A Priest at the Altar: at the First Mass of Father Thomas Sharp.

We are here to make eucharist with Father Thomas. He is among us as a new priest, just a few hours old. Eucharist means thanksgiving. At this mass, we give thanks for all the priests God has given to his church in this ordination season. Especially for Thomas whom we surround with our prayers and our affection on this first day of his journey in the priesthood, the day that sets the course for the rest of his life.

Our readings are those of the festival of St Mary of the Angels. The Basilica of that name just below Assisi is holy place for all Franciscans. It was there at the little Portiuncula church that is now inside it that Francis heard Jesus’ words about his disciples leaving everything behind to follow him. This is what he did. Throwing off his staff and shoes, he set out on the road as a poor brother of the Lord who had nowhere to lay his head. Others joined him, who became known as the Order of Friars Minor.

I spent last week in retreat with the deacon candidates with the Franciscans at Alnmouth, a place I know well from my days as Vicar of Alnwick. I was struck once again by the intensity of the Franciscan vision of a life yielded up to the fierce and wonderful love of God, living close to the earth in the company of all his creatures, embracing poverty as a vocation. When such a vision is truly realised, it is life-changing.  

It must have been a real annunciation for Francis when God spoke to him in words of fire. Like Isaiah’s temple vision, like Mary with the angel, there is only one response that could do justice to the encounter. When you look into the face of God, what else can you say but “here am I, send me”; “behold the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word”? In such annunciations worlds meet: God’s and ours face each other. There is recognition. Edwin Muir’s poem puts it like this:

Each reflects the other’s face,
Till heaven in hers and earth in his
Shine steady there

And this is the pattern of things: a divine annunciation, a mutual recognition, and then a “yes” to a vocation to start walking through the door the angel is opening. This is how it has been for Thomas in his vocation that has brought him to the altar on this day. This is how it is for everyone called to a ministry in God’s church. This is how it is for us in baptism. God comes to us and calls us by name and claims us as his own. And we start our lifelong walk in Christ. You could say that all of Christianity comes down to this: annunciations of God’s mercy and kindness; God’s recognition of us and we of him; that open door, that “yes” to God, that walk into his future that is the new life of grace.

This is true of the eucharist as well. As the emblem of God’s love, the eucharist itself recognises us, beckons us to come, invites us to the banquet, draws us to this place of love, gathers us around God’s altar. And Thomas is our representative, our intercessor, our priest. When he offers the bread and the wine, when he lifts up his hands towards heaven to say the blessing, when he breaks the bread and gives it to us, it is in the name of the church that he does these things. In our name. And more than anything else, in God’s holy name, because we are his and one anothers’ companions, bread-sharers as Christ’s body. The eucharist recognises us. It recognises Thomas as our priest. In the eucharistic action, there is an annunciation that says, “come unto me, all who labour and are heavy-laden, and I will refresh you”. We come, we are glad, we eat and drink. And life is changed, transfigured. We see things in new ways. Like Francis, like Mary, like Isaiah. 

These are deep and wonderful truths of the Christian life that we celebrate today. The word immensity comes to mind. John Donne uses it in his great poem on the Annunciation story. “Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb” he says as he imagines himself in the presence of Blessed Mary and of the divine humanity that is beginning to grow within her. I think we can transfer that wondering gaze to the eucharist too: immensity cloistered in the humble earthy creatures of bread and wine:

Sweet sacrament divine, earth’s light and jubilee,
In thy far depths doth shine the Godhead’s majesty

“Here O my Lord I see thee face to face.” Today, Thomas has become a priest of these things. He has gone through the open door that annunciation has pointed him towards. As the president of the eucharist, he opens up doors of possibility for us too, annunciations without number of the immensity of God’s majesty and love that shine in the body and blood of the crucified and risen Lord. Here we touch the mystery of God. And find that it is the mystery of our own selves too who feed on angels’ bread, touched by God, his children for ever for whom eucharistia is at the heart of everything: thankfulness, celebration, joy without end.

At the First Mass of Fr Thomas Sharp, Church of the Holy Nativity, Newcastle
1 July 2018
Isaiah 6.1-5, Luke 1.46-55

Back to Booths!

When you are embarking on an ambitious building project, it consumes a great deal of your time and energies, as we know well here at the Cathedral. Nehemiah, governor of Judah, has set himself the task of rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, ruinous since the Babylonian invasions over a century before. A man of energetic character who brooks no opposition, he achieves this task despite the Machiavellian tactics of his opponents. They allege that this huge act of reconstruction is to cover up a conspiracy to rebel against the Persian empire.  Why build walls unless your intention is to declare independence?

If this were all there was to the story, it would hardly be worth telling. But the next part of the book shows that a deeper purpose lies behind it.  When the wall is finished, and families have settled into their homes, a great assembly is convened. The people tell Ezra the priest to bring out the book of the law and read from it. For a whole morning he reads aloud at a ceremony marked by both tears of joy and shouts of thankfulness: sorrow for the years they have been alienated from this torah, God’s instruction for sound and healthy living; thankfulness to have their covenant with God given back to them. And they see how the renewal of buildings, temples, walls, houses is a symbol of something deeper: the renewal of their vocation and resolve to live purposefully in obedience to God’s rule.

Nehemiah sees that the ancient book requires them to do something specific to mark their obedience. It’s the autumn, the season of harvest. Nehemiah realises that according to the law, a long-neglected festival needs to be reinstated.  So he instructs everyone to go out into the fields, gather branches of whatever trees they can find, and construct leafy booths in the open air: on their housetops or in streets and courts and public squares, even in the temple precincts. Then they are to go and live in them for a week. All this the people do. The text goes out of its way to say that they did it gladly: ‘there was very great rejoicing’.

Here’s an odd thing: to celebrate the end of a building project not by occupying the newly created buildings but by deliberately quitting them to live outside. Clearly, the people understood what this meant because the text doesn’t explain why it was important, only that it was part of being thankful. We have to look back into the torah, the books of the law, to understand the significance of the festival of Booths, If there are gaps in the law-codes, we shall need to use our imaginations a little. Here is how I read it.

First, the feast was as an act of celebration. How better to mark the ingathering of the harvest than going out to live in the very fields where you have sweated and toiled all summer to garner the fruits of the earth? It is God’s harvest, but it is also the work of human hands. There is something endearing about this command to go out and be at home in the open air. It is our natural environment, a memory of how once upon a time a man and a woman lived without fear or shame in a garden where the Lord God walked and enjoyed the company of his human friends. What we love about Cuthbert and Francis is that they were so much at home in the natural world.

By contrast, we see around us ever more evidence of how alienated we have become from good earth, so estranged from it that we can contemplate the planet burning because of our contempt for the environment. Tabernacles reminds us how our own health and the earth’s renewal depend on our learning to reconnect with the natural order, learn to treat all things living with courtesy, ‘discover our place in God’s creation’ as the Cathedral’s purpose statement puts it. It looks forward to the day when nature and humanity are reconciled and, in Isaiah’s vision, the wolf dwells with the lamb, the child plays over the hole of the asp, and nothing hurts or destroys in all God’s holy mountain, for the earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

Second, this exercise in al fresco living was meant to teach the Jews something important about dependence. It’s precisely at the time solid structures are completed that Nehemiah says: don’t depend on these beautiful stones and beautiful buildings. Depend only on God. Let your faith in him be re-energised by having to live for a while without the securities you are getting used to again. For this was precisely how your ancestors lived in days of old: ‘a wandering Aramean was my father’ says one of Israel’s oldest creeds: nomads and fugitives in the barren wilderness for all those years they trekked, often despondently, towards the land of promise.

Yet despite their obduracy and lack of hope, God did not forget the Hebrews but prepared a table in the wilderness for them, as Ezra puts it in his magnificent covenant-making speech in the next chapter. Tabernacles was a way of going back to that story, rekindling the memory of far-off days when the Hebrews had no houses, no temple, no abiding city. ‘You shall dwell in booths seven days, so that your generations may know that I made the children of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them up out of the land of Egypt.’ It reminded them how life’s changes and chances threw them on the mercy of the covenant. It told them not to vest ultimate security in anything they could see or touch. It threw them on the mercy and goodness of God. We no doubt expect to learn this lesson in other ways. But learn it we must, if faith means anything.

There is a third theme running through this celebration. How often does the torah instil the habit of being generous and compassionate towards the wanderer and stranger, the outcaste, the disadvantaged, the poor. The more prosperous and successful you become, the easier it is not simply to forget those who need your help, but actively to choose not to remember them. The feast of Booths is a kind of enforced homelessness, having to live in temporary accommodation, discover what it is like to live in the cold and the wet and the dark. When people with a social conscience decide to live for a week on unemployment benefit, perhaps sleeping rough in parks or doorways, it’s easy to disparage this as the token gesture of the comfortably off: acting a part rather than truly taking part.

But this is what Tabernacles calls the people to do. I imagine that it is physically and emotionally
costly to live in a booth for a week. I have never done it. I like to think the Jews of Nehemiah’s day discovered as we can that by taking up roles and acting out rituals, their meanings become more real, are understood in new ways. That leads to the transformation of attitudes and perspectives, in this case a deeper sympathy with and compassion for those for whom living in streets and squares and the open country is not a matter of joy and will not come to an end next week.

The renewal of a people’s mind and heart is what Nehemiah wanted to achieve. He knew that building the walls was the easy part. Much harder to rebuild a community on the values of justice, loving-kindness and truth. This great communal celebration of an ancient festival was only the beginning. But it sowed the seeds of the future when, under pressure and at times of terrible persecution, Judaism covenant would remain steadfast to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who had called them into this privileged life and promised that in their seed all the peoples of the world would bless themselves. In Jesus, Christians believe that promise to be coming true. This is why we pray as he taught us, ‘thy kingdom come’, and look with eager longing for the day of God when the rich promises foreshadowed in one of the old pilgrim feasts become nothing less than a new heaven and new earth.


Durham Cathedral, 20 October 2013 (Nehemiah 8. 9-end)

Two Young Men who Ran Fast: St Cuthbert and St Francis

I think of St Francis as the Cuthbert of Italy. I put it that way round because here in Cuthbert’s shrine, we recognise that Cuthbert is the senior saint by 500 years. What do they have in common, these two saints who lit up the worlds they moved in and have been remembered and loved ever since? Famously, there is the ecstatic love both had for the natural world, not a sentimental affection for furry creatures but a reverence and courtesy towards all living things that sprang directly from how they saw creation transfigured by God’s presence.  You could imagine Cuthbert singing The Canticle of the Sun. There is the compassion they both had for human beings at the extremes of wretchedness and need: they embraced the poor and outcaste as God’s special possession.  There is the simplicity and humility they were both admired and loved for, their willingness to take up the cross and for its sake become nobodies. And finally their burning witness to the good news of Jesus. ‘Why not be turned into fire?’ asked Francis once. It was the fervour of their lives that made their testimony so life-changing for others. ‘Preach the gospel: use words if necessary.’

But I’d like to focus on what strikes me so strongly in both these beloved saints we honour.  They were both young men, privileged and powerful, like the character in today’s gospel reading, running up to Jesus and eagerly kneeling in front of him.  To me, he captures something of the spirit of Cuthbert and Francis, at least as the story begins. He wants to know what he has to do to inherit eternal life.  He does not walk or stroll but runs: he wants to know.  This is not the lazy insouciance of someone who is not greatly troubled by the answer, whose question is merely a courtesy or a way of alleviating the boredom of being rich.  He wants to know because he needs to know and he will not go away unless he gets an answer.  So Jesus tells him, not without first pressing him to examine his assumptions: ‘why do you call me good?  No-one is good but God alone’.  Be sure of the premise of your question.  Does this would-be denizen of the kingdom of God have any idea who this good Man is who has stopped to teach him what citizenship means? 

Yet we can admire this youth who though young and rich and powerful is not so arrogant as to forget the importance of curiosity.  His running up to Jesus tells us something about his motivation and desires. He wants to be a disciple, a learner in the school of Christ, and embrace the kingdom of God that is coming upon the world which Jesus’ teaching points to so urgently.   So he runs towards Jesus and all that life in him will offer: wisdom and purpose, truth and joy and peace. He will do anything it takes to inherit eternal life. 

Anything?  Jesus tests him on this next, for now it is not only the premise but the resolve that must be examined.  ‘You know the commandments: don’t murder, or kill, or commit adultery, or steal, or practise falsehood, or defraud; and honour your father and mother.’  It is a kind of spiritual triage: who can come out of it with clean hands and a pure heart as the psalm says?  Yet still he is there, undaunted, looking up into Jesus’ face, full of desire to do the right thing and not disappoint the man whose words are charged with promise.  ‘Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.’  Does Jesus smile at a young man’s naivete?  Or does he give him the benefit of the doubt: not that he has been perfect (‘no-one is good but God alone’), but that he has sincerely lived by torah all his life, the divine law that is the source of all that is wholesome and good in human life?  To follow torah is to learn virtue, train our moral compass, live wisely and grow in the image of God.  All this he has done from his mother's arms.

He will not turn away.  And here St Mark’s story makes the most telling point of all.  ‘Jesus, looking at him, loved him.’  That little detail, like the young man running, paints a picture a thousand words could not even sketch.  He loved him.  It is the only time Mark, Matthew or Luke ever say that Jesus loved someone.  Indeed, if you search the word ‘love’ and its cognates in the first three gospels, you will only find it used of God’s love for his Son, and our obedient love for God and neighbour, apart from here.  ‘Jesus, looking at him, loved him’, a verb Matthew and Luke can’t bring themselves to preserve when they tell this story.   Why not?  Is this love for a winsome youth too specific, too particular?  What was it that Jesus loved?  His dogged persistence in not letting go?  Jesus was drawn to people like that: the Canaanite woman who was not put off by his insulting riposte that it is not right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs; the wayward Mary Magdalene so desperate to be loved.  A parable told of the widow who wouldn’t give up pestering the judge until he gave her what she wanted.  This young man is another unlikely companion: there aren’t many rich people in the gospels as dogged as this when it comes to the kingdom of God. 

And then the denouement.  We don’t want it to come, wish that it could have been otherwise, for we too have come to care about this young man and his destiny.  ‘You lack one thing’ (how his heart must leapt at that: just one thing!). ‘Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come follow me.’  And at once the light in his eyes starts to dim.  ‘When he heard this he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions’.  It’s as if there has been a kind of death.  For it is a real bereavement: the hope, the vision, the promise suddenly knocked away from him, and only the stern, unyielding demand of the good Teacher echoing in his ears as he slinks away, the cruel summons to give up his life for the sake of the kingdom he wants so badly. 

‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’ says Jesus, and this is the point of the story.  He goes on to reflect with his disciples on where lasting value lies: not, he says, in material gain but in following where the good news leads.  Contemplating the renunciation of what we have and what we are for the sake of the kingdom of God: that is the only test of how much we really want it, how eager we are to embrace it.  I think of Cuthbert, the privileged young man who had a vision of St Aidan and abandoned his old life to run towards the monastery at Melrose.  I think of Francis the privileged young man whom his angry father disinherited and who gladly ran into the arms of Lady Poverty, giving away everything he had to the beggars of Assisi. It is stories like these that tell me that Christianity is true, and how far I have to travel before it becomes true in me.    

Most of us are not rich and not powerful, and many of us are not young any more.  Perhaps our running days are over, perhaps the gleam in the eye is duller than it used to be, perhaps our naïve but eager curiosity has been displaced by life’s abrasions into settling for the easy compromises of a cosy, untroubled existence.  So how do we keep the spiritual flame burning bright?  By practising singleness of heart, the kind of simplicity that by making us a nobody, cleanses our sight, focuses our intention and gives us back the longing with which we always wanted to run towards the kingdom of God.  We only have to run towards it, say yes to it, grasp hold of it.  This was Cuthbert, and it was Francis, two young men who obeyed the call, became poor and found where true wealth lay. Could it be you? Me? I feel for the rich young man who began so well, but could not do it, or could not do it yet. Yet I’m confident of this: that even when he turned away, the good Teacher did not stop loving him.

Durham Cathedral, 5 October 2013 (Mark 10.17-31)