Category: Fr Phil’s Weekly Message

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Fr Phil's Weekly Message

Fr Phil’s Weekly Message: St Alban’s Patronal Festival and Trinity 2

SEE YOU ON SUNDAY FOR ST ALBAN’S PATRONAL FESTIVAL – 10AM Eucharist followed by fizz and nibbles!

This Sunday we celebrate the Patron Saint of our Church, St Alban. He is the first recorded Christian Martyr in England and as such a reminder that being Christian used to be a dangerous thing, and still is in some places. Alban was clearly passionate about his faith in a way which has inspired many others.

Over the summer we are going to have a series of sermons looking at Paul’s letters to the earliest Christian communities in the New Testament. These were often tiny communities of people who, like Alban, often lived in fear of their lives because of what they believed about Jesus Christ. The sermon series is called “Writing Home: Paul’s letters to the first Christian Communities”. I hope you will come and hear the sermons but we will also post them either on the website (cowleystjohn.co.uk) or on my blog page (eastoxfordvicar.com).

The dates are as follows: 9th July: Rome, 16th July Corinth, 23rd July, Galatia, 30th July Ephesus, (then a break for the Transfiguration and the Assumption), 20th August Philippi, 27th August Colossae, 3rd September Thesolonica. We’re having this sermon series to try to look at the answers these communities might give us to three questions: 1) Why does the Church exist? 2) What are we to ‘be’ as a Church? 3) What are we to ‘do’ as a Church?

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Fr Phil's Weekly Message

Fr Phil’s Weekly Message: Corpus Christi and Trinity 1

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever.”

“To enjoy God is to take complacency and delight in him for being what he is, and doing what he does, loving what he loves, requiring what he requires: it is to rest in him, as the compleat and satisfactory Object of all our desires…”
Thomas Traherne

It seems to me that Corpus Christi, which we celebrated on Thursday at St Alban’s, is all about gazing on the wonder of God’s love for us revealed in the sacrament and wondering how it is that we can ‘rest in him, loving what he loves and requiring what he requires’.

The north Derbyshire superior of the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield used to tell us that the sacrament, was “for eating, not for waving around”, but Corpus Christi has always involved a good deal of waving around and of prayerful contemplation of the real presence of Christ in the sacrament. And what we notice in this contemplation is that distance between us with all our contorted desires, broken promises, half baked plans and the peaceful, loving completeness of God represented in this sacramental bread. Rowan Williams in his wonderful book on Augustine says: “I know myself as an act of questioning, a lack and a search, perpetually unsatisfied in this life, yet not frustrated.” The wholeness we seek comes ultimately from God and we meet it gazing on the living bread that came down from heaven.

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Fr Phil's Weekly Message

Fr Phil’s Weekly Message: Trinity Sunday

“A good that ‘transcends human flourishing’.”
How (Not) to be Secular, James K. A. Smith

“Humans possess an ineluctable natural destiny for the beatific vision.”
The Suspended Middle, John Millbank

‘Human flourishing’ has recently been a very popular concept, ranking alongside words like ‘mindfulness’ and ‘resilience’ as part of the key to successful human living. Trinity Sunday reminds us, slightly unfashionably, that to speak of God is to speak of goodness which is not only human but ultimately divine.

We live in an age which, in the West at least, is powerfully driven by the immanent rather than the transcendent. Jesus is seen as a good man who showed us how to flourish as humans, someone we can learn from about human living. On Trinity Sunday, we are offered a far larger vision, in which humanity is both part of God’s creation but also the recipients of God’s Grace.

Trinity Sunday has often been the time when brighter men and women than me have explained the complexities of the relationships between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But for now it seems enough to suggest that Trinity Sunday invites us to find the source of human flourishing in Divine Love. That we seek the source of the love we see in the God who loves us, who came to us in Jesus and who continually pours his Holy Spirit upon us.