'No longer contained' An Easter Sermon

 Acts 10.34-43 ‘We have eaten and drunk with him after his resurrection’

 

1 Corinthians 15.19-26 Christ is the first-fruits of those who have died

 

John 20.1-18 He must rise from the dead

 

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Alleluia. Christ is risen.

 

This is the Christian proclamation par excellence!  Jesus Christ - truly God, truly human, born of the Virgin Mary – this Jesus, who died upon the cross and was buried is now alive, raised by the Father from the dead.

 

Christ is risen.

 

It lies at the heart of what we call ‘the mystery of faith’, a mystery whose depths we plumb in these days of Easter: ‘Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again’.

 

And as St Paul reflected in his first letter to the Corinthians, this is not an abstract idea. Resurrection is so much more than a general concept of new life, the cycle of birth and death or even the transformation of caterpillar, to chrysalis, to butterfly: those things of nature, beautiful as they are, point to, but are not, resurrection. Resurrection depends on a body, a body that was dead now alive.

 

Resurrection is shocking and in one sense against nature.

 

And it is wholly of God: ‘this is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes’, says the psalm (Ps 118.23).  

 

Resurrection is found in an encounter with the body of Jesus Christ made visible in the concrete, in person, embodied community of faith he draws around him to live his Risen Life and through the sacraments that body, the Church, celebrates.

 

That body, our first brothers and sisters in the church, made their way to the tomb. They did not find the bloodied corpse, but they found the tomb empty.

 

Mary Magdalene had gone to pay her respects at the tomb after Jesus’ brutal death, and instead finds herself responding to the reality which you and I are called to respond to today and, after her example, to pass on to others today, that Jesus Christ is not constrained by death, darkness and despair but is alive and risen.

 

There it is. Christ has died. Christ is risen.

The gospel passage for today paints a picture of urgency, of spreading the news, of bewilderment and of encounter.

 

Urgency. Mary arrives at the tomb so early in the morning that it was still dark. Such was her urgent desire to be near the body of her Lord and Teacher. On finding the tomb empty she urgently ran to tell Simon Peter and the beloved disciple. They in turn ran urgently to the tomb.

 

There is an urgency to the Christian life: this matters!

 

We see that urgency in those new Christians who have an intense and urgent appetite for Christ and in those lifelong Christians are renewed by a deep sense of assurance and hope. We see that urgency for Christ in the vibrant global Church.

 

Rekindling our urgent desire for the resurrection faith will be transformative for the life of the Church in England, where too often zeal flags in the face of a remote relationship with the gospel and with Jesus Christ.

 

Spread the news! With urgency comes a desire to hand this on; to spread the news. This news can’t be bottled up. Mary Magdalene had to go and tell. She became, in Pope Gregory the Great’s wonderful phrase, ‘the apostle to the Apostles’. Mary is sent to tell the ones who will in turn go and tell the whole world, as Peter says in the Acts of the Apostles..

 

Someone told you once of Jesus Christ. Perhaps it was a parent, a grandparent, godparent or friend. However you were told you are now to go and tell. Mary told two people, if you told two people of the power of faith in Jesus Christ and demonstrated in your life that it is life-giving and urgent, then the church here in this land would grow as it does in many parts of the world. People are going and telling in countries all around the world, which is why Christianity continues to grow.

 

And don’t tell a bland, dull, tepid, inoffensive account of this – that’s not the Gospel - speak of the vibrant, urgent life that comes from an encounter with the Living God in Jesus Christ.

 

Bewilderment. At the same time, we have to be frank; this is bewildering. It is not a superficial gospel we tell.

 

Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the Risen Lord was bewildering and disorientating. It took time for her to become aware of what was going on.

 

So many people look at the resurrection and are too bewildered to go further. They walk away. Mary was ready to stay, to pause, to ponder, to ask the deeper questions in her encounter with the Risen Lord.

 

That is the beginnings of a life of prayer and mystical union with Christ. And from that Mary realised that her life had to be re-ordered in relation to who Jesus Christ is. She couldn’t project her own desires onto him, be they romantic, deluded or idolising. She had to come to see him as he really was, stripping away the preconceptions she wanted to hold on to.

 

And again, reflecting on the complexity, she had to go and tell.

 

So the Easter Proclamation is not superficial: it is deep, it is urgent, bewildering, yet life giving. It has had, and still has, the capacity to turn the world upside down, human lives upside down, to reorient us to God, our Maker and our Redeemer,

 

So let us roll the stone away from our eyes and hearts, see the Crucified and Risen Lord and go, tell the Good News. Alleluia.

'Can you drink this cup' A sermon for Maundy Thursday

 

Exodus 12.1-8, 11-14 The Passover is a day of festival for all generations, for ever

 

1 Corinthians 11.23-26 Every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are proclaiming the death of the Lord

 

John 13.1-15 Now he showed how perfect his love was

 

‘The Son of Man who came to serve not to be served and give his life a ransom for many’ (Matthew 20.28; Mark 10.45).

 

 

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Tonight’s liturgy is perhaps the richest of the whole Christian year. 

 

It densely packs together scripture, and associated imagery, in a symphony of salvation.

 

We are presented with Christ, the servant king, washing his disciples’ feet: ‘the Son of Man who came to serve not to be served and give his life a ransom for many’.

 

We receive the Institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper, in Christ’s Body and Blood as the Paschal Lamb, which itself connects us to the Passover and the recollection of deliverance from slavery.

 

We see the betrayal of Jesus by Judas, one of the twelve, and its themes of human betrayal intrigue and failings. We see the all too human flaws of Peter, who refuses to have his feet washed, and also denies Jesus, having emphatically said he wouldn’t ever do such a thing.

 

Maundy Thursday ends in Gethsemane, the place of Jesus’ prayer, facing, in union with the Father, what is about to unfold.

 

That sets the model for the Watch of the Passion, which we will observe at the close of the Liturgy where we are invited to ‘watch and pray’ in the sacramental presence of the Lord.

 

Maundy Thursday inaugurates a liturgical ‘event’ that runs through to the night of Holy Saturday, when Christ is raised from the dead.

 

This ‘event’ is known as the Triduum Sacrum, the Holy Three Days, and is all of a piece. It is, as it were, the longest Christian service or act of worship, albeit interspersed with going home for rest and to eat.

 

Faced with so many themes and implications we could baulk at it all. Take time, though, in these coming days to digest what is going on here. It sets the bearings for Easter, but also for the whole mystery of the Christian life.

 

We are at the heart of the Christian faith here. The incarnate Lord, who has assumed our humanity, endures suffering, his Passion, and plunges into death, that we might be raised to life.

 

A theme that runs throughout the Triduum Sacrum is that of ‘outpouring’.

 

The Passion of Jesus Christ is an outpouring of love for all humanity and an invitation into the inner life of God.

 

These holy days are marked by the outpouring of God’s life and love.

 

Water is poured out on the feet of the Twelve – an action replicated tonight on the feet of disciples here in this church.

 

That outpouring of water hints at baptism because it is not just about an external wash but an inner cleansing that incorporates us into the Divine Life. As Jesus said to Peter, ‘unless I wash you, you have no share with me’ (John 13.8b).

 

Also poured out at the Supper is wine. The Passover wine recalls the blood of the lambs daubed on the doors of the Israelites so that the avenging angel would pass over them so they could flee slavery in Egypt.

 

Wine is poured out in the Eucharist. And tonight, after two years of deprivation the chalice is restored to everyone who wishes to receive from it. Not receiving the Precious Blood does not halve your intake of Grace. The Church teaches that receiving in One Kind is sufficient, but drinking of the outpoured wine, now Christ’s blood, gives the one receiving a deeper sense of participation in the bloodless sacrifice of the Eucharist.

 

The outpouring of blood is integral to sacrifice. That was at the heart of the sacrificial system of the Temple in Jerusalem alluded to in our first reading from Exodus.

 

Our culture speaks a great deal of ‘an outpouring of emotion’ or ‘of sympathy’. Those metaphors are not the same as the outpouring of water and blood is Christ’s sacrifice: blood and water is material, substantial, real.

 

The lamb is the sacrificial creature par excellence. It was John the Baptist, our patron saint, who points to Jesus as the Lamb of God. Jesus fulfils John the Baptist’s prophecy that he, Jesus, would be the Lamb of God and the definitive sacrifice. St Paul later recognises this stating, ‘Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed’ (1 Corinthians 5.7).

 

This is why at the breaking of the bread of the Eucharist we sing the text ‘Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis’: ‘Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world, have mercy upon us’.

 

As Christ’s broken body hung upon the cross - the definitive sacrifice of reconciliation to complete all sacrifice - a Roman soldier, in what was intended to be an act of mercy, pierced his side with a lance and from it flowed water and blood, the seed of Baptism and Eucharist.

 

The Passion is the greatest outpouring of sacrificial love from Christ, who is both priest and victim.

 

This sacrifice is made sacramentally present at every Eucharist —not for the sake of God, who has no need of it, but for our sake. In the Eucharist, we participate in the act by which divinity and humanity are reconciled, and we eat the sacrificed body and drink the poured-out blood of the Lamb of God.

 

Mothering Sunday & Our Lady of Sorrows

 4th Sunday of Lent - Mothering Sunday. Readings: Exodus 2.1-10; Psalm 127; 2 Corinthians 1.3-7; John 19.25b-27

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Today, the fourth Sunday of Lent, has three additional titles!

 

The second is Laetare Sunday, which takes its name from the Latin introit, the opening text, of the Mass of today: ‘Laetare, Ieruslem’ It means ‘be joyful, Jerusalem, and all who love her!’ That infuses some joy into the Lenten fast, and is why today rose coloured vestments are worn.

 

This theme of taking the edge off Lent – strong purple giving way for a day to gentler rose  – gives us the third title: ‘Refreshment Sunday’. The forty days of Lent are a long slog, and Refreshment Sunday helps us to ease off the Lenten rigours ready for the remaining days of Lent and the coming Holy Week.

 

Finally, the fourth Sunday of Lent is also known as ‘Mothering Sunday’. Very happily it usually falls around the time of the feast of the Annunciation of the Lord, the day recalling the Archangel Gabriel coming to Mary to announce that she would be the Mother of the Lord. We celebrated that day last Friday, 25^th March.

 

Mothering Sunday has become a very ambiguous day. The original Mothering Sunday concept - about Mother Church, Mary, the Mother of the Lord and the maternal nurture of the Faith - has changed, out of all recognition, at the hands of the greetings card, confectionary and florist industries amongst others.

 

Mothering Sunday has mutated into ‘Mother’s Day’ and, in the process, has put huge pressures on women, both those who are mothers – labouring under the ‘Best Mum in the World’ title - those women who might yearn for a child and not have one, those women whose child has died. Mother’s Day reveals that rawness and its sensitivity.

 

That said, the tradition of Mothering Sunday has always taken the pains and trials of motherhood seriously, not glossing over them.

 

Meditation on the place of Mary in the life of the Church cannot help but lead us there. As the hymn puts it:

 

Sing we, too of Mary’s sorrows,

Of the sword that pierced her through,

When beneath the cross of Jesus

She his weight of suffering knew,

Looked upon her Son and saviour

Reigning high on Calvary’s tree,

Saw the price of man’s redemption

Paid to set the sinner free.

 

On 15^th September each year is the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. The feast flourished in the Middle Ages, a time of high infant mortality, plague, internecine war and unremitting misery. There is a huge contemporary resonance.

 

The feast touches on the pain of motherhood, it evokes texts such as from the prophet Jeremiah:

 

A voice is heard in Ramah,

lamentation and bitter weeping.

Rachel is weeping for her children;

she refuses to be comforted for her children

for they are no more. (Jeremiah 31.15)

 

That text is used on the feast of the Holy Innocents, when Herod killed the children under two years old, and it is a text that echoes through the ages, not least when we consider Ukraine today.

 

We see the mothers and grandmothers of Ukraine seeking refuge for their children; women bearing the pain of war, sharing the pain of war with husbands, brothers and sons. Consider too the pain of the mother who child has died in knife crime, gang violence or drugs: that is all too local. ‘Best mum in the world’ seems a cheap slogan in the face of those realities. Our Lady of Sorrows helps us face the pain and know that we all, men, women and children, receive the maternal love of the Mother of the Lord and Mother of his Body, the Church.

 

On Friday, Lady Day, Pope Francis consecrated Russia and Ukraine to the immaculate heart of Mary. This language may be unfamiliar to many Anglicans, but it is of deep value.

 

The Blessed Mother’s heart was indeed pierced with pain at the Crucifixion of her Son, as Simeon had prophesied. The hymn composed for Our Lady of Sorrows, Stabat Mater, puts it like this:

 

At the Cross her station keeping,

Stood the mournful Mother weeping,

Close to Jesus to the last:

 

Through her heart, his sorrow sharing,

All his bitter anguish bearing,

now at length the sword has pass'd.

 

By consecrating Russia and Ukraine to the heart of Mary, Pope Francis is saying that, as Jesus is in the midst of the suffering of Ukraine, so too his Mother is close at hand, with the compassion and love of a mother who has known the sight of pain.

 

Russia and Ukraine are bound by deep Christian traditions, especially veneration of the Mother of God. One of those threads is the icon of Our Lady of Vladimir, a copy of which we have in church.

 

The original icon was painted (technically icons are ‘written’ for they are images [in Greek ikon] of the Word of God) in Constantinople, before being taken to Kyiv, from where it was given to the Assumption Cathedral in the city of Vladimir. It is a dreadful parody of the point of the icon that the one waging war against Kyiv and Ukraine today is himself named after that holy icon: Vladimir.

 

The Son of God suffers today for those people, and his Mother, as she always does, stands close by gazing with eyes of compassion and love.

After the Eucharist today, go and pause before the icon: see the intimacy of Mary and Jesus, cheek to cheek; see her heavy, knowing eyes gazing at you as she presents the Saviour, who is nestled in her arms, to you and all the world. Light a candle for the mothers, grandmothers and all the people of Russia and Ukraine. And pray.

 

Eternal Father, in the maternal heart of the Virgin Mary you give us an image of perfect compassion with your Son’s saving sacrifice; grant us a heart like hers, and let the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, at her intercession, be blessed in justice with your peace, which is not of this world. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.

'We are the Body of Christ' A Meditation before the Blessed Sacrament

 

‘We are the body of Christ’

 

Jesus, we honour your body, incarnate, risen and glorified, your Body present with us now in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar.

 

By baptism and grace, we, your Church, are your Body on earth, bound together, as limbs and members, by the one Spirit who you breathed upon your disciples in the Upper Room.

 

That same Holy Spirit overshadowed your mother, Mary, who said ‘let it be to me according to your word’ (Luke 1.38b).

 

You took flesh in the body of Mary. As St Augustine reminds us, your blessed Mother  ‘conceived [you] in her heart before she conceived [you] in her womb’.

 

Jesus, may you be conceived in our minds, and fill our bodies with your life.

 

From Mary’s body you were born in time and place, in Bethlehem, a town whose name means ‘House of Bread’.

 

In this church, this House of Bread, the Bread of Your Presence, we feed on your Body to become your body.

 

In your Incarnation, becoming human, you hallow matter and our bodies: our bodies matter to you.

 

We pray this night for the wounded, hungry, thirsty and abused bodies of men, women and children in Ukraine, Afghanistan, of Tigray and Ethiopia and in this country and community.

 

Jesus, in your body we find healing of our bodies, our minds, our spirits. Be to us the food for our journey.

 

May all your people find their souls satisfied and may we be led to the banquet of heaven.

 

Jesus, by your grace we are your body; help us each to grow into the full stature of your love.

 

Silence

 

Blessed be God.

Blessed be his holy name.

Blessed be Jesus Christ, true God and true man.

Blessed be the name of Jesus.

Blessed be his most Sacred Heart.

Blessed be his most Precious Blood.

Blessed be Jesus in the most holy Sacrament of the altar.

Blessed be the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete.

Blessed be the great Mother of God, Mary most Holy.

Blessed be her holy and immaculate Conception.

Blessed be her glorious assumption.

Blessed be the name of Mary, Virgin and Mother.

Blessed be St Joseph, her spouse most chaste.

Blessed be God in his angels and in his saints.

 

The Lord is my light and salvation: A Sermon

Preached a sermon at the Sung Eucharist at Croydon Minster on the Second Sunday of Lent: Genesis 15.1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27; Philippians 3.17-4.1; Luke 13.31-end.

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This morning, as at every Eucharist, a psalm has been recited.

 

This morning it has been sung. This is right and proper because psalms, when first composed some two and a half to three thousand years ago, were written to be sung. The word psalm means ‘song’.

 

The origins of the psalms are for use in the worship of the Temple in Jerusalem, and in the liturgical life of Israel. By tradition the author of the psalms is King David.

 

The psalms are an integral element in the Liturgy of the Word, that part of the Liturgy which contains the readings from the Old and New Testaments and the Gospels . After all, Jesus himself says, ‘everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled’ (Luke 24.44).

 

Psalms are from the Old Testament and have always been a feature of Christian worship from the earliest days, because they represent the fulfilment of God’s promises in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.

 

It’s also the case that of all the books of Old Testament that Jesus quotes, the psalms are quoted most frequently. At the end of the Last Supper, Jesus and his disciples sang a hymn, which we could assume to be a psalm, and headed to the Mount of Olives where Jesus would go to Gethsemane to pray. Jesus’ dying words on the Cross – ‘my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ – are from the Book of Psalms; they’re the opening words of Psalm 22.

 

The psalms are the backbone of the Divine Office, what we know as Matins and Evensong, the Church’s prayer in the morning and evening.

 

Psalms lead us through times of exultation and praise: ‘O praise God in his holiness, praise him in the firmament of his power!’ (Psalm 150)

 

they go with us to the very depths of human experience; ‘O LORD God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee : O let my prayer enter into thy presence, incline thine ear unto my calling. For my soul is full of trouble : and my life draweth nigh unto hell’. (Psalm 88.1,2)

 

they express deep questioning; ‘Nevertheless, my feet were almost gone : my treadings had well-nigh slipt. And why? I was grieved at the wicked : I do also see the ungodly in such prosperity’. (Psalm 74.2,3)

 

and they articulate the most profound words of trust and assurance. ‘The Lord is my shepherd, therefore can I lack nothing’ (Psalm 23.1); ‘I will sing forever of the steadfast love of the LORD forever (Psalm 89.1)

 

We don’t need always to be searching for words of our own composing; what we can do is turn to the book of psalms for their words are given to us.

 

Today’s psalm is a psalm that I first became familiar with through the most simple of chants from the community of brothers at Taizé, in France: ‘The Lord is my light, my light and salvation, in him I trust, in him I trust.’

 

At times of danger, or fear or when I am uncertain, they have been words on my lips. Psalm 27 became a song to feed my heart.

 

The custom in Jesus’ day was to quote the first verse of a psalm which was an indicator of the whole psalm. So Psalm 22, ‘my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ triggers to the hearer a psalm that is not just saying that God has forsaken the speaker, but actually becomes a song of praise of what God has done in raising up the afflicted from rock bottom.

 

Likewise, ‘The Lord is my light and my salvation whom then shall I fear?’ opens up a wider story.

 

The Ukrainian Catholic Church have quoted this psalm many times over the last two weeks. It is not a casual or unthinking expression of hope in God when everything is going wrong, but a deep expression of trust in God:

 

Though a host encamp against me,

my heart shall not be afraid,

and though there rise up war against me,

yet will I put my trust in him. (verse 3)

 

The psalm concludes with words that could almost be written by a Ukrainian today:

 

Deliver me not into the will of my adversaries, 

for false witnesses have risen up against me,

and those who breathe out violence.

I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord

in the land of the living.

Wait for the Lord;

be strong and he shall comfort your heart;

wait patiently for the Lord. (verses 15-17)

 

The words of the psalm are directly from someone in a situation of being attacked, when people are out to kill him. Indeed that echoes David’s own situation when he was being pursued by King Saul. The words ring true for Ukrainians today and attacked people throughout the ages. They are true as well for Jesus as his enemies encircled him, as the Pharisees told him, ‘Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.’ (Luke 13.31).

 

Jesus walks into the darkness of his impending death, not shying from the Cross, as threat encircled him. In so doing he walks with you and me into the darkness we face, such that we are not alone and can still sing, ‘The LORD is my light, my light and salvation, in him I trust, in him I trust’.

 

The psalmist seeks to worship God in God’s holy temple and seeks the face of the LORD. Jesus inhabits and fulfils this psalm.

 

Jesus is the New Temple, the place of sacrifice and reconciliation. This is accomplished on the cross, and the bitter irony is that this takes place in Jerusalem. Jerusalem means ‘city of peace’; yet is a parody of peace. The temple of Jerusalem is supposed to be the place of encounter with the Living God, yet the Living God, made flesh and given a face in Jesus Christ, is rejected and killed.

 

The face of the LORD is not in vengeance and destruction, but seen in the face of the Crucified and Risen Lord.

 

Seeking the face of Jesus enables us to see in the darkness, and leads us deep into the heart of God, the heart and wellspring of life and light. Celebrating the sacraments and receiving their grace, personal prayer and devotion, feeding the hungry, giving water to the thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting for the sick and imprisoned are the ways we seek to see the Lord’s face.

 

The psalm revels in seeking ‘to behold the fair beauty of the Lord and to seek his will in his temple’ (Psalm 27.5) and to ‘offer in his dwelling an oblation with great gladness’ (27.9). Offering that oblation is what we do now in the Eucharist.

 

As we seek Christ’s face in the temple and in his world so we will know the power of the final words of the gospel reading today, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord’ (Luke 13.35b), words we know as the Benedictus and, believe it or not, they are words from a Psalm too (118.26).  

 

We come now in the name of the Lord, seeking blessing and entrusting ourselves to the Lord, our light and salvation.

I am the Bread of Life: A meditation before the Blessed Sacrament

 

‘I am the Bread of Life’

 

Jesus, in the gospel of St John you tell us that you are the bread of life, and that whoever comes to you will not hunger, and who believes in you shall never thirst. (John 6.35)

 

Lord, we come to you hungry to follow in your way, to know your truth and to receive your life. You alone can satisfy; our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.

The Feeding of the Five Thousand - Croydon Minster
'I am the bread of life...'

 

‘I am the Bread of Life’. You spoke those words to the crowd of Five Thousand, for whom you multiplied the gift of the child, five loaves and two fish.

 

Take the meagre offerings of our prayer and devotion, and multiply them. May the grain of our lives yield thirtyfold, sixtyfold and a hundredfold.

 

May we cast our ‘bread upon the waters’ (Ecclesiastes 11.1) and be people who know the lavish generosity of your life and love, receive it and share it with others.

 

Your generous love is given when you are broken. Your body broken on the cross, your lifeblood poured out for the life of the world. We see you broken in the sacrament of the altar to bring completion to our lives, feed us with your presence and lead us to the Father.

 

Lord Jesus Christ, Bread of Life, feed us, your people, in our earthly pilgrimage.

 

You are the Bread of Life, yet not everyone feeds on you, may all who seek to be fed in their body and spirit find their satisfaction in you.

 

Bread of Life, we pray tonight for all who hunger for bread.

 

We pray this night for the people who are beginning to go hungry in Ukraine, the starving of Afghanistan, of Tigray and Ethiopia and all in food poverty in this country.

 

Jesus, in your body we find healing of our bodies, our minds, our spirits. Bread of Life, be to us the food for our journey.

 

May all your people find their souls satisfied and may we be led to the banquet of heaven.

 

Silence

 

Blessed be God.

Blessed be his holy name.

Blessed be Jesus Christ, true God and true man.

Blessed be the name of Jesus.

Blessed be his most Sacred Heart.

Blessed be his most Precious Blood.

Blessed be Jesus in the most holy Sacrament of the altar.

Blessed be the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete.

Blessed be the great Mother of God, Mary most Holy.

Blessed be her holy and immaculate Conception.

Blessed be her glorious assumption.

Blessed be the name of Mary, Virgin and Mother.

Blessed be St Joseph, her spouse most chaste.

Blessed be God in his angels and in his saints.