The Rector's Message for the Week of September 13, 2020

Rector Turner
The Reverend Canon Carl Turner

Dear Friends,

September 14 is the anniversary of my first Sunday mass with you all – it is also Holy Cross Day.

At the beginning of his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes “The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1 Cor 1:18)

‘The power of God’

The God who brought everything into existence who, in Jesus Christ, experienced all that it was to be human (including betrayal, anger, pain and death) turns what the world sees as weak into a strength. This great paradox is at the heart of the Christian Faith; that God turns things upside down.

As a parish priest for many years in the East End of London, I would sometimes meet people who had made no time for God in their lives and yet, when death affected them or a loved one, would ask why God had allowed such a thing. Most priests know that, really, there is no answer to that question. As the priest says in the words of absolution at Morning and Evening Prayer, God “desireth not the death of a sinner, but rather that he may turn from his wickedness and live.” So, we minister to those grief-stricken people who have not yet discovered the Christian hope.

I think that nothing does this more powerfully than when the priest stands on the edge of the graveside. This is something that happens less and less in the United States but there is a kind of wonderful irony that the family with all their doubts and questions assumes that the priest is secure with all the answers! In Great Britain, it is still the case that the minister stands right on the edge of the grave – something that ‘health and safety’ now forbids in the United States it seems. When the priest stands at the graveside, he or she stands, as it were, on the edge of one world and the next – between the living and the dead. In this way, the priest stands between the grief of the loved ones and the stark reality of death. But there is an irony that is hidden from the family. It is the fact that the priest stands on a wooden plank that, no matter how well the grave-diggers have fixed it, always wobbles dangerously when the priest steps onto it. And there we have it! The family don’t notice, but every priest feels under his or her feet how insecure and vulnerable he or she really is. I think that vulnerability gives power to the liturgical words, to the sentences and the prayers; for the presence of a possible disaster (of falling into the grave) reminds the priest of their own mortality and, ironically, of their priesthood which is to hold the pain, and the questions, and the doubts.

Some Christian communities see the cross in terms of punishment and divine wrath for human sinfulness. Still other Christian communities hide the cross – they want to live only with the Resurrected Jesus. We Anglicans, of course, are bound by the liturgical year which, through the cycle of the seasons and feasts and fasts, allows us to enter more deeply into the story of Jesus who is God incarnate and yet wounded for love of us.

Whenever the Resurrected Jesus appeared to his disciples and friends, he often showed them his hands and his side – as he did to Thomas in the upper room and depicted on our great reredos behind the High Altar. This is so they could recognize the real Jesus and not some imposter or ghost. Even when Jesus ascends to his Father, he lifts up his hands in blessing and the apostles see the wounds taken into heaven – to consecrate all times and space. For it is the eternal freshness of the wounds of love that are the key to understanding the mystery of God’s love.

Dame Julian of Norwich, the great mystic from the late 14th century, gives us an insight into how we can enter into the mystery of the cross. In one of her visions, Jesus invites her to enter into his wounded side:

“Then with a glad cheer our Lord looked unto His Side and beheld, rejoicing. With His sweet looking He led forth the understanding of His creature by the same wound into His Side within. And then he shewed a fair, delectable place, and large enough for all mankind that shall be saved to rest in peace and in love.” (Revelation of Divine Love Chapter 24)

Now, this is no Stephen King nightmare or horror movie – there is no description here of the pain that Jesus suffered or the guilt that he might have borne for us. Instead, her vision is quite extraordinary; by entering into the wounds she finds a place “fair and delectable…large enough for all mankind.” Isn’t that a wonderful image? Julian of Norwich discovers that the cross is not an end but a beginning.

When our own fragile nature becomes apparent through sickness or frailty; or when the church gets it wrong and seems distant from the values of the kingdom; or when natural disaster makes us question our faith; we are reminded that the glory of God is emptied into creation and is still wounded until the time when all is consummated in his love.

Affectionately,

Your Priest and Pastor,

Carl