An extra thought for All Saints from New Zealand

Greetings from New Zealand! As we are 12 hours ahead if you I've already been to Sunday Mass before some have you have gone to bed on Saturday night!

I has the privilege if preaching at the Auckland diocesan girls school this morning for their Founder's day and the transferred feast of All Saints. It's quite a nice way of thinking of the Great Cloud of Witnesses. Those who set up the school, who established traditions and took a stand for something in the Mission of God and those with whom we are still surrounded (the Old Girls) inspire still our engagement in God's mission.

We can fall in to the trap (I think) of seeing those traditions and expectations as things we have to live up to. To emulate the lives of others. For me Jesus' words to us in the Beatitudes are not His expectations of us but His hopes for all of us, His saints, to live lives in keeping with those around and before us in the Mission of God. Not attempting to live the life of another but to live out who we are in the time and place we find ourselves. To make a stand for the glory if God.

All Souls Day

We human beings are very good at lying to ourselves. No more is this apparent than in the face of death. There is a poem which is often read at funerals. It's actually ripped out of context from a sermon by the great Canon Henry Scott Holland. It goes like this:

Death is nothing at all.
I have only slipped away to the next room.
I am I and you are you.
Whatever we were to each other,
That, we still are.

This is a lie. It is a cruel lie which doesn't take human beings, our deepest emotions, loves, and losses seriously. Death is not nothing. It is a cruel, and universal, human reality, which takes loved ones away from us. It brings tears, suffering, loneliness and unfulfilled dreams.



Today we acknowledge this reality. Without attempting to deny the bitterness of death, we bring the entire human race, living and departed, in all its brokenness to our heavenly Father. We pray for all the dead. We remember the good and the bad, the young and the old, those who were close to us and those separated by time and space. Every single human being who ever lived on this planet is today remembered by the Church, which commends them all to the God who wills that all might be saved.

We don't pretend that the hope of resurrection means that we, who still live, don't feel the pain of loss. Nor do we pretend that the dead were perfect while they lived. We commend them to God asking that loose ends be tied up, sins forgiven, and the relationships that were never healed on earth be brought to perfection in eternity.

We believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. But our hope is hard won, through the Cross, through our own loss, and through that process of growth continuing through death that the Church has traditionally called 'purgatory'.

This is a bittersweet day, a day both of hope and of sadness. Come to Mass if you can - here we offer for all the departed the sacrifice of the One who wept for a dead friend, Jesus who conquered death. If you can't get to Mass, say a prayer for all the dead, asking God that they may come to share in the glory of the saints which we celebrated yesterday.





A Prayer for the Dead

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

All Saints Day

My only-slightly mispent early youth on the Isle of Wight was spent in no small part at discos. These were very much the in thing for your Isle of Wight teenager: people had them for their birthdays, schools put them on for special events. This was during the 1980s. The rest of the world had been into discos about ten years previously, and had by now moved onto other things. But this was, as I say, the Isle of Wight.

One of the the bands whose music one danced to most often at your Isle of Wight disco was the Communards. A synth-pop duo, one member of this has subsequently been ordained as a priest. I mention this because Fr Richard Coles, as he is called, has just released a book - Lives of the Improbable Saints. He has been trailing this on the Internet for some months, and I've been following it avidly. We learn about saints who sat on pillars, saints who annoyed everybody around them, saints who undertook the most absurdly pathological penances, saints who (apparently) levitated, and so on.

The saints canonised by Holy Mother Church were, on the evidence of this book, a bunch of weirdos. But they were God's Holy Weirdos.

And there's the point - frail, funny, things that human beings are, God calls us as we are, with our quirky personalities, peculiarities, weaknesses, and strengths. Warts and all God calls us to holiness, that is, to wholeness. God calls us as we are to, through his grace, be the people we were always created to be.

The saints recognised by the Church are a sign that this is possible, that God's grace can be triumphant in people like you and me. May they pray for us as we continue on our journey, growing into the people God calls us to be.

A Blessed All Saints Day

All saints day is a wonderful day when we are reminded that we are not alone in our journey of faith but indeed are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses ( Hebrews 12.1).

There is often a tension in our iconography andlanguage around the use of the term Saint. Saint often becomes associated withsinlessness – “Oh she is a saint “meaning never does any wrong. Saints seem tobe distinct from sinners in modern parlance.

It is true of course that there are those who havebeen canonised by the church as individuals who have lived an exemplary life, alife of outstanding piety and virtue that ensure that they become one of those remembered by name in the life ofthe church and even given a day upon which to be remembered. But to say thattheir life on earth was without sin cannot be correct as we are reminded inscripture “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Romans 3.23)

All Saints day therefore is not just a time tofocus on those who have gone before us and whose lives and prayer continues toinspire and strengthen us on our journey. It is also a time to give thanks forone another, fellow saints at St john and St Matthias,  all of us who are surrounded by a great cloudof witness and called by God and knit together into a holy fellowship.

So often I think of that “cloud of witness” asthose Saints in the presence of God:

“ Those saints who before us have found theirreward” and

“whose journey is ended,

whose perils are past,

they believed in the light

and its glory is round them

where the clouds of earth’s sorrow are lifted atlast” 

(In our day of thanksgiving”)

This All Saints tide I will be giving thanks foreach one of you, the Saints of St John and St Matthias, and for all that youteach me and show me that is of God and his love towards us.

I was passing through the tube this week and sawthis lady amidst the hustle and bustle of life at Hendon Tube station. I wasanxious to catch a train but paused a moment to speak with her as she collectedmoney for the British Legion.

It made me wonder what others saw and they rushedpast to catch a train of push their way out of the station, of course the truthwas that many walked on as if she was not even there.

 

Lady Alma has worked for 27 years at the Conventin Edgware. She showed me her CBE which was awarded her for a life timededicated to raising money for good causes. She ran the Marathon earlier thisyear, her 95^th year, as she has every year since the Marathon firstcame to London.

What anamazing woman, what a saint of God – Abeloved sanctified faithful sister present in Hendon one of the great cloud ofwitnesses who surround us -

A blesses Saints tide to you all

Thoughts for the last Sunday after Trinity

I've just got back from a period of annual leave. One of the things I did on that leave was attend my nephew's first birthday party. This was fabulous, involving substantial amounts of cake and a marathon session of pass-the-parcel. And, of course, presents. Lots of presents.

Giving presents is deeply human. We give presents in recognition of special events, birthdays and anniversaries. We give gifts as a way of saying 'thank you'. We give presents to say sorry - think of the bunch of flowers sheepishly bought the day after the forgotten wedding anniversary. We give presents to say "I need you", "I love you", or "I miss you". In all these circumstances, the gift is a way of showing our concern for another person, our regard for them. We give gifts as a sign of giving ourselves.

Just as human beings give one another presents, so throughout history people have given gifts to God (or to the gods). These gifts are what we call sacrifices, and they have been given for much the same reasons that we give presents to each other: in celebration of festivals, in thanksgiving, in atonement for wrongdoing, in prayer for a special need, and so on. Day by day, year by year, in most human societies sacrifices have been offered. And, as human societies evolved, a class of people emerged whose job it was to do this - the priests. The People of God we read about in the Old Testament were no exception to this: God called priests to offer sacrifice. In time, the Temple at Jerusalem became the place where this happened.

This was all a thoroughly good thing. It is good to want to worship God, to recognise our dependence on him, our need to give thanks and the reality of sins for which we need to atone. Sacrifice is a human move to act in recognition of these things, and to the extent that human beings lack the desire to sacrifice, they lack something importantly human. In actual fact, I doubt that even in our secularising society there are many people who lack the desire to sacrifice - it is just that they many offer themselves up to things like the market, their career, their immediate pleasure, the nation or the State, a phenomenon for which the biblical word is 'idolatory'.

But for all that it is genuinely good, there is a problem with sacrifice. You see, when I offer a gift to another human being I do so - if my gift is genuine - within a context of fundamental equality. The other person can reciprocate my gift, and I theirs. The exchange of gifts takes place as part of an ongoing relationship within a shared world. I am the same sort of thing as the person who gives me a gift, and I can respond in kind.

Sacrifice is a different matter. There is an absolute absence of natural equality between human beings and God, and there is no natural possibility that we live in a shared world together. God is beyond us, and beyond our comprehension. No matter how many sacrifices I offer, I will never establish the kind of relationship with God that I celebrate in more everyday human gift-givings. My sacrifices will always fall short of God. More than that, they will always somehow miss the point. They will certainly never be enough: So even though, as today's reading from the epistle to the Hebrews reminds us, the high priests offered sacrifices daily, their constant gifts were never enough.

But that reading tells us something else: we have a new high priest, Jesus. And he offers a sacrifice to God that is acceptable. He offers himself, his entire life was one of self-offering to the Father, a self offering that continues now he is ascended into Heaven, "he holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues for ever."

The difference with Jesus is that he can offer to God on an equal basis. In Jesus, the Son of the Father, who eternally offers praise to the Father, takes a human life, and in human form offers himself to God as an equal. He can do this because he is equal with the Father. He is, as we say in the Creed, "God from God.. of one being with the Father".

Jesus' sacrifice offers to the Father what we could never offer by nature. Through him, to whom we are united in our baptism, we can offer praise and thanksgiving, we can ask with confidence for our sins to be forgiven, and we can bring our concerns in prayer. Above all we do this at Mass, at the Eucharist. Every Mass is a true sacrifice. Not a different sacrifice from the sacrifice Jesus offered once and for all, but the same sacrifice made present for us. At Mass Jesus comes to us, present in the Blessed Sacrament, and because Jesus' whole existence is a self-offering to the Father, he offers himself with us, through us, and for us. We come with our daily concerns, our hopes, our fears, and our needs, and we offer them to the Father. Here we find fulfilled that natural human desire to offer sacrifice adequately. In a famous passage, the great Anglican Benedictine Dom Gregory Dix, meditates on Jesus' command 'Do this in remembrance of me":

Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God.

A late but very enjoyable harvest at the Hyde primary school

An amazing quantity of gifts have been brought into school this morning. Some will go to elders in the neighbouring streets in the parish and the bulk will go to Homes Action in Barnet. All will be sent with live and gratitude to God who makes this all possible.

Consultation of new Logo for St Marys and St Johns through school

In the summer the local authority gave their approval for St Mary's and St John's primary school to become an all through school for pupils from the age of 4 -18.
This is a very exciting project, SMSJ will the only all through school in the borough, and there is a tremendous amount of work to be done between now and the opening of our new doors to year 7 pupils for the first time in 2014. 

One of the first things we need to get agreed is the new logo for the school for marketing purposes. To this end there are three designs for the new school that have been commissioned and by Monday 22nd we need to agree to one of them!

You can view them on the schools website: http://www.smsj.barnet.sch.uk/School+Logo

you can vote for your choice by following this link http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NG3QVSZ