Fifth Tuesday in Lent

Ephesians 4.1-6; Matthew 5.1-16

We've come to the fifth and final of St. John's Paths of Repentance, so tonight we are thinking about Humility. I think this one brings us right back to the beginning again. Those of you who've been with us since then will remember that we began with the first path which was Condemning Our Own Sins. To do this we had to, as it were, look into the mirror as St. James suggested and then acknowledge who and what we saw there, whether we liked what we saw or not. Looking in a mirror at our own reflection can be a very humbling experience. Accepting what we see is an act requiring great humility, because humility causes us to put everything into perspective, and it causes us to acknowledge our context, our surroundings, those we live with, with truth.

I suppose that pride is the opposite of humility; the putting of ourself and our own opinions before any other; believing that we are better than others without regard to their attributes, beliefs and opinions. And put in those terms, we realise that humility is about the truth. Being humble is about being true, to yourself and to others and acknowledging the truth about yourself no matter how easy or difficult that might be.

So humility is about knowing the truth of you and knowing the truth of the world in which you live and the people in that world; and living freely and happily and usefully with that. I think St. Paul sums that up when he says, 'Be humble always and gentle, and patient too, putting up with one another's failings in the spirit of love'. And that sets the scene for us to look at the Beatitudes, Jesus's opening words in His Sermon on the Mount. Let's look at those He says are 'blessed.' The poor in spirit; or, as it is sometimes translated - 'those who know their need of God', which says so much. Those who are sorrowful; that is those who sorrow for their own sinfulness, those who are sorrowful because of the state of the world and the plight of those whose lives are ridden with disaster and tragedy of one sort or another. Blessed are the gentle; that is those who are able to let people be - be themselves and not force on them other opinions, values, beliefs. Those who hunger and thirst to see right prevail; that is those who have a passion for justice. Those whose hearts are pure and the peacemakers and those who are persecuted in the cause of right; you can only make peace out of pure motives and intentions anything less causes more division and dissension and in justice somewhere. Those who suffer for God.

All of these are characteristics of humility. And notice that thought of in this way, there is nothing weak about these. These are all characteristics of great spiritual strength. And that's because to be as one of these blessed you need to know yourself and accept yourself and love yourself, as Oliver Cromwell wanted himself painted - 'warts and all'.

Humility is about knowing yourself and your place with God, made in His image and likeness and yet no better and no worse than anyone else. It's knowing where you come from and of what you are made. 'Dust you are and to dust you shall return' are words used in the ashing on Ash Wednesday, followed by the words 'turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ'. To be faithful to God demands humility, because only where pride is excluded will the Holy Spirit come and help us keep faithful to Christ. We need humility if we are walk hand in hand with God and hand in hand with one another. Humility, not thinking more highly of ourself, is the only thing that keeps us hand in hand as we try to walk together on our journey through life.

And we start to become humble, in the right sense when we look in that mirror, the mirror of our heart and instead of turning away and forgetting, we acknowledge who and what we are and decide that we won't stop making that image into the image and likeness of God; we'll do all it takes to live by God's commandments and do God's will; because we remember that we can only say we love God if we obey His commandments. And as St. John says, if we say we love God and hate our brother then we are a liar. Strong words, but true. And we only turn from hate to love, we can only live God's commandments, we can love God and our neighbour through this journey of repentance; a life long journey.

Fifth Sunday of Lent

Philippians 3.4b-14; John 12.1-8

Turning our heart to God has been the enduring theme we've been thinking about during these weeks of Lent, the theme of repentance. We've looked at belief and doubt, and what it means to stand firm and keep on going in our repentance. Last weeks readings about the Prodigal Son and what St. Paul says about being a new creation when we are turned to God helped us go a bit deeper into what repentance means. And I think that this week's readings help us in the same way.

When we change in any way, whether it's to get rid of an old habit, or take on a new exercise regime or diet, or whether we move job or move house, there's a sense in which we leave the old behind. And that's always difficult. Often when we've made the move we can look back and think how good things were, how settled we were in that old life. The old life brought us many benefits of one kind or another. And even though the old life had its drawbacks here and there it suited us for a while. It was a bit like that with the Hebrews when they came out of Egypt and suddenly found themselves in the wilderness with all its deprivation. Even though they'd been hard pressed under Pharoah's task masters and suffered under a brutal regime, they looked back when things got hard for them again and with rose tinted spectacles thought how good things had been in the past. At least they had food and drink and shelter in the old life. So they tended to look back and put a rosy glow on even the bad stuff.

When St. Paul became a follower of Christ he found himself under all sorts of hardships and pressures, even from Jesus's other disciples from time to time. He writes about all his troubles in his letters. And he could look back and think how good things used to be in the past, especially how secure his place was in religion and in society. He was a Pharisee and a Roman citizen. So he was in the elite in both worlds; in both religious and secular societies. But he says an interesting and most important thing in what we've read this morning, in this letter to the Philippians. He says that no matter how good his old life was, none of it compares with what is promised by being a follower of Christ. In fact he says that he counts his former life as rubbish (our translation is being polite when it uses the word 'loss') compared to the value of knowing Jesus Christ. He wants to know the power of the resurrection of Jesus in his life and he'll not stop turning to Christ and following Him until he's reached that goal. It's interesting that he seems to have brought the same sort of zeal he had as a persecutor of Christ to being a follower of Christ. He wasn't going to let anything stop him or get in the way of him following Jesus Christ as fully and as faithfully as he possibly could. His dedication to Christ was total. The turning of Paul's heart to God through Jesus Christ was total.

There's a passion in that writing and in that approach; the passion of total dedication, the passion of the fearless crusader for Christ. In the passage we've read from St. John's gospel we see another sort of passion but a passion that also shows, I'd say, a total dedication and love. Mary has brought this costly perfume to anoint Jesus and does so in this very sensual way, anointing his feet then wiping them with her hair. You can guess the sorts of comments that people would make as they witness what's going on and especially from the disciples. Only one comment is recorded and that is the one made by Judas, but it doesn't need much imagination to know what the gossip would be like after this incident. And gossip always leads us away from the truth, always. That's why St. Paul puts gossip alongside murder in his list of sins. Gossip is one of the most effective tools of assassination. And what the gossip leads us away from here is this act that shows total love for and dedication to Jesus, that is the feminine balance if you like to the masculine protestations of St. Paul. Mary and Paul are both, equally and in their own ways totally dedicated to Jesus Christ. Both had put their former lives behind them, both counted their former lives as loss for the sake of following Jesus Christ.

Jesus is going to challenge us all very soon as we move closer to His death and resurrection over the next two weeks. He's going to challenge us to take up our own cross and follow Him. He's going to tell us that those who say they will follow Him, or are followers of His, are of no use to Him if they keep looking back. And it doesn't matter if that former life that we keep looking back to was a good life or a life filled with sin, whether it was a life of comfortable luxury or hard and deprived; what's important is the new life we talked about last week when we read that when we are 'in Christ', when we are baptised into His name then we are a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come. When Jesus asks us to take up our cross and follow Him, He asks us to leave behind all that's gone before and start out on a new life with Him. And that new life is a life of total love and total dedication to Him, above and before all else; hearts turned totally to God in repentance.

We see Paul do it and we see Mary do it. If they can, we can, otherwise Jesus wouldn't ask us. But that will be the challenge for us as we travel with Jesus to the cross and beyond. Only in travelling it will we know if it's worthwhile. That's why it's a journey of faith.

Fourth Tuesday in Lent

Romans 12.9-18; Matthew 6.2-4,19-21

Having thought about condemnation of our own sin, forgiving our enemies and prayer, we come next in St. John Chrysostom's five paths of repentance to 'almsgiving'. My dictionary defines 'alms' as 'relief given out of pity to the poor; a charitable deed'. We tend to think of almsgiving in the Church as giving of money and especially in this season of Lent at St. Andrew's we focus on collections for USPG. The collection plates we use in our Sunday services are properly known as alms dishes and at one time there would have been an alms chest, somewhere in the church for offerings which would be for the poor of the parish.

The dictionary definition though helps us to begin to think of a wider context with relation to alms. We may still think in terms of the poor to begin with but we see also that in alms meaning 'a charitable deed' we don't have to think specifically in terms of the poor, but in fact charity extended towards anyone. I think too we can sometimes put a particular emphasis on the word charity by meaning help given to the poor, or less fortunate in some way, than ourselves. But the word charity has in our English language here and there been exchanged with the words grace or love. And so we are beginning to see as we look at the word 'almsgiving' that it can have a much wider meaning than simply giving money to the poor, in that it can mean any good deed either involving the giving of money or not, done to or for any other person.

So in this season of Lent as we focus on almsgiving as a Lenten discipline or path of repentance, I think it's good to think of it in terms of what sort of disposition it demands of us, the almsgivers, and why giving should be an act that helps us repent or be part of the discipline of Lenten reflection.

I'm using for most of these reflections, some of the references that St. Theophan the Recluse gives us as suitable reading, to ask ourselves how much we measure up to what God demands of us as Christians in our day to day life. In this part of St. Paul's letter to the Romans, which St. Theophan recommends we here St. Paul telling us what sort of general demeanour or disposition we should have personally and towards one another as Christians. And within that he says 'contribute to the needs of God's people, and practise hospitality'. There is the obvious notion of giving to others in that. And you will remember that in another letter St. Paul reminds us that we should give gladly, from a generous heart, because God loves a cheerful giver. We are often told in the Church that we should give sacrificially. But I think we need to be careful when we use such a term because the word 'sacrifice' usually conjures up an image of something that is going to be hard on us in some way, something not very nice. But in the Church the word sacrifice can mean any offering as in the eucharistic prayers we sometimes say that we offer our 'sacrifice of thanks and praise'. So yes, we give sacrificially because we do it with joy and with an attitude of thanks and praise to God.

In this letter to the Romans St. Paul goes on to say, 'Call down blessings on your persecutors - blessings not curses....live in agreement with one another. Never pay back evil for evil...live at peace with all'. All of these, I think require a spirit of giving. They call for that disposition in us which is in fact charity or love. It's a giving of ourself to others in some way that makes the lives of others better. And that's what giving alms is all about. So almsgiving is not just about charitable deeds but about a charitable disposition, a disposition that is in obedience to God's command to us to love our neighbour as ourself.

Jesus tells us how we should do these good deeds, and that is without ostentation, in secret if possible. And again we are reminded that St. Paul says that love is not boastful or arrogant or rude in 1 Corinthians 13. Jesus pushes the point home by telling us that if we do these acts quietly and without ostentation then we will God will reward us. And we reminded there too that any giving comes back to us in some way, full measure, pressed down and running over.

So we are beginning to see I think how this outward act, even though much of the time in secret becomes a path of repentance, because what we give and how we give comes from who we are. We can't give in God's way without love, we can't give without thanksgiving, we can't give without being grateful ourselves for what we have. We can't give without a heart whose treasure is love of God and neighbour and a following of God's will and living of His commandments. The more we turn to God, the more we love God, and the more we want to do His will and live His commandments. So the more we turn to God, the more we turn to our neighbour in love in charity, in almsgiving.

Fourth Sunday of Lent

2 Corinthians 5.16-21; Luke 15.1-3, 11b-32

We've been thinking about repentance in these weeks of Lent as we've thought about Jesus's first words in His ministry "The kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe the gospel". As we looked at His temptation in the wilderness we thought about our own temptation to doubt and th ways in which the devil tries to draw us away from God. Following that we thought, by way of contrast about what it means truly to believe, to, as it were, bet your whole life on God, as nothing less will do. And then last week we thought about St. Paul's call to Christians to stand firm in their faith, to keep going on that life long journey of repentance, as especially we can be pulled this way and that as we meet with the challenges to faith.

This week has a slightly different hue as the focus is moved from us to God; and as it does so it gives us great encouragement to continue on our journey of turning our heart to God. We meet this week with the parable of the Prodigal Son, one of the most memorable parables of Jesus. Jesus is challenged about talking to and socialising with sinners and so he tells three stories, not just this one. The parable we've read this morning is prefaced by the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. All three make something of the same point, which I think is to do with the all-embracing love of God. The sheep, the coin and the son are all in some way lost to the shepherd, the woman who has lost the coin and the father either by negligence or free will. It doesn't really matter how they are lost, what does matter however, is the concern shown by the shepherd the woman, and the father. All three show by their searching, either physically or emotionally for what they've lost, their love for the lost.

Very often in Bible studies, we look at the characters in the parable of the Prodigal Son and think very closely about each one of them and how we ourselves compare with them. And we think about our experience of the love of God for us as we do that. I think it's useful though to look at a parable as a whole and take the meaning of the whole thing without necessarily thinking about the individual characters. And this parable in particular I think tells us something about the values of the Kingdom of God. God allows us to use our own free will and He risks the loss of everything by doing that. So free will is an important feature of being in the Kingdom. We don't have a God to whom we are enslaved like puppets with Himself the puppeteer. We are allowed to go our own way, with all the risks that involves for God in allowing His creation to be kept intact or destroyed by the very beings He has created. And evidence of all of that is all around us.

The one thing though that holds all together is shown by the father in the parable and that is the love of God which not only creates but redeems as well. The parable shows us that we can never go beyond the love of God. And all it needs for us to be saved, to be redeemed is to come to know that and make a conscious decision to turn to God's love. Just as we have free will to move away from God, so we have the free will to turn towards Him as the lost Son did. And I think we should note that turning towards God's love is our natural state, turning away is an unnatural state. The turning point is where the Son, "came to himself". I think that's a most important phrase, probably the most important in the whole parable, because it implies that when we are turned away from God we are not ourself, we are not our true self. We are made in God's image, to be in His likeness also and when we are turned away from God and towards sin, we lose His likeness and so lose ourself.

Jesus was Himself, someone truly turned to God, He was without sin, truly human and truly divine and His prayer was that we would be also so that we could be described as being in Him as He is in the Father. And in that way we are turned fully to God and fully reconciled. His death on the cross seals that for us. St. Paul takes that up in his letter to the Corinthians when he says that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. It was Jesus's specific task to turn the world to God again, to reconcile and redeem the world. And St. Paul emphasises the fact that in being reconciled we are a new creation, the world is a new place, completely new. The life we live as Christians isn't the old life with a new structure or a new regime put in place, our life isn't 'under new management'. No, our life in Christ is a completely new life. Just as the father in the parable says that his son was dead and is now alive so the same is true for us as Christians. We were dead in sin, as St. Paul says but now we are alive in Christ. The two are totally different.

And I think that's what we need to realise that repentance is all about, it's about creating a new person, as we repent we are being made new and being made whole. And that is what the Kingdom of God is like. It's values are unlike merely human values, its justice and mercy are unlike merely human justice and mercy; because we are talking about God's kingdom and not human kingdoms.

So the goal of repentance is twofold if you like. The first is to be made new in Christ, to have this new life fully in the Spirit of God and then secondly to live in the Kingdom, a Kingdom in which God's values and justice give shape to life. And all of this is made so gloriously plain in three weeks time when we celebrate the crowning glory of God's Kingdom in the resurrection of His Son. And knowing that makes the journey of repentance and the trials and tribulations of the journey all worthwhile as we anticipate the feast being laid even for us as it was for the son who was lost, the son who was dead but is now alive.

Third Tuesday in Lent

1 Thessalonians 5.12-end; Matthew 6.5-15

The third of St. John Chrysostom's five paths of repentance is 'Prayer', and again I'd like to quote from a Russian saint - Theophan the Recluse. 'Prayer is the test of everything; prayer is also the source of everything; prayer is the driving force of everything; prayer is also the director of everything. If prayer is right, everything is right. For prayer will not allow anything to go wrong.'

I don't really think there's much left to say after that. Prayer is our communication with God, it's how we form our relationship with Him, it's how we get to know Him and to know His will for us. It's through prayer that we come to know the Holy Spirit working in us and through prayer that we are given the wherewithal to live God's commandments. Through prayer we are the living branches on the vine and without which we wither and die, fit only to be pruned off and cast into the fire. As St. Theophan says, get prayer right and everything else is right.

But we labour over prayer so much, it seems so hard to us, at least to those who take prayer seriously. Prayer is difficult because sometimes it's easy and at other times, inexplicably difficult. Sometimes we feel we are really in touch and at other times all that goes through our mind is our wandering thoughts and we can't even remember what we are supposed to be doing let alone concentrate on it. And that, I think is why prayer is so difficult, because each occasion brings its own thoughts, feelings, emotions.

But difficulties aside, if we are truly to turn our hearts to God, if we are truly to repent then we have to press on with our prayer through good times and bad, through times of consolation and times of desolation. And these times can last a long time or a short time and you never know from one day to the next whether the clouds will descend again or they will disperse and the Sun of God's love shine in our hearts and minds. We just have to carry on, in faith and in the hope that God hears and with the assurance that God always answers our prayers giving us what we need whether or not He gives us what we want, just as a loving mother will give her child what it needs before she gives it what it wants.

So what do we do on this path to repentance, how do we go about treading the path? St. Theophan says we should pray 'with the mind in the heart'. Our praying is not simply the use of our rational mind. The heart is the dwelling place of the soul, it's where we have our true being, and it's from our heart that we talk with God, and it's in the heart that we hear him best. And so we bring the whole of ourself to our prayer. We sit or stand or kneel, we cross ourself and make prostrations in some traditions, we speak in silence, or out loud in chant and song. We pray together and alone. But in all of these ways we pray from the heart. We take our mind into that room that is our heart, close the door and pray to our Father who is in secret, as Jesus says in his Sermon. Our prayers for ourselves and others, on our own and with others are made to and from this 'secret' place and it's here we get the answers, answers which can seem illogical to the rational mind but to the heart, it's consolation and salvation.

So knowing how we pray, when do we pray? It's customary to pray in the morning and evening. The Church sanctifies the opening and closing and the course of the day with its prayers. 'Seven times a day have I praised you' the Psalmist sings and monks and nuns use this model with their seven times of prayer throughout the day and night. Once, twice, seven times, all are good. But St. Paul says to the Church at Thessalonica, 'Pray continuously' in the version of the Bible we are using at present, in others it reads 'pray without ceasing'. So we turn our heart to prayer which is never ending. St. John Cassian in the fourth century advised; "To keep yourself continually mindful of the presence of God, you should set this formula before your eyes: 'O God, come to my aid; O Lord, make haste to help me'. Our prayer for rescue in bad times and for protection against pride in good times should be founded on this verse of Scripture. The thought of this verse should be turning unceasingly in your heart. Never cease to recite it in whatever task or service or journey you find yourself. Think upon it as you sleep, as you eat, in the various occupations of your daily life. This heartfelt thought will prove to be a formula of salvation for you. Not only will it protect you against the assaults of the devil, but it will purify you from the stain of all earthly sin...Let sleep close your eyes as you meditate on its words until as a result of good habit you find yourself repeating them in your sleep....Let it form a continuous prayer, an endless refrain when you bow down in worship and when you rise up to do all the necessary things of life."

So we see that a simple verse repeated can turn our heart to God and lead us on the path of repentance. And it opens the door to the dwelling place of God so that we can encounter him face to face as Moses did. Something so easy for the rational mind to do, done with the heart leads us to peace and the glorious presence of God wherein we find our salvation. Another prayer is that known as 'The Jesus Prayer' which comes to us again from antiquity. Again it's a simple formula; 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner'. Repeated over and over, it's a prayer that is used by the beginner and by the expert, by the lay person starting out on the path of repentance and the most experienced in prayer and holiest of saints. All that's needed is to stand or sit or kneel and say it, from the heart; and the heart, truly turned to God will receive all it needs from God, which it realises then, is all it ever really wanted.

Third Sunday of Lent

Isaish 55.1-9; 1 Corinthians 10.1-13; Luke 13.1-9

We continue our journey through Lent with our ongoing theme of Repentance, of Turning the Heart to God. And I'd like to start by quoting part of the Old Testament reading set for today from Isaiah chapter 55 because it's in this context that we can view what we've read this morning from the epistle and the gospel. These are the words:

"Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." If you wondered where I got the title for my sermon blog from, well now you know. But I've not read that out simply to let you know that. As I said, they really set the context for the other two readings and not just for those but for the theme of Repentance. And that context is of course the almighty and ineffable God.

On the first Sunday of Lent we thought about doubt. Last Sunday we contrasted that, by thinking about belief. And between these two poles we might think that we are being pulled to and fro, first towards one then towards the other. The Christian life often feels like that. And in very practical terms as we try to live out God's commandments it seems that sometimes we feel quite successful and at others, quite the opposite. And so you can so that our attempts at repentance sometimes feel successful and at other times, we find ourselves quite caught up with the passions raging inside us and fall foul of the commandments in one way or another. Certainly it's a hard job to continually do what Jesus commands which is to love God and our neighbour as ourselves, all the time. If you are like me you wake up in the morning full of good intentions but even before you've got to the bathroom or put the kettle on, you've 'missed the mark' to some degree. And from then onwards it's like you just can't stop yourself, you've got caught up once again in the momentum of those passions and you end the day just like you ended it the day before at odds in some way with someone about something, even if it's just somebody on tv whose opinion you don't share.

We could then tend towards despair at never being able to live in accordance with the commandments, and readily run away with the idea that living the life long journey of repentance is really a waste of time. It's then that we need to look closely at what we are being told today in the readings. First of all we have to put to one side our own human logic, to put aside our human reason. God doesn't think like us, God doesn't reason like us. And it's not just a slight difference, the range of difference between God and us is like as the heavens are higher than the earth. Of course, take a ride into the heavens and you never stop the outward or upward journey. So God's way is infinitely different to ours. Jesus make the comparison when he says things like "You have heard that it was said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say to you love your enemies, pray for those who hate you, do good to those who spitefully use you". One is the human way, the other is God's way, and they are totally different.

So God's way is different to the human way. St. Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians that we have to watch that we don't keep falling back into the human will once we've set off on the journey of repentance, to doing God's will. All the time we'll meet trials and temptations just like the people of God in the wilderness did. But they are there now as an example to us of the ways we might be tested and how not to succumb. But also that God is there in it with us and that more than that He won't give us a testing that is to big for us. He says that "God is faithful, and He will not let you be tested beyond your strength". It's sometime hard to believe, when we are tired from being tested and tired from trying that there never will come a test that is beyond us. Sometimes we are so pushed that we believe the next thing that comes along will be the one that finally pushes us over the edge. I believe that it's true that nobody in a right state of mind, with the right support available is ever tested beyond endurance. But, as I said, sometimes when it's us being tested it's hard to believe that. And it's then that we need to remember St. Paul's encouragement, from last week, to 'stand firm'.

And we can look at it from God's side as well, which I believe the gospel reading helps us to do. The parable of the fig tree shows us that God always gives us that extra opportunity and extra support and encouragement. God is, whether it seems so or not, on our side. Long years can go by without us seeing or feeling any different no matter how hard we try to do God's will. We don't seem to be bearing the fruit of the Spirit, to our own satisfaction at any rate. But the parable today tells us not to give up because what we are praying for and working towards, might just be around the corner, not this year, but next. It's for God to know, whose ways are not our ways and whose thoughts are not our thoughts.

So repentance can be a difficult process, a long process that doesn't seem to bear fruit. But the promise is that it will bear fruit because it's God to whom we are turning and He is there in the process with us, His grace going before us and His Spirit working within us, and so we do it in His time, at His pace. And the glory and the mystery are present together in the turning, a turning that is only complete when we meet with God face to face in His heavenly Kingdom. Until then we thank Him for His continuing forgiveness and stand firm in the assurance of His love.

Second Tuesday of Lent

1 John 2.1-11; Matthew 5.38-end

This week we come to the second of St. John Chrysostom's five paths to repentance - Forgiving our Enemies. Our readings this evening don't mention forgiveness as such but they do talk about love, and neither forgiveness nor love are those things without one another. And so when Jesus or His apostles tells us that we should love our enemies then it is taken for granted that it means we must forgive our enemies, for we can't truly, if at all, love them if we don't forgive them.

I won't apologise for reading again tonight quotations of a 20th century Russian saint, Saint Silouan on this very subject of loving our enemies, that I put in this month's edition of our parish magazine. As I said in the article, these are some of, if not the most challenging words I've read in recent years; so here's what St. Silouan says: "The Lord is love; and He commanded us to love one another and to love our enemies; and the Holy Spirit teaches us this love. The soul that has not come to know the Holy Spirit does not understand how it is possible to love one's enemies. The man who cries out against evil men, who does not pray for them will never know the grace of God.....The grace of God is not in the man who does not love his enemies."

We should just linger over those words to let the sense of them sink in. What Saint Silouan is saying is that if we don't love our enemies then God's Spirit, the Holy Spirit isn't in us. And we only know how to love our enemies through the Holy Spirit because it's the Holy Spirit that teaches us. This highlights a particular point of view that says that we work in co-operation with God, in synergy with Him. We need to do the work of opening our hearts to God by doing our best to obey His commandments and then His Spirit will work in us. We work and live hand in hand with God.

So you see there are no half measures. We can't pick and choose which commandments we want to keep and which we don't. Jesus reminds us of that. Break one commandment and you've broken them all, he tells us. 'Then we are sunk without trace', you might say, 'we've failed before we've started'. Well not quite. God loves us first and so forgives us first and so He always is ahead of us in everything we do, in all our trying. His grace goes before us - 'Go before us O Lord, in all our doings, with thy most gracious favour', are the opening words of an ancient collect, which reminds us of that. So where's the starting point? Well, out of our love for God that He loves us, we are able to respond positively to His commandments and to love not just our friends and neighbours but our enemies also. Who are in fact our 'neighbours' according to Jesus. So if we aren't to be estranged from God we mustn't be estranged from our enemies.

Our enemy can be just about anybody including ourself. How often do we say of somebody 'he's his own worst enemy' when that person isn't acting in his or her own interests? And that can apply to ourself too. We get caught up in all sorts of delusions about ourself which give us a distorted sense of our own self and when pride and vainglory come into the picture too then we are not being the true self at all. It's then we come to what we were talking about last week in recognising our sin and then forgiving ourself. We have become an enemy to ourself and we need to rediscover the real self and love ourself by forgiving ourself all over again. Then when we get back to reality about ourself and love ourself then we are over half way to loving our other enemies.

Jesus can be our enemy when He makes demands upon us that seem too big a call. And then we've got to forgive Him and love Him again and realise that God never asks the impossible of us. Jesus was fully human and He loved His enemies so we can too. "Forgive them Father for they don't know what they are doing" he said as they hammered nails into his hands and feet. Most people outside the Church see Jesus as an enemy. They might not put it in those terms but why are they so hostile to Him if He isn't their enemy?

Being at odds with and even hating our enemy robs us of our peace, steals away our peace of mind, heart, body and soul. So many people are walking about with bodies racked with pain because they are tormented and burdened by an unforgiving spirit. Another quote from St. Silouan: "All men want peace but they do not know how to attain it. Paissy the Great, having lost his temper, begged the Lord to deliver him from irritability. The Lord appeared to him and said, 'Paissy, if thou dost not wish to get angry, desire nothing, neither criticize nor hate any man, and thou wilt have no anger.' Thus every one who renounces his own will before God and other people will always be at peace in his soul; but the man who likes to have his own way will never know peace.....Peace in our souls is not possible if we do not beg the Lord with all our hearts to give us love for all men. The Lord knew that if we did not love our enemies we should have no peace of soul, and so He gave us His commandment: 'Love your enemies.'

So for tonight just three things to ponder on. Love and forgiveness go together - no forgiveness, no love; no love, no forgiveness. Without love for our enemies we cannot be said to love God and more than that His Holy Spirit is absent from us, we don't know God if we don't love our enemies. And last it's love for our enemies that brings us real peace of mind, heart, soul and spirit. Without love, without forgiveness we are for ever distanced from God and for ever troubled.

(Quotations from 'Wisdom from Mount Athos - The Writings of Staretz Silouan 1866-1938' by Archimandrite Sophrony, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press)