LENT 3 March 23^rd 2014

“KNOWN AND LOVED”

Readings:

Exodus: 17: 1-7 – Water from the Rock

John 4: 5-42 – Living Water

In the desert the people are thirsty. On his journey Jesus thirsts. And he’ll thirst again, as we know, when that journey ends on the Cross.

Now on one level, thirst is thirst. It’s not just a metaphor. We have real needs which God knows. The people need to drink and so does Jesus.

But the real issue here is something must deeper. For the Jews it’s about trust. God has not brought them out into the desert to watch them die in the sand. But they’re scared, and so is Moses. They’re not here because they’ve got God taped. “Yes, this’ll all be fine. We’re the Chosen People. From Egypt to Canaan, that’s just a package holiday for us, so bring it on”.  No the desert is where they learn by being taken to the very edge of everything, right to the brink of life and death, to see that God is faithful indeed – even if they are not. It’s about trust.

As indeed it is for the Samaritan woman. This is the best verbal fencing match the Bible has to offer. The woman is struggling to trust Jesus in any way at all. He’s a Jew, he’s a man. He shouldn’t be talking to her at all. So what’s his agenda? So she’s deeply suspicious, but at the same time she can’t tear herself away. This is, I’d say, the closest anyone gets to flirting with Jesus in the Bible, but it’s not that. Although there’s a parallel here it would be a shame to miss. In St Michael’s and All Saints in Edinburgh there’s a pair of stained glass windows, with the well in the background of both of them, one showing Jesus and the Samaritan woman with her water jar. The other shows Jacob with Rachel bearing her water jar, and their eyes meet. Some very important things have happened at this well.  But there’s something even deeper here. This encounter is going to change this woman’s life, although not without her putting up pretty much every bit of resistance she can come up with.

Offered the water of life, she comes back with: where’s your bucket then? No bucket, deep well. You’ll have to better than that, mister. She even challenges him:  Are you saying you’re greater than Jacob? Actually Jesus is a whole lot greater than Jacob, who was pretty much of a rogue, as will eventually become clear to her.

He offers his living water again, and again she almost wilfully misunderstands. No more trips to the well with a heavy jar on your head, great. Sign me up now.

But that’s not it either, so here Jesus gets cheeky back almost. OK, go and get your husband and I’ll talk to him. Ah, here we have it. This bit of the exchange actually hits the target. The defences start to crumble. And what becomes clear is that this woman has a hinterland of brokenness and sadness, which somehow this man knows. (She’s had more husbands than Elizabeth Taylor). How uncomfortable is that? When your mask slips, and you’re known without ever, as far as you know, ever having revealed yourself. But there’s no condemnation, just a statement: This is how your life is, isn’t it?

The woman has one last, feeble attempt at evasion. She tries a bit of theology: Which mountain will God reveal himself on, this one (Gerizim) or Jerusalem? But the answer is standing right in front of her. God’s revealing himself right now, in her presence as if to make the universe stand still for this wonderful moment. It’s perfect, almost like lovers trapped in each others’ gaze. Jacob and Rachel – only better.

Cue the disciples to break the magic: What the heck’s she doing here? is what they want to ask, but daren’t. But what’s happened for this woman no-one can take away. She leaves her water jar by the well, a lovely incidental detail (she’ll need it again – but for now she has all the water she’s ever going to need) and goes off to tell the world: Come and see someone who told me everything I ever did! “He can’t be the Messiah can he?”  But she knows exactly who he is.

And so do the people she brings, almost instantly. They end up saying to her: Now we don’t just believe because of what you said; now we’ve heard for ourselves and we know that this is truly the Saviour of the World.

So this is what’s going on here. The fields are ripe and Christ the sower of the seed is now Christ the reaper of the harvest. While the woman’s left the stage to go off and tell her story and bring her friends, Jesus has had another dialogue with his disciples, which almost looks like a digression, words to be said on stage as a sort of filler while other actors get ready in the wings. But this is John’s Gospel and John never wastes a word. This woman and her friends are part of a joyful harvest of eternity which is starting right now. They’re the first fruits – and they’re the very fruits the religious people would have thrown away.

So what can I take from this? It’s this: God will knock down my defences one by one until I let him in, until I get to the point where I abandon my masks and let him gather me in. Lord, you have searched me out and you know me, says the psalmist. I’m known, and known to the last detail – but never rejected. Every labyrinthine twist and turn of my psyche is as it were unravelled by God’s love, and we’re rejoiced over. There’ll be a harvest feast in the kingdom because of you and me. Here your thirst to be really known and loved is quenched at last. By this you can know that Jesus is the world’s Saviour and yours. 

Lent 2 - 16^th March 2014

"The Spirit blows where it wills"

Readings:

Genesis 12:1-4a – Abram went forth…

John 3: 1-17 – The Spirit blows where it wills.

Last week we left Adam and Eve making the choice that gets them cast out of Eden, barred from going back by an angel with a flaming sword. There will be no return, not by that route anyway, just as we often find in life that there is no way back – only forward, even if the way is unknown and uncertain. And that could all be unspeakably depressing were it not for today’s descendant of Adam.

Our journey begins in Adam and is consummated in Jesus, but it’s in Abraham that we see that redemption is at work in every step of our human story. The casting out of Eden makes a great cliffhanger in the soap opera of God’s people. It’s undoubtedly the moment where the titles would roll and you’re left thinking that can’t be it. That can’t be the end.

And it isn’t. In Abraham it looks like things have worked out OK for the descendants of Adam. But even then there’s more. The man who has everything is offered a covenant, a promise and descendants numberless as the stars. But the price Abraham has to pay for that is to keep moving. Just when you think you’re all sorted, the mortgage is paid off, and you’ve got more wives and camels and flocks than you ever dreamt of, up God pulls you by the roots and pushes you out the door.

So are we back to square one, back to Eden’s garden gate being shut behind us and that angel with his sword again? No, not at all. We’re moving forward because this is a dynamic God who’s constantly stirring us into life. And in Lent what we’re doing is consciously opening ourselves to God’s message to Abraham – get up and move, because there’s more. And, yes, that means you, me, all of us.

For Nicodemus, this is more than he can dare to believe. Can I start again? Can I really? “How can anyone be born after having grown old?” Surely that’s it. You’ve already written the ending of your own story. But Jesus says no, and this really excites me, because the God of Jesus is the God of alternative endings. You know, I may write some very unhappy twists in the plot of my own life, or life might just do that for me, but what happens next is never without hope if I’m open to making the next bit of the journey in faith. And the great, wondrous thing is that this incredible relationship between God and Abraham is not performance-related.  It doesn’t depend on any of us being “good”. Abraham’s faith meets with God’s grace. That’s it. So there is hope for Nicodemus, who’s worried that it’s too late; but the Spirit blows where it wills, Jesus says, and it brings grace and life and passion.

In Joanne Harris’s Chocolat, a tiny French village is shaken to the core by the arrival of Vianne, blown in by the mischievous north wind. She arrives on Shrove Tuesday, the very eve of Lent.  People are horrified: To open a chocolate shop and in Lent? And such exotic chocolate too? But this mysterious woman almost erupts in their midst to blow away the cobwebs of all their sadnesses, to move them on and to change them in so many ways. The puritanical local mayor, her sworn enemy from day one, eventually breaks, melts and allows his dying marriage to die, and moves on. And everyone’s lives are disturbed and changed and often healed and beautified by this sweet wonder that arrives from nowhere. It’s the experience of grace. It’s God’s “yes” to Nicodemus, that however old we are, God goes on saying “yeses” we can hardly believe in.

FIRST WEEK OF LENT, THURSDAY

Homily at St Anne’s House Chapel 

“Ask, search, knock – and don’t give up.”

Readings:

Esther 4:17 – “I have no helper but you, Lord.”

Matthew 7: 7-12 – “The one who asks always receives.”

These readings remind me of a passage in Luke (18:1ff) where Jesus tells the story of a judge bothered by a widow who persists and almost nags until the judge gives her the justice she’s looking for. Luke says: “Jesus told a parable so that his disciples would pray always and not lose heart.” – or “Pray and don’t give up, pray and keep on praying.”

Today’s two readings are in the same vein. Jesus gives us: Ask, search, knock; if you know how to be good to your children, how much more will your Father hear your prayers. So pray, and don’t give up.

Rewind to Esther and she finds herself in a horrific dilemma for which much prayer, urgent prayer, is needed. In fact she asks her ladies in waiting and all the Jewish people to fast and pray for her to have the courage to do what’s being asked of her.

She’s been asked to appeal to her husband, King Ahasueras, for his Prime Minister, Haman’s, edict ordering extermination of the Jews to be rescinded. She isn’t even allowed into the King’s presence unless summoned, hasn’t been called for by him in thirty days, and now she’s asked to draw attention to the fact that she is herself a Jew and as liable to this new law as anyone else.

So Esther is, as it were, another proto-saviour. Like Joseph in Egypt, she's a forerunner of the ultimate Saviour, and this is her Gethsemane. She too begs for the cup to pass from her but, in a wonderful phrase, her uncle Mordecai writes to her: “Who knows whether you have come into the kingdom for such a time as this.” (4:14b) Esther, calling for fasting and prayer to strengthen her for the task, replies: “I will go to the King, though it is against the law, and if I perish, I perish.” (4:16b).

"Not my will, but thine be done". Esther prays to her God straight from the heart, remembering his covenant, maybe as much reminding herself of his promises and his faithfulness. And as she prays, you can almost feel her resolve strengthening and the courage she's praying for coming to her as she remembers who she is before God, his child and one of his chosen, and who God is for her, the faithful one for ever to be trusted. 

We’re given these readings in Lent to stir us up to urgency in prayer. We need to be real and honest and tell it to God just like it is. Maybe this is a time to pray like it is the lifeline it really is or can be; perhaps a time for some sacrifice, some fasting maybe, a time to make a desert space in which we can hear God.

Ask, search, knock, says Jesus – and don’t give up.

LENT 1 ST ANNE’S DUNBAR

Sermon by Revd Margaret Raven

“Away with you, Satan!”

Readings:

Genesis 2: 15-17; 3: 1-7 – “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat…?’”

Matthew 4: 1-11 – “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert…”

 “ Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that God had made”  

Genesis 3:1

There will have been times when the serpent conned you. I know this to be true in my case……one temptation or another put me in opposition to God. I chose a wrong way.   Pretended God didn’t matter for the time being.

It must have happened to you too?... somehow or another God was in the way of what you or I wanted very much – and we quite deliberately turned our back on God.

“God got in our way”?  Hardly…God the giver of all good gifts getting in our way ?  Not at all!   How did we get to see things that way?

Something intervened to unbalance us, to change our perceptions, shift our values, confuse our judgement – That something is called “the serpent”: ego, self-will, evil, Satan, desire, the devil, pride.

The Prince of Darkness uses Grandiosity, Hubris, Selfishness, our will to power, a desire for fame and fortune, joy and delight taken at the expense of someone else, self-centred fear, a need to be recognized…

The Prince of Darkness operates by destabilizing us,playing to our illusions or fears and, through misrepresenting the issue. We have just heard it illustrated in the myth of Eve: how the serpent misrepresents the issue: narrows the range of options, ignores both the truth and the big picture…..from a report of God generously giving every good gift to Adam along withthe freedom to choose and eat any fruit in God’s Garden we can watch how the crafty serpent misrepresents the truth. The crafty serpent narrows the truth to the two trees whose fruit can’t be eaten. A spark of  resentment is ignited in Eve, along with surge of contradiction buttressed by faultless commonsense reasoning: “When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its’ fruit and ate”  Instead of God at the centre of this picture, Eve is now the centre of the picture in her mind. She has forgotten to take into account the obligations of the relationship with God.

The serpent got between God and Eve….. God the gracious creator and host and Eve the dependent, grateful, well-mannered guest with almost total freedom of the garden - by moving the goalposts. , dug a hole  and  focusses Eve on what is forbidden.

The serpent created a doubt  in the trust relationship between Adam, Eve and God where there was acceptance before. The serpent created a desire backed up by intelligent self-justification.

Now The Bad News is that given our insecurities, our secret fears, our clamouring needs, our priorities, strategies and plans derived from our own commonsense,…given our culture of individualism,  self-reliance, achievement, our need for financial security and our desire for recognition and power….The Bad News is that The Prince of Darkness will always be able to drop us in it!

The Good News is that with worship and service of  God at the centre of our living and thinking The Prince of Darkness will have a much harder time coopting us into the anti-God agenda.

Jesus has no problem dealing with Satan’s crafty strategies: Remember them?Surprise, isolation; destabilization; provoking insecurities and self-doubt; misrepresentation/confusing the issue/moving the goalposts; making a bargain…proposing what looks like a good deal

And here is the good news….Jesus (and by implication each of us ) already knew he lived in the love and care of God so his stability couldn’t be rocked and his reasoning  hijacked by shocks, isolation etc. Even famished after 40 days without food he recognizes the temptation is not directed at his hunger but at any lingering insecurities he may have had about being the Son of God (If you are the son of God says the tempter change the stones into bread…). From his knowledge of Scripture Jesus is shown refutingboth the challenge to his relationship with God and resisting hunger a bit longer. He is the Beloved of God. He can stand secure and so can we.

Satan then tried a combination of strategies: the inevitable  insecurities Jesus the man must have had about how to achieve his mission of bringing in the kingdom of God…insecurities of identity and purpose; destabilization  intensified by being dizzy with hunger, swept up from the desert and set high up on a pinnacle of the temple; disinformation – a nice touch - as Satan wrenches scripture out of context to encourage Jesus to do stunts to achieve fame and recognition if- again that is if he is the Son of God.  If you are the Son of God…Jesus overcomes the disorientation. He rejects the “if” and the stunts, and the testing. He is the beloved of God, he can stand secure inside that relationship and so can we. He heard this coming up from the water of his baptism….This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. e is the Beloved of God. He    Being in a reciprocal loving relationship strengthens us all. That is why we work on our spiritual lives in Lent….in order to be strong and firm and energetic and joyful and free.

You would think Satan would have given up at this point but there is one more strategy in the arsenal of evil and that is bargaining…..trying to do a deal. Jesus’s task as Son of God is to convert the whole world. He has to have been worried about how he could possibly achieve such a thing. Satan of course already possesses the whole world so what could be easier?. Bow down to me proposes Satan and you can have the whole world. Sorted. Problem solved. God’s expectations met. No worries!

“Worship the Lord your God and serve only him” quotes Jesus from scripture…..a basic rule of life for him and for us.

Secure in the love of God we can all rely on our relationship with God, scripture, worship, Christian community and service of God as our rule of life and, like Jesus in the destabilizing , complex, difficult and testing times say with confidence: Away with you Satan!

FEAST OF ST KESSOG

Homily at Emmaus House Chapel 10^th March

Readings:

Leviticus 19: 1-2, 11-18 – “Be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.”

Matthew 25: 31-46 – “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you?”

Today is the feast of St Kessog. Who, you might ask? Well, in fact Kessog, an Irish Celtic missionary of the late fifth, early sixth centuries is one of Scotland’s most important early saints. Like Columba, he was of Irish royal blood, the son of the King of Cashel, and today still commemorated by churches dedicated to him and by an area of Inverness, an oilfield in the North Sea and a real ale named after him. 

Kessog was Scotland’s patron saint before St Andrew and his name was used as a battle cry by none less than Robert the Bruce as he led his army against the English at the battle of Bannockburn. More than that, Kessog’s bishop’s crozier and his relics were carried before the men as they advanced into battle. So Kessog was still important and much loved even six hundred years after his death.

Martyred, it’s said, on a missionary journey into Europe, his body was returned to Scotland wrapped in linens and sweet herbs, to be buried at Luss (meaning herb in Gaelic). Kessog continued to be more popular than St Andrew for many years because whilst St Andrew was imposed by a King (Kenneth McAlpin) Kessog had lived and worked and served among the people, and did so travelling between warring kingdoms fearless of the danger to his own life, such was his zeal for the Gospel and love for people.

The Bible tells us “The righteous shall be had in everlasting remembrance; the memory of the just is blessed”, and this is why the Church keeps ancient names like Kessog’s alive even now – because a light still shines. Men died with Kessog’s name on  their lips.

But the challenge to us is to be lights ourselves, remembering that the effects of what we do and how we live echo and reverberate into other lives, other futures far beyond what we can see.

Just as the righteous in the Gospel say: “When did we do this for you, Lord?”, so we will be surprised too. Whatever we do for the least of our brothers and sisters today may still be life-giving for someone years from now. Many years ago I heard a school chaplain preach at an assembly on the theme: “Be a saint – why not?” The call to righteous living in Leviticus, Jesus asking us to wake up to other people’s needs, these are not impossible demands.

We can do it. The Spirit of Jesus lives in us to help us. Lent is when we open up our lives to God so that he can, in the words of our liturgy, kindle in us the fire of his love, and stir us again with the joy of the saints.

Sunday 9th March 6pm at St Anne's Dunbar

On Being ... Mindful

a talk by Ajahn Candasiri

Ajahn Candasiri is a senior nun (Siladhara) in the Thai Forest Tradition of

Thai Theravada Buddhism. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1947, she became an occupational therapist in themental health field after graduating from university. Having been raised as a

Christian she later, as an adult, began to take an interest in the teaching of the

Buddha. In 1977, after exploring several meditation traditions, she met Ajahn

Sumedho in the United Kingdom and was introduced to the Dhamma. She ordained

in 1979 at Chithurst Buddhist Monastery, England. She was one of four

women anagarikas who founded Chithurst Buddhist Monastery's community of nuns

in West Sussex, England. In 1983 she took Siladhara vows. Ajahn Candasiri resided

at Cittaviveka, Chithurst until 1999 when she moved to the Amaravati monastery.

Ajahn Candasiri takes a special interest in Christian-Buddhist understanding. She

has taught and led retreats in many places and enjoys teaching young people. Ajahn

Candasiri is well known for her work in advancing vinaya training for women.[1] She

has written and contributed to many articles.

ST ANNE’S DUNBAR GOSPELS

Ash wednesday– 5th march 2014

Run for it!

Readings:

1 Cor 9: 24-end – Run to win!

Matthew 6: 16-21 – Where your treasure is

I’m one of those people for whom sporting imagery doesn’t really work. I never even won an egg-and-spoon race.  I was a very weedy little boy in a school of rugby players. When it was time for team captains to pick their players, I was always the last chosen, with the captains usually bickering over who was going to take the liability that was me: “You have him!” “No, you have him!” It doesn’t do much for your self-esteem.

My school reports also didn’t help. In one year the games master just wrote one word: “Timid”. In another, the damning resumé: “Tries hard, but his physique is against him”. Until finally, after a year of hiding every time the bus came to take us to the sports fields: “I do not know this boy”.

So sports and me don’t have a good history. And yet I know what Paul means, without discipline we don’t achieve anything. Or as Jesus often puts it, if we want new growth to come, then we’ve got to be ready for the pruning that makes that possible. Sometimes, of course, we want to say to the Lord: "Enough, you’ve pruned me as much as I can take".

But we’re encouraged to get into this race because Jesus has run this race before us. The writer to the Hebrews says we should start this athletic discipline because Jesus has already blazed the trail for us. He’s our pioneer. He subdued his own nature, his ego, he endured the discipline of shedding everything and taking up his Cross. Why? - to embrace suffering for its own sake? – no, he did this “for the joy that was set before him.” (Heb 12:2a)

So we begin to see that this invitation to follow Jesus into the wilderness and beyond the wilderness, to Jerusalem and the Way of the Cross, is, in the end, an invitation to joy. So if we discipline our bodies in order to make our souls more opened to God, maybe loosened up a bit from our obsession with ourselves, we do it in order to embrace life.

So fasting, if we do that, is only a way to make a space where God and you can meet – that’s why Jesus says you do it in your secret place and don’t parade it about for all the world to see. The world doesn’t need miserable, po-faced Christians. It needs joyful Christians, who emerge out of that secret place where we meet God in a special way and go out into the world in a way that gives life. Out of any sacrifices we make, any disciplines we offer to God, should come only good fruit: love, joy, peace and all the rest.

And it’s not just about abstinence – which I have to admit sometimes just makes me cranky and hard to live with. Instead Lent can be about not giving something up, but taking something up. Maybe Lent can be when I write that letter to a friend that I’ve been meaning to write for months, or picking up the phone to someone, or deciding to sponsor a child in a developing country, or remembering to show some interest in the person who serves me at the checkout at Asda, or dedicating more time to praying for people I love.

Because this is Jesus yet again trying to help us see what’s really important. Where is the treasure of my heart? Do I love God and do I love others as much as I like to think I do? This is a time to stir up the gifts of the Spirit in me, so that I really do produce good fruit, for myself and for the world. And that only happens with some pruning, some discipline. And we don’t have for ever to get down to this. It’s not tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Paul says: Now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation. That’s why in this service we’re reminded of our mortality. We are dust and to dust shall return; but we’re dust into which again and again God breathes the breath of life. May he breathe that breath into us today. 

ST ANNE’S DUNBAR GOSPELS

Last Sunday before Lent – 2^nd march 2014

Light from the holy mountain

Readings:

Exodus 24: 12-end - The glory of the Lord on Mount Sinai

2 Peter 1:16-21 - A lamp shining in a dark place

Matthew 17:1-9 - This is my beloved Son

Today is almost a festival of light before we enter the more sombre days of Lent, with the darkness of Golgotha even now before Jesus. This is the news he’ll share with his disciples the very moment they come down from the mountaintop.

But right now everyone is shining. The face of Moses shines so brightly that he has to cover his face with a veil so his people can look at him without being dazzled, and I’m guessing even Peter and James and John shine with a kind of borrowed glory from this transfigured Jesus whose radiance and glory just knocks them off their feet.

As I was thinking about this business of shining faces I was reminded of Richmal Crompton’s “Just William” whose faced used to be scrubbed to an unnatural shine, I think with something like carbolic soap, so he could be presentable for guests or made fit to send to Violet Elizabeth Bott’s birthday party or some such. Of course it never lasted long with William, whose shine wore off in very short order and who managed to disgrace himself almost the moment he walked out the door.

And the shine for us can be just about the same. St Paul gets converted on the Damascus Road in a flash of Light. Unforgettable and enough to change you to the very core, but Paul can still write years on: Wretched man that I am. Who will deliver me from this body of death? For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. So even Paul’s still struggling with this. The shine seems to almost get rubbed off by my life in the world and by all the stuff that’s warring inside me.

So if shining is down to me, like scrubbing your face with carbolic or some huge effort of the will, then I ain’t got much hope. But if the shining is down to God, then maybe it’s different. And perhaps the shining isn’t down to what we do, but what we are, intrinsically what God made us. Something about us that shines just because God wills it so. When I do baptism preparation visits with parents of new babies, there’s a lot of shining around. Because the language of baptism, when you unpack big religious words like resurrection and redemption is all about a love that shines in every parent’s heart about this radiant little star of a life that’s just fallen into your lives and is going to change everything.

What does any parent want for their child? You want your child to know they’re loved. Not because of anything they do, but just because they’re there, because they exist. This is what reduces most parents to a state of complete goofiness as you stand at the foot of your little one’s bed at night, and even if they’ve been a complete horror all day, your heart overflows. There’s a radiance around you, around your child, and it is a full-blown, never-doubt-it-for-a-minute, miracle. This is a spark of the divine, light from the Holy Mountain brought right into your own home.

This is why our hearts are wrung when that miracle is soiled in any way. I’ve mentioned in this month’s magazine the interview on television earlier this week, when the BBC’s reporter in Syria, Lyse Doucet, visited a refugee camp just outside Damascus. For 20,000 people trapped in that camp, sixty food parcels had arrived that day. Amidst the chaos and wreckage of ruined buildings, all the visible horrors of war, she interviewed a boy of about twelve who was queuing for food with everyone else.

He answered her questions bravely and honestly, but a moment came when this little boy just couldn’t hold it together any more – he was hungry; there’d been no bread for days – and his young face just crumpled and he broke down and wept. Thank God, Lyse Doucet, in that moment almost stopped being reporter, observer, and reached out and touched him – as I think anyone watching would have wanted to do. This is an affront to God, an abuse of the divine purpose – a young face marred, dirty, streaked with tears, when it should be shining.

The absence of that shine tells us that this search for love and light and radiance and warmth and joy, is something God has planted deep within us. This radiance isn’t external, not achieved by a kind of moral scrubbing to make yourself fit for God or acceptable to the world. This is yours by right, by the divine plan. God says: You are my beloved... and those words reverberate way beyond the Holy Mountain to echo in our hearts for us. This is Peter’s “lamp shining in a dark place.” Light in our hearts, no matter what. This is not an external shine.

Thomas Merton, an American monk, once caught a glimpse of this as, sitting on a bus, he watched people through the window and longed to share with them the glory he was seeing

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people. It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race!

To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake. I have the immense joy of being human, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun”.

It’s a wonderful, famous passage, but suddenly I realise that after quoting it in many a sermon down the years I want to disagree with the last line. We can tell each other that we shine. We may not find that easy to hear or believe, but we need to go on saying it to each other again and again, for all those dark days when we need a lamp, a light and maybe it takes a friend to show it to us again. We need to remember that the Father who calls us Beloved has lit a light in our hearts, and it never goes out.