How often in the Gospels we hear Our Lord speaking urgently to his disciples of the need for vigilance, for being always on the alert, for not getting too lax, too complacent about our relationship with God. Here Jesus tells them “See that you are dressed for action and have your lamps lit!” The mention of lamps makes us think straightaway doesn’t it of the wise virgins and the foolish virgins of the famous parable, the wise virgins who had brought enough oil with them to keep their lamps lit for when the bridegroom would arrive. It is in Matthew chapter 25 and when finally the bridegroom comes we read that “those who were ready went with him to the marriage feast and the door was shut” (Mt 25 x) and the moral is “Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour”, a phrase we find repeated in Matthew and also in Mark. There is a sense in all these stories that we must not drop our guard, that we are like sentries in a war, we have to keep scanning the horizon to see if the enemy is trying to approach. In the First Letter of St Peter we hear the good advice of the apostle: “Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour.” (I Pet 5 viii) We think too of course of Our Lord’s request to his disciples when his troubles came upon him and he needed to feel their loyalty- you remember, on the Mt of Olives Jesus saying “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here and watch with me” (Mt 26 xxxviii) and alas, such is our frail human nature, none of them could stay awake!
What is this watchfulness that Our Lord wants from us? Well, it is partly to show him we care, we care enough about him to stay awake, to stay alert, not to doze off, lulled by the lullaby of the world and all its delights. But it is not just for the enemy that we have to be watching earnestly, it is for the One we love. When we are in love with someone, we are so excited to be in their company that we are wide-awake, we don’t want to miss anything, not a nanosecond of their company: that great love song in the Bible, the Song of Songs, has the lover saying “I slept but my heart was awake. Hark! My Beloved is knocking!” (Cant 5 ii) We should be as eager for Our Lord as that, as ready to wonder if we are hearing his footstep, or recognising the sound of his voice, as we do when we are besotted with someone. Because if we are listening as earnestly as that, then we will hear his voice- he will be speaking to us in all sorts of ways using all sorts of people and anything from the “Metro” to the Bible– things will leap off the page at us, filled suddenly with meaning because we are thinking of him. This watchfulness will show itself also in our fondness for prayer, our determination to keep the lines of communication with the Beloved open at all times- how many times do people text their boyfriend or their girlfriend? Maybe you are doing it even now in some corner of a pew! A bit further on in Luke’s Gospel Luke has Jesus tell us “But watch at all times, praying that you may have strength…” (Lk 21 xxxvi) and St Paul tells the Ephesians “Pray at all times in the Spirit” (Eph 6 xviii) and ends his First Letter to the Corinthians with the advice “Be watchful, stand firm in your faith, be courageous, be strong” (I Cor 16 xiii).
And so in today’s Gospel we hear Jesus saying “ You too must stand ready, because the Son of Man is coming at an Hour you do not expect”. We have seen that one way of imagining this attitude is to think of the lover waiting for the loved one, but here we have another image: the servants who are waiting up to be ready to greet the Master of the household whenever he returns, however late it may be, however inconvenient it may be. Jesus says we are to be “ready to open the door as soon as he comes and knocks”. Here we have another aspect of this watchfulness: we are to be on the look-out for the least thing that our Master might want, to be there to hand whatever it is to him, to look after him, to be as it were thinking ahead to help him – the perfect servant, the servant he will love to have by his side, whom he can’t do without, whom he relies on, with whom there is an unbreakable bond of trust.
What we are seeing in fact is a description of the Christian life as we should aim to live it- vigilant and faithful is what we are supposed to be, what Our Lord wants from us above all. An attitude that is all about how we can serve Our Lord and how we can show him our love in our service, how we can grow in our love in our faithfulness to prayer and how, by keeping our hearts always fixed on him, we can discern his traces, his footsteps and the sound of his voice, in a thousand things that happen to us in the course of a week, how we can keep our distance from the snares of evil, how we can stay on guard over our frail human nature so that we do not in a moment of foolishness fall so half asleep with our fantasies that we sell the pass. Those first disciples were a hopeless lot, weren’t they- do you remember on the Mt of Olives Mark tells us Jesus , who so wanted them to stay awake, found them all sleeping “and he said to Peter, “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not watch one hour?”” (Mk 14 xxxvii) We ask this morning for the grace to stay awake, on the alert and on guard. Help us to stand ready for Our Lord in every aspect of our lives. O Jesus, when you come, find us watching, find us with our lamps lit, find us ready to jump up and let you in- and then, like the Master in today’s Gospel, dear Jesus sit us down at your table and wait on us, take us to the marriage feast, give us the Bread of Heaven from the Table of the King of Kings. Amen.
Friday, 13 August 2010
Sunday, 25 July 2010
Sunday 25 July 2010
Homily for 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C 25 July 2010
May I begin this morning by reflecting with you on the first reading from Genesis, which is the famous passage where Abraham is shown interceding and almost bargaining with God over the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. We see at once that this is from a very ancient source because in the opening verses God is depicted as behaving like a human being- he doesn’t know exactly what has been going on and intends to go down and find out for himself – so much for an omniscient God!
There are two main points I think to this story. First, we must remember that Abraham hasn’t been Abraham very long – it was only in the previous chapter that God appeared to Abram as he was then and made his covenant with him, to make him “the father of a multitude of nations” (Gen 17 iv onwards). As signs that now a special relationship existed between Abram and God, he has a new identity- a new name - and he and all his male household are circumcised. God wants this new identity to go deep: “so shall my covenant be in your flesh as an everlasting covenant” (Gen 17 xiii) - it is not something superficial! Then last week we saw how God visits Abraham under the appearance of three young men, to whom Abraham gives hospitality, another sign of friendship, this new intimacy with God that involves a sharing of our lives and our resources with him. Now today Abraham moves on further in this new relationship. He is trying to understand the nature of God, and what we see in this great game of haggling with God over how many will be saved in these wicked cities, is Abraham trying to get an answer to the questions that all thinking people ask sooner or later in life: is God just? Is God fair? Or is God merciful? Does he let everybody off no matter what they’ve done? And should he? Because if people who do wrong get off scot free, where’s the justice in that? (And, of course, the footnote to that is: well if there’s no advantage in being good, I may as well be bad!) So Abraham begins by asking God “Are you really going to destroy the just man with the sinner?” And at the end of the cross-examination God says “I will not destroy it for the sake of ten” - and here we come to the second point I want to raise with you, the idea that the just can save not just themselves but the unjust too, that it is possible for a whole community to be saved by the merits of a few. This is something that the Jews were unclear about at this period – I suppose this story in its present form is dated from the post-exilic time, late 6th c BC – a generation or so before this, the prophet Ezekiel is quite clear that we can’t be saved by the merits of somebody else: he says, talking about a faithless land “even if these three men, Noah, Daniel and Job, were in it, they would deliver but their own lives by their righteousness”. (Ezek 14 xiv). But as Catholics we know different don’t we: we know that the whole human race was saved by one person, by the suffering and death of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Our second reading reminds us of that: St Paul tells the Colossians that Jesus has “cancelled every record of the debt that we had to pay”. Do you remember what Jesus says on the cross- “it is finished”- in the Greek tetelestai, the very word as I told you on Good Friday that archaeologists have found written across tax bills of the time of Christ, to say they are paid in full. And of course as Catholics we know too that we do no go it alone, we rely for support in our daily lives and in our journey to heaven on the assistance of our fellow Christians, and especially the saints who have gone before us- how often we hear the priest remind us in Confession that we can rely on “the merits and prayers of the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints” as well as “whatever good we have done and evil we have endured”. In the Mass we call on the aid of the saints: after the long list in the Roman Canon the priest says “may their merits and prayers gain us your constant help and protection” and Canon III speaks of “Mary the Virgin Mother of God, the apostles, the martyrs and all your saints on whose constant intercession we rely for help”. So this Genesis reading is partly about what we might call the righteousness of God – the balance that God has to hold between mercy and justice – and partly about the whole idea of being saved by someone else’s merits, foreign to the Jewish mind but part of our everyday experience as Catholics.
And now let’s pass to our Gospel reading. St Luke, after giving us his version of the Lord’s Prayer, talks about prayer in general. He is thinking here only of one form of prayer, the most common of all- praying to ask God for things. We of course realise that prayer involves much more than just asking for things- we should have praise in there somewhere and thanks too, when we talk to God, we know that really, don’t we, even if we don’t always manage to put it into practice. So the evangelist says we will always get what we need from our loving Father- “knock and the door will be opened to you, for the one who asks always receives…” Now the problem with that is, that doesn’t match up to our experience at all- we ask and we don’t get. But what does Luke actually say we will receive? He doesn’t say it’s a straightforward asking for something and receiving exactly what we described in our prayer a few days later. It’s not like filling in one of those forms at Argos and after a bit of a queue voila your new whatever it is is ready for collection! It’s not like Amazon – click on the book you want and hey presto tomorrow the postman delivers it! May be it’s more like E-Bay: you hope you’re going to get what you want, but maybe your bid just wasn’t high enough and you don’t get it. No, if you look carefully at this passage, St Luke says what God will give us in response to our request is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God that will help us discern what our needs really are, what our behaviour in any given situation should be, how we cope with the now, whatever the demands of the present moment in our lives are, and that will be the answer to our prayer. Look at St James- it should be his feast day today - do you remember what a pushy mother James and John had, asking Our Lord to give her sons the top jobs once he set up his new regime? What was the answer to that request, to that prayer? Jesus saw behind that demand for the right hand post, the real desire of James and John to be as close to him as they could, because of their devotion to him. And that desire he grants- can you drink the cup that I am going to drink? He asks them, and they reply so enthusiastically, “Sure we can!, just try us!” And we know that St James in his desire to be a close follower, a close imitator, of Our Lord, followed him so closely that he was the first of the apostles to be put to death – he drank indeed from the same cup that our Lord had done. O God, help us to trust in your justice and in your mercy, help us to realise our dependence not just on you but on our fellow Christians, especially your Holy Mother and all the saints. We are knocking at your door with our many prayers, our many needs, this morning- O Jesus, open the door and give us your Holy Spirit. Saint James, pray for us. Amen.
May I begin this morning by reflecting with you on the first reading from Genesis, which is the famous passage where Abraham is shown interceding and almost bargaining with God over the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. We see at once that this is from a very ancient source because in the opening verses God is depicted as behaving like a human being- he doesn’t know exactly what has been going on and intends to go down and find out for himself – so much for an omniscient God!
There are two main points I think to this story. First, we must remember that Abraham hasn’t been Abraham very long – it was only in the previous chapter that God appeared to Abram as he was then and made his covenant with him, to make him “the father of a multitude of nations” (Gen 17 iv onwards). As signs that now a special relationship existed between Abram and God, he has a new identity- a new name - and he and all his male household are circumcised. God wants this new identity to go deep: “so shall my covenant be in your flesh as an everlasting covenant” (Gen 17 xiii) - it is not something superficial! Then last week we saw how God visits Abraham under the appearance of three young men, to whom Abraham gives hospitality, another sign of friendship, this new intimacy with God that involves a sharing of our lives and our resources with him. Now today Abraham moves on further in this new relationship. He is trying to understand the nature of God, and what we see in this great game of haggling with God over how many will be saved in these wicked cities, is Abraham trying to get an answer to the questions that all thinking people ask sooner or later in life: is God just? Is God fair? Or is God merciful? Does he let everybody off no matter what they’ve done? And should he? Because if people who do wrong get off scot free, where’s the justice in that? (And, of course, the footnote to that is: well if there’s no advantage in being good, I may as well be bad!) So Abraham begins by asking God “Are you really going to destroy the just man with the sinner?” And at the end of the cross-examination God says “I will not destroy it for the sake of ten” - and here we come to the second point I want to raise with you, the idea that the just can save not just themselves but the unjust too, that it is possible for a whole community to be saved by the merits of a few. This is something that the Jews were unclear about at this period – I suppose this story in its present form is dated from the post-exilic time, late 6th c BC – a generation or so before this, the prophet Ezekiel is quite clear that we can’t be saved by the merits of somebody else: he says, talking about a faithless land “even if these three men, Noah, Daniel and Job, were in it, they would deliver but their own lives by their righteousness”. (Ezek 14 xiv). But as Catholics we know different don’t we: we know that the whole human race was saved by one person, by the suffering and death of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Our second reading reminds us of that: St Paul tells the Colossians that Jesus has “cancelled every record of the debt that we had to pay”. Do you remember what Jesus says on the cross- “it is finished”- in the Greek tetelestai, the very word as I told you on Good Friday that archaeologists have found written across tax bills of the time of Christ, to say they are paid in full. And of course as Catholics we know too that we do no go it alone, we rely for support in our daily lives and in our journey to heaven on the assistance of our fellow Christians, and especially the saints who have gone before us- how often we hear the priest remind us in Confession that we can rely on “the merits and prayers of the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints” as well as “whatever good we have done and evil we have endured”. In the Mass we call on the aid of the saints: after the long list in the Roman Canon the priest says “may their merits and prayers gain us your constant help and protection” and Canon III speaks of “Mary the Virgin Mother of God, the apostles, the martyrs and all your saints on whose constant intercession we rely for help”. So this Genesis reading is partly about what we might call the righteousness of God – the balance that God has to hold between mercy and justice – and partly about the whole idea of being saved by someone else’s merits, foreign to the Jewish mind but part of our everyday experience as Catholics.
And now let’s pass to our Gospel reading. St Luke, after giving us his version of the Lord’s Prayer, talks about prayer in general. He is thinking here only of one form of prayer, the most common of all- praying to ask God for things. We of course realise that prayer involves much more than just asking for things- we should have praise in there somewhere and thanks too, when we talk to God, we know that really, don’t we, even if we don’t always manage to put it into practice. So the evangelist says we will always get what we need from our loving Father- “knock and the door will be opened to you, for the one who asks always receives…” Now the problem with that is, that doesn’t match up to our experience at all- we ask and we don’t get. But what does Luke actually say we will receive? He doesn’t say it’s a straightforward asking for something and receiving exactly what we described in our prayer a few days later. It’s not like filling in one of those forms at Argos and after a bit of a queue voila your new whatever it is is ready for collection! It’s not like Amazon – click on the book you want and hey presto tomorrow the postman delivers it! May be it’s more like E-Bay: you hope you’re going to get what you want, but maybe your bid just wasn’t high enough and you don’t get it. No, if you look carefully at this passage, St Luke says what God will give us in response to our request is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God that will help us discern what our needs really are, what our behaviour in any given situation should be, how we cope with the now, whatever the demands of the present moment in our lives are, and that will be the answer to our prayer. Look at St James- it should be his feast day today - do you remember what a pushy mother James and John had, asking Our Lord to give her sons the top jobs once he set up his new regime? What was the answer to that request, to that prayer? Jesus saw behind that demand for the right hand post, the real desire of James and John to be as close to him as they could, because of their devotion to him. And that desire he grants- can you drink the cup that I am going to drink? He asks them, and they reply so enthusiastically, “Sure we can!, just try us!” And we know that St James in his desire to be a close follower, a close imitator, of Our Lord, followed him so closely that he was the first of the apostles to be put to death – he drank indeed from the same cup that our Lord had done. O God, help us to trust in your justice and in your mercy, help us to realise our dependence not just on you but on our fellow Christians, especially your Holy Mother and all the saints. We are knocking at your door with our many prayers, our many needs, this morning- O Jesus, open the door and give us your Holy Spirit. Saint James, pray for us. Amen.
Sunday, 18 July 2010
Sunday 18 July 2010
Homily for Sixteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time Year C 18 July 2010
One of the wonderful things about this parish is the large numbers of converts, of all ages and backgrounds, that come and ask to be brought into the Catholic Church through the Sacraments and what a joy it is to instruct and prepare them – and today we welcome into the Church in the sacraments of initiation that will follow this homily two dear young people Etienne and Peggy from our French-speaking community. And so, mes chers enfants, I am speaking to the whole congregation but you will easily guess that I am speaking at the same time particularly to you!
Today’s readings seem very appropriate for this occasion of welcoming new members into the Church. In the letter of St Paul to the Colossians St Paul describes his mission- a mission in which all Christians, but especially all clergy, share: he says he is “responsible for delivering God’s message to you”. That is the awesome task of those who instruct converts, whether in the RCIA programme or by individual sessions – we must deliver God’s message to you, not our own agenda, not what we would like God’s message to be, not what we think you would like to hear, not what we think will sound really up to date in 2010, but God’s timeless message as we have it from the long tradition of the Catholic Church’s teaching authority that goes back ultimately to the Gospels. And he describes the message as essentially a mystery- “the message which was a mystery hidden for generations and centuries and….now ….revealed to his saints”. Now when we use the word “mystery” in Church things, we do not mean a mystery in the sense of something we can’t understand, like an Agatha Christie novel. It can’t be something we don’t understand because, as I tell all my converts, we have been born with a brain and God expects us to use it to understand him better, we do not check it in at the holy water stoop when we come to Mass and pick it up again on the way out. No, our holy religion cannot be a mystery in that sense! When we use the word “mystery” we use it as a technical term, just as when we speak of the ancient religions of the East, the famous Greek shrine at Eleusis for example, we call them “mystery religions”. A mystery in this sense is something that is acted out on earth at a given place and time, that has simultaneously an eternal significance. So today, using the very ordinary materials of water and oil, we will baptise Etienne. We will see, at about 12 noon, water being poured over his forehead. With the understanding of our faith, we know that something is happening that is not just me giving his face a bit of a wash – no, by these actions, so simple in themselves, something is happening on the supernatural plane, something with eternal significance: Etienne is becoming grafted onto the Body of Christ to belong to him and to us in eternity. That is a mystery. That is what we mean too when we talk about the mysteries of the rosary- we are not saying these are a series of events that we cannot understand, we are saying these events in the lives of Our Lord and his Holy Mother 2000 years ago have eternal significance now and forever. This is what St Paul means when he says “The mystery is Christ among you”. What is our religion about? It is about Our Lord Jesus Christ, not dead, not in Heaven occasionally looking out of a window at us, but actually in our midst- “Christ among you”. Among us when we say our prayers, among us when we read the Bible and reflect upon it, among us when as he puts it “two or three are gathered together”, but above all among us when we encounter him in the sacraments, when he comes to nourish us in Holy Communion and to kiss us better in Confession. “This” St Paul says today “is the Christ we proclaim, this is the wisdom in which we thoroughly train everyone and instruct everyone”. He goers on to say that the aim is “to make them all perfect in Christ”. That is a daunting ambition! The Psalmist today has some good advice to help us on our way towards this perfection, this union with Christ, this spiritual height that he calls “your holy mountain”: he suggests that we should try to “act with justice and speak the truth from (our) heart” and not “slander with (our) tongue”,”do no wrong to (our) brother” and “cast no slur on (our) neighbour”. The psalmist hopes that we will be people of our word, who keep our promises and do not let our friends down “come what may”, honest in business and fair in all our dealings. This psalm is in fact an ideal choice for today’s ceremonies of initiation, because this is one of the psalms that were used as a sort of liturgy when Jews entered the Temple in David’s time: the visitor arriving at the courtyard entrance would say “Lord, who shall dwell on your holy mountain?” as a way of saying “Who can come into this holy place? What do you have to do to be good enough to come in?” and the priest would respond with these verses that begin “The one who…” Have do we live in union with God, the psalm asks? The person who is trying to lead the good life is on sure ground, comes the reply. We see this again in Psalm 24, when the pilgrim at the Temple gates would ask “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord and who shall stand in his holy place?” and receive from the priest the reply “ He who has clean hands and a pure heart” and so on.
Dear friends Etienne and Peggy, you stand today on the threshold of the Temple that is the Christian life in the Catholic Church. As you approach its gates, that are the sacraments of initiation, you too ask “Who can come into this holy place?” – “Lord, who shall dwell on this holy mountain?” Who can belong to the Catholic Church? If you look around you, you will see that we do not seem to have very strict requirements, it’s not like the golf club, there are all sorts here and that’s just in the sanctuary! The answer we give you is not a great long list of requirements, without which we shall not be satisfied and the gates will remain shut! You are already aware of the teachings of the Church, which are the teachings of Our Lord himself as you will shortly testify before us all, and we know that you will do your best to take them seriously. Don’t be too alarmed, too nervous about the step you are making, but take heart from the words of Jesus to Martha this morning: “you worry and fret about so many things, and yet few are needed, indeed only one”. This story, unique to Luke’s Gospel, shows us that although loving our neighbour and doing good to those around us is vital, what we need for the authentic Christian life is to put all our actions into the context of listening to the word of God – that is the one thing that really matters, so that all our actions are informed by our love of God. Dear Peggy, dear Etienne, like Mary in today’s Gospel you have understood this truth, and Our Lord affirms you this morning, saying of you as he does of her: “You have chosen the better part, it is not to be taken from you”. New Catholics or old, let us make today’s gospel acclamation our prayer at this Mass and always: “Open our heart, O Lord, to accept the words of your Son”, come among us, be Christ among us as we stay faithful to your sacraments and to your Church. Amen.
One of the wonderful things about this parish is the large numbers of converts, of all ages and backgrounds, that come and ask to be brought into the Catholic Church through the Sacraments and what a joy it is to instruct and prepare them – and today we welcome into the Church in the sacraments of initiation that will follow this homily two dear young people Etienne and Peggy from our French-speaking community. And so, mes chers enfants, I am speaking to the whole congregation but you will easily guess that I am speaking at the same time particularly to you!
Today’s readings seem very appropriate for this occasion of welcoming new members into the Church. In the letter of St Paul to the Colossians St Paul describes his mission- a mission in which all Christians, but especially all clergy, share: he says he is “responsible for delivering God’s message to you”. That is the awesome task of those who instruct converts, whether in the RCIA programme or by individual sessions – we must deliver God’s message to you, not our own agenda, not what we would like God’s message to be, not what we think you would like to hear, not what we think will sound really up to date in 2010, but God’s timeless message as we have it from the long tradition of the Catholic Church’s teaching authority that goes back ultimately to the Gospels. And he describes the message as essentially a mystery- “the message which was a mystery hidden for generations and centuries and….now ….revealed to his saints”. Now when we use the word “mystery” in Church things, we do not mean a mystery in the sense of something we can’t understand, like an Agatha Christie novel. It can’t be something we don’t understand because, as I tell all my converts, we have been born with a brain and God expects us to use it to understand him better, we do not check it in at the holy water stoop when we come to Mass and pick it up again on the way out. No, our holy religion cannot be a mystery in that sense! When we use the word “mystery” we use it as a technical term, just as when we speak of the ancient religions of the East, the famous Greek shrine at Eleusis for example, we call them “mystery religions”. A mystery in this sense is something that is acted out on earth at a given place and time, that has simultaneously an eternal significance. So today, using the very ordinary materials of water and oil, we will baptise Etienne. We will see, at about 12 noon, water being poured over his forehead. With the understanding of our faith, we know that something is happening that is not just me giving his face a bit of a wash – no, by these actions, so simple in themselves, something is happening on the supernatural plane, something with eternal significance: Etienne is becoming grafted onto the Body of Christ to belong to him and to us in eternity. That is a mystery. That is what we mean too when we talk about the mysteries of the rosary- we are not saying these are a series of events that we cannot understand, we are saying these events in the lives of Our Lord and his Holy Mother 2000 years ago have eternal significance now and forever. This is what St Paul means when he says “The mystery is Christ among you”. What is our religion about? It is about Our Lord Jesus Christ, not dead, not in Heaven occasionally looking out of a window at us, but actually in our midst- “Christ among you”. Among us when we say our prayers, among us when we read the Bible and reflect upon it, among us when as he puts it “two or three are gathered together”, but above all among us when we encounter him in the sacraments, when he comes to nourish us in Holy Communion and to kiss us better in Confession. “This” St Paul says today “is the Christ we proclaim, this is the wisdom in which we thoroughly train everyone and instruct everyone”. He goers on to say that the aim is “to make them all perfect in Christ”. That is a daunting ambition! The Psalmist today has some good advice to help us on our way towards this perfection, this union with Christ, this spiritual height that he calls “your holy mountain”: he suggests that we should try to “act with justice and speak the truth from (our) heart” and not “slander with (our) tongue”,”do no wrong to (our) brother” and “cast no slur on (our) neighbour”. The psalmist hopes that we will be people of our word, who keep our promises and do not let our friends down “come what may”, honest in business and fair in all our dealings. This psalm is in fact an ideal choice for today’s ceremonies of initiation, because this is one of the psalms that were used as a sort of liturgy when Jews entered the Temple in David’s time: the visitor arriving at the courtyard entrance would say “Lord, who shall dwell on your holy mountain?” as a way of saying “Who can come into this holy place? What do you have to do to be good enough to come in?” and the priest would respond with these verses that begin “The one who…” Have do we live in union with God, the psalm asks? The person who is trying to lead the good life is on sure ground, comes the reply. We see this again in Psalm 24, when the pilgrim at the Temple gates would ask “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord and who shall stand in his holy place?” and receive from the priest the reply “ He who has clean hands and a pure heart” and so on.
Dear friends Etienne and Peggy, you stand today on the threshold of the Temple that is the Christian life in the Catholic Church. As you approach its gates, that are the sacraments of initiation, you too ask “Who can come into this holy place?” – “Lord, who shall dwell on this holy mountain?” Who can belong to the Catholic Church? If you look around you, you will see that we do not seem to have very strict requirements, it’s not like the golf club, there are all sorts here and that’s just in the sanctuary! The answer we give you is not a great long list of requirements, without which we shall not be satisfied and the gates will remain shut! You are already aware of the teachings of the Church, which are the teachings of Our Lord himself as you will shortly testify before us all, and we know that you will do your best to take them seriously. Don’t be too alarmed, too nervous about the step you are making, but take heart from the words of Jesus to Martha this morning: “you worry and fret about so many things, and yet few are needed, indeed only one”. This story, unique to Luke’s Gospel, shows us that although loving our neighbour and doing good to those around us is vital, what we need for the authentic Christian life is to put all our actions into the context of listening to the word of God – that is the one thing that really matters, so that all our actions are informed by our love of God. Dear Peggy, dear Etienne, like Mary in today’s Gospel you have understood this truth, and Our Lord affirms you this morning, saying of you as he does of her: “You have chosen the better part, it is not to be taken from you”. New Catholics or old, let us make today’s gospel acclamation our prayer at this Mass and always: “Open our heart, O Lord, to accept the words of your Son”, come among us, be Christ among us as we stay faithful to your sacraments and to your Church. Amen.
Sunday, 13 June 2010
13 June 2010
Homily for the Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time 13 June 2010
This Sunday’s readings all share the theme of forgiveness: in our first reading the prophet Nathan assures David that, in spite of his wicked behaviour, the Lord forgives him; and in this famous Gospel passage we have just read the woman with the bad reputation hears the words of forgiveness from Jesus “Your faith has saved you, go in peace”. Forgiveness, vital to our well being, knowing we are forgiven, vital for our peace of mind. Doing the forgiving ourselves, very hard! Very hard, and yet something we have to attempt! I want to share with you this morning some thoughts, some texts, on forgiving.
Forgiving those who do us wrong is a central point of the teachings of Our Lord, we find it again and again in the Gospels don’t we, and of course it is part of the Our Father- “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”. Now forgiving your enemies was never really much talked about in the Jewish religion in Old Testament times, and when it was it tended to be in terms of trying to get the offence into some kind of proportion- “an eye for an eye” and so on. This is one reason why the disciples often ask Jesus about forgiveness – “How many times shall I forgive my brother?” and so on. Now ironically David, who figures in our first reading conscious of his need for forgiveness, is one of the few figures in the Old Testament who is shown forgiving his enemies, forbearing to kill those in his power. There is that crazy story in 1 Samuel where David and his men are hiding in a cave, the very cave that his enemy Saul decided to go into to relieve himself, and although this seems to David’s men like the ideal moment to kill Saul, David won’t let them take unfair advantage of Saul in this way, and Saul leaves the cave unscathed. (1 Sam 24) And then a couple of chapters later (1 Sam 26) one of David’s men creeps into Saul’s tent when no one is about and asks David if he should kill him there and then, with his own spear, and again David won’t allow Saul to be murdered and he sleeps on. In this case David is prepared to leave judgement to God, to put his enemy into God’s hands - he says “As the Lord lives, the Lord will smite him or his day shall come to die….” (1 Sam 26 x)
Of course the great example of forgiveness comes from Jesus himself- you remember as he is being nailed to the Cross he says “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Lk 23 xxxiv). The first Christians knew they had to follow this supreme example of Our Lord when their own sufferings came upon them- remember St Stephen, stoned to death? How his dying words were “Lord, do not hold this sin against them?” (Acts 7 lx) And listen to St Paul, writing to the Corinthians describing what should be the Christian response to those who offend us: “When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered ,we conciliate…” (1 Cor 4 xii-xiii). And again, in his letter to the Ephesians, he has this advice for his converts: “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger be put away from you….be kind to one another….forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you”. (Eph 4 xxxi-xxxii).
And there we have the connexion between the way we behave to those who offend us and the way we want God to behave to us when we offend him- it is all in that small word “as” – St Paul says we must forgive one another as God in Christ forgave us, as or just as, exactly as. And this is the little word at the very heart of the Lord’s Prayer, that we say so many times we hardly notice what it actually means – forgive us, we say to God, forgive us our trespasses, as- exactly as, in exactly the same way as, we forgive those who trespass against us. Now that is quite an alarming thing for us to be saying in our prayers- God, you know how I have messed you about, I want you to treat me how I treat the people who mess me about. That is what we are saying in the Our Father with that little “as”. So if we think that God is going to take us at our word, we’d better make sure that we are getting good at forgiving- we certainly are expecting him to do a lot of forgiving when it’s our turn to come before him, so we need to be practising our forgiving as much as we can while we have the chance- because we’re saying in that prayer, “See what I’m like when it comes to forgiving? That’s what I want you to be like”. Matthew spells it out for us: at the end of the text he gives us of the Lord’s Prayer, he adds “For if you forgive men their trespasses your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses”. (Matth 6 xiv-xv)
I know- believe me, I know- how hard it is to forgive those who do us wrong, who cause us harm, those whose evil actions leave consequences that have to be lived with as best we may, but we have to make a start, we have to try- it is our Lord’s wish and he has shown us the way. We must try to let go of the grudges and start to wish these enemies of ours well, to ask God to look after them, to leave them and their destiny, their desserts, in God’s hands. Because – St Paul again, writing to the Colossians: “as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive” (Col 4 xiii). Forgive us all our offences, dear Jesus, and as we rejoice in our forgiveness help us to become bearers of forgiveness in our world, so that when we pass from this life to the next it will be said of us, as Nathan said to David “The Lord for his part forgives your sin, you are not to die”. Amen.
This Sunday’s readings all share the theme of forgiveness: in our first reading the prophet Nathan assures David that, in spite of his wicked behaviour, the Lord forgives him; and in this famous Gospel passage we have just read the woman with the bad reputation hears the words of forgiveness from Jesus “Your faith has saved you, go in peace”. Forgiveness, vital to our well being, knowing we are forgiven, vital for our peace of mind. Doing the forgiving ourselves, very hard! Very hard, and yet something we have to attempt! I want to share with you this morning some thoughts, some texts, on forgiving.
Forgiving those who do us wrong is a central point of the teachings of Our Lord, we find it again and again in the Gospels don’t we, and of course it is part of the Our Father- “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”. Now forgiving your enemies was never really much talked about in the Jewish religion in Old Testament times, and when it was it tended to be in terms of trying to get the offence into some kind of proportion- “an eye for an eye” and so on. This is one reason why the disciples often ask Jesus about forgiveness – “How many times shall I forgive my brother?” and so on. Now ironically David, who figures in our first reading conscious of his need for forgiveness, is one of the few figures in the Old Testament who is shown forgiving his enemies, forbearing to kill those in his power. There is that crazy story in 1 Samuel where David and his men are hiding in a cave, the very cave that his enemy Saul decided to go into to relieve himself, and although this seems to David’s men like the ideal moment to kill Saul, David won’t let them take unfair advantage of Saul in this way, and Saul leaves the cave unscathed. (1 Sam 24) And then a couple of chapters later (1 Sam 26) one of David’s men creeps into Saul’s tent when no one is about and asks David if he should kill him there and then, with his own spear, and again David won’t allow Saul to be murdered and he sleeps on. In this case David is prepared to leave judgement to God, to put his enemy into God’s hands - he says “As the Lord lives, the Lord will smite him or his day shall come to die….” (1 Sam 26 x)
Of course the great example of forgiveness comes from Jesus himself- you remember as he is being nailed to the Cross he says “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Lk 23 xxxiv). The first Christians knew they had to follow this supreme example of Our Lord when their own sufferings came upon them- remember St Stephen, stoned to death? How his dying words were “Lord, do not hold this sin against them?” (Acts 7 lx) And listen to St Paul, writing to the Corinthians describing what should be the Christian response to those who offend us: “When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered ,we conciliate…” (1 Cor 4 xii-xiii). And again, in his letter to the Ephesians, he has this advice for his converts: “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger be put away from you….be kind to one another….forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you”. (Eph 4 xxxi-xxxii).
And there we have the connexion between the way we behave to those who offend us and the way we want God to behave to us when we offend him- it is all in that small word “as” – St Paul says we must forgive one another as God in Christ forgave us, as or just as, exactly as. And this is the little word at the very heart of the Lord’s Prayer, that we say so many times we hardly notice what it actually means – forgive us, we say to God, forgive us our trespasses, as- exactly as, in exactly the same way as, we forgive those who trespass against us. Now that is quite an alarming thing for us to be saying in our prayers- God, you know how I have messed you about, I want you to treat me how I treat the people who mess me about. That is what we are saying in the Our Father with that little “as”. So if we think that God is going to take us at our word, we’d better make sure that we are getting good at forgiving- we certainly are expecting him to do a lot of forgiving when it’s our turn to come before him, so we need to be practising our forgiving as much as we can while we have the chance- because we’re saying in that prayer, “See what I’m like when it comes to forgiving? That’s what I want you to be like”. Matthew spells it out for us: at the end of the text he gives us of the Lord’s Prayer, he adds “For if you forgive men their trespasses your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses”. (Matth 6 xiv-xv)
I know- believe me, I know- how hard it is to forgive those who do us wrong, who cause us harm, those whose evil actions leave consequences that have to be lived with as best we may, but we have to make a start, we have to try- it is our Lord’s wish and he has shown us the way. We must try to let go of the grudges and start to wish these enemies of ours well, to ask God to look after them, to leave them and their destiny, their desserts, in God’s hands. Because – St Paul again, writing to the Colossians: “as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive” (Col 4 xiii). Forgive us all our offences, dear Jesus, and as we rejoice in our forgiveness help us to become bearers of forgiveness in our world, so that when we pass from this life to the next it will be said of us, as Nathan said to David “The Lord for his part forgives your sin, you are not to die”. Amen.
Saturday, 29 May 2010
Trinity Sunday 30 May 2010
Homily for Trinity Sunday 30 May 2010
Today I always think of as the most difficult Sunday to preach on in the Church’s Year because this is Trinity Sunday, and we have to turn our minds, as best we can, to reflecting on the nature of God – what is God like and what is the life of God? And the technical term for the nature of God is this word Trinity, and once we start trying to explain the Trinity we seem doomed from the start to confusion – that is inevitable in a way, because how can our minds take in God?- and if we are not careful we can get into an awful mess. You know there is a lovely story about Trinity College Oxford that always makes me smile: it has a square tower with four statues on the top one at each corner, and one day an American tourist asked the porter who they were, and the porter looked at him pityingly and said “Well, this is Trinity College isn’t it and there they are, three persons and one god”.
When I was at Oxford I was lucky enough to attend a course on the ancient fathers of the Church given by that great Orthodox theologian Bishop Kallistos Ware, and I remember when we looked at what they had to say about the Trinity, and he kept drawing on his flipchart all sorts of diagrams- three torches giving off one light and one heat, three sides making one triangle, and so on, and then he turned to us and said “But I think this is the best diagram for the Trinity” and turned the page over, to reveal- a blank page! The best diagram because whatever we try and work out, we shall never get it completely right. If we could really totally understand God, God just wouldn’t be God. The way I like myself is the way the great Dominican scholar St Thomas Aquinas explains it in the 13th century, in terms of Love. God is above all a god of love, as the Letters of John tell us, especially chapter 4 of his First Letter, to which I shall return. That most exciting of poets Lord Byron wrote when he was nineteen “I cannot exist without some object of love!” and what was true of the restless Byron is true of us all and true on a far greater level of God. God, so to say, cannot exist without some object of love. St Thomas says God the Father has to love, he loves and in his loving needs an object worthy of his love, and that is God the Son, who is the Beloved Son as we hear God the Father repeatedly call him in the Gospels, at his Baptism for instance, and at his Transfiguration, which we have depicted in our apse here. And the Lover and the Beloved love each other with a perfect love which is constant movement between them, passing from one to the other, and that love is what we call the Holy Spirit. Like all true love, it is not just a question of the two lovers being satisfied and edified, not just what the French call an “égoisme à deux”, but somehow there is always a surplus, always more left over to overflow, in children, in friends, in neighbours, in the whole entourage of a couple, and to sustain and encourage them too – just what the Holy Spirit does in the world, the overflowing love of the Father and the Son irrigates the whole world.
But let us get back to that First Letter of John. John tells us that this great outpouring of divine love that is the Holy Spirit flows into each one of us, he says “he has given us of his own Spirit” (I Jn 4 xiii) and because of this the Holy Spirit is living within us- “we abide in him and he in us”. And therefore we are caught up into the divine life, we are swept up into all this constant exchange of love that is the life of the Trinity, the life of God. Any little bit of loving we manage to do in our own lives will be adding to that great stream of loving, just like our funny little rivers in Lewisham run into Deptford Creek and out into the mighty Thames. Our loving will be part of the loving that God does, and not only will that – nonsense I know- “help” God, but it will also, certainly, help us – it will change us, as we in our loving are doing something that is essentially divine and therefore we bit by bit become more godlike ourselves. St John again: “If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us”, (I Jn 4 xii) and he even goes on to say “in this is love perfected with us….because as he is, so are we in this world”. That is our Christian destiny, to allow ourselves to be caught up in the great momentum of loving that overflows from the Godhead, that loving that is the life of God Father Son and Holy Spirit. And in every act of love that we try to show in our own lives, every impulse of love that we receive from the Holy Spirit, is an invitation for us to do something godlike and in so doing become a bit closer to that image and likeness of God in which we are created.
I close with a prayer from that young French Carmelite from Dijon who devoted herself to the Trinity, which she always affectionately called “My Three”, Bl Elisabeth of the Trinity. “O consuming fire, Spirit of Love, come down upon me that there may be brought about in my soul a kind of incarnation of the Word, may I be for him an added humanity in which he renews all his Mystery”. O God of Love, live in us and perfect you love in us! Amen.
Today I always think of as the most difficult Sunday to preach on in the Church’s Year because this is Trinity Sunday, and we have to turn our minds, as best we can, to reflecting on the nature of God – what is God like and what is the life of God? And the technical term for the nature of God is this word Trinity, and once we start trying to explain the Trinity we seem doomed from the start to confusion – that is inevitable in a way, because how can our minds take in God?- and if we are not careful we can get into an awful mess. You know there is a lovely story about Trinity College Oxford that always makes me smile: it has a square tower with four statues on the top one at each corner, and one day an American tourist asked the porter who they were, and the porter looked at him pityingly and said “Well, this is Trinity College isn’t it and there they are, three persons and one god”.
When I was at Oxford I was lucky enough to attend a course on the ancient fathers of the Church given by that great Orthodox theologian Bishop Kallistos Ware, and I remember when we looked at what they had to say about the Trinity, and he kept drawing on his flipchart all sorts of diagrams- three torches giving off one light and one heat, three sides making one triangle, and so on, and then he turned to us and said “But I think this is the best diagram for the Trinity” and turned the page over, to reveal- a blank page! The best diagram because whatever we try and work out, we shall never get it completely right. If we could really totally understand God, God just wouldn’t be God. The way I like myself is the way the great Dominican scholar St Thomas Aquinas explains it in the 13th century, in terms of Love. God is above all a god of love, as the Letters of John tell us, especially chapter 4 of his First Letter, to which I shall return. That most exciting of poets Lord Byron wrote when he was nineteen “I cannot exist without some object of love!” and what was true of the restless Byron is true of us all and true on a far greater level of God. God, so to say, cannot exist without some object of love. St Thomas says God the Father has to love, he loves and in his loving needs an object worthy of his love, and that is God the Son, who is the Beloved Son as we hear God the Father repeatedly call him in the Gospels, at his Baptism for instance, and at his Transfiguration, which we have depicted in our apse here. And the Lover and the Beloved love each other with a perfect love which is constant movement between them, passing from one to the other, and that love is what we call the Holy Spirit. Like all true love, it is not just a question of the two lovers being satisfied and edified, not just what the French call an “égoisme à deux”, but somehow there is always a surplus, always more left over to overflow, in children, in friends, in neighbours, in the whole entourage of a couple, and to sustain and encourage them too – just what the Holy Spirit does in the world, the overflowing love of the Father and the Son irrigates the whole world.
But let us get back to that First Letter of John. John tells us that this great outpouring of divine love that is the Holy Spirit flows into each one of us, he says “he has given us of his own Spirit” (I Jn 4 xiii) and because of this the Holy Spirit is living within us- “we abide in him and he in us”. And therefore we are caught up into the divine life, we are swept up into all this constant exchange of love that is the life of the Trinity, the life of God. Any little bit of loving we manage to do in our own lives will be adding to that great stream of loving, just like our funny little rivers in Lewisham run into Deptford Creek and out into the mighty Thames. Our loving will be part of the loving that God does, and not only will that – nonsense I know- “help” God, but it will also, certainly, help us – it will change us, as we in our loving are doing something that is essentially divine and therefore we bit by bit become more godlike ourselves. St John again: “If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us”, (I Jn 4 xii) and he even goes on to say “in this is love perfected with us….because as he is, so are we in this world”. That is our Christian destiny, to allow ourselves to be caught up in the great momentum of loving that overflows from the Godhead, that loving that is the life of God Father Son and Holy Spirit. And in every act of love that we try to show in our own lives, every impulse of love that we receive from the Holy Spirit, is an invitation for us to do something godlike and in so doing become a bit closer to that image and likeness of God in which we are created.
I close with a prayer from that young French Carmelite from Dijon who devoted herself to the Trinity, which she always affectionately called “My Three”, Bl Elisabeth of the Trinity. “O consuming fire, Spirit of Love, come down upon me that there may be brought about in my soul a kind of incarnation of the Word, may I be for him an added humanity in which he renews all his Mystery”. O God of Love, live in us and perfect you love in us! Amen.
Pentecost 2010
Homily for Pentecost 23 May 2010 (Yr c)
Preached at Our Lady Immaculate, Chelmsford
When I spoke in this dear church last it was on your patronal festival and we reflected together on the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady. If I begin by referring to the homily I gave then it is not because I think my words were so memorable that they may be still in your minds but because you may have read it more recently in your parish magazine. I spoke then of there being in the mind of God an ideal version of each one of us- a “form” of each one of us to use Plato’s term- and how of us all only Our Lady has succeeded, by her perfect identification of herself with the Will of God, by the “fiat” that was her constant response to every prompting of the Holy Spirit, in achieving that ideal, being completely and exactly what God had always in mind for her to be.
This ties in very well with our theme for today’s great feast of Pentecost, when we consider the Holy Spirit at work in our individual lives and at work in the Church as a whole. We have already used the word “prompt” and that is a good way of thinking about the Holy Spirit, the great prompter of the Church. Jesus explains to his disciples in today’s Gospel that they are not to be anxious about how they are going to manage after he has returned to heaven (they were great worriers weren’t they!) because “the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you”. The Holy Spirit comes to those first Christians today at Pentecost as we heard in our reading from the Acts, and only now do they really understand the full implications of everything that has been happening since the crucifixion- as John has Jesus say elsewhere in this Gospel (Jn 16:15) “It is from me that he will derive all that he makes plain to you” (Knox tr) and as the priest will say at this Mass in the prayer over the gifts “may the Spirit you promised….reveal to us the full meaning of this sacrifice”. That is one of the titles of the Holy Spirit, isn’t it- the Revealer.
Now the Holy Spirit is like a prompt in that respect- he reminds us of the teachings of Our Lord and helps us understand something of what the Passion and Resurrection of Our Lord mean. But he is also a prompt in other ways too. I don’t know if amateur dramatics flourish in this parish, if any of you tread the boards, but if you do you will know that when people act and go on stage, one of the things they most dread is forgetting their lines, and so there is a prompt, someone sitting just offstage in the half light with the script, who can put them right when they dry up or lose- literally- the plot. Well of course that is exactly what the Holy Spirit does in our lives. Archbishop Fulton Sheen says “the great business of the Holy Spirit is to stand behind the scenes to make Christ more real”, to make Christ more real to us and to make us get our lines right. We have it on good authority that “all the world’s a stage” and in recent years there’s a saying that one hears all the time- “life’s not a rehearsal”. Life is not a rehearsal, and we have only one go at it. We are shoved on stage when we pop out of the womb and we have to act our part as best we can from then on, to whatever audience we’ve got here below, whether appreciative or not, throwing tomatoes at us or bouquets. It doesn’t matter in a way, because watching us and willing us on is God himself and his holy Mother, and because whispering to us the next line and the next move is that great prompt, the Holy Spirit. All we have to do is have the confidence to walk out on the stage and look the audience in the eye, and to listen out for those prompts! The prompts may be quite simple, quite straightforward, like “Don’t forget to say your prayers tonight”, “Why not pop into that church on your way to the shops and have a few minutes before the Bl Sacrament?” , they may be nagging away at us, reminding us that we should be beginning to put a few ideas together for our next Confession (“because it’s been a while and we don’t want to get slack do we?”) The prompts may be about how we show that we are people of love, which our Lord said was to be our defining characteristic as his followers (see how they love one another), saying to us “why not smile at that person who’s on their own this morning? “; “ Shall I call in on Mrs so-and-so and see if she needs anything?” You know the sort of thing, those little signs of caring and affectionate interest that can mean so much. And they may be bigger, more urgent, more demanding prompts too- “couldn’t we give more in the Giftaid scheme?”, “ Should I really be involved with this person?”, “Is this the right kind of work for a Catholic?” “ Do I have a vocation and how much longer can I smother it?”
In all these ways what the Holy Spirit is doing is – in another wonderful phrase of Fulton Sheen’s – “wooing the soul”, drawing us ever closer to Our Lord, bringing us into an ever more intimate union with him, in an embrace that is ever tighter. We must let the Holy Spirit do his work, we must allow this ever closer intimacy to come about. Pope Leo XIII of happy memory devoted an encyclical “Divinum Illud Munus” in 1897 to the Holy Spirit and describes this divine intimacy in this way: “that union of affection by which the soul adheres more closely to God, more so than the friend is united to his most loving and beloved friend, and enjoys God in all fullness and sweetness….attributed in a peculiar manner to the Holy Spirit”. (sec 9)
I close with a little story about a builder I used to have. He was Turkish Cypriot and his name was Easy. Now Easy’s private life was a source of as much amazement to me as his bills were, and at the time he was working for me he was living with the third Mrs Easy. One day I met the third Mrs Easy in the street, walking with their little son who was about three years old. I did what was expected of me and went ooh and aah and I said “He’s just like his father!”, whereupon Mrs Easy said rather grimly “I know, but I’m knocking it out of him!” Now that illustrates what I mean about the Holy Spirit and his role in our lives. We need to have our egoism knocked out of us and our likeness to God be made more apparent. One of the great theologians of Alexandria in the 4th century, Didymus the Blind, says “the Holy Spirit brings us back from a state of deformity to our pristine beauty and so fills us with his grace that we can no longer make room for anything that is unworthy of our love”. The Holy Spirit exists to knock us into shape, to offer us all the prompts we need to follow God’s holy will for our lives, to turn us bit by bit into that ideal version of us that God has in his heart for each one of us, our eternal destiny as one of his beloved sons and daughters, with no room in our lives for anything unworthy. It is up to us to react to the Holy Spirit, to respond to his promptings. Can we be like that French Carmelite, near contemporary of Ste Thérèse, Bl Elisabeth of the Trinity, who prayed “I wish to spend my life in listening to you, I wish to make myself wholly teachable, so as to learn everything from you”? We have before us always the supreme example of Our Lady. As God’s plan for her began to dawn upon her, she asked Gabriel “How shall this be?” and received the response “The Holy Spirit will come upon you”. Let us ask the Holy Spirit to come upon us at this Mass, to come and in St Paul’s words “make his home in us”, come and whisper to us ever more clearly the words of the script we need to bring off our greatest role, the Child of God that God wants us to be, and may each of us find at the end of our lives in the applause of the angels and saints that what we given is the performance of a lifetime. Amen.
Preached at Our Lady Immaculate, Chelmsford
When I spoke in this dear church last it was on your patronal festival and we reflected together on the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady. If I begin by referring to the homily I gave then it is not because I think my words were so memorable that they may be still in your minds but because you may have read it more recently in your parish magazine. I spoke then of there being in the mind of God an ideal version of each one of us- a “form” of each one of us to use Plato’s term- and how of us all only Our Lady has succeeded, by her perfect identification of herself with the Will of God, by the “fiat” that was her constant response to every prompting of the Holy Spirit, in achieving that ideal, being completely and exactly what God had always in mind for her to be.
This ties in very well with our theme for today’s great feast of Pentecost, when we consider the Holy Spirit at work in our individual lives and at work in the Church as a whole. We have already used the word “prompt” and that is a good way of thinking about the Holy Spirit, the great prompter of the Church. Jesus explains to his disciples in today’s Gospel that they are not to be anxious about how they are going to manage after he has returned to heaven (they were great worriers weren’t they!) because “the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you”. The Holy Spirit comes to those first Christians today at Pentecost as we heard in our reading from the Acts, and only now do they really understand the full implications of everything that has been happening since the crucifixion- as John has Jesus say elsewhere in this Gospel (Jn 16:15) “It is from me that he will derive all that he makes plain to you” (Knox tr) and as the priest will say at this Mass in the prayer over the gifts “may the Spirit you promised….reveal to us the full meaning of this sacrifice”. That is one of the titles of the Holy Spirit, isn’t it- the Revealer.
Now the Holy Spirit is like a prompt in that respect- he reminds us of the teachings of Our Lord and helps us understand something of what the Passion and Resurrection of Our Lord mean. But he is also a prompt in other ways too. I don’t know if amateur dramatics flourish in this parish, if any of you tread the boards, but if you do you will know that when people act and go on stage, one of the things they most dread is forgetting their lines, and so there is a prompt, someone sitting just offstage in the half light with the script, who can put them right when they dry up or lose- literally- the plot. Well of course that is exactly what the Holy Spirit does in our lives. Archbishop Fulton Sheen says “the great business of the Holy Spirit is to stand behind the scenes to make Christ more real”, to make Christ more real to us and to make us get our lines right. We have it on good authority that “all the world’s a stage” and in recent years there’s a saying that one hears all the time- “life’s not a rehearsal”. Life is not a rehearsal, and we have only one go at it. We are shoved on stage when we pop out of the womb and we have to act our part as best we can from then on, to whatever audience we’ve got here below, whether appreciative or not, throwing tomatoes at us or bouquets. It doesn’t matter in a way, because watching us and willing us on is God himself and his holy Mother, and because whispering to us the next line and the next move is that great prompt, the Holy Spirit. All we have to do is have the confidence to walk out on the stage and look the audience in the eye, and to listen out for those prompts! The prompts may be quite simple, quite straightforward, like “Don’t forget to say your prayers tonight”, “Why not pop into that church on your way to the shops and have a few minutes before the Bl Sacrament?” , they may be nagging away at us, reminding us that we should be beginning to put a few ideas together for our next Confession (“because it’s been a while and we don’t want to get slack do we?”) The prompts may be about how we show that we are people of love, which our Lord said was to be our defining characteristic as his followers (see how they love one another), saying to us “why not smile at that person who’s on their own this morning? “; “ Shall I call in on Mrs so-and-so and see if she needs anything?” You know the sort of thing, those little signs of caring and affectionate interest that can mean so much. And they may be bigger, more urgent, more demanding prompts too- “couldn’t we give more in the Giftaid scheme?”, “ Should I really be involved with this person?”, “Is this the right kind of work for a Catholic?” “ Do I have a vocation and how much longer can I smother it?”
In all these ways what the Holy Spirit is doing is – in another wonderful phrase of Fulton Sheen’s – “wooing the soul”, drawing us ever closer to Our Lord, bringing us into an ever more intimate union with him, in an embrace that is ever tighter. We must let the Holy Spirit do his work, we must allow this ever closer intimacy to come about. Pope Leo XIII of happy memory devoted an encyclical “Divinum Illud Munus” in 1897 to the Holy Spirit and describes this divine intimacy in this way: “that union of affection by which the soul adheres more closely to God, more so than the friend is united to his most loving and beloved friend, and enjoys God in all fullness and sweetness….attributed in a peculiar manner to the Holy Spirit”. (sec 9)
I close with a little story about a builder I used to have. He was Turkish Cypriot and his name was Easy. Now Easy’s private life was a source of as much amazement to me as his bills were, and at the time he was working for me he was living with the third Mrs Easy. One day I met the third Mrs Easy in the street, walking with their little son who was about three years old. I did what was expected of me and went ooh and aah and I said “He’s just like his father!”, whereupon Mrs Easy said rather grimly “I know, but I’m knocking it out of him!” Now that illustrates what I mean about the Holy Spirit and his role in our lives. We need to have our egoism knocked out of us and our likeness to God be made more apparent. One of the great theologians of Alexandria in the 4th century, Didymus the Blind, says “the Holy Spirit brings us back from a state of deformity to our pristine beauty and so fills us with his grace that we can no longer make room for anything that is unworthy of our love”. The Holy Spirit exists to knock us into shape, to offer us all the prompts we need to follow God’s holy will for our lives, to turn us bit by bit into that ideal version of us that God has in his heart for each one of us, our eternal destiny as one of his beloved sons and daughters, with no room in our lives for anything unworthy. It is up to us to react to the Holy Spirit, to respond to his promptings. Can we be like that French Carmelite, near contemporary of Ste Thérèse, Bl Elisabeth of the Trinity, who prayed “I wish to spend my life in listening to you, I wish to make myself wholly teachable, so as to learn everything from you”? We have before us always the supreme example of Our Lady. As God’s plan for her began to dawn upon her, she asked Gabriel “How shall this be?” and received the response “The Holy Spirit will come upon you”. Let us ask the Holy Spirit to come upon us at this Mass, to come and in St Paul’s words “make his home in us”, come and whisper to us ever more clearly the words of the script we need to bring off our greatest role, the Child of God that God wants us to be, and may each of us find at the end of our lives in the applause of the angels and saints that what we given is the performance of a lifetime. Amen.
Sunday, 9 May 2010
Sixth Sunday of Easter 2010
Homily for Sixth Sunday of Easter 9 May 2010
Today’s Gospel is taken from the long discourse that John recounts Jesus as having with his disciples during the Last Supper, where the emphasis is again and again on love- the disciples are above all to be people who love. In fact last week we heard Jesus say that that must be the defining characteristic of his followers from now on – “by this love you have for one another, everyone will know that you are my disciples” – that is why he says “I give you a new commandment, love one another just as I have loved you”.
Jesus of course when he says this has just given the disciples a vivid example of what he means by love when he washes their feet: love is to be above all about service to others, and our love to be worthy of the name must show itself in practical ways, we must be of use, of help, to those we love. That is how we shall show that we love God- by loving our fellow human beings, doing good to those around us, and trying, insofar as we are able, to live life by the rules, by the teachings of Our Lord as they are mediated to us in every generation by his Church. This is what Jesus means when he says “if anyone loves me he will keep my word” and “those who do not love me do not keep my words”. And then, because Our Lord knows how frail and half-hearted we so often are when it comes to trying to please him and do the right thing, he tells the disciples that they are not going to have to go it alone, because the Holy Spirit will be sent to them at Pentecost to strengthen them, the Holy Spirit who “will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you”.
That is the key to the Christian life isn’t it, the Holy Spirit, given to us in our baptism and living within us to keep us always in close contact with God and to keep prompting us to make that contact day by day in a thousand ways, suggesting to us that we could do this or that, say this or that, helpful thing to the people in our lives, putting the idea into our heads to go into a church and say a prayer, to come to Mass, to start having a few thoughts about our next confession. We see in the creation stories in Genesis the great truth that man is created for intimacy with God, that friendship with God is our destiny, and that this is achieved by God giving us his Spirit. We read in Genesis 2 that when he had created Adam God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and he became a living being”. Breath and Spirit are the same word in Hebrew, ruach, and here we see the human race coming alive, coming alive to its true destiny and to all its potential, with the gift of Holy Spirit activating it.
But Jesus says another, quite extraordinary, thing in this gospel reading today. He describes the Christian life, this intimacy with God that we are all called to, in the most moving way when he says that when we live in love, God will come to us in the closest possible way, we shall have the Holy Trinity living in us- “we shall come to him and make our home with him”. This is the vocation of every Christian, to have the Trinity dwelling within us, living in us and acting through us, making us part of the divine life of the Godhead, caught up in the eternal momentum of love that is God’s nature. The Greek word for home that John uses is “mone” the same word in fact that occurs a bit earlier on, when Jesus says “in my Father’s house there are many “monai”, many rooms, many dwelling places. So the word that Jesus uses to describe Heaven is the word he uses to describe our life when it is lived with God in us, a sort of Heaven on earth.
There is a French Carmelite you may know, a near contemporary of her more famous sister Ste Thérèse, Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity. She too died in her early twenties, she too left behind a body of writings that have carried her influence far and wide from her Carmel of Dijon. On her first communion day a nun explained to her that her name Elisabeth meant “House of God” and she loved to think of herself from an early age as just that, God’s little house where he is at home and where he can do as he likes. Just before she died she wrote to her mother “You can believe my doctrine for it is not my own”- she developed her spirituality that the Christian has the Holy Trinity –“my Three” as she affectionately calls them- living in him from Scripture, especially these words of Our Lord in today’s Gospel. Of course how comfortable the Trinity is living in us will depend on us, on how much room we are willing to let God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit have (that’s three bedrooms for a start), how open we are prepared to be to the command to love. The more we let God have of our lives, the more he will fill our lives. It’s up to us. The greatest Carmelite of all perhaps is St Teresa of Avila; she reminds us that “Christ does not force our will, he only takes what we will give him, but he does not give himself entirely until he sees that we yield ourselves entirely to him”.
So there is God, the Creator of the Universe, waiting to see what we will spare him, if we will risk a little loving and in so doing let him into a corner of our lives, let him come in and rent a room- or maybe give him a long lease on the whole property. Up to us! Jesus, we love you, we will keep your word; come to us at this Mass, come Father Son and Holy Spirit and make your home in each one of us, live in us and make us your dwellings, your little bits of Heaven, the channels of your love in our broken world. Amen.
Today’s Gospel is taken from the long discourse that John recounts Jesus as having with his disciples during the Last Supper, where the emphasis is again and again on love- the disciples are above all to be people who love. In fact last week we heard Jesus say that that must be the defining characteristic of his followers from now on – “by this love you have for one another, everyone will know that you are my disciples” – that is why he says “I give you a new commandment, love one another just as I have loved you”.
Jesus of course when he says this has just given the disciples a vivid example of what he means by love when he washes their feet: love is to be above all about service to others, and our love to be worthy of the name must show itself in practical ways, we must be of use, of help, to those we love. That is how we shall show that we love God- by loving our fellow human beings, doing good to those around us, and trying, insofar as we are able, to live life by the rules, by the teachings of Our Lord as they are mediated to us in every generation by his Church. This is what Jesus means when he says “if anyone loves me he will keep my word” and “those who do not love me do not keep my words”. And then, because Our Lord knows how frail and half-hearted we so often are when it comes to trying to please him and do the right thing, he tells the disciples that they are not going to have to go it alone, because the Holy Spirit will be sent to them at Pentecost to strengthen them, the Holy Spirit who “will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you”.
That is the key to the Christian life isn’t it, the Holy Spirit, given to us in our baptism and living within us to keep us always in close contact with God and to keep prompting us to make that contact day by day in a thousand ways, suggesting to us that we could do this or that, say this or that, helpful thing to the people in our lives, putting the idea into our heads to go into a church and say a prayer, to come to Mass, to start having a few thoughts about our next confession. We see in the creation stories in Genesis the great truth that man is created for intimacy with God, that friendship with God is our destiny, and that this is achieved by God giving us his Spirit. We read in Genesis 2 that when he had created Adam God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and he became a living being”. Breath and Spirit are the same word in Hebrew, ruach, and here we see the human race coming alive, coming alive to its true destiny and to all its potential, with the gift of Holy Spirit activating it.
But Jesus says another, quite extraordinary, thing in this gospel reading today. He describes the Christian life, this intimacy with God that we are all called to, in the most moving way when he says that when we live in love, God will come to us in the closest possible way, we shall have the Holy Trinity living in us- “we shall come to him and make our home with him”. This is the vocation of every Christian, to have the Trinity dwelling within us, living in us and acting through us, making us part of the divine life of the Godhead, caught up in the eternal momentum of love that is God’s nature. The Greek word for home that John uses is “mone” the same word in fact that occurs a bit earlier on, when Jesus says “in my Father’s house there are many “monai”, many rooms, many dwelling places. So the word that Jesus uses to describe Heaven is the word he uses to describe our life when it is lived with God in us, a sort of Heaven on earth.
There is a French Carmelite you may know, a near contemporary of her more famous sister Ste Thérèse, Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity. She too died in her early twenties, she too left behind a body of writings that have carried her influence far and wide from her Carmel of Dijon. On her first communion day a nun explained to her that her name Elisabeth meant “House of God” and she loved to think of herself from an early age as just that, God’s little house where he is at home and where he can do as he likes. Just before she died she wrote to her mother “You can believe my doctrine for it is not my own”- she developed her spirituality that the Christian has the Holy Trinity –“my Three” as she affectionately calls them- living in him from Scripture, especially these words of Our Lord in today’s Gospel. Of course how comfortable the Trinity is living in us will depend on us, on how much room we are willing to let God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit have (that’s three bedrooms for a start), how open we are prepared to be to the command to love. The more we let God have of our lives, the more he will fill our lives. It’s up to us. The greatest Carmelite of all perhaps is St Teresa of Avila; she reminds us that “Christ does not force our will, he only takes what we will give him, but he does not give himself entirely until he sees that we yield ourselves entirely to him”.
So there is God, the Creator of the Universe, waiting to see what we will spare him, if we will risk a little loving and in so doing let him into a corner of our lives, let him come in and rent a room- or maybe give him a long lease on the whole property. Up to us! Jesus, we love you, we will keep your word; come to us at this Mass, come Father Son and Holy Spirit and make your home in each one of us, live in us and make us your dwellings, your little bits of Heaven, the channels of your love in our broken world. Amen.
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