Fr John Francis on Swiss Radio.

If we want peace and are prepared to do the hard job of sowing it, then we will receive it. If we truly want joy or love or any of these fruits, and if we want them desperately enough, then we will labor in the heat of the day, preparing the ground, plowing, weeding, planting, watering, we will reap. In this sense, God gives us what we want in life. But we have to really want it. God will probably not open up our lives to reap love if we're unwilling to sow it in other people first.

But when we focus too much on the past we flirt with twin dangers – nostalgia and regret. We can idolize the past, enshrine it as a time that was happier, holier, and all round better than now; or we can curse the past - ruminate on mistakes we made, decisions we blew, sins we committed. And those two roads are dead ends. It doesn’t matter which one of them you pick – they will both distract from seeing God now, make you fearful about the future, and depress your mood.

I wonder if you have broom tree. I wonder if you go there sometimes, sit under it, and submit to the demons of despair like Elijah. I wonder if you too have done great things for God or for humans; exerted yourself, stepped out in faith, put your time and energy on the line, achieved amazing results, and then crashed. Do you know that exhaustion that doesn’t just melt away with a good night’s sleep but that attaches to your body, mind and spirit, and like a creeping vine strangles the hope out of you? I wonder if you have been so low, and so unable to see a way up that you have even uttered Elijah’s prayer.

The year was 1226 -- the day was October 3rd, Saint Francis of Assisi left us and joined the realms of heavenly light. Saint Francis of Assisi -- a name that means "free man".

Maybe we don’t like the idea that the Holy Spirit is down and dirty, living in the ugly, the pained, the dying. We don’t like grey, even if it does come with a shiny neck. Grey is rain and cloud; it is drab and melancholy. Grey is the color of impersonal cities, soul-destroying high-rises, foreboding skies and threatening seas. Grey is at best dull, and at worst dangerous. Maybe that is why the pigeon at Christ’s baptism is white in Western art. Online you’ll find volumes of paintings of Jesus’ baptism. Many of them feature a bird. None of them are grey. This unsettling, unpredictable Pentecost we must resist the tendency to see God merely in the holy and the beautiful. Because we don’t live in the holy and beautiful. We live in the grey – where there’s distress, and death, and decay, and doubt. We live with the grey because that is where the Spirit of God is. We wish it were not so; we wish we could find the white bird and live aloof from the dirt of this world, be transported to a place without the mess.

We can choose to stay with them, and drag them around with us, like the ghost of Jacob Marley in ‘A Christmas Carol’. Or we can allow God the Chain-breaker to do what God the Chain-breaker does, and live in the freedom he has won for us. We can remain enclosed in our tight little, slight little vision of life. Stay safe and sound in our risk-free, small-minded, nothing-ventured-nothing-gained shackles of ordinariness. Take up residence in a cell of lukewarm faith, half-hearted commitment, low-energy discipleship. Refuse to invite God the Chain-breaker to set us free, fearing that if we turn over our hearts to him he may expand them, fill them with dreams, and stuff them with love.

I’m not a psychiatrist, neither am I an expert in public policy, so it’s not for me to suggest how you and I can make a difference to this appalling public health crisis. Except in one way. As your pastor I can suggest something. Love. Love our depressed neighbors, our anxious neighbors, our neighbors who have some imbalance in their brain chemistry, love those who were born atypical, or became so after trauma of some kind. Love them. And I’ll leave you and the Holy Spirit to collaborate in working out what that means in your situation.

This line on the floor is a hinge, a boundary, a gateway, a Prime Meridian. It’s the one that Peter straddled in the attic in Joppa. On one side is Tabitha’s bed, Gazelle’s bed, the place of death. And on the other is the land of the living. On one side is the graveyard of dreams. On the other the maternity ward of hope. On one the law of cold hard justice – the salary of sin is death. On the other is the law of grace – the free gift of peace with God, with people, with yourself, and with all creation. Peter straddled it because that’s what we followers of Jesus do. We grasp the hand of God, and resurrection passes through our bodies, across that line to touch the people and situations in the place of death.

Here’s the end of your life - where Christ has gone, so will you. As he has passed through death and into resurrection, so will you; as he has faced down humankind’s last enemy and walked on victorious, so will you. This is your destiny. Yes, the right way to read a book is to begin at the end. Your life is not heading into oblivion. Your future is not bones fossilizing for ever under ground, or ashes scattered in Yankee Stadium. Your future is resurrection – a new body, free of pain and aging, a mind without anxiety and confusion. Start the book from the end and let God’s pure light illumine the true nature of what you are experiencing now.