THOUGHTS FOR TRINITY 4 Today’s Gospel (Matthew 10. 40-42) comes at the end of Jesus’ instructions to his disciples. We are living in a time where prophesy is needed. None of us know where our current situation will take us. We are called to trust that the way forward will be clear. What we say and do as Christians will be looked at. We have a responsibility to speak and act with care in accordance with what we understand to be the will of God. We can only find out what that is through prayer and meditation. The habits we have developed in the time of our lockdown will stand us in good stead now that we have greater freedom. We look forward to a time when we can meet again in our churches. We are waiting for our bishop to produce the guidelines we need to hold our first acts of public worship in three months safely and with due reverence. The expected date is 5th July. We look forward to that date. Hold that thought in your prayers. The second reward Jesus promises us is the reward of the righteous. We are called to be fair and God-fearing in our daily lives. I think we have all been challenged by the lockdown and have found it frustrating. Many of you have found it an opportunity to reach out to family and neighbours. I know many of you have been supported by generous neighbours with shopping and carrot cake and trips to the surgery to collect prescriptions and a myriad other ways of helping and supporting. Your dogs have all become much fitter with all the walks they have had. That all has to continue! we must go on supporting one another. We hold one another in our prayers, especially those who are still shielding. The threat is still there, but so is the light at the end of the tunnel. That light is a smile, the loving smile of our Lord, a reward for our loving support of others. Jesus lived his life for others. He died for others. He constantly refers to ‘the little ones’. By this he principally meant, of course, children, as children had even fewer rights than women in his day - we must call on our leaders to make sure that our children get back to school as swiftly and as smoothly as possible. The damage that is being done will take a long time to correct, and they deserve to have the same chances we had as children. But Jesus also refers to the weak and the sick, the disadvantaged and the disabled by ‘the little ones’. All those who cannot assert their rights against others. Our society is under strain. Don’t forget ‘the little ones’ in your prayers, and don’t forget our leaders in your prayers - that they may act and think prophetically and with total concern for all of society. Today is Trinity 4 but it is also the feast day of Irenaeus of Lyons. Born circa 130 in Asia Minor he heard Polycarp of Smyrna preach, who was himself a disciple of John the Apostle. Irenaeus was thus a link with the early days of our faith. In a long life he rose to become bishop of Lyons in Gaul. He wrote extensively (alas, his writings are mostly lost). He is best known for two works which combat heresy and set out the doctrines of the Catholic Church. He is the first great Catholic theologian, one who drew on the emerging traditions of East and West. He died about the year 200. He had the vision to give his life to Jesus in challenging times. He lived through the persecutions of Marcus Aurelius and the plagues and famines of the second century. He kept the faith. He is an example to us all nineteen centuries later. God our Saviour, look on this wounded world in pity and in power; hold fast to your promises of peace won for us by your Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen
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REFLECTIONS FOR TRINITY 2 At first sight today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 10.24-39) seems very hard. Our Lord is moving around Galilee, healing, preaching, teaching, making disciples. This passage is a selection of some of his teachings, and yes, it does seem very hard. He instructs, he exhorts, he commands his disciples - and us - to follow him whatever the cost. He even goes as far as to say that if we love our family above Him we are in trouble! He also says He has not come to bring peace, but a sword, which seems completely contrary to what we understand by the Gospel! Our Lord seems to be rearing himself up for the coming conflict with the authorities in Jerusalem. But on the other hand He tells us God knows the number of hairs on our head and also knows when common little birds like sparrows fall to the ground. We are surely more important than sparrows. We find these ideas very challenging indeed. How are we to live this out in our daily lives? It seems that, in order to take up the cross and follow Him, we simply have to strip ourselves of our pride, our desires and our earthly concerns, even our human relationships, and centre our lives full square on the Lord Jesus Christ. It is so frightfully easy to say that, but it takes a life-time to achieve. This means of course that we must be aware where our true loyalties lie - to Jesus - each day of our lives and not be complacent. We are not complacent in this lockdown. It offers us ample opportunity to focus on Jesus our Lord through prayer, through reading the scriptures and strengthening our ties with our fellow-Christians, even through the dreaded Zoom! I really feel we have managed to make Jesus the centre of our lives in our parishes, but this is an issue we must all re-visit daily. At the end of the reading Our Lord brings the issues down to our personal relationships and eases the seriousness. The image of giving cool water to one of these little ones is the Jesus we know and love and want to follow. In our time of lockdown, even as it is eased, this acts as an encouragement to us to continue reaching out to others, because ‘truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.’ PRAYER Lord Jesus, we thank You for the assurance we receive in scripture that we must not be afraid but simply follow You: deepen our faithfulness to You and inspire us with the good news of the Gospel; for You are alive and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Thursday was Corpus Christi. It is a celebration of the Eucharist, which gets crowded out on Maundy Thursday, the natural time to celebrate the Eucharist. On Maundy Thursday we recall Christ’s washing of his disciples’ feet, renewal of vows as priests, deacons, readers, bishops etc, then Jesus’ agony in the garden and his arrest. Thomas Aquinas, in 1264 after the Miracle of the Mass at Bolsena, suggested the celebration of the most sacred body and blood. It has always been a good occasion to go to church and thank God for the gift of Holy Communion, which lies at the centre of many of our lives as Christians. One of the things that I have missed over the lockdown has been going to church and taking the bread and the wine with my brothers and sisters in Christ. This Thursday was like having a birthday party without presents or a cake! Our Gospel reading today comes from Matthew 9 v35 -10 v8. As you will hear in the video it starts with Jesus overwhelmed by his ministry of healing and driving out demons. Time in again in our scriptures we read of Jesus being moved with the very deepest compassion for the suffering of the sick and possessed in his ministry to the sick. Sometimes it seems his compassion boils over with real anger, as here where he sees the people ‘like sheep without a shepherd with all the very dangers that implies, open to attack from every side with nobody to shield them. Jesus also speaks of the harvest being ready to be brought in but also of a shortage of labourers. He then sends out his disciples to heal and bring relief - ‘to gather in the harvest’, to shield and shepherd the needy and the sick. We also have a list of the Twelve, the close disciples of Our Lord. We are their successors. They are sent out to carry on the ministry. Clearly twelve can do more than one can. During our time of lockdown we find it doubly frustrating that we cannot carry on our calling to follow the disciples in ministering to the sick and needy. We are called on to be conduits of Christ’s compassion to the world. How can we be conduits if we are locked up in our homes? Well, we have found ways to reach out to others, even in lockdown, haven’t we? By shopping for our neighbours, by calling our neighbours on our mobiles or by sending them emails and silly cartoons from Facebook, by holding alfresco drinks parties and coffee mornings, by checking up on others -in all these and so many other ways we have found ways to reach out - and in doing so have found our lives enriched too. Now that we are able to move around more freely and meet more people - still observing the safe distance of two metres, of course - or to form ‘support bubbles’ where we can at last touch our nearest and dearest, many more ways will be found. We cannot let this situation defeat us. So many off us have responded to Christ’s words: “You received without payment, give without payment.” It is enough to know we are doing the Lord’s work and sharing his compassion with others. Another coincidence of dates - Friday was St Barnabas’ Day. He was a Jew from Cyprus who joined the early church and sold land to give to the community in Jerusalem. He later went on to help Paul in his missionary journeys. His Jewish name was Joseph, but he was known as Barnabas. Barnabas means ‘son of encouragement’. Let us all be brothers and sisters of encouragement to those around us. Let others say of us when this is all over - “they cared, they loved, they encouraged”! Let us pray - O Christ, door of the sheepfold, may we enter your gates with praise and go from your courts to serve you in the poor, the lost and the wandering, this day and all our days. Amen
I have two pictures by the Rhineland mystic, abbess and thoroughly good egg Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179). One is of the Trinity as she saw it in a vision. There are two spheres, one gold, one silver and in the middle stands the figure of a man. Sometimes one is more prominent, sometimes another. There is about the whole a fluidity that allows each person of the Trinity to dominate, but not totally. The other vision is called The Trinity and the Macrocosm with the Figure of Man. In this God the Father holds the circle of Creation, God the Creator; inside is a circle of flames from which spring winds and creatures and fish, God the Sustainer of Life; in the centre, once again, is a Man, symbol of the Humanity of Christ that we share with him; we are represented by Christ Jesus and drawn by him into the creative whole, God the Redeemer. Of course they are only pictures. Each one of us has our images of God, and we draw inspiration from the visions of others, even from those of a twelfth-century nun! Today’s Gospel (Matthew 28.16-20) comes from the end, the very end, of Matthew’s account of the Ministry of Jesus. He has stressed all along that Jesus is a second Moses and yet much more, the Son of God. His Gospel stops at this point. Like Moses Jesus vanishes - he ‘is taken up’. His earthly ministry is complete. It is finished for him, and the disciples are charged to carry it on into the whole world. The charge that Jesus gives the eleven disciples applies to us too. ‘Go and make disciples of all nations.’ This is pretty hard to do under present circumstances, of course. In quiet, private ways it is still doable. By the way we are with our friends and neighbours and the members of our families we show our fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ. The second part of of Jesus’ command is to baptise the disciples we have made ‘in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’ Once again it is impossible to do this at the moment. What joy when we will be able to baptise once again! Surely it cannot last much longer. Some of you remember your own baptism or that of your children and grandchildren. We must soon be able to share that joy with others. Soon, I say, very soon. The Gospel finishes with a promise, which I certainly need to hear at this time. It is a promise to be with us ‘to the end of the age’. Through all that we have experienced and are experiencing we can hold on to that promise. ‘I am with you until the end of the age.’ Hang on to that! Today’s Epistle comes from Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13 vv11-13. It finishes with the words ‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.’ That is another short prayer, full of the promise of God’s presence with us through all our lives. One definition of ‘grace’ is ‘the love of God active in our hearts and minds.’ This prayer promises us that God will continue to work in our lives through the love he has for us. Holy God, faithful and unchanging: enlarge our minds with the knowledge of your truth, and draw us more deeply into the mystery of your love, that we may truly worship you, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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AuthorCanon John Green Archives
May 2021
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