You know when you’re at an airport, going on holiday, and you’re flying economy class? Then while at the gate you get an announcement to come to the desk only to be informed that you have been upgraded to business class? Feels good, doesn’t it? And OK, it’s not quite the same as our gospel story today, but hopefully you get the gist. It feels good to get something you didn’t expect. Possibly something you felt you didn’t deserve; to sort of get buoyed up. This is one of the things inferred by Jesus in today’s gospel reading.In general, the teachings of Jesus highlight the importance of humility. And to be quite honest, while I was writing this sermon, about humility, I recognised in myself quite a fair few of the non-humble traits I was writing about. Was quite a wake up call…..In today’s gospel, Jesus gives us not only guidance regarding table manners but also insight into the underlying values that influence our personal lives, our communities, and our position within the kingdom of God. These lessons encourage us to really think about what it means to be called by Christ: to live with humility and grace, while also being aware of those less fortunate than ourselves, or those who are marginalised by society.In the gospel we see guests vying for a seat at the top table, so to speak. Pharisees, keenly aware of social status, rank & order. They exalted themselves, assuming their importance and their expectations of seats of honour. ‘Look at us, how good and honourable we are, how well we keep the laws and observe the Sabbath. How excellent we must be in the eyes of God!’ But their small mindedness which pushes itself forward, leaving others behind, is then confronted by the big-hearted love of God, which is far greater than anything we or they could ever imagine, and they end up being humbled.Jesus taught exaltation versus humility. We need to live with eternity in our sights, not present-day notoriety. We should not seek exaltation ourselves by presumptuously pursuing a position of greatness. We should assume the lower position and let God exalt us, where warranted. Humility is the true path to glory.While Jesus teaches good social advice, His main teaching is about pushing oneself forward, or rather not pushing ourselves forward, not only in the eyes of our fellows but primarily, most importantly, in the eyes of God. Just because someone has money or status doesn’t mean that he or she has a higher standing in the sight of God. We are all in a relationalposition with each other, as God’s children, but it’s how we see ourselves before God that really matters, and that we do not feel deserving of the higher places. How often do we seek recognition, status, or advantage in the eyes of others? The impulse to put ourselves forward, to reach out for what we believe we deserve, is as old as humanity itself. It’s in our DNA. Arrogance, or pride, the opposite of humility, is not just wanting to be noticed, but to be the most noticed. ‘And the Lord harshly punishes the arrogant.’(Ps 31:23) Pride is the great cloud which blots out the sun of God’s generosity. Jesus spent His entire life breaking through that cloud, bringing the fresh healing sunshine of God’s love to those in its shadow.Jesus warns against this striving for status. He tells us that those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted. This is not just a way of avoiding the embarrassment of being asked to take a lower seat, for example, it is a principle of the kingdom of God, a kingdom that stands in stark contrast to the world’s ways. A kingdom that is countercultural.What is humility? It is not self-abasement, nor is it the denial of our worth or gifts. Rather, humility is a realisation of where we are in the grand scheme of existence. It is the courage to see ourselves as we truly are, warts and all —no more, no less—and to regard others with genuine respect and openness. It is the ability to see ourselves honestly, to recognize our dependence on God, and to value others as highly as we value ourselves. In the eyes of Jesus, greatness is not measured by where we sit or how we are seen, but by our willingness to put others ahead of ourselves, to serve rather than be served. He came to serve, not to be served.C.S. Lewis once wrote, "Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less." A humble person does not deny their talents. Humility invites us to acknowledge our strengths with gratitude, and our weaknesses without despair. Even to boast in our weaknesses because that is when God’s power is at its greatest. Humility is indeed countercultural, as already mentioned. Our world is brimming with noise and ambition and often elevates the loudest voice or the proudest gesture. We are encouraged to seek the spotlight, to climb the ladder of success, to secure for ourselves the highest position. But Jesus says, “Take the lowest place.” In the kingdom of God, the way up is down. Literally the upside-down kingdom. True honour doesn’t come from self-promotion, but from humility before God and others.In our human lives, humility can, in fact, stand out as a powerful and transformative virtue. It has a significant influence not only on our interactions with others but also on our spiritual relationship with God. And it is not a sign of weakness, but the foundation of true strength. Scripture teaches us that God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Humility creates space in our hearts where wisdom can take root and where we can hear the still small voice of our God. We can approach our lives with a sense of wonder, recognizing that we are just a small part of a story thatis way bigger and grander than we are, or could ever hope to be.In everyday life, humility is being willing to listen before speaking, to serve without seeking recognition, and to admit when we have been wrong. It is demonstrated when we genuinely celebrate the success of others, but also when we share in their sadnesses or woes. It’s knowing when we need help and not being too proud to ask for it. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness, or that we are a failure. On the contrary, it is a sure sign of strength, admitting that we can’t do it all on our own. We do need the help and support of others, pretty frequently actually. But more than that – we cannot ‘be’ without the help of our God. And so we can come to Him with humility and ask for His help, His grace and His mercy.Jesus tells this parable at a dinner party. Luke uses ‘dinner party’ settings for many of Jesus’ teachings and parables. Today’s dinner party is labelled the ‘fifth disastrous dinner party’ by Nicholas King, it being the fifth such event in the gospel thus far. Four out of the five involve the Pharisees and the prickly relationship between them and Jesus. In Luke’s time of writing, the gentiles were beginning to ‘come to the party’ so to speak, many non-Jews were becoming Christians and coming along to the dinner party prepared by the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob. The Jews found this hard to stomach and worked hard to maintain their place at the top table, as the ‘chosen people.’ So much so, that they failed to grasp what God, though Jesus, was doing – breaking the mould, turning the world on its head. Those who exalt themselves will be humbled and those who humble themselves will be exalted.So, let’s do more than simply imagine a place where people are not measured by status, but by love; not by wealth, but by willingness to serve; not by who they know, but by whom they welcome. This is the vision of the kingdom of God, and it begins with us, at our own tables, and in our own hearts.
Reading of eating and drinking in today’s Gospel, my mind wandered back to childhood family gatherings, Christmas, anniversaries, birthdays. Those occasions when the table was set with an old-fashioned buffet… sandwiches, sausage rolls, trifles, cakes. And there was always an unspoken rule, the family held back. Guests went first. It wasn’t simply manners, it was generosity, hospitality, and a way of making sure that everyone felt welcome.That memory brought to mind something very British too… queueing. Especially during wartime rationing, or on busy weekends outside the post office or the shops. People queued not just because they had to, but because it felt right. Fair play, patience, and respect for others shaped the way we waited our turn. These small disciplines of life carried with them a sense of care for the neighbour.Yet in today’s Gospel Jesus gently unsettles many of our instincts. Someone asks him, ‘Lord, will those who are saved be few?’ Instead of giving a number, he speaks of the ‘narrow door.’ This is not about heaven being rationed, as though there were only a few places, but about how we enter. The Kingdom of God is not reached through entitlement or privilege, but through humility, openness of heart, and readiness to receive grace.The image of a narrow door is a vivid one. Think of visiting an ancient priory, a castle, or a medieval church. The doors are often small, the passageways tight. To go through them you must slow down and pay attention. They invite a change of posture. Even the narrow windows in thick stone towers were not made for show, but for safety. They filtered light, kept out danger, and required a different kind of looking… careful, deliberate, focused.Perhaps Jesus’ narrow door is like that. It is not a sign of restriction or harshness, but of a passage that reshapes us as we enter. It calls us to lay aside baggage and ego, to surrender pride and entitlement, and to pass through in simplicity and trust. It is the way of humility that leads to freedom.Luke places this moment of teaching ‘on the way to Jerusalem.’ That phrase is more than geography… it is theology. The whole Gospel is moving towards the cross. For Luke’s first readers, many of them Gentiles, the question of who truly belonged was pressing. Jesus’ vision here, of people coming from east and west, north and south, to feast with Abraham and the prophets, was a radical reassurance. The Kingdom was open to all who responded in faith.But the challenge is also real. Some protest, ‘We ate and drank with you; you taught in our streets.’ Yet Jesus replies, ‘I do not know where you come from.’ It is possible to be close to the Church, close even to the words of Christ, and yet far from the heart of the Gospel. What matters is not outward proximity but inward transformation.Our other readings today echo the same insight. Isaiah foresees the great gathering of nations, God’s welcome widening to embrace all peoples. Hebrews reminds us that discipline and trial are not signs of distance but of love… the way a parent forms a child. All are being drawn into God’s household, shaped to walk through that door of grace.St Cyril of Alexandria reflects that those who rely on pride or entitlement risk being left outside, while those who come in humility are gathered in by Christ. The Kingdom is not entered through achievement or entitlement, but through humility. And that humility is not learned in grand gestures, but in the daily disciplines of love… in small acts of kindness, in patient endurance, in trust that perseveres even in suffering. Holiness is not about outward show and recognition but about lives quietly shaped by God.And we do see it, don’t we? Think of the parent who cares day by day for a child with a life-changing illness or the spouse who sits faithfully at a hospital bedside. There is no fanfare, no glory, only the steady choice to love. Or think of something smaller still… the stranger who steps aside in a queue to let another go ahead, not because they are in a hurry, but because kindness matters. These are narrow door choices, humble thresholds. Little windows of grace that change the way we see and the way we live.And today, in a very simple way, our parish fair is another glimpse of this. It is not about grandeur, but welcome. As we share time, conversation, and fellowship, we do so not to raise ourselves up but to open wide the doors of hospitality. What we celebrate in miniature today is a sign of the Kingdom… generosity offered, neighbours & community gathered, joy shared.The Eucharist makes this visible in its fullest sense. At the altar there are no first or last. We kneel together, side by side, our hands empty, leaving behind status and achievement. And into those empty hands is placed the same gift… bread broken, wine out poured, the love of Christ shared, Christ himself is our host.So, as we step into the week ahead… with its queues, its family duties, its frustrations, its hidden opportunities… the narrow door is never far. It is near to us in how we speak, how we wait, how we love. It is not a barrier, but an invitation to holiness, to see differently.And like those ancient small doorways that lead into beautiful churches, the way of humility leads to a place of wonder and welcome. Amen.
Sometimes people like to say that the Assumption of Mary is ‘not in the Bible’ and we have to accept that scriptural references are scant. The Gospel we hear today is that of the Annunciation, another feast day entirely, and that is so because there simply is not a Gospel reading that describes the Assumption in the same way as, for example, the Ascension. There is, similarly, no direct mention of the Assumption in any of the other readings we have heard today. So why keep the feast at all? Is it just a pleasantly neat way of gift wrapping the life of the Mother of God in a way that gives us all a little hope? I would like to suggest that if it were so, we should not keep the feast at all – at a funeral, I and no other Priest would say ‘they are in Heaven now’ at the end of the rites – we don’t have the capacity to make that judgement and to do so would be to contravene scripture, we have faith in the love and mercy of God, that is all. In the same way, I would have great difficulty keeping this feast if it contradicted scripture, tradition or reason.It is reasonable to assume that Mary is bodily in heaven with her Son, I believe. It is reasonable to think that He took her to Himself in a way that maybe is a foretaste of the general resurrection of the dead, as once her womb gave life to His embryonic and developing body so His post resurrection fleshy body is united with hers in heaven. But reason is subjective, and we should turn also to tradition which supports an interpretation of scripture that accepts the dogma of the Assumption, and that tradition, with some scriptural consideration and the human reason mentioned earlier, give those of us, myself included, who would need convincing, the ability to place the teaching of the Assumption on sure foundations.We need look no further than the next County for part of those foundations – York Minster contains pre reformation art which depicts the Assumption, and there are accounts of belief in the Assumption that dates back one thousand seven hundred years and maybe earlier, it’s hard to be precise with writings so far back. The writings of St John Damascene in his account of the Council of Chalcedon in 451AD recounts that the Virgins empty tomb was attested to then, and Pope Leo IV celebrated the Feast of the Assumption in the 800’s, but also wrote that it had at that point been kept ‘for centuries’. The reference that people occasionally make to the declaration of Pope Pius XII in 1950 of the Assumption as being a new, or invented, or modern idea is simply false, as a life lived outside of modern English church buildings will testify – and we can go to York to see this, or any number of ancient churches and monasteries in the East and the West. Dismissing the Assumption is to dismiss the faith of the church of God going back before the Great Schism – it dismisses the hope of unity as well, which is the express wish of Christ.It is about love, as well. And the first and primary crucible of divine Love is the persons of the Trinity - the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father and that love of the Father to the Son and the Son to the Father has a name – the Holy Spirit. The great icon showing the Holy Trinity by Rublev, now being used as a political pawn in Russia, reminds us that we can share in the love of the Trinity in which we can dance, and rejoice, and find hope for all time because that dance and hope will last forever and ever in the Kingdom of the Trinity where, this day attests, human flesh will one day reside because Mary is already there in the flesh, with her Son in the Flesh, and Rublev shows that the table the Trinity sit at has a place for us, for humanity, there as well. A place that Mary occupies first for us, to lead us to them. The Assumption shows us the way to get home, shows us the Trinity because it shows us love. Christ became human through Mary and through Mary, the love which burns in the crucible of the Trinity is opened out to humanity. We rejoice because of this love and this love will bring us home.The Second Adam, Christ, has opened through His sacrifice on the Cross the way to heaven and Mary, the new Eve, gazes upon God in her flesh, shares in the love of the Trinity in her flesh. She is the first member of the Church, and she sits in heaven forever representative of the redeemed, restored, forgiven human race, brought home to the heart of the Trinity, sharing with them in the heavenly banquet.The Church of God without the Assumption of Mary would be a poorer one, a less human one, and the Trinity would be less understandable for us, because as always, Mary points the way to her own Son, and she can point us to Him because she is with Him now and will be with Him forever.Pray for us, O most holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.
We hear a lot about faith today, and we become faithful by faithfulness, not by faithlessness, and there is the stumbling block for so many – there are things that we have to do or indeed not do in order to be faithful to the commands that God gave us – and these are of course underpinned by love, so it is by faithfulness to God that we encounter His love, and what He asks is that we understand His love through what He left us – the church, the scriptures, the Holy Ghost who gives life to those things. If there were an easier way, I would happily take it, but the feet of Him whose steps we follow did not themselves have it easy. Faithfulness, as anybody who has known love will tell you, requires commitment. Faith requires commitment.Christians in the UK are having to face the reality that our numbers continue steadily to decline and society is no longer recognisably Christian in any meaningful sense. There are many factors that have contributed to this decline – the materialism of a wealthy society that can enslave the worse off with loans to buy rubbish that only the wealthy benefit from, a widespread amnesia about the nation’s Christian roots, the prevailing view that religion is a private matter – even among Christians who choose not to speak about their faith, the desire to be seen to be impartial in matters of religion and a consequent neglect of Christian teaching in schools – even Church schools - and an inertia on the part of many Christians when it comes to meeting the challenge posed by secularism. For this we are all to blame – from those who govern down to individual Christians.All children, of whatever faith, deserve a thorough education in our Judaeo-Christian heritage if they are to understand our nation’s history and culture including our concept of human rights and duties to community, and we need to rediscover our own heritage of welcoming the stranger, feeding the hungry, visiting the sick and working for justice and peace if we are to keep our Christian heritage – for it would be impossible to our forefathers to imagine bearing the name ‘Christian’ and not doing those things.The second reading reminds us that faith was Jewish before it was Christian and indeed Abraham’s faith predates even the Jewish tradition. Abraham may have been an illiterate nomad but his faith in God was sure. It was the honest response of a human soul to his Creator. It was as pure as the response of fallen humanity can be and established a faithfulness and obedience to the world and call of God on which we also base our own hope, our own faith. His obedience was such that he was even willing to sacrifice his own son, Isaac, the very son through whom God would effect His promise. Isaac was as much the fruit of his mother’s faith as his father’s. Yet neither parent could have hoped to see the countless descendants that God had promised, that one day their ‘yes’, echoed and given a new life, a new Covenant by the ‘yes’ of Mary, would lead to a building in Blackpool wondering how we are to carry this on, how we keep the faith going – and the answer, we are told over and over again in the readings today, is to say ‘yes’ ourselves to the change and movement which comes to all who faithfully follow God and to have faith, even when things seen impossible. Maybe what we need to rediscover is the glorious liberty of not having to engrave plaques and stone with our names, but to live in such a manner that the Covenant of faithfulness is kept by us and those who follow us, Abraham, and his descendants forever.Faith, hope and charity are the work of God’s Spirit within us. They are all connected and we should pray for an increase in all three. Just as Abraham recognized that his faith made demands of him, we must accept the demands being made of us – above all the demand to witness to Jesus Christ by what we say and do. The gospel is not just a reminder to act, but also a warning of the dangers of not acting on our faith. Much has been entrusted to us – in fact far more than was entrusted to Abraham. He will be the first to condemn us if we fail to witness to the truth that God has come to us in Jesus, to make His love for us visible and tangible. He will be the first to ask why he made the journey, and Mary to ask why she said ‘Yes’ and had faith to walk to the cross, and we who have been given all this, we have been so easy to lose it, to say ‘well, what can you do’. What can we do? Stay faithful, keep committed, keep loving the God who calls us and having the faith of Abraham and Sarah and Mary to leave our comfort and venture into the unknown and to the unknown where God is so often found.We need solid grounds for believing in ourselves and grounds for genuine, lasting hope. We can only truly believe in ourselves if we first believe in God and in what His Son has promised to those who are faithful to Him. Now is the time to perfect our response to His great love for us. For those who are faithful to Jesus Christ there truly is no need to be afraid of where the journey will take us, for it will end in Him, the source of our hope and our longing, our love and our commitment. He is always faithful to that, let us pray that we may be so as well.
