Sunday 19 August 2007

Twentieth Sunday of Year C 19 August 2007


Photo taken at Pentecost of James (in the red dalmatic) congratulating one of the ten converts received at mass that day.




Homily for Twentieth Sunday in Year C 19 August 2007

This is one of those uncomfortable Gospel readings, especially if we like to think of Jesus as meek and mild, or if we are like the person who accosted me on the 484 the other day to tell me that she had several problems with the Church but not with Jesus because after all, he was a modern man who got on with everybody.

Today’s Gospel reminds us very clearly just how demanding Jesus will be if we embark on a relationship with him. It will inevitably shake us up and cause friction, conflict even, at some point in our lives. Jesus says to the disciples quite bluntly, “Do you suppose that I am here to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.” And he explains why: “I have come to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were blazing already!”

What is this fire he is talking about? We must be clear first of all that he is not talking about the fire of hell or the fire of punishment- we do not believe in a God who is rubbing his hands with glee saying “Now they’re for it, I’ve had enough now, I’m really going to punish them this time!” We on the contrary believe in a God who never tires of us, whatever we get up to. This symbol of fire that Jesus uses is the fire that is the awe-inspiring presence of God, the close awareness of God. This comes from the Old Testament of course, and first of all from the encounter that Moses has with God on Mt Sinai in Exodus 3. There we read that God appeared to him “in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed”. And God calls to Moses out of the flames and reveals to him his name, “I am who I am”, he reveals to him something of his nature, of his very essence, exactly what kind of God he is. And then later, when Moses has led the Israelites out of Egypt and into the wilderness there was a pillar of cloud, that turned at night into a pillar of fire, which stayed with them and which signified to them the continuing presence of God in all their wanderings and troubles, and which acted as their guide as we read in Numbers 9. The pillar of fire guided them all the time, they were constantly aware of it. The Fathers of the Early Church all agree that this fire that guides the Israelites is in fact the Holy Spirit, and of course this reminds us straightaway of the birth of the Church at Pentecost, when St Luke describes the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles with the words “and there appeared unto them tongues as of fire….resting on each one of them”. So what Jesus is fervently wishing for the world is not that there should be some ghastly punishment, but that there should be a new awareness of God, a new closeness of people’s lives to God’s will, all over the earth. And how he wishes that this sense of the reality, the immediacy of God, would set people ablaze with a new enthusiasm for living the sort of life that God wants us to live.

Fire is a potent symbol- it stands for warmth and light, indeed our ancestors in their caves only began the long march towards civilisation when they discovered fire and all its properties. It also stands for purefying- in the heat of the fire impurities drop away and in the heat of autoclaves surgical implements become sterile and fit for use in the operating theatre. And it stands for moulding and recreating- in intense heat sand is turned by glass-blowers into glass, and once they are melted by the heat metals can be poured into moulds and take on new shapes and new uses. All of these ideas resonate with us, don’t they, as we think about what a close encounter with God would involve, and what changes it would start off in us. If we let it, that is. Because of course the other thing about fire that has to be borne in mind is, that it is dangerous! So too it is dangerous to get close to God- Moses, we read, “hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God”. It is a risk, because God is a lover, he is the best of lovers, and like all lovers, he is demanding. Or perhaps, to put it another way, when we begin to realise more and more of the nature of God, we will see with increasing clarity the things in our lives that are out of place, that jar, that must sooner or later go- our love for God will cause us to make demands on ourselves. And we will change, the fire of love will change us, and we will come to desire that change, because nothing less will satisfy us in our ambition to be close to God.

And then of course we will discover that not everyone in our life, be it in the family circle or in the workplace or wherever, will be comfortable with the change that they see in us. For our newly kindled awareness of God in our fellow men and women may cause us to speak out against unfairness and injustice in a way we haven’t bothered or dared to before; our new knowledge of God may cause us to see the wrong thinking that lies behind some of our country’s laws and find us having to stand up for the Church’s teaching in a more open way than we have been inclined to before- we may in other words find that we have to stand up and be counted! We will no longer be content just to relax and go with the flow of our society, because we will be resting in the Lord and going with the flow of the Holy Spirit. Jesus knows this very well, which is why he is carefully warning his disciples of the cost of discipleship in this reading- “the father divided against the son” and so on. For it is in the crucible, in the fire of a real encounter with God, in the heat of the moment, so to say, that we see what God requires of us and how much must be burnt away before we can be poured into the mould he has prepared for us. The risks are great, but the rewards are even greater!

This morning we approach the God who lives in the burning bush, which is the tabernacle, the God whose presence never leaves his faithful people, the God who, giving himself to be consumed by us in every Mass, is nevertheless never consumed. As we receive Our Lord in Holy Communion today, let us ask make this our prayer: Lord Jesus, enkindle in us the fire of your love, the fire of the awareness of what you wish to do in our lives. Amen.

Thursday 16 August 2007

Eve of the Assumption 14 August 2007

Homily for the Eve of the Assumption 14 August 2007

Many years ago I was teaching at a Church of England school for girls in Westminster, where the Headmistress was a formidable woman, Dorothy Stephenson- it had been a grammar school in its heyday, and the saying was that it wasn’t anymore but no-one had dared tell the Head. She used to give little sermons at morning assembly and I remember one feast of Our Lady when she began like this: “Now the Virgin Mary was a young girl, not much older than some of you, but there was one big difference”- and she fixed the girls with a hard stare at this point- “she was obedient!”

The Virgin Mary is indeed like us, a human being like us, but there is a difference, and Miss Stephenson was not so far wrong in her view of what that difference consisted of. We know what it was, essentially, and we remind ourselves of the difference every time we say the Hail Mary, when we call on Our Lady and say “Hail Mary, full of grace”. Our Lady was full of grace. Now the text of the first part of the Hail Mary comes as you know from St Luke’s Gospel, the greeting that the angel Gabriel gives to Our Lady, sometimes translated as “full of grace”, sometimes as “highly favoured one”. The Greek word is very important, it is kecharitomene, and actually this is not an adjective, “full”, it is a passive, and literally means “the one who has been filled up, or if you like, the one who has allowed herself to be filled right up to the brim with grace. She is completely filled with the grace of God, so that there is no corner of her life that is not covered by it, there is no area which she has reserved to herself- and hence, of course, no room for any sin, no possibility for God’s will for her to be blocked in any way. She herself acknowledges this when she says to the angel “let it be to me according to your word”.

That is where the difference between us and Our Lady lies- we all receive grace from God, grace to enable us to respond to his will for us, but, unlike Our Lady, we restrict the action of that grace in our lives. We hold back bits of ourselves from God, we want to hang on to various areas of our lives, and so grace cannot permeate us to the full, we do not achieve the fullness of grace that was Our Lady’s special privilege.

Nevertheless, that is what God wills for us, that is the destiny he had in mind for each one for us- to be like Our Lady, completely conformed to his will by our total acceptance of his grace flowing into every part of ourselves. The point was forcefully made by none other than our dear lamented Cardinal Lustiger, who died in Paris ten days ago. In a homily on the feast of the Assumption in Notre Dame a few years ago, the Cardinal said that God wants each Christian to have his or her own version of the destiny of Mary. Mary was the vessel chosen by God to bring into the world Our Saviour Jesus Christ, and that actually, when you think about it, is our vocation too. After all, each of us is in a sense the servant, the handmaid of the Lord. He says “C’est la volonté de Dieu que son serviteur soit dans le monde celui par qui la vie est donnée - It is the will of God that his servant should be in the world the one through whom life is given”. May each of us strive to realise in our lives this high vocation, to bring the life of Christ to our world, and may our blessed Lady help us to achieve this, by encouraging us to respond – “sans réserve” as Saint Claude used to say, without holding back- to the graces that God will surely send us. Amen.

Sunday 12 August 2007

Homily for Eighteenth Sunday of Year C 5 August 2007


Homily for Eighteenth Sunday of Year C 5 August 2007

Today’s Gospel starts with what seems to us at first glance a perfectly reasonable request: a man in the crowd asks Jesus to persuade his brother to share their inheritance between them- “give me a share of our inheritance”. It sounds like a request for justice, for fair shares, and so we are perhaps a bit surprised at Our Lord’s rather cool reaction and refusal to get involved- “Who made me your judge or the arbitrator of your claims?” We need to look at that request of the man in the crowd a little more closely- what is it really about? What is he really saying? As so often, to make sense of these things we have to go back to the original greek text. The word we have translated as “inheritance”- kleronomia- is actually, as the RSV, always more accurate, knows, a word meaning property, or real estate. Divide up the property, is what the man is saying. And the word for “arbitrator” –meristes- is literally a word that means “divider”, the one who splits the property up. Now, in the Jewish world at the time of Jesus, normally a dead man’s estate passed whole and entire to the firstborn, what we call in legal terms primogeniture. But you could ask to have it split between the children, which is the norm in some countries like France today. The problem was, would the farm, or whatever the state consisted of, still be viable once it was split up? And this is part of what we must consider this morning: is it OK for me to have what I want from life, what I think of as rightfully mine, is this a legitimate ambition? And especially, we need to consider, is it still OK if my taking these things for myself means taking them away from somebody else? Because usually, my having something will mean someone else, perhaps someone equally or more deserving than me, not having it. And what do we think about that?

Don’t worry, I am not going to use this as a springboard to preach against material things and to urge renunciation upon you. How could I, who you all know, am one of the most acquisitive of people, risk such a thing! No, there is nothing wrong, as far as I see it, in wanting and acquiring the good things of this world- up to a point, and as long as we recognise- as the Church has been teaching from the great Leo XIII in the late nineteenth century to the present day- that possessions come with responsibilities as well as rights. The idea too that you might want to put something by for a rainy day, does that seem so bad? It sounds like the action of a prudent person, and I am sure we would all like to be in the comfortable position of the rich man who says to himself “you have plenty of good things laid by for many years to come”, and indeed, perhaps some of you are!

And again, I have to say I rather like the sound of the advice the rich man gives himself: “take things easy, eat, drink, have a good time!” Food and drink, especially wine- especially perhaps Cotes du Rhone- these are surely among the good gifts of a loving Father that we are expected to relish? Enjoying the fruits of creation, appreciating the good things of life, well, it’s almost a religious duty, depending how you look at it. So I often reason with myself.

But there is a danger in all this, isn’t there. And the danger seems to me that in what seems like a proper desire to become self-sufficient, to stand on one’s own two feet in life, and to have your pension plan sorted and your investments ticking over nicely, you can begin to think that you have got life under your own control. What a delusion! And somehow then God is often gradually sidelined, because he is needed so much less, as there are fewer and fewer occasions when we feel frail and unprotected and when the future frightens us, and these, as Fr Bosco reminded us last week, are usually the only occasions in which we turn to God in prayer at all. This is why in his version of the Beatitudes St Luke can say just “Blessed are you poor”- God will always be a vivid reality to people who have no money to shield them from whatever life throws at them.

But life will throw things at us, whoever we are and however much money we’ve got. And we fool ourselves, don’t we, if we think that our possessions and policies, that make us feel so secure, are the source of our ultimate security- as Jesus says “a man’s life is not made secure by what he owns”. The good things of life, which we rightly enjoy, may be taken from us without warning- look how we are reeling in St Saviour’s this week from the sudden death of our beloved Josephine, gone from us in the twinkling of an eye. She is someone, we may safely guess, who is going straight to the heavenly banquet, but can each of us be so sure about ourselves? Will I be going straight from the foie gras and the Cotes du Rhone to the nectar and the ambrosia of the feast with the saints? At the moment it is too close to call….

And so, while we still have time, that most precious of our possessions, and one that may be taken from us any second, let us sort out our portfolio for Heaven, and just as we might go to a financial adviser to get our investments on to a solid footing, let us think about going to another sort of specialist, let us take a searching look at our spiritual life and make a visit to the Confessional this month. Let us make ourselves rich, then, whether we can make ourselves honestly rich in the sight of the world or not, rich in the sight of God. Lord Jesus, give us the grace to keep “our thoughts on heavenly things” as St Paul says, so that when the demand is made for our souls, we will not appear before you empty-handed, but be able to offer you a hoard made up, not of gold and silver, but of our prayers an good deeds. Amen.