Patronal Festival and Farewell service

 Patronal Festival and final service – July 7 2024

“I thank my God every time I remember you”, writes one of our two patron saints, St Paul to the church in Phillipi. When I pondered which Bible readings to choose for my final service at Seal, there was never any doubt that this would be one of them. 

I don’t know whether I intended to stay as long as I have done here in Seal, but eighteen years later, I’m still here. Now and then, a Bishop or Archdeacon has asked me whether I might feel like moving but my answer has always been “No, why would I, when Seal is the best parish in the universe?” 

That’s not to say it’s all been easy, of course. No community can exist without disagreements - not if it is a real community, where people are allowed to be real people, in all their baffling diversity. But if we stick with one another through the ups and downs, we learn to see God in each other, and once you have seen that, happily, it is something that you can never quite unsee, even if you wanted to. 

I have often described ministry as a “Great God Hunt”, not in the sense that God is hiding from us, making himself hard to find, but that we are invited each day to open our eyes to his presence around us, to wonder where we will stumble across him that day. Usually, if I spot that “good work” of God in people’s lives as Paul puts it, it’s in the things I haven’t planned or worked at. Instead, it will be in the comment of a child in school collective worship, or a story, an idea, a joy or a sorrow someone tentatively shares with me, a moment of connection, a sense that something is happening which really matters. There have been countless moments like this, countless times when I have seen the “good work” of God in you. “I thank my God every time I remember you”, 

But this passage isn’t just about looking back to the past. It is also very much about the future. Paul prays for this little congregation in Phillipi, “that their love may overflow more and more.”  He doesn’t pray that nothing bad will ever happen to them – after all, he’s in prison when he writes these words. Nor does he pray that they will be successful in worldly terms, with thousands flocking to join them. No, he prays that their love “may overflow more and more” so that there will one day be a “harvest of righteousness” because of them, things that have been put right in the world, ways in which their love has made a difference. 

Before I was ordained, my good friend Carol, who was a Reader in the church she and I attended, told me about a conversation she had had with another Reader, called Dot. Dot wasn’t a great academic theologian or a particularly eloquent preacher and yet, somehow, people who came into her orbit seemed to be wonderfully changed by the experience. One day Carol asked her what her secret was. Dot paused and thought, as Carol waited for some erudite pearl of wisdom, till Dot said “you’ve just got to love them…” Many of you will have heard me tell that story before, and I don’t apologise for that, because it is one that I’ve carried with me through the years, and returned to again and again, especially if I was feeling tempted by the latest fad or fashion swilling around in the church, looking for some magic wand to wave over the difficulties of church life – not enough people, not enough money, arguments and frustrations.  “You’ve just got to love them…”, said Dot, and she was right, though I think I’d want to add that you’ve got to let them love you too, and we have both felt mightily loved here.

In church life, some ideas succeed, while some sink without trace. The numbers in church go up and down for reasons that aren’t always obvious. Clergy have to record those numbers in a register after every service, but I’ve learned to be sceptical about those statistics, because as ever with statistics, we only count the things we can count, and we then try to convince ourselves that they are the things which actually count. The problem is that there’s no column in the service register for the most important question of all, which is “did people go away at the end knowing they were loved?”, reminded, or perhaps discovering for the first time, that, just as they are, they are precious to God. That’s what really counts, if only we could count it, because if they did, they will have found a love which can’t but overflow to others, and change the world for the better.

So we look back with gratitude, and we look forward with hope.

But what about the present? What can we say about this moment, now? 

A few weeks ago, as I was decluttering in advance of our move, I came across three ring binders, which turned out to contain the scripts of all the sermons I’d preached in the early years of my ministry, before I had a computer to store them on, including my very first sermon after my ordination as a Deacon in 1993. I was evidently preaching from Romans Chapter 12, “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” and  I told the congregation about the point in the ordination  service where those of us being ordained had literally “presented our bodies”. One by one, as our names were read out, each of us took a big step forward towards the Bishop– we were told to make it obvious, a sign of that step forward into a new ministry and a new life.  Retirement may sound like a step backwards, but in reality, like every other part of our journey of life, we have to go forwards to embrace it, and that’s what I hope to do, as deliberately as I did at my ordination, continuing that “great God hunt”, looking for God at work in this new stage of life.  

But this moment is also a step forward for you.  The period between one vicar and the next can be a tricky and unsettling one to navigate. It is tempting to retreat, to hunker down and just wait, but I hope you won’t do that. I hope instead that you will hear the invitation in this time to step forward, to discover new gifts, grow closer together, support and encourage each other. 

And if that sometimes feels a bit scary, as it probably will, for you and for us too,  perhaps we can take comfort from today’s Gospel story, which features our other Patron Saint, Peter. He steps forward, right out of the boat he is sailing in on this stormy sea, and after a few steps, unsurprisingly, he starts to sink. He realises he is way out of his depth, and that people, in any case, can’t walk on water. But in that moment, he cries out “Lord save me”, and the Lord does save him. Jesus didn’t ever rebuke him for getting out of the boat and trying. In fact, it’s Jesus who calls him to do so, not because walking on water is a great party trick if you can manage it, but so that Peter can discover that whenever life overwhelms him, Jesus will be right there.   

I thank my God every time I remember you… and I pray that your love may continue to overflow, as it has done to us over these last 18 years. And I pray that we will all  have the courage to step forward, out of the boat, even if it means sinking a bit from time to time, so that we can learn to stretch out our hands and find that we are held securely by the one who will never let us go. 

Amen

Trinity 5 2024

 Trinity 5 2024

I expect we’ve all been aware in the news over the last week or so of the  search for Jay Slater, the 19 year old who went missing in Tenerife, especially coming hard on the heels of the death of Dr Michael Mosley in similar circumstances. It’s hard not to fear the worst as the days pass.  We’ve seen too, the desperate pleas of his family, in particular his mother, for more help, more action, more feet on the ground to look for him.  The local search and rescue teams probably are doing all they can, but I am sure we can understand and sympathise with the feeling that the family want to throw all they have at this in order to find Jay. Who among us would feel any differently about someone we love?

We meet a parent with that kind of desperation in our Gospel reading today. Jairus, one of the leaders of the local synagogue, comes to Jesus to ask him to help his twelve-year-old daughter who is “at the point of death”.  Jairus is a respected, significant man in his local community, but he thinks nothing of throwing himself at the feet of this carpenter from Nazareth, begging “repeatedly” we are told. But he didn’t need to beg, because Jesus very willingly responds and sets off with him to his house. I am sure Jairus feels a huge surge of relief.

But as they hurry towards his house, just as Jairus thinks a chink of daylight is dawning on the darkest day of his life, Jesus stops, and looks around him, saying that someone has touched him. What’s he on about? They’re in a crowd. Of course someone has touched him. But Jesus won’t be hurried. He waits until a woman steps forward reluctantly, and admits it was her. He listens as she tells him her story - “the whole truth” – and my experience is that can take some time – before he sends her on her way, healed and blessed and restored to her community, which would have considered her unclean because of her illness. 

Can you imagine what Jairus might be thinking and feeling as all this plays out? After all, this woman’s condition was hardly urgent. She’d been ill for twelve years, coincidentally – or perhaps not - the whole of his daughter’s lifetime. Couldn’t she have waited another few hours, another day? For his daughter, every second counts.  

And sure enough, when they reach Jairus home, they find that those seconds have counted, and that she is already dead. The mourners have turned up, and all the rigmarole leading up to a burial, the weeping and wailing, is well underway. If only Jesus hadn’t stopped to heal that other woman, he might have saved her. After all, Jairus has seen that he has the power to heal. He just hasn’t been in time to heal his daughter, because he was healing someone else. 

And who was that other woman anyway? Jairus was a leading figure in his community, and his daughter had all her life before her. The anonymous woman was a nobody, even in her own eyes – she didn’t want to be noticed at all. She’d been marginalised by her condition, and bankrupted by her attempts to find healing. 

But, Jesus seems calm, unhurried, as he takes control of this chaotic, grief-stricken crowd, sending them away firmly, and taking just a small group of the family into the girl’s house. “She is not dead but sleeping” he says.

Biblical commentators argue about whether this was literally true or not. It could have been that she was just so deeply unconscious that she had been taken for dead; we don’t know. But either way, Jesus brings her back to life, back to health, back to her family. All had seemed to be lost to Jairus, as the minutes had ticked away while Jesus’ attention was elsewhere, wasted on this other women, but Jesus knew what he was doing. He knew there was time enough for both of these suffering individuals, and most of all, he knew that in God’s eyes, each was as important as the other, neither deserved attention more, or less, than the other. 

Suffering is a great and incomprehensible mystery. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do some recover, and some not, even with the same treatment?  When we are ill, or a loved one is, we often say that “it isn’t fair – what have I done to deserve this?” We might appeal to science – “I’ve always eaten my five a day, walked my 10000 steps”. Or we might appeal to faith “I’ve always been a good person and helped others”, but underneath it there is an assumption that health or illness are rewards or punishments doled out in the game of life to those who have passed some test or other and are judged more, or less, worthy. 

Whatever else these stories tell us, they knock that idea firmly on the head. In the eyes of their society, Jairus’ daughter is worth more than the woman with the haemorrhage – and if we had to ration their healthcare, I wonder what choice we would make. She is certainly, and understandably worth more to her father. But the woman whose healing delays Jesus is also someone’s daughter, as Jesus points out. Jesus calls her daughter – the daughter of God – just as beloved to God as the child of this wealthy and influential leader. 

There is a deep human tendency to look at life as a competition, one we are desperate to win, but we don’t have to compete for God’s love, these stories tell us. Jairus’ desperate demonstration – throwing himself at Jesus’ feet and begging repeatedly – were no more or less persuasive than the quiet act of a woman who just reached out her hand in a crowd to touch Jesus cloak, hoping never to be noticed. Jesus had the time to give them the time they needed. 

The last verse of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, which we heard earlier, underlines this. He has asked the church in Corinth to help their fellow Christians in Jerusalem, where there is a famine. They have said they would, but then just haven’t got around to making good on their promises. Paul thinks he knows why, and he’s probably right. They are thinking “if we give our money away, what if we need it ourselves?” But as they dither and procrastinate, people in Jerusalem are dying. 

Paul reminds them of the story of the Manna in the Wilderness, God’s provision of daily food to those who were trekking across the desert with Moses on their way out of slavery in Egypt. Every day there was enough for everyone to gather what they needed, but if anyone tried to gather more than that, they found their hoard would be full of worms the following morning.  Gradually they learned that it wasn’t a competition; “the one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little.”

We live in an unequal world. That is not God’s plan, and all the studies show that inequality damages us all in the end. We are called by the Gospel to change that, and the change starts I think, by taking on board that health, wealth and status are not signs of people’s worth to God.

The good news of these stories is that God doesn’t love you more than me, or me more than you. He doesn’t love the young more than the old, or the rich more than the poor, or even the good more than the bad. He doesn’t need to make these calculations. He doesn’t need to ration his love, or his time and attention, because they are inexhaustible, there for all of us.

Amen