Rite of Entry 16 December 2007

Homily for Advent III 16 December 2007 Sitting at the front of our church today we have a group of people who have been attending our weekly course of instruction in the Catholic Faith with the aspiration of joining the Church and becoming fully one with us and with Our Lord next Easter. Shortly they will be coming forward to make the first public act that signifies their commitment to this process of discernment and growth, in the Rite of Entry, when they will be formally accepted as catechumens or as candidates, if they are already baptised. You are a great sign of hope for us all and a proof that the Church is constantly renewing herself with new blood, and we welcome you. This Gospel today is very appropriate for you, because of the question that Jesus puts three times in slightly different forms- “What did you go out into the wilderness to see?” Now, the wilderness, the desert in other words, is often used in the Bible to mean a place where you go to grow and to learn, to be purified and to become holy, often as a preparation for some special task or vocation. You too have gone out into the wilderness, you have left the cares and commitments of your busy lives each week to come to St Saviour’s and to find out about our Catholic Faith and how to align yourselves more completely with Our Lord by entering the Church which he founded. And so, you can answer that question that Our Lord teases the crowd with in this passage- “What did you go out to see?” And also you can answer the question John the Baptist sends his messengers to ask Jesus- “Are you the one who is to come or have we got to wait for someone else?” You came week by week, not just for the company, although we get to know each other and support each other and sometimes become friends; not just for the intellectual stimulation of finding out about our religion, although the joy of studying and thinking is there and we certainly have to use our minds to appreciate our faith; not ultimately for any other reason but to follow Jesus, to sense his presence in our midst, to prepare to meet him more fully in the sacramental life that awaits you, and to deepen your awareness of Our Lord Jesus, so that it can develop into friendship and into love. “What did you go out to see?” Why, on these cold and dark nights, have you set out after your day’s work, left your cosy fireside, roused yourself from that armchair and switched off the TV and made your weary way to the presbytery? You dear good people, you have done this to follow Jesus, in the knowledge that the Holy Spirit has given you, that the best and surest way of following him is in his Church. God will reward you! Having realised who Jesus is, we face immediately the other question- what does he want of me? what does he want me to do? Our Faith must be translated into action! Love that is only words is not much good, is it! Jesus, in the echo of the passage from Isaiah we heard as our first reading, gives us the programme as he describes the miracles he is doing that prove he is the Messiah and that he is ushering in the Messianic Age, the reign of justice, peace and concord, the start of that ideal world that we all long for. He tells the messengers to go back to John the Baptist and tell him “the blind see again, and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised to life”. Now we are all attempting in the Christian life to make our lives more and more like Our Lord’s- the Holy Father, speaking on the recent Feast of the Immaculate Conception, says “we will be judged on our similarity to Jesus.” So can we be like Jesus, can we do what Jesus did? Well, you may be saying, how can I do any of that? I can’t cure the sick or raise the dead. I certainly have no such powers! But let us just think for a moment about what we might try to do- we can’t change the word single-handed, we can’t bring about a revolution, but we can do something every day to change our corner of the world, we can start in our own backyard. We may know people who have been blinded, dazzled by what Pope Benedict called last week “messages that offer false models of happiness” and “the dead-end roads of consumerism” – can we show them the reality of God’s love and where true contentment lies? We may know people who are lame, lame ducks, whose lives have got into a mess for all sorts of reasons- can we lend them a hand, offer them some practical help and advice? And the lepers, the outcasts of society, the people other people steer clear of, can we approach them and let them see that there do exist people whose minds are not clouded with prejudice and offer them a neighbourly greeting? And as for the deaf- Fr Chris recently spoke of “the lullaby of materialism”, that drowns out all other voices and deafens us. Can we counter that with a broadcast of our own, with a message of the unselfishness that is at the heart of the Christian life? If we can do these things, witnessing to our Catholic Faith day by day to those around us, in our street and workplace, by our kindness and openness, what the Pope calls being “united in the task of building a more just, supportive and peaceful world”, then indeed we shall see the dead raised to life, we shall see people given new life, new hope, new confidence, a new dignity as sons and daughters of our heavenly Father. May our love for Our Lord Jesus Christ cause us to grow more and more like him, whom the Pope has called “the standard God gave humanity to live by” and may the example of our lives help those around us to answer that question “What did you go out to see?” Amen.

Brussels pilgrimage

Homily preached in the National Basilica of the Sacred Heart, Brussels 7 December 2007 Here we are in Brussels, in this vast church dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a devotion dear to so many of us at St Saviour’s. As you know, this great church took an extremely long time to build, the first stone being laid in 1905 and the last in 1970- and what events, what dramas had taken place in that time between the start and the finish of this colossal undertaking! It was a very different world in 1970 from that tranquil world of a hundred years ago, a world that was forever swept away in 1914. And not only was the world completely different, but the church, the finished edifice, imposing as it is, came in the end to bear very little resemblance to the first ideas of those who laid out the original foundations- we have ended up with a beautiful and holy place, but it is far from how the people who began the work imagined it would look. I suppose our lives are like that. How surprised we would all be if, when we stood on the threshold of adult life in our teens and first began to imagine what kind of life we might like to fashion for ourselves, we could have done a sort of fast-forward to today, and seen ourselves in our later life- very few of us, I imagine, have been able to stick faithfully to the blueprint we had sketched out at the start of our lives, we have probably had to have a few rethinks, rubbing out a bit here and there which no longer seemed appropriate or possible, having perhaps to demolish a bit that no longer worked or was what we wanted. Probably also a few changes have been forced on us, there have been unexpected developments, surprises, shocks perhaps, that we have had to muddle through as best we can and try to make something of. But in the end, although we are not exactly- or not at all- what we thought we might be, I imagine that on a good day we can look at ourselves with something like approval and say with the poet Tennyson “That which we are, we are”. But actually, of course, it can only be a good thing that we have not been trapped in a rigid plan, a self-centred vision of ourselves that dates from a time before we had acquired much in the way of maturity. Change is growth, and in the changes of our lives we will have grown- Cardinal Newman, whom I rarely quote because I don’t really get on with him, said “To live is to change, to be perfect is to have changed often”. We are all, as Christians, trying to align our lives ever more closely to the life of Our Lord, and that is a lifelong task that we are engaged in, and it requires a readiness to be constantly making a few adjustments to the plans, to be doing that fine tuning of our souls. We need to develop a habit of introspection- not an unhealthy obsession with ourselves, but a habit of reflecting prayerfully on our daily lives, a habit that will of course inevitably involve us coming frequently to lay our findings before Our Lord in the Sacrament of Confession, and entrusting ourselves, and the lives we are trying to make and make sense of, to Our Lord’s infinite mercy, to his Sacred Heart. If we are adapting ourselves little by little to Our Lord, as we come to appreciate more and more what he wants us to be, what we could be at our best, then our lives will be what this great church was for so many years, a work in progress. St Philip, whom I do get on with, used to say “nulla dies sine linea”, no day without a touch- and so, if we have had a retouch here and there, a rethink now and then, it may be, please God, that at the end of our earthly lives we shall realise that what we have achieved with our lives is a magnificent edifice, a Shrine, like this, where the Sacred Heart of Jesus is at home. Jesus, gentle and humble of heart, Touch our hearts, and make them like thine own. Amen.

33rs Sunday of the Year C 18 November 2007

Homily for 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C 18 November 2007

These readings today which we have just heard seem to refer in their various ways to the end of the world, and one of their messages is, how fruitless and futile it is to speculate on when and how this may come about. St Paul is very down to earth in his letter to his converts in Thessaloniki, telling them to put their minds and their energies into living now, rather than into worrying about some possible cataclysmic event in the future- he says they should “go on quietly working and earning the food that they eat”- that is, being productive members of the Church and of society. And Our Lord too speaks in similar vein, when, at the end of his rather grim predictions of what life will be like for his followers in the years leading up to the destruction of the Temple, he ends by saying “your endurance will win you your lives”. We are being told today in our Scripture readings to “go on quietly working” and to endure, to stick at our Christian vocation.
I have said before that although we cannot be sure about when the end of the world will come, we can be quite sure about one thing, that the world will end for us, that one day my world will end, that I will one day die and be here no more. What awaits us beyond the grave? And how can we prepare for it? To try to answer those important questions I want to use the wise words of two of our greatest saints.
St Thérèse of Lisieux knew for a long time that she was terminally ill and reflected a great deal, especially in her last months, on what the after-life would involve. In one of her prayers she uses a memorable phrase, when she speaks of eternal life as being like a constant conversation we will be holding with Our Lord, caught up, as she puts it, in an eternal face-to-face. We shall see Our Lord face to face, and be held by his loving gaze. It will be like two lovers meeting who have been apart for a long time, the sort of meeting you might see at a railway station or an airport, when they run to embrace each other at the barrier, and in the intensity of their emotions have no words to say, they just are lost in looking at the one they love. St Thérèse says that once all the things that get in the way of our loving Our Lord have vanished, what she calls the shadows, that is to say, all the passions and desires we have for material things, for the things of this world, the things that so easily cloud our vision and sidetrack our thoughts, once all that has gone, we shall be able to concentrate on our love, the love that we always knew was there, the love that we sometimes glimpsed in ourselves, the love we have for Our Lord- then, she says, “I will be able to talk to you of my love in an eternal face-to-face” –“vous redire mon Amour dans un Face à Face éternel!” In death she imagines that her soul will “throw itself….into the eternal embrace of Your Merciful Love”.
Now we are not, I suspect, Christians of the stature of St Thérèse! We may be thinking, how far we are from feeling ready to throw ourselves into the arms of Jesus in this way. The whole idea of an encounter at this level of intimacy with God may seem quite beyond us, may be making us squirm and feel very uncomfortable. How can we ever hope to approach death with that kind of confidence? Well, now I turn to another great favourite of mine, St Augustine! Only this week I read this, from one of the sermons he gave to his congregation in North Africa all those centuries ago: “Let us choose every day to know who we really are in case, while we are without a care in the world, the Day arrives at last, and, of that which we thought we were, nothing is found to be real.” Let us think about that a minute. St Augustine is saying that the only way to be ready for death when it comes, the Day with a capital D, our D-Day that will finally liberate us from this world and the tyranny of sin, the only way to prepare for death is to be real now - not to hide behind falsehoods, a false perhaps rose-tinted view of ourselves, not to start to believe all the half truths about ourselves that we often present to the outside world, you know what I mean, the version of events that we put across when we describe ourselves to new people when we meet them, that ensures they think well of us- no, hard though it is, St Augustine recommends that the best thing, the safest course in the long run, is for us to stick to the truth about ourselves, to deal with the realities of who we really are and what our lives are really like. This is, I think, what the endurance Jesus speaks of means- if we can hold on through our lives to a version of ourselves that is more or less accurate, that if our version of who we think we are isn’t that too far from God’s version of who we are, then we will be in with a chance, and then our meeting with Our Lord at the end of our lives will not be too painful, too awkward to contemplate. If we have faced up to the truth, we will find we can face the one who said “I am the Truth”. God forbid that we die believing in all our fantasies, and so adrift from the reality of our lives and our true selves that “of that which we thought we were, nothing is found to be real”.
I have wandered far from our texts, but I hope you see the link I am trying to make- that our big chance for eternal happiness lies in our living now, “going quietly on” as St Paul says, embedded in the reality of who we really are. Help us, Lord Jesus, to be among those whose endurance will win them their lives, so that on the Last day we may stand with confidence before you, the Son of Man, and spend our eternity with you, telling you our love face to face. Amen.

Homily for 29th Sunday Year C

Homily for twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C 21 October 2007 Today’s readings are about prayer and the importance of prayer, the necessity for us to be constant in prayer, to persevere with our life of prayer. It is always daunting to talk or preach about prayer, partly because so much drivel, so much confusing stuff, has been written on the subject, and I am sure that some of you are already switching off! The trouble is, that prayer has become associated in the minds of many of us with something complicated and rather special, something perhaps best left to the experts, and there are so many books about prayer that with all their talk of meditation, contemplation, and other rather technical terms, can completely put us off and make us think “This is not for me”. It reminds me in a way of all the mystique and snobbery that surrounds the whole business of wine and wine drinking, especially in this country. People not used to drinking wine feel completely out of their depth when some snooty waiter in a restaurant hands them a wine list the size of a photograph album, and then there’s all that palaver about good years and bad, and people claiming they can tell which slopes a certain vintage was grown on, how can anyone compete with that kind of expertise? On TV programmes about food and wine you get presenters going through a whole rigmarole of sniffing and swishing the wine around in their glass before actually tasting it and saying “Yes- I can taste blackberries, chocolate, a hint of boot polish….” All complete nonsense of course! All you actually need to know about wine is, do I like what I am drinking? If so, try to remember what it’s called and buy it again next time. There are a few easy rules, like the ABC (Anything But Chardonnay) and red wine goes with red meat, and, as that great cookery book of the 1960s, “Cooking in a Bedsitter”, said, white wine goes with carpets. You can get along very easily with just a few basic rules of thumb like this and just by trying things out for yourself. Don’t be afraid, just go ahead, have a go, taste and see. Well, that’s enough about wine- I don’t want you to think I am getting obsessed! But do you see my point- forget all the stuff that’s written about wine and just get on with it and enjoy it. Prayer is exactly the same- forget all the stuff that’s written about prayer, the levels and stages of prayer, St So-and-so’s method of prayer, the nine days of this prayer, the hundred days of that, don’t be side-tracked by any of all that. Prayer is not a specialist subject to answer questions on in a quiz programme! Prayer is something easy and straightforward that all of us, however ordinary a Catholic we may feel ourselves to be, has the ability, the right and the duty to engage in. So what is prayer? Well, in essence it is simple a conversation with God. St John Chrysostom, the fourth century archbishop of Constantinople, says “Prayer is the supreme good, the familiar conversation with God. It is a relationship with God and a union with him”. You see, we as Christians are called upon to develop a relationship with God, that is what the Christian life is, an on-going and ever–deepening friendship we are trying to have with Our Lord. And how can we have a relationship with someone if we don’t talk to them? We have got to be on good terms with God, and that means at the very least being on speaking terms with him! And so we talk to God, that is what prayer is. We can use other people’s words, the words the Church uses, like the Our Father and the Hail Mary, or we can use our own words, just spilling things out to God, telling him what is on our minds right now. We don’t need to find special words to do that, we don’t need to feel awkward because we haven’t got the right churchy language to put it all in, we can just talk to him as we would talk on our mobiles to a friend we want to keep up to date with our life in all its as pects. And that is important too, we don’t have to clean up our act to talk to God, we don’t have to leave out all the messy bits that won’t sound too good- God knows us inside out, so we don’t need to hold anything back for fear of spoiling the impression; we need to give him the truth, the truth of our joys and sorrows, our anxieties and so on. As we would to a best friend. Of course conversation ideally is a two-way traffic. You won’t have much of a relationship with someone if you do all the talking and you never listen to what the other person is trying to say! So too in prayer: we have to let God get a word in edgeways. How does God speak to us then? Well, principally in the words of Scripture, when we listen attentively to the readings at Mass, when we read portions of Scripture every day in our private devotions- either using the Divine Office, if we like to join in the great prayer of the Church that is always rising from the four corners of the world, or in the excellent Bible reading notes that Melina and Connie sell in our shop. Very often as we read a phrase will just stand out, a sentence will pop up before our eyes, full of meaning for us in our particular situation that day. And God also speaks to us in silence, especially if we come and keep him company by praying before the Blessed Sacrament- in the stillness there Our Lord can drop a word into our minds. The main thing I want to stress this morning, apart from how easy and uncomplicated it actually is to pray, to talk to God, is that this must not be just a sporadic activity on our part, something we only do when we’re feeling in the mood, when a special holy feeling comes over us. I don’t get those holy feelings very often- and that feeling may never come! St John Chrysostom again: he says “Prayer is not confined to set hours or moments, it is in continual activity”. We must keep that life-giving conversation with God going at all times, when we feel like it and when we don’t, for without that conversation our relationship with Our Lord will wither and we will never become the close friends that he wants us to be, and that in our better moments we also desire. We must persevere, we must be like Moses, praying all through the long day and the heat of the battle. Our arms may well grow heavy as we keep them outstretched in prayer, but we can be like Moses and get help to ensure that we persevere – he had Aaron and Hur who came and held his arms up when he grew tired, and we can call on Our Blessed Lady and the Saints to come to our aid too, and join their prayers to ours. May we persevere in our relationship with Our Lord, may we keep our arms outstretched to Heaven in our life-long conversation of prayer, and may the help of Our Blessed Mother ensure that our arms remain firm until sunset. Amen.

Homily on my return from pilgrimage 16 September 2007

Homily for Twentyfourth Sunday In Ordinary Time Year C 16 Sept 2007 I am just back from escorting a parish from Brentwood diocese round Portugal, and Fr Chris is back from his annual leave in Ireland, and I guess during the summer, if such we can call it, many of you have also been away. In France this time of year, early September, is known as “la rentrée”, the coming back, the coming home, because this is the time of year when we come back- the children go back to school, and we return to our routines, to our normal life. There is a saying, isn’t there, that weekdays are fact and weekends are fiction, and that is certainly true of the holiday season, which in England used to be called by the press the silly season, when because everyone was away and everything was shut down, the only news the papers had to print was trivial stuff. So perhaps we have been away, and indulged in holiday mood in what we might call fiction- we feel different, we may even look different, wearing our holiday clothes, our resort wear- or, as a friend of mine said when he saw some brightly coloured shorts I was planning to take to Turkey, our last resort wear. We go to different places, do different things, perhaps do uncharacteristic things, things we wouldn’t normally think of doing at home- we feel somehow liberated from the constraints of our ordinary lives, because we are away, we are on holiday, and often, in a sense, we are on holiday from ourselves. These experiences, these adventures, are all very well, perhaps a necessary letting off steam for us- perhaps we feel it is good for us to kick over the traces once in a while. Perhaps it is. But there is a danger in fooling ourselves into thinking that the fiction that we create on holiday is, or could become, fact. It must remain an escape, and be recognised as such, and we must accept the fact of our lives, of our real selves, which is greater than any fiction, than any fantasy, and return to them, because it is in the reality of our daily lives, in the very ordinariness of our ordinary lives, in the humdrum of our routines, that God is waiting to encounter us- not in the fantasies, not in the escapism of the emotional highs, but in our true selves, in our day to day existence. This is what the prophet Jeremiah means when he says “The heights are a delusion, and the orgies of the mountains also”, a phrase I came across in the breviary some weeks ago and which I cannot get out of my mind. Not in the highs of escapism, but in the plains of our down to earth lives will we find truth, and the God who is Truth. Look at today’s Gospel. Today the Church gives us a second chance this year to reflect on the parable of the Prodigal Son. The prodigal son tires of his life, and goes off to have a permanent holiday from it, he exchanges fact for fiction, and lives out his fantasies to the full. And what happens? He finds at the end of the day that all he has left in his hands are husks, things of no substance, and he is desperately, supernaturally hungry, because all the fun of the fair has not been able to satisfy him and he ruefully recognises the sheer emptiness of all the pleasures he has been chasing after. What does he do? He returns! He comes home! And once he is on the path of return, what does he find? He has been rather grimly gritting his teeth about his homecoming, rehearsing a speech he is going to make, of abject apology, and being ready for life to be much harder than it was before, recognising he is no longer worthy to be called his father’s son, but actually it is not going to turn out like that at all- the Father is there, coming to meet him on his way, welcoming him with open arms, and giving him back all his former status as the beloved son. This is what we will find, please God, this autumn, as we return to our routines and the calendar moves inexorably on, with our old commitments and responsibilities making their claims on us afresh- it will be in the normality of things, “back in our own backyard” as Byng Crosby (I think) used to sing, that we will find Our Lord waiting for us. The return to ordinary life, the picking up again of our old familiar ways, will not be a thing to be afraid of or resentful about, for if we approach our lives in the right spirit, we will find that God is there and God will reward us and make our burden light. Are we the returning prodigal son? We may, some of us, baulk at identifying with that wayward young man, we may be thinking “Well, that’s all very well, but I haven’t escaped ever, I’ve just been soldiering on, and very hard work it’s been”. In that case perhaps we are rather like the other son, who is so annoyed at all the fuss when his brother suddenly turns up again, and who remonstrates with the father: “Look, all these years I have slaved for you and never once disobeyed your orders!” He clearly has got just as fed up with the day to day drudgery of life on the farm as his brother had. And our daily routines and our ordinary lives can indeed seem a drudgery, a treadmill, grinding us down. If we see the Christian life as obeying orders, if we see ourselves as slaves, with no say or interest in what’s happening around us, then of course we will be fed up, and we will go a bit sour and resentful, like this other son. Alas, we can all think of people who have been turned sour by religion, who have kept all the rules and ended up bitter and twisted. We must keep the rules out of love, not out of fear, we must follow loyally the teachings of the Church not because we have no choice but because that is our desire, what we do to show our love for Our Lord, Our Lord who said “I do not call you slaves any more, but friends”. Lord Jesus, accept us as we return to you; come and find us in our ordinary lives, and let us find in our daily routines a hundred ways to serve and please you, for the heights are a delusion and we need the truth, the truth of our lives, if we are to know you who are the Truth. Run to us, clasp us in your arms at this Mass and kiss us tenderly as we receive you in Holy Communion. Amen.

Pilgrimage to Portugal

Homily for Our Lady of Sorrows 15 September 2007 delivered in Oporto Cathedral Today’s Liturgy shows us how close to her beloved Son Our Lady was, and how that closeness, that total identification, meant that his pain became her pain. That is a terrible phrase, a piece of psychobabble we hear all the time, but the parents among you, especially perhaps the mothers here, will know the truth of it- how you go through all the turmoils of your children’s lives with them. Closeness to people eventually means that we become like them, we take on some of our friends’ ways, their speech and turns of phrase, even perhaps their opinions. And when we look at that special form of friendship that is marriage, we all know married people who have grown so together that they always know what each other is thinking, what they’re going to say before they say it, and so on. That is why it is very important for us to choose our friends well, because they will influence us. Parents know this very well, that is why they are always so anxious about their children’s friends, especially in the teenage years, when children can become such copycats! As you know, I worked in the East End of London for many years with delinquent teenagers and their families, and one of the first questions I would always ask when I first met a youngster in trouble was “Who are your friends?” In German there is a saying, “Mitgegangen, mitgehangen”, which means, the people you hang around with will get you hanged. So who are our friends then? Well on our pilgrimage this week we have made a deliberate effort to come close to some really major saints, those closest in life to Our Lord. We went to Compostela to get to know St James, to acquire some kind of intimacy with one of the disciples- Peter, James and John- who was always in Our Lord’s inner circle, one of his special friends, one to whom he gave special insights. Then yesterday we journeyed to Fatima, to Our Lady, to draw close to Our Blessed Mother, the Mother of Jesus and the Mother of us all, the person who was and is closest of all to Jesus, who always has his listening ear. Can we let them influence us? I think we should. Let us be a bit rash in our love for Our Lord, like St James- when Jesus said to him “Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?”, even though he didn’t really know what that meant, nevertheless, he said straightaway “Yes, we can!” We want to have some of that enthusiasm of St James too, that is why we hugged him at Compostela, we want to be one with him and make the same kind of enthusiastic offering of ourselves to Our Lord. And as for Our Lady- do you remember the Gospel reading we had the other day, when the angel appears to Joseph and says “Do not be afraid to take Mary to your home”? Well, that is a message for us- we must not be afraid to take Mary with us to our homes as we return to them this evening. May each one of us have no fear, and be willing and happy to take Mary to our home. Let us make the saints our friends and let our intimacy with them influence us, change our lives and bring us ever closer to our Blessed Lord. Amen.

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.