Ash Wednesday

"Come back to me", we read of God saying in the book of Joel. And turning back to God is what today is all about.

We have all turned away from God through sin. We receive ashes at today's Mass as a sign of our turning back to God. God calls us to be his People once again, to re-live the new life we received at our baptism, and so be ready to celebrate the passing over of Jesus from death to life at the end of Holy Week.

Throughout Lent, which begins today, we try to co-operate with God's grace, to be renewed. In this way we will be ready to participate in the great events of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil.

There are a number of ways in which we can keep Lent well. One thing which we should all consider - and we in the Church of England are sometimes not very good at this - is making our confession. Celebrating the sacrament of reconciliation (confession) gives us a chance to examine ourselves, to confess our sins, and - most importantly - to encounter God's forgiving grace and receive strength to live the Christian life more fully. If you would like to make your confession, please talk to any priest.

More generally, there are three ways in which Christians have traditionally observed Lent:

• Fasting - A lot of people give something up for Lent. In doing this, we develop self-control and, with God's help, set ourselves free from dependency.
• Prayer - Lent is a good time to think about our prayer lives, to develop the habit of saying morning and evening prayers, and to try new ways of praying - for example, praying the rosary or praying with the Bible.
• Almsgiving - In being generous to others, whether with our money or our time, we share in the love which God has for all people.

We will also be running a Lent course at St Matthias'. This starts next Thursday evening. Alternatively, you might like to join our brothers and sisters at St John's on Wednesday mornings.

Service of songs for our late brother Adeniyi Adebanjo

Tonight over 200 of us gathered at St. John's to remember before God our brother Adeniyi and to pray for his family and comfort one another in our loss and grief.
May he rest in peace and rise in glory and may we all know the love and peace of God in our hearts at this time.

O God, Who brought us to birth,

and in whose arms we die

In our grief and shock

contain and comfort us;

embrace us with your love,

give us hope in our confusion

and grace to let go into new life

through Jesus Christ. AMEN

Please join us tomorrow for his Funeral Mass at 1.00pm

Alleluia! Song of Sweetness!

Today is the Sunday before Lent. As we prepare in that season to celebrate Easter, we don't use the Easter word 'Alleluia', so this was the last Sunday we'll be singing it for a while. In some churches they 'bury' the word 'Alleluia' on Tuesday!

In the old hymn books there was a hymn that captured the spirit of this Sunday well:

Alleluia, song of sweetness,
voice of joy that cannot die;
alleluia is the anthem
ever raised by choirs on high;
in the house of God abiding
thus they sing eternally.

Alleluia thou resoundest,
true Jerusalem and free;
alleluia, joyful mother,
all thy children sing with thee;
but by Babylon's sad waters
mourning exiles now are we.

Alleluia cannot always
be our song while here below;
alleluia our transgressions
make us for awhile forgo;
fort the solemn time is coming
when our tears for sin must flow.

Therefore in our hymns we pray thee,
grant us, blessed Trinity,
at the last to keep thine Easter,
in our home beyond the sky,
there to thee for ever singing
alleluia joyfully.

Lent begins on Wednesday. How will you be observing it? There are some suggestions here.

And what better way to begin Lent than by coming to Mass and receiving ashes? There is a said Mass at St John's at 11am and a sung Mass at St Matthias at 7:30pm.

Thought for Candlemas

In our Gospel for Candlemas we meet a cast of characters we can recognise and relate to.

Mary the new mother

Joseph the father and husband

Simeon the strange but wise old man

Anna the effervescent and welcoming old woman

All brought into our focus by a 40 day old baby who is also our God and King. Each of these characters is given hope and new life in their encounter with the Christ-child. Simeon defies all he knows about the great and mighty messiah and recognises him in the babe in arms Anna bounces with joy and shares the hope of the new belonging for all encompassed by this babe, held in his mother's arms.

There is a glorious interlinking between these people in the snapshot of the temple. The give and receive from each other regardless of prescribed societal and religious norms. And herein lies a joy and a lesson for us as 'church'. We need each other. We are less than the Church without each other. Young and Old, Male and Female, gay and straight, able and less able bodied, healthy and sick, happy and miserable black, white and all the colours in between. Only together are we Church, are we the Body of Christ.

Fourth Sunday of Epiphany

 ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me 
to bring good news to the poor. 
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
 and recovery of sight to the blind, 
to let the oppressed go free,
 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’ Isaiah 61.1-2

The search for community, as longed for by Nehemiah in our first reading this morning,  and lived for by the first followers of Jesus, is rooted in the person of Jesus.

In our Gospel we turn to Jesus in his home town reading from the prophet Isaiah. Jesus has just returned from the desert following his baptism which marks the beginning of his public ministry. 
In the gospel of Luke this is the first thing that Jesus does in his ministry – before he calls his disciples as recorded by St Mark and St Matthew and before he performs Miracles and wonders as recorded by St John.
Luke records Jesus declaring what his ministry is going to be about, a manifoesto is revealed if you like. The words of Jesus reveal what will be found at the heart of his ministry and work in Galilee.
It is interesting that this declaration of intent is not about teaching us a better spirituality, but about doing God’s justice, and creating God’s community? The Christian body that Paul is pleading for, in our second reading from his first Epistle to the Corintihians, will be recognisable by the way it treats others. To be the body of Christ, we have to do as Jesus did.
As we hear these words of Jesus we should ask ourselves in what way does our life together reflect the “manifesto” of Jesus declared in the synagogue of Nazareth?
In what ways do we as a community, as a congregation, as individual members of the body of Christ:

Bring good news to the poor?

Proclaim release to those held captive?

Give sight to the blind?

Set the oppressed free?

And proclaim a year of the Lords favour?

The Conversion of St Paul

Today is the feast on which the Church commemorates what has traditionally been called the 'conversion' of St Paul. You can read about in it the book of Acts.

Recent New Testament scholarship has looked again at Paul, and questioned some of the settled ways of understanding him. You can listen to a good take on the conversion of Paul at the NT Pod here.

We pray today for all churches dedicated to St Paul, and especially for our own cathedral.

Today, Lord, we celebrate the conversion of Saint Paul,

  your chosen vessel for carrying your name to the whole world.

Help us to make our way towards you by following in his footsteps,

  and by witnessing to your truth before the men and women of our day.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,

  who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,

  one God, for ever and ever.

Amen.

The Wedding At Cana

Walking up to preach at St John's this morning was an interesting experience. It was much a case of skating as walking. The streets of West Hendon were pretty much deserted: just me in my cassock and the odd person heading to Sainsbury to panic-buy. I thought that, whatever hymns we'd chosen to sing this Sunday, we should have included 'See Amid the Winter's Snow'.

That wasn't the most inappropriate thought, since there is a real sense in which today's gospel reading both looks back to Christmas and develops the message of Christmas.

At the daytime Mass on Christmas Day we read the familiar verses from the beginning of John's gospel, which had their climax in those words that epitomise the message of Christmas: "The Word was made flesh and lived among us". The Word of God, God himself, without for one second ceasing to be God - with all that this involves - lived a human life, like ours.

But, we might ask, why? Why did the Word become flesh?

As we read on in John's gospel we find, in the first part of that gospel (known as the Book of Signs), the reasons that the Word was made flesh laid out for us in symbolic form, through a series of 'signs' worked by Jesus. And the first sign Jesus works is at a wedding in Cana, Galilee. He changes water into wine.

There are a thousand things to be said about the eleven verses of the Fourth Gospel which describe Jesus' transformation of water into wine. They are rich in symbolism - almost the entire Christian gospel is summed up in those verses. The water is placed in jars used for a Jewish ritual of purication ritual and then transformed - here we have a sign of the rich fulfilment of the Old Covenant, God's promises to the Jewish people (John's gospel, in the first chapter, has spoken of Moses, and promised 'grace upon grace'). And wine itself is an image used frequently in the Old Testament of the abundant life God promises his people. The transformation of water into wine happens 'on the third day' - looking forward to the ultimate transformation (of death into life) which will take place on a subsequent third day. Jesus, rather rudely to modern ears, calls Our Lady 'woman' and talks of his 'hour'. Jesus will next call his Mother 'woman' on the Cross, when his 'hour' has come.

There are a million sermons that could be preached on today's gospel. I chose to preach about the fact that this miraculous transformation of water into wine takes place at a wedding. Again and again in the New Testament - as we were reminded in today's Old Testament reading - God's passionate love for his People is described in terms of a desire for marriage. God, like an eager young suitor, wants nothing more than to be bound to God's People forever in love. And at the end of the New Testament, in the book of Revelation - written by someone in the same tradition as the author of John's gospel but (and I'm sorry to the people of St John's for deflating the heritage of our patron) as certainly as one can ever be about these things, not written by the same person - Heaven is described as the marriage feast of the Lamb. Our God is a God of love. And just as the best symbol human beings have come up with for love is marriage, one of the best symbols we can come up with for the love God has for us is marriage. God marries his people. And Christ is the one in whom God marries his people.

At Cana there is a wedding. Not, on the face of it, Jesus' wedding. Yet Jesus makes it his own. In the story he becomes the focus of attention. So much so that when the steward talks to the bridegroom at the end of the passage and says "you have saved the best until last" it is, at best, ambiguous whether he is talking to the literal bridegroom or to Jesus. The author of the Fourth Gospel knows what they are doing. Here we have the fist Sign of the Word made flesh. And the God who has promised repeatedly in the Old Testament to marry his people has made good on that promise. Here, in this man, we have a marriage feast the like of which we could not have imagined.

The gospel begins and ends with love. The first of Jesus' signs is about love. His death is about love. His resurrection is about love. And, more incredibly, it is about love for the likes of me, and the likes of you. And that love is the reason the Word became flesh.