from Jesus was important to help the Disciples regain confidence and going about the duties that Jesus has selected them for. The traumatic events of the week end just gone are still very fresh and raw in the minds of the Disciples. There was a very real fear that following the crucifixion of Jesus that they would be next to be executed. This is a very real fear as the followers of any key figure are normally in as much danger as the leader. All are likely to be arrested and executed as Jesus was.

In this case that does not seem to have been in the minds of those who put Jesus to death, their sole objective was to get rid of Jesus. The followers were not considered a threat. The Disciples were not of know this so had retreated in fear to a “safe House”. Jesus appears to them here to motivate them for the mission he had spent time selecting them for. This was a key intervention and had the desired result, the Disciples were motivated to leave Jerusalem and set out for Galilee. It is from here that they went about spreading the word to all. We can now see how significant and a turning point this was. Would we be gathered here if Jesus had not appeared to the Disciples and motivated them on their journey.

Let us reflect on the events and what would we have done in the same situation; we must take into account that if we were there we would not have the wisdom of hindsight. Would we have been any less afraid, particularly considering this was a very violent time and the combined rule of the Jews and Romans was brutal regime. People lost their lives for very little, and as I have already indicated all who followed Jesus were equally at risk if the rule of Rome and Jewish law was applied consistently. I wonder if there are any of us gathered here today who would have behaved any differently, the fear resulting from the events of the previous Friday would have been very fresh and raw when we consider our leader had been executed by the combined action of the Roman and Jewish rulers. This would have left the Disciples wondering what was coming next. This is why they needed Jesus to appear and motivate them to continue.

In all that was happening there was one Disciple missing, Thomas. Thomas did not believe what his fellow Disciples were saying, that they had seen the risen Lord. Would we be any different as it would have been hard to believe that Jesus had risen from the dead. That simply did not happen, once a person died, they do not rise again so Thomas was true to that view and needed to see for himself that Jesus had truly risen from the dead.

Thomas was looking for evidence of the events of the week end just gone, and he did not have his wishes granted for another week. Thomas wanted o see Jesus with all the marks of the crucifixion so that he could truly believe. Thomas however greeted Jesus in a way that no other Disciple did. He answered Jesus with the words:

“My Lord and my God”

None of the other Disciples recognised Jesus with these words so here was Thomas stating clearly the Jesus was God. This is the only record of one of the Disciples saying these words. In all this the words of Thomas who wanted to see for himself the evidence of the risen Lord responded with a key set of words.

Would we or any of the other Disciples have behaved any differently in this situation. The key is that even though Jesus had told the disciples what would happen it seems that none of them took this in, so when it actually happened Jesus appeared to them to show that he had risen from the dead and so fulfilled his teaching.

We have to remember that the Gospels do not cover every detail of Jesus ministry and life on earth. This sequence of events is included to give us the proof that Jesus really did rise from the dead. It is a key passage to give the credibility that here was one of the Disciples whom Jesus had selected for his teaching doubting the teaching when it became real. The Disciples are showing to the early believers that they too could question and doubt what took place. This was adding credibility and evidence to what really took place.

What do we know about Thomas? In short very little, however tradition tells us that he travelled outside the Roman empire spreading the Gospel. He is credited with the spread of the Gospel in southern India, Tamil Nadu and Kerala and is recognised as the patron Saint by many Christians of the church in southern India. None of this can be verified however as is often the case tradition is based on some degree of truth. As we do not know the fate of many off the Disciples it is quite possible that this has some degree of truth in the story and if it helps many come to Christ what is the issue, and does this present a problem?

Sunday 31st March

The Rector

In the name of God Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

I’d like to begin by saying ALLELUIA! (shake those eggs!)

Each Easter that I preach more or less the same message

(and Richard preached last year so at least you have had one year’s break from me!)

But every year I do always seem to be saying the very same thing … that I envy the apostles and the first disciples.

And I really do….

Not just that they knew Jesus as a man but because I always feel that they had such an advantage over all of us later Christians because they were there.

They were actually there….

They were actually present at all of the events related to us in the Gospels.

They saw the risen Jesus with their own eyes,

they touched him with their hands.

Therefore, in my mind, I reason that faith must have come easier to them, 

I am convinced that it would be easier for me if only I could see Jesus for myself, as the apostles did,

If only I too could see his miracles, as the first disciples did.

But you know, while the first disciples did have the advantage of seeing Jesus with their own eyes, from what we read in the Gospels, it didn’t seem to actually make faith any easier for them…. In fact Jesus was always telling them not to be so thick… well in gospel words he said things like  ‘Let those with ears, listen’ or something polite like that… but really he was telling them not to be thick!

Because when the disciples looked at the figure of Jesus,

what did they see?

…..They didn’t see God ….

In Jesus they just saw a human being ,  whom for all intents and purposes was just like themselves.

When you think about it , to go from seeing Jesus in the flesh to believing that he was the Son of God was probably even harder for them!

I mean –  they knew Jesus as a flesh and blood man…. They knew his mother Mary !   They knew his brothers and sisters….

Do you remember the words in the gospel….

How could this man be performing miracles,

isn’t he from Nazareth?

What good ever came out of Galilee?

So the disciples who recognised Jesus as the Son of God must have required just as enormous an act of faith as we do two thousand years on.

Just think of the thousands of people in Palestine then  

who saw him and heard him speak and yet still did not believe in him.
The crowds who shouted for him to be crucified on that Good Friday obviously did not see him as the Son of God!

So …..  I should relax …. seeing is not necessarily believing.

The shock caused by his passion and death on the cross was so great that even his own followers were slow to believe in the news of the resurrection.

In our Gospel today ‘go , tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee, there you will see him, just as he told you’

This is the first time we’ve heard of poor old Peter since the denials in Herod’s courtyard… since that Cock crowed for the second time…..

Peter was conspicuously absent at Golgotha…. It was John who was with the women at the foot of the cross….

But here, via the faithful women who didn’t desert him,  Jesus is sending Peter a forgiving message….

‘I will see you in Galilee , just as I told you’

But of course, these were mere women carrying the message and later on, when Jesus appeared to them later on that first Easter evening, in the upper room , he gave out to them for their unbelief and hardness of heart because they had not believed Mary Magdalene when she told them her story.

So where does that leave us?

Obviously we can’t see Jesus the way the apostles saw him.

We aren’t present with the rest of the disciples in the upper room when Jesus just drops in.

We can’t put our hand in the wounds of Jesus.

We can’t look into his actual face and say ‘My Lord and my God’

We have to live by faith, not by sight

We are always going to be disciples at second hand.

And because of this some things are harder

But…….. some things are easier.

Twenty centuries have gone by since Jesus physically walked on this earth.

But on the other hand, he is with us ….just as strongly now in 2021 as he was with Mary when she discovered that someone had rolled away that stone.

All disciples, then and now,  us and them, have to make the same leap of faith  ….. 

All of us must become disciples through faith alone.

Jesus was constantly saying this to the people around him while he was still on this earth.

We don’t have to see signs and miracles

in order to believe.

We don’t need to feel the wounds or see the blood

in order to recognise that Jesus is our saviour.

The famous Irish writer of the Narnia Tales, C.S. Lewis,  once said that belief in God was like belief in the Sun.

‘Not because I can see him, but BY him I can see everything else’

Jesus dying on the cross and rising again changed everything for ever.   As that lovely hymn ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’ puts it , from then on , EVERYTHING is ‘interpreted by love’

On that first Easter day God’s grace entered our lives and by that miracle , we know that good will triumph over evil

That life will triumph over death

We know that we will get through even this current abysmal state of our world, with war, degradation of human rights, climate catastrophe, refugee crisis………

We know this because we are an Easter People!    Alleluia!

Our physical gathering together speaks volumes, the shaking of the Alleluia Eggs in joyful children’s hands,  the small chirping of the new chicks in the background – reminding us of the Easter theme of new beginnings,

the joyful Butterflies on the walls visually shouting ALLELUIA everytime we look at them…..

What we do , individually or collectively, is our witness.

That’s why things we do out and about in our daily lives is so important,

Who we are in public , what we do in life, is so important to the Good News.

Because we are judged by not what we say but by what we do

What we pray inside the walls of this church must effect what we do outside these walls or we are failing in the mission we have been entrusted with.

We are entrusted with spreading the good news of the Resurrection  –  that the Gospel is for all of us.

Let us leave this church this day and spread that excellent news wherever we go and whatever we do!

Amen

Alleluia!

Sunday 17th March

The Rector

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Today is the fifth Sunday of Lent but more importantly in Ireland , today is the day we celebrate the life and witness of St. Patrick, our national saint.

Some say that the day has become just a carnival, a street show.

But sure what harm is in that?

Isn’t it still called St Patrick’s day?

Isn’t it still a day put aside from the ordinary working days of our life

and of course this year, its an actual Sunday so that helps boost the numbers coming to Church!

And whether it falls on a Sunday or not, there are always still plenty of people who use the day to remember the holy man rather than the ‘drowning of the shamrock’

But it is true that we all take the existence of St Patrick for granted.

We have perhaps lost touch with how weird a life he had.

When we look at what we know about his life….

It certainly is exciting stuff…….epic adventures in fact!

Now I’m not assuming you all know everything about St Patrick so I’ll recap just a little…

So please forgive me if I am repeating stuff  you already know.

So what do we think we know about him? And remember lots of these ‘facts’ are disputed! But anyway, here we go ….

• Born in Roman Britain,  in the 5^th Century
• Son of a government official who worked for the Roman administration, at a dangerous time just when Rome was losing its grip on society there
• Kidnapped by marauding pirates and sold as a slave to a Celtic chieftain
• After extreme hardship and years of slavery, he finally escapes back to Britain and freedom and becomes a cleric like his father and grandfather

But this is where it gets weird

…. Patrick decided to come back VOUNTARILY to the place where he had been cruelly enslaved….

Why?

Why would you do this?

Well…. we actually know why

We know because Patrick himself wrote about his life…. in a book called Confessio , he wrote about his life and he tells us that he came back to Ireland because God has put ‘a burden on his heart’ , the burden of all of the pagan souls in Ireland

In his dreams, he told us that these pagan souls were crying out to him to come and preach the word of God to them…..in their own language….

And this of course was the nub of it…..

Patrick really was the only possible man for the job. There wouldn’t have been many people around at that time that could credibly pull it off…

Just think about his CV

• He spoke Irish fluently
• He knew the Irish people from first hand experience
• And he was from an educated family, a priestly family, steeped in Christian living in a predominantly pagan world.

And of all of these facts, the most important of all was the fact that he spoke Irish!

He, and probably only he in his educated class and station in life, could communicate as a native with the natives.

So he was ideal for the task, earmarked by God…

And yet…

it still must have been very very difficult to go back to a place where he had been so badly treated. 

Most of us wouldn’t go back to a restaurant where we’d had a bad meal….

Over a period of more than 30 years Patrick and his team of missionaries made Ireland a Christian country.

In the course of time, it would be the fruit of his work, monks from Ireland, who would bring the Christian faith back to a Europe devastated by the invasions of the so-called ‘barbarians’.

It was Patrick, too, who from the very beginning gave a peculiarly Irish stamp to Christianity in the country.

His years as a shepherd had made him familiar with Irish language and culture.

In introducing Irish people to the Christian message, he incorporated much of traditional ritual rather than totally eradicating native beliefs as ‘superstitious’.

For instance, he used bonfires to celebrate Easter because the Irish honoured their gods with fire.

He superimposed a sun, an important symbol in Celtic culture, on to the Christian cross, creating what we now know as the Celtic cross.

This way of behaving is what we would now call ‘inculturation’.

Perhaps the Church in Ireland today could learn something from his approach for we kind of know that the old, traditional ways of presenting the Gospel are no longer very affective.

There have been deep cultural changes in Ireland in recent times and the message of the Gospel has to be presented in ways that speak to Irish people today.

It is not good enough simply to condemn people for being ‘materialistic’ and ‘consumeristic’.

In presenting the Gospel vision we have to begin by taking people where they are and not where we think we would like them to be.

If we want people to change, the evangelisers will have to change first.

St Patrick understood in his day that communication is not just about speaking; it is primarily about being heard and understood…and listening!

And, hopefully, when people hear what we have to say it will be accepted because what we say make sense and gives meaning to life.

Jesus in our Gospel says something that is as relevant today as they were then.

He reminds his disciples that there is a huge harvest but not enough people to bring it in. St Patrick certainly took that Gospel message and ran with it!

It is a prayer that is all the more urgent in the Ireland of today, not to mention many other places as well.

Ireland, like much of Europe, is now a missionary field waiting to be harvested.

The work of the missionary is not an easy one, as Patrick himself knew very well.

It is difficult to understand how Jesus’ message of truth and love, of justice and compassion and the unconditional acceptance of every single person as a brother or sister would not meet with the enthusiastic approval of every one who hears the message…..

Yet, as Patrick himself well knew, the message of the Gospel can come up against the most vicious opposition, sometimes from those who view themselves as devout Christians!

The history of Christianity carries a long list of people, men and women, who gave their lives in trying to share a simple message of truth, love and fellowship…. it also carries a long list of people who sullied the message with violence, greed and opportunism.

What did Gadhi supposedly say

‘I love your Christ but I don’t think much of your Christians’

Patrick understood this and from his writings we know that he tried to live the Gospel to the full.

It is thanks to him and to all those who faithfully followed in his footsteps that we have the Good News of Christ in our own lives.

What shaped Patrick’s decision to go back to the barbaric Island of Ireland was his own close relationship with God

During those long lonely years of slavery in Ireland,  Patrick had developed a close prayerful relationship with God.

And we are guessing back through the centuries to imagine what Patrick thought…. in his book ‘Confessio’ , Patrick speaks to us all, in his own words,  from across the distance in time.

When I studied the book Confessio 20 years ago, I loved it…. in fact I remember choosing it as one of the questions I answered in my year end exams as the words and themes had (somehow!) remained with me I think it was because the translation from the original Latin was so accessible and was still so amazingly relevant to our modern world.

So captured forever in print, in his own words, Patrick tells us about that period in his life, his time of captivity and loneliness,

He writes that while tending the flocks.

‘the love of God increased in me more and more, and the faith grew in me, and the spirit was roused so that in a single day, I have said as many as a hundred prayers….because the spirit was fervent within me.’

This was the same spirit that wouldn’t let him rest easy when he did eventually return to his family.

This same spirit strengthened him enough to undergo his priestly training , to leave his family behind and  to return to the land where he had been a slave.

In all of his remaining life , Patrick trusted in God to be with him every step of the way.

Whatever was asked of him, and a lot was asked.. Patrick trusted in God to equip him to deal with it.  

Like Paul speaks about in our 2^nd reading today… we ourselves are only clay jars but the extraordinary power comes from God 

and with God’s help we can be afflicted but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed…  because we carry the light of Jesus in our bodies!

This is what Patrick was talking about in those famour words of his ‘Breastplate’

He himself wrote

Christ with me, Christ before me

Christ behind me, Christ within me

Christ beneath me , Christ above me

Christ at my right, Christ at my left

Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me

Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks to me

Christ in every eye that sees me

Christ in every ear that hears me.

I read once that

‘the Jesus that you and I participate in, are graced and redeemed by ,    is the Risen Christ who is no longer confined by space and time.’

I feel a little that because of Patrick’s Confessio, he is not confined to space and time….

So this then was his own words, what he himself called his Breastplate…. Christ as his ‘armour’ against the world,

Now, 1500 years on, while we don’t wear Breastplates (at least I don’t think so!) …..  these words can still ring true for us.

You might know that  ‘cutie’ little fridge magnet that has God saying

‘There is nothing that the world can throw at you today that we can’t get through together’

Personally I think St. Patrick said it better…..but the sentiments are exactly the same.

I think I’ve mentioned before that many years ago,

I heard the former Archbishop of Dublin, Walton Empey, speaking about being in all of the fancy processions for various civic services in Christ Church Cathedral. (bit like our bishop Paul today in St Fin Barre’s!)

He said that when all of the choir and clergy were leaving the chapter room,

He was always last in the procession ….as is the protocol, the highest ranking cleric is always last out….

He said that one evening ,

at a very formal and important service,  where there were many many people ahead of him, the robed choir, the cathedral chapter, the dignitaries, the preacher, the visiting clergy etc etc..

Anyway, he looked behind him and felt a wave of loneliness

A sense of ‘the buck stops here’

The huge responsibility of his position struck forcibly home. 

And then he said that somehow the words of St Patrick came to him

Christ with me, Christ before me

Christ behind me, Christ within me

And he knew that whatever he was called on to do in his life, he was never going to be alone in the task.

(St John’s – might be singing the Breastplate (Hymn 322)

I’d like to finish with Patrick’s closing request at the end of his Confessio  :

“I pray for those who believe in and have reverence for God. Some of them may happen to inspect or come upon this writing which Patrick, a sinner without learning, wrote in Ireland. May none of them ever say that whatever little I did or made known to please God was done through ignorance. Instead, you can judge and believe in all truth that it was a gift of God. This is my confession before I die”

May Christ be beside all of us this day of St Patrick

and remain with us through all of our lives

We give thanks to God for ,

and draw courage and hope from

the example of Patrick’s life and witness in our Country. 

AMEN

Sunday 10th March

Sile Hunt

What do we call our mothers? Mam, mama, mammy or mum? When I first met my husband many years ago, every telephone conversation he had with his mother was peppered with ‘mammy’ and the dreadful thing was I laughed as I thought he was too old to call his mother ‘mammy’ oh how wrong I was! We all want to impress the mammies in our lives and the time came for me to travel to meet my future mother in law, an independent northern Irish lady called Mrs Hunt. I put out my hand to greet her and what came out?  Only ‘pleased to meet you Mrs Mammy!’. I thought the ground would swallow me, she laughed and wrapped me in a warm hug and took me in for tea. Every greeting card is always signed ‘with lots of love Mrs Mammy’. The words we use are all terms of affection for the very special woman who gave us life or supported us in life and today on Mothering Sunday we celebrate this very special day by honouring the special place they hold in our lives.

The transformative form of love is a thread that underpins all of today’s readings. Today’s Gospel reading from John 19:25-27 is short but timely for Mothering Sunday.  Like Hannah in today’s old testament reading she has dedicated her son to the Lord, Mary knows she will be present in Jesus’ life for a short while.

John’s gospel is the only one which places Jesus’ mother Mary at the foot of the cross. I want you to visualise for a moment the character of Mary here at her most broken and vulnerable. She has seen her son viewed by the Romans as a criminal, tortured, tried and condemned to death and she is at a loss what to do, apart from being by his side to comfort him. Her deep unwavering love for her son is clearly visible. Jesus’ fate has been sealed but she understands his greater purpose and stays until the end. A few weeks ago we heard about Simeon at the dedication in the temple and now she realises that Simeon’s prophesy that a soul would pierce her own soul also is coming true. Eventhough Jesus is an adult, she does not stop being his mother, worrying about him or providing comfort to him in an act of unconditional love. She knows that on Jesus death her motherhood will be transformed as she retains her faith in the midst of suffering. A mother’s love knows no bounds.

It is taken at this stage that Jesus’ mother was widowed. Remember society at the time the gospel was written had no widow’s pension and women once widowed if not economically independent themselves, were dependant on her eldest son for financial support or else she would have been homeless and destitute. The fourth commandment to honour your father and mother was taken very seriously and children sought to provide for parents in old age.

Now we become aware of the beloved disciple, John at the foot of the cross. Jesus makes the ultimate request of his dearest friend to take his mother in for the remainder of her life and John agrees. But what really struck me here is the type of language used and I had to look again to see if I read it right. “Woman, here is your son”. It’s a bit of a shock to think that we hear Jesus giving cheek or backchat to his own mother. But if we look a little deeper in to the culture of the time in which the gospel was written, we can see things through a new lens of understanding. Far from being a mark of sarcasm, it was a mark of utmost respect and reverence. His tone is formal and translates as ‘dear woman’ and is not cold or dismissive. He needed to formalise the new legal position between John and his mother in Roman law and leave no doubt as to how she would be cared for going forward.

One of the loveliest expressions of motherhood is one I remember from a poem from my schooldays called ‘Piano’ by the English poet, D.H. Lawrence where as an adult he reflects on the image of his mother:

‘a child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the

tingling strings,

and pressing the small poised feet of a mother

            who smiles as she sings’

An image of patience, not of frustration, of encouragement not dismissal and it captures pure natural joy as her young son played at her feet as she sang hymns in the living room of a Sunday evening. We all have a snapshot of a tender moment in our own lives with our mothers or those who stepped into the role of mother, let us pause for a moment to give thanks to God for their memory or presence in our lives today.

This quote from the book of Proverbs encapsulates what we celebrate about mothers today. She “ is clothed with strength and dignity, and she laughs without fear of the future. When she speaks, her words are wise, and she gives instructions with kindness”. Mothers never stop worrying about us regardless of age. She has an inner strength, deep worldly wisdom, self-assurance and confidence, she is the go to person for advice and comfort. She is the fixer of broken hearts, skinned knees and broken toys. A multi-functional marvel of God’s creation. Let us give thanks to the Lord for mothers this Mothering Sunday.

Sunday 3rd March

The Rector

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Three wonderful readings today,

‘there’s ate-ing and drinking in them’ as the saying goes.

That lovely Psalm ‘One day pours out its song to another and one night unfolds knowledge to another’  – what a poetic way to think about passing time.

Our first reading from Exodus told us all about how the Commandments were given to Moses ‘God spoke all these words’

I will be covering the 10 commandments next week with the Confirmation class and I always try and emphasise with the young people that these are not just ‘Thou shalt nots’ to be thought about as prohibitions only but are in fact quite sensible rules for living with yourself and with others, in the grace of God.

We then had the appointed Psalm for today which puts the Law of God in the right positive light when it reminds us that

The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; •
   the testimony of the Lord is sure
      and gives wisdom to the simple.
 The statutes of the Lord are right and rejoice the heart; •
   the commandment of the Lord is pure
      and gives light to the eyes.

Rejoice the heart, revive the soul, gives light to the eyes.

Of course, we know from our Gospels that Jesus had quite succinctly condensed all the commandments into just two…

love God and love your Neighbour.

For as he says ‘on this depends ALL the law AND the Prophets’ 

which meant the entire scriptures.

and then Paul, as a former Pharisee and an expert in that Law,

is speaking to the fledgling Christian community in Corinth

and no doubt is trying to dampen down tendencies for the intellectuals to lord it over the lumpen proletariat,

Paul tells us that ‘Jews demand signs’

(in other words, miracles and the like)

and ‘Greeks desire wisdom’

(Everything must be teased out intellectually and philosophically)

and that neither extremes are what it is about at all!

For we must proclaim Christ Crucified,

which is a stumbling block to the Jews of the time who , like Peter last week, will NEVER understand a Messiah who died for us,

and on the other hand it is foolishness to the Greeks of that time , who equally will never understand Christ dying. 

Philosophically, to them, it just didn’t make sense.

And yet as Paul points out, to us who believe, Christ is the power and wisdom of God,  for ‘God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength’

and so onto today’s Gospel from John

recounting the time when the Jews seeing that Jesus has lost it in the temple asked him ‘What sign are you showing us’

… again the looking for miracles, John always calls miracles ‘signs’.

I would have thought that the action of throwing the money changers spoke for itself

but alas no, for those non-disciples gathered around him in the temple there had to be a ‘sign’

Jesus, using the incident as a learning activity,  tries to tell them what is to happen by making parallels with himself and the edifice that is the temple.

‘In three days I will raise it up’

Which is later understood and used by his disciples after his death and resurrection to prove that Jesus knew what was to come.

But what a most powerful action.

Physically overthrowing the trappings of Temple workings,   which represented the outworking of slavishly following the Law,

the idea that you have to follow rigid rules of buying a sacrifice to be able to come before God.

The money changers were there because there was a rule that actual money couldn’t be used in the temple (remember that real money would have had the head of the despised Caeser on it).

They had gotten around this by having ‘temple money’

which was then used, in the temple confines,  to buy the spot free animals which were the only ones which could be used for sacrifice.

Of course, this lucrative trade was literally a money maker and it is always the poor who suffer when middlemen get involved.

Jesus, by scattering the animals and overturning the money changers tables,

was railing against all those who , then or now, put stumbling blocks between the Creator and his Creation.

God is here  ….. we don’t need to sacrifice to connect.

We don’t need to jump through hoops or fulfil ritual obligations to relate to him.

He is our CREATOR.   Our lives are ‘a living sacrifice’ , it is our lives that we must make spotless , not a dove or a calf or a goat.

The Prophet Jeremiah had said that to them centuries before….

they have not given heed to my words;
   and as for my teaching, they have rejected it.
 Of what use to me is frankincense that comes from Sheba,
   or sweet cane from a distant land?
Your burnt-offerings are not acceptable,
   nor are your sacrifices pleasing to me (Chapter 6)

And because we know how impossible this is, to make our lives a living sacrifice, to make our lives spotless, we can draw on our understanding of Jesus , God’s Son, who although he was human and was tempted , did not sin.

Jesus, our guide and example of what will be possible in his Kingdom.

Jesus, who because he was one of us, is able to understand us in all our brokenness.

Amen.

Just before I leave the pulpit, just a little about Fairtrade…. You can’t help but notice the Banana at the very least!

Most of you know John Donne’s famous words,  about how we are all part of each other, no man being an island entire onto himself.

This is where Fair Trade thinking has its roots…

in the idea that we are all responsible for each other’s welfare

in the notion that we actually care more about fairness and justice than about the quick buck, the cheapest option available.

all any of us want is to be treated fairly ?

So we should make the effort to treat others fairly in return.

When we buy something in a shop, we hope that the price will be fair as well as tasting good!

We also want the person who made it or grew it on a farm to be given a fair share of the money we are paying for it.

Everyone who works, including us, our children, our parents and relatives and friends,

we all want to feel that we’re being paid the right amount.

That’s why so many people are willing to buy Fairtrade products,

because they know all about being fairly paid,

and they want to treat other people as they would like to be treated themselves.

so it is up to us to check out if what we are buying is available in the Fairtrade version and if it is … then we buy it!

And by checking out and buying Fair Trade goods we help change the world for the better!  

So why not, for this fairtrade fortnight to be begin with…

look for , and if they haven’t got any then ask for – Fairly traded goods in our shops!

Sunday 25th February

The Rector

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The disciples have been with Jesus a fair while now and are getting to know him better – his healing power, his teaching skills and his authority.

The latest Bible Buddy book the children are reading is called ‘Heroes of Faith’ and they read about who was a Superhero in the Old Testament…..

Peter and the other disciples weren’t superheros, they were ordinary men of their generation.

Their idea of the messiah was of a conquering King,

one anointed by God to free them from foreign oppression,

and indeed the word Messiah – and also the word Christ – literally means the anointed one.

But we know, of course, looking back across 2000 years of Christianity that wasn’t what Jesus was about at all.

In fact, Mark begins his gospel with the words ‘The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God’ 

So although there is a current of secrecy throughout Mark’s Gospel, and the characters in the story don’t know who Jesus really is, WE are told right from the start ‘….. it couldn’t be more clear to us.

Jesus tries to explain what his messianic mission was about,

His mission is outlined…. he will suffer greatly, will be rejected by the leaders of his own people , will be executed as a criminal and on the third day he will rise to life.

This, obviously, comes as a great shock to Peter and the disciples.

To them, in their day, with their expectation from the scriptures they knew so well…..It just doesn’t make sense.

This is definitely not the Messiah they had been taught to expect.

We think of what we know is to come –

Jesus’ humiliation and execution at the hands of the Roman and Jewish authorities

We know this but the disciples around him would never have dreamt this would happen to their Messiah!

Peter steps forward, surely speaking for all of them, and insists that this couldn’t happen to Jesus.

But Jesus, knowing that Peter has become a real stumbling block in the way of his mission  

‘Get behind me Satan, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things’

Now we have to remember that Satan, in this context, just means adversary, an opponent and indeed, at that time, Peter’s attitude must have seemed like a real temptation to Jesus…opposing everything Jesus was trying to achieve, undermining his resolve.

Jesus goes on to tell the disciples and indeed to tell anyone who reads this gospel and has ears to listen

That not only must he – Jesus – go the way of suffering and death to life but that anyone who wants to be a follower of Jesus must also go the same way.

How many of us are like Peter & the disciples in the gospel, setting our minds totally on human things and ignoring divine things.

We want to be morally good people but our values in life are often indistinguishable from the rest of society,

We are mostly concerned with material wealth, with professional success , with great careers for our children.

We are in the business of saving our lives not losing them as Jesus instructed us.

He tells us that we have to let go

To stop clinging – To be really free

To give and not to grab       To share and not to hoard

To see others as sisters and brothers not as rivals and competitors.

We live in a world that we are meant to reach out to

rather than to guard against.

Yet we suffer with a ghetto mentality

An I’m all right Jack attitude,

To be a Christian disciple is not primarily to ‘save my soul’ or to ‘go to heaven’ but to enter fully into the mainstream of human living and human concerns

To become part of it through loving and sharing and building up with others.

It is not a matter of everyone for themselves

But each for the other , one for all and all for one!

In our current approach to life, there are only a few winners and many, many losers…….. and we know in our heart of hearts that this is not right.

Jesus is proposing a subversion of that worldview,

His good news proposes that we all just let go and live our lives for others

And for sure, if we all lived like that , our society would be radically different.

Jesus is telling us in our gospel reading today that,

‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’

The story of Abraham and Sarah in our first reading seems not to have anything to do with what Jesus is telling us in the Gospel……

The reading from Genesis is about an unlikely, elderly couple who hear the call to service and respond with a shaky but faith-filled  “Yes.” 

In a later verse,  Sarah will actually laugh at God for the proposition of becoming the mother of a nation.  It seems quite  impossible given that they are already beyond child-bearing age.  But this is God’s promise – They are blessed to be a blessing to all nations. 

His promise for the future…. For the faithful..

And of course, Paul, in his letter to the Romans, also speaks about the promise made to Abraham and underlines to the small Christian community in Rome that it was the Faith of Abraham that made the difference ‘He did not weaken in faith…. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God’

Abraham accepts God’s promise of the future for him and his family.

Jesus proclaims the future to the disciples,

but Peter can’t step out in faith

and face it

he won’t hear of it…..

The previous verse heard Peter say in answer to Jesus’ question ‘Who do you say that I am’ – that Jesus was the Messiah .  But Peter is still seeking the victorious Messiah, not a weak, slain leader.  

When Jesus rebukes Peter by giving the highest insult and calls him  “Satan”  he then tries to teach the disciples what it is all really about….

‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’

He is telling them that the way of discipleship is

life-giving,

but it is not without sacrifice, and it is not without loss. 

This call to the first disciples is still our Lenten call today..

We deny ourselves, take up the cross and we follow him….

In our time , in our way…… in whatever way we can.

Amen.

Sunday 18th February

Síle Hunt, Diocesan Lay Reader

What does the term lent evoke for us? If we are honest it can bring about feelings of emptiness as we give up items that are part and parcel of ordinary daily life, e.g. marmalade on toast or taking a social media break. It can involve feelings of frustration as we give up that tempting first cup of coffee in the morning. When I was a teenager in the 90’s there was an advertisement with the tag line’ nobody said it was going to be easy’ and Lent is not meant to be easy.

David Van Biema wrote in Time Magazine in May 2020 that the time period from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday  “is a time many Christians spend considering the nature and depth of Divine compassion”. Today’s Old and New Testament readings contain the overarching theme of compassion. Today’s gospel reading of Mark opens with the reception of the Holy Spirit by Jesus through his baptism by John the Baptist in the river Jordan. In verse 11 we are given an insight into the tender nature of God as a proud and loving father who builds Jesus’ self esteem “you are my son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased”. This statement sets the first signpost towards the way of the cross on Good Friday. God’s deep love, especially for his only son and his compassion for humanity is key to his very nature, a love that reaches it’s pinnacle when Jesus offers up his life to atone for our sins. The ultimate unselfish sacrifice.

This reading is situated in the wilderness. The story takes an unexpected twist. The holy spirit (the protector) that Jesus receives in baptism then drives Him out into the wilderness for 40 days in the open desert, a barren landscape, together with wild animals that were an ever-present threat. Jesus is tempted by the devil but does not succumb to temptation. We are reminded that Jesus defeated temptation in his 40 days in the wilderness. Lent is a time of preparation and personal reflection as we examine and develop our relationship with God as we prepare our hearts for the way of the cross. At the end of today’s gospel reading Jesus proclaims the Good News in Galilee and heralds that the Kingdom of God has come near and invites us to repent and believe the good news.

We all have encountered our own personal wilderness at some stage or another, perhaps a fear of change in work or in school/college, illness, being stuck in a rut or a time when our faith was challenged or side-lined and we put the desire for material gain ahead of our own spiritual development. We all have different challenges as we enter Lent and no two people in the congregation here this morning are at the same starting point. But we are all journeying together in support of one another.

We are promised salvation with the advent of the kingdom of God and today’s gospel is dovetailed with the lesson from 1 Peter, which reminds us that the Holy Spirit made Jesus who died on the cross come alive again. Peter reflects on the saving act of baptism as “an appeal to God for a good conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ”.

How about we consider an Invitation to use the time of emptiness to examine ourselves, our attitudes our reactions and their consequences are they in good conscience? How can we make room for what God has planned for us? We can participate in reflective bible study. When we give up items could we put the savings from same towards a local community project?  Perhaps we can look at how we can best budget our time for the benefit of others this lent, e.g. spending an extra hour outdoors with someone special in our lives. We can reach out as God did and offer compassion and affirmation to those who need it, perhaps to a friend or a colleague who is struggling. Lent provides us with a time to reflect openly on our own personal relationship with God and make the necessary adjustments as we enter a period of deep reflection, prayer and preparation during the season of Lent. God will be faithful to us through our own personal wilderness as we journey together as a congregation towards Easter.

Sunday 11th February

The Rector

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Today, the Sunday before Lent, we celebrate the Transfiguration.

I always feel that this is great timing.

Just before Lent.

Just before we get down to the hard task of fasting or whatever it is we feel we should be doing to mark the season of Penitence.

Obviously we can only go by the accounts in the Gospels….

We don’t actually know .. and can never know .. what physically happened up on that Mountain top.

But something marvelous did happen.

Jesus was praying

He was just about to begin his journey into Jerusalem and the cross and he was taking time out to seek his Father’s approval and to ask for strength to face what lay ahead.

Up there on the Mountain top,

Moses and Elijah appeared to be talking with him.

Moses – the great Lawgiver

Elijah – the greatest of all the Prophets, Elijah who we heard about in our first reading this morning.

Symbolically these two major Prophets represented Israel’s life and thought and religion…. And they were there, right beside Jesus, giving their approval of Jesus and his path.

But while the moment of the Mount was absolutely necessary, it could not be prolonged beyond its own time.

Jesus had to come down from the Mountain top and face his destiny.

I must say I can understand why the Apostles wanted to stay in that perfect moment.

Why they wanted to put up tents and stay put.

It was one of those perfect moments.

All was well with the world.

We are granted those kind of moments sometimes.

I have often spoken about my own understanding of Epiphany.

The moment when you see a bird for the first time, its heartbeat underneath the feathers, and you know , you just know

exactly what its all about.

When we are lucky enough to have these amazing moments of understanding, it’s like stepping into unexpected light…

But those moments are by their very nature fleeting

And indeed afterwards its hard to believe it happened, these visions of glory.

Someone once said transfiguration was being

‘called to glory at that moments, but then we end up worrying about the Gas Bill!’

Now Peter was always the man of action.

He was the man who needed to be doing something ….anything!

Peter wants to build dwellings, sometimes the word used here is translated as ‘Booths’ or ‘Tents’, so a temporary dwelling place in other words.

Peter wants to put up some kind of structure for Jesus and Moses and Elijah to live in.

something to keep them there on the mountain top….

to keep this magic moment happening.

to put off the inevitable return to normality and all that that involves…. The dreaded Gas Bills!

But to stay on the mountain top isn’t living life….it’s postponing life.

We all have to accept that most of our lives are spent down in the valleys rather than at the top of mountains.

DISCIPleship is DISCIPline, interestingly the same word root….

Most of our lives consists of tough day by day existing…

And to be sure we gain strength and purpose from that mountaintop experience….

but any experience we gain is for sharing – not for hoarding,

There is a time for stillness, a time for contemplation

a time to ‘Be still and know that I am God’

and these are important times, needed times

But then we have to go back to the valley

refreshed and renewed by our time with God.

Ready to make a difference in our world.

and to quote yet again a piece of my favourite prayer from Teresa of Avila

Yours are the feet with which

He is to go about doing good,
and yours are the hands

with which He is to bless us now.

For the opposite to going back in the valley is to try and artificially stay in the moment, like the way Peter tries to.

Poor old Peter often gets it wrong doesn’t he!

That’s probably why we identify with him…

Peter does understand that this is an important moment,

a time of intimacy and nearness to God

but what he doesn’t get is that these moments are meant to strengthen and then with that strength go back out into the world refreshed, just as Jesus did, he drew strength that day on the mountain and went on to face the cross.

Which is why I think that the Sunday before Lent is the perfect day to hear about the Transfiguration…..

And so we thank God for all of our epiphanies, all of our Mountain Top transfiguration experiences  ….

and long may we seek & find them

But we also thank God that, through these experiences,  we have been given the wherewithal to use our inner strength and conviction

to be his hands and his feet in a world which so badly need him.

As I said, Peter quite understandably wanted to stay in the sheen of Glory and not have to return to the everyday common things…and who can blame him….

But we need to understand that the Mount of Transfiguration moments are given to us  for a reason

to provide strength for the daily work of ministry

And to help us walk in the way of the cross

not in order to hide from the world.

Susanna Wesley, the mother of John and Charles Wesley wrote a prayer addressing our instinct to try and form holy huddles of like minded people….

‘Help me Lord, to remember that religion is not be to confined to the church or closet, nor exercised only in prayer and meditation, but that everywhere I go, I am in thy presence’

…..

I have mentioned before about the famous Anglican priest called George Potter who worked in the east end slums of London in the early 20^th century when these were areas of high unemployment and the consequent huge social problems.

He was what you might have called very ‘high church’, bells & smells and all that.

But while he had the highest possible ideas of worship

he understood the relative value of those moments of high worship, that our transcendent moments are there to strengthen us in this world.

He used to say to the many young idealistic priests that wanted to work with him as curates.

‘You mustn’t sulk if you can’t get to the vespers on the feast of St. Thermogene, for you may be sitting in a police station waiting to help a ‘Client’

Or

‘You mustn’t be the type of priest who runs into the kitchen sobbing because we run short of incense’

What Fr. Potter understood is that his curates must rightly value their prayer and worship time as without them they were not equipped to do the grueling work in the slums.

But he told them 

‘ the fact is that we spend more time at the bottom of the Mount of Transfiguration than at the top’

He knew that these exalted times of prayer and meditation were essential in order to strengthen and equip these young priests out in the cold and ugly world of 1930s London,

But he also knew that these heady experiences were not so that they could wallow in them so as to escape reality but to equip them to get out there and tackle reality.

William Barclay , that down to earth Scottish theologian that  Richard Dring often quotes in his sermons, puts it beautifully,  

He says this about transfiguration….

‘The moment of glory does not exist for its own sake

It exists to clothe the common things with a radiance they never had before’

Isn’t that lovely  –  to clothe the common things with a radiance they never had before…..  so beautifully put..

Our job is recognise the Glory of God

and then to bring Gods glory from our mountaintop back to the valley for all to see and understand for themselves.

We say in our service, in the post communion prayer, ‘May we whom the Spirit lights, give light to others’

Our job is to clothe the everyday with a radiance it never had before……. Amen!

Sunday 4th February

The Rector

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The words of the old testament (or the Hebrew Scripture as they are more often called nowadays,)  

today comes from the book of Proverbs.

It speaks of Wisdom , the word ‘Sofia’ in Greek, which is always used in the feminine.  Latin is the same ‘Sapienta’ is a feminine word.

This particular proverb tells us that the Lord created her, (Wisdom that is ) at the beginning of his work….when there were no depths she was brought forth.

‘I was daily his delight,

rejoicing before him always

rejoicing in his inhabited world

and delighting in the human race’

Beautiful words and beautiful sentiments

God’s helper from the beginning of time.

And then in our gospel reading, from John, we heard the well known words… very well known indeed as this was the ‘Midnight’ Christmas Gospel too….

‘In the beginning was the Word

and the Word was with God

and the Word was God’

tying in with Wisdom being with God always, before time , before space, before light….

John continues ‘The true light, which enlightens everybody was coming into the world’

And it really is startling….

and a little hard to believe really.

That the Word became flesh and lived among us.

Lived among us….. Humanity

I’ve told this story before but some of you may not have heard it….

In fact, I only told it to the Confirmation Class last week….

But they AND the rest of you who did hear it before are just going to have to listen to it again!….

It’s a story about a man, a farmer, a good man, but not a Christian man as we’d define it….

He just couldn’t get his head around God entering our world as an infant

Actually becoming one of us

This man just couldn’t actually believe it

And unlike many , he was too honest to pretend that he did… which was a hard thing to do back then…

So each Christmas Eve, when his wife and children would go to the midnight church service

He would always stay at home, on the farm.

The story goes that one such Christmas, when his family were already gone to Church, the snow came down very heavily .

As he sat in the warm kitchen, beside the fire,  he kept hearing these thuds against the kitchen window and when he went outside, he saw lots of small birds trying to shelter under the lit window.

They had thought that they could shelter in the warm kitchen but they didn’t understand about glass windows.

The pathetic little wet bundles of bird touched this man’s heart and he decided that he would open his shed and let them shelter there.

But how to get them into the safety of the shed?

He opened the shed door and tried to shoo them in,

He put out bread in a trail to try and entice them in

But nothing worked,

Every time he went too near to them  they just scattered in fright.

He realised that it was hopeless, he just couldn’t get them to move into the shed.

He hated to see them freezing to death out in the cold when there was a warm shed just waiting on them.

He was so frustrated and came to realise that only birds can communicate with birds…. If only he was a bird, then he could explain to them where to go ……

Suddenly he sank to his knees as it dawned on him just why God had become man.

He understood for the first time why ‘The word became flesh’.

He finally ‘got it’

Wisdom: there when the world began,

The Word: there in the beginning ,

Jesus: there in the flesh and who lived among us.

God draws near to us in person

He became one of us,

He lived among us

He meets us where we are

He took our humanity on himself

This means that we don’t have to deny our humanity to meet him.

He came to show us how to live out the fullness of our humanity.

Our humanity wasn’t something base or worthless…..

In Jesus, holiness is now connected to humanity,

Connected to earth as well as heaven.

By becoming one of us, God took away the distance between the divine and the human.

He bridged the gap….forever

The Word became flesh

Not as a judge but as a Saviour

Became flesh in order to reveal our divine dignity as God’s own children

This is the good news,

Like the farmer in our story, all we have to do is open our hearts to receive it.

The wonder of God’s creation is there for all of us and that is why it can seem so horrible to see it being wantonly destroyed, usually by our carelessness and thoughlessness.

Sally McVeigh, a famous American Theologican, uses the idea of a Hotel vs a Home in trying to get us to understand what humankind are currently doing to our planet Earth.

As she points out , when you stay in a hotel, you use all the towels and throw them on the ground to be washed by someone else. You use more shampoo than you need… sure isn’t it free!

But if you are at home, you’d be careful to hang up your towel to dry so that you’d get at least a couple of showers out of it….

You only use the amount of shampoo that you need and you put the cap back on the bottle carefully so that it doesn’t spill all over the floor of the shower and get wasted.

This is the difference in how we must view the Earth, our home.

As a great poster puts it ‘There is no Planet B’,

Earth is all we have

and we are risking everything when we treat it as some kind of Radisson type Hotel we can move from to the next Hotel chain down the road.

We have to work to recover our sense of wonder for what is around us.

We have to sit up and notice the miracle of the moon above us.

We have to listen to AND value the birds and the bees – while we still have them!

Its a habit we can cultivate you know…

When I was a child I don’t ever remember seeing blue tits or  blackbirds…..

I know logically they must have been around but I don’t actually remember as a child looking and really seeing the beautiful colours of a Goldfinch or a Blue tit..

All birds I can remember were either crows, or seagulls or sparrows….

Is there more birds around now…. No….it’s only that now I take time to appreciate all that is around….

As I said, we take our lead from our scriptures and the Bible is hardly a minor contributor on writings about caring for creation, in fact, the Bible is a powerful ecological handbook on how to live rightly on this earth.

Since God creates and sustains ALL of creation,

we find, naturally enough, that the Bible calls us to honour all that is God’s

God repeatedly calls his creation GOOD

And Jesus Christ is the one through whom ALL THINGS are reconciled to God.

We are called, as part of Creation, to take care of the Creation that God has given us.

Often we just don’t do many of the things we know we should do.

Its important that we identify the stumbling blocks and try to do something about them.

We can do much as individuals obviously , at home, recycling , buying products that are not harmful to the environment, watching the water usage and so on but we can also do something as a church community

And that is where Eco Congregation comes into it.

As you all know , we are an Eco Congregation Church.

Eco-Congregation Ireland (ECI) encourages churches of all denominations to take an eco approach.

It was a project initiated by the Church in Society Forum – a standing committee of the Irish Inter-Church Meeting.

The Roman Catholic, Church of Ireland, Presbyterian and Methodist churches are involved as well as the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).

For three years I was the Church of Ireland Representative on the committee but I resigned from a lot of these committees about a year after I came to Cork as I was spending too much time travelling up to Dublin for meetings!

But that didn’t mean I stopped being interested in the environment …. I firmly believe that it all begins at home, we have to concentrate on these issues locally!

The Archdeacon Andrew Orr took my place on Ecocongregation and he is the Chair of it now, so we’re very proud of him.

Carrigaline Union became an Eco-Congregation a decade ago, back in 2014.

We signed up to their vision which is to see churches throughout Ireland adopt an eco approach to worship, lifestyle, property and finance management, community outreach and contact with the developing world.

Eco Congregation ask Christians everywhere to reflect on the beauty of God’s world and to consider what practical steps can be taken to prevent further damage to the environment.

Also, we are asked to pray for our wounded planet, for people in the developing world already affected by climate change and for future generations.

Eco Congregation offer resources and support which will helps us, as a church, to take practical eco action in the context of our Christian faith.

The resources are designed to enable congregations to be self-sufficient in their eco work and monitor their own progress.

Over the last 10 years, we have taken many small steps and while they seem small in the face of the magnitude of the Climate Change issue, they will make a real difference to our world and we can only begin here and now.

We have a vibrant parish Eco Group, headed up by Valerie and John Andrew and they would love to hear any ideas you might have to improve our eco living as a parish.

I would like to thank them both for the work that they put in and of course, the planting of the Bicentennial Oak Tree was at their suggestion.

Actually it has been wonderful the way all the different groups in the parish have been involved in our last year of celebrations.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

So let us all make a renewed effort to recapture the wonder of the glory of God – his creation…..

and then when we really really see the wonder of creation,

we will remember to treat creation as holy.

Amen

28th January 2024

The Revd Richard Dring

In the Gospel reading today Luke is detailing the Jewish rituals that are required following the birth of a child. This helps us to understand that Jesus was Jewish and was being brought up in the Jewish traditions and rituals. He was not a Christian living in Israel, the emergence of Christianity came as a much later stage after Jesus was crucified.

The Jewishness of Jesus and his family is a key part of his life, and we should not forget or overlook that aspect of his upbringing. It also helps us to consider what has happened to the Jews through the centuries, and particularly the Holocaust of World War 2. Yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day where we remember the impact the Nazi regime had on the Jews, some 6 million were systematically exterminated. Imagine if the whole population of Ireland was rounded up and systematically killed. That is the magnitude of the atrocity of what happened. We must also not forget that there were many millions more systematically removed form society and killed, groups such as the Roma, Gay, Political opponents such as Communists and Disabled people who did not fit the Aryan standard.

Holocaust day is remembered so that these Genocide events will not happen again, yet since 1945 the following Genocides have happened. It is in remembrance of the day in 1945 when the Red Army entered Auschwitz. Significantly the theme this year is “Fragility of Freedom”:

Darfour           (Sudan)           400,000 killed             (Ethnic cleansing)

Rwanda                                   800,000 killed             (Tutsi tribe)

Bosnia Herzegovina                200,000 killed             (Muslim faith)

Cambodia                   between 1.5 to 3.0 million killed.

Cultural Revolution    27 million people starved to death.

The United Nations has been unable to prevent these atrocities from happening, and revenge is never going to be a solution. What is continuing to happen around the world shows us how ineffective the system set up after World War 2 has become where the Victorious powers have a right of veto at the highest level, I believe there are strong reasons for reform however I also do not believe it will happen in the short term.

Back to our gospel reading, Luke chapter 2. Luke has painted a picture in this Chapter to help us all relate to the Birth of Jesus. There is something for everyone:

1. Jesus was born to a woman Mary who was not married to Joseph her future husband.

• Jesus was born in a Stable, probably not as we imagine but the lower area in a house where the animals are brought in out of the cold at night. The family living there were at a level slightly higher but unlikely to be separate room.

• The first people to visit Jesus were the shepherds, the lowest in society but encouraged by an angel to visit.

• Jesus is named on the 8^th day.

• Mary and Joseph sacrificed two turtle doves, an offering of the poor, those with money would have sacrificed a lamb. The purification ceremony which is briefly mentioned was purification of Mary, which had prevented her from entering the temple for in the case of a boy 40 days and for a girl 80 days. She was considered unclean.

• Jesus was then presented in the temple before two key people, Simeon who had been waiting for this to happen and in the discussion and blessing that took place he foretold to Mary and Joseph what was going to happen in the future as a result of Jesus ministry.

• Finally they met Anna a prophet. We have very little detail of what was spoken.

In all the events described by Luke he has given us all individuals with whom we can identify and through this make the story our own. We all can play a part no matter how small a part we feel it is. We are not all born to be leaders, we need all the gifts God has given each of us individually to be able to work together to develop and grow Gods kingdom on earth. The analogy used by some writers is all the parts of our body are unable to function alone however when put together look at what is achiever a living person. So If we all were leaders, chaos would ensue, and we would not have the talents required to work together for growth and development of the Kingdom of God.

We also are encouraged that at this is the point in Luke’s gospel that all of the events described are part of Jewish rituals. Jesus was a Jew and remained a Jew for all his ministry. Jesus used his knowledge as a Jew of the Old Testament to be able to challenge the establishment. He would have spoken with authority in any situation and would have been able to command the respect of those gathered for what he was saying based on his knowledge of the Hebrew scriptures.

The 7 events listed earlier show how the many aspects of Jesus life can relate to so many different people, Mary was a young single mother, from a family that very clearly did not have unlimited wealth. Mary and Joseph had to be aware of what they had and how to survive in a very challenging time.

Jesus was then presented in the temple where he was presented to Simeon and Anna, two who were in the twilight of their lives, however it has to be seen as important as their meeting with Jesus is included in Luke’s gospel. Not all of Jesus life is described in detail so when included in the Gospel there is a reason and we need to take note, it is there for a purpose.

The Rector

19^th January 2024

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Today’s gospel tells us that Jesus consciously stepped into the shoes of John the Baptist  (and remember how John had warned us that he wasn’t worthy to tie the thong of Jesus’ sandals!) 

now here is Jesus , taking the risk of being aligned to the person who has just been handed over to the authorities (and who we know will be slaughtered at the whim of a dancing girl’s mother)

So knowing the great personal cost, Jesus preaches the same message as John, but perhaps in gentler tones…  and maybe in better clothes!

But the message is the same

Yes, turn around your life

but do it because of your own intrinsic worth as children of a loving God, not just because of fear.

Today’s image is of Jesus walking along the shore and just picking out potential disciples….. just calling out to others to be with him in spreading the word of God.   It all seems so random!

He called ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

They were fishermen, carpenters, tax collectors, a few hotheads, a few wise ones, and he asked them to step up to the mark, to leave everything they knew and to follow him.

But we don’t have to feel guilty when we look at this pattern of total service to God,

The pattern of just downing everything and following.

 ….  For not everyone is called to leave our boats and our nets,

to leave our family and friends and homes,

The vast majority of us are only called to stay where we are and serve God here where we are

But what we all have in common

and what we all have to take seriously

is the call to follow him, not by leaving everything we know

but by transforming everything we know.

By becoming ourselves the light that lightens the darkness.

Don’t forget this is still the season of epiphany,

where we celebrate the coming of THE light of the world

that’s why the Star still shines from the spire of our church.

We have all seen over the last few years how the increasing levels of denial, division and misinformation around in society means that we must remain ever vigilant against hatred and identity-based hostility.

Rapid technological developments, a turbulent political climate, and world events beyond our control can leave us feeling helpless and insignificant.  

But ….. we can all stand in solidarity.

We can choose to be the light in the darkness in a variety of ways and places – at home,  in public,  and online.

There are many small ways that we can do this…..

We can be aware of what is going on around us,

we can ask awkward questions,

speak truth to power,

in any little way we can.

This is an epiphany of sorts…… 

We can train ourselves to be open to the suffering of ‘the other’ in a positive way, in a way that helps us to help others….

We can be the light in the life of someone else who needs help.

On the front of the Pewsheet today I spoke about people who quote other people and yet don’t actually change the way they live their lives to reflect the essence of the quote….. 

So called ‘virtue signalling’  

In this world of false faces on social media platforms, it can seem enough to just say something… rather than doing something.

And on the subject of quotes….we all know that very famous quote from the 18^th century Irishman Edmund Burke ,

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

But maybe you don’t know the rest of the quote?

It says …

Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little. The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.

Did nothing because he could only do a little… that really rings home to me anyway.

So what if we can only do a little…..

it’s a start ….. and didn’t Jesus tell us about tiny mustard seeds growing into trees that provided shade for many animals…

I know that recently I have often spoken about Sabeel, the Palestinian Ecumenical Peace Group. I try and attend their online Thursday services when I can.  

But there’s another group that I’ve be connected with for the last few years called ‘Rabbis for Human Rights’, they are based in Israel and are exactly what it sounds like… a group of Rabbis who work, on the ground, for peace.  I’m a great admirer of their brave work, often at odds with the Authorities there. 

At the moment, they have an initiative called ‘Plant Justice – Build Hope’

At this tragic and brutal time , in the shadow of war, they feel that there is a desperate need for action, to build Israeli-Palestinian partnership, to show solidarity and compassion, and to act for human rights for all.

This month they are planting over 1,000 Olive Trees in partnership with Palestinian communities in the West Bank. Already dozens of Rabbis and activists have taken part in planting events, which are both symbolic and very real.

They said that they returned to the Palestinan village of Burin, just weeks ago the farmers had sent them a video of settlers burning their olive trees. They came together in their commitment that Palestinian farmers must have access to their lands and need to be protected from Jewish terror.

They planted trees in al-Sawiya, where Mohamad Bilal Salah was shot dead by a settler while he harvested his olives.

And they will be returning to Turmus Aya, a town which suffered a major settler attack, resulting in the death of a young man and the arson of homes, cars and olive groves.

The partnerships they build are meaningful and as they say themselves

‘our message is clear: Palestinians deserve human rights, their land must be respected, and their lives protected. In the context of the war in Gaza, these values are more important than ever’.

They ask people to please join them by donating a tree which will be planted in partnership and solidarity in a Palestinian community which is facing threats.

This I was able to do, donating from the comfort of my own sitting room….. I know it’s only a little but isn’t it better to light a candle than sit and curse the darkness.

Simon, Andrew, James and John had their Epiphany that day on the shores of the Sea of Galillee , and as we know, they responded wholeheartedly and followed Jesus.

They didn’t say, but sure we’re only simple fishermen, there’s nothing we can do that would make a difference  …..

They were surely terrified at the change that was being asked of them……and yet they responded of their own free will….. and by their response they were freed from the mundane lives they had led,

So yes, they must have felt terror but perhaps exhilaration too!

When you put your life in God’s hands, it is terrifying, when you step out in faith, it is thrilling and frightening, but also so so right.

We don’t choose our Epiphanies, any more than the disciples did on the lake shore that day 

Epiphany is all about our lives having changed forever ,

because when the word became flesh,

when the light came into the world,

nothing was ever the same again.

We are all called to be that light in the darkness.

Amen.

The Rector

14^th January 2023 2^nd Sunday after Epiphany.

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

I love the story of Samuel, his confusion about who was being called and so on. This was the first reading for last Wednesday’s HC service too.

I’ve mentioned before that it always reminds me of Donald Keegan, a wonderful man who had been the Archdeacon of Birr, and I met him when he had retired to Greystones and used to help out now and again, actually his daughter Ruth Elmes is now the Rector in Dalkey where I did my training.

Donald was a really lovely man who died all too soon into his retirement and is still sadly missed….

But why I mention him again today is that I remember him preaching about these words from Samuel and telling us all that he had a dog which he called Samuel because he always had to call him three times before he came to him!

The theme of two of the readings today is that of being called

Samuel is called to be a prophet.

Andrew and the others are called to be disciples.

We don’t decide if we are called….

The initiative is always Gods.

The call is always Gods.

We can just respond…..

And every call demands a response.  You often hear of people who ignore a calling for years but it never goes away….

In today’s readings, we hear of specific and unique calls.

And usually we call a specific and unique call a vocation.

The bishop last year organized a wonderful morning of Prayer in Cloyne Cathedral specifically to encourage people to think about whether or not they were being ‘called’ – actually it was a lovely morning AND a great success, there were a good few people who came forward for lay reader training or OLM training… amazing.

Indeed it was so good that the Bishop is repeating it again at the end of this month…. It’s in the Pewsheet but basically there will be an ‘open’ church in Cloyne Cathedral from 11 until 1pm on Saturday 27^th… you can just drop in for a few minutes if you feel like it…..

We used to think of vocations as something only people like priests had ….. or at a stretch, nurses and teachers, so even though I mentioned the Bishop’s morning, I’m not just speaking about vocations to ordained ministry…Thankfully nowadays it is beginning to be recognised that at times we are all called, in some manner or another, in whatever we are or do,

We aren’t all priests, teachers, nuns or doctors but we all share the same call to service,

And of course service to God doesn’t begin and end on a Sunday morning.

As I typed these words I am reminded that God is just as present with us at 20 to 5 on a Friday afternoon as he is at this minute…in this church.

And God has indeed called us all

In many ways and at many levels.

He called us into life,  and throughout our lives God continues to call us….

calls us to live a life worthy of our dignity as his children.

And then at the end, God will call us again

From this life to life eternal.

There is no doubt that God’s call can take many forms, and be fulfilled in different ways.

And it is rarely experienced in the dramatic way as the call of Samuel…. I think God would have to have called me more than THREE times!

Or it’s rarely experienced in as real a way as the first disciples of Jesus, abandoning all they had and following him

But….

God does call us – he calls out to the depths of our hearts

Calls us to be close to him.

There is a Jesuit Priest in the US , Richard Rohr, whom I admire greatly and whom I have spoken about many many  times….

He and his team in New Mexico share daily thoughts by email and once when he was speaking about the practice of contemplation.. he said this..

You cannot know God the way you know anything else;

you only know God or the soul of anything subject to subject, center to center,

by a process of “mirroring” where like knows like and love knows love—

“deep calling unto deep” (Psalm 42:7).

The Divine Spirit planted deep inside each of us yearns for and responds to God—and vice versa (see James 4:5)

Perhaps we feel the call or whatever you like to call it like some kind of a tug on our hearts, rather than words or an actual call.

As St. Augustine put it in that well known phrase ….

Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.

Some people experience this call as a yearning inside of themselves,

which perhaps can be felt most strongly in our quieter and more reflective moments.

I have often mentioned that Mother Theresa quote about how she was once asked by a journalist what words did she use while she was praying.

She said that she didn’t use words….she just listened.

The Journalist immediately asked her what God said to her….she answered, nothing! God just listens too.

The story of the call of Samuel and of the disciples are still relevant to us now, here, in 2023.

For just like Samuel , we too are being called to work for God,   here  – in our own time and place, in this crazy, war weary time and place.

And just like the first disciples, we are also called to be his disciples…..

Last week, we thought about our baptismal promises….

At our baptisms, what we are actually called to is discipleship ,

At baptism , we are incorporated into the community of disciples.

All of us

In all of our different roles, jobs and situations,

Whether we are ordained, lay, working, retired …

We all have been called.

Samuel found out….eventually ….. that every call needs a response.

And we just have to work out,  with God’s help,

what our response is to be!

Amen.

The Rector

Baptism of Christ 1^st Sunday after Epiphany 7^th January, 2024

In the name of God, Father , Son and Holy Spirit

Today we are hearing about what is the third great ‘epiphany’ or ‘showing of God’ in the human person of Jesus.

The first ‘epiphany’ was of course at the actual birth of the child Jesus in the stable at Bethlehem when he was visited by the shepherds representing the poor, the marginalised and the sinful for whom Jesus had specially come.

This, obviously, we celebrated on 25^th December, Christmas Day.

The second ‘epiphany’ was when the ‘wise men’ came from ‘the East’ to worship the newly born Jesus. They represented all those peoples and nations who were being invited to be numbered among God’s own people through the mediation of Jesus as Lord.

This was celebrated yesterday 6^th, the feast of the Epiphany….

But today we celebrate the third great ‘epiphany’ of the Lord in Jesus Christ.

The chronological time has leaped forward by at least three decades….. much later than the events celebrated over the last two weeks, the birth of Jesus and the visitation of the Magi.

In our Gospel today, Jesus is now an adult, probably about 30 years of age.

We are brought to the banks of the River Jordan somewhere north of Jerusalem where John the Baptist, a cousin of Jesus, is living out in the desert.

All through the Hebrew Scriptures, we find that the desert in some ways is a place where God can be found, although for Jesus, immediately after the baptism,  it was also a place of trial and temptation.

John leads a very austere life, dressed in the simplest of clothes and sustaining himself on whatever nourishment he can find in the vicinity.

He has already made a name for himself as a man of God and large numbers come out to hear and be influenced by him….  which is why he is always at pains to explain that it is Jesus and not he who is the chosen one of God.

The opening words of today’s Gospel tell us that he was proclaiming “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins”.

It is important not to misunderstand the meaning of these words.

It would be quite wrong to think that people simply had to come for baptism in the river for all their sins to be wiped out.

That would be little more than superstition.

The baptism itself was a symbolic act which had to be accompanied by an inner change.

The word for ‘repentance’ here is metanoia in Greek, a word I’ve often mentioned before.

This word implies a radical change in the way we look at the meaning and purpose of life

and how we actually and practically live that life ourselves.

It calls for much more than is normally meant by ‘repentance’ which we normally understand as ‘being sorry’ for something we have done.

Metanoia is much more than just feeling sorry.

It calls for a total re-organisation of our attitudes so that such our current way of behaving would simply be cut out of our life.

It’s all very new yearish isn’t it!

This then is what is required of us,  to turn away from sin and turn to God, cleansed and renewed by baptism.

On Thursday , I joined in with people from all over the world for the weekly service from Jerusalem. Sabeel, the Palestinian ecumenical pacifist Christian theology group I have been connected with for the last 20 years have a zoom service each Thursday at 4pm Irish time and I have tried, since 7^th October (imagine 3 MONTHS ago today!) to be there when I can.  Tony Murphy is a regular too.

Each week, the readings for the coming Sunday are discussed , from the perspective of what these Palestinian Christians are going through, and it makes for some tough listening.

Last Thursday was no different.

One of the Sabeel fulltime people, a young man called Samuel, led the reflection.  

For the last months, along with many others, I was guilty of assuming that he was only there to help the older Sabeel people manage the Zoom technology…. Boy were we wrong!

He was unbelievable.  Such a powerful sermon.

He spoke from his own personal experience of being a young Christian living in the Holy Land, especially for the last three months.

He talked about Baptism, drawing also on Paul’s ‘Baptism of the Holy Spirit’ theme in our epistle.

He asked just what is Baptism of the Holy Spirit and connected it with Martyrdom.

Martyr is a word you hear every often at the moment in Gaza and Israel.

To be a Martyr is to be a Witness

The word “martyr” comes originally from the ancient Greek legal term for “witness”, for someone who gives testimony or evidence in a court of law.

Samuel spoke about the fact that he and many young Palestinian Christians are being encouraged to stay put, to be witnesses , to be martyrs,  in this land of Jesus’ birth.

One of the group afterwards commended Samuel on remaining in the land, especially as he has half British and could ‘escape’ anytime he wanted to.

Samuel reminded us that the Gospel of Mark, the Gospel we have just heard, was originally written for a martyred church but that is also a living text for all, for the whole community, heroes and villians alike…..

One sentence he said really stuck with me

‘The waters that cleanse you also drown you’

In Baptism , we are meant to die to the old life and be renewed in the kingdom values of Jesus.

Where oppressors will never have the last word, where we are committed to the power of love, not the power of power.

Where we take on the likeness and identify of Christ.

Where we commit to witnessing even if it comes at great cost. Where we have to reject the current thinking, reject colonial racist ideologies and toxic hierarchies

Where we have to work together to dismantle systems of thought that subjugate others…embracing humility, working at listening to others, even those, particularly those,  we don’t agree with.

Which brings to mind Dietrich Boenhoffer’s ‘Costly Grace’ and of course he did pay the ultimate price when he was executed by the Nazi Regime days before the end of WWII.

When we are baptised , most of us as babies, ….I was only 5 days old when I was baptized… not that unusual 65 years ago…….

When we were baptised, our parents and Godparents would have spoken for us,

Then when we were confirmed, we took on these promises as our own, we ‘confirmed’ them,  although to be fair, I wonder how many of us actually thought THAT much at the time of our confirmations back then? 

I do think nowadays the young people think about their confirmations more but back then there was a certain way of just getting it ‘done’ …. Or perhaps you were all far holier than I was then!  The only thing I can remember is being terrified of the bishop asking me a question!

But now, like Jesus in our Gospel today, we are all grown up.   And as adults we must continue to live up to the promises that were made, by our Godparents on our behalf or by our younger selves.

I’ll just remind you of what the bishop says to the candidates for confirmation…..

He says that ‘In baptism, God calls us from darkness to his marvellous light. To follow Christ means dying to sin and rising to new life with him’

Then he asks if they reject the devil and all proud rebellion against God?

If they renounce the deceit and corruption of evil?

If they repent of the sins that separate us from God and neighbour?

Here then is the commitment , the baptism of the Holy Spirit, what we are all signed up to, to work against evil and sin for the rest of our lives, here we have the responsibility to stand against evil.

After these renouncements, the bishop continues with the positive affirmations….

Asking if they turn to Christ as Saviour, submit to Christ as Lord, come to Christ, the Way, the Truth and the Life?

All that is not just for confirmation days you know,

That is what is asked of us all… and not just in January but each and every day

to turn to Christ

and to live each and every day in his Grace… his costly Grace that sometimes asks a heavy price.

Amen.

The Rector

The Epiphany  6^th January, 2024   St Mary’s

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit

Today we have moved out of Christmas tide into Epiphany-tide  

The word Epiphany itself means a Revelation, 

a showing forth

The wise men saw through the dirt and ordinariness of the stable.

They glimpsed the radiance of the Holy Child of Bethlehem.

Faith enabled them to see beyond the straw and animals,

I’ve heard the ‘Faith’ of the Wise Men being spoken of as  their fourth Gift to the Baby Jesus.

Gold, Frankincense, Myrrh and Faith.

A wise man once said the original Wise Men didn’t see the star and set out in faith

but that they had set out in faith and this enabled them to see the star……

The word Epiphany means a Revelation and our ordinary daily lives are full of little epiphanies for those who have eyes to see and minds to reflect.

They slip though the cracks of our busy, restless lives and catch us unawares.

A moment of peace

A moment of beauty

We all have the capacity to catch  a glimpse of what the Wise Men saw that day.

C.S Lewis puts it beautifully.

He calls it the ‘inconsolable Secret’ in all of us

‘The scent of a flower we have not found

The echo of a tune we have not heard

News from a country we have never yet visited’….

Like the three wise men, people can sometimes travel to far-off places in search of spiritual experiences

But we don’t have to physically travel anywhere.

His star rises before us wherever we are

Because of the coming of Christ,

we need no longer fear the darkness

A light has come into the world

A light that shines in the dark

A light that no darkness can overpower

That’s why I love having the Christingle service AFTER Christmas!

In our lives , there is no one Epiphany

There are lots of little ones…..

God has been gradually revealing himself to us all of our lives.

Through the conviction of our parents

Through the influence of spiritual people who have touched us in some way

Through the piercing insights granted sometimes to us while doing something perfectly ordinary.

In our faith communities….

And through unexpected kindnesses from strangers…..

It’s like looking at a flower in great detail all of a sudden, seeing it in all its glory,

Or really seeing a bird in all its feathery beauty as if for the very first time.             

Epiphany – Manifestation or showing forth, something wonderful is revealed…..

Through the discerning eyes of these foreign visitors to a vulnerable baby, 

Jesus who is to be the Christ is revealed to all of us,

not just as a Jewish baby for a Jewish Nation

But as a Saviour for the whole world

A Saviour for each and every one of us.

The Magi were searching for Christ.

When they found him, they worshipped him and offered him gifts.

Millions of people have followed in the footsteps of the Magi and have come to Christ.

We count ourselves among them.

Let us open our hearts and minds to encounter Christ anew in this Eucharist today, on the feast of the first Epiphany!

Amen.