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.