In life there is much that could depress us or even make us feel that the whole business of living was pretty pointless. For some people life is relatively easy but for many of us there seems to be an endless cycle of problems and sorrows. What is the meaning of life? Many of us are troubled by the cruelty of others. How can people behave as they do? The Old Testament teaches us that God is our Creator and that he is good and loving and indeed we were created for a relationship with him and destined to life in his presence.

Yesterday was the feast of St Luke and as one who was baptised in a St Luke's Church, trained as a nurse, entered the Community on St Luke's Day 32 years ago and bears his name' it is a very special feast for me. While I was pondering what I should write for this address, I was reading this passage from Luke's gospel and something struck me about the passage we have just heard. It begins with Jesus praying all night in the hills, then choosing the twelve apostles. He then comes down with them and heals the multitude of their diseases. After that he sits down and teaches the people in Luke's version of the Beatitudes, which is a guide to holiness.

So it seems to me that there is a definite progression - Prayer, Healing, Holiness - and this is what I would like to explore this evening, because holiness is desperately needed in our Church today. At a conference of contemplative nuns a few years ago we were addressed by the Roman Catholic envoy to England who said, 'What the Church needs is Saints. You are called to be Saints'.

We are all called to be holy but most of us have rather a fuzzy idea of what holiness is. It is easier to see in other people unless they are members of our own families or friends whose faults are glaringly obvious. Last year one of our sisters died and some time afterwards I was speaking with a priest to whom she had been very helpful and he said, 'Of course she was a saint'. My immediate thought was, 'Huh! You didn't have to live with her!' But on reflection he was right. Yes, she was often infuriating but under that was a self giving to God which enabled Him to work through her and many were the letters we had after her death which witnessed to that.

A Dominican Friar of the 14th century, Meister Eckhart, said that holiness 'consists in doing the next thing you have to do, doing it with your whole heart, and finding delight in doing it'. And our own 17th century Anglican, George Herbert, in his famous hymn, 'Teach me my Lord and King, in all things Thee to see,' said the same thing: 'Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws, makes that and the action fine.' Whatever holiness consists of, it is not, 'never making a mistake' or 'being without faults' or 'never upsetting anyone'. Still less is it to do with being in a constant state of ecstasy in communion with God - you only have to read about Mother Teresa of Calcutta's struggles to hold onto her faith to realise that it consists of doing what you have to do, doing it as well as you can and taking delight in so doing. Holiness means being what God intends us to be.

In the 7th century, a saint called Maximus the Confessor spoke of the 'logoi' of all created things; 'the fundamental meaning in accordance with which they have been created'. 'It implies that there is a divine presence and meaning in all things, that there is a unity in all things, that creation is a sacramental reality, and that there is also a divine, dynamic movement in creation towards the creator, from whom creation takes its origin and in whom it finds its meaning. Creation is not a once and for all happening, but has a dynamic movement from and to God. As applied to human beings, our essential nature is the capacity for relationship, an orientation towards love and unity with others and with God.' ( Leslie Morley ) And that is a fair description of what it means to be holy an orientation towards love and unity with others and with God.

We have most of us fallen far short of this ideal. We are probably more aware of our brokenness, our unholiness, our lack of love and unity with others. But Jesus would not have said, 'Be holy even as your Father in heaven is holy' if it were an impossible ideal and he gives his example and the teaching in the Beatitudes to show us the way.

First we need to unite ourselves to Jesus in prayer to God in the Holy Spirit. The prayer I am thinking about is the prayer of supplication, asking God for things, Jesus said that we were to ask for what we need and God would give the Holy Spirit to those who asked for it---and also the wordless prayer which consists of being present before God. A few years back, a young woman was describing to me a walk she had taken with her boyfriend on top of the South Downs in Sussex. The wind was so strong that they couldn't hear each other speak, but it didn't matter because he was there and she was there and that was all that mattered. And I thought, that is an excellent image of prayer; you are there and God is there and though you can't hear Him speak, it doesn't matter. Something is going on at a very deep level which deepens our relationship with God. It is as if Jesus is in us praying to his Father in the Spirit and we are the channel through which that prayer flows and the only thing we can do is stay still in awestruck wonder.

But prayer is not just something we do for a bit and then go back to our ordinary lives. Prayer changes us. God works on us from within and one of the things He does is make us aware of our shortcomings. This can be disconcerting at first as it can be interpreted by us that we are becoming more sinful, less holy. But it is in actual fact a sign that we are indeed proceeding in the right way. Moses in the desert, when the Israelites disobeyed and were smitten by a plague of fiery serpents, was commanded to make a replica of a serpent and put it on a pole. When those who had been bitten looked at the serpent they were healed.

On the spiritual level, it means we have to look at and acknowledge whatever is coming between us and God, what is contrary to His will, because we can only be healed if we first admit that we are sick. I have been struck by the fact that the same word in Greek, sozo, is translated in the Gospels as both healed and saved. Jesus says to the woman who was a sinner, 'Your faith has saved you.' And to the woman with an issue of blood, 'Your faith has made you well', the same word in both places. Salvation cannot be confined to mere physical healing and healing means also saving from spiritual death, that is from sin and its effects. Healing and salvation are linked to faith which is increased by prayer.

Yesterday, Sister Mary Michael and I had the privilege of being at St Paul's Cathedral where St Luke's Hospital for the Clergy was celebrating the centenary of its foundation. The preacher was Archbishop Rowan Williams and among the things he said was that the healing miracles were not problem- solving, but the restoration of a relationship with God who gives much more than we ask for and often what we do not even think to ask for, gratuitously, in an abundance of generosity.

There is a great mystery here. Sometimes Jesus will only heal in response to the faith of the sick person or in response to the faith of someone asking on their behalf, but occasionally he will heal in spite of the lack of faith. He asks the paralysed man at the Pool of Bethesda, 'Do you want to be healed?' and gets an ambivalent reply, but heals him anyway. And one senses that physical healing is not the only aspect. When his friends let the paralytic man down through the roof, Jesus tells him first that his sins are forgiven and then, as if in proof that he was empowered to forgive sins, heals him of his paralysis.

Prayer, faith , healing and salvation are thus very much intertwined. In the silence of our communion with God we are made aware of our 'illness' and asked to be saved from it. This happens again and again throughout our lives as gradually the things long buried come up to the surface to be dealt with. And this is the path which gradually leads to holiness.

It is interesting to look at Jesus' idea of holiness, blessedness. Blessed are the poor, the hungry, those who weep, the persecuted; not many people's idea of blessedness! But look at it as a picture of what holy people are like. Those who know their inability to achieve holiness on their own but rely on God; Those who say with St Paul, 'I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do'; Those who long for people in the world to be peaceful and just; who live lives of integrity; who mourn because the people do not know the things which make for peace; who are misunderstood, calumniated and attacked for their beliefs. Paul cries out, 'Who will save me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord'.

There is a progression here an acknowledgement of our poverty, powerlessness, inability to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps; a hunger because we sense we are missing something, lacking something vital; we weep because it is not in our power to change the world or ourselves, and because the majority of people, at least in the West, dismiss Christianity as at best irrelevant and at worst the fount of all evil and therefore try to attack anyone and any institution which tries to live in accordance with the traditions of the Church and the teachings of Jesus. The most recent example is Richard Dawkins and his vitriolic attack on faith and religion in general in his book, 'The God Delusion'. Most painful of all is when the attacks come from those who are nearest to us. We must expect to be attacked, but as we are only following in the footsteps of Jesus there is cause for rejoicing. Because of our Lord's victory over sin and death, we have the assurance that the Kingdom of God is ours, mourning will be turned to joy, our reward will be great in heaven. We are blessed. Jesus seems to be saying that it is when we experience our lack of power that we can actually be healed and in the wake of that healing comes holiness.

That should give us great encouragement. If we take a good hard look at ourselves and through prayer begin to see where we fall short of the ideal set before us; if we acknowledge our inability to change ourselves but pray to God that He will send the Holy Spirit to convict and convert us; if we weep because of all that happens that is contrary to God's will; if our faith is tested by persecution, that of being subjected to scorn and derision; if all this does not embitter us or make us fearful or defensive; if we can truly love those who disagree with us, hurt us or stand in opposition to everything we believe and pray genuinely for God to bless them in every way; then, I think, a power is given us to work for good that through us, others may be healed and blessed - become holy.

I leave you with a quote from Julian of Norwich; 'By His permission we fall: and by His blessed love and wisdom we are kept and by His merciful grace we are raised to many, many more joys.'

AMEN