Among the things that I, and all priests, are ordained to do is to administer the sacraments of the Church. And no one in the Church should be in any doubt about this because during the ordination service, the bishop asks all the candidates for ordination this question:

Will you faithfully minister the doctrine and sacraments of Christ as the Church of England has received them, so that the people committed to your charge may be defended against error and flourish in the faith?

To which all those wishing to be ordained as a priest must answer,

By the help of God, I will.

Along with the vast majority of the worldwide Church, the Church of England recognises seven sacraments: Baptism; Confirmation; Holy Communion; Reconciliation; Anointing the Sick; Holy Matrimony; and Ordination. Only a bishop can confirm and ordain people so, in practice, a priest can administer five of the sacraments. Of course, in order for a priest to administer the sacraments, people have to want to receive them and, leaving aside the dearth of people who want to be married in church these days, of the five sacraments that I as a priest can administer, two are sadly, I might even say woefully, underused; anointing of the sick and reconciliation, or to give that sacrament it’s more common name, confession.

On Tuesday of Holy Week I, along with many other priests and people attended the Chrism Mass at Manchester Cathedral. That’s a service at which the clergy renew their ordination vows and the Holy Oils, including that used for anointing the sick are blessed by a bishop. At the end of the service, the bishop of Burnley, who celebrated the Mass and blessed the oils urged the clergy to ‘use the oils generously’, to ‘have healing liturgies so that people can receive this sacrament and be drawn into closer relationship with Christ.’ At which point I thought, ‘I do have healing liturgies, but no one comes to them!’ Actually, that’s not entirely accurate because some people do come to them, but very few people do, and it’s always the same few who come to them.

I must admit, I find it very strange that people are so reluctant to take advantage of the sacrament of anointing. All of us, at times suffer in body, mind or spirit and so we all need healing. So why then, are people so reluctant to come to God, to be anointed with oil in the name of the Holy Trinity, and to seek his help when they’re in need of help and healing? And if the answer to that is because people think it’s something only Catholics do, and by that mean Roman Catholics, I’m sorry, but those people are utterly and completely wrong. The sacrament of anointing is recognised by the Church of England, a Church which, by the way, has always, and only ever claimed to be a Catholic reformed Church. But in any case, anointing the sick with oil is one of the very oldest practices of the Church, and predates the Roman Catholic Church by about 1,500 years. We know that with certainty because we read this in the Letter of James:

Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed.

We’re sure that was written by James, the brother of Jesus, and leader of the Jerusalem Church, and it was probably written no more than 15 years, and perhaps less than 10 years, after the Lord’s Resurrection.

In that passage from his letter, James also speaks about the need to confess our sins, and that brings us to the second woefully underused sacrament I spoke about, the sacrament of reconciliation, or confession.

This past week, I heard a confession for the first time in a long time. In fact, if memory serves me correctly, the confession I heard this past week was only the third confession I’ve heard since I’ve been the vicar in this benefice. I said this was a sacrament that’s woefully underused and when you realise that I’ve only been asked to hear confessions three times in 5 years, I think you’ll understand why I said that.

I do know that this is a sacrament people are reluctant to use for a number of reasons. One very common reason for not using the sacrament of reconciliation is that it is something only ‘Catholics’ do. I think the fact that the Church of England recognises the sacrament of reconciliation, and what we read in the Letter of James should answer that objection to using the sacrament. But more than that, the confession of sins and the pronouncement of absolution by the Church has clear dominical authority. In this morning’s Gospel do we not hear Jesus himself say to his disciples,

“Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.”  

So Christ clearly gave his Church authority to pronounce the forgiveness of sins. But how can the Church pronounce forgiveness of sins if it isn’t aware of them? I think it’s obvious that in order to forgive we have to know what needs to be forgiven. So to take advantage of this wonderful gift that Christ gave to his Church, the authority to say to people that their sins are forgiven, the Church needs to know what those sins are. And so people need to confess those sins.

Obviously, no one likes to admit they’ve done wrong, and we often don’t want others to know what we’ve done wrong, so pride and embarrassment also stop people from making confession of their sins. But pride itself is a sin, and one of the worst sins. So if pride is stopping anyone from using the sacrament of reconciliation then, to coin a phrase, they’re just heaping more coals on their heads by being too proud to confess their sins.

Embarrassment though, whilst it might be a symptom of sinfulness, isn’t a sin in itself. In fact and in a sense, being embarrassed, ashamed about what we’ve done, and feeling uncomfortable talking about it is a kind of self-inflicted penance for our sins because we wouldn’t be embarrassed about what we’d done if we hadn’t done it. But there’s no need to be embarrassed coming to a priest to make your confession. In my 17 years as a priest, I’ve never heard anyone confess to anything that I’ve been either shocked or disgusted by. A priest is also bound by what’s often called the Seal of Confession, they’re forbidden by canon law from repeating anything that’s said to them in confession, to anyone. And a priest won’t think any less or worse of you because of the sins you confess because we’re all sinners too. In fact the very last thing a priest says to the penitent, the one who’s made their confession, after absolution has been pronounced is this:

My dear brother/sister in Christ, God has put away your sins, go in peace and pray for me, for I too, am a sinner.

So there’s no pride or holier-than-thou attitude in the priest in confession.  Priests don’t absolve people from sin, we can’t because we’re sinners too. What a priest does in the sacrament of reconciliation is pronounce God’s forgiveness by the authority that Christ gave his Church to do that.

Another objection to using the sacrament of reconciliation is that, as it’s God who forgives sin, there’s no need to go to a priest to confess your sins. Many people do take that approach, and for them, the General Confession at the Mass or Eucharist is enough. But the problem with this is one of  certainty. If we don’t receive the spoken assurance of absolution from the concrete sins we’ve confessed to, how can we be certain that we’ve been forgiven for them? It’s a problem summed up by the German Lutheran, Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book Life Together. Bonhoeffer said this;

Why is it that it is often easier for us to confess to God than to a brother? God is holy and sinless; he is the just judge of evil and enemy of all disobedience. But a brother is as sinful as we are. He knows from his own experience the dark night of secret sin. Why should we not find it easier to go to a brother than to the holy God? But if we do, we must ask ourselves whether we have not often been deceiving ourselves with our confession of sin to God, whether we have not rather been confessing our sins to ourselves and also granting ourselves absolution. … Who can give us the certainty that, in the confession and forgiveness of our sins, we are not dealing with ourselves but with the living God? God gives us this certainty through our brother … A man who confesses his sins in the presence of a brother knows that he is no longer alone with himself; he experiences the presence of God in the reality of the other person.

Anointing of the Sick and Reconciliation. Christ gave these great gifts and great authority to his Church for a reason. He gave us these things to bring us healing in body, mind and spirit, and to give us the assurance of the forgiveness of our sins, so that our relationships with God, with our neighbour and with our own selves can be put right. By the authority Christ gave to his Church, I’m here as a priest to make these things available to you and for you. So I urge you to make use of them.

Amen.  

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The Propers for the 2nd Sunday of Easter can be viewed here.

In my sermons on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, I spoke about those things, the things we remember and celebrate on those days, as being about life. I spoke about them as being about the life we receive and share through our sharing in Holy Communion, about the life of service and self-sacrifice that all Christians are called to live in obedience to Christ, and I spoke about the life we can lead in which our sins can be forgiven, if can only accept ourselves as sinners in need of forgiveness, turn to Christ in faith, and ask for his mercy. I said that if we can only do these things, then the life that Christ offers us through his Passion and Cross is a mortal life that leads to eternal life. And today, on Easter Day, it is that promise that we can have eternal life that we praise and worship God for as we celebrate the Resurrection of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

If we look at the Bible as a whole though, we can see it all as being about life. It begins with God’s creation, without which there would be no life at all. But we very quickly move on to what we know as the Fall, the time when the life that God gave us was marred by sin. From then on, the Bible is about God’s calling of people to return to him and the life he created them to live. That’s a story which culminates in the coming of Jesus Christ and his Passion, Cross and Resurrection. The rest of the Bible, is primarily concerned with the way the early Church tried to live out the new life Christ called them to. And if we look at the Bible in that way, we can see this morning’s Gospel reading as the event which brings the story full circle.

In the Book of Genesis, immediately after the sin of Adam and Eve, we find the story of God walking in the garden, looking for his people and calling out to them because they’d hidden themselves from him on account of their sin. Today we heard the story of men and women, again in a garden, but this time they are looking for looking for God, in the person of Jesus, God’s Son. In the story in Genesis, it’s the man and woman who are hidden, but in this morning’s Gospel, it’s God who’s hidden, at least in a sense and for a short time, because Mary mistakes Jesus for the gardener. But even this of case of mistaken identity has its roots in the Genesis story because God appears as a gardener there too: he planted the very first garden, in Eden.

The image of God as a gardener is a very good one. If we go back to the very beginning of the story of creation we told,

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

So what we read here is not only that God creates, but that he also brings order to chaos. And isn’t that just what a gardener does?

If we think about what a piece of land is like when it’s untended, we could say it’s chaotic; it’s simply an unordered tangle of wild growth. We’ve both had and have areas like that around our churches, so we know what a piece of land looks like when it’s left to grow wild. But if we put a gardener onto that piece of land, it becomes very different; the wild growth is cut back, harmful plants, weeds and so on, are removed and replaced with good, beautiful plants, flowers, shrubs and lawns. In time, a gardener can turn what was once an overgrown mess into something beautiful so, in effect, a gardener, just like God, creates order from chaos.

This idea of God creating order from chaos is one that was very deeply ingrained in the Jews of Jesus’ day. In fact, their whole view of the world and the universe was based on it. Even the Jerusalem temple was built to mirror this idea of God creating order from chaos. It’s a view of the world and the universe that’s sometimes likened to the rings of an onion. For the Jews, God was at the centre of all and then here were various stages of closeness to God and furthest from God, where God’s presence wasn’t known or wasn’t at work, there was chaos. And chaos was closely associated with death.

In the Old Testament, the dwelling place of the dead was known as Sheol. Sheol was described as a place very reminiscent of the world we read about at the beginning of Genesis, a place of darkness and deep waters. We also find in the Old Testament the idea that those who dwell in Sheol, the dead, are cut off from God. So if Sheol, the dwelling place of the dead can be equated with chaos, then chaos can be associated with death, and in that understanding, the life and ministry of Jesus, his teaching and example, and especially his Passion, Cross and Resurrection, which are all about life, must also be about bringing order to chaos.

In the Creeds of the Church we profess our belief that, after his death on the Cross, Jesus descended to the dead, he went into Sheol, that place of chaos, to bring order and life even there by proclaiming the Gospel to the dead.

And if we think about it, isn’t that exactly what Jesus brings to us too; order to the chaos of our earthly, human lives?

If we think about human life as it’s lived without any belief in God, or obedience to Christ, what is it but a chaotic mess? What is it but a chaos of self-centred, competing individuals and nations who all want their own way? To use the gardening analogy, what is life without belief in God and obedience to Christ but a chaos of self-centred individuals and nations who all want the garden to be ordered according to their own idea of how it should be ordered? A chaos of self-centred individuals and nations who aren’t even content with ordering their own garden in the way they want, but who are quite willing and happy to tear up anything that any other gardener plants so that they can order everyone else’s garden in the way they want it to be ordered?  And ultimately, where does all this chaos lead any of us except to the grave? Where does all of the chaos of human life lived without belief in God and obedience to Christ lead any of us except to death?

But with belief in God and obedience to Christ, the chaos is replaced with order and death is replaced with life. Through his life and ministry, through his teaching and example, and through his Passion and Cross, Jesus offers us life. He offers us a life in which we can once again walk with God in his own garden, a world ordered according to his plan. And he offers us that life not only for the brief time of our earthly lives, but he offers us the chance to live that life for eternity. He offers us the chance to live our lives on earth according to God’s plan so that, when our time on earth is done, we can escape the death and chaos of Sheol, and live and walk with him forever in God’s heavenly garden.

For many people, that perhaps seems too good an offer to be true and so it’s an offer they can’t, and don’t, take seriously. But today, Easter Day, the day when we celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, not only our Lord and Saviour, but our brother and fellow traveller through the chaos of human life, is the proof that his offer is a true one. So let’s take him up and that offer and walk with him in this life so that we can live and walk with him forever in paradise.

Amen.

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The Propers for Easter Sunday can be viewed here.

If we had to choose one word to describe what tonight, Maundy Thursday, was about, I don’t think we could choose a better word than ‘life’. Because if we think about what we remember and celebrate tonight, the institution of the Eucharist, of Holy Communion, our Lord’s washing of his disciple’s feet, and his agony in Gethsemane, all these things are about the life that Christians are called to live; a life lived in communion with one another, a life of service of one another, and a life of self-sacrificial love for one another.

Our Gospel reading tonight marks the start of a section in St John’s Gospel that’s known as the Farewell Discourse, the final teaching and instruction that Jesus gave to his disciples before his Passion, his arrest, trial and execution. Later in the Farewell Discourse, we find Jesus’ great prayer for unity amongst his disciples as he prays to the Father that his disciples, both those present with him and all those who will come to believe in him through them,

“… may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”

It’s a great prayer for Church unity, a prayer offered by our Lord himself on the night of his arrest, that his Church, his disciples, may be one, and a great symbol of that unity is the Eucharist which our Lord instituted on that night.

We call the Eucharist by many names, but Holy Communion is perhaps the one that best expresses what it should signify for us. It’s where we come together in communion, in fellowship, to share the communal meal our Lord gave us, and where, through our sharing in the bread and wine, which is Christ’s Body and Blood, we come to share in his life.

Unfortunately, as we’re all only too well aware of, the Church is not one, and one of the main causes of our disunity is our disagreements about the Eucharist. The fact that the Church has ignored Christ’s prayer for unity is the greatest tragedy, and I would say the greatest sin, of the Church. And perhaps the most tragic thing about it, is that our disagreements about the Eucharist have made the very thing which is supposed to unite us, and should unite us, one of the things which most divides us. 

I’m not going to go into the various understandings and disagreements about the Eucharist, I’m simply going to say this. In the Aramaic language that Jesus spoke, the word we translate as ‘body’ is the equivalent of a personal pronoun, in the case of the speaker, ‘me’. And in the Old Testament, blood is explicitly equated with life. So in the Jewish understanding of Jesus’ day, blood is life. And our word ‘remembrance’ , meaning a mental recollection, doesn’t have the same meaning that a ritual remembrance such as Jesus’ command to “Do this in remembrance of me” had for those he first said those words to. For Jews to this day, for example, the ritual recounting at Passover, of the story of the first Passover, makes that first Passover real, present and active for them in the here and now. So regardless of our disagreements and divisions about exactly how Christ is present in the bread and the wine of the Eucharist, in their original language and context, what Jesus’ words mean is that, when we celebrate the Eucharist, when we receive Holy Communion, he is here with us, now, and we are with him at supper on that first Maundy Thursday. And what we receive and share in, when we receive Holy Communion, is nothing other than Jesus himself and his life. But what does it mean to share in Jesus’ life?

Our Gospel reading tonight tells us that sharing in Jesus’ life is sharing in a life of service towards each other, and we see that in his example of washing the feet of his disciples. But, whilst we may be perfectly happy to receive and share in Jesus’ life in and through the sacrament of Holy Communion, how willing are we to share in his life of service?

One of the great traditions of our Maundy Thursday liturgy is the Washing of Feet, that time during the liturgy when people come forward to have their feet washed by a priest. But if we think about Jesus’ words when he did this for his disciples, I think we have to question whether we’ve actually got this right. After washing his disciples’ feet, Jesus said,

“If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you.”    

Despite what Jesus himself did, he didn’t set an example that one person should wash everyone else’s feet, but that we should all, each and every one of us, wash one another’s feet. And yet when I’ve put this to the test, which I have done on a few occasions in different churches, it seems that this is an example of service that hardly anyone is willing to follow. In the past, in different churches, when I’ve asked for volunteers for the Washing of Feet, hands have shot up all over the church. But when I’ve said that instead of me washing everyone’s feet, I will wash the first person’s feet, who will then wash the second person’s feet, who will then wash the third person’s feet, and so on along the line, the hands have  gone down. And when I’ve asked again for volunteers for the Washing of Feet, very few hands have gone up, and on more than one occasion, no hands have gone up at all. And yet this is surely more in keeping with the example to “wash one another’s feet” that our Lord set for his disciples than the way we usually do the Washing of Feet in our Maundy Thursday liturgy. So it seems that for many people, their willingness to share in the life of Christ is limited by the extent to which they’re willing to serve and by what kind of service they’re willing to give to one another. Washing feet, for example, isn’t a pleasant job, it’s probably seen as a menial job, and it seems that many people, whilst they’re quite happy to let someone else wash their feet, aren’t prepared to serve others in the same way.

This willingness to do the difficult and unpleasant  for the sake of others is, of course, what our Lord’s earthly life was, ultimately, all about because it’s this self-sacrificial love of others that led him to his Passion and Cross. And tonight we remember the start of Jesus’ Passion; his agony in Gethsemane, and his betrayal and arrest.

One thing we always have to remember about Jesus’ Passion and Cross is that it’s something he didn’t have to go through. It’s something he chose to do out of love for others, including for you and for me. Jesus may have been called to drink from this cup, as he put it, but he was just as human as everyone else and so he had a choice. He had a choice to either follow this calling or not to follow it. He had a choice about whether to go to Gethsemane, a place it was his custom to go, as St Luke tells us in his Gospel account of this night, and so a place where he knew he’d be found by those looking to arrest him, or not to go there. He had a choice about whether to stay there and pray, knowing Judas and his cohorts were on their way to arrest him, or to leave and go where he wouldn’t be found. But Jesus chose to go to Gethsemane and wait for what he knew was inevitable in the circumstances he’d chosen to put himself in, to happen, because this was the life he’d been called to live and chose to live.

We know from his agony, his agonising over the choice he had to make, that  it’s something he really didn’t want to do; we see that in his prayer;

“Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.” 

It’s very, very unlikely that any of us will ever have to make such a life and death decision on account of our faith but, nevertheless, we are called to show that same self-sacrificial love in our lives that Jesus showed in his. Jesus showed that love most clearly as he allowed himself to be arrested in Gethsemane, knowing that it would lead to his death. He showed it by being faced with something he really didn’t want to do but doing it, willingly, for the sake and good of others. How we might show that same kind of self-sacrificial love will depend on what we’re faced with in our own lives. Whether we do show that love will depend on whether we can face up to what we’d rather not do, and do it willingly, for the sake and good of others just as Jesus did. And if we can’t do that, then we can’t fully share in Jesus’ life.

Tonight is about life; Jesus’ life and our life. It’s about giving thanks for our Lord’s institution of the Eucharist and of the receiving and sharing in his life that Holy Communion allows us. It’s about giving thanks for the life of service and self-sacrificial love that Jesus led for our sake. And it’s about committing ourselves to following that life after his example. We know that we can receive and share in Jesus’ life through our receiving and sharing in the bread and wine, the Body and Blood of Christ, in Holy Communion. But the extent to which we can truly share in his life will depend on how closely we can follow his example in our own lives. It depends on whether we, when we’re faced with things we’d rather not do, but as disciples of Christ know we should, can say, as he did,     

“Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.”

Amen.

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Propers for Maundy Thursday can be viewed here.