Life in the Spirit and Salvation

A testimony given to the Life in the Spirit seminar organised by the Nenagh Charismatic Prayer Group in St John's Church, Nenagh on Tuesday 23rd September 2025

Introduction

My name is Joc Sanders, and I am a sinner. I try to follow the example of my Saviour Jesus Christ, but all too often I fail, as we all do if we are honest. I am a baptised and practicing member of the Church of Ireland. I am a layman, authorised by my Bishop as a lay minister to lead worship and preach within his gigantic diocese of Tuam, Limerick and Killaloe. I am also a member of the Community of Brendan the Navigator.

This evening I’m going to give you a very personal testimony. I have agonised over it for many hours, trying to be as open and honest and clear as I can be.

I shall tell you about how I have experienced the Holy Spirit at work in my own life. And I shall offer you my own thoughts about the nature of Salvation, which is the theme of this second seminar. But first I shall tell you a little of my life story.

A little about myself

My mother Lucie was a Waller of Prior Park near Carney. My father, Rev Derick Sanders, was a priest ordained in the Church of England, part of the Anglican Communion, whose family came from Charleville, north Co Cork. I was born in Nenagh hospital on Easter Day in 1948. My mother told me that the nursing sisters attending her had to miss their Easter Mass because of me – and she joked that I had been a trouble ever since!

My childhood in England with my younger brother was idyllic, at first in a rural village near Cambridge, and later in a small town in North Dorset. We had pets. We had bantam hens and Muscovy ducks. We raised a baby rook, and tawny owlets. I attended the 2-teacher village school, and I ran wild around the village with the other children, raiding birds’ nests, pond-dipping, and scrumping fruit. I came to love the natural world all around me, learning the names of plants and the songs of birds, a love which has only grown over the years.  

I was just as naughty and bold as all the other children, and got into all sorts of scrapes. But I was blessed with a loving and thoroughly Christian upbringing. As a child I learned from my parents’ example that the most important thing in life is to be a ‘useful engine’. You may remember that the Fat Controller in the Rev W Awdry’s books used to praise Thomas the Tank Engine for being a ‘useful engine’, when he had been particularly good.

Every summer my mother brought us back to her home place, where I learned to milk a cow and teach calves to drink from a bucket. Later, as my grandparents aged, a friend lent us a one-up-one-down cottage on Lough Derg, which we could only reach by boat. We met cousins, we paddled, swam, rowed boats, sailed, and generally mucked about on the water. I am blessed that much later I was able to bring my own children to stay there, and they in turn did so with theirs – 4 generations of wonderful memories.

Later, as a young adult, I worked in IT, at first in London, and then in South Wales. I married in my early 20s, and with my first wife we raised 4 lovely children. Sadly, our marriage didn’t last. It was as if an evil spirit was spreading through our social circle, driving couples apart with untold damage to our children and our friends. I was terrified of the future. I fell into depression. I went through a very painful divorce, from which I like to think I emerged a more empathetic and kinder person. Happily, the mother of my children made sure they could come to stay with me one weekend a month and for a fortnight’s summer holiday. The divorce must have been equally painful for them, but I’m glad to say they remain close and loving, and I’m proud that they are all, in their different ways, ‘useful engines’.

Through these years I drifted away from the unthinking faith of my childhood. I could no longer see the Good News of the Gospel as anything more than myth. To declare a belief in ‘God the Father, creator of heaven and earth’ seemed to me just another way of saying ‘I do not know how ‘all that is, seen and unseen’, came to be’.

My professional life moved on. My focus changed to software quality assurance and standards. I took early retirement and returned to Ireland, where I worked at the Centre for Software Engineering on the DCU campus. This gave me opportunities to teach and mentor, to write a textbook, to work on European projects and meet software engineers across Europe. I became an Irish technical expert with the International Standards Organisation developing software engineering standards.

That is how I met my wife Marty, God bless her – she was a technical expert with the USA delegation. Raised a Methodist, she shares my Christian faith. We did our courting over the internet, with long weekly phone calls, and getting together at quarterly meetings. I am very blessed that she agreed to move to join me in Ireland. You have to move fast to sustain an intercontinental relationship, and we were married within a year of meeting, in her mother’s Presbyterian church in Florida.

We lived and worked in Dublin for several years, but we longed to settle back in North Tipp, where we had a weekend cottage, to be close to my parents, extended family and friends. Finally, we took the plunge, resigned from our jobs, and started a new life here. I got a teaching job with the Tipperary Institute. Marty continued standards work, and went back to study in UL for a PhD. Since then, we have both retired.

The Holy Spirit in My Life

Let me turn to some of the ways that I have experienced the Holy Spirit at work in my life.

One of my earliest memories as a toddler is of escaping from my mother’s side in a church pew, and throwing myself on the ground in front of the processional cross. Everything had to stop until I was picked up. I was upset and hollered, but I don’t remember being chastised for it. I wonder if this was an early prompting of the Holy Spirit. If so, I managed to evade the Spirit’s call for all too many years!

Prayer

I think that I most experience the Holy Spirit at work through prayer. It was my mother who taught me my first prayer, this simple bedtime prayer:

‘Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, bless the bed that I lie on.’

And my father taught me prayers I still use, among them this one, by St Richard of Chichester:

‘Thank you, Lord Jesus Christ, for all the benefits you have given me, for all the pains and insults you have borne for me. O most merciful redeemer, friend and brother, may I know you more clearly, love you more dearly, and follow you more nearly, day by day.’

It is in stillness, contemplation, and quiet reflection, often without words, that I can feel God’s loving presence. Then the Holy Spirit can work with my God-given reason and my conscience to help me distinguish right from wrong, the Spirit can show me my need for the forgiveness Jesus promises through his life and ministry, death and resurrection, and the Spirit can gently guide me to know what God my loving Father wants of me.

I have come to realise that prayer is not about demanding what I want from God, like a petulant child. Instead, prayer is about aligning my wishes with God’s will, through the mediation of the Spirit. That doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t pray for what I wish for – if I can’t reveal my desires to God, who can I reveal them to? But I should model my prayers on Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he prayed, ‘Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me – yet not my will but yours be done’.

Lay Ministry

I began to reconnect with church after I returned to Ireland. This was not a sudden, blinding conversion experience, such as St Paul had on the road to Damascus. It was more a slow, growing attraction to the essential psychological truth of the Good News.

When Marty and I left Dublin, we found our church home in the CofI Nenagh Union of Parishes. I was co-opted onto the lay committee responsible for managing parish affairs. There’s nothing like giving someone a job to engage them! Later our Rector retired, and without a resident priest, regular worship fell away. We are blessed in the CofI to have authorised services other than the Eucharist which can be led by laity. A few of us, with permission, began to lead services of Morning Prayer to fill the gaps.

The long and the short of it is this. I came to feel a ‘call’ to lay ministry, in the sense that leading worship was something that I could do for the church community. You might say I wanted to be a ‘useful engine’. After a period of training and discernment, I was commissioned as a Diocesan Reader. That is the somewhat misleading name the CofI uses for a lay minister authorised by a bishop to lead worship and preach within his or her diocese. I have been doing this for more than 18 years now, usually one Sunday a month in my own parish, and sometimes elsewhere to cover holidays and vacancies. I value this privilege, which has given me great joy. I enjoy the discipline of preparing a sermon on a text from the lectionary, as an opportunity to explore my own faith.

I do sometimes pity the poor souls who have to listen to me, but on the whole, I get encouraging feedback. Today I have no hesitation in saying that the Holy Spirit called me to this work.

From time to time, I have been asked would I consider seeking ordination as a priest. Early on I asked myself the same question. I worried I was being tempted to imitate my father. But over time I came to realise that his call was not mine. I am deeply introverted. Much of my life is lived in my own head, and I am not good at reading other people’s emotions. I realised I do not have the pastoral skills necessary for a priest.

I do have a vocation, but it is not to priesthood. My vocation is to be a witness, a witness pointing to the goodness of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, a witness testifying to my Christian faith, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners like you and me. A witness is what I try to be, to the best of my ability.

Pilgrimage

I have also come to recognise the Spirit calling me to pilgrimage, as a model for a Christian’s life journey. The pilgrim journey goes like this, as I see it.

We leave our own home and friends to travel to a destination alongside others. As we travel, we talk. We enjoy each other’s company. We break bread together. We share our life stories. We explore each other’s beliefs. We receive gifts of faith and comradeship. We learn new ways of being in the world. And when we reach the destination, we return home to our friends, bringing back and sharing the gifts we received along the way.

I felt it would be good to be part of a community seeking to be pilgrims together. I shared my thoughts with others across the Church of Ireland, and found that they were feeling the same. So, I became a founder member of the Community of Brendan the Navigator. We are an evolving, dispersed religious community in the Church of Ireland, welcoming members of all Christian traditions across the island of Ireland. Pilgrimage is in our DNA, and we meet together as pilgrims several times a year. As part of my personal discipline, I lead monthly Morning Worship in Killodiernan Church, Puckane which is streamed on the Community’s Facebook page, and I lead Friends of the Community on pilgrimage to local places, sometimes just a walk around the graveyard to appreciate the glorious diversity of God’s creation.

I try to apply this model of pilgrimage when I meet ecumenically with Christians of other traditions, as I am doing here this evening. We owe a debt of gratitude to the leaders of the Holy Spirit Prayer Group, for bringing us together here, Christians from different traditions. I am sure that we all receive more of the Holy Spirit when we come together. We are better together than we are apart.

Salvation

I am an old man. I have experienced tribulations in my life. I have lived through divorce, and seen how it hurt those I love. I have felt helpless at times, filled with regrets for things I have done and not done. I have endured dark nights of depression. But I know, sinner though I am, that I have been blessed, very blessed. The Holy Spirit has been leading me to a place where I feel at peace, increasingly close to God my loving Father, walking alongside Jesus Christ, my redeemer, friend and brother. I know that when I fail to live up to God’s standards, as I surely will, I can return to him and find forgiveness.

The theme of this week’s seminar is Salvation. What is salvation? It is what God our loving Father does, by saving us from sin and its consequences – saving us from separation from his love – through Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection.

Sin is the name we give to our offences against God’s holiness and goodness when we break his commandments. You will remember Jesus summarised God’s commandments this way: ‘You shall love God, and you shall love your neighbour as yourself’.

It is part of our human nature to be tempted to sin, that is, to do what we want, not what God wants, even when we can see it is wrong. God has made us with free will. We often give in to temptation. We sin, and we suffer guilt as a result. But Jesus tells us that if we acknowledge our sins and repent – if we make a fresh start in our lives – his Father will forgive our sins. Through his compassion and self-giving on the cross, Jesus shows us how to resist sin. The burden of guilt is removed, and we find inner peace and joy.

Sin comes in many forms, both in doing what we ought not to do, and in not doing what we ought to do.

There is what I call ‘retail sin’ – petty cruelties that wound other people, insults, gossip intended to hurt, unfaithfulness to loved ones, through personal addictions, dishonesty and stealing, up to violence and murder.

And there is what I call ‘wholesale sin’ – unfair social and political structures that cause poverty and illness, criminal drug-dealing networks, group hatreds and racism that oppress outsiders, the evil killing and destruction of war, and the damage we do to the natural world on this good earth.

Sin does not just hurt God, it hurts each one of us. And it hurts every other person too.

We all bear the consequences of ‘retail sin’. We have all been hurt by what others have said or done to us, and if we are honest, we will recognise how we have hurt others, even those we profess to love. It makes us closed off, wary, anxious. It causes depression in many, and even drives some to suicide.

And we all bear the consequences of ‘wholesale sin’ too. We see so much wrong with the wider world around us, and it tears our hearts apart. We all see in the media pictures of violence at home and abroad. We see images of death and destruction in countries at war. We see images of droughts, floods, and wildfires.

And we all know people in our community struggling with poverty and ill health, struggling to pay the bills, put food on the table, clothe their children, afford doctor’s visits. Their lives are blighted by fear, stress, illness and depression. But for the grace of God, any one of us might be one of them. As I have been at times in my life.

But God does not wish upon us any of these awful consequences of sin. His nature is loving, and he wishes all his creatures to flourish in this wonderful world he has placed us in. It will meet our every need, if only we care for it and our neighbours as we should. God offers every one of us forgiveness for our sins, an end to guilt, when we respond to his Holy Spirit at work within us, when we follow his Son Jesus, when we model our lives on his life of compassion, and self-sacrifice upon the cross.

Salvation is not an end result, a finished state. It is a process, a process which leads us closer to our loving God. We can never say we have been saved, once and for all, because temptation is always biting at our heels. But we can say we are being saved, provided we allow the Holy Spirit to work within us, and do our best to follow Jesus’s example, drawing us closer to our loving Father. Our lives will remain poor and mean, lacking joy, unless we accept God’s gracious offer.

The Story of Salvation

In this Creation Time, it seems right to tell the Story of Salvation in the language of Harvest, both the earthly harvest of material things we enjoy, and the heavenly harvest of spiritual blessings, which Jesus offers us.

Think for a moment about the breadth and variety of the earthly harvest. We have the staples: wheat for bread, barley for beer, oats for porridge, hay for horses and silage for cattle. And there’s so much more than staples to enjoy. There are delicious fruits, grains, nuts, and vegetables, all sorts of dairy products, different kinds of meat and fish - all in amazing variety. There are gardens full of beautiful flowers. There are chicks, kittens, calves and lambs born this year, and there is the fruit of our own bodies, our children and grandchildren too. It is surely right for us to thank God for the earthly harvest. God has given it to us because he loves us!

Above all perhaps we should thank God for our health and our strength, and also for our intellects, our God-given cleverness. As every farmer knows, this bountiful harvest does not appear from heaven as if by magic: it takes intelligent planning and hard graft!

Yet for all our cleverness, the earthly harvest is perishable and uncertain. Our human plans do not always work out. We can all see how much is wrong in the world. Why has God not given everyone perpetually good harvests? Perhaps to remind us that we are not masters of the universe: God is. God’s laws don’t change: Nature is as God has made it, and what we sow, we shall reap. We remain as we have always been, totally dependent on God’s continuing fatherly goodness.

Jesus speaks to us about salvation in John’s Gospel (6.27-35). He says, ‘Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.’ ‘The bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world’, he says. And he makes this great claim: ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whosoever believes in me shall never be thirsty’.

What is Jesus talking about? His words are difficult, at least I find them so. And so did those who first heard them, we are told. But one way to look at it, which I find helpful, is this.

Just as God has made us clever, able to till and keep the world of which we are part, so God has made us in his image to be moral beings, to be souls. Souls with the capacity we call conscience to distinguish right from wrong, truth from lies, love from hate - and to prefer good to evil, as he does. When the Spirit inspires us to use our conscience to make the right choices, we reap a heavenly harvest of good, which nourishes us for eternal life. As the old saw says: The good we do lives after us.

But we are not masters of our own souls, any more than we are masters of the universe: our souls are as God made them, with free will, vulnerable to temptation. So it’s hard to be good. We must work at it, just as we do for the earthly harvest. It is hard work resisting temptation, putting what is right above our own desires. All too often we fail. We name that sin. And when we fail and sin, the evil we do poisons our soul, and that evil too is eternal. A bad deed done can never be undone!

What a mess we are in! What a mess! How can we possibly be as good as God wants us to be? As good as God has made us want to be, in our best moments.

This is where Jesus speaks to me about Salvation. He promises us all the help we need to reap the heavenly harvest. All we need to do is come to him and listen to his words. When we do, our souls will never be hungry or thirsty. As the bread of life, he strengthens our souls. Through his life and ministry, and his self-sacrifice on the cross, he shows us how to resist temptation, how to do good, and how to defeat evil. And when we fail, as we surely will from time to time, when we come to him in penitence, he will suck out the evil that poisons the soul – in other words he will save us. The only cure for a bad deed is to repent and be forgiven!

It is in this sense that Jesus is the bread of life that nourishes us for eternal life. This eternal life is not everlasting life in a distant heavenly future. It is not pie in the sky when we die. It is here, it is now. As John (17:1-3) tells us, Jesus prays for his followers to his loving Father, asking him to give them eternal life, ‘And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent'.

This is the story of our salvation, told in a language we can all understand, the language of harvest. God our loving Father offers us salvation, a way out of the mess we are in, through his Son Jesus, and the Holy Spirit at work within us. But it is up to you and me to respond to that offer. If we accept that offer, our souls will find peace, and we will be filled with joy.

So, let me finish by putting some questions to you.

Will you say ‘Yes’ to the Holy Spirit at work within you?

Will you join me in saying, ‘Yes!’ together? Altogether now: ‘Yes!’ Let us say it again, only louder, ‘Yes!’.

Will you say ‘Yes!’ to Jesus’s promise of salvation?

Will you join me in saying, ‘Yes!’ together? Altogether now: ‘Yes!’ Let us say it again, only louder, ‘Yes!’.

Do you want to feed on the bread of life? Do you want God your loving Father to forgive your sins, remove your guilt, give you eternal life in Jesus Christ?

Let us respond together, ‘Yes, I do’. Altogether now, ‘Yes, I do!’ Say it again, only louder, ‘Yes, I do!’

 

Human tradition and the commandment to love

Reflection for Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 9th September 2025

In that reading, Mark (7:1-13) recalls how some pharisees and scribes from Jerusalem came to listen to Jesus. They asked him, ‘Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?’ – that is without washing their hands, as Jewish ritual purity laws demanded. I suspect they were trying to catch Jesus out, because they were offended by his and his disciples’ unconventional behaviour and growing popularity, which undermined their position as interpreters of the Jewish faith.

Jesus responds forcefully. He calls them hypocrites, and tells them, ‘You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition’. He does not directly answer their question about ritual handwashing. But he moves on to challenge Jewish religious tradition that conflicts with God’s commandments.

In the passage immediately following (Mark 7:14-23), he goes on to say publicly, ‘Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile’. And he explains privately to his disciples what he means, ‘Do you not see that whatever goes into a person cannot defile, since it enters not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? … It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.’

Nowadays we know it is important to wash our hands regularly, to avoid spreading germs rather than to be ritually pure. I feel sure Jesus heartily approves of us washing our hands before we eat. But Jesus is not concerned here about human tradition and petty rules. What matters for him is that we resist evil intentions.

So what can we take away from this episode? As Jesus tells us, God’s greatest commandments are to love him, and to love our neighbours as ourselves. We must always test the traditions we have received, our rituals, our dogmas, our unspoken ways of being and behaving, against these commandments to love. If there is any conflict between them, we must abandon or reform our traditions.

One area in which we should do so, I suggest, is the Church of Ireland’s traditional doctrines of sexuality and marriage, that sexual relations are forbidden except in the context of marriage, and marriage is only possible between one man and one woman. This causes immense pain to our Lesbian and Gay brothers and sisters in Christ, who seek the blessing of the church on their permanent, faithful, loving relationships. And pain to their families and friends too. These doctrines fail the test of Christ’s commandment to love. It is high time our church started to rethink and reform them.

Faith without works is dead

A reflection given at morning worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 12th August 2025

In his Epistle, James urges Christians to break down the barriers of class and wealth in order to relieve the distress of the poor.

We can’t be certain who this James was, but an ancient tradition says it was James the brother of Jesus, a leader of the earliest church in Jerusalem. At the great council there, he and St Peter supported St Paul’s case that gentiles should be accepted into the Christian church alongside Jews without being circumcised.

Nor do we know what church or churches he is writing to, but in the verses immediately preceding today’s reading, it is clear they are riven by class divides – the wealthy are being treated better than the poor. He points out that God has ‘chosen the poor… to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him’. And he reminds them of the law proclaimed by Jesus, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’.

In today’s reading (James 2:14-26), James asks rhetorically, ‘What good is it, my brothers and sisters if you say you have faith but do not have works?’ By ‘works’ he clearly means good works, deeds of love and compassion toward those in need. He continues, ‘If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food… and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?’ ‘So’, he concludes, ‘faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead’.

The message is clear. We have no right to call ourselves Christians – our faith is dead – unless we seek to relieve human distress when we see it.

For us in modern Ireland, this means that we should not evade the taxes which fund the social welfare system and the health service. We must also be generous in giving to the organisations which support those who slip through the cracks, to the extent we are blessed to be able to do so - organisations such as St Vincent de Paul, Protestant Aid, the Simon Community, and Pieta House, to name a few.

And our Christian obligation extends beyond our own community and country to all those in trouble, need, sickness and other adversities, wherever that may be. We rightly pray for them, and we must also give generously from the riches God has given us to the aid agencies working on our behalf with the poor and hungry in all too many places around our shamefully broken world. 

Among them is Church of Ireland Bishops’ Appeal. Set up by our church to bring good news to the poor and relief to the suffering around the world, it has an excellent reputation for working with partners with the local knowledge and resources to ensure that funds reach the people who most need support.

Of Bees and Humans

A foraging honeybee

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan Church on Sunday 10th August 2025, the 8th after Trinity

What wonderful creatures honeybees are!

I used to keep bees myself, but now I find lifting the hive boxes too much for me. I have given my hives away to a kind friend and neighbour, Caleb Clarke, who keeps a hive in my garden. I can still enjoy the bees visiting the flowers, and he gets a harvest of honey.

Wild bee colonies have become scarce in Ireland, killed off by the Varroa mite, an alien species inadvertently introduced from overseas. This is one of many examples of how human actions are damaging biodiversity. Our actions threaten to unravel the wonderful web of life which God has created on this planet through evolution, which is the mechanism God uses to continuously create new life.

Because of Varroa, beekeepers must treat their domesticated hives with bee medicines to keep them healthy. I have just come back from a holiday on the Isle of Man, which remains Varroa-free. The Manx government is making strenuous efforts to prevent its introduction. I hope they will succeed. Here in Ireland there are some hopeful signs that honeybees are evolving over time to resist Varroa infection.

We all love honey of course, and the finest church candles are always made from beeswax, but even more important is the service bees give the rest of creation by pollinating flowers.

Bees have evolved in an intricate three-cornered dance of life with flowering plants and animals including ourselves. In this dance, plants provide pollen and nectar to sustain bees, which in return pollinate the flowers so that they can produce fruit and seeds. These in turn sustain animals, which in wonderfully ingenious ways distribute seeds to start a new generation of plants.

God’s purpose in creating bees, I think, is simply that they should be good bees, playing their part in the dance of life alongside all the other creatures he has created to sustain the web of life. Their scarcity should shock us out of complacency. We thwart God’s purpose if we do not protect them.

In God’s eyes, I think, we are not so very different to honeybees!

Surely God’s purpose in creating us is simply that we should be good human beings.

Like bees we are small, vulnerable creatures, short-lived, subject to disease. Unlike bees, we are made in God’s image, as souls with consciences. We are able to reflect on what is right and wrong, and to plan for the future, in a sense to be co-creators of it with God. But with this privilege also comes our susceptibility to those spiritual diseases which we call sin - spiritual diseases like greed and selfishness which all too often lead us to hurt our fellow human beings and damage God’s creation.

Today’s readings tell us much about how to be the good human beings God wishes us to be - and how to resist our innate susceptibility to sin.

In the OT reading, Isaiah (1:1,10-20) proclaims a great insight.

God has no use for empty rituals and sacrifices, says Isaiah. From the dawn of our species people have sought to placate, even manipulate, gods they have seen as angry and untrustworthy, to benefit themselves – as many still do today. But all this is folly: ‘What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; … I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity’.

Instead, Isaiah tells us, the one true God wants us to ‘cease to do evil, learn to do good’. God will bless us when we behave as good human beings should, treating others as we would want them to treat us, if our circumstances were reversed – a principle often called the ‘golden rule’, which we Christians share with many others of different faiths and none. We are to ‘seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow’.

In the NT reading (Luke 12:32-40), Jesus reveals deeper truths.

Jesus understands that people are often selfish and greedy because they are anxious and afraid for the future. So he tells the disciples – and through them, us – that we should put aside such anxiety. God knows what we need, and God will give us all we need when we work for his kingdom – in other words, when we try to be the good human beings God wants us to be. ‘Do not be afraid, little flock’, he says, ‘for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom’.

God has given us all that we have in order that that we may be generous with it, not hoard it. What we give away, to those who need it more than we do, is ‘an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys’. If we want to be good human beings we must focus on that kind of spiritual wealth, rather than accumulating material wealth, ‘for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also’.

And we must be alert for opportunities to respond generously, as and when God prompts us to do so. As Jesus puts it, ‘Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit’. We should not put off calls on our generosity, waiting perhaps for a better time or a more pressing need to come along. We are mortal – we do not know when God will knock on the door to call us out of this life. ‘You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour’, says Jesus. And it would be shameful, quite shameful, when he does come knocking - as we know he will - to admit that we wasted the opportunities he gave us, the opportunities to act like the good human beings he created us to be.

One opportunity to be generous you might consider is this - to support our Templederry parishioner John Wallace as he walks the entire Beara-Breifne Way – 550km from West Cork to Cavan. John and his family lost their father William to suicide in 2015, a tragedy many here will remember. John is taking on this journey in his father’s memory to raise funds for mental health charities Aware, Jigsaw, and Pieta House. He’ll be walking between 30 and 50 km a day, unsupported, carrying his own supplies and relying on the kindness of local communities for food and accommodation, seeking to publicise the message: ‘Help is out there if you’re willing to ask’. You can support John by donating through iDonate – just google ‘Miles for Minds John Wallace’.

Of course there are so many other worthwhile causes, opportunities to respond generously to God’s generosity to us, but whatever you choose to support, ‘be dressed for action and have your lamps lit’!

Let me finish with prayer:

O God, grant us the grace 

to cease to do evil and learn to do good;

to be unafraid and generous with your gifts,

so storing up unfailing treasure in heaven;

to be always alert for opportunities

to be the good human beings you created us to be.

We pray in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen

Martha and Mary

Christ in the home of Martha and Mary, Johannes Vermeer, 1654-5

Address given at Templederry Church on 19/7/25 and St Mary's Nenagh on 20/7/25, the 5th Sunday after Trinity

What a contrast there is between today’s readings (Amos 8:1-12, and Luke 10:38-42)

In the 1^st reading, Amos pronounces doom on the people of Israel, because they have done evil in God’s sight. But notice that Psalm 52 reassures those who are righteous that they will be spared that doom.

But today I shall leave all that doom on one side. Instead I’m going to focus on the 2^nd reading from Luke, in which Jesus responds with sensitivity and compassion to Martha’s tiff with her sister Mary.

When Jesus visited his friends Martha & Mary, he walked into the middle of a family row.

I’m sure we’ve all had that kind of experience some time or another, to be a guest in front of whom the hosts quarrel. How embarrassing!

As Jesus was talking, Mary sat at his feet as the custom was then, listening to Jesus. Martha, meanwhile, was making herself busy, tidying and preparing refreshments – a banquet perhaps, for their special guest. I imagine that Martha must have been fuming inside for quite a while - perhaps long before Jesus’s arrival - feeling that Mary was not pulling her weight about the house. Now here was Martha, dashing around like a mad thing, while her sister Mary just sat and listened with rapt attention to Jesus’s every word.

Finally Martha’s self-control snapped. She rushed in to Jesus and burst out, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.’ She deliberately involved Jesus, their guest, in their family row. She didn’t have to. She could have come in and had a quiet, private word with Mary to ask for help, but in her anger she tried to show her sister up in front of Jesus. How embarrassing it must have been for Jesus.

Jesus answered her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.’

It was a very mild rebuke. Jesus recognised that it was Martha’s worry and distraction that was the cause of her rudeness. But it was not for him to take Martha’s side in her row with Mary. He surely realised that what Mary needed at that moment was to listen to his words - her ‘better part, which will not be taken away from her’. And perhaps that is what Martha needed too.

‘There is need of only one thing’, Jesus tells Martha. I wonder what Jesus meant by this.

Was it that he didn’t want a big fuss made of him? No big dinner - just a single, simple dish would be quite enough. Well, possibly – but there’s more to it than that, I feel sure.

Many Christians, particularly from contemplative or monastic traditions, have interpreted the one thing needed as to listen to Jesus’s words, as Mary chose to do. Does this suggest that those who work hard at practical tasks of service like Martha have chosen a lesser part? I don’t think this is what Jesus meant at all. Service to others was very important to Jesus - we need only remember the example of service Jesus gave to his disciples by washing their feet in John’s version of the Last Supper.

The truth is, surely, that God has not made everyone alike. We are all individuals. Some are dynamos of activity who can spend their lives in service to God and other people, while others are naturally quiet and more suited to a contemplative life. God needs his Marys, and his Marthas too. And most of us alternate between these two poles at different times – when service becomes too stressful, we need to take time out, for recreation, to re-create ourselves, to listen to Jesus, so that we may return again refreshed to serve.

I think the one thing needed must be something else. I wonder if it could be this - that Martha and Mary should love one another, whatever their petty differences, just as Jesus loved them both – as in the ‘new commandment’ which Jesus gave to his disciples, again in John’s version of the Last Supper.

I am blessed to have a Martha at home – that is the name my wife Marty was given at her baptism.

I think she must be close to sainthood to put up with me. She spends so much more time than me looking after the house, while I lock myself away in my office struggling to understand Jesus’s words in order to preach about them. I don’t think I am very good at noticing when this starts to irritate her, and I fear I often fail to recognise her needs for time out.

Martha’s problem, I believe, was not too much service, but that she became ‘worried and distracted by many things’, to use Jesus’s words. I think this is often a problem for people who give their lives in service. They may feel unable to admit to themselves when they need to take a break, and those around them may fail to notice their rising stress-levels. When the stress becomes too much, something snaps and they can break down in anger, or depression, or even physical illness.

We should pray for those who minister and care for others, whether in their homes, or in hospitals and nursing homes, or social services and other caring professions, that the Holy Spirit may give them the strength, not only to serve, but to know when to take a break, or to ask for help when they need it. We should cut them some slack, and cultivate in ourselves the sensitivity Jesus showed to Martha and Mary. And we should show them our love, as Jesus loves us and shows us his love.

I shall finish with a prayer, a Kitchen Prayer, in recognition of all the Marthas in our lives. It was written by a retired schoolteacher, Klara Carlotta Munkres from Missouri, USA, and it goes like this.

Lord of all pots and pans and things, since I've no time to be
A saint by doing lovely things or watching late with thee,
Or dreaming in the twilight or storming heaven's gates.
Make me a saint by getting meals or washing up the plates.

Although I must have Martha's hands, I too have Mary's mind.
And when I black the boots and shoes, thy sandals, Lord, I find.
I think of how they trod the earth when e’er I scrub the floor.
Accept this meditation, Lord, I haven't time for more.

Warm all the kitchen with thy love, and light it with thy peace,
Forgive me all my worrying and make all grumbling cease.
Thou who didst love to give us food in room or by the sea,
Accept this service that I do - I do it unto thee.

Amen.

God seeks out our whole self

Reflection at Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 8th Juky 2025

In that reading (Romans 12:1-8), St Paul appeals to brothers and sisters in Christ to offer their whole selves to God. The old Greek word translated here as ‘appeal’ – ‘parakalo’ – is still used in modern Greek to mean ‘I beg you’, or simply ‘please’, as those of us who have enjoyed holidays in Greece will know.

Paul is speaking directly to those in Rome in his time, but also I believe to Christ’s disciples in our time, and in all times. His appeal to them - and to us - is twofold:

1.     ‘Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God’. Most people today cringe at that word sacrifice, I think. It reeks of the blood and guts of animal sacrifice, which we rightly reject as barbarous, though in Paul’s day it was just a normal part of life. Don’t let the word sacrifice put you off, because Paul makes clear that what he is talking is a spiritual sacrifice. It is worshipping God, the source of our being who gives us life, which is just what we are doing today.

2.     ‘Be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good acceptable and perfect’. It is our whole self that God wants of us, both body and mind. Being holy, turning up to church and worshiping God, is not enough. We must also do our very best to understand what God’s will is for us, and act on it, in order to be acceptable to God.

It is when our whole self, body and mind, is accepted by God our loving father, that we will truly flourish as his beloved children.

Paul then goes on to warn his readers, and you and me, against individual pride. We must not think too highly of ourselves - none of us is any better than any other. Paul uses the metaphor of the human body, as he often does.

Just as a human body is made up of different organs, with different functions, ‘so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another’. We are not all the same, we are individuals. God has graced us with different gifts, and God needs each of our gifts if Christ’s body, those of all traditions who confess his name, is to function as it should. Paul gives several examples of things needed by Christ’s body: prophecy, ministry, teaching, exhortation, giving, leading, compassion. And there are so many more, aren’t there, from cleaning and flower arranging, through music and art, to buildings maintenance and financial management. All these tasks need specific gifts, not all given to any single person, but distributed among us.

Discernment is the word we use for perceiving God’s will. Discernment is a corporate, not a private thing, because God has made us to be social beings. When we seek to discern what God’s will is for ourself as an individual, it is not just about any sense of calling we might feel personally. We need to recognise and respect the gifts of other people, as well as our own. And we need the God-given wisdom of others around us to understand the nature of God’s call to us as individuals.

Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you

Reflection at Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 17th June 2025

‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you’, says Jesus in today’s reading (Matthew 5:43-48). It is part of Matthew’s collection of the sayings of Jesus we call the ‘Sermon on the Mount’.

It is relatively easy to love our neighbours, people like us, people who like us, people to whom we can turn for help in times of trouble. But every one of us finds it difficult to love an enemy, someone who has harmed us in some way, or seeks to do so, whatever the reason.

It is important to understand what ‘love’ means here. In Greek, it is the word agape, which means a deep concern for the good of the other that reaches out, even if it receives nothing in return. It is not sexual, physical love (eros), nor is it the mutual love of intimate friendship, nor that between marriage partners (philia).

Our God is love in this ‘agape’ sense. He loves us, and desires what is good for us, whether we are good or bad. As Jesus puts it, ‘he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous’. Jesus is teaching us that we can only be good human beings, can only be ‘children of our Father in heaven’, if we imitate God’s love, and that includes loving our enemies.

And is it so unreasonable to love, to care for, to have genuine concern for our enemies, and pray for them? My enemy may hate me, but what do I gain from hating my enemy back? Anyone who hates suffers mentally, doing more damage to himself or herself, than to the supposed enemy. And if my enemy harms me, they harm themselves as well. If I have a true Christian spirit, I will reach out in compassion to that person. I will want that person to be healed, healed of their hatred, healed of their anger, and to learn how to love. Surely it is much better, and makes more sense, to pray for that person than to hate them back - to bring about healing and reconciliation, rather than deepen the wound on both sides.

What Jesus is asking us to do is not something impossible or unnatural. It is the only thing that can bring peace to me and hopefully, in time, to the person who is hostile to me. As we proclaimed earlier, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God’. (Matthew 5:9)

Jesus tells us today, ‘Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect’. This is an ideal that we can only reach for with the help of the Holy Spirit. But it is a call to do our utmost to imitate God in extending our goodwill impartially and unconditionally to every single person. This is not just a commandment. When we reflect on it, it is simply common sense, and it is as much in our own interest as it benefits others.

 

Travelling together on pilgrimage

Article published in the June issue of Grapevine, the parish newsletter of the Nenagh Union of Parishes

On Saturday 24^th May I went on a day-long pilgrimage around ancient holy sites in East Galway. This was organised by Ms Valerie Raitt, a Pioneer Minister working to develop ‘spiritual tourism’, or pilgrimage, in our diocese, something Bishop Michael is keen to promote. Around 40 of us travelled by bus around the different sites, where Dr Christy Cunniffe, an expert on Irish medieval church architecture, expertly interpreted the buildings we visited. Despite the somewhat wet day, the rain held off for the most part, and those of us who participated greatly enjoyed the day.

Holy Trinity Aughrim, with Archdeacon John Godfrey

We began at Aughrim Church, where Archdeacon John Godfrey welcomed us and led us around the community climate action park, once his historic glebe, and the site of an ancient monastery founded by St Connell c. 500, of which no trace now remains above ground. It is an inspiring place with paths mown through a flowering meadow and a walled garden, maintained by local people, with the help of school children who learn about planting, the cycles of nature, biodiversity, and sustainable living. Here, and at each of our stops, Archdeacon John shared verses from the Psalms to reflect upon as we walked, a lovely practice of the early Irish church.

Kilconnell Franciscan Friary

Pilgrims in the choir at Kilconnell

From there we travelled to visit the C15th Kilconnell Franciscan Friary, with its high tower visible from miles around. The ruins are in a near perfect state of preservation – it would not be hard to put a new roof on and bring it back into use. The curvilinear tracery of the east window, and a magnificent tomb with statues of saints are particularly notable. We then repaired to Broderick’s Bar for tea and sandwiches.

Clontuskert Abbey curvilinear tracery

Clontuskert Abbey doorway

The next stop was Clontuskert Abbey, a C12th Augustinian Priory, with its magnificent doorway adorned with complex iconography, expertly interpreted for us by Christy, including a mermaid, similar to another in Clonfert Cathedral.

Dr Christy Cunniffe explains the iconography of the great door of Clonfert Cathedral

We then made our way to Clonfert, where we stopped for tea, provided by the ladies of the RC parish, and contemplated a rare medieval painted wooden statue of the Madonna and Child in the RC church. After that we went on to C12th Clonfert Cathedral, with its quite extraordinary Hiberno-Romanesque doorway. It became a significant pilgrimage destination in the Middle Ages, and the doorway was probably built as a shrine to St Brendan the Navigator, who founded the monastery and is buried there. After Christy guided us around the building, we sang a hymn about Brendan composed by the Rector Dr John McGinty, we prayed St Brendan’s Prayer and the Lord’s Prayer, and we finished with a group photo.

The next event organised by Valerie Raitt is a pilgrim walk on Slea Head, Dingle Peninsular on Midsummer’s Day, Saturday 21^st June at a cost of €40. It sounds fascinating if your legs are good. You can find out more at tlk.ie/spiritualtourism. If you’re interested, early booking is advisable.

We may not have such magnificent medieval churches in our Nenagh Union of parishes, but alongside our precious parish churches, there are a host of interesting medieval ruined churches and holy wells. I hope we can work with Valerie Raitt to find ways to enable visitors and pilgrims to hear the stories each of them have to tell.

Joc Sanders

27^th May 2025

Paul's advice to Ephesians - and to us

St Paul writing, from an early IXth Century manuscript
in the Abbey of St Gallen, Switzerland 

Reflection at Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 13th May 2025

The first three and a half chapters of Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians are deeply theological, about the relationship between God – as Father, Son and Holy Spirit – and human beings – both individually and together as the Church.

But in today’s reading (Ephesians 4:17-32), Paul moves beyond theology to look at its ethical implications. That is, how the Ephesian Christians should behave to each other and to their neighbours. He insists that their Christian faith must make a difference to how they live. Now, Paul tells them ‘Put away your former way of life, your old self … and clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness’. And Paul continues with very specific advice about how Christians should behave:

You must speak the truth to your neighbours, because you are all members of one community. By neighbours, I am sure Paul means everyone in the community, not just those who are Christians.

If someone angers you, you must seek to make it up. Anger is not wrong in itself – remember, Jesus often showed righteous anger, for instance when driving the money-changers from the Temple. But if you let anger fester – if, in Paul’s words, you ‘let the sun go down on your anger’– you allow evil a way into your lives – you ‘make room for the devil’.

You must be honest in all your dealings – you should work for what you get, not steal it. And why? So that you have something to share with those in need. Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor – but this is not the Christian way: you must work, so that you have a surplus to give away to those who need help.

You must avoid speaking words intended to hurt others rather than help them. And, in this time of fake news, one might add, you must weigh up carefully what you hear, to avoid being deceived into doing what is wrong.

So, says Paul summarising, ‘Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you’.

Paul is addressing the Ephesian Christians of his own time. But his message is just as relevant to Christians in every time and place, and that means to you and me. We must:

• Speak the truth
• Not let disputes fester
• Be honest in all things with everybody
• Be generous to the needy
• Avoid hurtful speech, our own and others’

Let us all take Paul’s advice to the Ephesians to heart.

 

The Good Shepherd and the sheep

 

Christ as the Good Shepherd …
a mosaic in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna
(Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan Church on Sunday 11th May 2025, the 4th of Easter

‘My sheep hear my voice’, says Jesus, ‘I know them and they follow me’.

Now, I don’t have much personal experience of sheep, but one day as a child I helped my Grandfather move a flock to fresh grazing. It wasn’t easy – the sheep took every opportunity to get away through gaps and over ditches as we drove them down the public road. We got them all there in the end, but I’ve never forgotten how wilful sheep can be.

One Sunday, years ago, I was preaching about the Good Shepherd, and I remembered this experience. I expressed surprise that in Jesus’s time shepherds could expect their sheep to follow them. Surely shepherds then must have had a different relationship with their sheep than they do today, I said. After the service a wise and experienced farmer came up to me and said slyly, ‘My sheep follow me’. I asked him how he did it, and he replied, ‘I walk in front of them with a bucket of sheep nuts – they’re intelligent animals, they recognise me, and they know very well what the bucket means’. I learned a good lesson about leadership that day.

John tells us in his Gospel that Jesus said, ‘I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep.’ (John 10:14)

Those who heard him couldn’t agree whether Jesus was the long expected Messiah, or not. Some thought he must be mad, but others pointed to his miraculous deeds, such as causing the blind to see, which was just the kind of thing they expected of the Messiah.

Jesus returns to this shepherd theme in today’s reading from John’s Gospel (10:22-30). He is walking in the temple, sheltering in the portico of Solomon from the winter weather, during the festival of the Dedication. This festival commemorates the re-dedication of the temple 200 years before, after the great Jewish leader John Hyrcanus had defeated the Greek Seleucid king Antiochus IV, who had desecrated it. In Hebrew the festival is called Hanukkah, and Jews still celebrate it around Christmas time – this is why some people, particularly in America, prefer to say ‘Happy Holidays’ rather than ‘Happy Christmas’.

A crowd gathers around Jesus, asking him to put an end to the debate about his identity, ‘How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.’ Jesus knows that many in the crowd are looking for a Messiah who is a great military leader, someone like John Hyrcanus, someone who will liberate them from Roman oppression and re-establish the kingdom of Judah, someone who will make Judea great again. But this is not the kind of Messiah that Jesus knows himself to be. He surely also knows that many in the crowd hate him, and hope he will incriminate himself as a subversive, so they can get rid of him.

So Jesus does not answer directly. Instead he says, ‘I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me; but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.’ Jesus is pointing them to God, who he calls his Father. God works through me, says Jesus, I know those who believe in me, they listen to me and follow me. But you do not.

He continues, ‘I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand.’ Jesus is saying that he gives those who follow him eternal life, which is to know God, and he will keep them safe, because God has given them to him.

‘The Father and I are one’, he finishes. This last phrase infuriates the crowd. Jesus is claiming identity with God, which pious Jews see as blasphemy. In the following verses they get ready to stone him, but Jesus makes his escape and travels away from Judea, across the Jordan. His time has not yet come.

As Christians we believe Jesus when he says, ‘The Father and I are one’.

We believe that God the Father, God the Son, who is our Saviour Jesus Christ, and God the Holy Spirit are three persons but one God.

We should take great comfort from Jesus’s words. We are his sheep, and as our shepherd he gives us eternal life and will keep us safe – nothing and nobody can take us away from him, just so long as we believe in him. As the 23^rd Psalm appointed for today puts it:

‘Though I walk in the shadow of death, I will fear no evil;

for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.’

The truth is we are not alone. Jesus lives and Jesus is in and with us. And not just with you and me, here today, but with everyone who has ever believed, and will ever believe in him, from those first apostles and disciples like Peter and Tabitha we heard about in the 1st reading (Acts 9:36-43), down the centuries to us, and forward in time to Christians yet unborn. United with them, and led by Jesus our Good Shepherd, we make up the eternal church, militant here on earth and triumphant in heaven.

We should listen to the physicists and cosmologists, I think, and look beyond the four dimensions of space and time in which we live our little lives. Because God is not constrained by space and time. In God’s perspective all that is, and was, and is to come (Revelation 1:8), is simultaneously present. And that includes every one of Jesus’s disciples, dead, living, and yet unborn.

Whenever and wherever we live, we are all included in St John’s great vision of the eternal kingdom expressed in the poetry of today’s reading from Revelation (7:9-17). We all belong to that

‘great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white’.

Seen from God’s perspective, outside space and time, in a higher dimension, we stand with them

‘before the throne of God,

and worship him day and night within his temple,

and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter us.

We will hunger no more, and thirst no more;

the sun will not strike us,

nor any scorching heat;

for the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be our shepherd,

and he will guide us to springs of the water of life,

and God will wipe away every tear from our eyes.’

Jesus is not just our Good Shepherd, but also the Lamb who laid down his life to bring us to eternal life.

I shall finish in prayer with the Collect of the Word set for today:

Gracious God,
you sent Jesus, the good shepherd,
to gather us together:
may we not wander from his flock,
but follow wherever he leads us
listening for his voice and staying near him,
until we are safely in your fold,
to live with you for ever;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,

who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen