Fixed Hearts in a Shifting World

Finding Rest in the Father of Lights

A sermon preached at the parish church of St Margaret of Antioch, Iver Heath, on the Fourth Sunday after Easter 2025

With the Father of Lights, St James writes, there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. No change. And it because of God’s unchangeability - His enduring stability - that, according today’s Collect, our hearts may surely be fixed, even among the sundry and manifold changes of the world in all its fickleness and fancy, on the place where true, eternal and unchanging joys are to be found. The Collect, Epistle and Gospel for the Fourth Sunday after Easter point us to the unchanging truth of God revealed in our Risen Lord.

So, it may strike you as ironic to find when you walked into church today… a few changes: some cosmetic, others fundamental. I hope that it does not feel too much as though an overnight guest has just rearranged the furniture in your living room, and expects you to applaud the improvements when you come downstairs. Not all change is welcome. You will notice that I have moved a couple of icons and crosses around, rearranged some chairs to open up some spaces, made the Book of Remembrance more accessible: these are the cosmetic changes, and if I have caused upset by moving any treasured items, do say, as they are easy enough to move back.

But there are two more fundamental changes, and you may wonder how they can be justified given today’s scriptural emphasis on changelessness. First, the altar is where the Bishop left it and made very clear that he wants it to stay, up against the wall at the East end. And second, the order of readings at Mass, which we call the “lectionary,” has changed - from the late twentieth century, three-year cycle to the ancient one-year lectionary of the Western Church.

Some might wonder what altars and lectionaries can have to do with the saving power of the risen Lord. Are these not rather ephemeral concerns? Well, these two changes - to the place of the altar and to the readings - are, I think, good illustrations of how we are called to repose in the eternal changelessness of God. And that is what, in a nutshell, the Lord commands us to do today: not to shift around with the latest fashions of this world, not to seek refuge in the marketplace of personal choices and preferences, but to find our rest in God alone. For as St Augustine famously prayed, our hearts are restless until they rest in Him.

Take the Epistle first. St James writes, Every good and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights. What a glorious title for God - the Father of Lights! It takes us back to the Father’s first words in Genesis, let there be light, and to St John’s recognition at the start of His Gospel that this spiritual light, the Light of the World, is perfectly reflected in His Son, the Word made flesh, who came to dwell among us in the person of Jesus Christ. Christ is the unchanging image of God’s glory, God’s radiant light, Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and forever, as the letter to the Hebrews has it. Christ is St James’s engrafted or implanted Word, the Logos emphytos, whom we are to receive in our souls: but only after we have laid apart what our magnificent translation calls superfluity of naughtiness, meaning not one too many Mr Kipling’s, but abundant evil. And that evil is defined by haste. We are to be slow to speak, slow to wrath, not hasty, not in a frenzied rush to address the latest thing.

And isn’t that the point of our adherence to tradition? As a church affiliated both to the Prayer Book Society and the Catholic Movement of the Church of England, we stand accused of empty ritualism, aestheticism, liturgical pedantry, of caring more for the heritage of the English language than for the propagation of the Gospel. But these are hollow objections. What we are about is stability of exactly the kind commanded in the Gospel. What we are about, paradoxically, is choosing not to choose, but to abide in the Apostolic inheritance that we have received as a gift from above, and which roots us in the changelessness of God.

So when the Bishop commands me to push the altar up against the wall, he is not doing so out of liturgical taste, one personal choice among others. He is exhorting us rather to return to the tradition of the church which endured from the time of the Fathers until the 1960s, when certain liturgical committees decided that they knew better. He is telling us all to stand togther, you and I facing the same way, so that you are not focussed on my face, but we are all focussed on the Blessed Sacrament, that greatest of gifts from above, and beyond It towards the Mystic East which represents the dawning of the world’s true Light. I know that some people might find me a bit distant up there, so in recompense, the sedilia - the three chairs for the sacred ministers - have moved closer to the pews. But fundamentally, this is not just a matter of what we like. It is a choice not to choose, but to abide in the wisdom of our fathers in the faith.

As for the lectionary, again, this is a choice not to choose. The one-year cycle of readings in the Prayer Book was not made up by Archbishop Cranmer in the 16th century. It was used by the entire Western Church, Roman Catholic and later, the Lutherans and us, certainly from the seventh century, and quite possibly to the fourth and the time of St Jerome - again, until a committee in the 1960s decided they knew better. We will discover as we go through the old lectionary week by week that the Collect, Epistle and Gospel are in sync with each other in a way that the three-year cycle simply cannot offer, and further, that the pattern of the ancient lectionary itself takes us on an annual spiritual pilgrimage, rather than just trying to cram as much Bible as we can into our Sunday mornings. The 1960s compilers' idea, perfectly laudable, was to expose us to a greater variety of Scripture, but this came at the expense of memorability - it’s far easier to remember something when you hear it every year - and coherence. As for whether the average churchgoer’s biblical literacy is better now than it was in the 60s, thanks to this innovation, you can judge for yourselves. I would suggest that the principal beneficiaries of moving from the lessons printed in the Prayer Book to the three-year cycle have been those who work in the supply and maintenance of photocopiers. But to get back to the point, when we choose to use the Prayer Book lectionary, apart from saving rainforests, we are saying no to choice: no to taking our pick from the panoply of modern Bible translations, no to the gifts offered by liturgical committees, no to the new idea that the mass is a Bible study session with Communion stuck on at the end, and instead, a great “yes” to the abiding wisdom of the Church.

But where is this all leading us? To the Gospel, naturally. And that is where we will find where true joys are to be found. John 16.5 onwards is part of the Lord’s farewell speech to the Apostles at the Last Supper, the night before He died. In it, He identifies a problem: the cause, in fact, of the Apostles' sorrow. He says that He is on His way to Him that sent me, returning to the Father of Lights, and the problem is this: none of you asketh me, Whither goest thou? His followers are not interested in where He is going. They think they’ve reached the end of the line. They are interested in Him being with them as He is, now, in the flesh, dining with them, leading them, healing the sick, and so on. They cannot see beyond the flesh to the Spirit, the Comforter whom He will breathe upon them from the Cross, in the Upper Room, and most spectacularly at Pentecost.

It’s like the moment when St Mary Magdalene encounters the Lord in the garden, and He has to tell her, noli me tangere, do not touch me: that is, do not cling to me as I am now, in the flesh, still damp with grave soil, but wait until you can grasp onto me at the Ascension, because that is when I will lift you up with me, in the Holy Spirit, to our true home with the Father of Lights. You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and I choose you in my time, not yours, for the life of the Spirit, not the life of the flesh. The Spirit abides; not the flesh. Our Kingdom is not of this changing world. Fix your hearts there, make oneness with God in me your sole desire, commands the Lord.

And that, in the end, is what we are here for, in church: guided by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in the ancient and unchanging faith of the Church, mediated to us in the English tradition of the Prayer Book. We are here not for a bit of what we fancy, for what makes us feel good, for the latest newspaper’s hasty words, a fresh dose of indignation to feed unruly wills and affections. We are here to leave behind us the Prince of this World, the Father of Lies, and to orient ourselves in worship of the Father of Lights; to receive with meekness His engrafted Word in the gift of Our Lord’s Body and Blood; to be fed and filled with His Light; to abide in Him, to grow more and more like Him while we are yet here below, that at the last, we may take our place with Our Lady and St Margaret of Antioch, among the lights of heaven.