How sweet are your words

Exodus 17.8-13 ‘Whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed.’

2 Timothy 3.14-4.2 ‘That the man of God be complete, equipped for every good work.’

Luke 18.1-8 ‘God will give justice to his elect, who cry to him.’

 

How sweet are your words on my tongue!

They are sweeter than honey to my mouth.

(Psalm 119.103)

+

This morning’s second reading, with its reference to the scriptures, is a good opportunity to reflect on the word of God, as read in the Bible, and how that word is, to quote Psalm 119, ‘is a lantern to my feet and a light upon my path.’ (Psalm 119.105).

I hope also it will inspire each of us back to reading the Bible, or reading and hearing the Bible in a fresh way.

Each of us will have a different relationship with books.

Some of us will be novel type people, some preferring thrillers or detective works.

Some of us will be non-fiction readers, some preferring biography or meaty history.

Books can open up new worlds for us and allow our imagination to run riot.

Some people are described as ‘bookish’ meaning that they always have their head in a book, and the implication that they are so in a book they’re not in this world.

A song of my youth, in the late 1980s, had this line:

I bought you a book

Now you can read, yes

Get the experience without having to bleed (The Bolshoi, ‘She don’t know’, 1987)

Could it be that, sometimes, Christians are to be so caught up in a book, the Bible, that they’re not in this world, that they don’t know how to bleed?

We read the Bible as ‘the word of the Lord’, and know Jesus Christ as ‘the Word of God, the Word made flesh.’

The reading of the Bible is to bring us into a vibrant and living relationship with the Word Made Flesh, with Jesus Christ the one whose life blood was poured out for us.

Writing to Timothy, St Paul, speaks of being ‘acquainted with the scriptures’.

What a beautiful phrase.

Being acquainted with something or a person means to be at ease with them, familiar with them and deeply affectionate.

I wonder if that’s how you feel about the Bible?

Are you at ease with it, familiar with it, deeply affectionate towards it?

The sad fact is that Christianity in the modern world has gone down two routes, both of which would be unrecognisable to St Paul or the Fathers of the Church.

One route is the ‘Biblicist’, where the Bible is to be taken literally without nuance or appreciation of context.

The other is the ‘Bibliosceptic’, as I’ll call them, are those who say that the Bible is a text from a remote past, that has some inspiring phrases, but that’s about it.

Both take the Bible literally but not seriously.

One sore point for Biblicists and Bibliosceptics alike is part of a verse from Paul’s second letter to Timothy which was read this morning: ‘All Scripture is breathed out by God’ – that means the Bible claims to be literally true they cry!

Taking it literally one uses it like an instruction manual, and also taking it literally the other effectively bins it.

It’s tempting to quote Jesus’ words to the Sadducees: ‘You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.’ (Matthew 21.27)

Only one bit of the Bible was inscribed by God on tablets of stone, that’s the Ten Commandments.

The rest is breathed out by God and captured by human writers.

That is not to diminish the Bible, but to be real about it.

We are to be acquainted with the Bible, at ease with it, familiar with it, deeply affectionate towards it, because through the scriptures we meet Jesus Christ, ‘the word made flesh.’ (John 1.14).

Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1960s, said that ‘Christians are the people, not of a book, but of a person, himself described as the Word of God’.

And what Jesus, St Paul and others call ‘the Scriptures’ refer to what we call the Old Testament.

That is the first witness to Jesus Christ, as he himself makes clear to the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus on the Day of his Resurrection:

And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. (Luke 24.27)

That’s what the apostle Philip did on the road between Jerusalem to Gaza with an Ethiopian man when he asked about what the prophet Isaiah was on about:

Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus. (Acts of the Apostles 8.35)

When this was opened to them on the road to Emmaus, and then Jesus broke bread, the two disciples declared:

“Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” (Luke 24.32)

The Ethiopian heard Philip’s interpretation and asked immediately to be baptised.

We don’t read this book to get the experience without having to bleed, but we read the Scriptures to take up the cross of the One who suffered for us.

So, the Scriptures, that wonderful collection of texts, different in genre, written over centuries, are the reliable witness that the Church has to the mighty acts of God in Christ.

Their purpose is that we come to know Jesus, the Word Made Flesh, in the power of the Spirit, so that with him we see the Father’s face.

May we each renew our acquaintance with the Scriptures, cherish them, be at ease with them, love them.

As we come to taste the Living Bread from heaven may we also say of the Scriptures:

How sweet are your words on my tongue!

They are sweeter than honey to my mouth.

 

 

A Funeral Homily for the late Angela Bond RIP

 Homily preached at the funeral of Angela Bond, Croydon Minster 14th October 2025. Mother of a young child, Angela worshipped weekly at the Minster and worked in the parish office for 4 years. She died last month.

+

A funeral is a time when we come together to remember, give thanks for and commend to God a person we have known and loved.

We are doing that today for Angela.

And we entrust her on a journey, begun in this life and continuing now to the very heart of God, in the hope and confidence that she is led by the hand of Jesus Christ – the way, the truth and the life - to the place prepared for her, as our gospel reading promises.

The promise and hope is offered to us that death is the birth into a new life, a life we glimpse through acts of faith and hope and love, and revealed uniquely in the life, teaching and resurrection of Jesus Christ, through whom we are promised a heavenly dwelling place.

In the introduction to the service booklet I have written a few words saying what a funeral is and, hopefully, helping us reflect on some of the feelings we have here today.

The horrible reality is that we are here because someone we love, Angela, a child of God, made in God’s image and likeness, has died and we can no longer share our lives with her on earth.

A funeral is a time of remembering, of giving thanks, of grieving and of giving and receiving comfort. It is also a time of healing and reconciliation.

When we come to our prayers shortly that is a good moment to whisper before God, things said and done that are now regretted, or things we failed to say or do for which we seek forgiveness too.

A funeral is never an easy experience, especially when the person who has died is one so relatively young, like Angela.

Here we are faced with our own mortality, that none of us will live for ever, and we are presented with the challenge of how to live our lives well and to the full.

Do go back to those words, and the words of our readings, for they seek to proclaim also something very important about today.

That proclamation we read in the scriptures is that ‘many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it’ (Song of Songs 8.6).

For Christians this love is the love of God, embodied in Jesus Christ; the floods of death could not drown his love, which endures because of his resurrection from the dead.

Angela shared that hope.

Sunday by Sunday she was here in this church, as along with Alex, she brought their daughter to learn what faith is and to know the enduring love of God: what a gift to give to a daughter.

Angela is, as we know, both a mother and daughter, and I can’t help but reflect on that picture above the desk she worked at for four years in our church office.

It’s a detail of Philippo Lippi’s  Madonna and Child. There is a glorious, golden background but in Mary’s face we see the tenderness of a mother and the sadness the will overwhelm her as she stands at the foot to the cross watching as her son dies, seeing his pain and mourning her loss.

May Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for Angela, for Hilda, for her daughter.

Finally, given Angela’s love of, commitment to and involvement in theatre, a quote from Shakespeare is not out of place.

In Hamlet Ophelia is distributing herbs to others and says, ‘there’s rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray, love, remember.’

Today we have remembered Angela.

Though separated now, we still love her – mother, daughter, sister, cousin, friend, colleague – knowing that many waters cannot quench God’s love for her.

And we pray for her, that she may rest in peace – healed and forgiven – to be perfected in God’s image, before we commend her finally to God’s mercy.

Rest eternal, grant to your servant, O Lord,

and let light perpetual shine upon her.

 

Prevention of restlessness - the collects of Trinity 17

 

Today I want to offer what you could call ‘A Tale of Two Collects.’

First, what is a collect?

Very simply put it is a short prayer that ‘collects’, or brings together, intentions into a single, focused petition.

Collects are assigned for each Sunday, high days and holy days throughout the year.

At the Eucharist the collect concludes the opening of the liturgy before we sit to hear the readings.

At Matins and Evensong, the collect is one of the concluding prayers of the Office.

So, the first of the two collects I want to reflect on tonight is the collect appointed for the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity in the Book of Common Prayer, which is today.

It has been sung this evening.

It is beautifully pithy, and is a translation by Thomas Cranmer of an early Roman collect from a ancient source, the Gregorian Sacramentary.

Here’s the text:

Lord, we pray thee that thy grace may always prevent and follow us, and make us continually to be given to all good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

It has a cause of some confusion to many due to a change in how we use a word.

To ask that God’s grace may always prevent and follow us, sounds odd, until we learn that prevent is not meant in the way we use it now.

If we prevent something, we stop it happening, we put an obstacle in the way, so what is God’s grace preventing us from doing the good works we pray to be able to do?

Well, that’s not what it’s saying.

Latin scholars will spot this.

‘Pre-vent’ is an English word that comes pretty much straight from the Latin meaning ’to go before’, pre-venire. 

So, we’re actually praying that God’s grace goes before us, and well as follow us, so it’s wrap-around grace, that free gift of all that enables us to glorify him in all things.

It actually gives us a beautiful balance of God’s grace, a free unmerited gift to us, and our response to that grace which is to be shown in the concrete actions of life, the capacity to do good, as opposed, to bad works.

The second collect today is in the Common Worship prayer book.

There are no linguistic tricks, but equally beautiful riches:

Almighty God,

you have made us for yourself,

and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you:

pour your love into our hearts and draw us to yourself,

and so bring us at last to your heavenly city

where we shall see you face to face;

through Jesus Christ our Lord.

This collect is relatively new to the Anglican tradition, but is actually an ancient prayer.

It is a prayer of St Augustine of Hippo, one of the great early Church Fathers, to whom we owe so much, from his famous book Confessions.

Confessions is not about indiscretions that need to be confessed, but there is certainly some of that, but primarily a confession of faith.

This collect, this prayer, gets to the heart of Augustine’s predicament and to the experience of many people throughout the ages.

It is a sentiment that the new Pope, himself an Augustinian, has picked up on in this prayer.

Let’s take a look at it.

Almighty God,

you have made us for yourself,

Augustine sets out the frame of meaning for human existence: we don’t exist for ourselves, we don’t exist for other people, we exist for God.

The Westminster Confession of put it like this, ‘Why did God create humankind’ but to ‘glorify God and enjoy him forever.’

That is our purpose, and that is God’s grace preventing – going before – us.

We are made, fashioned us of the dust of the earth, in God’s image and likeness, to glorify our Creator and enjoy him forever.

What a beautiful vision, until human restlessness is brought into the picture.

This restlessness is so terribly of now: an ongoing itch that can never be scratched, the ache that will never be relieved, the hunger that is never really satisfied.

Only God’s grace, preventing us and following us, will be able to draw us back to him, who is the source of tranquillity and peace.

As Augustine says:

our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you:

Wow! Doesn’t that express something deep within us today.

 

Rest is not found gazing into the screen of a smartphone, or a bit of ‘me time’, or overindulging in a whole host of things.

Our existential restlessness is relieved by love going before us, and following us, into God’s presence:

pour your love into our hearts and draw us to yourself,

Pour your love: God’s love fills up the depleted wellsprings of our hearts, that by our own merits, without God’s grace run dry.

This re-forms, refashions, renews us, into a human being who lets go, who no longer resists being drawn into presence of the One for whom we are made.

This draws us into what the Fathers, and the Anglican Divines of earlier centuries call, the Beatific Vision, the vision of blessedness, the vision of God, hence the prayer continues:

and so bring us at last to your heavenly city

where we shall see you face to face;

In these two collects we have found our beginning and our end, the Alpha and Omega, the purpose of our creation and our final consummation in God’s presence, a presence that by grace has prevented – gone before – us and followed us.

On earth may we be given to all good works; in the heavenly city may we gaze gloriously on the face of the Beloved; and in both may we seek only that his kingdom and his will be done.

Amen.

 

 

Harvest Thanksgiving

Preached at Harvest Thanksgiving

Deuteronomy 26.1-11 I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.

Revelation 14.14-18 The clusters of the grapes of the earth are ripe for harvest.

John 6.25-35 I am the bread of life, says the Lord.

 

Do not let your hand be stretched out to receive

and closed when it is time to give.

(Sirach 4.31)

+

Two fundamental principles undergird our celebration of harvest thanksgiving today.

The first is that everything we have – our possessions, property, life itself - is a sheer gift from God.

The second is that in response to the gift that is life, possessions and property, we offer something back to God to acknowledge his greater gift.

The tithe is the supreme example of this in the Bible: offering a tenth of our income to God.

This is applied by many in church, to give a tenth of one’s income to serve the mission and ministry of Christ.

Giving is good for us; generosity is a virtue that we need to make a habit of, in response to God’s generosity to us.

This is all captured by Job’s words when he meditated on the catastrophic loss of possessions and all that was dear to him:

Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. (Job 1.21)

It’s no accident that those words are used at a funeral to express that all we have in this life is God’s gift: we mustn’t fool ourselves into thinking that what we have is by our merit and that we can take it with us, we have to relinquish control and ownership at some point!

Harvest, like a funeral, is also a time of accountability.

At harvest the farmer measures and weighs the fruits of his labour, just as at the end of life our deeds are accounted for before God.

But the work of harvest is not just about the end, but about how the land and its planting was prepared, cultivated, watered and tended.

So it is in our lives.

That’s why the old customs of rogation are so important – that’s actually when we ‘plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land’, not at harvest, despite the traditional harvest hymn.

The poet TS Eliot puts it more intriguingly:

Take no thought of the harvest,

but only of the proper sowing. From Chorus in The Rock

A good harvest takes long, slow, patient cultivation just like our lives.

We have God’s gift of life: how are we going to use it? How will we be fruitful? How will we multiply what God has given?

It is in our hands.

Literally.

Wheat needs human hands to be made into bread.

Grapes need human hands, or feet possibly, to be made into wine.

The gift of life is shaped by you and me; what does it become in your hands?

So, harvest thanksgiving is about giving thanks for God’s gift and giving in response.

It is also about thanksgiving for those people whose skills transform that gift into something we can make use of: farmers, craftsmen, brewers, cooks, workers: the human hands that transform the raw gift into something edible, beautiful, functional for our use.

Harvest thanksgiving subverts the human tendency to make everything into a transaction: to buy and sell, make profit, always looking at the bottom line.

The Eucharist is, in a mundane and eschatological sense, always a harvest thanksgiving.

In other words, it celebrates the fruit of the land and points us to judgement.

All is encapsulated in Jesus’ free, gracious, sacrificial offering of himself to us.

Our gospel reading speaks of the miraculous bread, the manna, given to the Israelites in the wilderness.

They did not deserve it, they hadn’t earned it, yet God provided it.

Jesus connects this to his own giving of himself, the Bread of Life.

Whoever comes to him will never be hungry, whoever believes in him will never be thirsty (John 6.35).

There: no transaction, no sale, but a free gift for salvation and life.

We stretch out our hands to receive that life in Holy Communion with Christ, the Bread of Life, mindful, I hope, of the sentiment of the book of Ecclesiasticus:

Do not let your hand be stretched out to receive and closed when it is time to give. (Sirach 4.31)

Finally, our reading from Deuteronomy spoke of the gift the Israelites were to give in response for their deliverance from Egypt.

Today we are invited to bring forward our own gifts for St Alban’s Foodbank and the Skylight Project for those experiencing homelessness.

Don’t trudge dutifully forward at the offertory but joyfully, recalling these words:

You shall set [your gift] down before the Lord your God and bow down before the Lord your God. (Deuteronomy 26.10)

It’s more than ‘helping out’ or ‘doing a good turn’ – and it is doing that – more fundamentally it is a freewill way of offering back to God all that you have had received from his abundance, in service of those in need:

Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house. (Deuteronomy 26.11)