Anatomy of Eternal Light

Sermon for Trinity Sunday

Did you watch the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex? Perhaps then, you might remember that the bride walked into the Chapel to the music “Eternal Source of Light Divine” by Handel. You might not be very familiar with that. It was composed for the birthday of Queen Anne in 1713. The words, written by Ambrose Philips, run as follows:

Eternal Source of light divine,
With double warmth Thy beams display,
And with distinguished glory shine,
To add a lustre to this day.

Contained in this verse, we can discover the foundation of our Catholic Faith whether or not Philips intended it to be so.

How does this work?

[PAUSE]

Here on Trinity Sunday, we have a duty to reflect upon the incomprehensible existence of God. Today, we have the opportunity to rejoice in the fact that God must go beyond our understanding, that He must confound our thinking. In order to see this, we must start with what we know.

We believe in God the Father Almighty.

If we start here, then we are acknowledging at least three things. First, that we do believe in God. Second, that He is a Father. Third, that He can do all that is possible to do.

He is the Father, and this is significant. If He is a Father then He must have at least one child. He must be the reason why someone else exists. He is a source – the Eternal Source.

We believe in Jesus Christ, His Son, Our Lord. If Jesus is the Son of God, then He is the reason why His Father is God. Furthermore, we believe that Our Lord Jesus is the only Son of God. As children of our parents, we know that there was a time when we did not exist. We call that “before we were born”. However, we believe that He is the Son but that He was born of the Father in Eternity. This means that Our Lord Jesus is Himself Eternal and, like His Father, there has never been a time when He did not exist. As the Christmas Carol says of Jesus, He is “Very God, begotten, NOT created.” Because the Father and Son are linked very closely, we see that they must both be fully Divine. Jesus tells us that He is the Light of the World, and His Father is the Eternal Source of Light Divine. The Father is God. The Son is God.

But there is only one God. So the Son is fully God and the Father is fully God. But the Father is not the Son. That’s where things begin to go beyond our understanding.

[PAUSE]

Let’s continue.

We believe in the Holy Ghost, too. We know Him as the Lord and Giver of Life. He is the Breath of God Who is there from the very beginning. He is breathed out by the Father and that is what we mean when we say that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father. Again, this happens in Eternity apart from any created Time. Does the Holy Ghost proceed from the Son?

We see that Jesus breathes out the Holy Ghost on His disciples just before His Ascension into Heaven. However, this is in Time. To ask when the Father brought forth His Son doesn’t make sense because this happens outside of Time. To ask when the Father breathes out the Holy Ghost doesn’t make sense because that happens outside of Time as well. We can say when Jesus breathes out the Holy Ghost, so this means that it isn’t eternal. The Holy Ghost does not eternally proceed from the Son, but rather eternally from the Father and into our Time through the Son. That’s what we should mean when we say in the Creed that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son. Each one is God, yet there are not three gods but One God only.

[PAUSE]

Perhaps you are finding this all very technical and probably exceedingly boring. Why’s that? Perhaps because you stopped understanding what’s being said? Or perhaps you knew this all already? So why bother with it all?

We bother because this complicated God of the Creed is our God. This is how He is and how we begin to form our relationship with Him. Our lack of understanding helps us connect with Him through what we do know. We know that God is our source, the reason why we exist, and by thinking about how He reveals Himself to us, we fall down at His feet worshipping the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, each distinct, each true God.

When our understanding leaves us, this is precisely the moment when we need to stand in the warmth of His light and just enjoy it. This is the Light Divine that warms us completely through, not just our minds, but our bodies and souls as well! We use the loss of our understanding to propel us into that Light Divine where we can truly discover God who exceeds all we can possibly imagine and yet reached out to us in true, pure love, warming our dark, cold lives with the beams of His light.

Let us say our creed and rush headlong past where our heads cry, "stop!" trusting only in His love for us.

Believing in prayer

Sermon for Trinity Sunday

 

Why do we say the Creed every Sunday after the Sermon? Surely we know what we believe by now.

 

We believe the Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Ghost is God, and yet there are not three gods but one God only. We know that this passes our understanding, but we also know that we want to make sure that we address God correctly. However, we say the Creed in one form of three at every service in the Anglican Catholic Church. Isn’t this overkill? Won’t this make our words a bit too easy to say?

 

[PAUSE]

 

Perhaps what we sometimes for get to appreciate is that we pray the Creed. We don’t just say it! This is why it’s part of our liturgy. Remember that liturgy means “work of the people” – it’s our job to do when we come to worship God.

 

In ancient times, the Mass was very obviously separated into two bits. The first part of the Mass was attended by everyone so that they could hear the readings and the Gospel. However, at the beginning of the second part of the Mass, all those who had not yet been baptised, those who were new to the Faith and those who were doing public penance of their sins had to leave before the sacrament of the Eucharist took place. In order to receive Communion, you have to believe. We are brought into a relationship with God.

 

It’s obvious why the people who had just turned up to the Church for the first time were not able to receive Communion. They did not have any idea what they were doing and needed, not just to be taught, but to become familiar with the Church. Let’s be clear, intellectual knowledge is not what you need to be a Christian. It’s not what you know, it’s Who you know. Thus, people new to the faith had not yet begun to form that relationship with God or His Church.

 

Likewise, sinners too, people who had fallen from the Faith, who had stolen, even murdered, were not allowed to receive Communion for a while – sometimes nearly twenty years. The reason why is actually clear: these folk had broken their relationship with God through their sin and need some time to re-forge that relationship.

 

[PAUSE]

 

In our Mass today, it is the Creed that bridges the gap between the first part of the Mass and the second. It is the moment when we say clearly Whom we worship. If we are going to receive Our Lord Jesus Christ in the sacrament, then we are going to need to believe that He is there and fulfilling His promise to us that we eat His Body and drink His Blood. However, if we believe in Jesus Christ, then we are going to need to believe in His Father Who sent Him, and the Holy Ghost Whom He sends and by Whom the sacrament happens.

 

Not only is our Creed a statement of our faith, it is a prayer for our relationship with God. It is a prayer that forces us to confront the immensity and incomprehensibility of God who is in three Persons and yet fully one.

 

That’s a lot of work to do but saying the Creed prayerfully is the beginning. The more we invest in our Liturgy, in our work to praise God, the deeper our relationship with Him.

 

Identifying Anglican Catholicism

I suppose that much of which I blog about is the question of labels and naming. The question is and always seems to be these days, what is the noun and what are the adjectives? After all, it is the noun and the adjectives that make the business of identification work. The question is, who gets to choose those adjectives? Do they come from us, or do they come from the world around?

Let us take, for example, the Anglican Catholic Church. That’s the name that we chose for ourselves nearly forty years ago and, yet, every term in our name might be disputed somewhere along the line. It comprises of two adjectives (Anglican, Catholic) and a noun (Church) and thus we do have a burden of responsibility as to why someone else should agree that we are what we say we are.

With regard to “Anglican”, we find ourselves up against the Anglican Communion who would say that, to be Anglican, we must be in communion with the Church of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury in particular. That’s the definition that they use.

With regard to “Catholic”, we find ourselves up against the Roman Catholic Church who would say that, to be Catholic, we must be in communion with the Bishop of Rome and submit to his authority over the whole church.

With regard to “Church”, we find ourselves up against some Protestants who say that we cannot be Christians because we claim to be Catholic and are therefore not of the Church. That being said, neither would the Eastern Orthodox nor the pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church regard us as being a Church. These days, the RCC would say that we are an ecclesial community whose relationship with the Church is somewhat ambiguous. Since, for them, the Church subsists in the Roman Communion, it would seem that we are not.

Thus, at every stage we find ourselves in conflict with someone else’s thinking on the matter. We are now faced with a problem because each one of these groups defines each term differently from us. The problem goes away if we just, like Humpty Dumpty, make our own definitions of the terms. However, we are still faced with the fact that we use words to communicate and, if we change the definitions, then we lose that communication with so many people.

Of course, many modern folk will say that language is fluid and that words change their meanings all the time. The child born on the Sabbath Day is bonny, blithe, happy and gay, yet there seem to be a lot of heterosexuals born on a Sunday, too! If words do evolve and change their meaning with time, then clearly who and what we are is not something that can be understood by all people everywhere. Yet, the Catholic Faith is that which is indeed supposed to be believed at all times, in all places by all Christians – at least that’s the impression that St Vincent of Lerins says. Is he defining “catholic” for himself?

If I use the words “hard drive” everyone in the computing industry knows what I’m talking about. Those who lived sixty years ago would think that I had trouble getting from A to B. Thus, context matters: “I had a hard drive to get my hard drive fixed.”

It seems that it cannot ever be wrong to use words and adjectives in their original sense because that is what the words were used for. Thus, if we want to use the phrase “Anglican Catholic Church” in a way that people agree with our use of language then we can always specify that we use the words as meant in their original sense before the intervening centuries changed the meaning. This gives at least a peg on which we can base any further discussions.

Thus, for the word “Anglican” we go back to 1246 and say that it means “English” in the sense of “ecclesia Anglicana”.  Clearly, this predates the Reformation and thus predates the Church of England in the sense that we now mean it, namely those in Communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury. This does pose a problem because, clearly, the present Archbishop, Justin Welby is not be in communion with Archbishop (St?) Boniface of Savoy (incumbent 1241-1270). Archbishop Boniface is clearly a member of the ecclesia Anglicana. Yet, if the Anglican Catholic Church cannot use the word Anglican, neither can the Archbishops of Canterbury from Cranmer onwards! (Cardinal Pole being an exception, perhaps)

Where do we go for “Catholic” in the original sense? The earliest we can go is to St Ignatius of Antioch writing to the Church in Smyrna in AD107 and it appears that the word is older than that. St Ignatius writes (Smyrnaeans viii.2)

οπου αν φανη ο επισκοπος, εκει το πληθος εστω, ωσπερ οπου αν η Χριστος Ιησους, εκει η καθολικη εκκλησια 

Wherever the bishop appears, there let the congregation be; just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.

Nowhere in this definition is any mention of the Pope, just the gathering of the people around the bishop. Yet, neither is the notion of Catholic Church as the body opposed to the later heresies from AD200. Given our firm stance against all the heresies that have arisen over the years, including those of the present age which are a resurgence of the old heresies, we might be oversimplifying our case by going to the original definition. However, we can see that what St Ignatius is getting at is an idea of a church that is unified by the bishops who are worthy of obedience because they possess the ability to dispense grace of the sacraments through God’s grace to them. St Ignatius seeks the unity of the Church in doctrine through that obedience to the Bishops and thus it is reasonable to conclude that, although the notion of Catholic Church versus heretical sects arises from the third century, the word “Catholic” does not change definition sufficiently radically from St Ignatius to St Vincent of Lerins who says that the Catholic Faith is “quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est.” (That which is believed everywhere, always and by all) Note that the same cannot be said of the Pope’s Universal Jurisdiction.

And what about “Church”? That goes back to the word “kyriakos” meaning belonging to the Lord. By professing our Faith in God we are assured of being members of the Body of Christ. 

So there you have it. We have real and objective reasons for believing that the Anglican Catholic Church is appropriately named. While our name is a registered service mark, we are willing to talk with all those who believe that the phrase might apply to them.

I was made aware of a husband and wife team who started to call themselves the Traditional Anglican Catholic Church. In adding in the word "Traditional" they sought to distance themselves from us. The difference that I noted was that they allowed the highly untraditional and heterodox notion of ordained women. They weren't true to the original definitions of the words.

Why should that matter? Words change their meaning.

Of course it matters. We believe ourselves to be part of the Catholic Church, and that means that we do have a responsibility to all her members to preserve unity. The fact that the majority of those members are dead means nothing: we are still in communion with them and we seek to maintain that solidarity. Thus, in this case, the original senses of the words do matter even if we are using English and not the Greek of St Ignatius, nor the Latin of St Boniface of Savoy.

The "Traditional Anglican Catholic Church" was not true to this idea and is essentially self-contradictory. I believe they have now renamed themselves as the "Trinitarian Anglican Church" which is even more bonkers as you have to be a Trinitarian in order to be in the Church! Quite why they don't join an existing body like the CofE, AMiE, or one of the liberal Old Catholic Churches who ordain women, I don't know. Why exist to preserve disunity among Christians? They even claim to be "continuing Anglican" but have nothing to do with the Congress of St Louis which gave birth to the Continuing Anglican Movement. As of 2017, all Continuing Anglicans are in communion and the Trinitarian Anglican Church is not one of them.

This principle of going back to the roots may not always work, but it should help over disputed terms such as, perhaps, "man" and "woman".

How to See a Ghost!

Sermon for Whitsunday

Apparently, the British Isles is one of the most haunted countries in the world. Many of its historical sites are reputed to be visited by spirits, some of whom re-enact the manner of their demise. Others stare despondently through windows. Others are said to play pranks.

Apparently twenty-eight percent of British citizens claim to have seen a ghost. What do we think about that? Christians aren't supposed to believe in ghosts, are we?

[PAUSE]

Of course we are! We are supposed to believe in the Holy Ghost, and we remember that today. But have you ever seen the Holy Ghost?

It's a sad fact that the Holy Ghost is not perceived by many Christians as being very obvious as the Father and the Son. Even in the Bible, the Holy Ghost only seems to become prominent as being foretold by Our Lord and becoming present in the Acts of the Apostles. Yet, He is present throughout the entirety of Holy Scripture, moving on the face of the waters in the first verses of Genesis. We know that Scripture is God-breathed and we remember that the Hebrew word for breath is ruach which is the same as the word used for the Spirit of God.

We do see the Holy Ghost descending on Our Lord like a dove at His baptism. We see His fire upon the heads of the Apostles as they receive their ordination as bishops from God Himself on this day of Pentecost. They have already been baptised with the Holy Ghost when Our Lord breathes on them and tells them, "receive ye the Holy Ghost." This anointing with the Holy Ghost comes after Our Lord's ascension.

We believe that we too, like the apostles, are baptised with the Holy Ghost. Like the apostles, when we were baptised, we probably didn't see anything at that moment. We didn't see the Holy Ghost descend on us like a dove when we were at the font. Our Bishops probably didn't have a fire seen burning above their head when they were consecrated, though there are some reports of unusual and holy things happening for some.

That ought to worry us a bit, for Jesus does say to His disciples that the Holy Ghost "the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him." If we don't see the Holy Ghost at our baptisms, confirmations or ordinations, then perhaps we aren't really receiving Him because we aren't seeing Him. Perhaps all of our sacraments are elaborate charades, just dress-up, smoke and mirrors.

You don't believe that, do you?

[PAUSE]

Of course, some people do believe that and will laugh at us for all our ritual, our strange dress, our focus on little actions which seem so insignificant as to be just silly. Guess what! It's these people who are of the world. They see only through the world's eye; they do not know God because they don't want to know God. Thus, they will be given exactly what they want - an absence of God. They can't receive Him because they won't receive Him.

Our Lord seems to be saying that there are two ways of seeing things, and this really does show up in our church life.

 What we see is wafer and wine, but we are looking with our eyes of the world. If we look again, this time bringing our belief and trust in Our Lord Jesus' promises, then we see His Body and Blood. Nothing changes with our eyes, but something does change in the way that we look at things because we look at them with God showing us His truth.

We see water on the baby's head and, trusting in God, we see a new member of the Church.
We see the hands of the Bishop upon the man's head and, trusting in God, we see a new priest at whose hands we may receive the true grace of God given for us through His love.

We see because we believe. This is the mistake that St Thomas makes and yet he is corrected. It's so sad that he is known as Doubting Thomas for this single instance of doubt when, receiving the Holy Ghost, he goes out and brings Christianity to India which still thrives to this day! We should be calling Him Believing Thomas because we see, trusting in God, a man who brings the faith to people who are hungry for salvation and tired of sin.

We see a church of millions arise from the work of a tiny handful of men and women and, trusting in God, we know it to be the work of the Holy Ghost.

[PAUSE]

Creation is literally nothing without its Creator. Many people try to disengage the world from God and in doing so lose out on what really is. They lose the light of the world and so things become dark. If we want to see God, then we must believe in Him and we will see Him at work. We can't just ask to see Him as if He were a spectacle like a fireworks show because that is not believing. That is putting Him to the test.

To believe means to love and, if we love, then we must obey His commandments. That's how we see the Holy Ghost!

The Postmodern Babel of Self-Definition

So let us therefore create a new guild of craftsmen, free of the divisive class pretensions that endeavoured to raise a prideful barrier between craftsmen and artists! Let us strive for, conceive and create the new building of the future that will unite every discipline, architecture and sculpture and painting, and which will one day rise heavenwards from the million hands of craftsmen as a clear symbol of a new belief to come. (Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Manifesto 1919)

Now let us compare this with:

And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. (Genesis 11: 4)

The Bauhaus Manifesto is a crystallization of ideas of various artists which began the whole idea of Postmodernism. While definitions are always a bit tricky to come by, it seems to be a defining characteristic of Postmodernism to seek to rid itself from the shackles of the Modern and to purge itself of former things which impede its becoming.

If Gropius is indeed representative of the postmodern movement in art and if art is the means by which people can engage with the thinking of others on the basis of a physical Impression of a form, then Postmodernism can only ever end in Babel and its consequences.

We see this happening now with the distortion of language whereby people are now defining what words mean on their own terms and thereby rob the conversation of any common language. The claim that we can always self-identify and have the right to be what we say we are is wholly solipsist because it denies the point of view of others. To say that we are what we say we are denies the existence of objectivity and the right of others to speak as they see.

I notice that there are those who refuse to debate their acceptance of the right to self-identify on the grounds that to engage in debate would be tantamount to debating their very existence. Their only recourse is to protest violently and fight to silence their opposition on the grounds that their opposition is an oppressor and they victims of this oppression.

These folk are effectively confusing adjective with definition. If they are not described by the adjectives that they deem to make up their person then they believe themselves to have been diminished in a real way which they interpret as oppression. An Aristotelian might say that there is a confusion of accident with substance, but the materialist would say that there is no distinction to speak of between the two concepts. For the materialist, we are the sum of our adjectives. Yet, those who believe in the right to self-identification - i.e those who believe that they can control how they are to be perceived - not only are they materialist in their thinking, but also, in that they believe that they exercise this control, seek to bend the world to their will in a solipsist manner. They are effectively narcissists.

Thus with the destruction of the objective, these folk destroy any and all honest scientific enquiry but rather subject all science to personal politics and personal philosophy.

Thus, a world in which the right to self-identification is inherent is a world of noise as people try and live as a society of atoms, never truly interacting, never truly sharing anything of humanity and labouring all the while to define themselves against the oppression of others' language. Truly, this becomes a case of l'Enfers c'est les autres. Never can there be any rest or relaxation because the fight to exist is constant. I wonder if this may be the cause of an increased rate of suicide and the call for euthanasia. 

To be truly social is to be self-giving. Love requires this at the deepest level and to love means to allow others to make a claim on you. To desire to be part of a better society means giving up any pretence to a right of our own self-definition and allow ourselves to be identified by others. We cannot join a group by defining ourselves to be a member. We have to wait for the invitation and the consent of others so that we know we can be accepted as we are and as others see us. If there is no invitation or consent, then to take membership of the group by force is a form of rape. It is an affront to Love and to Society. The result is confusion, scattering, isolation and an existential nightmare.

Already, Western Governments are paving the way for self-identification to become a legal right. The societies they govern are becoming sick, jaded, faithless, hopeless and loveless. The only hope is to recognise that we have an objective existence over which we have no control, to accept that, and further to allow it to bring us closer to other human beings and to God Who in being the Creator has the right to define us as we really are so that we can be truly loved.

An End to the End of All Things

Sermon for the Sunday after the Ascension

It looks as if St Peter has donned his sandwich boards and is strolling through the streets saying, “The end of all things is at hand!” How do you feel about that? How do these people who keep banging on about the end of the world being nigh make you feel?

There have been quite a few dates for the end of the world given recently, none of which have obviously come to pass. In fact, the behaviour of some Christians in predicting the End of the World so accurately is rather embarrassing for the rest of us because it never happens! And we who do not make such sweeping statements about the End get tarred with the same brush of lunacy. It’s not fair, is it?

Is St Peter really one of those who wants us to believe that the world will end next Thursday tea-time?

[PAUSE]

The End of the World – it’s a phrase that carries images of death, destruction, war, famine, pestilence, Heaven and Hell. And yet, this is perhaps not what St Peter means because he says in his second letter, “But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” Our Lord Himself reminds us that, concerning the End of the World, “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.” This is clear:  human beings are not to know when the End will come.

Yet St Peter is now two millennia distant from us. How can the End of All things be near if they are in fact so far in the past?

Perhaps there is a different way of understanding the word “End”.

[PAUSE]

We often say, “the ends does not justify the means.” What does this mean? It means that the task we intend to complete does not allow us to use any method (especially an immoral one) to complete it. The word “end” here is related to the “completed task”. The “End” here is the finished article. When Our Lord cries out, “It is finished” on the Cross, He is crying out in triumph because He has completed our salvation in Him. He has done what He set out to do at the cost of His life. This is Our Lord’s End, but it is not the end of Him as the Resurrection shows.

Our Salvation is completed only by being completed in Jesus Christ Our God. This is our End and it is the End of All things.

St Peter is telling us that we are not talking about an eternal destruction. He is telling us to be aware that we could die at any minute and we need to be sure that we are right with God so that we fulfil His desires for the world. In saying that the End of All Things is near, St Peter is making us pray the Lord’s prayer more sincerely, especially “Thy Will be done.” It is only through God’s will that All Things will be perfected in Him. If we reject that and choose the desires of our own will and thus a life of sin instead then we cannot be part of that Wonderful, Glorious and Happy End.

[PAUSE]

As we watch Our Saviour ascend to Heaven, then we can live assured that in ascending, He is actually closer at hand to each human being than He was two thousand years ago in Galilee, Nazareth and Jerusalem.

This End of the World is such good news! But we do have to prepare ourselves for it!

Ascension to the Outside

If you are the only person to have access to four dimensions, then you only need to move a millimetre to disappear from view. If this is not something you understand, think of your favourite comic strip character - Garfield, for example. Imagine if Garfield were able to move one millimetre above the page of his cartoon - wouldn't Jon and Odie be rather astonished? Garfield would have just disappeared from their page-bound view.

For God all the dimensions of existence lie open before him like some hazelnut in the palm of His hand. No wonder He can appear in locked rooms and ascend from view. This is what Our Blessed Lord can do with ease. His earthly ministry finished, He ascends, stepping out of the small piece of reality to which we are confined, to stand "outside" it all to be with the Father. Quite what this "outside" is we can't know or understand: the only possibility that our human minds can reasonably deduce is that this "outside" is God Himself.

This seems as absurd to the human mind for which time and position, size and weight, concrete and abstract are the framework of our understanding what reality is. If St Thomas Aquinas is correct and the simplicity of God renders Him identical with His Divine attributes, then this must go against anything that we can understand of our own reality and our own being. And yet, it is God Himself who gives us the framework of understanding in the poverty of our fallen existence. It is God who gives us objectivity whereby we must ascend out of very ourselves in prayer and in consideration for others. 

While we must rejoice in the colour of life that our subjective experience gives us, the existence of God is an objective reality upon which we cannot impose any of our subjectivity, but must rely on how He reveals Himself to us. If we want to know God, then we must learn to ascend to Him in the practice of prayer and doing good things according to His Will. This will necessarily take us outside our own perceptions of what is.

As God prepares us for life with Him, that process being Salvation through redemption, justification, sanctification and glorification, so do we become more fully us by letting go of that which we believe defines us and does not. All our labels and self-descriptions are nothing: in the beginning, all God creates us to be is man and woman to live with Him in the Garden of Eden. 

Our Lord ascends, and in so doing we forget about His face though we glimpse it through the ikon. We forget about what He eats or wears; we forget about his size and shape; we forget about all those psychological, sociological, and political labels with which we may have confined our thinking about Him. What remains of Him for us is the Word, now two-thousand years distant. Yet, the Word stands outside, and thus always is what it is. What we are to receive is the Holy Ghost binding us to the outside by bringing that outside within us so that our earthly knowledge of our self becomes just a shell - a shell that will be discarded when we too ascend.

Thus, the Church can never be "the Modern Church" because "modern" is part of the shell to be discarded. If our Faith is not of Eternity, then it is nothing and to be thrown off. If our Faith roots itself in the here and now, then it will be left there and come no further. If we want a Faith that changes with time, then we have no faith at all because Time itself will be discarded on the Outside. "The Modern Church" is a selfish institution, introspective and self-satisfied, accepting the limp and frail aspects of ourselves as the only things that must be included. There is nothing of Eternity therein, just empty words, empty logic, and empty comfort.

Yes, the Church must be radically inclusive, because it must include what really is, and separate it from the Hell of being insubstantial. It must accept people as they are, casting away their labels, and allow them to change by casting away their labels for themselves. It is the radically inclusive Church that helps human beings become the men and women they were created to be in God by helping them ascend to the Outside, an Outside that lies within. That ascension has been gifted to us in the Ascension of Our Lord.

God's phone number

Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Easter

What do you do if you’re leaving a place that you’ve called home for such a long time? Clearly, there’s packing to be done, the place to be tidied for the next person in your lodgings, and then there are your friends.

These aren’t just acquaintances we’re talking about here. Not the people you talk with about the weather in the street whom you never get to know. These are your friends and you want to stay in touch with them. What do you do? Surely you give them the contact details of your new address.

[PAUSE]

This is why, as He approaches His crucifixion, we see the disciples clamouring around Jesus wanting to know where He is going and wanting to come too. We see hear them ask for things that will give them assurance that all will be well.

As yet, they don’t really know that the events of the next few days aren’t the end but the beginning.

They are not yet ready for the Resurrection.

And yet, Our Lord hands them His contact details anyway.

“ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.”

Strange contact details!

[PAUSE]

This is the point. These will not be the contact details that we’re used to in our age of email and tweet. The contact that Our Lord gives us is Himself in the coming of the Holy Ghost. Our contact is prayer and the phone number is the Name of Christ Himself. We ask in His name to receive what God is willing to give us.

All we have to do to be in contact with Our Lord Jesus, our Friend, Our Lover, Our Master, Our King, Our Judge, is to pray in His Name and we are in direct contact with Him.
We can, of course, get the wrong number, though.

[PAUSE]

Just by sticking the phrase “in Jesus’ Name” onto a prayer is not a guarantee that we’ve prayed in the Name of Our Lord. What if we’ve got the phone number wrong and prayed in the Name of a different Jesus- it’s a common name! Perhaps we pray in the Name of a Jesus who is a figment of our imagination. After all, there are so many people who pray only to a Baby Jesus lying in the manger and forget the entirety of His Incarnation, not just a well-rehearsed Nativity Play. There are so many who pray to a Jesus who will accept them for who they are no matter what they do, a Jesus who will accept their own idea of what’s right and wrong and who will sanction their behaviour because it is done in His Name.

They do not have Our Lord’s contact details. The do not pray in His Name.

[PAUSE]

Prayer takes a great deal of effort to do well. It is something we must struggle at and fail at and get frustrated at, because we are engaged upon our search for the real Lord Jesus. We are to pray in His Name, which means that we have to be ruled by His law, find good what He calls good, reject what He calls bad, and repent of all that we do wrong in His eyes. His morality is not the same as those of our society around us. Indeed, If Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever, then all His followers must abide by the same morality if they are to know Him, and through Him, the Father.
The Church has a whole compendium of prayers for us to use because they are shaped by the relationship which Our Lord has with the saints. It’s why we have Liturgy so that we don’t follow too much the devices and desires of our own hearts that we might otherwise do through always only using our own prayers. Our Lord is clear:

At that day ye shall ask in my name: and I say not unto you, that I will pray the Father for you: For the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God. I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.

God will hear each and everyone who truly believes in Him and this God is the One in Whom we shout out our Faith in the words of the Creeds. If we believe, then we must show that we believe not just by saying the words but by living out what they mean, following them to their conclusions and suffering the scorn of the world for following the True Jesus and not the straw man that it tries to palm us off with.

[PAUSE]

We know how to contact God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost. If we’ve forgotten His number, then we just need to find His address book. It’s called the Church and His number is written in the lives of the saints.

Inventions, Myth and Consciousness

Today, in my Benedictine Breviary, is the Feast of the Invention of the Holy Cross. Obviously this is not the same as the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross which occurs on the 14th September when we celebrate the dedication of the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre. Today, we celebrate the finding - the literal translation of inventio - of the Holy Cross.

Of course, the cross is a symbol that goes beyond the Christian usage. It's pretty much universal, though ascribed different meanings. It can be found as a symbol for burial in the Bronze Age in which it is circumscribed by the disc of the sun. It can be tally marks, two Greek letters, ten in Chinese rod numerals or seven in Shang oracle bone numerals. It is the shape of a man standing with his arms outstretched, or with arms and legs stretched out. Even the Egyptian Ankh is a version of the cross.

If we want to find the true cross, then we have to find the right meaning and that requires a framework - essentially a cultural narrative. The Truth is explored through the narrative of collective human experience. As a Christian, I believe I have good grounds that the Christian narrative epitomised in Holy Scripture and given voice by the Church throughout Time in the teaching of the Fathers gives the most accurate framework for knowing what Reality is through contact with God Himself, the Creator and thus Arbiter of what truly is. That which does not conform to this narrative is deficient and ultimately leads the soul away from God and into Hell.

 I note with a degree of cynicism the thoughts of those who think they know what Hell is. I note that there are those who reject God in favour of finding a deeper meaning in the path to Hell or the path to oblivion. Pop Music has brought out bands like Black Sabbath and, more lately, Ghost which glorify that which is Satanic ostensibly in the guise of entertainment. There is something in our culture which sees skeletons dressed as popes titillating and entertaining because it rebels against the narrative - it tries to tell a different side of the story.

This is something that we might note frequently happens in our society today. How many films are remakes of older versions? I seem to remember a shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock's Psycho and I wondered why. What's the point of that? If we want to tell the original story, then we put on the original film. I fail to see why remakes are necessary. Many will say that this is to do with updating the special effects or bringing out the "true meaning" of the story imbuing it with extra nuances and details that weren't there originally.

There are those, of course, who would say the same about the Christian Narrative, particularly those such as Bart Ehrmann who seeks the truth by "demythologising" Holy Scripture. As we've seen already,  Myth is something that we cannot really dismiss as not being God's word. Calling something a myth is not saying that it has nothing of the Truth in it.

 Yet, when it comes to the Gospels, there is a fundamental desire to preserve the truth and here History becomes Myth and Myth History. This poses a problem for historians like Bart Ehrmann for whom miracles cannot happen, and so any miraculous doings must be re-interpreted in a "truth" that fits a framework without miracles. He would reject any narrative in which the miraculous plays a part. So would many materialists in the Scientific community. They reject myth in favour of the "truth".

What they cannot see is that the whole of the Scientific approach is written in its own narrative in which parts are played by Aristotle, Hypatia, al-Khwarizmi, Roger Bacon, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Mendel, Einstein, Bohr, Lemaitre, Dawkins and Hawkins all play their inextricable and valuable part. Their discoveries are part of the Grand Narrative of "How?" and the story is worth telling because it pertains to something of the truth. The materialist scientific myth is worth knowing both for its explanation and for its failure to be the only means to the "truth". For one thing, it may try to explain consciousness as an emergent phenomenon or as an epiphenomenon in the brain as part of neural processes. While we may often reject views that are subjective, the fact that the subjective exists in the first place is a problem when it comes to believe that human beings are biological machines and therefore theoretically and completely objective. How can the firing of neurotransmitters in the brain translate to the sensation of pain that we all feel, and know how it feels, and yet cannot adequately translate that feeling to others without the use of a narrative, metaphor or analogy - a mini-myth?

As we look at a world that is struggling with itself, we see great examples of pain and suffering emblazoned on our screen in their own narratives. We see the recent atrocity from ISIS turning a captured Syrian into an explosive missile and from that we see a glimpse of the mythology of Hell lying so close to the human soul. We see the stories of Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans and we see the myth of the struggle between state and soul, the individual and the Social Machine.

For Christians, the Cross becomes the bridge between our understanding of reality and what reality is. Indeed, we find the true cross by confronting reality. First, there is the reality of pain and suffering in our own lives and in the lives of others. We see it, and we suffer too, not as a bundle of neural transmitters but as human beings who have some degree of empathy, sympathy and love for one another. Indeed, we see our togetherness in suffering and in sin.

Second, we note that the Narrative of the Cross  crosses the Narrative of History. The Cross is an historical fact and this allows for the Christian Myth to be a potent and essential vehicle for the study of Reality because it presents us with God Incarnate. No longer is God a resident of etiological myth but He becomes Historical. We see Christ and we see the Father. Thus, the etiological myth present in the Old Testament bears witness to truth beyond mere History.

Third, we see Hope for all of us trying to find meaning. We no longer have to be the authors of our own myth as the Existentialists would have us do to prevent suicide. We no longer have to be slaves to finding an authentic self from scraps is sensation and the whims of passing fashion. We do not have to be both Frankenstein AND the Creature. The Christian Narrative is a freedom from total self-construction into a co-operative enterprise in which we create ourselves under the guiding hand of a Loving and Eternal Father.

To be authentic is to root our consciousness in God through Christ and unite it with our fellows so that our Narratives weave together and become, perfected by the Christian Narrative, a testament of what is truly real.

We should never be afraid of the old, old story, just the new, new ones that sell their authenticity for the fleeting relevance of Modernity.

Departing love

Sermon for the fourth Sunday after Easter

How do you prepare yourself when a loved one leaves?

The pain of separation is one of the most acute stress factors that human beings can suffer. According to some sources, the most stressful things that a human being can undergo are the death of a loved one, childhood trauma, and divorce. Each is centred around and breeds from a loss of love. Yet, each one of us will suffer these sorts of stresses in our lifetime. It’s unavoidable.

Sometimes, it seems that Our Lord glosses over this sort of pain. We hear Him say to the Eleven Disciples, and us, “Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go away, and come again unto you. If ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father: for my Father is greater than I.”

Is it really that easy to rejoice, knowing that a loved one is going away to a better place? Is this not a bit of emotional blackmail on the part of the Lord Jesus? “If you really loved me, then you would rejoice…” Is that what He is saying?

[PAUSE]

The pain of separation is caused by nothing less than our love. It’s a pain that many people can’t truly face and so try to avoid it where possible. Some will try never to love but remain protected in a shell that keeps everyone at a distance. Others will fill their lives with distractions, turning from this fashion to that fashion so that they are not still enough for love to catch up with them. Others will numb themselves to the pain, even through things like drink and drugs. This is happening so much in the world around us.

The fact is that Love requires the greatest investment we can give, and yet it is only something that we can give as a gift. It’s never a bargaining tool. If we give love, then we can only give it freely in the knowledge that, in so doing, our hearts will be broken.

If this is the case then why does Our Lord tell us that if we love Him then we would rejoice because He goes back to the Father? Is that not like saying, “if you really loved me, you wouldn’t get that tattoo”?

[PAUSE]

The fact is that Our Lord does recognise that His departure will lead to our sorrow. “Now I go my way to him that sent me, and none of you asketh me, Whither goest thou? But, because I have said these things unto you, sorrow hath filled your heart.” Yet He must go so that He can bestow more love upon us, namely the gift of the presence of the Holy Ghost. It is through the Holy Ghost that God can be present to each and everyone who desires His presence. But that presence is unseen and His ways are unseen. If we love Him then we must trust Him because trusting someone is what we do as part of our love for them. We can rejoice in Our Lord’s impending departure because we know where He is going and, in Him, we have the hope that we will go there, too!

In Christ, there is pure Hope! - a certainty of our resurrection and the end of our pain. It can only come through Him and through no other means. No self-help book, no philosophy, no other religion can give us that certainty because it comes through realising Who Jesus is and entering into a relationship of love with Him.

Of course Love is hard – really hard. The pain it will cause each one of us is immense because it requires giving of ourselves at a level that we simply don’t believe we can afford. This is why many of us try to protect ourselves from it, or numb ourselves to its pain. In so doing, we lose the benefits of Hope and Faith that come with Love and are subject to it.

[PAUSE]

Love is the perfect gift that comes down to us from Heaven from the Father of lights. As Christians, we dare to receive that gift and the cross that comes with it. Do we receive the Hope that also comes? It is part of the package deal after all.

Missing Myth

Some people believe in the literal history of Genesis.

I think that's fine and not wholly unreasonable. They believe that God tells us the truth and that the Bible is His Word and therefore the events of Genesis are history.

This does mean that those who hold this viewpoint must reject the findings of our science and its conclusions. If this stance deepens their relationship with God and helps them love Him in spirit and in truth and in obedience to His command to love  then this can't be a bad thing. The point of fact is that no human can have complete knowledge of our origins. All we have to go on is evidence and reason from that evidence.

However, I must say that I believe the events of Genesis to be a Myth.

I might perceive a gasp of horror from some of my readers, especially those from a more Evangelical persuasion. I beg you to bear with me so that I might be allowed to explain myself.

 The modern way of thinking is that a myth is necessarily untrue, or just a story - something that doesn't need to be believed. This is because we tend now to use the word wrongly. We talk about the myth that dock leaves cure the wounds caused by stinging nettles, or the myth that women have smaller brains than men. These are untrue statements but they are definitely not myths.

Modern thinkers like to reject myth as not being an authority on what is true and therefore believe that we may have free reign to interpret it how we want. 

This is false.

"Myth" should not be a dirty word for a Christian who believes in the inerrancy of Holy Scripture. Our Lord's parables are stories and get to the point about what myths are for the Christian. 

We tend to have a narrow view of what counts as knowledge, these days. We view scientific truth as the only truth and thus discount the existence of God because He is unobservable. If there is truth of God's existence (and there is scientific evidence) then it must be by revelation from Him and therefore beyond the limited way we think.

Myth frees us from our obsession with understanding things without God's help. 

This is why I personally think that a purely literal interpretation of Genesis is far too narrow to be the truth. There is a lot that is revealed to us in Genesis without needing to ask when it happened or who wrote the text and with what intention. If we trust God then the Holy Scriptures that He has called His Church to compile for all Christians must be theologically true regardless of the modern tendency to subject the texts to various criticisms in order to find the truth.

Indeed, I am becoming more convinced that the modern way of Biblical Criticism tries to set modern thinking up above all thought that predates it. Modernity looks down its nose at the interpretations of fishermen, tent makers, carpenters, and first-century women with the same disdain as the Pharisees. Everything must be criticised according to the correct up-to-date critical theory before it can be judged to be true.

If the myth of Genesis tells me that God created men and women then I believe that, and from that I can believe that men and women are not interchangeable else the text would not make mention of the differentiation. From Genesis, I know that God created all that is. It doesn't say how, but I know that there are six different aspects of that creation. However, I cannot understand how a "day" can happen without the Sun nor a planet on which there is to be a day. I know from science that a day on Venus is longer than its year. How am I to understand this "day" if there is no reference to astronomy yet created. I can only understand it as an aspect of God Himself, of His engagement with Time from Eternity which boggles my tiny understanding.

There is always an accusation that the liberals make of Traditional Christians cherry-picking our myths or the interpretation of our common myths that the Bible contains and it is their attitude that denigrates the mythic nature of our Faith. We do not have to be ashamed of what we have received from the hands and mouths of our forebears. We should be proud of it. The liberal accusation not only stops there but also denigrates the Sacred Tradition of the Church Fathers as being morally inferior to the present age. They are judged as sexist but permitted to be because they were products of their time. Our time is clearly superior.

The question is in what system of values they make this judgement of superiority. Why is Now with its demythologising influence better than "Then" with the Myths and stories which God has given His Church for all time in order for it to explore the transcendent nature of Reality inaccessible to Science and Rationalism? Who gets to make that decision?

My Evangelical friends may still criticise me for believing in God and the Big Bang and Darwinism. However, I hope that they appreciate that I, too, hold to the inerrancy if Holy Scripture as a means of knowing God and His relationship with Humanity, of knowing His pleasure and thus the necessity for us to live lives which resonate with this pleasure, of knowing our own sin and our salvation in Christ, and of knowing that there is hope for the future through Christ alone.

Metanoia and Thatcher

Sermon for the third Sunday after Easter

Sometimes, everything seems to get at you, even inanimate objects. Jets of water from the tap always seem to end up on you in an embarrassing way. Milk cartons refuse to open without the intervention of heavy-duty cutlery. And let us not get started on trying to open bin bags.

Sometimes the world seems to just get at you.

Of course, some people have it much worse than others. Some of us seem to suffer misfortune after misfortune. Respectable men and women suddenly find themselves with nothing. Clever and enterprising young folk end up on the street. Little children grow up scared and scarred because of the actions of grow-ups.

The Church has a lot of work to do.

If only the world would let us do it.

[PAUSE]

As Christians, we can definitely subscribe to the feeling that we are being "got at". This is because we are being got at. The question is trying to work out who is getting at us. The answer is not always very obvious.

You might say, "actually, it is the world that's getting at us." Our Lord Himself says, "Verily, verily I say unto you, that ye shall weep and lament, but the world shall rejoice!" What is this "World"?

It's easy to think that it's a them and us situation. It's us versus the world - Athanasius contra mundi - and we put on our suits of armour and seek to challenge the World to a dual.

The trouble is, the World is not something outside of us. Think of this: you're never stuck in traffic, you are traffic. By being in a car, you are part of the traffic congestion on the M25. Margaret Thatcher is right: Society doesn't exist as something outside ourselves that we can always blame for our troubles. While we participate in Society, we cannot pass the buck.

"What's wrong with the World?" We say as we see the latest atrocity. G. K. Chesterton would reply, "I am." While we are in the World, we cannot separate ourselves from what's wrong with it. While we live in worldly ways, we contribute to the very thing that we struggle with.

How can we hope to separate ourselves from the World?

[PAUSE]

It's clear that we can't any more than we can package up the darkness before we switch the light on. We turn to Christ and use His light to help us transform our ways. We cannot hope to seek the will of God in worldly desires. A new car will not bring us closer with God: it will just make us more worldly. Where our treasure is, there our heart will be also.

We turn to Christ. The only thing of any real value to us is the Cross of Christ, His suffering, His humiliation, His death. Death is the only thing that the World can ever give us because it is corrupted by our sin. Christ breaks through that barrier for us and offers us the way through.

We turn to Christ. We learn to value what He values and seek only love and unity with Him. A true search for unity with God cannot exclude other people because if we are united with God, then we will be united with all others who find Him. Our lives are to be spent, not focussing on the world's problems for the world's sake, but focussing on loving God and accepting His values so that we can solve the world's problem in true and honourable service to Him. We can gain the world, but we lose our souls in the process.

[PAUSE]

We cannot do any good in this world without God's involvement. The solution is simple: we involve God in our lives in prayer and the study of His word. We look at how we can shrug off worldly values and the pursuit of worldly esteem, we take our cross and suffer with Christ.

Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.

Just wait in God, and see.

Good shepherds?

Sermon for the second Sunday after Easter

Don't you feel that being referred to as a sheep is a bit demeaning?

What about your priest being referred to as your pastor, or your bishop as the shepherd of your souls? Do you like being part of someone's flock?

Does that mean while you're merely a sheep, an ordained priest is actually a real human being?

[PAUSE]

Clearly, some have held this view in the past which seems to set priests up above the laity. It's little surprising that, because they cannot become priests, women see the Catholic priesthood as being another example of male oppression over them. If they are the sheep and the priest is the shepherd, then it seems that women will always be lesser. Likewise, men who are not called to the priesthood would have some objection to being referred to as a sheep.

There is clearly a point to answer here and, as always, to know the truth we listen to Jesus Himself, and it only takes a few words.

"I am THE good shepherd."

He doesn't say, "I am a good shepherd." It is very much, "I am THE good shepherd." There are no other good shepherds than Our Lord.

And now we begin to see something. With God as Our Creator, any comparison that we make between Him and us is always going to make us look insignificant. Before God, we are nothing more than dust. Our lives begin and end in the twinkle of His eye. We are nothing in comparison with Him.

To describe Himself as a shepherd and us as sheep is actually a great kindness to us. He could simply not bother with us at all, because we are so insignificant before His Eternal Majesty. The fact that He calls Himself our shepherd shows that He does care - really care. This is a care that is far beyond any care that a human being could have for anyone.

Listen to Him:

I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth; and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth the sheep. The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling, and careth not for the sheep. I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine. As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep.

He is not in it for any money, or kudos, or for the glory of being worshipped. He has no need of any of those things. His care is completely focussed on the sheep. He will defend us to the hilt from all Evil that would beset us - even to death.

And how He proves that to us on the Cross.

What does it prove? 

It proves that, no matter who we are, God wants to create us. He loves us so much that He brings us into being in the first place and then gives up His own life for us so that we might not be lost to Him through our own sin.

[PAUSE]

It's also worth listening to St John Baptist when he says of Jesus, "Behold the Lamb of God!"

Lamb?

So Jesus Himself is being referred to as a sheep?

If we're sheep, then so is He!

And now we really do see that when God calls us His sheep, He is referring not to us being animals before Him, but rather demonstrating His care - a care so great that He becomes one of us in order to be with us. He shows that our human state - while being infinitely inferior to His glorious majesty - possesses worth for Him, possesses dignity, possesses in its very heart Heavenly Gold. We are not nothing to God.
Why then do we call priests, "pastors," and bishops, "shepherds"?

[PAUSE]

This point cannot be emphasised enough. It is not because priests and bishops are humans and the laity merely flocks. Look carefully: how can Mother St Teresa of Calcutta be lesser than one of those awful paedophile priests who have brought shame upon the whole Catholic priesthood? How can St Mary Magdalene be lesser than the treacherous Judas?

No. In failing to see priests and bishops as being somehow above normal human beings, we miss the point of Christ's sacrifice as the Lamb of God. The ordination of a priest is the means by which Christ operates through a sinful, fallible human being in order to feed us with His grace in the sacraments. The priest is a sheep through whom the Shepherd gives His care. What credit does that give to the priedt?

The priest is only a pastor by virtue that each Christian should look to him to see Christ the Shepherd. In fact, in not allowing the grace of God to act in him, in not showing care for his parish, the priest commits a terrible sin.

It is important to note that every faithful member of the laity is made holy through living their faith. Men and women together have an equal opportunity to become saints and to stand before God's throne for Eternity. The faithless priest, the priest that is in it for the prestige, the fancy robes, the adulation and respect, is an hireling and will receive his reward which can only end in Eternal Death.

Go out: be holy and faithful under the oversight of our Shepherd, the Lord Jesus Christ, and don't forget to pray for priests and bishops that the whole world may be filled with Christ's grace.

Mathematical Sehnsucht

I find, to my amazement, that I have had something to contribute to Fr Anthony's Blue Flower project. While I won't reproduce it here, I will perhaps mention that Mathematics does begin to give expression to the Transcendent and I may expand on that in a future article for the Blue Flower if there is sufficient interest.

Do please look out for this publication as there will be articles written by those of greater academy than me. I'm told it is aiming to be out in June.

A late announcement

To many not used to the liturgical interplay between the solar and lunar calendars, the concept of a date not being a saint's day seems difficult to understand. A few years ago, I upset revellers celebrating St George's day, when I pointed out that - it being the Octave of the Resurrection - St George's day did not happen on April 23rd. (What an obnoxious know-it-all I am! 😜) This year, in the Roman Rite, St Valentine got bumped to a commemoration by the privileged feria of Ash Wednesday.

Especially this year, March 25th was not the Feast of the Annunciation according to the Roman Rite Since it clashed with Palm Sunday, the Rubrics ordered that it be transferred to the nearest available date outside the Easter Octave. Of course, this is not a universal practice. The Sarum Rite, for example makes provision for the Annunciation to be celebrated on the next day, being the Monday of Holy Week.

So we have had to wait a while for the announcement that Our Lady is to bear a child.

How typical!

Announcing the birth of a baby is not as straightforward as one might think. Parents filled with the joy that they are going to have a baby find themselves frustrated that it's really best to wait for the twelve-week scan before making a formal announcement so that they can say that the baby is happy and healthy. Were the Angel Gabriel to follow the same practice, we would be celebrating the Feast of the Annunciation on 25th June instead - the day after the Nativity of John the Baptist.

However, the Angel just needs to announce the Immaculate Conception of Our Lord. His birth is guaranteed, unlike many pregnancies even today. It is a matter of great sadness that many pregnancies end naturally within the first twelve weeks. Some babies do die even before their own mother knows that she is pregnant. For some mothers, the miscarriage is the first she knows.

We make later announcements so that we can share the joy of the presence of a baby knowing that it is viable for life. Even then, pregnancy is delicate and though the probability that the baby dies shrinks daily, it is never zero.

Could Our Lady's pregnancy have failed? Yes, it could: Our Lord's gestation was as fraught with danger as our own. However, it did not fail and this is something that those possessing an Eternal point of view always know.

We rejoice in the benefit of hindsight that, from His Conception, Our Lord's birth was assured and the path of our salvation at His hands revealed. While we rejoice, we must pray for all pregnant women and for all those who suffer the tragedy of miscarriage.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us!

Pressing Faith

Sermon for the first Sunday after Easter

You may have noticed that, around Easter time, the newspapers tend to scrabble around for something to write about. We've had a congregation whose Easter banner said "Chris is Risen," the Archbishop of Wales being reported as saying that we can never know that the Resurrection happened, and the Pope being reported as saying that Hell does not exist which the Vatican denies. It seems that the press want to say something about Easter, but are not sure precisely what to say. What they give us is either something light-hearted or something that challenges the belief of millions of Christians.

Why? Why does the press want to challenge the Christian Faith?

[PAUSE]

At the most obvious level, the press just want people to buy papers and so print challenging headlines to make us think. Some papers rejoice in giving purely reactionary articles just so that people find a reason to shake their heads and tut about the state of the world. In many ways, the press give the people what they want to read and, as the old proverb says, they won't let the truth get in the way of a good story.

If today's press is inaccurate why can we be sure that the Gospels are accurate? Perhaps it is difficult to believe that Our Lord is risen from the dead. Perhaps we will never know.

[PAUSE]

It's okay to be tempted by thoughts like this. Poor St Thomas has trouble believing the reports of Jesus' Resurrection and so He demands evidence. It is only when they see His scars that the disciples are glad when they see the the Lord. After such a horrible few days in which we see Christ humiliated and executed, we are bound to be shaken up by this. The fact of the matter is that, in our experience, people don't tend to rise from the dead.

But Jesus does.

And that cannot be exaggerated. People are either alive or dead. Jesus was dead and now He is seen to be alive by eyewitnesses who then go about preaching of this resurrection. There's nothing to mishear, misinterpret or distort. Jesus was dead and is now alive. It doesn't get clearer than that. In two-thousand years, there has been no reasonable evidence to contradict the eye-witness testimony of the time.

When we doubt, what we have to do is to have faith.

Faith is not something that denies what we see. It doesn't throw out reason and scientific evidence. Faith is the result of trusting that God is Who He says He is and believing Him when things seem dark. Jesus says He will rise again from the dead. When He does die, we have to trust that He is right. When He does rise again, we see that our faith in Him is justified. We see that He is telling us the truth. We see that He does keep His promises even when they seem difficult to believe.

Having faith is a powerful thing. St John tells us clearly that

Whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?

The Faith that God gives us allows us to treat the misinformation of the world with a grain of salt. It means that we can hold onto Church teaching and not worry when it conflicts with this world's morality because we trust in God and not the world. It means that we are not slaves to culture, nor to big business, nor to what Society expects of us. We just need to have faith and allow that faith to grow in God.

[PAUSE]

Like the plants that begin to bud in spring, so our faith grows because of Our Lord's Resurrection from the Dead. It is the report of the death of our faith that is greatly exaggerated.

The Threshold

Sermon for the Feast of the Resurrection

We stand at the door of the empty tomb, peering into its dark interior as the sunlight begins to flood the cemetery. Towards us is the black open door leading into the place of the dead and to who-knows-what. Behind us the sky is black with the beginnings of a pale blue hue at the horizon just before the Sun begins its ascent into the sky.

And we come to the realisation that this is the beginning of a new day. It's a beginning, not an end. Looking at the empty tomb, we are not seeing an end even though it is supposed to be a last resting-place. The credits don't roll. We aren't going to find out who the production assistant and script editor are. This is not a drama that has just played itself out. This is still happening.

[PAUSE]

We stand on the threshold of the tomb at the threshold of the day trying to understand the events of the last few days. They have been a threshold too, that between order and chaos. This is where it all begins as God Himself stands at the moment of Creation on the threshold between something and nothing, looking into the void and deciding in His impenetrable infinity what to create.

The threshold is where we are and it is here on this threshold that God saves us.

Every day, we teeter on the edge between good and evil, and we're not always aware of it. The world around us is a chaotic pattern of ripples from good deeds and ill entering into our everyday lives, often without us knowing. The order of our lives is being nudged by forces we can neither see nor control. We might as well be playing blind man's bluff on the edge of Beachy Head. The mind of Humanity is dark and cold to the love of God. And dark and cold is the morning as we gaze into the empty tomb. Many of us spend our lives here at this threshold and never seem to cross it.

But He is not here: He is risen and He meets us in the dawning of day and the breaking of bread. In order to meet Him, we have to cross the threshold into the unknown. This is the nature of our Faith.

Faith is not some unreasoned acceptance of an apparent truth. Our Faith is a growing trust in someone we are coming to know. It is as empirical as Science is itself. Our faith grows by what it sees and experiences. Our faith in God grows because we experience Him and seek Him out. Abraham knows God and trusts Him to raise Isaac when God calls him to sacrifice his son. It is only because he knows what God is like that Abraham would even dare to obey. In so doing, Abraham crosses a threshold into a new relationship with God with Isaac alive.

[PAUSE]
Leaving their hiding places from the crucifixion to gather in some secluded spot to decide what to do, the disciples find Christ. And they realise that their experiences of His teaching and miracles are true. The figure they see standing before them, still bearing His scars, still Him, is Christ Jesus Our Lord, and none other. No ghost. No hallucination through grief or intoxication. Through faith in Our Lord, they cross the threshold from a world groaning for Salvation into a world in which Salvation is present for those who want to receive it.

And the threshold of this Salvation is Christ the Door, the Strait Gate, the Way. He is the threshold between Life and Death. He is the door of the tomb for those who wish to pass from death into Eternal life.

[PAUSE]

This is as much our Resurrection as His. This is why He comes back to see us and show us the truth that our faith may be strengthened and our joy complete.

The sun rises and the blackness of the tomb lies behind us. Let us proceed in the peace of Christ into His life.