Tag: selfless

Simon’s Reflection for the Third Sunday of Advent

As I read that passage from St John’s gospel, I’m struck by two ideas that come from John the Baptist’s message. On the one hand, there is a sense of preparation for something that will happen in the future. Then, on the other hand, there is a sense that that something is already here. In Advent, as we prepare for the future coming of Jesus, how do we recognise the ways in which he is already among us? These two things must, I think, be linked. If we are living lives in which we are prepared for the future coming of Jesus, we will at the same time notice that he is already here among us.

There’s a lovely and profound story of St Francis of Assisi; one of many of course. St Francis was busy hoeing a garden when a pilgrim came up to him and asked him: “If you became aware that you were going to die a few hours from now, what would you do?” St Francis replied: “I would finish hoeing this garden.” St Francis was already with his Lord in the present and experiencing time as a gift and his work as co-working with Jesus. So he was ready.

What are the things that we need to do to be ready to meet Christ in the future and to recognise that he is among us?

Well, prayer is one thing. On this Gaudete Sunday, with its theme of rejoicing, we may not feel that rejoicing is very close to us. We may also think that St Paul was rather tactless in telling the Thessalonian Christians in the middle of a time of persecution to rejoice, just as I might be rather tactless telling everyone simply to rejoice in my sermon on Sunday with all that is happening at the moment.

Rejoicing was not particularly easy for St Paul, though, with all that he was going through; imprisonments, opposition, failure, physical ailments. It doesn’t come easily but is something to be worked at. It doesn’t come so much from externals but from finding Christ within and without. That is why Paul links it to prayer and to prayerful thanksgiving which are, again, things which have to be worked at.

The former Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Basil Hume, wrote a lot of good, grounded and realistic things about prayer and he was particularly good in talking about the need to keep going when it was difficult. He said that while prayer brought moments of peace and inner joy to all of us, it could also be hard work. At such times, he said, it is important to keep going because we pray to please God and because God wants us to and not just to make ourselves happy so he writes: “Carrying on when we seem to be getting nowhere is a proof of our faithfulness to God, and it shows that we are selfless and generous in our service of him. We are prepared to do the right thing for his sake, and not for ours.”

There are two ideas here which link to the themes of today’s readings for me; being ready for Christ by praying and being ready for Christ by living for others. When we do those things, we will reflect something of his light to others and we will reflect Christ’s light through who we are and in our own particular way. It is a light that is given not a light we have to generate.

We see these themes in our reading from St John’s gospel about John the Baptist. John the Evangelist is very clear about who John the Baptist is. “He is not the light. He is a witness to the light.” Nonetheless, like all of us, he has been given something important to do. He occupies a special place that God has given him to prepare the hearts of the people of Israel to receive their Saviour. But that role is self-effacing. It is to live for others to be a person who lives for others.

It must have been very tempting for him, with all those voices urging him, “Are you the Messiah?”, to say “Well, yes I am actually!” If he had been thinking about his own ego or his own glory, perhaps he would have succumbed but John knew that the loving thing to do was to point people to Jesus not to himself.

We sometimes think of Christians as having a “messiah” complex in the way they approach being a Christian. That may or may not be egotistical. Sometimes it can be about having an over-extended sense of responsibility or thinking that we have to do it all on our own or that we need to know all the answers. We don’t. Like John the Baptist we are pointing people to Christ not to ourselves.

Our Isaiah reading today is of course the passage that Jesus chose to read out in the synagogue in Nazareth (Luke 4:17 – 21). It gives the manifesto of a Messiah who Himself came to live for others and maybe in a sense we could read that list of actions as a list of places where we can find him.

It is by being more aware of the opportunities in our own lives to live for others and by rising to them, that we will find and bring joy and that we will be both ready for the Lord who is to come and we will also meet the Lord who is here among us. We will be more prepared for him and we will also know how much he loves us for who we are.

 Amen.

Sunday 1st November

SIMON’S REFLECTION FOR THE FEAST OF ALL SAINTS

Reflection

In the church, we keep feast days for some of the special saints of church tradition; the household names that we all know. We have days for St Peter, St Luke, St Frances, St Andrew, Mary, mother of our Lord, St Margaret and many others.

All Saints’ Day was not originally a day to remember these well-known saints, but was for those saints who had no special saint’s day of their own. It was for “the rest of the saints.” On All Saints Day then, in a sense, we are remembering the unknown saints; “the great multitude that no-one could count” described in the Book of Revelation.

I find this very poignant on many levels. For one thing, since the Reformation, the Anglican tradition, recognises names of its more modern Christian heroes but has no mechanism for giving them the title “saint.” More than that though, it is good for us to remember that we do not know the names of many of our benefactors. There is an anonymous tide of good will and good deeds inspired by the Holy Spirit that has brought the Christian faith to us through the generations and from across the world.

There is a bit of a parallel in this with our thinking about our heroes of the past year. I wonder who your heroes were? Captain Tom raising all that money for the NHS. Joe Wicks putting us all through our paces with his daily workouts. There were many people who did great things to help others, some of whom became known and for example recognised in our honours lists. There were, however, also a mass of people like doctors, nurses, good neighbours, essential workers, care home staff and others from all walks of life, who behaved selflessly and sacrificially in their service of others. Some of them were recognised and honoured but many are unknown to us though we have cause to be grateful.

The idea of a mass of unknown saints brings the saints a bit closer to us. When you make a statue or a stained- glass window in someone’s image, they suddenly seem less human and seem more distant from our everyday experience and who we are. But the saints were human just like us. They didn’t have any power that we don’t have. That’s the point. Because of what Jesus has done for us, the power that was in Jesus, can be in ordinary women, men and children just like us.

It can also be at work in us alongside our human fallibilities and failings. As St Paul wrote: “We hold this treasure in clay vessels.”

If the gospel just stopped with the great saving deeds of Jesus, we might wonder how the world could be changed for the better but it doesn’t stop there. We read on in the Book of Acts, how the power that was at work in Jesus, was at work in the people of the early church. We read on beyond the words of the bible to see many lives since then that have pointed us back to Christ. Sometimes that has happened in an extraordinary way but also sometimes in a more ordinary every day, way through “little” acts of love and service in Jesus’ name.

The New Testament recognises this by using the word “saint” in two ways. It uses the word to denote the named ones, the known heroes of the faith but it also uses it to denote “the rest of us” as St Paul, for example, often uses the word to refer to all Christians.

Of course, the saints we revere were extraordinary in one sense. It was not that they were already perfect or sinless but their lives were so centred on God and they had such a passion for God that they became transparent to God in an extraordinary way. Paul Tillich wrote: “The saint is saint, not because he is “good” but because he is transparent from something that is more than himself.” What makes them particularly transparent to God and what makes them speak most powerfully to us is their shared humanity.

Our gospel reading today could be read as a sort of manifesto for discipleship. Jesus tells the crowds who it is who will be blessed in the age to come. I wonder if we were asked who we thought was blessed in our own age and society, would it look anything like Jesus list? Would we include the poor, the meek, those who mourn, the persecuted? I suspect not.

The saints learned to embrace a different set of values to the values of the world. With their ordinary humanity they embraced the values of Jesus rather than the values of the world.

A rich businessman once said to St Theresa of Calcutta: “I would not do what you do for a million dollars.” She replied: “No, neither would I.”

On all Saints Day, we remember the saints and we remember that we are called to be transparent to God just as they were and that we are called to be saints too and to allow in our hearts, the Holy Spirit’s work of transforming us to God’s ways of doing things and God’s way of being.

Pope John Paul once wrote: “We need heralds of the gospel who are experts in humanity, who know the depth of the human heart, who can share the joys and hopes, the agonies and distress of the people, but who are at the same time contemplatives who have fallen in love with God. For this we need saints today. Amen.