A rainbow of tenderness

Below is the text of my homily at Parish Mass on 21st February, the first Sunday in Lent.

The readings were Genesis 9, 8-17 (in which the rainbow becomes the sign of connection between God and humanity) and Mark i, 9-15 (Mark’s succinct account of Jesus’ baptism by John, his time spent alone in the wilderness, and his subsequent declaration of the Gospel, a message of good news.)

‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’

Such a short Gospel passage and yet containing so much that can speak to us, today…

Crises come in many forms. For the people of that time the over-rule of a powerful Roman empire, the mixture of law and arbitrary cruelty and local corruption that characterise all powerful empires. The consequent uncertainty and fragility of life, especially for the poor and the vulnerable. Such a crisis that made crowds journey out from the city to listen to John the Baptist.

In our days, a crisis that breaks upon us on many fronts. Illness and the fear of infection. Isolation. Jobs terminated and so many others furloughed and thus in doubt. Fear and resentment so easily projected upon others. Death, thousands of excess deaths each week in England alone, and for many a loneliness that we fear perhaps more even than death. Such a crisis as makes crowds flock…well, nowhere, that’s part of the problem for us. We stay at home, we watch the news, we talk on Zoom, we post on Facebook – and we wonder, where will it all lead?

And into the midst of that crisis, and this, steps Jesus. Jesus who enters the water and is baptised with the crowd, Jesus who enters our chaos and feels our bewilderment and hears our silent cry.

The sky, in Mark’s account, was opened – but not with a roar of God’s wrath and judgement. Instead, with words so kind, compassionate and hopeful, a kind of rainbow of tenderness joining heaven to earth: this, my Son, one with you, is also my beloved, and as he is one with you so you are my beloved also, with whom I am well pleased…

In our time of crisis, are we also able to hear again the kindness and the commitment of God towards us, through Jesus who walks alongside? I hope so, and I believe so. I sense that something has shifted for many people and that while there will be no massive change to the secular landscape of our lives, yet the walls have thinned that separate people from thoughts of God and of the soul. Too bad that in most cases the church’s doors remain for the time being locked. Ours fortunately are open. Our enormous building with its moveable chairs is as if designed for a pandemic’s safety protocols! More people venture in to pray, or pause, or perhaps at times wonder why they entered – and yet they do. Among our church members as well there is a change and you can sense it – in church and online: and I will dare to describe that difference as a renewed focus on God. Of course, God has always been our main focus, but ordinarily for us as for all church communities that focus has at times been distracted by so many other things. There is a renewed focus on God, who is not far off, nor judgemental, but is kind, and inclined, toward us.

Following those rainbow words from heaven, Jesus was himself called, or compelled, into the wilderness, and so we should not perhaps be dismayed that we too seem to have entered a desert time of isolation and difficulty through coronavirus. Let us though remember all the more with what words of hope Jesus emerged from that experience:

‘The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’ Every crisis shatters the existing era and makes a new one possible. And if we will repent (which does not principally imply a sorrowful wail of self-recrimination: rather, to repent means, to look at things anew, to take a new perspective on one’s life and one’s world) – if we will repent then we may begin to enjoy the world again as one in which, for all its sadness and sin, God is king and in which life and love, justice and peace are his ordinances.

A few days ago a person unknown to me came into church to pray, and left. That normally would be that and known only to God. But in a back pocket was money, a significant amount for the person concerned. Later they realised it was lost and called me but there was little expectation of finding it. Yesterday I went to take coffee to Steve, our friend of very long standing who is homeless and who was sitting in the porch, his safe space. Currently he is sober (a miracle that we must pray for on a daily basis, please) and consequently amenable and helpful. ‘Father Pip’, he remarked, ‘somebody left a note for you’ and so I saw what otherwise I certainly would have overlooked for weeks, a folded sheet pinned to the notice board from someone else unknown to me who had discovered an amount of money and hoped I might be able to help locate its owner. So, amidst a time of fear, isolation and loss, here was an act of generous kindness between strangers, reminding us that The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near…’ Perhaps to rediscover the reality of God’s Kingdom could really be almost as simple as that.

Meanwhile the skies remain grey and the rain is not yet ceased. We live in dark and dangerous times. But yet we can still be daft and daring enough to be found singing in the rain (a friend recently reminded me of that wonderful cameo from the 1952 film!) We can sing in the rain because in Christ Jesus the reign of God is begun and assured. We may not mirror the agility of Gene Kelly but yet, repentance need not be a dismal duty but a joyous recognition that come rain, come shine, we can sing (even if not in public for a little while longer…) and dance and be happy again.

‘I turn to Christ…’ – a homily for Candlemas

As allowed for by the Church of England lectionary we anticipated Candlemas (properly to be celebrated on 2nd February, 40 days following Jesus’ birth) on the preceding Sunday, 31st January. Below is the text of my sermon. It was a grey, rainy day and when at the end of the Mass we switched off the lights and I led prayers from the font, I noticed the people – spaced apart and yet somehow closely joined with each other and those online, and with the company of heaven – and saw their faces illumined by candlelight, I felt that what we were doing was no brief escape from the long Covid darkness but rather a statement of hope in the victory of God’s light.

Below is the text of my address during the Parish Mass.

As so often with the stories we read or hear from the Bible, today’s Gospel reading forms a very vivid picture in our minds. (I think it is a valid and often very helpful approach to reading the Bible, to allow ourselves to envision the scene, to let our imagination fill in some of the gaps, to permit our various senses, and our feelings, to become a part of our response to the text.)

The Temple in Jerusalem was big, and busy. There would have been plenty of other parents with their children that day. There would have been the ritual sacrifices taking place. It would have been noisy, and a bit chaotic.

And yet amid all this hustle and bustle, when he hear today’s Gospel we seem to be embraced in stillness and quietness. We are somehow at the still centre of all this activity and noise, with thoughtful old Simeon, and the prayerful old Anna. Simeon’s almost blinded sight yet recognises a light emanating from the child Jesus, a ‘light to lighten the Gentiles’, that is, all people everywhere, and Anna too, so accustomed to the Temple with all its daily and its grand occasions, sees in this tiny child cradled in Mary’s arms a Dr Who-like ‘break in the space-time continuum’, and a new beginning, a new dawn of hope, a crack through which all may enter a bigger world of God’s possibilities.

My friends, we are all caught up into a bewildering and changing world. At present especially each of our lives can feel so changed and so affected by circumstances beyond our control that we seem like corks tossed by the waves. I wonder if we, you, me, all of humanity, may still today find access to that bigger and kinder world…

There is an additional, poignant contrast as we contemplate this ‘tableaux’ of Christ’s Presentation in the Temple. For we also see infancy and age touching and embracing: the elderly Simeon, and Anna (who by the standards of that time was, at 84 years, very old indeed) being the ones to recognise and cradle the 40 days old Christ Jesus. Their wisdom and experience welcome the much younger couple, and Mary, they foresee, will share painfully yet wondrously in the love and the suffering of her son.

My companions on the Christian pilgrimage, each of us remains the child we were and each of us is daily moving towards an age, greater or less, that will bring our earthly journey to its close. At this time especially we are conscious of our interdependence, during a deadly pandemic that cruelly exploits age’s vulnerability, restricts younger people’s activity, and inhibits children’s potential, and in which all are to some degree separated and unable to embrace across the generations.

At the conclusion of today’s Mass I will lead prayers from the font, the reminder of baptism at which each of us was as it were presented to God, in thanksgiving and in trust. We may very likely have been a young child at the time or we might have been an adult – and for some listening today it may yet be a future possibility. At that baptism we, or our Godparents on our behalf, made or make some simple responses, statements that we will have repeated if and when we were confirmed: I turn to Christ…I repent of my sins…I renounce evil.

I recently heard one of our bishops explain that when he prays, the only words he always uses are to repeat those words: I turn to Christ…I repent of my sins…I renounce evil. I have been doing the same since I heard that. Each day we can re-live our baptism, that moment we, like Christ Jesus, were presented before God our Father, and when God embraced us and the child within us, and promised to share whatever suffering might come our way, to forgive us our sins that daily disfigure us, and to lead and strengthen us to renounce the evil that so often afflicts or even attracts us.

My dear friends, each of us struggles at times on this journey and each of us falls and falters and sometimes we all but despair, of ourselves or of others or of the world. But let us – here in church or at home and online – be reminded of our unity in Christ, to whom this day we turn (I turn to Christ) before whose kindly face we repent (I repent of my sins) and with whose hand to support us we renounce evil (I renounce evil.)