Sermon on The Last Sunday of Epiphany - Fr Sam Rossiter

There be given to me to speak in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Please do be seated.

Like most priests, once a month or so, I try to meet with my spiritual director. He's like my priest. He listens as I talk through the successes and trials of my own faith.

He encourages me and challenges me to do better. Just like every therapist has to go to therapy, it's a professional necessity for priests to have a spiritual director. You can't support anyone else if you are not yourself supported.

The only problem is that I need an uninterrupted hour for spiritual direction, and finding that time is hard. Between paperwork, meetings, emails, visits, services, sermon writing, and caring for a toddler who's teething and hasn't slept a full night in weeks, I've missed the last three spiritual direction sessions I had booked in. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to get to the session I have re-booked for Tuesday.

And though I've worked at capacity this week, I still haven't achieved maybe even half the things that I meant to, even before I start on the stuff that I know will help me grow as a Christian. It's not just me. Father Tristan, Cindy and I have often joked that it would be lovely to have a day to pray and worship like a priest should, but there's too much paperwork.

Of course, it's not just vicars who find this. Most of us are more busy than we can manage. It might be work, which demands our attention through mobile phones even when we manage to leave the office.

It might be friends who are having a tough time who we need to support. It might be family who need us to care for grandchildren because they're working so many hours. Or it might be the church itself and its never-ending demand for faculties.

Wardens, I do see you. The world seems to squeeze until there is very little room for God. It demands our sight, our hearing, our touch, our taste, our smell.

It presses in and overwhelms our capacity to just sit silently and listen. And God is the patient parent, whilst the world is a screaming toddler. God will forgive us if we miss a Sunday service, but miss the tax return deadline and see how forgiving HMRC is.

The loud demands of the world can easily create a hierarchy in our lives in which God just has to wait until we've got time for him. And because God is patient, he will wait, even as he takes lower and lower priority. So he'll still be there as he first falls between the needs of work, and then the demands of our family, and then the needs of our friends.

And then the need to have a Sunday lie-in, because we haven't had one in weeks. And then, eventually, the urgency of getting the lamb in the oven before nine so that the roast potatoes can go in before the family arrives, so actually there really isn't time to get to Easter Sunday morning this year. And it's not just busyness or sensory overload that displaces God from our priorities.

It's also cultural ideology. In the late 20th century, Western culture began increasingly to become suspicious of grand claims about truth, particularly based in authority. This began as a valid reservation about institutions who claimed to teach truth without an agenda.

We came to realise that everyone speaks from some kind of background. Everyone has a bias. But eventually, that healthy reservation polarised into pluralism, a broad sense that truth is a matter of perspective.

What's true for you isn't necessarily true for me. This idea can seem pretty popular because it seems to create an equality between beliefs. After all, atheism and Christianity can both be true if truth is in the eye of the beholder.

Who here has heard the words, you can believe what you want, just don't force your beliefs on me? Seems pretty reasonable, doesn't it? Unfortunately, this idea, which might be described as postmodernism, hasn't led to the harmony that many hoped for. Instead, when we choose our truth on an individual level, we lose the shared ground that lets community establish. We can't say, such and such is true, and we all affirm it.

We have to say, I believe such and such. Maybe you don't. And in the breakdown of community that has resulted, we've become divided, confused, unsure of who or what to believe.

In the 21st century, that's created a truth vacuum, in which many people really just want somebody who looks certain. We increasingly value simple answers, dramatic narratives, and voices which promise clarity and security in an uncertain world. And so we've moved from reservation about authority to fake news, climate crisis denial, anti-vax conspiracies, very popular and loud people speaking very loudly on GB News, into that news and noise and confusion St Peter speaks.

For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he receives honour and glory from God the Father when that voice was conveyed to him by the majestic glory, saying, this is my son, my beloved, with whom I am well pleased. We ourselves heard this voice from heaven while we were with him on the holy mountain.

It may be some comfort to know that confusion of warring ideologies isn't anything new. The early church battled with the same confusion of ideas that we do now. But St Peter was a fisherman, so he spoke in nice, plain terms.

We did not follow cleverly devised myths. We're not coming up with some special argument. We made known to you our Lord Jesus, of whom we had been eyewitnesses.

We're just telling you what we saw, people. On the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus of Nazareth's glory was revealed. His face was transformed.

His clothes shone like the sun. And St Peter, St James and St John saw him in the truth of his divinity. He wasn't transformed.

He was still Jesus, still fully human. He was transfigured, fully revealed as God. What those disciples saw was the glory of the Lord.

The glory that we heard described in Exodus, which fell on the mountain when Moses ascended to receive the law. A glory which looked like a devouring fire and a deep cloud. Glory which was so heavy with holiness that the nation of Israel withdrew out of awesome fear, begging Moses to go and approach instead of them.

Glory which was made fully accessible in Jesus, so that the disciples could look even as Moses could not. Because Moses had to hide in the cleft of the rock and only saw the back of God's glory. St Peter, St James and St John looked Jesus in the face.

What they saw was truth, revealed in part to Moses, in full to them. And that is the point that St Peter is making in his letter. The truth of God's glory, the truth of Jesus Christ, isn't subjective.

It's not a philosophical trend. You can't debate it. It is the foundation upon which all other truth stands or falls.

At the time, once the glory lifted, it seemed like everything went back to normal. Jesus and his disciples walked down the mountain, where the other disciples were squabbling because they couldn't heal a boy with epilepsy. Jesus stepped in.

The boy was healed. Jesus continued to teach. But St Peter never forgot what he saw.

As his letter shows, even after everything that followed, the miracles, the healings, the teaching, the cross, the resurrection, that was the thing that stuck. In all the busyness and the mess of establishing and leading the early church, the transfiguration, the revelation of Jesus's glory, was the thing that St Peter pointed to as his foundation. And it was because he knew he'd seen the truth and it mattered.

After the resurrection, St Peter was more busy than he'd ever been as a fisherman or as a disciple. He and a handful of believers were tasked with spreading the good news of Jesus Christ to the whole world. As they left Israel to teach, they encountered new ways of thinking, debating the truth of their claims with people who shared none of the foundational beliefs that had allowed them to leave their boats and follow Jesus.

Everywhere they went, they faced opposition, imprisonment, torture, and eventually most of them were executed. But by the end of their lives, the path had been lain for the good news of Jesus Christ to be known throughout all the world by billions of people. They succeeded in their impossible task because they stood on firm ground.

When the world and its demands pressed in, they knew that nothing matters more than God revealed as a human being who died and rose again. They knew that nothing is more important than offering God the praise which is his due, the prayer which is their strength, the study of the scriptures which was their nourishment. When complex ways of thinking assaulted their beliefs, they leaned back on what? On who they knew.

Jesus. Fully man. Fully God.

There is so much that makes being a Christian hard. We all have so much work, which seems so much more pressing than being here on a Sunday morning. It's easy to think, surely God won't mind me missing one week, or it'll be okay if I don't pray today as long as I do tomorrow.

I'll pick up the Bible once I've finished my John Grisham. Of course, these thoughts aren't wrong. God will forgive us when we miss church.

He'll be there when we finally find time to pray. He will reveal himself when we finally pick up that dusty old Bible. God won't suffer if he isn't our priority.

But we will. When we allow ourselves to stand on any principle or priority other than Jesus Christ, the firm foundation of our lives becomes quicksand, which drags us away from him, from truth. What we do here this morning, what we do here in church, matters.

Just because God is less demanding of our time than HMRC, or our diary, or our family, or our friends, or the Sunday roast, doesn't mean that he's any less deserving of it. Quite the opposite. So stand on the truth.

Stand despite the diary. Despite the world telling you that God will be there next week. Because life built on anything less than him is life built without truth as its foundation.

God might wait, but so will the paperwork. And only one of them leads to eternity. Amen.