Saturday 9 August 2008

Homilies on St Paul

Homily for XV Sunday of Ordinary Time 13 July 2008

As we are in the Year of St Paul, I’ve set myself the task of preaching, wherever possible, in the coming months not on the Gospel, but the Epistle, so that we can follow the Holy Father’s desire to reflect more deeply on the thought of St Paul.
Today’s second reading is taken from the Letter that Paul wrote to the Romans, which is the most complicated of all his writings and contains many of his favourite themes. One reason, incidentally, that it is so long and complex, is that, unlike all the other letters he wrote, Paul is not writing to people he knows, to his own converts- the Christian community in Rome, although it did contain some people he had met over the years on his travels, was unknown to him and he had not been their founder, the one who had converted them. And so he is at great pains to introduce himself and his teaching very carefully- he wants both to make a good impression on them and to make himself clear, without any misunderstandings.
One of Paul’s favourite themes is the contrast between Adam, the first man, who disobeyed God and brought about the ruin of the easy relationship between humanity and God, and Jesus, the new Adam or the second Adam, as he sometimes calls him, who by his life of complete obedience put right that relationship once and for all- what do we say, using Paul’s own words, on Good Friday?- “he became obedient unto death, even death on a cross”. Adam’s great sin, you remember, was the determination he had to make himself like God, making himself the judge of what is good and what is evil, the one decision God had told him was not his to make and on which the happiness of Adam and Eve depended in the idyllic state of total peace with God that we call the Garden of Eden. The snake said to Eve in the Garden, that if she and Adam eat the forbidden fruit, “your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil”. Whereas, Jesus, as Paul reminds us in his Letter to the Philippians, did the complete opposite: “though he was in the form of God (he) did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men”.
Now as you know the sin of Adam had enormous consequences, and ever since those days of innocence in the Garden, we have found having a relationship with God a difficult thing to sustain- our human nature keeps getting in the way, letting us down- you remember that elsewhere in Romans Paul is so frank about his own failings, typical of us all- “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” and so on. And in Paul’s eyes, not just mankind went adrift because of Adam’s Fall, but in some way so did the whole of God’s creation. You remember that when God created the world the idea was that Adam should look after it properly, on God’s behalf as it were, and that creation would be one harmonious whole, like a cultivated and well tended garden. But somehow, as far as Paul can see- and he was living many centuries before man had the kind of technology he has now to inflict permanent damage on the environment- man, because of his fallen human nature, is no longer able to be a reliable steward of the created world, and hence the world around us is as much in need of salvation as we are. For only when man is back in his right relation with God, only when he has stopped playing God but once again allowed God to be centre-stage, is there any hope either for the human race or for the world which it is supposed to be taking care of. The world, the climate, the environment, these are all going to be a mess, reflecting inevitably the mess human beings are in with God. All that is what lies behind what Paul is trying to say here, why “the whole creation is eagerly waiting”- the world, which is supposed to be a beautiful garden, is “unable to attain its purpose” and like us human beings wants to be freed from all the consequences of sin to be once again on an even keel. We too are “unable to attain (our) purpose” until we put ourselves right with God, we too will always be a bit askew until we align with Our Lord Jesus, for only then will we be set free from all the human failings that constantly hold us back.
No wonder we groan! St Paul says “the entire creation…has been groaning in one great act of giving birth” and “we too groan inwardly.” Last week there was a lot of groaning on the centre court at Wimbledon, as Federer and Nadal slogged it out. (there, I’ve done it, I’ve mentioned sport in a sermon!) Those groans of theirs were not the groans of self pity but the groans of effort, of self encouragement, as those two finely matched young men tried to find within themselves ever deeper resources of energy and skill, of determination. They were really pushing themselves, weren’t they. That is what St Paul is talking about here- I think- that constant effort that we must push ourselves to keep on making, to maintain that friendship with God, what Paul calls “the Life of the Spirit” that has been made possible for us by the life of obedience and the death of obedience of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Lord Jesus, we know that without you we cannot attain our purpose or fulfil our destiny to become the sons and daughters of God who as St Paul says “enjoy the freedom and glory ofas the children of God”. Come to us today at this Mass, come to each one of us, and fulfil our desire for your friendship “as we too groan inwardly for our bodies to be set free”. Amen.

Homily for XIX Sunday in Ordinary Time 10 August 2008

As we have entered now into the Pauline Year, the year dedicated by the Holy Father to St Paul, I would like to share with you some thoughts, not on today’s Gospel, but on today’s Epistle, which is an extract from Paul’s famous letter to the Romans- a community, you remember, which he had not founded and people he was at pains to explain himself thoroughly to. Much of the Letter before today’s extract is taken up with a great theme of St Paul, which is, that within the Christian Church we are all one, we are all equal, we are all have the same status, whoever we are – a view which he sums up in a famous verse in his letter to the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”.
St Paul says that it just doesn’t matter what our racial background is, because the really important thing is, not these details like colour of skin or country of origin which do show our differences, but what hides our differences, what unites us- our common humanity. And all humanity has been created by God and destined by God to be in a special relationship with him, not just the Jews. OK, St Paul says, the Jews had a head start, they had the revelation of God that we know as the Old Testament, the Word of God in the Psalms and the Prophets, but the rest of you have no excuse- anyone can come to knowledge of God, whether you have the Bible or not. How? Well, St Paul says, use your eyes! We can come to an understanding of God from just looking at the world around us, the wonders of nature if you like- there must be a God behind all this. St Paul says at the start of this letter in Chapter 1 “ever since the creation of the world, his invisible nature, namely his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made”. I was reading the other day a homily of St Basil, that great monk of the fourth century in what is now Turkey, in which he says “Look at a bee- even a small thing like a bee is enough to convince you of the existence of God; look how it is made, how the sting fits into its tiny shaft!” He says “even the smallest objects in the world are an invitation to faith”. That is what St Paul is saying too- the evidence for God is all around you if you think about what you see. The other reason why we have no excuse whoever we are to ignore God, is the fact that we are all born with a conscience, a sense of what is right and wrong- St Paul says of the gentiles “they show that what the law requires is written on their hearts while their conscience also bears witness”. Cardinal Newman once described our conscience as “the voice of God within”, and our conscience is certainly that, the place where we hear, if only we will listen, the promptings of the Holy Spirit. This is what St Paul means when he says in today’s passage “my conscience in union with the Holy Spirit”.
Having gone on about all this at length, here in the ninth chapter of his Letter, St Paul decides that he needs to explain about the Jews a bit more fully. This is something he feels he needs to do because the early church communities that met in Rome had had to start with a lot of Jewish members, but the Emperor Claudius had thrown all the Jews out of Rome, so the churches ended up being just full of Gentiles- but by the time Paul is writing this, the ban on Jews living in Rome had ended, and the Jewish Christians were coming back- and feeling unwanted in their old church because now they were no longer in the majority and in their absence things had moved on. Familiar to some of us, that feeling? Look how St Saviour’s has changed- I’ve only known it in recent years, but I imagine there was once a time when the congregation was all white, nearly all Irish perhaps, and then maybe there was a time when the congregation was indeed mixed, but only people of certain backgrounds ever did anything like read or run anything. Was it once like that? So anyway these Jewish Christians felt their noses a bit put out when they turned up again, things weren’t as they used to be and they didn’t feel at home any more. To them, St Paul, anxious as ever to deal fairly with everyone and not to upset anyone if he can help it, devotes three whole chapters, 9-11, to reminding them of their great heritage as part of the Chosen People, the ones to whom God spoke first- the people dear Pope John Paul II used to call “our elder brothers”. “The promises were made to them” he says “and from their flesh and blood came Christ”.
Poor St Paul- he can’t get over the fact that the Jewish people, with all these advantages, have by and large overwhelmingly rejected Jesus and his claim to be the Messiah and as a result he says “my sorrow is so great, my mental anguish so endless”. Whereas, of course, the Gentiles, the rest of us, with only our consciences and our discerning of God’s nature from our observation of the world he has created, have been the ones who have accepted Our Lord Jesus and his message. The Acts of the Apostles, a book which tells us much about St Paul, ends with a sermon he actually gave once he finally got to Rome, and got to meet these people he wrote this Letter to. He spent ages there arguing with Jews, as St Luke says “trying to convince them about Jesus” with only partial success. As they were getting up to walk out, Paul says “You shall indeed hear but never understand, you shall indeed see but never perceive” and he ends “Let it be known to you then that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles- they will listen”. They will listen- and this is how the Book of Acts finishes- they will listen. That’s us, we are the Gentiles, from all the nations of the earth here today –are our eyes open and do we understand what we see, are our ears open and do we understand what we hear? O dear Jesus, your salvation has indeed been sent to us, and from our hearts we assure you: we will listen. Amen.

Sunday 29 June 2008

Pentecost 12 May 2008

Homily for Pentecost 11 May 2008
After this homily we shall have the great joy of welcoming into the Catholic Church the group of eight converts who are in our front rows this morning and who have been attending for the past four months our second RCIA programme on Fridays. They have come, as always, from a variety of backgrounds and beliefs but for each of them the Holy Spirit has been leading them step by step- with sometimes a few steps backwards too, but that’s OK- towards this moment, when they become members of the Church founded by Our Lord himself, founded on this very day, Pentecost, when the tongues of fire came down on those first disciples gathered with our Lady in the Upper Room, as we have just heard in our reading from the Acts of the Apostles. It is of our new catholics today that St Paul is speaking in particular when he says that the Holy Spirit “is working in all sorts of different ways in different people”. They stand before us as a great example of just that- the Holy Spirit working in individual lives and calling them to make the choices in their lives that will bring them to a close relationship with Our Lord in his Church.
Many of these good people have spoken of their sense of unworthiness as this moment of commitment approaches- how can I, with all my inadequacies, come into the Church/? And in response to this I am reminded of a conversation I had recently with an old Italian lady who is a patient in one of the psychiatric hospitals where I am a chaplain. She has been very depressed and is very infirm and aged, but she remains very lucid. One day, looking back on her long life, and feeling the weight of the past on her, she said to me “I am not a lapsed Catholic, I am a bad Catholic”. To which I replied “Well, I’m not a very good one myself!” We know, don’t we, that we are not at Mass this morning because we are good Catholics, we know ourselves- I hope- too well to rest on our laurels. We recall Our Lord’s parable about the Pharisee who comes into the temple to pray and tells God how good he is, how religious he is, and who looks at those people in the next pew and says “Thank God I am not like that sinner over there”. That does not impress Jesus at all. Our Lord prefers the attitude of the man who creeps in at the back, conscious of all his many failings, and says “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner”. We all of us know in our hearts that we are that man, we have crept in, not relying on our own merits but on the unconditional love and constant forgiveness of God. In the Litany of Loreto which we often say in honour of Our Lady, one of the titles we give her is “Refuge of sinners”- that is also of course an excellent description of the Catholic Church. The Church founded by the one who said “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance”, founded by the great Healer of lives, who said “Those who are well have no need of a physician but those who are sick”, it is that Church, the Refuge of Sinners, into which our dear converts, like the rest of us, have crawled today. Life has bruised us all, life has been a muddle in which we struggle to find meaning, a jigsaw we seem never able quite to put together. But look, today you become a catholic- which is really the day you are given the picture on the box by which you will now be able to finish the puzzle and fit all the pieces together. The picture, the pattern, is none other than Our Lord himself. Now you have the picture, and now it will be up to you to start sorting the pieces out and putting your life, bit by bit, into the right order- and if you persevere, worrying about the bits that don’t seem to fit, what to do with some of the blank uncharted areas, and so on, you will make of your life a copy of the picture on the box, that is, a faithful copy of Our Lord’s own life, which is the Christian vocation of us all. You are joining a community of Catholics here in Lewisham, and in so doing joining the Catholic Church throughout the world. You are joining a community of people who are honest enough to know that they are not holy, not that good, but who know that holiness and goodness do exist and that they are within our grasp if we only try, if we spend our lives making an effort in the right direction. We are not holy yet, not good yet but please God we will be. To spur you on in that lifelong endeavour for holiness and goodness that you now publicly embark on, you will have the Holy Spirit, about to be imparted to you in the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation- that Holy Spirit which “will lead us into all truth”. “Light immortal, light divine, Visit thou these hearts of thine, and our inmost being fill”. Amen.

Portugal pilgrimage 24 May 3008

Homily preached in Braga Cathedral 24 May 2008

Today we come to the end of our pilgrimage, which has been a journey in many senses for us. Physically, we have travelled from one country to another, and then on to another; but also on a spiritual level we have been on a journey- we have made this week a conscious effort to move on in our lives. Each of us has issues- we know in our hearts what they are, I know what issues I have to work on in my own life- issues which we have been trying this week to make progress with, to move onwards with.
We have been on various motorways a lot this week, and how fast we have been able to travel on them- everything that hinders ordinary travel has been removed on motorways- there are no traffic lights, no obstacles in the way, all is smooth and we can just shoot along to our destination with nothing blocking our path. How unlike normal travelling that is- I think of the 484 bus which takes me from St Saviour’s up the hill to my home, how slow it goes, how many things get in its way! And as we sped along those motorways, we could see all the other roads in the valleys and on the hillsides beside us, busy roads clogged with traffic, lanes and byways, little cart tracks going up to the vineyards and so on. They were rather different! Well, we have tried this week to be on a motorway in our spiritual life: we have removed all the obstacles that get in the way at home- our jobs, our routines, the household chores, our families and friends and the demands they make on us and our time- we have had a clear run without them, so that nothing could get in the way of prayer and contemplation, of that practice of reflecting on God’s work in our lives and seeing his hand in everything, that we considered at Fatima, particularly in the devotion of Francisco. But now alas we head for home and we face a return to the byways, the side roads, the dark alleys, the cul de sacs of our lives.
In this regard I want to quote to you a French poem I came across this week again:
Tous les chemins de Dieu vivant
Mènent à Pâques,
Tous ceux de l’homme à son impasse:
Ne manqué pas au croisement
L’auberge avec sa table basse;
Car le Seigneur vous y attend.
You see there must be in our lives a crossroads, a junction, where our little road can meet the great highway, some roundabout where if we follow the right signs and don’t lose our nerve we can get on to the motorway that will be our fast lane to God, that will shoot us through to the intimacy with him that is our goal. Yesterday we celebrated Corpus Christi here in Portugal and we will again tomorrow back in London. It has been a great blessing for us that we have had all the added insights of that great feast this week, the celebration of the ongoing miracle of Holy Communion, because of course that is where we join the highway- Holy Communion is the great encounter, Jesus himself is the junction through which we enter the divine life, he himself is the Way, that road that leads to God and the fullness of life in his presence. At the crossroads, don’t miss the inn, for the Lord is waiting for us there. This chapel is the Braga turn-off, here in this cathedral we can join the King’s Highway. Here is the altar, and this altar is the inn at the crossroads, don’t miss it! Our Lord is the Host, and he waits to give himself to us and to take us with him in the fast lane to eternal life.

10th sunday in ordinary time 8 June 2008

Homily for Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time 8 June 2008
Today’s Gospel passage, the calling of Matthew, always reminds me of that great painting of this scene that was done by Caravaggio and is to be found in the French church of St Louis in Rome. There is Matthew, absorbed in his dirty tricks, busy with his collecting of taxes for the occupying forces, and there in the doorway stands Jesus, just fixing him with a look and pointing to him- “I want that man!” he seems to be saying, and Matthew has his hand on his heart and is looking up in amazement- “who, me?”
We do not know what had led Matthew to become such a traitor to his own people, to throw in his lot so completely with the hated Romans, to become one of those publicans, those tax collectors, that were looked on by the Jew in the street with such contempt and who were treated as such total outsiders that the critics of Our Lord as here always held it against him that he even considered mixing with them, with “tax collectors and sinners”. We only know that Our Lord saw him one day, up to his eyes in all his nefarious practices, and saw through all the rubbish in Matthew’s life to the real man within, and chose him for his own. Our Lord’s penetrating gaze fell upon him, and pierced through all the dross to the essential Matthew hidden within, and saw in that moment all the potential for goodness that lay submerged in him. Heaven knows, we too have done a few deals with the enemy in our time, we too make shameful compromises of one sort or another as we muddle our way through life, we too let the side down and fail to be true to our own people, that is, to the Christianity that we profess and to the Church that we identify with. And yet, Our Lord is gazing on each one of us with that long look of knowledge and love, Our Lord has a desire for each one of us, and he sees into our hearts and sees our potential, the person we could be if we would. Who me? Yes, says Jesus, You.
What a relief that is for us! We are not, whatever we have done, whoever we are, whatever we have become, we are going to be ostracised by God. In fact, as the Holy Father pointed out only recently at Corpus Christi, the whole idea that some people are the in crowd and others the outsiders is foreign to Christianity, the idea that some Christians are front rank and the rest no good, that the ones in the know are OK, in some sort of special clique, while everyone else is just an also-ran of no consequence, goes against the heart of our Catholic Faith, for the very word “catholic” means universal, embracing everyone.. Pope Benedict quoted St Paul in his Letter to the Galatians “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” and went on to say “In these words the truth and power of the Christian revolution is heard, the most profound revolution of human history….here people of different age groups, sex, social background and political ideas gather together in the Lord’s presence”. He reminds us that the eucharist is the great example of all this- “a public event that has nothing esoteric or exclusive about it” he says, where “we open ourselves to one another to become one in him”. And the Holy Father reminds us that “it is always necessary to be alert to ensure that the recurring temptations of particularism, even if with good intentions, do not go in the opposite direction”.
What he means by that, I suggest, is that we have always to be on our guard against becoming like those Pharisees! Not just in becoming more and more obsessed with the detail and the minutiae of our religious observances but in drawing up boundaries of the us and them variety, that is so deeply engrained in our human nature. In Christ, as St Paul reminds us, there can be no us and them- we are all one. There must be no boundaries made by us as to who is a good Catholic, a good Christian, and who is a bad, who is in and who is out. Fr Faber back in the mid 19th century wrote that hymn we never seem to hear nowadays that began “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea”. God is, as we heard in our Old Testament reading today , a God who can say “What I want is love not sacrifice” , which Jesus renders as “what I want is mercy, not sacrifice”. It is that mercy, that unconditional ever-forgiving love, that we are relying on for ourselves, and we must make certain that we do not, for all our petty human reasons and prejudices, withhold or limit it in our dealings with our fellow human beings. Let there be no boundaries put down by us to the love of God, which it is our job to be showing to the world. We are the followers of the one who said “Indeed, I did not come to call the virtuous, but sinners” and like those first hearers of this Gospel passage, it is to us that Our Lord is saying “Go and learn the meaning of the words!”
I close with one of the alternative prayers appointed for today’s Mass: “Father in Heaven, words cannot measure the boundaries of love for those born to new life in Christ Jesus. Raise us beyond the limits this world imposes so that we may be free to love as Christ teaches.“ And may Saint Matthew, that outcast, that pariah whom Jesus looked on and loved, help us to understand the meaning of Our Lord’s words today, to appreciate the universality and the essential inclusiveness of our catholic faith, and make us people of mercy to all those we meet and live among, for we are those sinners who pray “Jesus, Lord, I ask for mercy, let me not implore in vain”. Amen.

SS Peter and Paul 28 June 2008

Homily for the Solemnity of SS Peter and Paul and the Start of the Pauline Year
Sunday 29 June 2008

This weekend the Holy Father proclaimed the opening of the Year of St Paul, because historians place St Paul’s birth at some time between AD 7 and AD 10 and so this special Pauline Year commemorates the 2000th anniversary of his birth. The Holy Father hopes that as this year unfolds we will find occasions to reflect more deeply on the person of St Paul, his life and his thought that we have preserved for us both indirectly in St Luke’s account of the Early Church in the book of Acts and directly in the Letters of St Paul that form such a major part of the New Testament. Because of all this information, Paul is the person in the New Testament times that we know most about- apart that is, from Our Lord himself. And these letters are in fact the earliest Christian writings we have, all of them written before the Gospels came to be written down. No wonder Pope Benedict once described St Paul in this way; “He shines like a star of the brightest magnitude in the Church’s history”.
For me, part of the attraction of St Paul is that he is a follower of Our Lord who is exactly in our own position- remember he never met Jesus during Our Lord’s earthly life, unlike the other apostles who knew Jesus personally and who had been with him all through his ministry. We too have never met Jesus in the flesh, have we, our encounters with him are all of a supernatural nature- chiefly of course when we meet him in the sacraments, when he comes to us in Holy Communion and when we come to spend time alone with him before the Tabernacle and let him gaze upon us and speak to us. Probably, alas, our encounters with Our Lord in this way are not, or at least not often, of the dramatic nature of the great encounter that Paul- then known as Saul- had with the Risen Lord in the famous incident on the road to Damascus. Luke gives a full account of this decisive moment in Paul’s life, “when a light from Heaven flashed about him”. Paul himself is more reticent. In his Letter to his converts at Philippi he just refers to when “Christ made me his own”, in the Letter to the Galatians he says God “was pleased to reveal his Son to me” and in his second Letter to his converts in Corinth he says “it is the God who said ‘Let light shine out of darkness’ who has shone in our hearts”. His experience of this supernatural encounter with Our Lord was so vivid to him that he asks them “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” How wonderful it would be if we too could sometimes feel all this fervour and conviction! If we reflect on what we are really doing when we come to communion, what is really happening on the altar at Mass, who we are really talking to when we lament our sins in the confessional, maybe we too could come away from receiving the sacraments feeling that “Christ has made me his own” and saying “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” We are always in a sense on the road to Damascus, going about our routines, caught up in all the concerns of our lives, usually to some extent in all the compromises of our lives, let’s face it- and the sacraments are there as so many possible lay-bys and halts on that road that is our daily life- can Jesus speak to us too when we come to Mass? Will we too when we drop into church for a few minutes before the Blessed Sacrament feel so drawn into the presence of Christ that we will sense a light from heaven flash about us?
Or are there just too many distractions? Well, the other thing I really like about St Paul is that he is very frank with us about his frail human nature. He is certainly one of us, no superman! Listen to him writing to the church in Rome: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” Sounds familiar? That is certainly often my own situation- full of good intentions, then swept away by some old stupid habit of thought into the very behaviour that afterwards appals me. That is the dilemma of human nature isn’t it, that we all are familiar with, the fatal flaw that we know as original sin. Paul goes on: “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do”. All of that makes Paul seem a very honest, ordinary human being, who has to battle with himself in order to be a faithful follower of Our Lord. And that is also our own position entirely, isn’t it.
I leave to other occasions in the coming Pauline Year the various strands of St Paul’s theology; today as this momentous year in the Church’s history opens I want merely to remind us of how like us he is- a Christian, a follower of someone he has never met but only experienced in supernatural ways, a man caught up in the daily struggle within himself to be not just a follower, but a faithful follower, of Our Lord. As the Pauline Year unfolds may we share in some of St Paul’s experiences, may we too experience God shining into our hearts and know from our encounters with Our Lord in the sacramental life that “Christ has made me his own”. I close with the wish that St Paul enshrines in his first Letter to the Corinthians: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ”. Amen.

Sunday 20 April 2008

Easter V 20 April 2008

Homily for Easter V Year A Sunday 20 April 2008

Today we have another- and perhaps the most well known- of the “I am” sayings of Jesus that occur in St John’s Gospel. Last week we talked about “I am the gate”, this week we need to think about “I am the way, the truth and the life”. We need to try and see how these three things- the way, the truth and the life- are interrelated and what they mean. You see, when Jesus says “I am the Way”, he is saying two things at once really, because he is saying, in response to Thomas’s exasperated question “how can we know the way?”, that he is the way, he is the messenger and the message all in one, he is both the truth and how to find it, the truth and how to live it. What does it mean for us, this idea of living the truth? That is what I would like to reflect on with you today.
Back in the 1990s, the last Holy Father, our beloved John Paul II, wrote an encyclical some of you may remember, called “Veritatis Splendor”, the splendour of the truth- it was about the Church’s moral teaching, and this week I found myself looking at it again. It begins by quoting the first Letter of St Peter, where it says that we become holy by “obedience to the truth” and straightaway Pope John Paul admits that this is a very hard thing for us to maintain, because as human beings we are always being “tempted to turn (our) gaze away from the living and true God”- we know the truth, we know what Our Lord teaches, and what the Church, interpreting the mind of Our Lord in every generation, expects of us, and yet, on the whole, we would rather go off and do something else- what difference will it make anyway? This attitude that we so often fall into, is summed up by St Paul in the phrase we find in Romans- “exchanging the truth about God for a lie”. We have seen before, in many reflections we have shared on the Gospels, how that exchange, which we are always so eager to make, is a con trick, an illusion, that leaves us empty-handed at the end- think of the prodigal son, squandering everything on pleasure and still starving at the end, still unsatisfied. How can we maintain that obedience to the truth that will make us holy, how can we keep to the way and have the life, life- as we heard in last week’s Gospel- that Our Lord wants us to have “to the full”? The Servant of God John Paul gives us the answer in this document in a memorable phrase: he says “the good of the person is to be in the Truth and to do the Truth”. We have got to do the Truth. Do the Truth!
We find a similar phrase in the gospel of St John- “he who does what is true comes to the light” (Jn 3:21). It is up to us- God has given us brains, and he expects us to use them! We can think- we can use our reason to work things out, to weigh up the sides of an argument, to make choices and decisions, and we have our consciences, the basic knowledge of right and wrong that is written in our hearts, that we are all born with. These are the tools, and then it is up to us. This is how God made us, and how he expects us to operate- he wants us to work things out and make the right choices in our lives by ourselves, of our own free will. As it says in the Book of Sirach “it was he who created man in the beginning, and he left him in the power of his own inclination. If you will, you can keep the commandments, and to act faithfully is a matter of your own choice” (15:14-15). To follow Our Lord, what we have to do, and keep on doing every day, is make choices.
This idea of life being about choices, and the importance of our being free to make choices, was especially dear to the heart of that French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre- another John Paul, but rather a different one! He was obsessed with the idea that human beings could only be happy if they were what he called “authentic”. You couldn’t be authentic if you were always trying to fit in with what other people expected of you, he said. That is why he famously said “Other people are hell”- his idea was, you had got to make sure other people had no influence on you whatsoever, because only then would you have any chance of being free, and only then could you choose who you wanted to be and how you wanted to live your life. This is an attractive message, especially when you are young and wanting to rebel against all the adults in your life, which is why so many students back in my young days fell under his spell. But it is nonsense actually. We can never be a blank page, to write on what we want- we can never entirely free ourselves from the influences of our home and family, of our education and upbringing, of what has happened to us in our lives. We are stuck with all that, whether we like it or not, and what we have to do is a much harder, much more subtle task- we have to make our choices in life not by cutting loose from our background, not by re-inventing ourselves, but by absorbing what is there in our lives and making sense of it as best we can, by aligning ourselves ever more closely to the life of Our Lord, who has gone through every aspect of the human condition ahead of us and shown us the way. Not by shunning other people, so that they can make no demands on us and have no effect on our precious identity as a free agent, but by embracing them, and accepting and dealing with their demands on us, will we find our authenticity, our true selves. Because we know that all those paradoxes are true- it is in giving that we receive, in losing our life that we find it, and so on. Only when we stop worrying about our own happiness and our own tick-list of what we must have to be content, and think of the happiness of those around us and helping them to tick a few boxes, do we find that, to our surprise, contentment and peace have come to us.
Jesus, help us make the choices day by day that keep us close to you for you have said “whoever believes in me will perform the same works as I do myself”. Help us to recognise the truth, to do the truth, and never exchange it for a lie; for the truth will make us free and to serve you is perfect freedom. Amen.



Easter IV 13 April 2008

Homily for Easter IV 13 April 2008
Today’s Gospel comes from St John, and as you know St John’s Gospel has lots of “I am” sayings of Jesus- you know them all: “I am the way, the truth and the life”, “I am the vine”, “I am the bread of life”, “I am the light of the world”, “I am the good shepherd” and so on. Today Jesus says “I am the gate”, “I am the gate of the sheepfold”. What does this mean?
Well, when I was researching this text this week, I discovered something that I hadn’t realised before, that in the Middle East in ancient times, although sheepfolds would have a stone wall or a fence around them, they didn’t actually have gates at all. When the shepherd had managed to herd all his sheep into the fold for the night, he kept them there by lying down across the gap and sleeping there- he himself was literally the gate, his body was the gate. In a very real sense, to get into the sheepfold you had to pass over the body of the shepherd and the shepherd’s body was in the most literal sense the great barrier of protection between the sheep inside and the wolves outside. How full of meaning all this is for us! It is through our intimate connexion with Jesus, through our belonging to his body, the Church, through our Baptism, through our frequent absorption into ourselves of his body in Holy Communion, that we enter and make our home in the sheepfold that is eternal life, the fullness of life that begins already for us here on the earth but will only come to its plenitude beyond the grave in the life to come. Once we are part of the body of Christ, we are through the gate and involved with the shepherd in the process of salvation- Jesus says “anyone who enters through me will be safe”. We have, by becoming Christians, by aligning ourselves with Our Lord, by belonging to the Church he founded, entered the sheepfold of which he is the gate, we have joined his flock, we have become the sheep which he says will “be sure of finding pasture”.
Now that is another important point. Pasture. Why shepherds are roaming around the hills with a flock of sheep is not so they can admire the view or get some exercise, it is so they can feed- the shepherd’s main job, apart from keeping them all together and not losing any of them, is to find them places where they can eat, where they can eat the grass and so on. Sheep are not good at finding food for themselves, they are easily attracted to the wrong stuff, stuff that tastes great to them but is bad for them. There is that famous passage in Thomas Hardy, in “Far from the madding crowd” when Bathsheba’s sheep run off and get into a field of young clover, and gorge themselves on it until their stomachs swell up and they foam at the mouth. The peasants come running to Bathsheba- “they be getting blasted, that they be, and will all die as dead as nits if they bain’t got out and cured!” Sure enough, the bloated sheep start to collapse and die, and of course Bathsheba has to send for the man she has only just sacked, Gabriel Oak, and swallow her pride and ask him to sort the sheep out. (He does, she marries him.) Now this is us, isn’t it, we are not always the best judge of what is good for us, what will bring us happiness, contentment, fulfilment. We run after fantasies, we find the young clover of a thousand delusions, and fall on it ravenously, feeding every selfish impulse we have. We gorge ourselves at our peril. We can be however in safe hands, for we can choose to stay in the sheepfold with the shepherd, and our shepherd, Jesus, is the good shepherd, who ensures that we have good pasture- that is, that our souls are fed, that we have a diet that is good for us, that we grow in maturity and in our faith, that we find in unselfishness the road to true contentment and inner peace. For once through the gate that is our intimacy with Our Lord, we have entered upon the fullness of life, life as it is supposed to be lived and understood, life in its reality and in all its potential. As Jesus says at the end of this reading “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full”.
But to look at this parable a bit differently, we can say, as St Paul often tells us, that Jesus is the Head of his Body the Church- the Church is Jesus’s body on the earth, and we are the Church, so we are called as Christians to be for those around us the Gate, the way to eternal life. There is a church in the East End of London, near where I used to work, that actually has that written in huge letters round its walls- “This is the gate of Heaven”. Our dear St Saviour’s too is a gate, a gate between earth and heaven. We could say, whenever we come in, those words of psalm 117: Open to me the gates of holiness, I will enter and give thanks, this is the Lord’s own gate where the just may enter”. And the flock of sheep, that is of course the human race, now as then in urgent need of finding the right food, the pasture that will satisfy its needs, and therefore in urgent need of having good shepherds to protect and guide it. And that brings us of course to our need in every generation for men to be willing to discern in their hearts the calling of the great shepherd to join him in his task, in the priesthood and diaconate, to guide and nourish his flock on his behalf, for today is Vocations Sunday. Let us pray that there will be found in our own congregation boys and young men, and indeed men in their maturity, who will have the generosity of heart to respond to the prompting of the Holy Spirit and offer themselves for ministry in the Church. But in all this, let us never overlook the fact that each one of us, man or woman, has a calling to fulfil, a vocation indeed to be, as a Christian, a Gate, a way for those we work and live with to come into the safety of the sheepfold and the contentment of the good pasture. And as we come this morning to the pasture that is Holy Communion, to unite ourselves to the Body that is the Gate, let us say: “Lord Jesus, you are the Gate; may we enter through you and be safe, may we have life and have it to the full.” Amen.

Monday 17 March 2008

Good Friday 2008

Homily for Good Friday 21 March 2008

Today, the most solemn day in the Church’s year, we come to place ourselves at the foot of the Cross and to contemplate our suffering Lord, our dying Jesus- “Jesus, our love, is crucified” as the old hymn says. We do well to focus our gaze on the crucified Jesus today, and to try and give some thought to the fact that the Cross, and the death of Jesus on the Cross, is so central to our faith.
Some people, some theologians, have said that it is in fact only when we start to think about Jesus dying on the Cross that we can begin to understand what it means for us to be a Christian, to be a follower of Jesus, who said to us “Take up your cross, and follow me”. The Jesus who issues that invitation to us, is the God who became man for us. And as we look at the crucifix, we can see what that involved- what kind of man, what kind of human being he became- here he is: the outcast, the abandoned, the disgraced, the one with nothing, the one at the mercy of everyone, the one with no rights, the one with no say in what is done to him, the one who has only one motivation, the desire, that remains even to his dying breath, to love and serve, and identify with, “the least of my brethren”. The German theologian Juergen Moltmann says “God did not become man according to the measure of our conceptions of being a man. He became the kind of man we do not want to be”. And that is just as well, isn’t it, because deep in our hearts each of us knows that we too are in fact the kind of human being we do not want to be, we do not even measure up to our own standards let alone reach God’s aspirations for us! But Jesus is with us, alongside us in all our failings, in all the mess we make of our lives- he is what another theologian has called “the great companion, the fellow sufferer who understands”.
But there is another aspect we must consider as we gaze upon the Cross today. For there dying for us is our God. And just as the crucifixion shows us what kind of man God became in the incarnation, it shows us too, what kind of God we have- this is what our God is like! St John tells us “God is Love”. And here we see Love in its perfection- for as St Paul tells us in that beautiful hymn to Love in his letter to the Corinthians, “Love does not insist on its own way….Love bears all things….Love endures all things”. Here is our God who is Love, a Love that is- as we ourselves know from our own love that we give to our partners and our families and friends- happy to be humble, content in self-surrender, at ease in helplessness, always waiting on the response of those whom He loves, untiring in caring for them, and unsparing in his devotion to them. The idea that we could worship such a God was a source of bewilderment to the pagans in the first centuries of the Church’s history, used only to gods who they thought by definition ought to have power, real power, and use and display their power on all occasions. But here, on the Cross, is our God, and here he displays his power, the power of Love, a love that can contain all our failings, all our sin, all our disloyalty and defection, that can take the wounds we inflict on him and on ourselves as we lash out in the delirium of our selfishness. God is the almighty, the omnipotent, the all-powerful, but as Moltmann says “omnipotence is never loved, it is only feared”- and our God wants our love, he thirsts for our love.
And so, dear friends, as we join the throng that will surge forward at the end of our Liturgy to venerate the Cross, let us remind ourselves as we come to kiss those sacred wounds, “This is the kind of man God became, this is what our God is like”. Amen.