Sixth Sunday of Year B 15 February 2009

Homily for Sixth Sunday of the Year B 15 February 2009

Sometimes when we look at the readings given for a certain Sunday, it is hard for us to see the connection between them, why that Old Testament reading has been chosen and so on. But today the connection is very clear- the ancient laws by which the Jews had to try and live describe in our first reading how anyone with leprosy (that is, not the modern disease we call leprosy, but any one of a number of possible skin diseases) must be kept apart from everyone else and live outside the camp, outside normal society. And in today’s Gospel Jesus is dealing with a leper, who begs him to cure him, to let him regain his place in normal society, to belong again, to come in from the outside. What is the reaction of Jesus?
We need hardly ask! Our Lord’s ministry in Mark’s Gospel is shown above all as one of healing, healing not only of all the bodily ailments that afflict us and hold us back from any sort of physical perfection, but also of the demons, the demons within us, the stresses and phobias, the feelings of guilt and inadequacy, all the mental torments that hold us back too and obscure the person we could be in our full potential. And so Our Lord is very moved when he looks upon this suffering outcast- the translation we have here is hopeless, “feeling sorry for him” does not have any of the force of the Greek word, which means “became extremely emotional”, with a mixture of pity and anger. And he does what no one else would have risked doing- he “stretched out his hand and touched him”. That alone would have sent a frisson round the onlookers- gosh, did you see that, he actually touched him! Do you recall the effect that Princess Diana had back in the mid 80s when AIDS was a new and frightening thing, when she was photographed holding the hand of an AIDS sufferer in hospital? That gesture broke through a lot of the taboos that were building up fast at that time. Our Lord being prepared to touch the leper was already a huge statement, of acceptance, of the renewal of human contact, a sign of the possibility of a return to ordinary society, of belonging again. “If you want to, you can cure me” is the leper’s humble prayer, his hesitant request, which he hardly dares to hope will be answered. There is nothing hesitant, however, about Our Lord’s emphatic reply – “Of course I want to!” But of course this is precisely what Jesus has started his ministry to do- to cure people, to make them well and whole again, to free them from the shackles of disease and sin. “Be cured!” he says “and the leprosy left him at once and he was cured”.
But there is far more in this Gospel passage for us to consider, for what we actually have here is one of the first hints – we are still only in chapter 1 after all!- that Mark gives us of what Jesus’s ministry is really about, and where, with a terrible logic of its own, it will inevitably lead him. Here we see Our Lord gladly, one might even say enthusiastically, curing a leper of his uncleanness. But let us look what happens then to Jesus. What is the result of this welcoming of the outcast back into the fold, this touching of the leper, this healing of the unclean for Our Lord himself? Ironically, the situation is suddenly reversed, for now that the leper is back in society, in a strange way it is Our Lord who is out in the cold- we read “Jesus could no longer go openly into any town, but had to stay outside”. Our Lord has taken the uncleanness away from this poor leper, and as a result finds himself in the leper’s position, unable to go into the towns and having to keep away from people – it is as if he has taken on the burden of the man he has cured. All this of course resonates with our understanding of Our Lord’s death and resurrection, doesn’t it. Our Lord, taking on the burden of our sins, being “the lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” Do you remember what Isaiah prophesised about Our Lord? It is part of the readings we have every Good Friday: “the crowds were appalled on seeing him, so disfigured did he look….and yet ours were the sufferings he bore, ours the sorrows he carried…..Yes, he was torn away from the land of the living, for our faults struck down to death”. We have in today’s Gospel reading a hint of what is to come, of the other side of the coin if you like of the healing and the curing: it all comes at a price, all this healing, all this sorting out of the ills of humanity, all this putting of mankind straight with God once and for all – Jesus will suffer for us, he will be the scapegoat that is turned away into the desert to bear away the sins of the people and die. For where does Jesus eventually meet his death? Where is Calvary? It is “the green hill far away, without a city wall” as the hymn says- it is outside the city, outside the security and order of the city, beyond the walls, where people throw their rubbish and bury their dead, where all the uncleanness is. It is there, beyond the limits of normal society, in the very heart of the uncleanness and impurity of mankind, in the detritus and the wreckage of fallen humanity, that our Lord is driven to his death- driven of course by the Roman soldiers and the authorities who have connived at his death, but driven there ultimately as the inevitable consequence of his life’s work, the impetus of all the healings and of all the saving of souls. This is what lies ahead for Jesus, but we see him today in the very first days of his ministry, full of energy for his work, as Mark depicts him, dashing from one healing to another, full of eagerness to cure whoever presents himself before him.
He is eager still, Our Lord, eager to cure us, to free us from whatever demons torment us and from whatever sins hold us back from becoming our true selves. And we are like that leper, aren’t we: we know our uncleanness, we know our failures, we know the mess we make of things, we know what our own private leprosy is. We too are longing to come in from the cold, to experience the warmth of God’s love, we too are tired of being an outsider, an outcast, we too want to belong, to belong to God, to feel his healing touch in our lives. We too need acceptance. Let us approach Our Lord this morning, and say with that leper “If you want to, you can cure me” and may the Lord in his mercy and love look upon us, stretch out his hand to touch us, and say to us “Be cured!” Amen.

Sunday 18 January 2009

Homily for Second Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B 18 January 2009

Last week we had the story of the Baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan by John the Baptist, an event which marked the start of Jesus’s ministry, and here we have in today’s Gospel what happened the very next day, the calling of the first disciples. The other Gospels have Jesus walking by the lake of Galilee and calling them from where they sat by their fishing boats mending their nets, but John remembers it quite differently- for him the first encounter is by the river Jordan, where two disciples watch Jesus as he is walking by and are fascinated by him- encouraged by John the Baptist they start following Jesus, and Jesus turns round to see who they are.
What happens as John describes it is something that is deeply theological, something in other words that speaks to us of God and mankind’s relationship to him. And here we have the first words that Jesus speaks in the Gospel, “What do you want?” This is the question that Our Lord puts to everyone who shows any interest in him, in following him, in becoming a disciple of his- what is it that you are really looking for? What is it that you need? It is a question that touches on the basic need that is in every human being, a need to turn to God, to have some kind of intimacy and friendship with God that will put meaning and contentment into our lives. The answer of the two disciples is very interesting, they say “Where do you live?” or, in the better translation of the RSV, “Where are you staying?” The Greek word that John is using here –menein- does mean live, but it means stay, dwell, abide, words that have an idea of permanence about them. As humans, we live with the fact that nothing stays, nothing stays the same- “change and decay in all around I see” as the old hymn has it. One of the factors that is built into the human condition that cause us so much distress is that we live in a world of change, change and death, and we long to find something, someone, to grab hold of that will not change, that will stay the same no matter what. Alas, there is nothing, no one, that will not change- only God is the changeless one, never bored with us, never cross with us, never trading us in for a younger model, never abandoning us! An old hymn reminds us that “earthly friends may falter and change with changing years” – it is only Jesus who is the “friend who never faileth”, the one who is as St Claude la Colombière used to call “le seul, le véritable ami”, the one true friend. So the disciples are voicing this great yearning of all mankind, for something that is lasting, for a connexion of some kind to the eternal, for God. And Jesus responds to this desire with the invitation to join him in the place where he stays, in the permanence of his friendship- “so they went and saw where he lived”. And, such was the bond between them, so much was this the exact answer to their longings, that John says “they stayed with him”- they had come to stay in his friendship for ever. That is what our Lord has come to earth to offer mankind, the possibility of returning to an easy relationship with God, to enjoy his favour, to be at peace with him, and to stay in that peace.
The Gospel passage goes on to show us what is the natural, inevitable development that follows on from our entering into this new closeness with Our Lord. One of the two disciples we have been talking about is named here as Andrew, and the first thing he does is dash off to tell someone else about Jesus, who he is and what his message is- he goes to find his brother Simon Peter. That is part and parcel of being a disciple isn’t it- we become apostles too, people who go out to find others and bring them in to the circle and influence of our loving Saviour, so that they too can find in his friendship the peace and the permanence we crave in all the changes that swirl around us and bewilder us, mislead us and disappoint us. And notice what happens when we do evangelise, when we do our bit to explain the faith, to bring people to Our Lord. In explaining it, we enrich ourselves, in teaching- as any teacher knows- we deepen our own understanding. When Andrew first meets Jesus he just calls him “Rabbi”, just recognising that he is a great man, a great teacher, nothing more- at least, nothing he is sure of, even though he may have a few glimmerings of the glorious truth of who he really is. But by the time he is telling his brother about him, he is saying “We have found the Messiah”. So it is that as we try to explain our faith we find we grow in it and fresh and deeper insights come to us- I know I find this myself constantly on the RCIA programme.
And when Jesus meets Simon, as we all know, he gives him a new name- Cephas in Aramaic, or Peter in Greek. This is not a real name as such, it means Stone or Rock and so it is a nickname, like calling someone “Rocky”. We have had a lot in the press lately about nicknames. One of the stupidest sayings in the English language, I always think, is “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”. Rubbish! We all know that cruel unkind words can do far more harm to us than anything else, and their wounding impact stays with us far longer than any bruise. And sometimes nicknames are nasty, aren’t they, a sly way of insulting us. But in their proper use, they can be a great sign of belonging, being part of the group, one of the family and so on. They can also be a deliberate attempt at forging a new identity- hence all the tags young people use on the street and the internet and so on. That is what is happening here- Jesus is giving Simon a nickname to show Simon is now a particularly close friend, an intimate, and of course also to indicate his new identity, his special function in the group, which Matthew has Jesus spell out- “the rock on which I shall build my Church”.
And so in this Gospel today we can see the evangelist telling us that Jesus has come to satisfy all those deepest spiritual needs of men and women, for something, someone that will not change, in other words, for God. He shows us Jesus inviting us into the place where he dwells, into the eternal, lasting friendship that is the life of God, letting us stay with him, calling us by terms of endearment and giving us a new identity. When shortly Fr Chris holds up the consecrated host and tells us “This is the lamb of God” he will be echoing John the Baptist’s words in this scene. May we respond as those first two disciples did, and come to communion to accept Our Lord’s invitation to come and dwell with him, as he comes to dwell with us, and may we stay in his friendship for ever. Amen.

New Year's Day 2009

Homily for New Year’s Day: Mary the Mother of God 1 January 2009 The first impulse of the Church at the start of each new year is to confide ourselves afresh to the maternal care of Our Lady and to ask for her prayers to assist us as we make our first steps into the unknown- and not for many years has a new year seemed so unknown as this, when we face the colossal financial uncertainties in which the whole world is gripped. I try to read nowadays the business pages of the newspaper every day to see if I can understand what’s going on, but even the so-called experts who write the articles seem never to agree on how bad things are going to be or what it is going to feel like or how long this recession is going to last. And of course there is no shortage of religious people also wading in with their own predictions, their own take on these financial developments. Most of what they write annoys me I must say- I don’t like being told that being poor is going to be good for me! We will get our priorities right, they seem to suggest, once we are broke. Well, maybe….I find all that rather patronising, for who wants to be told that this is going to be good for you whether you like it or not? So now here I am this morning, yet another religious person, but not a patronising one I hope- and what is my take on all this? Well, I have no take actually. But one thing I do want to share with you, and that is a message that I have found this Christmas striking me with a new urgency in the familiar Gospel stories of the birth of Christ. You know of course that only two of the Gospels give us accounts of Jesus’s birth: Matthew and Luke. Let’s recall what Luke tells us first of all. Luke begins his Gospel not with the birth of Our Lord, but with the conception of John the Baptist, the cousin of Jesus who will be his herald, the last of the prophets announcing the coming of the Messiah, the one whom our Orthodox brethren call simply “John the Forerunner.” Elizabeth, barren and past child-bearing age anyway, is suddenly pregnant, and the angel Gabriel comes to John’s father Zechariah to tell him this astounding news. When he sees the angel, standing by the altar just as he is about to perform his liturgical duties, he is of course frightened- Luke says “fear fell upon him”. But Luke goes on to say that the angel speaks to Zechariah and his opening words are “Do not be afraid!”- “Do not be afraid, for your prayer is heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son and you shall call his name John, and you will have joy and gladness”. Do not be afraid- this is the refrain we hear no less than three times in the infancy narrative of Luke. You remember that this is what Gabriel also says to Our Lady when he greets her “Hail, O favoured one, the Lord is with you!” Mary too, like Zechariah, is bewildered by this sudden apparition, Luke tells us that “she was greatly troubled….and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be”. At once the angel says to her “Do not be afraid, for you have found favour with God”. And the third time we hear this saying is when an angel appears to those humble ordinary people, the shepherds, who were on duty that cold dark night, out in the fields watching their flock of sheep. They too were scared stiff- Luke says “they were filled with fear”. What does the old carol say? “Mighty dread had filled their troubled minds”. And what is the first thing the angel says to them? “Be not afraid” - “Be not afraid, for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people”. And when we turn to Matthew’s Gospel we find the same thing. Where Luke has concentrated very much on Our Lady and showing us everything from Mary’s point of view, Matthew instead concentrates more on the person of Joseph. (One reason he does this is that he is anxious to show how Jesus fulfils all the criteria that the prophets had given through the centuries about the Messiah, and of course one thing they all agreed on was that the Messiah would come from the House of David, and Joseph was a descendant of David). Matthew begins his account by telling us that Joseph and Mary have got engaged, and that Joseph at first doesn’t know what to do when he finds out that Our Lady is pregnant. He thinks, doesn’t he, that maybe the best thing will be to divorce her privately. Matthew goes on to tell us “but as he considered this, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream”. The angel explains that Mary is with child by the Holy Spirit- and he begins with the words “Joseph, son of David, do not fear”. “Do not fear to take Mary your wife”. And so you see no less than four times in the Christmas stories we hear the angels saying “Do not be afraid!” They are saying that to us too this Christmas if we will listen- at this holy season as my favourite carol says there are “angels bending near the earth to tune their harps of gold”. The carol goes on “But man at war with man hears not the love-song that they bring”. That is the risk we run when we are so consumed with all our worries about the future, that we do not listen! There are many people, many insistent voices, clamouring for our attention, especially now with news coming in every day of this or that bank collapsing, this or that firm laying off its workers, this or that politician promising all kinds of solutions and blaming everyone but themselves. We need to stay calm in all this maelstrom that is surging around us. We need to do two things, it seems to me. One is to use our brain, to use the brain that God has given us, to try to think as clearly as we can about what’s happening and how it will affect us personally. That is what Zechariah did: once he had heard Gabriel’s message he began thinking- “How shall I know this?” And it is what Our Lady did: she was thinking fast from the moment of the Archangel’s greeting when “she considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be”. Luke says “And Mary said to the angel, How shall this be, since I have no husband?” The other is to listen and take to heart the angels’ message to us- “Do not be afraid!” “Hush your noise” as the carol says “hear the love-song that they bring”. Let us advance into this year of grace 2009 in a spirit of confidence, inspired by the message that the angels bring us. Let us listen to the voice of God in our lives, those promptings of the Holy Spirit that will come to us in the quiet of our prayers and in our reflecting on the Word of God in the Scriptures; let us be like Mary in this, and “treasure all these things and ponder them” in our hearts, and then we may be like her in this too, that “we have found favour with God”. As we listen to the angels announcing to us the good news, of “peace to men who enjoy his favour” let us put aside our fears as the angels bid us, and may God “be gracious and bless us” as we walk into the unknown in the company of Our Lord and his Blessed Mother. Amen.

Christmas Eve 2008

Homily for Christmas Eve Vigil Mass 2008 As we processed it to church for this Mass, it was a joy to see so many dear and familiar faces, all smiling at the approach of this holy night, but chief among them I am pleased to see my old friend Solange, here in row A- she is nearly 89, and housebound, this is the first Christmas she has managed to get to Mass for many years but I dragged her here tonight. Soyez la bienvenue! Solange enchants me with her fund of stories about her childhood on a farm in the Vosges, in Lorraine, in Eastern France. I particularly enjoy her reminiscences about those village Christmases eighty or so years ago, when as midnight approached you could see from all the neighbouring farms each family set out for Mass, and come trudging along the paths at the edges of the fields, each with their own lantern swinging in the night, all those lights bobbing along, each one a family group muffled up against the cold, making their way to the village church while the bells pealed out in the frosty air. And there, in that ancient church as the Mass began, the choir- and Solange was in the village choir as a little girl- would belt out that charming old French Christmas hymn, “Minuit Chrétiens!” which we know in translation as “O Holy night”. It has a lot of theology in it, like all the old hymns do, and the second verse has a particularly striking line, I think: speaking of the birth of the Redeemer it asks “Qui lui dira notre reconnaissance?” Who will tell him our gratitude? How are we going to show our gratitude, how are we going to express to Our Lord how grateful we are that he came into our world, into our flesh, and dwelt among us? My Aunt, who brought me up, was big on manners- saying the right thing at the right time. But words, as I often found out, were never enough to satisfy her. If I had done something wrong, and said sorry, perhaps a bit too easily or a bit half-heartedly, she would say sceptically “Well, you don’t look sorry!” And so I learnt to act sorry! But that wasn’t enough either- to show I was sorry and meant it, I had to do something, to do something nice to the person I’d upset, to try to put right whatever it was I’d done wrong. And so it was with being grateful- just saying thank you was a start (I used to think as a boy that if I didn’t say thank you the ceiling would fall in, my Aunt’s eyes so often were raised to it!). Being grateful, like being sorry, had to mean more than just words, it had to involve action. And so it is with us tonight, when we consider how we are going to answer that question in the old hymn- how are we going to thank God for his precious gift, the gift of his only Son, the baby in the manger who has entered our world and taken on our humanity? Words are a start but we will want to do more than just words. An advert on TV has given me an answer- I wonder if you have seen it. It’s for the famous chemist’s that we have a branch of in the shopping centre here, and it takes place in an office where all the staff-mostly women- are taking part in a “Secret Santa”, and are secretly wrapping up the presents they have bought for the name they have drawn- a shaver for the man with the unruly beard, tweezers for the girl whose eyebrows meet in the middle, and so on. And there is one young woman who has a crush on the man whose name she has drawn, and she is busy wrapping herself up in a whole roll of Christmas paper and when the time comes for them all to go down to the tree and put their presents round it, there she is, try to hop her way down the stairs all done up as a present herself! She is the present, she is going to give herself, to some lucky man! Can that be us tonight? Can we make of our lives a present? If we stop and think about ourselves, and how we conduct our lives, and how we behave to those around us, are we a gift? Are we really much of a gift? Can we try to be a gift, a gift and a blessing, to our loved ones, to our neighbours and friends, to our work colleagues? We can ask Our Lord to help us become such a gift, so that we are better gifts, real presents to those among whom we live. At every Mass the priest takes the unconsecrated bread on the paten and says one of a variety of prayers: sometimes in Canon II he says “Let your Spirit come upon these gifts to make them holy”- those words you know apply to us too- “that they may become for us the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ”. You see, we too must change with the changes that are wrought on the altar, we need to be made holy, we too need to be changed into the Body of Christ, to become more and more like Christ so that we can be his body in the world. In Canon III the priest says “May he make us an everlasting gift to you”. Our Lord is a gift to us, and we in our turn want to be a gift to him- this is the exchange of gifts that the old missal called “a wonderful commerce”, that God shares our humanity and we share his divinity, which is in the prayer that the deacon makes as he mixes the chalice to hand to the priest. Tonight we use the ancient Roman Canon, in which you will hear Fr Sean say “Bless and approve our offering, make it acceptable to you, an offering in spirit and in truth”. When we hear those words, let us place in our imagination ourselves and our lives on that paten next to the bread, so that it is of ourselves we are speaking- bless me, approve of me, make me acceptable to you, make my life an offering in spirit and in truth. Then our lives will be changed- if we allow ourselves to co-operate with the graces that come to us at this holy Mass tonight- and we will be able to be the gift to our family that we want to be, the blessing to those with whom we live and work. And so we answer that old carol’s question – who will tell him our gratitude? – we will! Dear Lord Jesus, let you spirit come upon us this Christmas night to make us holy, to make us acceptable to you, to make us an everlasting gift to you, as we bring to the manger the gift that is our very selves, an offering in spirit and in truth. Amen.

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.

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.