You will see heaven opened - Michael, Gabriel & Raphael

 Revelation 12:7-12a ‘Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon.’

John 1:47-51 ‘You will see the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.’

‘You will see heaven opened’

+

Walking along Church Street to the church last week I was beginning to muse on what I might say for this homily.

As I walked I realised that this year I hadn’t seen any Michaelmas daisies, a simple but pretty flower at this time of year.

As I thought that I looked to my right, in the field that is often flooded, and there lining the verge were, none other than, Michaelmas daises.

I must have walked past them a number of times in the preceding days but not noticed them.

Were they a message? An angelic message?

I had totally missed something that was hiding in plain sight.

There is something about the angels in that: always bringing the messages of the God of Heaven and earth who sends them, often ignored or unnoticed by we mortals, unless we tune in to them.

This time of year, late September and into October, is good for us because it reminds us to tune into things angelic.

At risk of sounding like the General Synod of the Church of England, this is the Season of Angels, Angeltide, with today’s feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, and Friday’s feast of the Holy Guardian Angels.

That said, tuning into things angelic is not restricted to a time or season, rather, angelic activity pervades our worship, the scriptures, and the Christian Year.

In our worship we unite with the angels all that we offer in the Sacrifice of the Mass.

As the Book of Common Prayer 1662 magnificently retained (thank goodness):

Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious Name; evermore praising thee, and saying: Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts, heaven and earth are full of thy glory: Glory be to thee, O Lord most High.

And of course, the Sanctus is an angelic hymn using texts from Isaiah and Revelation.

This is a theme much loved by the seventeenth century Anglican Divine, Jeremy Taylor.

He says that ‘the holy table’ on earth is a copy ‘of the celestial altar’.

His Eucharistic theology is well articulated by the Roman Canon which connects the earthly and heavenly sacrifice through angelic means:

In humble prayer we ask you, almighty God:

command that these gifts be borne

by the hands of your holy Angel

to your altar on high

in the sight of your divine majesty,

so that all of us, who through this participation at the altar

receive the most holy Body and Blood of your Son,

may be filled with every grace and heavenly blessing.

And from the scriptures we could reference the cherubim, those angelic cousins, guarding Eden after the expulsion of our first parents; the angel who warns the disregarding Balaam, but is only seen by his donkey; the angelic visitors who receive hospitality from Abraham and Sarah - the list goes on.

Angels are there in the psalms: ‘In the presence of the angels I praise you, O Lord.’

An unnamed angel comes to Joseph, and surely the most joyous task of the angelic host is to proclaim the birth of the Messiah and singing, ‘Glory to God in the highest’.

But their activity doesn’t stop there: angels minister to Christ following his baptism; they are with him in Gethsemane; they attend the tomb at his Resurrection; they surround his Ascension into heaven; they lead apostles from prison; Philip to the Ethiopian eunuch and guide Cornelius to Peter.

Angelic activity rightly pervades our worship, our scripture and the every day because they are messengers of the Most High.

The angels still connect heaven and earth, as with the ladder stretching from Jacob’s pillow to heaven, an angelic sign pointing to Christ himself, which unfolds in the dialogue with Nathaniel in our gospel reading:

‘Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man’.

So at this time of year we glory in the angels in their ministry: you will see heaven opened.

Today we focus upon three of them: Michael, Gabriel and Raphael.

Those who have prayed the Office of Readings today will be familiar with Saint Gregory the Great’s homily that speaks of these three.

He reminds us that the word ‘angel’ is an office not a nature.

Although an angelos - the Greek word for ‘messenger’ - an angel is defined by the message they bear, not the messenger they are.

Yet the message can’t be unravelled from the messenger.

These three are messengers of salvation in its most powerful forms.

To the great Gabriel is given the highest task in preparation for the Saviour.

He goes first to Zechariah to announce the message of the conception of John and then to the Blessed Virgin to deliver what Saint Gregory calls, ‘the greatest message of all’, the Annunciation, so dear to us in Walsingham and at the heart of the charism of this holy place.

In that Holy House of Nazareth Mary joyfully responds to Gabriel, ‘Be it unto me according to thy word’.

Snubbed by Zechariah, heard by Mary, Gabriel takes back the ‘fiat’ of the Virgin to the Most High, the assent that the Word will be made flesh.

Gabriel’s message is salvation through the birth of the Saviour and the one who prepares His way.

Raphael brings salvation in the healing power of God that is manifest in Christ’s earthly ministry.

Raphael, St Gregory tells us, ‘wiped away the shadows of blindness from Tobit when he touched his eyes to cure him’.

Salve is healing; salvation is the healing remedy for the sickness of our mortal condition.

That healing, communicated by Raphael, is fulfilled in Jesus Christ as revealed in the Gospels.

And when Christ heals today, through the intercession of Mary and the saints, Raphael delivers that healing, restoration and salvation to us.

Finally, Michael, of whom we heard in the first reading, is an angel of salvation because he is engaged in manifesting the triumph of the Cross and Resurrection of Christ over the powers evil and darkness.

Michael’s name means ‘Who is like God’ and Michael’s primary task is to tell the ancient enemy, that fallen angel, that it is not him.

Satan is the adversary of God and nothing like him, even if human heads are turned by his wiles.

So as we celebrate the archangels today, and all things angelic on Friday, we’re left with a question.

We’re in an era when more messages fly around the globe than ever before.

‘To message’ has become a verb when once it was a noun, but perhaps in the spirit of St Gregory it always was.

In a message-soaked age – 24 hour news, social media, WhatsApp and email pinging - when angelic messages sit in the spiritual inbox unopened, or don’t get through the firewall of our vanity and deafness, or bounce back as celestial spam: what are we missing?

The angels are indefatigable because they are messages and messengers of the Most High.

I missed the Michaelmas daisies for days before looking out for them and being open to the possibility of their presence.

Let’s be ever more alert to the holy messengers of God, Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and all the heavenly host, to lift our hearts and minds to the One who sends them.

‘You will see heaven opened’

 

 

 

Let your 'yes' be 'yes'

 Ezekiel 18:25-28 · ‘When a wicked person turns away from the wickedness he has committed, he shall save his life.’

Philippians 2:1-11 · ‘Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus.’

Matthew 21:28-32 ‘He changed his mind and went. The tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you.’

 

Which of the two did the will of his father?

+

Who knew that Walsingham has a vineyard?

As it happens I did know, because amongst the many wonderful welcome gifts my family and I have been given since our arrival here, one was a bottle of Walsingham wine.

And very enjoyable it was too!

Last week the grapes were being harvested, even though this year’s weather with a bad frost early on and lack of rain later, means it’s not the biggest yield.

On Wednesday I visited the vineyard, tucked behind the old railway near the Catholic Shrine, to see the harvesters picking the grapes by hand.

It evoked last week’s gospel reading about the master of the vineyard hiring labourers to go into his vineyard, and this morning’s, in which a man asks his two sons to join him in working his vineyard.

Vineyards are an important setting for Jesus’ parables.

St Gregory the Great likes to see the human soul as a vineyard of God’s presence.

Just as vines need tending, so the task in the vineyard of one’s soul is attending to the disciplines of prayer, of seeking after virtue, of allowing Christ to tend our souls so that they are fruitful, like a vine.

In the parable today the vineyard is the setting for a key question for us about discipleship and our response to the Lord’s call, and its implications, in our lives.

The direct context of this passage is that the chief priests and elders of the people had heard John the Baptist call them to the vineyard but, despite outward appearance, they failed to repent and turn their lives around, but when John called the tax collectors, the prostitutes and even the run of the mill sinners to repentance they did.

Origen of Alexandria summarises it well for us:

in this parable the Lord spoke to such as promise little or nothing, but in their works shine forth; and against those who promise great things but do none of these things that they have promised.

So we too are invited to a deep self-examination about how we respond to the will of God: will our ‘works shine forth’?

Two sons are asked by their father to work in the vineyard.

One says ‘no, I won’t go into the vineyard’ but then does.

The other says, ‘yes, of course I will go into the vineyard’ but fails to.

‘Which’, Jesus asks, ‘does the will of his father?’

The answer is clear enough, it’s the first, he didn’t ‘talk the talk’, but he did ‘walk the walk’: he did what had been asked of him.

That is of far more value than the willing child who says yes and does nothing.

We should want to be like the first son; but, if we’re honest, we know we are prone to act – or not act - like the second.

Something very wonderful happened to the first son, and Jesus commends it to his hearers, it is a change of mind, a change of heart, what we call repentance.

The Greek text of this passage tells us that it was a sense of remorse that the son felt that prompted his change of heart.

Guilt, remorse, regret are generally regarded as bad things, and they are if they are left to fester and corrode our souls.

But they can also be the prompt we need to amend our lives.

So, for example, if I feel guilt over neglecting my obligations to a family member this can be the prompt to amend my neglect and make it joyful service.

If I have remorse over something I have done, rather than wallowing in misery, I can make restitution.

The son in the parable who said ‘no’ to his father felt guilt, remorse and regret over his unwillingness and this became the spur to act as he was called, despite his initial ‘no’.

The flip side is that enthusiasm and saying yes, needs to be followed up by action: prayer, reception of the sacraments, acts of mercy.

The letter of James expresses this nicely:

be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing. James 1.22-25

The ladder of virtue that we seek to climb takes us even beyond the ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but integrates our ‘yes’ into our action.

We’re not saved by good intentions and neither are we saved solely by doing good.

One son said ‘no’, one said ‘yes’ to the father’s call, neither said the words to which we should aspire:

Be it unto me according to thy word.

In the Blessed Virgin we see the one who both says ‘yes’ to God and acts in fidelity to his will.

Through her total openness to the Father’s will, in the simple word, ‘Fiat’ - ‘let it be’ - she is free from guilt and remorse and is always open to the intention and purpose of the Heavenly Father.

In that she is a mirror and reflection of her Son, Jesus Christ, who was ‘obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross’.

Let us respond then to the call to work in the Lord’s vineyard, sharing in the life of the Christ the Vine, who shed his blood for the salvation of the world.

May we walk into the vineyard of his love as ‘fiat’ people, ready to respond in word and deed like she who did the will of her heavenly Father.

 

 

Called to Christ's vineyard

 Isaiah 55:6-9: ‘My thoughts are not your thoughts.’

Philippians 1:20-27: ‘For to me to live is Christ.’

Matthew 20:1-16: ‘Do you begrudge my generosity?’

 

+

 

Moving into the Vicarage here in Walsingham last month I spent more time than I would care to on the phone - ‘on hold’ - to a national broadband supplier, who I won’t identify from the pulpit.

Aside from the dreadful tinny music, the experience of being left waiting ‘on hold’ is a weirdly frustrating one.

Even being told you’re first in the queue, next in line, doesn’t really help, especially when the answer is not very helpful.

None of us likes to be left hanging around, loitering or rudderless.

The contemporary human experience seems to be one of purposeless that leads increasingly to despair.

The ideas and accoutrements of modern living that were meant to make us so happy and liberate us have proved to be empty and increase the frustrations and not assuage them.

And, as has been observed, human beings are meaning making creatures, and so we want a sense of purpose, purpose that is informed by hope, the setting of our sights on something beyond us and higher than our experience.

The prophet Isaiah captures this in ancient and enduring wisdom.

He reveals purpose and meaning in seeking the Lord, in calling upon him and walking in his paths.

Contrary to therapeutic methods, that focus on self, we find that our meaning as persons is found by looking outside ourselves and beyond our imagining:

For as the heavens are higher than the earth,

so are my ways higher than your ways

and my thoughts than your thoughts.

That puts us in our proper place; not oppressively, but raising our sights to God our maker and redeemer, the Lord who is always beyond us, greater than us.

When we understand the divine-human order, then we can see that human dignity is found in the One who stooped down to us, to raise us up: Christ, born of the Blessed Virgin, humbles himself to share our humanity to raise us up to His divinity.

As Christians we live in and between the realities of heaven and earth.

St Paul captures it in the passage from his letter to the Philippians we heard today.

He savours what the Lord gives him to do in this world, sharing the apostolic faith, but at the same time yearns ‘to depart and be with Christ’.

St Paul lives life in the end times now.

The Lord has not put him ‘on hold’ but reveals through him the Christian calling, both to savour life in this world and to look to the life of the world to come.

We say it in the Creed:

I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.

We look forward with hope, that Christ will be honoured in our bodies, whether by life or by death.

Either way, Paul says, ‘Let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ.’

This takes us to the Gospel today, which we must first put in context within St Matthew’s gospel.

The parable of the workers in the vineyard is the last one Jesus tells before entering Jerusalem.

He knows what awaits him there.

No sooner has he finished telling the parable than he says: “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be betrayed and condemned to death.”

Notice that: the parable points to the mystery of the cross. 

On the cross the Lord says he will draw all people to himself.

Christ came to seek the lost, the rudderless, the loiterers.

The master of the vineyard is uncannily Christlike because he goes seeking precisely those people.

This parable reveals the gratuity, the grace, of God in drawing us back to the vineyard from which we were expelled through sin.

That ‘vineyard’ was Eden, the garden of creation.

The Lord, like the master in the parable, now seeks those who will labour for his kingdom, not reject life in the kingdom as Adam did.

That is the grace that goes out searching, to which we are invited to respond.

Grace is not a currency, it’s not wages or reward; it is unmerited, it’s boundless, it is all sufficient.

Yet the characters in the parable try to turn it into a debate about workers and shirkers, about labour rights and working conditions.

They miss the point.

And so will we if we think God’s grace is a reward, or that more is given to some people than others: remember, grace is unmerited, boundless, all sufficient.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD.

The master – Christ - goes out to seek the wanderer, the lost, the misguided, the ones wrapped up in themselves, to invite them into the kingdom of heaven.

He goes out relentlessly: at the third, sixth and ninth hour, and again at the eleventh.

That echoes the Cross.

At the third hour, in St Mark’s Gospel, the crucifixion begins.

It’s the time of that the morning sacrificial lamb was offered on Israel’s behalf.

At the sixth hour, the middle of the day, the brightest time, darkness fell.

At the ninth hour Christ breathed his last: the time of the slaughter of the evening Passover lamb in the Temple.

The eleventh hour is dusk, when Christ’s dead body is laid in the tomb.

From the cross – his Passion and death - Christ opens the gates, not of a return to Eden but to a renewed creation, born from the blood and water flowing from his pierced side.

At the third, sixth, ninth, eleventh hour, the Lord will seek out those who are ‘on hold’ in lives without him.

On the day of resurrection he will reveal himself - in the garden - to Mary Magdalene, who mistakes him, actually correctly identifies him, as the one who tends the garden of the renewed creation.

His mercy abounds; this parable is not a spreadsheet of the payroll department of the kingdom of heaven: it is grace, it is an invitation, and one you and I are called to pass on, as we join Christ in the market-place inviting the idlers, the rudderless those without hope into the garden of his kingdom and into his Church.

For the householder’s vineyard is a picture of the Church.

Come to the vineyard, where the grapes are produced that fill the cup of salvation and point forward to the ‘new wine’ we will drink with Christ in the Father’s kingdom (Matthew 26:29).

That invitation is not ‘on hold’ it is here, it is now.

Blessed are those who are called to the supper of the Lamb.

Disproportionate forgiveness

First sermon preached at St Mary's, Little Walsingham, and earlier at St Peter's Great Walsingham and Houghton St Giles

Sirach 27:30-28:7 ‘Forgive your neighbour the wrong he has done, and then your sins will be pardoned when you pray.’

Romans 14:7-9 ‘Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.’

Matthew 18:21-35 ‘I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.’

 

The Lord is compassionate and gracious,

slow to anger and rich in mercy.

 

+

 

One of the great blessings, and challenges, of the Christian life is forgiveness – receiving forgiveness and giving it.

This challenge is being addressed in today’s gospel in the Lord’s conversation with Peter and in the parable that comes from it about someone who is forgiven but then who cannot then forgive.

Aren’t we all locked into that to some degree?

All too many people, even in the life of the Church, hardly dare believe that, in the words of the psalm, ‘The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and rich in mercy’.

The psalm is absolutely serious – and do go back and read it – when it describes the heart and nature of God and the power of His forgiveness:

It is the Lord who forgives all your sins,

who heals every one of your ills,

who redeems your life from the grave,

who crowns you with mercy and compassion.

What a glorious promise!

And if we do accept that forgiveness are we ready to be mirrors of forgiveness?

So there’s a question posed by the Gospel today: is this promise of lavish forgiveness on the radar of your life as a Christian?

So Jesus shows that true forgiveness, God’s forgiveness, is lavish and generous and it doesn’t grudge: and it needs putting into action.

70 times 7 equals 490: that’s a lot of forgiving to be getting on with.

It’s as if Jesus is saying ‘do the maths!’

This is not to test your powers of mental arithmetic, but to emphasise that the forgiveness we give to others is a reflection of the forgiveness we receive from God, through the saving death of Christ on the cross, out of love for the world (cf John 3.16).

And in saying ‘do the maths’ the Lord is drawing on a character from the book of Genesis, chapter 4.

Lamech is a relentlessly unforgiving character, who takes disproportionate vengeance on those who slight him: he says that he won’t just take sevenfold vengeance, but seventy-seven fold (Genesis 4.23-24).

Recognise it?

Jesus flips that round for Peter and you and me.

Forgive, not just seven times but seventy-seven fold.

Lamech dealt in disproportionate vengeance, and vengeance, of any sort, is not the way of Jesus Christ and not worthy of his followers: Jesus deals in disproportionate forgiveness.

So today’s gospel is all about how we live our lives as forgiven and forgiving people.

It is first about life in the Church – that’s why Peter is part of it – it’s about being reconciled to God and to one another, and then about how that forgiveness spills out into our daily lives, thus revealing the ways of the Kingdom of God.

Forgiveness demands honesty, frankness and realism from the forgiver and the one seeking forgiveness.

If I cannot be real about my sins, I can never be ready and receptive to receive forgiveness.

Farmers and gardeners alike know what happens to hard dry ground when the rains come: the rain runs off the surface and leaches any remaining goodness.

When the surface of the ground is broken up and worked then the water can soak deep into the ground and water the roots of the growing seed and plants.

So too the watering of our souls with God’s forgiving grace means that the hardened shell we protect ourselves in must be tilled, so that forgiveness can soak into us and wash out the toxins of sin.

The Church, in her wisdom, gives us a powerful sacrament to aid this in our spiritual lives.

The Sacrament of Confession is the moment when we place ourselves before God - honestly, frankly and realistically - to receive his forgiveness.

Kneeling in penitence, articulating the hard and gnarled realities of our lives that repel God’s grace, is a healing balm and saving medicine.

That is what the Sacrament of Confession gives.

Confession is perhaps the most under used Sacraments of the Church, and yet one that can give deep and enduring comfort.

Getting back to regular confession - or getting started as penitents - reacquaints us with what forgiveness is about, and draws us close to the heart of the guardian of our souls.

Confession is good for us, and those with whom we share our lives, because it is the hinge of the Lord’s Prayer, praying to the Father: ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us’.

You cannot truly forgive until you have been forgiven.

And the parable makes clear; there is little worse than the forgiven person who then fails to forgive.

It shows how crushing an inability to forgive really is, especially from someone who has been relieved of the debt of sin.

The very word forgiveness has a gift at its heart.

It is a gift to receive and a gift to give.

The parable is not a tale with a moral at which we nod our heads, but is a prompt to live lives as forgiven sinners who themselves put forgiveness and reconciliation into practice.

Know yourself to be forgiven, so reacquaint yourself with God’s forgiveness in the Sacrament of Confession.

It’s hard but eternally rewarding: the clutch of sin is washed away at baptism, but our sinfulness abounds, as does God’s disproportionate forgiveness.

Seek out a priest – and there are plenty around here - knowing that he voices God’s forgiveness of your sins, the Lord ‘who’, through his saving death on the Cross, ‘forgives all your sins, who heals every one of your ills, who redeems your life from the grave, who crowns you with mercy and compassion’.

And, knowing yourself to be forgiven, forgive.

Today’s gospel is then a relentless and demanding account of forgiveness and the spiritual corrosion of the failure to seek forgiveness and forgive.

Forgiveness is not a path of weakness but a noble, virtuous way that needs the strength of God’s grace.

Try it out this week! Amongst those who rile you, offend you, disturb you, be they family, friends, colleagues, even new parish priests: no doubt there will be plenty of people and moments who can provide you with the opportunity to give disproportionate forgiveness – what a gift that is to you!

So, as redeemed sinners let us now be ready to come to receive the Lamb of God, who when entering under our roof says the word and heals us.