St Martin's & St Paul's
Parish Canterbury
Parish Canterbury
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How often do you find yourself saying to yourself, 'I can't live his or her life for him or her?' It is a fairly mature thing to say; it is so easy to look at other people's lives and problems and see a clear way forward, forgetting that we are standing in our place and not in their's where the view may be very different.
How far does the Christian faith offer clear answers to the problems that people experience and the questions they ask? Certainly sometimes, but much of the time faith is a framework and an ethos and a foundation rather than a handbook that says 'If your problem is this, try this'. Life is a journey through many stages each with its own good times and bad. All sorts of things will help us and inform us along the way, and we should not be ashamed to take whatever help is on offer. The greatest help of course comes from people who have been there before us: people who have struggled with illness of the body or the mind, people who have lost their way and found it; whatever the experts can offer there is nothing quite like the encouragement of reading about someone who says, You're not alone in what you feel, in where you are. I've been there too, and you can come through it.
In its years of persecution the Christian Church placed enormous significance on the martyrs of the faith. One way of showing this was to utter their names during the Eucharistic Prayer. In the midst of their terrible sufferings these people had shown the way and set a course. Those following that course would not be alone.
For the early Church in England, Alban was such a martyr, blazing the way for all who had the courage to welcome the Christian faith and begin to set their lives by it. His must have been a lonely death, but people who died like him knew that they were not alone.
In the wilderness Jesus experienced many kinds of suffering and privation: he chose the way of faithfulness to God, putting his trust in the bedrock of scripture; he may have desperately wanted bread, he may have longed to capture the hearts and minds of people quickly and easily, but he found the answer in scripture and placed it between himself and the temptation to deviate from the path of God; he showed the way we can follow; Paul writing to the Christians in Rome speaks of many human weaknesses, hardship, persecution, and affliction. None of these he says can separate us from the love of God. We are bound to God and faith by much firmer bonds than will break in the face of such things.
Jesus calls each of one of us to take up our cross. Our cross indicates just how individual and personal that burden can be; we are alone with it because it is uniquely ours and tailored to our individual life. No-one can say to us: 'Do this or that and you can put it down'. But who is going before us carrying his and showing us how to carry ours? It is Christ Jesus himself, and so our burden turns into our privilege instead.Amen.
