It is our great happiness this week to invite the Bishop of Blackburn to come and Confirm our candidates in the faith of the Church. Confirmation is a sacrament conferred less frequently than Baptism. Indeed it may be seen that Baptism is the most ‘popular’ sacrament in terms of numbers, followed by Holy Communion, and then numbers tend to dip rather towards Confirmation and even further to Marriage and to an all time low for Ordination, picking up again for the Last Rites – thus it is that people so often call on the church at the beginning and end of life on earth and somewhat conveniently forget about it in the middle, only returning occasionally to complain when something changes or when ‘their’ church is closed – may it never be so for us! Confirmation is often a time in our life when we make the full and conscious decision to follow Christ, and indeed to realise that He is with us. As Christ died on the cross, he called out ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me’ – and that has been seen in some quarters as an acknowledgement of His presumed abandonment by the Father – but if so, then why is He still talking to him? Even an anguished cry to Heaven is an acceptance of the will and power of God, and today we make not an anguished cry, but a joyful, full hearted one – My God, my God, I know that you will never forsake me’ and with that confession of faith, the Bishop then confers the sacrament of the Holy Spirit in the heart of the disciples who stand before us today. May they never leave the Church, and may the Church flourish because they are with us. Cyprian of Carthage is one of the Church Fathers, and he said this about Confirmation;“It is necessary for him that has been baptised also to be anointed, so that by his having received chrism, that is, the anointing, he can be the anointed of God and have in him the grace of Christ” (Letters 7:2 [A.D. 253]).“Some say in regard to those who were baptised in Samaria that when the apostles Peter and John came there only hands were imposed on them so that they might receive the Holy Spirit, and that they were not re-baptised. But we see, dearest brother, that this situation in no way pertains to the present case. Those in Samaria who had believed had believed in the true faith, and it was by the deacon Philip, whom those same apostles had sent there, that they had been baptised inside—in the Church. . . . Since, then, they had already received a legitimate and ecclesiastical baptism, it was not necessary to baptise them again. Rather, that only which was lacking was done by Peter and John. The prayer having been made over them and hands having been imposed upon them, the Holy Spirit was invoked and was poured out upon them. This is even now the practice among us, so that those who are baptised in the Church then are brought to the prelates of the Church; through our prayer and the imposition of hands, they receive the Holy Spirit and are perfected with the seal of the Lord” (ibid., 73[72]:9).So we see here that the ancient practice is continued in our church today. We also have candidates to present next year, on our centenary, so we give thanks to God that, today, He adds to our number and that His call has bene audible over the noise and clamour of this world. May God bless our candidates and each one of us as we continue in our Christian Pilgrimage of faith, knowing that we are following Christ and that he walks with us.
Much of our life, in one way or another, revolves around food. Some of our happiest memories gather around tables, Sunday dinners, birthday cakes, fish and chips by the sea, the smell of fresh bread, the comfort of a meal lovingly prepared. Even our entertainment reflects this fascination, like many people, I rather enjoy programmes such as The Great British Bake Off. There is something joyful and reassuring about watching flour, butter, sugar, and skill become something beautiful and shared. I still smile when I remember the old song from Oliver! “Food, glorious food!”Yet our relationship with food is often complicated, we live in a society where some struggle with obesity and unhealthy habits, while others struggle simply to afford enough to eat at all. Across our towns and cities, foodbanks quietly and faithfully serve those facing impossible choices between heating and eating. I am old enough to remember the debates around school meals and Jamie Oliver’s campaign to improve them, encouraging us to think more deeply about what truly nourishes human. Many of us remember turkey twizzlers becoming strangely symbolic of a wider conversation about what we eat. And if I am honest, I am no different from anyone else. I enjoy pizza rather more than I should, I have a sweet tooth. Like many people, I know perfectly well the gap between knowing what is good for me and actually choosing it consistently.The Scriptures today invite us beyond physical hunger toward something deeper still, spiritual hunger. The prophet Isaiah cries out: “Come to the water all you who are thirsty… come, buy and eat.” Isaiah asks a striking question, “Why spend your money for what is not bread, your wages for what fails to satisfy?” This question feels especially modern.We live in an age of endless appetite, endless scrolling, endless consumption, advertisements, algorithms, notifications, entertainment available twenty-four hours a day. We are constantly invited to desire more, buy more, watch more, become more. Yet beneath much of this lies a restlessness, perhaps a hunger we struggle to name. A hunger for meaning, peace reassurance. Sometimes we attempt to fill that hunger with possessions, distractions, noise, yet so often we remain unsatisfied.It was this deeper human hunger that Saint Augustine recognised in his own life. After years spent searching for happiness he came to understand that no earthly thing could finally satisfy the longing of the human heart. In the opening pages of his Confessions, he addresses God with words that have carried through the centuries: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” His insight remains remarkably contemporary. We live surrounded by opportunities, possessions, and endless choices, yet many people still experience a quiet restlessness beneath the surface. The heart ultimately longs for communion with God who created it.In today’s Gospel, the crowds follow Jesus into a deserted place. Matthew deliberately emphasises the setting and the problem... they only have “Five loaves and two fish.”. Not enough, and yet in Christ’s hands, scarcity becomes abundance, he sees their need, feeds them and “they all ate and were satisfied.”The feeding of the five thousand is not merely a miracle about bread it is a sign pointing toward the deeper reality of who Christ is. He himself becomes the bread given for the life of the world. In him, God feeds humanity not only physically but spiritually, this miracle quietly anticipating the Eucharist itself. And there is something profoundly moving in the actions Jesus takes, “He took… blessed… broke… and gave.” The very rhythm we hear in the Mass.This is one of the reasons why the Eucharist continues to speak so powerfully to people across centuries. Week by week we come carrying our own hungers, grief, exhaustion, anxiety, hope, gratitude, longing. And here Christ continues to feeds us. There is something deeply healing in simply hearing those familiar Eucharistic words, “Take this, all of you, and eat of it.” In the Eucharist we discover something the world often forgets, we are made for communion, for relationship with God and one another. Saint Paul, in today’s Epistle, speaker powerfully, “Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”The hymn “Feed me, Lamb of God.” captures all this beautifully, feed not just my body, but my soul, my hope, my heart, that part of me that endlessly hungers for meaning and peace. Amidst the noise and haste of modern life, the endless demands upon our attention, the scrolling, striving, worrying, and consuming, Scripture is gently inviting you and me to pause here for a while, just as those crowds once gathered around Christ in the wilderness. Remembering Christ did not send them away empty. He took what seemed insufficient, blessed it, broke it, gave it and they were fed and satisfied, here is the deeper invitation of Mass today. To bring before God not only our strengths, but our hunger. The parts of our lives that feel tired or empty, the anxieties we carry quietly. The deep human desire to know that we are loved and held securely within something greater than ourselves.Just think of the generations of Christians have continued to gather Sunday by Sunday, century after century, often carrying burdens invisible to everyone else, because somewhere deep within the human heart remains a deeper truth, we do not live by bread alone. This week, may Christ, who fed the crowds in the wilderness, feed us again with the bread of life until, by his grace, our restless hearts are finally satisfied in him.
There is a fashion now for ‘natural wine’, which comes out an orangey colour, and can be acceptable or can be utterly awful. People are paying a lot of money and it’s quite the thing in the hipster eateries of Hackney and Islington. The brutal truth is that it’s just how wine used to be made before we got the hang of it. The people at the time of the Gospel today would have been very familiar with it – quickly matured, usually in stone jars, added to so that some of the old feeds the new, the Greeks call it Romeiko and in Crete it’s the house wine of every rustic taverna, although tutted at by politer places on the coast. My Romanian friends make it in plastic jars, and it’s kind of OK. Hipsters so come across a strange paradox: in trying to discover something new, we can only discover something old, and this applies to every human endeavour I think, as we gaze int the sky at night, beholding a star that may have died millions of years before. In the church too, we find in the ancient rituals of the year, the alive, ever-changing presence of God. We are so often simply finding out what God laid down at the beginning of time.Solomon knew that if he wanted wisdom, the wisdom needed to govern God’s people properly, he couldn’t invent it, make it up as he went along. He had to be given it, from the only source able to give it to him, that is, from God himself. Only the Ancient of Days possesses the kind of wisdom Solomon seeks, wisdom older than time itself. We are, I suppose, used to thinking of God as old. There is good sense to that: God has always existed. But it is equally true that God is always new. We live our lives bit by bit, one part passing away just as another comes to be. We can only get older and older, but God is the same creative force that made us babies and who will receive our souls to Him at the time given. God is so alive that he has all his life all at once and forever. God is no older now than he was in the time of Solomon or the time of Adam. God alone is old and new at the same time, and He calls His Holy Church to be old and new at the same time, as a reflection of His own divine self. That’s why the Kingdom of Heaven can be compared to a treasure or a pearl of great price. We can search all our lives, work diligently, but without God’s help all we make and do will be only either original or true. Only when we come across God’s truth will we find something really new and fresh and also really foundational, something which shows the wisdom of the ages. This wisdom isn’t something we can make on our own or even deserve by our hard work. We are given it, as Solomon was also given it, simply because by God’s love we have the great fortune to do so. The treasure, the pearl, comes without any merit of our own. We come upon it because God in his goodness shares his wisdom with us. We don’t even fine it by looking for it, it just comes up in our dragnet because God wills it t do so, He wants us to fine Him, almost to trip over Him, as He is everywhere, sometimes He will be specifically somewhere that we might perceive Him more fully. He draws us in, He gives us His gifts – once He has given us something, it is ours – the treasure belongs to the man who owns the field, the pearl to the one who buys it. However, there is the caution that even though it has ben given to us, it has been given by He who made it, and He has a purpose for all things, for each one of us. We have free will, but it has been given to us by our Creator. These gifts, though bestowed on us freely, are not cheap. Indeed, when you find the treasure, you have to sell everything you have to buy it. When you come across this great treasure, this ancient newness, you have to give up on all the tired dustiness and all the vain inventions in your life, we have to give up whatever came before in order to possess the fulness of what is now given to us – to live fully, we have to begin empty and to be filed with whatever is of God, and to reject that which is opposed to His rule. Then the ones sorting the contents of the dragnet will not find us dead and rotting, no use to anyone.God offers us his wisdom, the wisdom of the ages, but something genuinely startling and fresh and new. As good scribes of the Kingdom, we have to learn to take out of our treasure chests things which are both new and old, the ancient wisdom of the God who is both old and new at the same time, and become more fully His children, young and old, ancient and alive.
I had never heard of Marestail until I moved here a few years ago. Now, I know quite a lot about it as I have spent here years getting gardeners to eradicate it from the grounds and picking it out of my own garden. The roots grow seven metres deep as you probably know, so picking it looks better, but does little. This year I have poured bleach onto the front gravel and that seems to be doing the job, and hopefully in a few years it will have worked its way down. You may though favour letting things just grow, and rewilding gardens. But what should we do about the weeds? That’s a problem facing every farmer and gardener — a problem that Jesus uses in one of today’s Gospel parables. We’re told about the darnel growing in the midst of the crop sown by the farmer. This isn’t just about whether your garden looks pretty or not, it’s about whether your crop will fail or not, whether you will be able to live this Winter. Weeds in a crop are an unwanted, destructive nuisance.The parables we hear this season are agricultural, and rightly so, for agriculture has sustained the world for millennia, and still does today. It’s not difficult to apply this to the Church here on earth because it’s only too obvious that it’s a mixture of good and bad people. And rightly so, indeed I am sure that we can all be good and bad at various times in pour lives – the church is not a palace for the perfect to dwell in, but a campsite for the wounded and the hopeful, to tend to each other and grow in faith, hope and love. When the nuclear holocaust comes, those who are left may be glad that they purchased good tinned food, water cleaning tablets and cigars, but more blessed are those who will share what they have. It is said that the church is full of hypocrites. Good! I hope so, because they are in exactly the right place to change. Serious sinners, though, can be different, and the weeds today show how they can kill a field. So how should the Church should deal with these threats to the Good News taking root and growing. Some would be like the impetuous servants in the parable. They would weed out the destructive sinner. Then, they hope, the Kingdom here on earth would consist only of good, holy people, with no room for sinners. Naturally they would include themselves among this elite band of Christ’s faithful followers. It is very easy to feel better than others, but in a post-apocalyptic world, would you share your food and water, and if not, when you found out your fellow survivor was a Doctor, would you expect her to help you? Testing times reveal who we are. Christ’s approach teaches that in pulling up the weeds we could do more harm than good. The same happens when people try to suppress unsavoury and harmful ideas. Banning a book or film will only give it unwanted publicity and increase its number of viewers. We are told the Dark Web is full of things we would rather ignore and is a great secret, but a great secret that everyone seems to know about! Mein Kamph has been forgotten because it is easily available and, clearly, drivel. Unreadable, dull drivel. We need freedom of speech and thought and religion when freedom of speech is denied then dictators flourish and the very thing we want to preserve -the freedom to sow and cultivate the Word of God – is denied to us and therefore denied to the world. Why do dictators often ban the Bible? Because it gives hope, and the knowledge that the rulers of this world have no power over what really matters. So we must be patient and be about our work of sowing and growing before the second coming, the time of harvesting, judgement and sorting, which will come like a thief in the night, So be prepared. This is the place of our preparation. In this time we must be prepared for a mixture of good and bad people, saints and sinners. Like the farmer, we can be mistaken in distinguishing the one from the other. So Jesus urges a patience which Peter’s 2nd Letter develops. He sees God’s delay in passing judgement and sorting out the good from the bad as a sign of his loving mercy. ‘The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.’ He wants to give the sinner the grace and time to repent and become a saint, the noxious weed to become a fruitful plant. Unfortunately that doesn’t happen in agriculture, but it does here, in this place of grace. In the meantime Paul urges us to wait till the second and final era of harvest time. Then the Lord of the Harvest will pass the final judgement. He alone is qualified to distinguish with certainty the good from the bad: ‘Therefore do not pronounce judgement before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness’. So it is that we are tasked with the work of the Kingdom, and of nurturing each other in the faith, in season and out of season.
