This weekend I returned to my old parish of Our Lady of Lourdes in New Southgate to celebrate Mass and to say goodbye to the people there properly. The people welcomed me with their usual generosity and love. It was a moving celebration. Being the year of St Paul, I decided to write the parish a letter rather than a sermon. A letter in the style of St Paul from me, Damian, a stumbling, shy, joyful, endlessly surprised, constantly humbled, fan and follower of Jesus Christ.
I cut my own yesterday morning like I do every Friday morning because Friday’s generally means getting ready for the weekend and preparing a sermon and I swear I preach much better with a freshly trimmed dome. To all the brothers and sisters in the New Southgate community, whether here in the Church, sitting on one of our new pews, just come in from the sunshine, about to celebrate Mass together.
- To those listening at home.
- to those whose prayer is 'Jesus I believe in you—it's your followers who scare me',
- to those who feel so isolated but you stumbled upon this parish and it's making you feel like you aren't alone, like there are others out there longing for the same kind of fresh moving of the Holy Spirit,
-to those who find themselves on top of the world, you're asked how you're doing and you say 'I’m good', and it's true and you mean it
- and to those who can barely drag themselves out of bed each morning
- to those who've recently lost their job
- to those whose children are making choices that are breaking your heart
- to those whose relationships are in trouble
- to the lonely, the depressed, the confused, the doubting
- to those who find it very, very hard to swallow the idea of a good, loving God, much less an open tomb, or a new creation, to all of you grace and peace.
Grace and peace,
That's how Paul begins most of his letters — with grace and peace.
Paul echoes the Easter greeting of Jesus – ‘Peace be with you’, because he knows that we live in disturbance and that peace is the place where we will flourish. That is what Jesus wishes for each of us. His grace. His peace.
Paul knows that if we get a handle on them —or perhaps we should more accurately say— if grace and peace get a handle on us, then we will never be the same.
Grace is gift. It begins with our wide-eyed wonder and awe that all of this is a gift.
The 'this' is of course many things,
it's the love of the Father,
the gift of the Son,
it's the unexpected soothing reassurance of the Spirit who whispers sometimes in the most
hopeless of moments: - "you're going to be fine"
It's my friend who wrote to me recently to announce that he and his wife are expecting a baby and they're beside themselves with joy. If you knew their story, the long years of waiting and living with dashed hopes that they have been through to arrive at this moment where she's actually growing a belly. Oh grace.
It's a woman I saw all alone in front of the altar, tears in her eyes, obviously struggling with some deeply personal pain and then up behind her come two friends who put their arms around her and begin to speak calm and peaceful words of truth to her and she receives them she soaks them in,
she hears them and they give her life because she's learning about grace and peace
Grace has been abundant in this place when we have gathered to baptise, to anoint, to join together in marriage, to reconcile, to celebrate Eucharist, to be a family of believers. Grace has been given to me in the words of love filled encouragement that have been shared with me in the short time I have spent among you. You will never know what this meant to me, because I cannot begin to put my gratitude into words.
Grace was with us in Lourdes when we shared our stories in depth and realised that somehow, in some way, God had called us together so that we could not just celebrate the Eucharist, but become Eucharist for one another.
Grace and peace have placed themselves in our homes as we gather around those we love in their final moments of life and we realise that love is the hallmark of who we are and what we are about. My heart is filled with memories of prayers and grace filled moments as I’ve accompanied you through the passing and the farewells to your loved ones. And the recent time when you were with me and my family in our grief. You were the presence of grace and peace.
Grace and peace.
Grace sneaks into that old barn that's filled to the roof with guilt and shame and self-loathing and hate and despair and it smiles and then lights a match and sets the whole place on fire.
Paul keeps using words like joy and peace and grace and rejoice, Some of his writings come from dark places, from injustice and prison. He writes to those who support him when awaiting his own execution. Death row is not where you use those words, but Paul insists that suffering and joy are good friends, they hold hands, they embrace. This isn't conventional wisdom, you're either happy because everything is going according to your plan or you are suffering because God did something horrible to you and messed with your plan and now you have car accidents and cancer and the economy and divorce and Spurs!... It's either one or the other, but not both, and certainly not both sharing the same bed
But what we see again and again is that God's new creation works differently.
All sorts of flowers grow up in between the cracks in the ugly pavement and it's their location, right in the middle of all that ugly concrete that makes them so strikingly beautiful, because ordinarily you wouldn't notice them.
That's why some of the best insights come from pain.
that's why some of the best poems come from suffering.
that's why some of the best songs come from longing.
that's why some of the best stories come from the times when we had given up on having a story to tell...
I recently met a woman who shared with me her experience of raising her ten year old daughter with autism. She eloquently spoke of all the good and true and beautiful that she and her husband and family have experienced because of their suffering and struggle and challenges. I was moved because that's what joy is about.
Joy is learning to discern that God is up to something even in this.
Joy is learning to perceive things that run counter to prevailing wisdom about how the world works. Joy is evidence of a particular kind of living.
The truth is this - you really can become a certain kind of person
the kind of person who lives in the Christ pattern of thinking feeling and acting
the kind of person who is working out their way into grace and peace.
You can set yourself on becoming this kind of person.
The kind of person who, like Paul, can write letters exploding with joy and wisdom.
The kind of person who resolves to find the grace and peace in any situation.
The kind of person who will not be crushed by circumstances.
The kind of person that always assumes that even in this situation,
in this tragedy,
in this desert experience,
in this failure and mistake and regret and nightmare,
there will be some sort of resurrection even in this...
Everything you've been through is being retold through Christ.
And so the hard part
the tough parts
the shameful parts
they are now living breathing examples of grace.
You don't say "I could never talk about that", you say "let me tell you what I've made it through".
You have survived,
you're here
and you're listening
and all those things that should have wiped you out have actually made you stronger.
All the things that would be painful regrets and unspeakable wounds
are now evidence that grace and peace are real.
You took those blocks and boards of your experiences and you let Christ make a table out of them so that others could share in your story, you can say rejoice and again you can say rejoice
because you know grace and grace is gift.
You are going to be fine
Paul at one point in his letter to the Philippians quotes an early Christ hymn about Jesus who is executed on the cross but then exalted by God.
The resurrection turns everything upside down; it opens up all sorts of possibilities
it puts all sorts of balls in play, it invites all kinds of people to the celebration as it announces that the last word has not been spoken.
So until then, in our fear and trembling, our doubting and our rejoicing, our forgiving and our being forgiven, our giving and our receiving, we have an open tomb - a new creation, and the heightened anticipation that there is more to be said...
And so we come to the end of my time with you. What a time I have had being with you in your joy’s and sorrows and you being with me in mine. This goodbye, this ending which is of course
like all good endings, is really just a beginning...
How I long for all of you to know, to understand, to live, to experience, and to enjoy grace and peace.
Glory be God who shows his power in us and can do much more than we could ask or imagine; glory to him in the Church and in Christ Jesus through all the generations for ever and ever. Amen.
With all the love I can muster, your priest and brother,
Damian.
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