NEXT BEFORE LENT, Year B: February 22 2009

Preacher: Fr Andrew Greany

'In the Name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit'. Thus innumerable preachers 'sign on' at the beginning of their sermons. So too begins the Mass. We begin the liturgy, every day of the week in this church, by invoking the three-in-one. Let us hear how the Dominican, Fr Timothy Radcliffe, writes about the significance of this invocation in his book 'Why go to Church?'( the Archbishop of Canterbury's highly recommended Lent book). He says: 'We come to church with our fragile identities, often enough constructed over against each other. We come as people whose sense of self is sometimes grounded in competition, striving for superiority or struggling with a sense of inferiority. Even our loves may contain knots of rivalry or reticence. We begin', he continues, 'by invoking the Triune God, a home in which we may flourish and find happiness, liberated from the need to fight for our identity, to justify our existence, at ease in the uncompetitive and equal love of the Father and the Son, which is the Holy Spirit.'

A home in which we may flourish. There's a striking thought: the Trinity, not a complex theological or mathematical problem, but a home. So too the Church of God is our home, or should be. 'We are travelling home to God' as the hymn has it —and this is because the Church is the effective sign on earth of the new Jerusalem, itself our true home and destiny. We imagine that we have to leave our homes to come to church, to get out of their familiarity and security. Yet those homes we've left this morning are not our final homes; this is home, and here, in the liturgy of the Mass, we express the joyful truth that we are at home in God the Holy Trinity. Or, to express it in terms which relate to the theme of our readings today, we find ourselves at home (unlike Peter) on the mountain of transfiguration, where we see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, acknowledged, in the Spirit, the beloved Son of the Father. Confused maybe was that little group of disciples; but this is where Jesus had called them to be; this is where they were to glimpse the deepest truth about the gift of Jesus to them and to the world. The glory of a God made vulnerable in sacrificial love. That's where they were to learn to be at home.

Maybe this is where we need to begin when we think about coming to church. It's not unusual on the Sunday before Lent for a preacher to encourage people to develop a particular pattern for their prayer and worship in this season (what used often to be called a 'Rule of Life' ; after all, the origins of this penitential season lie in the intense preparation for the celebration of Easter which catechumens — candidates for initiation by baptism and confirmation — undertook: prayer, fasting, instruction in the faith). But I have already been mildly reprimanded this year for using the language of obligation about coming to Mass; and the vocabulary of 'Rule of Life', often up for revision in Lent, might be thought equally inappropriate. Those of you present this morning would be justified in saying 'well, we're here anyway'!

So, as an alternative, let's at least give room to Fr Radcliffe's encouragement to think of life in the Trinity and life in our liturgy in church as 'coming home' — and not least because this gives us a way into a further vital truth: that this home is a place of community. Christian identity is a bodily identity —our identity is that of the Body of Christ. Those who are gathered here are, as we say, the Body of Christ, a local manifestation of the community of Christ's body which enfolds the living and the departed, saints and sinners, the apostle Peter and the most lately baptised member, the worshipper in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, in St Cyprian's Sharpeville, in the college chapels, here in LSM this morning. The absence of a member, a limb, is painful and injurious to that body. Participation in the liturgy of the Mass, then, is not primarily about each individual getting their private share of the body of Christ, but, to quote Radcliffe again, 'saying yes to the Body of Christ' (perhaps our Amen as we receive the host, or the greeting at the Peace): saying 'yes' to the Body of Chris is not just about me getting my bit of Jesus... it transforms how we belong to one another.'

Radcliffe has much more to say in his book, which I do encourage you to read for yourselves. He argues that as we listen to the word of God in the Ministry of the Word, we grow in faith: faced with the recalling of failure, violence and death, we find hope, because Jesus, on the very night before his death, took bread and wine, and said "This is for your re-membering of me": that is, in a bodily presence beyond the power of death. Finally, receiving and encountering the Risen Christ in his victory over death and hatred we know the force of love, and we are sent out to bring that love to the world. But for today, three days before we shall come to hear at Wednesday's imposition of ashes the words 'turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ', and with the prospect of a gathering next Saturday to reflect on the purpose and presentation of our worship... for today, I simply want to leave with you Radcliffe's picture of the homecoming of particpating in the Mass — the liturgy which begins, not just on Sundays, but every day of the week here in LSM, with the invocation of the Trinity in which we are at home, 'at ease', you remember, 'in that uncompetitive love'.

And I hope that we shall recall too that this is gift, this is the filling of our emptiness, our empty hands, with a love which we can't manufacture. So why then should we hold back from coming home, from climbing the mountain, certainly every Sunday, and, if this can be realistically part of the pattern, on a weekday as well? Why should we not see this coming Lent as the gift of a season in which to do this? Not just in order to get our individual helping, our little bit of Jesus, but in order to open ourselves to the transformation, the transfiguration, of the way in which we relate to each other and to the world —within the Holy Trinity to whom be ascribed all majesty and praise and adoration, now and for ever. Amen.