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.