The Parable of the Rich Fool - OS 18 C, 1^st August, 2010.

Now there are a lot of parables given in the Gospels. Usually there are telling stories, such as the parable of Lazarus and Dives, or the Good Samaritan. They are neat little character pieces, you can imagine them being played out.

Today’s parable, which we usually call the Parable of the Rich Fool, is a little unusual. There are only two characters, the Rich Fool and God. The first part is a conversation of the Rich Fool with solely with himself, which is unique. The second character, who talks to the Rich Fool, is God, which is also unique. Therefore it becomes a fascinating parable in that it is entirely different in style to any other.

The parable starts with the someone in the crowd who calls out to Jesus to tell his brother to divide the family inheritance with him. Now the Law was clear on how inheritances were to be divided: two portions to the eldest and the rest to the others. It is not certain what the problem here – presumably from the context it seems to be a younger brother wanting a half. Our Lord rejects the role of judge and then tells the parable as a guard to all kinds of greed.

He then starts the parable with that unique self-conversation. The image of a person talking to himself immediately shows a person outside a community. People exist in community and discuss their needs within that context – this is odd in that the person, with the wealth, talks to himself.

Now what he is thinking is not obviously wrong; in fact we would call it prudent. He has an abundance of crops, so he is going to build bigger barns to store it. Then he plans to relax, eat, drink and be merry in that lovely phrase that comes to us from the Authorised Version of the Bible.

What needs to be remembered here again is the idea of limited wealth that was shared in this culture. That means that there was only so much wealth that existed – if someone became richer then some must become poorer. So by amassing all this wealth, the Rich Fool had impoverished those around him. Instead of then acting with generosity in sharing it, the duty of a wealthy man, he decides to hoard it. This conversation to himself re-enforces his self-interest and his ignoring of those around. He is a Rich Fool outside the obligations of community and talking to no one but himself.

But then God enters the scene, with the rebuke of “You fool!” This very night the Rich Fool’s soul is demanded of him. His wealth is of no use. He is not wealthy towards God, only to himself.

But what is to happen to the wealth – well, the parable ends with that question. Naturally it will go to the heirs, which ties in very neatly with the start of the parable, with the Someone arguing for a proportion of the inheritance. The wealth of the Rich Fool has not only ensnared the Rich Man’s soul, now it will go to the heirs who can bicker over it to the detriment of their own souls. That’s the link here to the start – Our Lord is getting the Someone who called out from the crowd to think about how happy his family was with the inheritance, if it impoverished those around, before getting involved in a family dispute over it.

Our Lord warns us at the end, that we must not store up treasures for ourselves but be rich towards God. Now in typically parable form, that’s left for us to work out – parables are typically there to let us nut them out – God gave us brains, so we are expected to use them the hints of what that means come from the idea of limited wealth which is the framework of this parable: how is our possessions derived, are they from the unjust impoverishment of others. Are we being generous with our wealth, or are we just hoarding it? Do we own the possessions, or do they own us?

There are many things that I have: some have value; some are almost valueless. Some I keep because of sentimental associations: gifts from friends and family now in God’s hands. Some I think I will never part with; some no one else will want, and some I can give away now and then, sometimes with a story of how I received it, in the hope that it will be loved and cherished as well. But I know I have to give them up at some time, many of you here have been through that trauma of moving to smaller homes or into retirement villages, where the demands of space enforce a shedding of possessions. I know that that lies ahead, and I hope I will have the strength and grace to shed a few things along the way. My hope is that in the giving, I will grow rich towards God, in learning to surrender with grace, and be generous.

After all, to give is sacramental, that is what our Lord does, give, give and give, even unto death, giving is the core of the sacrament we celebrate here with his body and blood, given to us. That’s the generosity we must follow.

St Paul - OS 14C, 4^th July 2010.

If you flit through a copy of the New Testament you see a clear division of contents. There are four gospels, then the Acts of the Apostles, a history book, then twenty-one letters, then the Book of Revelation at the end. As you van see, the vast majority of the contents are letters, and then out of the twenty-one letters, thirteen are attributed to St. Paul. Out of twenty-seven books, thirteen are from one person. So you can see the importance of Saint Paul, the most prolific writer of our New Testament. That is why he occurs so many times as our second reading - depth of thought and output both make him a prime choice.

There is so much from Saint Paul because he was the great theologian of the New Testament. He started from the idea that the most important thing that you could be was that you were right with God. This was not because he came from a particularly religious world or he had led a blinkered life. On the contrary, he was a merchant, a tent maker by trade, and a good scholar. The world he came from was the Greek world, the city of Tarsus, and the Greeks knew all about the good life - from them we get our words for hedonism and eroticism and few others. Yet Paul knew that the only way to make sense of this life, to give it a purpose was not the good life, but finding out the way to live. The only way to find purpose was to understand the reason for life. That meant answering the question - how do we have a relationship with God?

Paul’s theology is about having a right relationship with God. Paul recognised that it is difficult to live a right life. It is hard to be right with God. He knew. He had been brought up as a faithful Jew, filled with the wisdom of the Jewish religion. He had devoutly kept the Law, all the rules and regulations of the old Jewish way. Yet he recognised that all the keeping of the rules did not change the fundamental problem that people sin. All the things we do, do not remove our faults. We sin no matter what we do. We know that we sin; yet we are helpless by ourselves to stop. Despite the laws, people still were not right with God: for our limitations, our sins, get in the way.

A Christian life is a life that is right with God. The gift of Christ is the assurance that sin is forgiven. That puts us right with God. We can only be made right, if we are in a good relationship with God, a relationship that is not based on fear or threats, but on love, freely given and understood. A relationship of love is also a relationship of forgiveness. To know Christ is to know forgiveness. To know Christ is to realise that God is aware of our sin and yet does take it away. This is called righteousness, the ability of God to make us right. We know this ability from Christ’s life, the fact that he died for us to take on all our faults. We are aware of this from our experience of Christ, his Spirit. Christ’s death and rising to life frees us from the terror of death, so we are able to live lives confident in God’s love, sure of his forgiveness, in hope of God’s acceptance.

Furthermore, God does not care about the past, or background, God cares about us accepting him. Paul states time and time again that all are equal in Christ, as in the reading today.

Also, and very importantly, God gives us the grace to be put right. We don’t earn forgiveness; we don’t earn righteousness; we don’t have to be put through the wringer to get there: God freely offers us the grace to be put right and life a good life. This is why in the Letter to the Galatians today can say that the grace of Jesus be with our spirit, so we can live the good lives that God wants us to live.

Paul tells us that there are three great graces given to us as Christians - faith, hope and love. This is the way we can lead a right life. By having hope, hope in the promises of God, we can overcome the darkest moment and situation. By having faith, we find our strength when others fail. Love, the greatest of the three, redeems the world by the support it gives to all. A loved person is always upheld by that love, love that overcomes defects and limitations and makes us greater.

These are the graces that allow us to lead lives that are right with God, lives that follow God. Paul calls this living by the Spirit, because we follow the Spirit of God. The graces are needed to live in the world without being corrupted by it. Many people in this world start with good intentions. Then, as time goes by, a compromise here, and a compromise there, leads to a path of sin, where the conscience is muted and a settled life of gentle evil results. Good intentions are left behind, not with any fanfare, but gently discarded to meet the situation of the moment. Time dulls the senses to the hopes and inspirations of youth and a comfortable life is left of moral emptiness, willing to put up with evil for the sake of a comfortable life. This is the contrast, of living with the flesh, as Paul calls it, living with the pull to be comfortable rather than right.

For Paul life is different. Life is the great call of faith, to live in the Spirit, to find God in a right relationship. This is the life that means that stands have to be taken at times, beliefs stated, and struggles continued. It means forgiveness that can be costly, forgiveness sought from God for our failings, and forgiveness of others. It is much easier to ignore a person than forgive a person. Yet if we are to live a life following the Spirit we have to forgive and love and engage the world with the power of God. Paul is the great caller to Christians to keep on moving, to seek God and become righteous, living the live that God has called us to live.

Learning about God - OS 13C, 27^th June, 2010

The Elijah story in the Old Testament is of those wonderful stories, full of blood and gore. You may remember how it goes: Elijah is the last prophet; everyone else is following the current fad of King Ahab, the god Baal. So Elijah arranges the famous contest: the competing sacrifices. The prophets of Baal build their altar, then ask their sacrifice to be burnt by Baal, they go round and around, gash themselves and call out, but nothing happens. Then eventually Elijah gets his turn: he builds the altar, puts the sacrifice on it, dowses it in water, and calls of God: and straight away the fire comes down from heaven and burns it all up, water included.

This story is a story of rival shamans, rival witchdoctors: who has the most powerful god.

Then in the midst of his triumph Elijah turns on the prophets of Baal, all 450, and has them all put to death. It’s a bloody triumph indeed.

But it’s followed by quite an anticlimax. A price is put on Elijah’s head by Jezebel and he wanders off into the wilderness, rather moaning a bit about his bad luck, before he gets to Horeb, or Sinai, the place of God that is so familiar to us from the story of Moses, the place of the burning bush, the place of the giving of the Law. There he hides in a cave, and he has the experience of God coming by: not in a hurricane, not in an earthquake, not in the fire, but in a still small voice, a little murmuring. God ignores all of Elijah’s whinging about how righteous he has been and how he has put the prophets of Baal to death, but goes on with the passage we read today. God tells Elijah that it’s time for succession planning. So Elisha is picked out, and Elisha has the farewell feast with his family and follows Elijah. Elisha will get twice Elijah’s power, and will be just as ruthless as times, even calling on a bear to devour the children who call him baldy. Don’t mess with the God of Elijah or Elisha is the clear message.

The passage from the Gospel according to Luke today draws a distinctive difference between the actions of Elijah and the actions of Jesus. Jesus and company are heading to Jerusalem and they get a cool welcome at a Samaritan village. The disciples clearly see Jesus as another Elijah figure – they suggest that fire could be called down to burn up those villages, in the same way Elijah called down fire.

Jesus is having none of this though. In some ancient versions of the Gospel there is even an addition that Jesus says to them, that the Son of God came not to destroy the lives of people but to save them. We also know that Jesus will later also tell in Luke that most telling of parables, the parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus is not going to go for a massacre; Jesus is not going to identify those Samaritans with the prophets of Baal.

What is going on here is a little playing around with the image of God. Now Elijah obviously saw God as a bigger and brighter and more powerful version of Baal. Have no doubt: the supporters of Baal were after Elijah’s head, and Elijah was after their heads. Elijah got his way. It really was dog eat dog. Yet Elijah is unable to bring his triumph home, instead he lapses into the wilderness as a hunted fugitive, and finds God is not in the big bang of hurricane, earthquake or fire, but in the small still voice. That small still voice is not interested in his massacre and justification, but rather with planning ahead and moving on. The God of Sinai is not going to be another Baal: this God is different. Elijah learns in the cave an important lesson: that he has indentified God with Baal in his massacres and spectacles. That identification is wrong. The cave at Sinai is where, as one writer puts it, Elijah has space for a theological blush.

However, people still like the God of fireworks, and that is what the disciples want from Jesus with that stubborn Samaritan village. Our Lord just keeps on walking – the God of vengeance is not the God the Father.

That’s why Paul can say in Galatians today to us; that the whole law is summed up in a single commandment: love your neighbour as yourself. God is seen through Jesus as a God of love, not a God who wants people’s deaths, not the God of Baal or the God of vengeance of Elijah, but the God who wants us to move on from this, the God of the still small voice, the God who does not want fire to be sent down on Samaritans.

Once you start to see that what Jesus is doing here is reflecting the example of Elijah the next passage becomes clearer. Jesus calls different people to follow him, but they all want do to do other things first, like saying farewell to family. That is precisely what Elisha did when called by Elijah. But Jesus rejects this and calls for immediate following: once more the example of Elijah is being undone.

One of the things we have to learn about God is that God undoes our images of God. We start out imagining how God is: but God continually wants us to grow beyond that and learn that God is much, much more. Elijah saw God as a superior Baal, and had to learn that God was not that only: God was also the God of the still small voice. The disciples saw God also a as God of fire and punishment; Jesus just tells them to walk on and get over it. The challenge to us is too allow God to grow our understanding but letting our images of God empty themselves. This is where a faith journey is exciting – it is a journey, God always wants us to grow, to learn more about God and let go of our own constructed images of what God is. That’s why we come to church, say our prayers, read our Bible and listen to God – so we can empty ourselves of our own gods and learn more about the true God, and move on.

Being the Body of Christ Corpus Christi, 6^th June, 2010.

Last week we started reflecting on what I called the pudding-time of the Church year, the time when the great feasts of Easter and Pentecost conclude, those great feasts that celebrate historical moments in the life of humanity and God, to turn to reflecting in more depth about the meaning of God. So last week we had the first of the great puddings, the sweetener after the hearty meal of Pentecost, the celebration of Trinity Sunday and the reflection of how God can be one in three. Today we contemplate the mystery of Corpus Christi, the giving of God in the sacrament. Then, next Friday, we have the last of the great feasts, Sacred Heart, when we ponder the mystical opening of Our Lord’s heart for us in the piecing on the cross with the flow of water and blood.

Well today is Corpus Christi, or more fully in Latin, Corpus et Sanguis Christi, the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ. During Holy Week we have on Maundy Thursday, the historical memory of the night before Christ was betrayed, the washing of the feet and the last supper. Today we explore more deeply what does it mean when Our Lord gives himself to us in his body and blood in the sacrament of the altar.

The starting point for understanding this is once more the realisation that God is love. Out of the relationship of the Trinity, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, loving and holding together in one God, comes the outpouring of love through creation. To show the love of God Jesus came to us, taking on our form and living our life, then through death, resurrection and ascension, taking our form back into the Godhead.

The giving of the sacramental presence of God in the bread and wine we take, is another outpouring of love. God wants to be with us. That’s the nature of love – the desire to be with someone. You don’t fall in love with a person and then decide to live on opposite sides of the world. It’s the same with Jesus. He loves us. He wants to be with us. He wants us to be near him. Yet, at the same time, a couple in love need space. They give each other space to be different and yet complement each other. Now Jesus in our midst would be wonderful - yet suffocating of our freedom. God has given us free will, and brains, and skills and expects us to use them. Being a Christian cannot be a cargo cult of waiting for God to sort out everything.

So we want to have Jesus close to us, and yet we need freedom to act and chose to follow God out of our love and trust. The sacrament of the altar is God’s solution. Our Lord will be with us – this is my body; this is my blood he says, taking the bread and wine. Do this in memory of me, he says, taking the ritual action of the blessing of bread and wine of the Passover meal.

The presence of Our Lord then in the sacrament becomes a way to have the loving presence of our lover God and yet the distance to escape being suffocated. So near, and yet so far. His word assures us of his presence – lovers don’t lie, and God does not lie when Our Lord says he will be in the sacrament. Yet his real presence in the sacrament does not become overwhelming – we are left with the mystery of the appearance of bread and wine.

Therefore we receive the bread and wine as the lovers of God, fully trusting in his promise that he is there, Jesus is there, in the bread and wine. Today we can celebrate it more fully – during Holy Week we follow the last heavy steps of the way of the cross, we can’t just sit in his presence and rejoice. That is why this day traditionally has benediction attached to it – the celebration of God just being there in the sacrament.

It is important also to remember that in the stories about Jesus and his miracles there is always an abundance. Think of the wedding at Cana, how much water was turned into wine – enough to keep the whole town afloat. The miracles of the feeding of the crowds, such as in the Gospel today, also show that same abundance – there is always a huge amount of scraps left from the original scanty meal. Whenever we come to themes in the Gospels that point to bread and wine, point to the coming of the new sacrament, then we also come to the sheer over abundance of God. It’s not enough that the miracle be enough – it has to be more than enough. That’s why there are twelve baskets left over today – more than enough for the crowd of 5000, and also mirroring the 12 tribes of the foundation of Israel. God wants everyone, the whole of Israel the whole of the new Church founded on the 12 apostles, to have enough in this great sacrament of the altar.

Finally, we have to contemplate the mystery on how we are also the body of Christ. We come and take this sacrament and also proclaim that we are that same sacrament, by stating we are the body of Christ. In this identification and union with Jesus we find our call to live in the world. Jesus was the willing victim, who took on the violence of the world, cling it to end by his death and resurrection. We, too, become part of that victim, taking on the violence of the world. The world did not like Jesus, so don’t be surprised when it doesn’t like us. That’s part of our identification – the world will never be comfortable with us. If the world was comfortable with the Church, then you know something would be wrong. We, through this sacrament, become the body of Christ. Therefore we cannot but help to take Christ to the world, a relationship of discipleship that the world will always react in the same way – with the adulation of Palm Sunday and the mockery of the Cross. But the Church will always be resurrected as long as it is the body of Christ.

So enjoy this pudding feast of Corpus Christi – but be warned its identification with us, the church means also a warning that discipleship has its price, like coins in the pudding, nice, but hard on teeth.

The Proof of the Pudding - Trinity Sunday 2010

It was the famous Dean Swift of Dublin, who wrote Gulliver’s Travels, who once supposedly said of a church he visited, a rather simple building without any tower; that a church without a steeple was like a dinner without pudding. Well, it’s nice to see a building well completed, as it is nice to have a full meal, and it’s nice when they all work together, as those of you who watch Master Chef can see: when one part is missing or goes wrong, the whole thing suffers.

Well, this season of the Church’s year is like pudding time. We had the starters at Lent, then the main course of Easter, concluding with Pentecost, and now we get the pudding feasts, Trinity today, Corpus Christi next week, and then after that, on a Friday, Sacred Heart. These extra feasts expand the great actions of God in our history to allow us to reflect more deeply and theologically on the nature of God. They give depth and flavour to Easter.

Well the pudding today is the Trinity, the reflection of the nature of God. The core to understanding the Trinity is to understand why we say God is love.

We can start by looking to the perception of God through the Old Testament. God can be seen as a rather difficult Being: blessing one minute, cursing the next. The engagement of God with the Chosen People of the Israelites was a struggle to understand the nature of God: whether God was just the greatest god among the nations or the sole God, and how that God worked out his covenant with the Chosen People. The understanding that they reached was that God they worshipped was the only God, who made his promise to his people that he would keep, and even loved the other peoples of the world, as the Book of Jonah teaches with the concern of God for the hated Assyrians.

Yet the understanding of the God of the Covenant was that it was still a God who needed endless sacrifice to avert the wrath that was due to all people because of their sins and violence. Only by the shedding of blood would God be satisfied.

The coming of God in the person of Jesus Christ showed a new revelation of God. God comes as Jesus, sent by the Father. Our Lord comes willingly, and allows himself to become a victim of that violence inherit in all humans. He chooses to suffer from our violence, and dies, giving up the Spirit. But the power of God is greater than death, and God the Father sends the Spirit back to his Son, and Our Lord rises from death to show that God is not limited by our sins of violence. The witness of the Son is that the cycle of violence and death has an ending in God.

Then to allow those who believe in the power of the Son, the Spirit is given to them to be the Church, the bride of Christ, the bride preparing for the wedding. We are, by the power of the Spirit, given at Pentecost, those who continually prepare for the wedding feast. We have learnt that it is not God who demands violence and sacrifice; God has shown that that cycle is exhausted by the Son suffering and willingly undertaking that cycle. Violence is not demanded by God: how can God demand violence against his own Son? The violence is from our own insecurity, our own fear, our own hate, our evil. The Spirit in the Church continually teaches us the story of the sacrifice of Our Lord ending the violence.

It is this contemplation of the actions of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit that shows the true revelation of God: God the Father loving sends the Son, who lovingly gives up his life, and then returns, and the Spirit teaches that loving action in his followers, the Church. It is this action of God that is seen in love, and love then becomes the understanding of God for all Christians.

You see, you can’t talk about God being love unless you are Trinitarians. It is this relationship of love between Father, Son and Spirit; that defines what God is. Every time you tell someone that God loves that person, then you are being a Trinitarian Christian. The reason why you can say that is because you believe in the nature of God being love as shown in the events of our history, the revelation of the working of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit; particularly in the revelation in the death and resurrection of the our Lord. When people start to talk about the Trinity often Christians run frightened: but instead it is the contemplation of the Trinity that gives us our power, as it is the source of endless reflection about the love of God. Don’t be frightened by the Trinity: instead enjoy it as the source and proof of love.

It’s like having a good pudding: it completes the meal. So it is with the Trinity: understanding the need for reflection upon the Trinity’s role gives meaning to the love of God. So enjoy this pudding-tide season, and our pudding treat of the Holy Trinity.

Preached at St George’s Goodwood, Trinity Sunday 30^th May, 2010.

Pentecost - The Child of Faith 23rd May 2010

To be a Christian is a strange thing to be. After all, it a commitment to something that can never be proved, and it is a promise by someone to follow what no-one can see. It is a statement about having faith, that curious thing that tugs at our souls.

Today we celebrate the Holy Spirit, the God who guides our faith. Now last week we commemorated the Ascension, Jesus leaving his disciples. The Ascension means that we have to be adult Christians, taking responsibility for our actions. We don’t have Jesus, here, on the spot, guiding and correcting us, we instead have to be responsible in what we do. The Church only grows by everyone taking responsibility, doing each part given. Being passive and child-like in a community means an infantile church, static and preserving, rather than growing.

Well, today is the other half of the coin. Today is how we are guided by God, how God helps us to make the right choices to be the adult Christians he wants us to be. It is how faith is lead.

I have been mulling over how to explain what faith is. Some people always have it, some people always doubt it. I think the best way to explain faith is that is the realisation that you can hear God. It is the openness to being guided by the Spirit. Faith is the realisation that you are being guided by the Holy Spirit. Whenever you find yourself in the right place at the right time, you know that God has been with you.

You find the Spirit guiding your faith by being a child of God. The odd thing is that each of us is an adult Christian by learning to be a child with God. This is not a contradiction, but rather how we become a complete person. A complete person is a responsible person, yet open like a child, to learn from God.

To be a child with God, to be open to God, you have to remember a few things about being a child. The first thing to remember is that children have bounce back quickly. It is remembering that we are tiny things, prone to falls, yet quick to recover. I am always surprised how a child can fall over, bawl for ten minutes, then run around being happy again. That is how we are to deal with our failings, we are not to endlessly mope and become depressed, but to have a good bawl, and get over it. The Spirit of God helps us to see our failings, and move past them.

The second thing about a child is that a child has endless confidence. A child wants to do everything and get into everything. In the same way God wants us to be lead by the Spirit, and have endless expectations of God. St John of the Cross puts it this way: “One obtains from God what one hopes for.” We have to learn that God wants us to have that confidence in him. The Spirit of God is what leads us onto new ways, to get us to try new things in our faith, that will surprise us as we grow.

The next thing to remember is that we are to have a sure trust in God’s love. A child always trusts that a parent will be there. In the same we have to trust God. Wherever we are, so is God. The Spirit will be there for us to give us what ever strength or skills we need. We are to have a tranquil trust in God, like a child

A true Christian is an adult and a child at the same time. An adult in taking the responsibility offered, a child in trust and love of God. For God is our source, and we need to be open to that source. Then we can move with confidence in the world. For when we are open to God, we find the Spirit of god. The Spirit, who is likened to fire, who gives us the energy and strength to do what we have to do in our lives.

A Christian life is not an easy life. There is much hard work to be done, and the jobs never cease. We are adults in the world, and have to work and get things done. This Church only survives from all the hard work of all its members. The hard work that is done in love is the work of God and brings with it the love of God that transcends the work. Working in faith brings that love and companionship that is the real secret of Christianity, of Christians working together, learning to put up with each other, and finding the love of God in that companionship. The Bible tells us that there are many gifts of the Spirit, ways that we are lead to work, and these gifts change through time and adapt to the needs to particular communities.

God will always be with, and his Spirit is the strength we need, giving us the power to do all the jobs that God will lead us to. We are adult Christians, taking our share of this work, yet the children of God, open, trusting, and confident in his love.

Ascension Sunday 16th May 2010 - Clash of Calendars

Recently I have been reading up about calendars an in particular about the Chinese calendar. Now any calendar has a major problem: how to co-ordinate the solar calendar with the lunar calendar. That is, how do you keep a record of a year as exactly as possible with the cycle of the moon.

Now we, in our culture, practically ignore the lunar phases and concentrate solely on the solar aspects. Our months are just pale shadows of the lunar periods they once were. In China the traditional calendar was heavily lunar, and things like Chinese New Year is still a lunar celebration that shifts on the calendar each year. Interestingly, the present way of determining the Chinese New Year, which is linked within a period of the Solar calendar, is based on that devised by a European Jesuit at the court of the Chinese Emperor in the 17^th C.

The only lunar festival that we observe now is that of Easter, which is based on the phase of the full moon, as was recorded in the New Testament as being the time of the Passover. Now, we know how messy it gets working that out. Next year Easter falls on April 24^th, around Anzac Day, which is going to be fun. That’s an example of the solar calendar clashing with the lunar calendar – Easter moves around and runs into what is fixed in the solar calendar. You could look at it the other way round too – Anzac Day moves round the lunar calendar and runs into Easter. Once many fishermen in Asia kept the old Chinese lunar calendar for the reason that the tides always fall on the same date in the lunar month, so it makes fishing easier to plan. Calendars are just a matter of perspective on how you organise.

With our Church year we use both calendars. The major feasts such as the saints’ days and Christmas are based on the solar calendar. Hence Christmas falls on the 25^th December every year. But Easter moves around. The feast of Easter is based on the death, resurrection, ascension of Christ and the giving of the Holy Spirit.

Now today we celebrate Ascension, which is based on the lunar date of Easter. Today we commemorate our Lord’s entry into heaven – not as a spirit, but bodily. He didn’t leave his human body behind as something inferior – he took it with him as part of his nature. This was an important point – the human body is not trash to be discarded. Many ancient religions looked on bodies as hindrances in the spiritual life, or even as evil. But Christ takes his body into heaven to show that it is worthy of God. This means the complete acceptance of body: its passions, sexuality and all, and something to be sanctified.

So in a strange way, Ascension completes Christmas. At Christmas God takes on a human body as the Christchild, through the incarnation, the entering into Mary at the Annunciation and birth at Christmas, God states that our bodies are worthy of Jesus. Then with the Ascension the cycle is complete – our bodies are not only worthy of God coming to us, but worthy enough for us to go to God. That is complete acceptance.

So Ascension is the fulfilment of Christmas, the other half. Ascension in the lunar calendar and Christmas on the solar calendar. I rather like the messy symbolism of the two calendars clashing though. You see, you don’t know the time between Christmas and Ascension – it can’t be calculated easily. It’s like or lives – we have a set start, but we can’t work out the end time.

The whole consequence of this acceptance of who we are as human beings and bodies is one that the Church still struggles with. In part we inherited an earlier view that the body was inferior, and this struggle between rejection of the body and celebration of it as God’s gift has bedevilled our culture and faith. The struggle still goes on with the question of homosexuality. You only have to look at some condemnations of homosexuality, such as some members of the Anglican Global South meeting which our Archbishop attended, and the deliberate promiscuity of a gay lifestyle that is often promoted as normal, as two poles of the same question about the role and acceptance of sexuality. It’s a clash – just like the dates of Easter and the solar calendar.

In the end we are forced back to the simple acceptance of God – God takes us who we are. We stuff it up with sin, but the death, resurrection and ascension of Christ say that our sin and our reluctance is overcome. God wants us. Not in pieces, not as some purified spirit with the messy bits cut out, but God wants us totally, and God will fix up our mistakes.

It’s called the love of God.

EASTER DAY – 4^th APRIL 2010

SIGHT

Bp Ian George

Theme for holy Week and Easter: O taste and see that the Lord is good (Ps34:8)

Christ is risen – he is risen indeed.

A recent email from a Roman catholic priest friend has given me some new insight into the resurrection life. Let me share it with you:

A Scottish couple decided to go to Spain to thaw out during a particularly icy winter. They planned to stay at the same hotel where they spent their honeymoon 20 years earlier. 

Because of hectic schedules, it was difficult to coordinate their travel schedules. So, the husband left Glasgow and flew to Barcelona on Thursday, with his wife flying down the following day. The husband checked into the hotel. There was a computer in his room, so he decided to send an email to his wife... However, he accidentally left out one letter in her email address, and without realizing his error, sent the email. 

Meanwhile, somewhere in Blackpool, a widow had just returned home from her husband's funeral. He was a priest who died following a heart attack. 

The widow decided to check her email expecting messages from relatives and friends. After reading the first message, she screamed and fainted. 

The widow's son rushed into the room, found his mother on the floor, and saw the computer screen which read: 

To: My Loving Wife

Subject: I've Arrived

I know you're surprised to hear from me. They have computers here now and you are allowed to send emails to your loved ones. 

I've just arrived and have been checked in. I see that everything has been prepared for your arrival tomorrow. 

Looking forward to seeing you then! Hope your journey is as uneventful as mine was. 

P.S. It’s jolly hot down here!

Christ is risen He is risen indeed.

During the past week we have been exploring together the ways in which we experience the presence of God through our God-given senses. We have worked our way through body - movement, smell, hearing, taste, touch and even what I call the sixth sense. Today we finish this series by looking at sight. I have kept this until last because it is so crucial and so apt for the celebration of the resurrection.

In these days after Jesus is raised he appears to so many and the emphasis is on seeing. Indeed Mary Magdalene is commanded not to touch him ( or to stop touching him, depending on how the verbs are understood). Somehow a different kind of sight is required. We might call it “insight”. At first Mary Magdalene does not recognize Jesus in the garden. She thinks he is the gardener. She does not see him in fact until he calls her by name.

The disciples on the road to Emmaus do not recognize the very person their conversation was all about. Not until he breaks bread with them do they recognize Jesus.

Professor Rudolf Arnheim says (Visual Thinking, Pvi): “ sight is the most efficient organ of human cognition”. But normal sight was not always equal to the task immediately after the resurrection. Insight was required.

In the Gospel reading from St Luke this morning there is a strong emphasis on seeing. In the early dawn, in twilight ( not a time for good vision), the women come to the tomb, see the stone rolled away, see no body and are dazzled by two men standing beside them. The men say “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” They rush home to tell the other disciples who do not believe them. But Peter races back, sees the burial cloths lying empty – and he is amazed!

Luke is preparing us for two heavenly messengers being present at the Ascension some weeks later. And he wants the whole early community of Jesus’ followers to be part of the experience of seeing the risen Jesus in some way. – as he makes clear in the opening of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles.

Lent is always a period of gathering darkness. As we focus more and more intently on the ways in which God’s world has betrayed God we see more and more deeply into our own personal betrayals. All this comes to a head in Holy Week. On Tuesday with Tenebrae we saw our lights gradually going out. On Good Friday the sky turns black to express the apparent victory of the powers of evil. In this darkness it is hard to see anything let alone any goodness or any hope for the future. And yet with the benefit of hindsight and insight we know better. We know that Lent also forces us to focus on the opposite to darkness – on light, on joy and on peace.

Symbolically and intensely visually we saw this last night at the Vigil, at the lighting of the new fire and the grasping of new hope and vision which led us to reaffirm our baptismal vows. In the darkness, we can suddenly see a little. In the gloom there is suddenly hope. The light of Christ leads us out of darkness to the ineffable light of God.

Yet somehow the word “light” is too glary or too inadequate to describe what we feel and what we see. The scholastic philosophers knew better. They wanted to analyse this light and describe its quality. They used the word “claritas”. It means much more than just “clarity” as English would like to translate it. But it is hard to express. I want to offer you a difficult option, but just let the language wash over you!

In James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” Stephen Daedalus tries to describe it. It takes him 300 words. But he concludes: “It is the instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the aesthetic image is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony in the luminous silent “stasis” of aesthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.” I know that is pretty heavy stuff….

If you are still with me, you will note the combination of the eye and the mind. You may like to think of sight and insight. With these in mind you may like to think of the resurrected Christ as the ultimate expression of the beauty of God – as Professor Hans von Balthasar expresses it (if I understand him correctly). Jesus then expresses the “enchantment of the heart” and if we can see him in this way our own hearts become enchanted in a mystical way.

So for us to come to terms with the Jesus Christ of the resurrection, of the first fruits of eternal life, we need to come to him with both sight and insight, seeking not only light but “claritas”, the light which passes all understanding.

It is our responsibility as the current disciples of Christ to proclaim that vision to the world in our thoughts, our words and our actions.

O taste and see, smell and hear, touch and INSEE that the Lord is good.

Closing poem: “Sensing God” by Judith Kirk.

HOLY SATURDAY: THE EASTER VIGIL

Theme: O taste and see that the Lord is good – Psalm 34:8

THE SIXTH SENSE

Bp Ian George

Most of you tonight will remember the name of Bishop J.A.T. Robinson, the new testament scholar who wrote the book “Honest to God”, said to be the most widely-read religious book ( after the Bible!) of the twentieth century.

John Robinson had a lesser-known brother, Edward. Not the Edward G Robinson of Hollywood fame, but a remarkable research scientist and sculptor who , in the 1980s and 90s ran the Religious Experience Research Unit at Manchester College, Oxford. This was set up by Sir Alister Hardy, a Fellow of the  Royal Society after World War 2 to pursue a hunch that the experience of God was much more common than most people, especially the scientific community, were prepared to admit.

I visited Edward in Wales in 1992 and he told me that they had collected thousands of stories of people’s experiences in the British Isles. They were prepared to estimate that over 70% of Britons had experiences which could be fairly described as experiences of the presence of God. There IS a sixth sense. O taste and see that the Lord is good.

But when they turned their attention to Africa they had so many accounts that they estimate that over 90% of Africans have had such experiences. Of course, I asked him why the difference and he said they believed that most Europeans ( and we would be included in that category for research purposes) had become so saturated by Western rationalism and scepticism that any such experience would be both unexpected and embarrassing! But in Africa – in a pre-industrial society -  such experience is expected as a normal part of life.

I wonder how you feel about your experiences. Perhaps sometime as a congregation you might sit down together and share your experiences. You might very well be surprised.

Few of us would be able to express our experience as vividly as Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She wrote in her poem “Afire”:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God,

And only he who sees takes off his shoes.

The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

O taste and see that the Lord is good.

Over the years I have conducted many liturgical workshops – especially in the 16 years I spent as a member of the General Synod Liturgical Commission. I frequently asked people to describe their most memorable experiences of worship. Almost always they fell into one or more of three categories:

1.    an open-air service in a special place

2.     a large gathering in a cathedral or big public place

3.    a service with a particular personal or family reference like a funeral or a wedding

I believe that in these unusual circumstances our sixth sense is especially activated. We somehow have a glimpse of what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead described as “ the vision of something which stands beyond, behind and within, the passing flux of immediate things:…something which gives meaning to all that passes..” I call it the sixth sense. O taste and see that the Lord is good.

Wordsworth knew it well. Your have on your handout for tonight one of the most evocative passages in which shared  his  “emotion recollected in tranquillity”. It is from “ Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting The banks Of The Wye During A Tour.”

Last century a remarkable German theologian, Professor Rudolf Otto, set out in his book “The Idea of the Holy” to examine this sixth sense or sense of the presence of God. He concluded that it usually had two main ingredients. He called them the “mysterium fascinans” and the “mysterium tremendens”. In other words most experiences of this kind have an all-engrossing fascination about them and also a sense of awe. One can have them in the widest possible circumstances. In a play, listening to music, enjoying a painting, watching a film, in the midst of a conversation, and especially out in the wilderness. Let us hope that the current desperate urge to get back to nature with so many SUVs ri[pping up the outback environment will help people find God in this way

You can even have such an experience in the middle of the city at a busy intersection waiting for the lights to change. Thomas Merton did and so have I.

Think now of your own experience. When were those moments when suddenly God seemed to be so real for you, or that a situation was transformed as if a new light was shed upon it and you knew clearly what to do. The famous Carmelite Brother Lawrence found it daily working in the monastery kitchen. And he describes a turning point in his life when he gazed upon a leafless tree and suddenly realized that soon its bare branches would again be covered with leaves. This filled him with such a “high view of the providence and power of God” that it changed his life. He eventually became counsellor to monarchs and bishops and wrote  the classic book “ The Practice of the Presence of God..”

For me the “veil of everydayness” dropped and I knew that I was standing on holy ground on a school scout trip to the Flinders Ranges. We had climbed Mary’s Peak and as I stood there alone I suddenly found myself spouting  a seemingly endless stream of rhyming couplets. I am so glad noone was near to hear because it was probably the most awful doggerel! I remember none of it but I will never forget the feeling of being transformed, elevated and elated. I cannot say it changed my life then but it no doubt reinforced the direction I believe God had in mind for me. O taste and see that the Lord is good..

All of this could be described and written off as highly subjective, emotional, irrational and not open to scientific examination – in other words, an oratorical gift to Professor Dawkins! Just tell that to Moses or to St John of the Cross – or to those thousands of people whose experiences have been collected by the Religious Experience Research Unit… O taste and see that the Lord is good.

So what has this to do with this Easter vigil? We have just heard a series of readings which remind us of the ways in which God is believed to have appeared, spoken with,  accompanied, directed, corrected (or tried to correct) God’s people over several millennia. They cannot all be mythological. Even at their strangest there must be a core of genuine experience behind the record.

And what we hear about constantly is a God who cares for the creation and who regularly seeks to enter into a new and loving relationship with that creation and especially with the people God has created. We hear of a covenant with Adam and Eve, with Noah, with Abraham, with  Isaac, with Jacob, with Moses  and so on throughout the whole saga of what we call Old Testament history. And it always humankind that mucks things up. God is faithful, and incredibly patient and forgiving. But again and again we decide to follow our own agendas. The result is always chaos…

Tonight we celebrate and give thanks that God has not abandoned us. O taste and see that the Lord is good.

Furthermore we rejoice that the new and final covenant promised us through Isaiah, Jeremiah , Ezekiel and others has become a reality because of the sacrifice of Jesus the Christ and the shedding of his blood to seal the new covenant.

We became part of that covenant in our baptism. So it is appropriate that tonight we should reaffirm our baptismal promises and our place in that new covenant.  And as we light the new fire, the promise of that light and love comes to us out of the darkness of the mess we have made in this world.  O taste and see that the Lord is good.

We should note in passing that the water with which we are sprinkled is the same element in which our Lord was himself baptized. And in so using this part of the natural world in which we live and move and have our being Christ indicates that the natural world in which we live is good and to be celebrated like the senses God gave us to appreciate it. O taste and see that the Lord is good.

The miracle of this night and tomorrow is that the God who has moved and spoken through history to so many people no longer speaks through intermediaries. The God who none dared see is now visible. That God has become one of us, has lived amongst us as one of us, has died and been raised amongst us. And he has appeared to many, eaten with some of them, could be touched – if they dared – and was the same Jesus but changed.

St Gregory of Palamas, the 14^th century Eastern Orthodox theologian , always insisted upon the importance of personal experience of God. And because he believed in the ever presence of  “divine energies” he insisted upon the  intrinsic holiness of the human body and of the whole material creation. So the whole person becomes part of the resurrection which we celebrate at this time.

O taste and see, and smell, and hear, and touch the Lord who is good.

Tomorrow we conclude this Holy Week series by thinking about the final sense- that of sight. But now let us close with the delightful poem about offering our senses printed on your handout. It is called “Sensing God” and is by Judith Kirk.

Good Friday

One of the features of St George’s is all its things. By things I mean its furnishings: it has shrines, pictures and a whole range of things, now mostly removed or covered with purple. The reason why they are covered with purple, it that what is left is being emphasised.

Now one of the things left uncovered are the Stations of the Cross – you can see them there, some 14 of them, along the walls. They depict the last journey of the our Lord, as he was condemned to death and then made to carry his cross to the hill of execution, Golgotha, where he was stripped, nailed to the wood, and then hung up to die. The final two are particularly sad – being placed in his mother’s arms and then put in a tomb.

The history of why Christians have them is a bit obscure. Variants of the idea of a Way of the Cross developed over quite a long time – the earliest had it going from the execution to Pilate’s house. However, one reason why they proved so popular was the promotion of the devotion by the Franciscans.

The Franciscans were the super order of the 13th C. They brought the faith alive to people by a radical preaching and a new use of images. It was the Franciscans who gave us the Christmas Crib, and it was the Franciscans who popularised the idea of having pictures of the way of the cross in churches – one friar, St Leonard of Port Maurice, expressed his zeal by erecting 571 sets of stations between 1731 and 1751, becoming known as the "preacher of the way of the cross."

So why did they do it, and why was it popular? The reason was that people had become blasé about what it meant. There had been pictures of the crucifixion from the early days – but they had become part of the decoration, and they did not have the impact. Then they started to paint even more realistic pictures, trying to show the ugly agony of Christ, but eventually they, too, lost their impact. So then the Stations found a new way of reaching people, allowing people not just to look at a picture, but enter into to the last footsteps of Christ, to walk his final journey.

But here we are, some several hundred years on. Pictures don’t move us in the same way, our lives are a riot of advertising and pictures and vibrant colour. We sit in front of our televisions and see the most horrific stories while we munch our sausages and mash or toy with our cannelloni. We are more concerned about the salt content of our food that the torture on the screen. We have dulled our senses by over-exposure.

Today is the day when we are invited to re-connect. Do worry about the pictures, movies, images or whatever – think and feel. Once, a long time ago, so long ago that is still closer in time than the dinosaurs, or even the pyramids, a man came into being. He was human like us; felt cold and pain like us; but he was also God. God had come to live among us to show that we were loved and that there would be no barrier between God and ourselves. But living with God is not easy – God has a very particular way of making things clear and showing what truth is. So in the end it was easier for people to live without God. So, with ritual and law, he was condemned to death.

However, God had seen this and decided that death would be acceptable. For God knows that, for each and every one of us, we have to face death. We lose our friends, family and finally our own selves to death. Death hurts and terrifies our souls. We see our bodies age and know that they will decay in death to dust. This frightens us. We fear a future without our bodies.

But God wanted to say that death is only a part of life. God wanted to say, that this world, with all its imperfections, is only a place of testing and growth and that God does not create us for futility, but God has created us to be everlasting. Therefore God accepted death.

This death was not the gentle sanitised death of the television soapies, a nice little chat and then the head drops to the side: this death was one of calculated pain and humiliation. Crucifixion is torture, bitter public torture. But the God-man, who took on the name of Jesus or in Hebrew Joshua, in memory of the one who brought the ancient Israelites into the Promised Land so long, long before, this son of Joseph, named in memory of the one who found a home for the Chosen People when they were threatened with famine so long, long before, this God-man took on pain and torture and humiliation willingly. He did this out of love. Love for each of us, love of us not as perfect clean healthy beings, but as tortured degraded sinful beings. God knew what we are like and God wanted to show us that love saw this and accepted us.

God needs no pretences – God knows what we do and who we are. All these picture, all these stations, all this liturgy today, are designed to make us stop and think – this was done for each one of us. Someone suffered and died for me today, and loves me no matter what. Furthermore, he showed a tantalising glimpse of a future, a future beyond death, which is offered to each of us, should we so take it. We may still fear the creep of death, the pain of our collapsing bodes, but we are offered hope and love through this strange God-man called Jesus who lived and died for us.

Jesus dies today; God dies today: for us.

MAUNDY THURSDAY – 1^st APRIL, 2010 Bp Ian George

”O taste and see that the Lord is good”- Psalm 34:8

TOUCH

The Counter – Reformation produced an amazing group of vigorous painters in Italy. By far the most important was Caravaggio. Some years ago I visited the church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome where two of his masterpieces hang. They are in side chapels and were in total darkness. Suddenly I realized there was a little slot to put a coin in so as to shed some light on the paintings. I had none. But I have never ceased to be grateful to a hunched up old lady all dressed in black, who shuffled across to me with a coin in her hand. I have never ceased to be grateful because it was the prelude to one of the most memorable moments in my life. I still get a shiver in the spine as I recall it

As the light flashed on I took a step backward in shock. At my eye level was the totally unexpected sight of a horse’s rump! They say that when travelling it is not the things you know about from the guide books which stay with you but the things you discover for yourself. I can vouch for that. If I had reached out a hand I could have touched that rump. I almost did but I didn’t really dare. After all it had been there since a bout 1610…..

Now you will be thinking – what on earth has this to do with Maundy Thursday?

Well, the rump that hit me in the face was that of the horse from which St Paul was thrown at the point of his conversion on the road to Damascus. At the bottom of this extraordinarily daring picture is St Paul lying spreadeagled on the road.

No artist of his time could rival Caravaggio for the vividness with which he represented the traditional biblical stories. And they have continued to stop people in their tracks through the centuries just as he did to me. But now we get to the point. Four years ago two of his paintings ( now authenticated ) were discovered in the loft of a rural French church where they had been relegated by church authorities after – it is thought – being taken from a French noble during the French revolution and subsequently presented to the church. Hold your breath – the two paintings were valued in 2006 at almost $250 million.

One of them is called “ Saint Thomas Putting His Finger On Christ’s Wound”. It shows Thomas actually putting his finger IN Christ’s wounded side. How would you like to do that? Could you do that? I certainly could not.

You will all remember the story. Thomas is told of Jesus’ resurrection and refuse to believe it until he can put his fingers in his wounds. Jesus later appears and invites him to do just that. According to St John (20:24 – 29) Thomas responds by saying “My Lord and my God” and one senses that he draws back in awe and embarrassment. But is interesting that John then has Jesus saying:” Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe”. So perhaps Caravaggio is closer to the truth….O touch and see that the Lord is good……..

Let’s move now to another of the most vivid events in the Gospel story – the washing of the disciples’ feet by Jesus as we heard it tonight from St John.

How do you picture this happening? Where are they? In Jerusalem these days one is taken to an upper room which turns out to be a crusader – built arcaded chamber with late gothic or early renaissance pillars – ideal for a Hollywood film set for the life of Jesus as a mediaeval man!

Who knows where they met?

It was probably a fairly small room in a classic Jerusalem hillside house where the main living room was little more than a cave dug out of the hill behind. There are many of them in Israel today. They probably did not sit around a table as we do but lay on mats leading into a central area where all the food was placed. Hence they would lean in and take food from various bowls with their fingers.

After they have eaten Jesus stands, takes off his outer garment, ties a towel around his waist, pours water into a basin, somehow washes the disciples’ feet and wipes them with the towel. The feet would all have been pointing away from the food so he would presumably have moved around the circle. Having done that he puts back his outer robe and sits – or lies down again. O touch and see that the Lord is good.

How would he have washed the feet? Not hurriedly – as many new arrivals would have done earlier, eager to get to the food. Nor would it be the gentle caress of the lover. It would be the careful thorough touch of the faithful servant or one of the women in the family performing her social duty.

.How stunned they must have been to see Jesus in this servant role! But it is an acted parable; something that Jeremiah was so good at in the prophetic past. Jesus is modelling for his disciples – and for us – the kind of attitude to each other – and to all others – he expected his followers to exhibit.

There is probably significant revolutionary comment here. From what we know of Palestinian culture of Jesus’ day ( and we have learnt much from the nineteenth and early twentieth century scholarly examination of Palestinian tribal and village patterns of behaviour) people were careful who they touched and how.

How important touch is to all of us! We have our origins in the coming together of bodies which leads to conception. In the womb we have the closest possible experience of “togetherness” united to our mothers and yet gradually achieving separation and individual definition. From the modest handshake to the embrace, from the lover’s caress to the nurse’s bathing we all need the reassurance of human physical contact to make us human. O touch and see that the Lord is good.

As many of you will remember, some years ago – as a result of the ecumenical liturgical movement from which we have learned so much about the worship of the early Church – we reintroduced the ancient custom of passing the Kiss of

Peace. What a refreshing recognition of our humanity that has been, even though it is usually a handshake. But I will never forget Bishop John Hines ( then Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church of the USA) saying when he lead Bible studies for the General Synod in the 1980s: “When we come to the Kiss of Peace in our Church, we have some shakers, we have some kissers, we have some huggers, and we have some who simply turn their faces to the wall!”. O touch and see that the Lord is good.

Sadly just as we have begun to recognize the importance of physical human contact for our spiritual health we have been confronted with all the terrible evidence of sexual harassment and abuse, of domestic violence, home invasions, and the ever-growing list of wars. Every night our TV news emphasizes this terrible saga of human beings’ ongoing inhumanity. Surely much of this is the sad response of human beings deprived of the normal love and affection, emotional and physical, which we are all created by God to need and expect… And these revelations have made it so difficult for clergy and lay leaders to touch the suffering and embrace those is need.

We have seen in our lifetime the revival of the healing ministry in the Church and the more frequent administration of the sacrament of unction with the laying on of hands with prayer for the sick in mind or body. I know , from my own experience – and I am sure Father Scott would agree – what a boon this has been to so many people. O touch and see that the Lord is good.

It was St Francis who became so famous for kissing a leper. That act of Christian generosity has inspired millions throughout the centuries just as Princess Diana’s willingness to touch those living with AIDS made such an impact on the community.

Dr Tony Nancarrow writes: “.. It was Friday, the morning I was due to visit the geriatric ward of a large regional hospital. I was anxious to get it over as quickly as possible. I found it difficult to talk with these elderly people.

There was a Nurses’ Aid at the hospital – a very practical person. She was middle-aged, overworked, a gruff no-nonsense type of person. Yet as she plodded around that ward on her tired feet, trembling arms were held out to her, faces turned towards her warm homely face, quavering voices called her by name. And she, knowing the heart hunger, the loneliness of the old, was lavish with her touch. She patted a cheek, pushed hair from a forehead, or sensing a really special need gave a hug. As I watched her, I thought if it works for her, perhaps it will work for me.

The response shook me to the soul. Eyes that I thought dull as marbles kindled, wrinkled hands returned my clasp. As I was leaving, I noticed an old German woman. Her hand, brown-flecked, dry as a leaf, lay upon the chair. I touched it . it was cold. She looked up in recognition with eyes I’d always thought of as vacant. And in response to the deepest need in all of us, she said: ‘I’m lonely. Hold my hand.” O touch and see that the Lord is good.

So there are questions we need to think about on this Maundy Thursday. Am I, like Peter, too proud to be served ? Am I too proud or too lacking in courage to be willing to serve all and sundry – following Jesus’ example? Does my own sense of value and being depend on my feeling superior or, at least, different from others? Am I willing to touch those in need? Do I really believe I can touch God and God touches me in the sacrament of the altar?

A young man came to me when I was Dean of Brisbane and said: “Father, I want to touch God.” I talked at length with him about the Eucharist and the way in which God comes to us and where we receive the Body and blood of Our Lord, Jesus Christ. Sadly it was not enough for him.

Tonight we celebrate the Institution of the Lord’s Supper. We are all reminded of that mind – blowing privilege to which we are all invited.

O touch and taste and see that the Lord is good.

HOLY WEDNESDAY – 31^st MARCH,

Bp Ian George

“O taste and see that the Lord is good” – Ps. 34: 8

TASTE

At this stage of holy Week we find a funny taste in the mouth. It is not a pleasant taste. It has something of the acrid flavour of dread. It has the hint of the bitter herbs which will be part of the last Passover meal Jesus shares with his disciples.

There is a slight sense of nausea at the pit of the stomach. Something bad is about to happen. As we just heard in that moving little conversation between Mary, Peter and Judas, Mary has exactly that same sense of dread.

There is the taste of blood in our mouths as the temple authorities gear themselves up at last to do something about this menace called Jesus of Nazareth – this upstart itinerant preacher and healer whose enigmatic personality and oracular pronouncements have such an electric impact on the crowds. And especially as Passover approaches, the last thing they want is for Jesus to stir up some kind of insurrection which would cause them trouble with the Romans. The taste of bile is rising in the high priests’ mouths. Little do they know that Jesus is about to engender the greatest stir in history. But it will be about resurrection not insurrection…

In the desert at a time which now seems so long ago, Satan took advantage of Jesus’ hunger to tempt him to limit his concern to the relief of those in need. In the power of the Holy Spirit Jesus had no taste for succumbing to such a tangent or to his own personal needs. His bread was not of this world and he saw ahead a cup from which it was his father’s will that he should drink and drink deeply. O taste and see that the Lord is good.

Indeed he knew that he was the bread of life itself, in himself. The crowds rallied around him and were fed. But he tasted disappointment and sadness in recognizing that they came to him for physical sustenance and missed the point. They did not see in him that heavenly food which alone satisfies all tastes and hungers. Even his closest disciples were too dim much of the time to comprehend the profundity of his words and actions. And some had little stomach or taste for it. Some had their own particular agendas. Don’t we all?

More than daily we ask for our daily bread. The Greek is not easy to translate accurately into English. The best agreed (but rather ugly) conclusion is that it means something like “ give us today the bread we need for tomorrow”. One eminent scholar says it is the plea of a simple day labourer facing another heavy day’s physical work tomorrow. He prays that somehow, in spite of his poverty, God will provide enough sustenance to get him through his burden of work tomorrow – without falling in a heap from lack of nourishment. I wonder if any of you here have ever been in such a predicament? It brings the taste of terror to the mouth. But if we have never been caught in such a position of physical need, have we found ourselves in such a position of spiritual need?

We may have tasted the fear of failure, the shock of betrayal, the disloyalty of so-called friends. We have all known the sour taste of rejection.

The writer of Psalm 70 which we have just heard certainly knew all about that. And so did Our Lord.

As Christians we all know the bitter taste of the scorn of those who have no time for or understanding of Jesus and his love. I remember vividly being spat upon by a man who despised those who wore a clerical collar. Sadly, perhaps he had good reason for his anger.

Are we coping, you and I, with our lives? Are we managing the demands people place upon us? Is there time for us to hear God. Do we regularly taste that balm of serenity, that sense of rightness and composure which comes from a significant period of time in the presence of God? Have you felt that sweet taste in the mouth that the peace of God which passes all understanding can bring? It is more refreshing I find than several hours of normal sleep.

O taste and see that the Lord is good.

Tonight we heard from St Matthew of the last Passover meal Jesus shared with his close disciples. They break bread together and dip their hands into the same bowl. At the end we are left with the bad taste of Judas’ imminent betrayal.

It is no accident that the Judaeo – Christian tradition has always placed so much emphasis on shared meals. True companionship, true community, comes from breaking bread together. O taste and see that the Lord is good.

The very word companionship says it all. It comes from the Latin “panis” for bread and “com” for together. There are few more pleasant experiences in this earthly life than preparing and sharing a meal together.

The book of the Acts of the Apostles tells us that the first Christian community (long before they were called “Christians”) met daily for the breaking of the bread and the prayers. From this has developed the mass, the eucharist, the holy communion or the Lord’s Supper – whatever we choose to call it. But the early Christians followed this with what was called an “agape” meal - from the word used for God’s love in the Greek New Testament. It was a “love feast”. In this meal they shared what they had together – especially with those in need. And food would be taken from The Agape meal to the sick or housebound. O taste and see that the Lord is good.

Dr Tony Nancarrow speaks of a particular experience of hospital chaplaincy:

“I was once called to the bedside of a very ill and weak woman. She had battled terminal cancer for several years, and was now in the final days of her life. She had trouble even swallowing the few drops of water from the shards of ice that her loving husband placed upon her tongue. The family had drifted away from God and the church many years before, and I was called by a nurse, who was a friend of my wife, with the request to offer her communion.

When I arrived the whole family was present. She seemed so small, like another species surrounded by sons and daughters, all looking like giants. Only her husband was small. He seemed to retreat into himself, as if to share her pain. We read psalms, and shared prayers. I began the liturgy, so familiar, yet on this occasion, so unique.

As I broke the bread, I began to wonder what I should do. Should I give it to her? What if she choked? I tore off the smallest piece my hands could manage. She opened her mouth for me to place it on her tongue. I watched as she rolled it round and round her mouth.

“Oh no”, I thought, “What do I do now?” Should I reach into her mouth and remove it? A dozen scenarios were playing out in my mind – none of them particularly pleasant.

The I saw the look on her face, and I understood. She was not struggling at all. She was savouring – savouring the moment – savouring the bread – savouring the very Lord upon whom she was feeding!

Finally she swallowed. She repeated the whole exercise with the wine. Some familiar words flowed through my mind, “O taste and see that the Lord is good.”..

How good is God, how complete in loving-kindness. God is the host of life itself.”

At his installation as Archbishop of Canterbury, Father Rowan Williams quoted from one of George Herbert’s most memorable verses called LOVE(III) which you have printed on your service sheet this evening. Love is presented as the host welcoming us to partake in the feast prepared for us. But we draw back, from guilt or from humility, and decline to go forward. But God – the host of life itself – persists and reminds us that the guilt is all wiped away. Herbert concludes:

“You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat; So I did sit and eat.”

Let us do likewise. O taste and see that the Lord is good.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. What taste is in your mouth at this stage of Holy Week this year?

2. When you pray the Lord’s Prayer, what are you asking for when you pray “Give us this day our daily bread”?

3. What do you think Jesus meant when he said “ I am the bread of life”?

4. Have you felt the taste of God’s presence?

5. Have you felt the taste of rejection, failure or betrayal?

HOLY TUESDAY- 30^th MARCH, 2010

Bp Ian George

“O taste and see that the Lord is good.” (Ps. 34: 8)

HEARING ( Acts 2: 36 – 41; John 12: 20 – 36)

O taste and hear that the Lord is good. Tonight we have the privilege of hearing Musica Reservata sing part of Tenebrae together with the reading of some splendid verse chosen for the occasion. Our ears are alive with the sound of music. O taste and hear that the Lord is good!

Speaking and hearing, call and response,  are at the very core of the whole Judaeo- Christian tradition. Genesis tells us that at the very beginning God said:”Let there be light” and there was light. Indeed God spoke no less than seven times and each time some major part of creation appears, including man and woman.

But God goes on speaking through the centuries, sometimes through angels, sometimes through dreams, sometimes through judges, sometimes through kings, sometimes through prophets, sometimes through ordinary men and women or events. We hear of God appearing and speaking to Adam and Eve, to Cain, to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, to Joseph, to Moses and so on throughout the centuries. God speaks and people respond – or not, as the case may be.

We hear of Elijah on Mount Horeb waiting to meet God. But the Lord was not in the wind, nor the earthquake, nor the fire, and then there was only silence. Only then does Elijah wrap his cloak around him and venture out to the mouth of his cave. The there came a voice to him – and he is told what to do.

How important is that silence. In much of the Western Church we have lost sight of the significance of silence. In our activist culture we have lost the capacity to listen clearly. And so often, like the song in that movie “The Graduate”, we are listening without hearing.  O taste and hear that the Lord is good.

The metaphor behind the idea of God speaking is very important. Noone can speak without breathing out. The breath of God creates. It is the spirit of God. And it becomes the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. Again noone can speak without uttering a word or words. When God speaks, Isaiah tells us, God’s word goes out to fulfil God’s purpose and that purpose will not be denied. God’s word will not return to God empty. And our own words do not return to us without consequences, as those of us who are careless with our talk inevitably discover.

God’s ultimate word is in the person of Jesus of Nazareth whom we call messiah or Christ. God speaks the final word of love and forgiveness for all humankind.

For the Jewish people everything begins with the Shema: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12: 29-30). They were expected to say it at least twice daily. Even today many of them wear it bound to their arms and fixed to their front doors.

It is no accident that in pre-literate societies the spoken word–or indeed, the sung word - is the dominant form of communication. We can only guess when the books we take for granted as the Old Testament were first recorded in some kind of written form.   Probably for centuries they were part of a rich oral tradition handed on from one generation to another. Even until Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press we were the inheritors of myriad mistakes unconsciously made in passing by scribes writing at the dictation of a master.

We now live in a culture swamped by the printed, emailed, texted, and indeed pictured and shouted word. So Lent and especially Holy Week is a good time to ask how and what we are hearing. Are we listening? Are we listening without hearing? Are we listening to the wrong things? Are we hearing what we want to hear? Are we open to God? Do we give time to hear what God is saying  uniquely to each one of us as individuals? Do we make time as a congregation to hear what God is asking us to do? Without listening and hearing we cannot respond appropriately. So  how can we be co – creators with God?

Someone once said that the most important things in life cannot be said – they must be sung. “I love you “ is quite a good example! Etienne Gilson the great Roman Catholic philosopher said that , of all the arts, music speaks most directly to the soul. Tonight we have the privilege of listening to some of Victoria’s great setting of Tenebrae. Let us be sure to hear what God is saying to us through this wonderful music – and the verse.

O taste and hear that the Lord is good.

HOLY MONDAY - 29^th MARCH, 2010 by Bp Ian George

“O Taste and see that the Lord is good” – Ps. 34:8

SMELL (The anointing at Bethany – John 12: 1 – 9)

Can you imagine the smell of that costly ointment – that pure nard – as it filled the whole house with its fragrance? It was overwhelming – enough to shock Judas into exclaiming about the waste. In Mark “some” are discomfited. In Matthew it is “the disciples”. Undoubtedly it caused a real stir.

There was something about that house – it was a place of smells. Not long before it was the place of Lazarus’ death and resurrection. You will remember that they were anxious about opening the grave at Jesus’ request. Ever – practical Martha says:” Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days” (John 11:39). All the herbs and ointments normally used in Jewish burials would have long lost their potency. It is a terrible gut-wrenching smell, the smell of decaying flesh. We find it repulsive, perhaps because of some atavistic fear of contamination. Such a fear was deep in the Jewish psyche.

But now the house at Bethany is swamped by a glorious smell of aromatic balsam. Jesus, as he says, is being prepared for his burial…. O taste and smell that the Lord is good..

It is said that our sense of smell is the most effective mode of acquiring and using information that we have. Apparently the information goes straight to the cerebral cortex.

You will each of you have very specific memories of smells which relate to important experiences in the past. The smell of dirty nappies is not something we easily forget. Some can vividly remember the smell of their parents, especially their mothers. Some find a particular perfume reminds them of a former girlfriend or boyfriend. Any sort of liniment has the capacity to jog the memories in most of us! Sometimes we are brought up with a jolt as a smell sweeps us back over the years to our childhood or to a particular place. Occasionally I get whiffs of city smells – probably diesel fumes from buses – which take me back to Manhattan where I had such a wonderful time as a theological student. Some of you will remember the film with Bob Hope in Venice when he falls out of a gondola into a canal and comes up to the surface, puts his finger to his nose and says:” Ah, of course, Canal Number 5!” A real estate salesman once said that the best way to sell a house was to get someone to bake a cake when people came to view the house. It always sold the house because the smell swept the people back to home!

God must have a wonderful smell. We speak of the odour of sanctity. There is a story told that when St Lawrence was being martyred the smell of burning flesh suddenly turned in to the sweet fragrance of perfume. For most of us here talk of the odour of sanctity immediately makes us think of incense. I have always loved the smell although the fumes are sometimes a problem when I have to sing the mass as celebrant. Some incenses are particularly memorable, especially, I think, those of Armenian origin. Tonight we are experiencing two different kinds of incense as our noses are especially awake… O taste and smell that the Lord is good..

Incense has undoubtedly been used for thousands of years in worship. It has sometimes been suggested that its original purpose was to cover the intense smells of the blood shed and the burning flesh of temple sacrifices. When I first went to Jerusalem I found it hard to believe the number of water storage cisterns which had been created for centuries around the temple. Then suddenly the penny dropped. The vast numbers of animal sacrifices which went on every day in the temple would have meant an enormous amount of blood everywhere. Can you imagine the flies? The climate is very like that of South Australia.. So they would have needed vast amounts of water to wash the temple down all the time.

We should note here that Jesus dies this week to render that temple system obsolete. Few Christians seem to realize that the regular system of sacrifices did not provide salvation to the Jewish people. It was a system for the cleansing of individuals and families from the impact of ritual shortcomings which rendered people unclean and therefore outcast from the worshipping community. Only on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) was there any sense of absolution of deep sins and renewal of the covenant. On that day, you will remember (and only on that day) was the high priest permitted to enter the Holy of Holies and spread the blood of the sacrifice around to symbolize the at - one – ment between God and God’s people. And on that day the scapegoat was led out to the wilderness, carrying the sins of the people, and thrown off a cliff to die.

Jesus on the cross, as our great and ultimate high priest, offers himself as the only perfect sacrifice. Just as Moses shed the blood of the sacrifice to seal the old covenant between God and God’s people, so Jesus sheds his blood to seal the new covenant of which we are the beneficiaries by our baptism into Christ. So too Jesus is the scapegoat carrying our sins forever. It is no wonder that the temple curtain, which divided off the Holy of Holies, is rent in twain. Jesus has made the centuries – old temple system obsolete. All this is brilliantly laid out for us in the Epistle to the Hebrews. I encourage you to read it this week. O taste and smell that the Lord is good.

Getting back to incense: some have said – especially in the Christian dispensation - that incense is meant to cover the smells of hundreds of unwashed bodies packed together in badly–ventilated churches! There is so often a very practical origin for what we later take for granted in liturgical usage – sometimes centuries after the practical need disappeared!

But surely the command from God to the Israelites to create an altar of incense in the temple is directly–related to the way in which the smoke of incense gently wanders upward; an instant reminder of the God to whom we pray. For millennia we believed God is up there... Leviticus 1 speaks repeatedly of “an offering by fire of pleasing odour to the Lord”. This applies to a wide range of sacrifices.

St Paul uses this as a metaphor for Jesus and our lives in Ephesians 5:1 :”Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” And writing his second letter to the Corinthians (2:14-16) he suggests that we partake of the smell of God: “ But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads in every place the fragrance that comes from knowing him. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing; to the one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life.” O taste and smell that the lord is good.

Holy Week, par excellence, is a time to examine our lives – to ask ourselves whether we are truly “the aroma of Christ” amongst whom we live and have our being.

At the end of this week we shall all enjoy hot cross buns – although the stores have been selling them since shortly after Christmas! These buns are a regular reminder of the saving sacrifice of Jesus Christ. They have a great aroma. O taste and smell that the Lord is good. Perhaps a little evangelism we could all do this week is to remind those we find enjoying hot cross buns of the background events that these buns celebrate?

O taste and smell that the Lord is good. And let us conclude by praying together the short litany on your Holy Week handout.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1 Can you imagine yourself in that perfumed room in Bethany?

2 What was Mary doing?

3 What would you be doing if you were there?

4 What light does this shed on you understanding of Jesus’ role?

5 What does it shed on your idea of God?

6 Are there memories in your life evoked by smells which need to be dealt with?

Celebrate Life - Lent 4C, 14^th March, 2010

There is a lot of grumbling that goes on in the Gospels. In the Gospel passage today, grumblers surround it. Chapter 15 in Luke starts with the tax collectors and sinners coming to Jesus and the Pharisees and scribes grumbling about Jesus spending time with them. So what does Jesus do?

He starts a series of parables about those who lose and find things. The first one is about the parable of the lost sheep, how the shepherd leaves the 99 sheep to find the lost one, then returns and rejoices with his friends and neighbours. Then he tells the parable of the lost coin, about the woman who loses the silver coin, who sweeps and searches until she finds it, and then calls together her friends and neighbours to rejoice. Then we have the parable of the prodigal son, which also ends with the party for the return of the younger son.

Parties are a big theme in these three parables, in response to the grumbles of those who criticise the company our Lord was keeping.

So what is going on in the parable of the Prodigal Son? Now one of the sticky bits in this parable is a question of translation. The parable talks about the division of property; the younger son demands half, then takes it away and squanders it in dissolute living. The older son, when the younger returns, complains how the younger has wasted the property with prostitutes.

Yet there is another level of this translation. The word that is used for property is ousia (in 15:12, 13 (and nowhere else in the entire New Testament)), and also bios (in 15.12.30) But ousia was already a technical term in Greek philosophy for being; it also has the connotation of substance or existence. And bios is the standard word for life. So a more literal rendering of Luke 15:12-13 would be:

The younger son said to his father, “Father, give me the share of [your] existence that will belong to me.” So he divided his life between them. A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and travelled to a distant country, and there he squandered his existence in dissolute living (zao).

And 15:30 would be older son saying to the father:

“But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your life with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!”

So instead of thinking of this parable about a property division, think about it as a gift of life. The father divides his life with his sons. Hence when the younger returns, what the father says carries more: “this brother of yours was dead and has come to life.”

So let’s think of this parable again. The younger son takes his father’s share of being. The older son accepts this and takes his – he does not complain about the division. The son then wastes that life with a dissolute life with prostitutes. Then, in the famine, he comes back to the father and wants to be a servant. But the father won’t let him finish the set speech; he takes him back and holds a party, a big party – a fatted calf means everyone is invited. So the father’s party is for the whole town: the son’s partying was just with prostitutes.

The older son proves to be a tougher nut. He plays dumb in the fields: what’s the party about? Remember those Pharisees and scribes who complained about Jesus partying? Aren’t they the children of Abraham, the children of the Law, the elder children of God? The elder son is even worse; he as shared in the division of the father’s existence, he is whinging about not even having a skinny little goat for a meal with his friends, when he had everything. Like the younger son, he wanted to only party with his friends as well, but even though he had everything, he wanted more from his father.

The father then becomes the key. He is not the stern father, waiting for the son to come and beg forgiveness: he runs out in haste to welcome the son he loves back: not the patriarchal thing to do at all and takes the son back. Then he calls for a party with a fatted calf, a big party – fatted calves are for community meals, it takes a lot of eating. When the elder son complains, he then tells the hard older son, that he is always with him, and that all that is his is his elder son’s. The father is a never-ending source not of property, but of existence, of life, of love.

This is the point that Jesus is trying to make: celebrate life. Share it with everyone. Don’t grumble about it, don’t whinge that God seems to be having a good time with the most unlikely people. What is important is that we are to open ourselves to everyone: don’t wait until someone asks for a skinny little goat; be generous in our giving of life: use a fatted calf. Our existence, our life is an incredible gift from God. Lent is the time when we realise that so much of what we hang onto, so many of our habits or paltry things we own, are not the real treasures of life. That’s what fasting, prayer and almsgiving is meant to show; it’s not food or things that are important: it’s the love of God, the love that welcomes back those who waste life on their own selfish ends, or are so uptight and miserly they never relax and never give love a chance; God loves them all as the father, and wants us to celebrate. Heaven is nothing more than a party with everyone in joy and love.

So don’t grumble: love the life that is given as a gift from God. Short or long, hard or easy, it’s all a gift to be shared. Everything has a purpose, and it’s all the gift of the existence of our God who never holds back, but is always running to meet us whenever we return.

No Rest Till the Top - Lent 2 28th February, 2010

A friend recently gave me a card, with a picture of some nice mountains. It was very pretty, definitely Australian, a dry landscape, but definitely not South Australia. The mountains were just way too high. In fact it was of the northeast of Victoria, where I spent many years around Wangaratta.

However, Adelaide is not blessed with mountains. Mount Lofty is not what you could call an overwhelming mountain. We think of it as our tallest mountain, at 720 metres, forgetting that the tallest mountain in the state is actually Mount Woodroffe at twice that height way up near the border with the Northern Territory.

However, we make do with Mount Lofty, and people go for pleasant walks up or down, or if very active both. I have on friend who only ever walks up it, and then has his wife pick him up at the top. It’s not too hard a walk, and there is a nice café at the top to sip a coffee before continuing on life’s journey.

In the reading of the Transfiguration today in the Gospel, we hear that Jesus took with him Peter, James and John up the mountain to pray. Unlike many of us, there is no description whether it was a hard climb or an easy climb – but only they got there and left. The coming and going is barely mentioned.

Yet in one sense the whole story of the Transfiguration only makes sense in the coming and the going. The people that Jesus takes with him, Peter, John and James will be with him at many intimate moments in his teachings and life, and will join him again in the agony in the Garden. They are the inner disciples, whose insights about Jesus will form the early Church.

Furthermore, the coming to this moment has been through the call of discipleship and the beginning of our Lord’s ministry. They have undertaken the discipleship: but as yet don’t understand the full meaning of how our Lord will be the Messiah.

The Transfiguration is really an insight for them to take on their journey of discipleship – they have travelled with his so far, thinking perhaps that he is a prophet, and this points to them how their journey will progress. No prophet was like this, and this experience will be food for thought as they journey to Jerusalem. They won’t fully understand everything, not until the resurrection, when finally all the pieces will fall into place and they will know that this Jesus is truly the Son of God.

That’s why we listen to this reading today. We have started our journey of Lent. We have barely even had a week, yet already some of us may be flagging on our Lenten journey. What have we undertaken for Lent, and how well have we kept our rule of life? This is only Lent 2 – there are six Sundays and Holy Week, forty days and forty nights to take. Walking up even our gentle Mount Lofty is not a picnic, and nor should our Lent be. The climbing of the mountain for the Transfiguration is skipped over, but would have been a bit of exercise. So should our journey of Lent.

The Transfiguration is a vision, an insight for the journey. It points to what is to come. In our journey of Lent, so we will have pointers to Easter, pointers to our own divine future. The glimpses of glory that matter in life, the vision of God that blesses our moments All these are important to us, and helpful and encouraging. Yet we must not forget – the Transfiguration happened on a mountain, and they had to climb up and down to get there. Lent needs a bit of hard work and climbing. You need to work at Lent if you are to taste the glory.

Remember the objectives of Lent: prayer, fasting and almsgiving. All three are hard work in their constant call. It’s like that walk up Mount Lofty, you have to keep the legs moving if you are to reach the top, and so with prayer, fasting and almsgiving, simple things in themselves but they keep us moving through Lent. No mountain is climbed by admiring the view – and no good Easter is made by letting time go by. Use Lent wisely and it will use you wisely. Lent is the time to become better Christians, to take on discipline to do what needs to be done, to give space to God to make us better people. Remember that the core of Lent is letting things go so there is more space for God. It is only be giving things up we find we have the space to let God give us new things.

So enjoy the moment of glory of the Gospel today – our Lord seen as he is, in uncreated light, brighter than anything earthly. Then get those legs walking and go down that mountain into life again. Lent is underway.

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