Homily for Fourteenth Sunday in ordinary Time 3 July 2011
Two weeks ago it was Trinity Sunday when the Church asked us to reflect on the very nature of God- what is God like, what kind of god is our God? We have to stretch our minds a bit when we try to understand God and to get our heads round the implications of this idea that God is Love, as St John tells us in his First Letter. Luckily, Trinity Sunday is quickly followed by the feast we celebrated Friday of the Sacred Heart and that Letter of John is read at Friday’s Mass to put into simple language for us what all this means- you remember, it contains those wonderful words “everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God” and again “no one has ever seen God but as long as we love one another God will live in us”. God will live in us! That is the extraordinary thing that St Paul tells us in today’s reading from his Letter to the Romans, when he says “the Spirit of God has made his home in you” and again “the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you”.
You see, the great thing about the Trinity, which as you know is only our technical term for the inner life of God and nothing to do with clover leaves at all, the great thing about the Trinity is that it is the constant momentum of love, the give and take of love between the Father and the Son, and that give and take, that flow of love, that fountain of love, is the Holy Spirit, a fountain which gushes out and inundates us all. Because one of great things about God is that he is not some remote aloof deity, about whom we know nothing and who wants to be left alone on some mountain top or in some grove as the pagans thought of their gods, whom you approached at your peril. God is forever approaching us one way or another, approaching us of course in the Incarnation, taking human form, and being one of us, so to speak, so we could get a better idea of what he has destined each one of us for by looking at the life of Our Lord Jesus; but approaching us constantly too in the form of the Holy Spirit, dwelling in us from our baptism onwards and forever prompting us towards the good and helping us to steer clear of the bad, so that as St Paul says today “there is no necessity for us to obey our unspiritual selves or to live unspiritual lives”. We have the Spirit, forever enlightening our minds if we will let him, so that the things of God become a bit clearer. That is why in the early centuries of the Church baptism was often called simply enlightenment; the fathers thought that once you had been baptised and had the Holy Spirit living in you, you would inevitably see things a bit clearer – a bit like having your eyes fixed by laser treatment!
You know I expect that famous icon of the Trinity, by the 15th century Russian monk Andrei Rublev, which is based on the famous story in Genesis 18 of Abraham entertaining the three young men who suddenly turn up at his tent hungry and thirsty. From earliest times the Church saw in these three young men a hint if you like, a foreshadowing, of the Trinity- especially as although they are three, Abraham talks to them as if they are one, saying “My Lord, if I have found favour in your sight, do not pass by your servant” (Gen 18 iii). This is God calling on Abraham, God hungry and thirsty, God wanting something from us. This is the God we know, isn’t it, this thirsty God, this is what St Margaret Mary understood in her visions of the Sacred Heart, when she saw Jesus thirsting for our souls, and the great desire he has for our love. This is the God we know who is forever patient with us, forever waiting for some response from us, some flicker of interest, however slight! A modern French writer says “devant notre mediocrité, Dieu attend” – confronted by our mediocrity, God just waits! And of course in this story in Genesis, Abraham does respond, he prepares a meal in the shade of the oaks of Mamre for his divine guests. This icon of Rublev’s shows the three young men sitting down to their refreshment, and one of them is looking out of the picture at us- the one dressed in green. Now we use red as our liturgical colour for the Holy Spirit, don’t we, because we think of the tongues of fire at Pentecost, but our orthodox brothers and sisters use green for the Holy Spirit, the colour of growth, of the green shoots springing up that signify rebirth. So it is the Holy Spirit who is the part of the Godhead who is forever looking out at us, not snooping on us to catch us out in some sin so he can jot it down, he is not a traffic warden, no, he is just gazing out at us with a look of love, and with perhaps an invitation in his look too. I say an invitation because if you look at this icon you see that there is a space at the table where the young men are sitting, because you see the Holy Spirit is asking us to join them, come into the life of God, come and take your place at the table, come on in, make yourself at home – you know that old music hall song, “put your feet on the mantel shelf, go to the cupboard and help yourself!” Come on in, says the Holy Spirit, don’t be out there in the cold, come on in and be at home with God who wants above all to live with us!
How do we take up this pressing invitation? How do we step into the life of God and sit at God’s table, how do we enjoy the companionship of God? St John in that first Letter of his shows us the answer, and the answer is love- when we do anything from an impulse of love, when we act lovingly and kindly towards someone, especially if they are someone we don’t like or fancy or don’t approve of very much, then we are doing something godlike, and in that moment, in the doing of that act of love, we are caught up into the life of God- the more acts of love we do, the more our life is oriented to this way of loving, the closer we shall be to God – we shall be, whether we realise it or not, slap bang in the middle of the life of the Trinity, seated at the table sharing in the heavenly banquet.
Dear friends, think of St Saviour’s as the oaks of Mamre, where our hungry and thirsty God is waiting for us to greet him and to offer him our companionship. The word companion you know is from Latin words that mean “with bread”, someone you share bread with. God is waiting for our response of love tonight, he is waiting to show us his love in the breaking and sharing of bread, the bread that is the sacred Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord. God in Three Persons, we welcome you, we say with Abraham “My Lord, if I have found favour in your sight, do not pass your servant by”. Come to us, make our home with us, live in us and let us live in you, help us to accept our place at your table, to take on our part in the outpouring of your love out into our world. “Do not pass your servant by”. Amen.
Saturday 2 July 2011
trinity sunday 2011
Homily for Trinity Sunday 19 June 2011
Today is Trinity Sunday (whatever that means, do I hear you say?). During the course of the year the Church proposes many aspects of God for us to consider in the various feasts that come and go - last week the great mystery of the work of God the Holy Spirit claimed our attention at Pentecost. Now today what are we supposed to be focussing on? The Trinity, but what is the Trinity? This word is quite simply the technical term the Church has been using for nearly two millennia to describe the life of God, the nature of God. So today we need to refresh our memories about God- who is this God who is our God? What kind of a god is God? And does it matter?
The best place where we find the answer is in the two creation accounts in Genesis, where we find that God is the benevolent Creator, who approves of everything that he makes and whose desire is for intimacy with the human race which he has created in his own image and likeness- yes, God wants us to be his friends, that is the whole point of creating this world and us in it. That is what God does all day- creating, sustaining, loving us. The great Dominican mystic of the 13th century Meister Eckhard said “I never give God thanks for loving me, because he cannot help it”. In the early 18th century an English spiritual writer from the Anglican tradition, William Law, has this to say: “from eternity to eternity no spark of wrath ever was or ever will be in the holy triune God….and this, for this plain reason, because he is in himself in his Holy Trinity nothing else but the boundless abyss of all that is good and sweet and amiable” He says too that God is in “an eternal impossibility of willing and intending a moment’s pain or hurt to any creature”. What wonderful words, and they are true. If you look at the two forms of the Opening Prayer for today’s mass, you see all this spelt out. In the first one, we hear that God the Father sends us the Word (Jesus, of course) to bring us truth and the Spirit to make us holy- that is how we can come to know the mystery of God’s life. The second one speaks of God “drawing us to share in your life and your love”.
And look at our first reading today. In this episode from Exodus, Moses has just told God that, far from welcoming the ten commandments as the start of a close and binding relationship between God and his people, the Israelites have rejected them and have made themselves a nice new god, a Golden Calf they can dance around. You remember, Moses got so angry he smashed the first lot of tablets up. What we have here is God saying to Moses, it’s OK, I can cope- I am “a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness”. And he gives Moses two new tablets, just as good as the old ones- this time, try not to break them! – and so this contract that God so desperately wants to have with his people is back in force, as if it had never been spoilt. That is what happens when we go to Confession isn’t it- we have broken a few commandments I daresay (in fact, I wonder if you examine your conscience by going through the ten commandments, that used to be a very common and very good practice), we have messed up, but we know that the priest we confess to will be the voice of the “God of tenderness” who is “slow to anger” – when we say like Moses “forgive us our faults and our sins” and ask to be back in the close friendship of God Our Lord will indeed “adopt us as his heritage” and all will be well again, as if –just as if- we’d never gone off the rails in the first place. Now that is exactly what this Gospel of ours today is saying, isn’t it. “God sent his Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world might be saved”.
Why send his Son at all? That is another question, and one to which books of devotion give usually quite crazy answers- paying the ransom for sin, settling mankind’s debt with the Devil, I can’t bear it! God, being goodness itself, is forever communicating that goodness- it is as simple as that. And Jesus is the good that God the Father wants to communicate to us. This man William Law speaks of “the goodness of God breaking forth into a desire to communicate good….He is the Good, the unchangeable, overflowing fountain of all that is good that sends forth nothing but good to all eternity”. And of course the greatest good he communicates to us is that aspect, that humanly knowable aspect, of himself that is Our Lord Jesus.
Of course, such is the madness, the perversity of the human race that we run a mile at the prospect of a God offering us relentless love- just as we often do when our fellow human beings offer us love, it is just too frightening, we think, to fall into that embrace of Someone who claims they will never let go of us no matter what. We want more independence than that, because surely all this constant loving is going to be stifling, isn’t it going to curtail my freedom severely? So thought the Israelites at Mt Sinai, who, when they first heard that Moses and God were holding this great converse from which came the Ten Commandments, “were afraid and trembled and stood afar off” (Exod 20 xviii- xix) and begged to hear no more- “let not God speak to us”. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews refers to this episode too when he speaks of “a Voice, whose words made the hearers entreat that no further messages be spoken to them”. (Heb 12 xix) Bring on the Golden Calf we say, we know where we are with that! Our dear Holy Father spoke only last week about this very phenomenon, the Golden Calf- he says “this is a constant temptation on the journey of faith: to avoid the divine mystery by constructing a comprehensible god who corresponds with one’s own plans, one’s own projects”. (8 june 2011 gen aud)
No, dear friends, we don’t want to avoid the divine mystery, we want to meet it and live in it! We want our full destiny as children of God, and that is nothing less than to be drawn into the divine mystery that is the life and love of God. Heavenly Father, we keep smashing up the tablets of the law that are written on our hearts, but we recall today that you are “a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness”; we are indeed in the words of Moses “a headstrong people, but forgive us our faults and our sins and adopt us as your heritage” Amen.
Today is Trinity Sunday (whatever that means, do I hear you say?). During the course of the year the Church proposes many aspects of God for us to consider in the various feasts that come and go - last week the great mystery of the work of God the Holy Spirit claimed our attention at Pentecost. Now today what are we supposed to be focussing on? The Trinity, but what is the Trinity? This word is quite simply the technical term the Church has been using for nearly two millennia to describe the life of God, the nature of God. So today we need to refresh our memories about God- who is this God who is our God? What kind of a god is God? And does it matter?
The best place where we find the answer is in the two creation accounts in Genesis, where we find that God is the benevolent Creator, who approves of everything that he makes and whose desire is for intimacy with the human race which he has created in his own image and likeness- yes, God wants us to be his friends, that is the whole point of creating this world and us in it. That is what God does all day- creating, sustaining, loving us. The great Dominican mystic of the 13th century Meister Eckhard said “I never give God thanks for loving me, because he cannot help it”. In the early 18th century an English spiritual writer from the Anglican tradition, William Law, has this to say: “from eternity to eternity no spark of wrath ever was or ever will be in the holy triune God….and this, for this plain reason, because he is in himself in his Holy Trinity nothing else but the boundless abyss of all that is good and sweet and amiable” He says too that God is in “an eternal impossibility of willing and intending a moment’s pain or hurt to any creature”. What wonderful words, and they are true. If you look at the two forms of the Opening Prayer for today’s mass, you see all this spelt out. In the first one, we hear that God the Father sends us the Word (Jesus, of course) to bring us truth and the Spirit to make us holy- that is how we can come to know the mystery of God’s life. The second one speaks of God “drawing us to share in your life and your love”.
And look at our first reading today. In this episode from Exodus, Moses has just told God that, far from welcoming the ten commandments as the start of a close and binding relationship between God and his people, the Israelites have rejected them and have made themselves a nice new god, a Golden Calf they can dance around. You remember, Moses got so angry he smashed the first lot of tablets up. What we have here is God saying to Moses, it’s OK, I can cope- I am “a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness”. And he gives Moses two new tablets, just as good as the old ones- this time, try not to break them! – and so this contract that God so desperately wants to have with his people is back in force, as if it had never been spoilt. That is what happens when we go to Confession isn’t it- we have broken a few commandments I daresay (in fact, I wonder if you examine your conscience by going through the ten commandments, that used to be a very common and very good practice), we have messed up, but we know that the priest we confess to will be the voice of the “God of tenderness” who is “slow to anger” – when we say like Moses “forgive us our faults and our sins” and ask to be back in the close friendship of God Our Lord will indeed “adopt us as his heritage” and all will be well again, as if –just as if- we’d never gone off the rails in the first place. Now that is exactly what this Gospel of ours today is saying, isn’t it. “God sent his Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world might be saved”.
Why send his Son at all? That is another question, and one to which books of devotion give usually quite crazy answers- paying the ransom for sin, settling mankind’s debt with the Devil, I can’t bear it! God, being goodness itself, is forever communicating that goodness- it is as simple as that. And Jesus is the good that God the Father wants to communicate to us. This man William Law speaks of “the goodness of God breaking forth into a desire to communicate good….He is the Good, the unchangeable, overflowing fountain of all that is good that sends forth nothing but good to all eternity”. And of course the greatest good he communicates to us is that aspect, that humanly knowable aspect, of himself that is Our Lord Jesus.
Of course, such is the madness, the perversity of the human race that we run a mile at the prospect of a God offering us relentless love- just as we often do when our fellow human beings offer us love, it is just too frightening, we think, to fall into that embrace of Someone who claims they will never let go of us no matter what. We want more independence than that, because surely all this constant loving is going to be stifling, isn’t it going to curtail my freedom severely? So thought the Israelites at Mt Sinai, who, when they first heard that Moses and God were holding this great converse from which came the Ten Commandments, “were afraid and trembled and stood afar off” (Exod 20 xviii- xix) and begged to hear no more- “let not God speak to us”. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews refers to this episode too when he speaks of “a Voice, whose words made the hearers entreat that no further messages be spoken to them”. (Heb 12 xix) Bring on the Golden Calf we say, we know where we are with that! Our dear Holy Father spoke only last week about this very phenomenon, the Golden Calf- he says “this is a constant temptation on the journey of faith: to avoid the divine mystery by constructing a comprehensible god who corresponds with one’s own plans, one’s own projects”. (8 june 2011 gen aud)
No, dear friends, we don’t want to avoid the divine mystery, we want to meet it and live in it! We want our full destiny as children of God, and that is nothing less than to be drawn into the divine mystery that is the life and love of God. Heavenly Father, we keep smashing up the tablets of the law that are written on our hearts, but we recall today that you are “a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness”; we are indeed in the words of Moses “a headstrong people, but forgive us our faults and our sins and adopt us as your heritage” Amen.
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