Sermond Preached by the Archdeacon of Northumberland 15th after Trinity 2010
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Trinity 15
Year C
‘…. And the grace of the lord overflowed for me…’
1 Tim 1:14
’…. and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.’

If I was forced into the situation of having to choose just one word to summarize the Christian faith, to choose a single word that could capture all that I have come to understand as the richness and profundity that our faith in Christ crucified, risen and ascended has come to mean at least to me but in common with so many others, as ridiculous a task as it may seem, as preposterous and impossible challenge a task as it would undoubtedly be, I think I know exactly the word that I would choose.

Now of course there would be other contenders: deeply significant and heavy loaded words such as atonement and incarnation, exhilarating words such forgiveness and liberation, intimate words such as compassion and love, pregnant words that point beyond the here and now such as hope and resurrection but my choice I have to tell you would be none of these. Not that any of these are unimportant to the faith I want to preach, on the contrary in almost equal measure these words appeal to the thinking and the feeling sides of the Christianity I have come to know and love and of which I am privileged to share in its ministry.

And of course it would be hard not to choose the simple proclamation Jesus or Christ as the only word that truly identifies the heart of our faith for without his precious name we have nothing. But there is a word that I would choose because it not only captures for me the very essence of all that Christ is and does for the likes of you and me but it also encourages , even more demands that I too follow in His way. This word is at the heart of the short reading that we heard from Paul’s First Letter to the Timothy just a few moments ago, it is I believe the very Good News that Jesus bids his disciples to proclaim as he sends them out on that first missionary journey, it is wrapped up in the joy of the angels as a sinner repents, and as the lost are found and it explains so clearly why much to the disgust of the Pharisees and Scribes Christ welcomed the table company of Tax collectors and sinners.

In Hebrew the word is chesed or chen, whereas in NT Greek it is normally rendered charis . In the OT it is translated as Favour or loving-kindness in the NT it is simply GRACE. The danger is that though one of the most beautiful words in the scriptures, my choice as the word is so often on our lips we fail to reflect upon its nature and to bask in its sunshine. Just think for a moment how often we use the word ‘grace’.
In secular terms we speak of luxury free living as ‘grace and favour’, we describe people as gracious and by that we mean courteous, kind, forgiving, benevolent, cultured, and movement as graceful like the dancers or the flight of a bird or even a plane. In church terms
• For some it is merely that mumble of words used before a meal
Tell the story ‘O god not those awful people coming for supper tonight’
• For many of us it is the little code that we use to finish our common prayers ‘the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and ….’
Yet if we pause for a moment and look at its use in the scriptures we will see that it plays a vital and defining part holding together all that is unique in the Christian faith – that’s why it is for me the Christian word.
Both the Greek and the Hebrew words have at their roots the notion of kindness usually of a superior to an inferior, they signify that which gives pleasure but it also stands for the pleasure that is given – both the kindness shown and the gratitude created in the giving. In the NT the characteristic use of the word grace is of God’s redemptive love which is shown to sinful humanity in the life and death of Christ.

The idea of grace more than any other binds the two testaments into a complete whole. Without grace there would never have been a chosen people, in fact any story to tell at all. The first thing we read concerning Noah is that he found ‘grace in the eyes of the lord’ (Gen 6:8) It was the same grace or favour that we read of in Exodus that led forth the people of God out of Egypt. In Deuteronomy we read that the people though undeserving were chosen by God through grace. And the Prophets give testimony that it is only God’s loving kindness – his grace that determines his treatment of a rebellious people and that guarantees that a remnant will return.
In the NT grace is intimately connected with Christ and all that he does to declare God’s love for human kind - for you and for me. ‘In Christ dwells all the fullness of the Godhead’ (Col 2:9) He is grace made flesh – personified, concentrated, made flesh.
And what is this grace
It is the free gift of God – it cannot be earned or deserved ‘Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me’
It is through grace that we are able to find God or to put it more correctly it is through grace that God finds us
It is grace alone that allows us to enter into a relationship with God
Grace is God’s actions in Christ – that Christ lays down his life for sinners such as us – Christ given for us that we might find peace with God and so to find peace with ourselves
It is this beautiful, sweet grace that as Paul says in Romans ushers us –you and me – into the royal presence of God himself like a humble subject is gently ushered into the presence of royalty. And in our reading today from 1Tim we hear Paul again tell how even though he was a blasphemer, a persecutor, a man of violence grace is bestowed on him in full measure through the loving work and action of Christ..
For us not only should we rejoice and give thanks for the grace bestowed upon by God through Christ but such grace invites us to be gracious ourselves. To acknowledge our own inadequacy and then, so aware of how good God has been to others that, we can only act graciously to others. So we are called to gracious living. The Christian there should be no talk of rights or even responsibilities but only of grace – the joy of responding to all that we have been given by God in Christ and the opportunity to act graciously ourselves. To see the best in those around us and even when we know our brothers and sisters shortcomings to encourage them to act lovingly. To never see ourselves as anything but those who are fortunate enough to have recognised god’s love working in our lives; To live lives of gratitude for whatever may come our way. To become graceful in response to the graceful God we serve.
Take the poem by Luci Shaw;
He was a born loser,
Accident prone too;
Never won a lottery,
Married a girl who couldn’t cook, broke
His leg the day before
The wedding
And forgot the ring.
He was the kind
Who ended up behind a post
In almost any
Auditorium. Planes
He was booked to fly on
Were delayed
By engine trouble
With sickening regularity.
His holidays at the beach
Were almost always
Ruined by rain. All
His apples turned out
Wormy. His letters
Came back marked
‘Moved, left no address.’ And it was
his car that was cited
for speeding
from among a flock of others
going 60 in a
55 mile zone.

So it was a real shocker
When he found himself
Elected, chosen by Grace
For salvation, fely
The exhilaration of
An undeserved and wholly
Unexpected Joy
And tasted, for the
First time, the Glory
Of being on
The winning side.
Yes for me there is one single word that sums up my faith: that encapsulates the Christian faith in all its complexity and profundity GRACE. It’s a good word for an a Christian to remember – I remain amazed that someone like me could be so loved by god aren’t you amazed he loves you too. And if we have been treated so graciously so we know he will treat others the same – whatever we think of them. My Sunday school teacher was right when long ago she taught me, echoing Paul in his letter to Timothy, GRACE is simply this
God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense
Thanks be to God for his graciousness.

'Take up your Cross' Sermon Preached by Canon Sheila Bamber on Sunday 5th September - 14th after Trinity
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I don’t know about you, but I have ups and downs in my prayer life. Sometimes it seems really great – words come easily if words are needed, and I have a real sense of being in the presence of God. And other times I can’t make sense of anything going on around me, I’ve nothing to say, the bible doesn’t give me much comfort or encouragement, and God seems very far away. At those times I can be lacksadaisical about prayer. It feels like going through the motions. I can’t keep still either mentally or sometimes physically, and I spend at least some of my prayer time wishing I was somewhere else. Any of those things might be how you’re feeling right now, knowing that there’s about five more minutes to go before I shut up and sit down.

If I don’t know what to do about something, I’ll often try and find a book to help me, and goodness knows, there are enough books about the Christian life and prayer! So when I went off on retreat last month, I took the works of St John of the Cross with me. Truthfully, I’ve been meaning to get round to this for years, but the book looks so dull and difficult that I thought I might be driven to times of reflection and prayer simply because I couldn’t take any more of it. Which wasn’t true at all as it turned out. And quite near the beginning of Book 1 of the Ascent of Mount Carmel John of the Cross uses the last verse of our gospel reading for today to set his stall out for the rest of the book. He translates the text from the Latin as ‘He that renounces not all things that he possesses with his will cannot be my disciple’. He’s very clear that ‘as long as the soul rejects not all things, it has no capacity to receive the spirit of God in pure transformation.’ You’ll notice that he’s keen on double negatives – here to emphasise his point that the only object of our desire must be pure transformation – the complete alignment of the soul with God.
For John, as I believe for Jesus, the giving up of all our possessions that’s necessary in order to focus solely on God is about much more than ending all our relationships, giving our money and coats and food to the poor, and all those other things we find so very difficult. Its about giving up the desire for all these things – not longing for them, not working for them even if the motive is to be able to give them away. The way to union with God is through detachment, which is a hard road indeed. And John pushes this further, so he would challenge the description of my prayer life I gave just now, when I said ‘sometimes I have a real sense of being in the presence of God’ and implied that prayer was much more difficult when that wasn’t the case. He would say that in order to move closer to God I need to give up the desire for the feeling that I’m in the presence of God – because that is not the way to union with God. Rather I need to seek to be passive – the soul does nothing and it is then that God is perfectly seen, perfectly free to work in us.

But if there’s no sense of being in the presence of God, no words come, no imaginative, intuitive response to the scriptures, no lifting of the heart when receiving the sacraments, no glimpses of God’s glory in creation – none of those things – and if the world seems full of suffering and disaster and God seems to have gone awol – if all is duty at best, for us who are driven by desires, and feelings and emotions that’s a very dark, barren and arid place indeed. Its a place we struggle to get out of – often by looking back with longing to the place where we knew God last.

John’s saying clearly that we shouldn’t seek to go back to that place – not least because it will be the very place of darkness and dryness and emptiness in which God will most perfectly be present – because there’s nothing in the way of the union of the soul with God. In what for me is one of his most challenging statements he says ‘he that now desires to receive anything in a supernatural manner . . . is as it were finding fault with God for not having given us complete sufficiency in his Son. For although such a person may be assuming the faith and believing it, nevertheless he is showing a curiosity which belongs to faithlessness.’ (BkII, XXII.7) Ouch!

We know that Jesus gave up his life on the cross, and went back to his Father, achieving perfect union with God. And yet he lived among us as a man – and on the cross he was fully human. But there, for a moment, was a glimpse of what it means to be fully human and yet completely at one with God. Jesus died as a human being – died in relation to what John of the Cross calls the life of sense. And at that point he was denied any relief or consolation – any notion of God being with him and in him – ‘My God, my God,’ he cries, ‘why hast thou forsaken me’. At that point Jesus was reduced to nothing – in sense and in spirit. And he was most perfectly at one with the Father and the Spirit.

In this life, the greatest and highest state attainable consists not in refreshment and in consolations and spiritual feelings, but in a living death of the Cross, both as to sense and to spirit – that is, both inwardly and outwardly. That’s what Jesus is driving at in his teaching – the nothingness that can only be realised through great humility – and that leads to everything, through faith. The darkness of that union with God isn’t a dry and arid place, but place of wholeness. In an interesting metaphor, John describes faith as midnight darkness – the deepest darkness – and union with God as the dawn.

If all of this seems a long way from where you are, then don’t despair. Because all our prayer and meditation and feelings of sense and so on are important in directing us further on the journey towards union with God. And none of this realisation of the power of the dazzling darkness that is God happens overnight – or sometimes ever. The really important thing is to seek God, and not to rely on things of the sense or the spirit that come to us on the way. That doesn’t mean that some of those things are not from God – its simply that we shouldn’t depend on them, or seek to replicate them. John counsels us to practice indifference, detachment, and to seek simply to spend time in the presence of God – the contemplative way that leads to fullness of life.

A final thought for today. One aspect of the way to choose life is set out in the reading from Deuteronomy – by keeping the law of God. Jesus came not to abolish the law but to fulfil it – so keeping the law of God continues to be at the heart of the Christian life, alongside taking up the cross with all that implies. Its a lifetimes work – and not only for this life. Amen

The Assumption - Sunday 15th August Preacher by Canon Robert Gage
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The Assumption of the BVM – 2010

Canon Robert Gage

I am very grateful for the invitation to preach this morning. It’s good to be here. But being asked to preach today – the Feast of the Assumption – is a challenge. For me, at least, this particular celebration seems to emphasize things that make Christianity hard to believe.

First of all, what is the Assumption? It’s the belief that the Virgin Mary didn’t die in the normal way, but was ‘bodily assumed’ into heaven – like Elijah in the Old Testament. Elijah, you remember, ‘taken up in a whirlwind’ in front of his successor, Elisha. [1 Kings 2.11]

The idea of Mary’s Assumption was unknown to the early Church. It began to circulate (in widely different forms) around the end of the 4th century, and was first formulated theologically by Gregory of Tours at the end of the 6th. It spread very gradually. By the middle of the 18th century, Pope Benedict XIV still only thought it ‘probable’. It wasn’t defined as dogma until 1950, when Pope Pius XII formally declared that this was something the faithful had to believe. (He also consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary – whatever that means!)

The Eastern Church teaches something similar to the Assumption, but is more vague about it. They call it Mary’s ‘falling asleep’. The Church of England has (I think very sensibly) kept quiet on the subject – but the Common Worship calendar makes today, August 15th (kept by Roman Catholics as the Feast of the Assumption) the principal feast-day of the Blessed Virgin Mary – a typically nifty Anglican way of saying you can believe this if you want to, but nobody’s got to!

But let’s be positive. The Assumption does raise some rather useful issues: about the nature of Christian faith, about the process of believing, and about the teaching of the Church.

First, the nature of Christian faith. Like me, you’ve probably been taught all your life that Christianity is based on historical facts. Jesus was a real person, who said and did particular things. His life (like every life) has a specific historical context. To the eye of faith, that context includes not just how people had shaped Jesus’ world, but what God had done. Jesus is the culmination of two thousand years of Jewish history. He inaugurates a new era – based on things we believe happened. Above all, Christians claim that the Resurrection happened. If it didn’t – well, as St Paul says: ‘If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile.’ [1 Cor. 15.17]

But did these ‘facts of faith’ we’ve all been taught actually happen? In today’s western culture, that’s a perfectly natural question. It’s what we ask about any fact. Our minds are geared, not to suspicion, but to curiosity. We always want evidence. That’s how we trust what we think we know. And frankly, if we’re presented with a supposed ‘fact’ like the Assumption of Mary, which comes out of a cosmology now utterly foreign to us, and for which there can be no evidence, our minds balk. We’re not being impious. We’re just being intelligent!

But circumspection about the Assumption raises questions about other ‘facts of faith’. What about the Virgin Birth? What about Jesus’ miracles? What – above all – about the Resurrection?

A hundred years ago, there was an assumption amongst educated people that if you couldn’t see something, or measure it, or weigh it, or observe it in some way, it couldn’t be ‘real’. This world-view is called ‘materialism’. Physicists in particular were fairly sure that they understood reality pretty completely – and thought there wasn’t much more that could be said. They believed that Isaac Newton had said it all, and they had little time for the Bible.

Then came Einstein and Heisenberg, and a host of others. Newton no longer had the last word. Space is curved. Time is relative. Atoms aren’t solid at all, but composed of mysterious particles which cannot be observed, or measured, or weighed. They can only be inferred mathematically.
Around the same time, Freud and Jung started probing the unconscious – something 19th century physicists couldn’t have imagined. We’ve now had more than a century of depth psychology.

As a result of all these discoveries – these new modes of intellectual enquiry – the study of history changed. Biblical scholars stopped trying to prove (say) the Virgin Birth, in the way Victorian physicists tried to prove things, and started to ask, ‘What did the early Church mean by this doctrine?’ This has proved a much more fruitful line of enquiry.

Words – including the words of the Bible – always convey meanings beyond factual correspondences. They express feelings. They hint at things we know to exist, but which can never be observed scientifically – for example love, or fear, or hope. The Christian faith is indeed about ‘facts’ – but those facts include understandings that science can never prove.

Second, the process of believing. What does it mean to ‘believe in’ something? When scientists say they believe in this or that, they’re expressing trust in a strong probability based on both evidence and inference. Scientists ‘believe in’ gravity – but that’s not the same as knowing by experience that if you drop a book it will fall to the floor. Gravity is a highly sophisticated concept, backed up by mathematics. It’s a concept which explains why the book falls to the floor.

But if I say ‘I believe in the Resurrection,’ I’m making a different kind of statement altogether. Again, I’m expressing trust; but I know my belief in the Resurrection can never be backed up by evidence. I’m not even clear about what happened! The stories of the empty tomb show the Gospel writers struggling with the same problem. The Resurrection is not about an empty tomb. It’s about the experience of meeting Jesus, alive. We trust the Biblical record that the first disciples did have this experience; but exactly what happened is beyond our knowledge.

And third, the teaching of the Church. In every generation, the Church reflects (largely unawares) some of the presuppositions then current. In the 19th century, enthused by historical discoveries (especially in archaeology), and living in a climate of scientific materialism, the Church tried to claim that the facts of faith were of exactly the same kind as the facts of science. But they aren’t; and trying to insist they are just makes Christianity unbelievable.

Well then. Are the ‘facts of faith’ no more than fairy stories? I’m not saying that at all – though of course fairy stories are not ‘stories that are untrue’, as 19th century materialists claimed. Fairy stories are ‘myths’ – tales that express truth though parables. Jesus used parables a lot. No one imagines that the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son were historical persons; but the parables convey profound truths very vividly. The Assumption of Mary is a kind of parable.

And what does this parable tell us? That Mary was special. Yes, indeed! Hail Mary, full of grace: the Lord is with thee. But proclaiming Mary’s specialness does not require thinking ourselves back into classical cosmology, and accepting, as historical ‘fact’, that she was somehow taken up to a heaven above the sky without passing through death.

The Christian faith is not a long list of impossible propositions. It is trust in Jesus as God’s supreme revelation of himself. It is recognising God’s costly love for us. It’s making that same self-giving love the programme for our own lives. It is being part of Christ’s body, the Church, nourished by word and sacrament.

If Mary’s Assumption helps you do this, great; but please! Don’t feel you’ve got to just grit your teeth and somehow or other ‘believe’ it – or else forfeit your hope of heaven!