Rediscovering the Presence of Christ

BBC Radio 4. It’s ten past eight. ‘Rediscovering the presence of Christ in the midst of busy and complex lives’ is the subject of Sunday Worship this morning, which is led by the Rev Richard Carter, Associate Vicar for Mission at St Martin-in-the-Fields.

MUSIC: Be still for the presence of the Lord (CD: More than Hymns, Wells Cathedral Choir, Lammas)

Richard Carter:
Good morning. It often seems for many of us that our lives are busier than ever before and each day is a constant race against time to fulfil all that’s expected of us so as not to let ourselves or others down. Over the summer many of us may have experienced just for a few days the possibilities of a different kind of life during a holiday. We’ve enjoyed time and space for rest and relaxation and felt the freedom and spontaneity of that- when the mobile could be switched off for a while and we’re not pursued by e-mails. But perhaps in a few hours’ time that dreaded Monday morning feeling will return and you’re wondering how you can keep that spaciousness and freedom alive

One of our greatest poverties is the lack of time many of us have. It’s become more and more difficult to switch off. St Augustine wrote Lord you have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until we rest in you. But what does that mean in the rush and stress of our modern world?

MUSIC: Nunc dimittis – Taize (Recorded for Sunday Worship by St Martin’s Voices

Reading:
We plan the holiday in advance
But the holy day is today
The monks knew the ancient wisdom of giving each part of the day to God
So that they tasted the height, breadth, and depth of God’s presence:
The coming of the light, the hopes and struggles of the day,
the intensity of noon,
the shadows of evening bringing the toil to an end,
food and refreshment, the silence and darkness of the night.
But often we no longer notice the movements of the Sun
We do not see the sky just the screen
We’ve used the remote and become remote
We who often have no time for God
Have become time’s prisoners
We’ve pulled the curtains on the sun and moon and have closed the windows so that we no longer smell the rain or breathe the air of summer turning to autumn.
We’ve been given treasure beyond price, and yet we scarcely notice it.

Richard Carter:
Prayer is here and now.
Wherever we are today
The person you are speaking with
The room you are sitting in
The street you are walking along
The door you are opening now

Bible reading:
After Jesus had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came he was there alone.

Richard Carter:
Our first discipline is Silence
We are “called home,” as St Augustine put it, “from the noise that is around us to the joys that are silent. Why do we rush about…looking for God who is here at home with us, if all we want is to be with him?” Silent contemplative space is the ground in which everything else is nurtured and grows. And to discover it is like a seed that has died discovering the soil.

MUSIC: Lux aurumque – Eric Whitacre (CD: Light and Gold, Eric Whitacre Singers)

Reading: With God

I find an ordinary place:
Wet grass
Grey sky
A path
A row of park benches
Gentle rain falling Would ‘drizzle’ as a single word have more impact?
And I wait for God to open my heart and nourish me
as he nourishes all creation
I look at the trees, their shape, their grandeur
The way they slowly follow the rhythm of the year
Their rooted huge trunks unmoving.
They will be here long after I am gone
And they speak:
“Give back time to the earth
Give back space to God
Give back your attention to the miracle and mystery of life”.

Reading:
We are always moving
So we don’t see
Always talking
So we don’t hear
Or we hear in snatches, or bites,
You actually have to stop to see,
To be still to notice.
We have to be still enough to let the world catch up with us,
And meet us in the still place.
Our lives can be so fast we cannot read the signs,
Only a flash of colour and blur of people and place.
No time to notice
Or see the signs of God

Richard Carter:
Lord God, creator of all help us to become present to the deeper rhythms of our lives
Help us to find you in all the seasons of our lives
Our autumn dying
Our winter waiting
Our spring awakening
Our summer warmth and flourishing
Open our lives to your presence at the centre of all things

Our Second Discipline is Service.

When we find the still place in our lives we begin to discover an empathy and compassion for others. We become more attentive to human need. The Gospel calls us to see in the other- the face of Christ. Jesus said that whatever we do for the least of our brothers and sisters we do it for him. It could be as simple as visiting an elderly mother or relative, it could be a ministry of welcome, or prison visting, or child care. It could be being with those facing poverty, mental health difficulties, destitution or with migrants and refugees.

MUSIC: Nada te turbe - Taize (Recorded for Sunday Worship by St Martin’s Voices)

Reading:
To be with someone means to be with them as they are, not as you would like them to be.
When you meet people face to face
And see their humanity it becomes hard not to carry them with you
Holding within you their need and their cry
And longing for their joy.
To be with people means that you know that there’s no fix or easy solution
But there’s a mystery, a humanity, a wound, a frailty, a cross but also a resurrection, and a hope

Richard Carter:
It had begun with her falling in love against the advice of her parents. This act of disobedience, she believed, had had catastrophic consequences, so that now as she looked back it appeared like the cause of years of suffering. It included unimaginable violence against her and her children carried out by her partner, torture, beatings, humiliations, slicings with blades, rape and then, when she escaped, destitution, loneliness, guilt and then further entrapment though by another man unbelievably even worse than the first, as though passed on from one evil to another. And the fear within her that because of her that same suffering she has known will be visited upon the next generation. “It is my destiny to suffer,” she said. “No, no,” I tried to convince her, “it is not” and then summoning up the only words that would come into my head: “God loves you.” I meant it, meant it with all my heart, but I knew it to be an insufficient, almost pathetic response. But After her story I longed to believe it. “God loves you.” But now her pain had become a scream, ripped from her guts – a guttural primordial cry of anguish. I’ve heard that cry before, not infrequently, and there’s no mistaking it, for it comes from the horror of having seen evil face to face. “Is this God’s love? Is this what you call God’s love? How can you say God loves me? Is this life of mine – is this God’s love? Is this God’s love?”

God’s love powerless, immobile, found wanting. God’s love nailed to a cross.
I am defenceless, silenced by her cry. After those words there can be no pretending. All I know is that somehow God’s love is this woman’s courage; her love, her scream, her longing for resurrection, Christ’s cry that it is finished – no more suffering, no more humiliation or pain. “God loves you.” I knew it to be true. Naked truth, without explanation. The only thing worth believing in. We part. But her memory does not part. It haunts me, pursues me and cries: “How can you say God loves me?”

MUSIC: Ubi caritas – Ola Gjeilo (CD: Lux, Voces8, Decca)

Reading:
Why is it that it’s the broken who show me Christ?
Because it’s through the cracks
That the true life flows through
When the shell and the façade are broken open
The kernel is shared
Their light is sometimes hooded, covered, hidden or cocooned in fear or shame.
So you have to wait
You have to be present
You have to be face to face
You have to see the wound to know the sign of resurrection
And to know that beneath the pulled down woollen hat
Is the halo real humanity,
Against all the odds.

MUSIC: Christ has no body but yours - Liam Lawton (CD: Eternal – Liam Lawton)

Richard Carter:
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours

The third of our disciplines is the daily reading of scripture. What a revealing thing it is to read the scriptures prayerfully and discover again and again how they are so often find meaning and our own lives.

Reader:
Lectio Divina means 'divine reading'. It is prayerful reading of sacred texts. It involves taking a sacred text and reading it with the conviction that God is addressing you.

The text is seen as a gift to be received.
The passage of scripture is read slowly.
It is given time and space.
It is allowed to filter into our own life and context.
It is repeated, each reading taking us deeper.

The text questions us and opens possibility.
It is a means of discovering God.
It is a means of discovering our hidden selves.

MUSIC: O Trinity most blessed light – Plainsong (CD: Music for a Cathedral’s Year, Truro Cathedral Choir, Priory)

In the twelfth century, the Carthusian monk, Guigo, described the four movements of lectio as:
- Reading: selecting the sacred text and listening to it speak to you.
- Meditating: a deep entry into the meaning of the text.
- Praying: the reader’s response to God in the light of this reading.
- Contemplating: resting or living in the presence of God.

He uses the image of eating to illustrate these different stages of digesting a text:
- Reading selects the food and puts it into the mouth.
- Meditation chews it and breaks it open.
- Prayer extracts its flavour.
- Contemplation is the sweetness itself which gladdens and refreshes and strengthens your whole life..

Richard Carter:
When we enter into scripture it’s no longer a text from the past it’s our story the Word of God speaking through and into our context, our lives, our hope our pain. We read scripture but the scripture is also reading us.

Bible reading:
Mary turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?’ Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, ‘Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” ’ Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

MUSIC: Variations on ‘Dives and Lazarus’ – Ralph Vaughan Williams (CD: Midnight Adagios – Decca, Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Decca)

Reader:
We come from over 35 different countries. We speak many languages. We have experienced many different cultures. We come from different faiths, and also faithlessness. We each come with our own wounds, carrying the scars of our lives in our bodies and scorched in our memories. We carry our own hopes, our own achievements and insurmountable needs. We are different colours, ages, sexes, genders, sexualities. characters We don’t know all the answers. Some of us have money to generously share, some of us don’t, but all of us have something to give. The greatest poverty is to believe you cannot help another, and it is a real truth that it is those who believe they have least who in fact often seem to have the grace to give the most. Who are we? The truth is that we are all the body of Christ.

Richard Carter:
I met with a group of people at the Connection at St Martin-in-the-Field’s where I serve as a priest. The Connection provides support for homeless and vulnerable people in London. We read together the resurrection account slowly. Mary outside the tomb believing the Risen Christ to be the gardener. I asked them to imagine being a disciple coming early in the morning to the tomb of Jesus after they’d just witnessed the agony of his death. And there coming towards them out of the light is Jesus Christ himself. “What would you ask him?” I questioned them, “and what will he reply?” I was not sure if this contemplation would work. Perhaps it would seem like make-believe, a fantasy far removed from the tough reality of their lives, many facing destitution where nothing was changed by magic. But quite the contrary.

He is quiet in the group. So quiet in fact that I wondered if he registered my question or even knew what I was asking him to imagine. But he said this:

Reader:
“Jesus held out his hands to me and I could see they were still bleeding. They were wounded hands.”

Richard Carter:
“What did you ask him?” I asked

Reader:
“I asked him if I could bandage his hands. I wanted to bind up his hands to stop the blood.”

Richard Carter:
“What did Jesus reply?”

Reader:
He thanked me but said he needed to hold up his hands like this in order to bless me. Bless me like this with open wounded hands. He said that the blood was a sign of his love for me. He was showing me now. With these wounded hands he was blessing me. He was saying to me this is how much I love you”

Richard Carter:
Our fourth discipline is Sacrament.

We are called to the Eucharist, this act of thanksgiving to be in Communion with one another and with God. It is the sign of Christ’s saving love for us.
How can we make this Communion central to our lives? How can we ourselves become outward visible signs of Christ’s reconciling grace? How can we come to this sacrament and make it live again? How can we become the bearers of Christ?

Bible reading:
While they were eating, Jesus took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to the disciples, and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body.’ Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you, I will never again drink of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.’

MUSIC: Agnus Dei from The Armed Man – A Mass for Peace – Karl Jenkins (CD: Karl Jenkins Motets, Polyphony, Decca)

Poem: Communion

Everything is Eucharist
The light breaking through our East Window
The altar laid out in preparation
Those who gather- Eucharist

The together, the alone
The confident and the lost
The crumpled, the lonely, the different, the difficult, the needy
Those who carry heavy burdens
Those whose faces are filled with light and those whose eyes speak their pain.

The generous givers and the consumers of God’s inexhaustible grace
Those whose needs spill out and those whose grief or pain is locked within.

A gathering
Christ remembered. Christ here now. Christ shared
An altar to which we have been called to come
Bread
Wine
Body
Blood
Love offered for you and for the world
Come to this place where all our stories meet

Come again and again
This is God’s Unconditional love for you
This is the Word made flesh in you now and for eternity
This is Sacrament.

MUSIC: The Lord’s Prayer (from ‘African Sanctus’) – David Fanshawe (CD: David Fanshawe African Sanctus, Bournemouth Symphony Chorus, Classics)

Lord God, creator of all help us to seek you in silence-
to become present to the deeper rhythms of our lives.
Help us to make each day a Holy Day
and to be attentive to your presence in all things.
Help us to discover again your word
That our lives may become your Gospel
Help us to make each day a Eucharist in which we rediscover and share your love

We pray for the people we will meet today
The lives they carry
The stories in their faces
The uniqueness of each person

We pray for the struggles, conflict and difficulties we know others and our world is facing, like a cry of longing in our own hearts,
We pray for our nation in its rich and wonderful diversity
Help us to walk softly, attentively, help us to walk with you.

MUSIC: The Falls from ‘The Mission’ – Ennio Morricone (CD: Yo-Yo Ma plays Ennio Morricone, Sony Classical)

Richard Carter:
Today we have heard reflections about four simple disciplines, silence, service scripture, sacrament. These are ancient disciplines that nourish and deepen our faith. How can we appropriate them to our own lives in ways that are authentic and renewing, so we find Christ’s life for ourselves and others? I wonder how each day we can create time to be with God in silence, in the service of others, in the reading of scripture and become the bearers of his love

May the Lord bless you and keep you.
May the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you.
May the Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you, and give you peace.
My brothers, my sisters, may the Lord bless you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Now and forever. Amen.