When people talk about the need for change in the Church today, one of the things that usually comes up is the question of priests getting married. The idea of celibacy is out of tune with the mood of our time and people find it very difficult to understand. It comes up, too, in conversation with priests. Some also find the Church’s position difficult to accept and look forward to the day when this rule – for that’s all it is – will change. Celibacy as a way of life is not without its difficulties, and many priests struggle with it. But what is often forgotten, and what I often remind people of, is that, despite its difficulties, it is, compared to marriage and having a family, an absolute ‘doddle.’ There’s just no comparison. Selfishness is a danger no matter our state in life. There are selfish married people, selfish celibate people, selfish single people and selfish people who live together, but what I invite you to reflect on today is the way in which the challenges of marriage and family life are designed in a very particular way to enable us to grow beyond our natural self centredness and ultimately prepare us to share the life of God himself. And it starts at the very beginning.
The truth is that, adorable as we may be when we are born, we are, at that stage in our lives, totally and absolutely self-centred. For several months we cannot even distinguish between ourselves and the outside world. For the tiny baby the only things that exist are me and my needs. And, of course, that’s understandable, if extremely stressful sometimes to parents attempting to meet those needs so powerfully and noisily expressed by their child. But it cannot go on. Before too long we have to learn that other people too have needs and that, contrary to what we thought, we are not the centre of the universe. And, of course, we learn this first through interacting with other members the family. That’s where we first learn to share and think of others and any child who turns up at school at the age of five without having learned it is an absolute menace.
The next big challenge for both children and parents, of course, is adolescence. By now, the adorable infant is a distant memory as he or she begins the process of being born for a second time. This time the birth is into adulthood and takes much longer than the one into infancy. We don’t have time here to explore the painful nature of this second birth but what it does or can do for parents is draw out off them a depth of loving previously unknown to them. We all love a child, even when it is being its completely self-centred self, but to love a teenager at his or her worst can stretch a person’s love to the very limit and there are times when only a love like God’s love can manage it. And no celibate or single childless person can ever really experience that. But many of you here know exactly what it is like.
Having made its way through adolescence, hopefully causing no permanent damage to ourselves or others, we approach the next stage on our journey. We began life selfish, we learned to share, we became selfish again as we struggled to work out who we were, and now it is time to reach out once more into what, for most people, is marriage or its modern equivalents. This, too, has its risks. I remember when I was ordained nearly forty years ago the danger was people rushing into marriage and children before they had finished finished negotiating their way through adolescence. The result was men in particular who were married for years and had children before it finally dawned on them what it actually meant to be a husband and father. Nowadays, for a whole variety of reasons, people marry much later. And, while, on balance, I believe that is better, the danger is that we become so used to what, for the lack of a better phrase I would call ‘having our own way,’ that the demands of marriage for life and, in particular, children become too great and one of life’s great challenges and great opportunities to learn what it means to love is missed. But time, as it has always done will sort that one out.
The marriage relationship itself, of course, is one of never-ending growth and development drawing the two parties in it into deeper and deeper self-giving: at least that’s the theory. What passes for love in the early stages is not always what it appears. Mixed up with it is a lot of self in the form of need, a lot of subtle and not so subtle using of the other to meet or satisfy our own needs. But as the years pass this can change. Sometimes, sadly, it does not and only God knows how many people are sitting in marriages which, through selfishness, have never become what they were intended to be Some sit there and suffer it while others eventually pick up the courage and walk away. But when marriage works, there is nothing more godly on the face of the earth. To see a couple who have moved from selfishness to otherness is to see human nature at its very best. Sometimes, as when a husband or wife develops a condition like dementia it takes on truly heroic and Christ-like qualities which we can only admire and marvel at. Such men and women have made the great journey from childhood to adulthood. They have learned through hard experience the truth of everything Jesus says about love and are ready now to share the life of God himself.
And in the meantime, the rest of us are on the journey. The road is far from straight and we can still throw two year old tantrums in our forties or behave like adolescents in our sixties. But take time today to reflect on where you are on this great journey. How much of the self-centred baby is still at work in you? Identify the ways in which selfishness continues to influence your life. Identify the way in which life is challenging you to confront and overcome that selfishness, especially within your family circle. Remember your parents, your brothers and sisters, your children, your husband or wife and all those who, by challenging you in all kinds of ways, have drawn you out of yourself, shown you what love is about and so helped prepare you for entry into the Kingdom of God. Be thankful for all of them and ask God on this Feast of the Holy Family to pour out his blessings on every family in this parish.
BIDDING PRAYERS
We pray on this Feast of the Holy Family for married couples everywhere, especially here in this parish. We pray that wherever they are on their life-long journey from self-centredness to other-centredness they will, with God’s help, persevere to the very end and never settle for less than the total commitment they promised to each other on their wedding day………Lord hear us
If you only love those who love you, Jesus says in the Gospel, then you are no different from the pagans. Even they do that. Christian love is about loving the way God loves and this means reaching out to the world beyond the limits of natural human affection to all who are in need. And so we pray that the families of this parish, in the midst of all their own concerns, will always find room in their lives for those who are poor, both at home and abroad, and so be living signs of the kingdom in the midst of the world…………………….…Lord hear us
We pray in a particular way for families who are struggling with the challenge of raising children in today’s society. Many young people don’t even speak the same language as their parents or share the same values, as computers and the internet open up a world unknown to previous generations. And so we ask God to guide us at so that we can not only overcome the challenges of this new situation but grasp the great potential for good contained within it…….Lord hear us
Written nearly two and a half thousand years ago, the Book of Ecclesiasticus tells us that, even if their minds should fail, we should never despise our parents in our health and strength. On the contrary, we should support them in their old age. And so we pray for the millions of people today for whom the care of elderly parents is a very real issue that they will have the wisdom and generosity they need to do what is right………..…Lord hear us
In Matthew’s story of the Flight into Egypt Jesus, Mary and Joseph become refugees in a strange land. Throughout history there have been refugees who, for all kinds of reasons, have had to leave their homes and make a new life for themselves in a foreign country. Many of us here are descendents of such refugees and immigrants. And so we ask God to stir in us a deep empathy for those in the same situation today who find their way to Scotland…..…Lord hear us
We pray finally on this Feast of the Holy Family for those families which, for whatever reason, have broken up. This can cause great pain for those involved and there is plenty of it around these days. And so we hold up before God all who are living with this pain, especially children who are separated from one of their parents or who are forced by circumstances to choose between them……………Lord hear us
Saturday, 29 December 2007
Tuesday, 25 December 2007
Midnight Mass
On the first Sunday of Advent we began our journey towards Christmas with the ‘vision of Isaiah, son of Amoz, concerning Judah and Jerusalem.’ From there we went on to reflect on how we ourselves are called to be people of vision in the midst of the world today, men and women of faith who can see beyond the immediate, imagine something new and begin to understand and interpret in a deeper way everything that happens in the world. And on the third Sunday, when we met John the Baptist languishing in prison, riddled with doubt and wondering if he had made some terrible mistake, we reflected on the need to keep trusting the vision when it begins to fade, as it will sometimes, and we start to lose confidence in it. This is only possible through the grace from God we call Hope, the theme of an Encyclical letter published by Pope Benedict on 30th November, just as Advent was beginning. Then on Sunday, just two days ago, faced with Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus, in which Joseph rather than Mary is the central character, we reflected on how, if the vision we speak of is to become a reality, we must go beyond the limits of human thinking, beyond what seems logical or makes sense to us, and embrace a entirely new sets of values and a new way of thinking….Which leaves the second Sunday.
On that day, as the people came to the Jordan to be baptized by John and confess their sins, we reflected on the nature of the reality we call sin. And we saw how sin is anything and everything in us that blocks the movement of God deep within our lives and deep within history. At its root it’s not about individual sinful actions. Essentially it’s about the human condition: the deep-rooted selfishness, the greed, the tendency to violence, the prejudice, the hatred of self and of others; all the destructive forces in us which have caused and continue to cause so much pain and suffering in the world. They manifest themselves in individual sinful actions or events, but these are often just the rash on the skin which indicate a much deeper dis-ease. And it’s this deeper dis-ease which has bedeviled humanity on its march through history. And now, having made this journey of reflection together during Advent, we come to the whole reason for it, contained within the Christmas story.
What we commemorate tonight is the beginning of something revolutionary in human history. It is only the first stage of a story which will take us to Easter and the death and resurrection of Jesus, but at Christmas the vision we are called to embrace and live out in our lives begins to unfold. It is a vision so absurd that only a God could have thought of it it. In it, the one through whom everything that exists came into being, enters into human history and becomes one with us. Having created us in freedom, with all the risks that that involves, God comes among us to show us how to be human. It is not easy to be fully human. Freedom is a dangerous thing, opening up as it does all kinds of possibilities. Looking around the world many would conclude, as I saw one journalist do in the paper yesterday, that the biggest mistake God ever made was to give us the gift of freedom. And as evidence of this he quoted the obvious signs of human sinfulness such as war, hunger, poverty, the extensive abuse of individuals all over the world, the damage we are doing to the environment and so on. And certainly there is plenty of this stuff to fuel the kind of pessimism about the future which is so prevalent today in the hearts of many. And who knows what will happen over the next fifty or a hundred years?
But the message of Christmas, and beyond it Easter, is that it does not have to be like that. If freedom carries risks with it, then it also carries immense possibilities. The Incarnation, the mystery by which God becomes one with us and shares our human condition, is an enormous vote of confidence in what it means to be human. There is nothing in the whole of creation that could even begin to compare with what it is to be a person. Yes, we do some terrible things. But we are also capable of great love. History may be filled with evidence of our sinfulness but it is also filled with evidence of the potential for good that is in us. The teaching of Jesus is held up before us, not as something impossible which we can never achieve, but as something possible through grace. By uniting ourselves to the one whose birth we celebrate tonight, it is possible to love our enemies, do good to those who hate us, feed the hungry, clothe the naked and all the other things Jesus speaks of. And not only is it possible: it is happening all over the world as, in even the worst of circumstances, the grace of God breaks through in unheralded and unreported ways and human beings show the most amazing love, generosity, capacity to forgive and so on.
And this is the vision we are called to hold up before the world. a vision filled with hope. The world is not lost. The situation we are in is not hopeless. Pessimism as a default position is profoundly mistaken. The world is redeemed. The kingdom is coming. Jesus has triumphed over sin and death and slowly but surely his vision for humanity, which is God’s vision, is unfolding for those who have eyes to see. Of course there are risks. The struggle is not over yet. At every step of the journey the gift of freedom has to be used well. The decisions we make on a daily basis are shaping the world we live in for good or for ill. But what we celebrate today is the most incredibly good news. We are not alone. God is with us. He is among us and we have ultimately nothing to fear.
So have a very happy Christmas. And as you leave here tonight, take with you to all whom you meet the message of the angels. Tell people not to be afraid. Tell them that today, in the town of David, a saviour has been born to us and that he is Christ the Lord. Tell them that the Word who was with God in the beginning and through whom all things were createdd is made flesh and lives among us; and that, to all who accept him, he has given power to become sons and daughters of God.
Not even Isaiah could imagine that.
BIDDING PRAYERS
Called to be a people of vision, we ask God to fan that vision into a flame in us. We ask him to open us up the the truth we celebrate tonight; the truth of the Incarnation by which Jesus, true God and true man, enters into our history, giving it the most profound new meaning and showing in his own person the heights of love and self-giving human nature is capable of when it is filled with God’s grace and led by the power of the Holy Spirit…………………………..Lord hear us
The word which appears most in the preaching of the prophet Isaiah during Advent is the word ‘peace.’ It expresses the deepest longing of humanity while, at the same time, demonstrating our inability to bring about the thing we most desire. And so on this Christmas night, as the world hears again the message of peace announced by the angels, we ask God to lead us at this moment in our history towards the peace Jesus speaks of, a peace the world cannot give…………………………….…...Lord hear us
If there is to be peace in the world then there must be justice too. The poor, not the rich, must become humanity’s priority. Jesus was born in poverty and throughout his life he cared for and was associated with the poor. He mixed with prostitutes and sinners. reached out to those on the margins of society and in every way possible showed, in his own person, God’s special concern for those whom the word despises and rejects. And so we pray that, as a parish, we will be like him……….Lord hear us
St Luke tells us that Mary ‘treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart.’ And so we pray for the grace to be like her this Christmas; to reflect deeply on the mystery we celebrate; to see beyond the superficial aspects of the story and enter into what they mean; to recognize God in the celebrations we have with our families and friends, so that, by our pondering them in our hearts, everything we do may become an experience of faith for us…………....Lord hear us
Throughout the world on this day, many people will attend Church who, for all kinds of reasons, do not normally do so. And so we pray for them, especially those who in the past have felt disappointed or let down by God or the Church, that what they find will be a source of encouragement to them and enable them to continue on their personal faith journey throughout the rest of the year…………………….Lord hear us
Christmas can be a lonely time for many people. It is also a difficult time for those who are bereaved, especially when the death of a loved one has happened during the previous year. And so we pray for all for whom this is the case. We pray, too, for all those whose loneliness and isolation is the result of homelessness and who live in hostels or in the street. And we pray, finally, for those in prison and for their families………..Lord hear us
On that day, as the people came to the Jordan to be baptized by John and confess their sins, we reflected on the nature of the reality we call sin. And we saw how sin is anything and everything in us that blocks the movement of God deep within our lives and deep within history. At its root it’s not about individual sinful actions. Essentially it’s about the human condition: the deep-rooted selfishness, the greed, the tendency to violence, the prejudice, the hatred of self and of others; all the destructive forces in us which have caused and continue to cause so much pain and suffering in the world. They manifest themselves in individual sinful actions or events, but these are often just the rash on the skin which indicate a much deeper dis-ease. And it’s this deeper dis-ease which has bedeviled humanity on its march through history. And now, having made this journey of reflection together during Advent, we come to the whole reason for it, contained within the Christmas story.
What we commemorate tonight is the beginning of something revolutionary in human history. It is only the first stage of a story which will take us to Easter and the death and resurrection of Jesus, but at Christmas the vision we are called to embrace and live out in our lives begins to unfold. It is a vision so absurd that only a God could have thought of it it. In it, the one through whom everything that exists came into being, enters into human history and becomes one with us. Having created us in freedom, with all the risks that that involves, God comes among us to show us how to be human. It is not easy to be fully human. Freedom is a dangerous thing, opening up as it does all kinds of possibilities. Looking around the world many would conclude, as I saw one journalist do in the paper yesterday, that the biggest mistake God ever made was to give us the gift of freedom. And as evidence of this he quoted the obvious signs of human sinfulness such as war, hunger, poverty, the extensive abuse of individuals all over the world, the damage we are doing to the environment and so on. And certainly there is plenty of this stuff to fuel the kind of pessimism about the future which is so prevalent today in the hearts of many. And who knows what will happen over the next fifty or a hundred years?
But the message of Christmas, and beyond it Easter, is that it does not have to be like that. If freedom carries risks with it, then it also carries immense possibilities. The Incarnation, the mystery by which God becomes one with us and shares our human condition, is an enormous vote of confidence in what it means to be human. There is nothing in the whole of creation that could even begin to compare with what it is to be a person. Yes, we do some terrible things. But we are also capable of great love. History may be filled with evidence of our sinfulness but it is also filled with evidence of the potential for good that is in us. The teaching of Jesus is held up before us, not as something impossible which we can never achieve, but as something possible through grace. By uniting ourselves to the one whose birth we celebrate tonight, it is possible to love our enemies, do good to those who hate us, feed the hungry, clothe the naked and all the other things Jesus speaks of. And not only is it possible: it is happening all over the world as, in even the worst of circumstances, the grace of God breaks through in unheralded and unreported ways and human beings show the most amazing love, generosity, capacity to forgive and so on.
And this is the vision we are called to hold up before the world. a vision filled with hope. The world is not lost. The situation we are in is not hopeless. Pessimism as a default position is profoundly mistaken. The world is redeemed. The kingdom is coming. Jesus has triumphed over sin and death and slowly but surely his vision for humanity, which is God’s vision, is unfolding for those who have eyes to see. Of course there are risks. The struggle is not over yet. At every step of the journey the gift of freedom has to be used well. The decisions we make on a daily basis are shaping the world we live in for good or for ill. But what we celebrate today is the most incredibly good news. We are not alone. God is with us. He is among us and we have ultimately nothing to fear.
So have a very happy Christmas. And as you leave here tonight, take with you to all whom you meet the message of the angels. Tell people not to be afraid. Tell them that today, in the town of David, a saviour has been born to us and that he is Christ the Lord. Tell them that the Word who was with God in the beginning and through whom all things were createdd is made flesh and lives among us; and that, to all who accept him, he has given power to become sons and daughters of God.
Not even Isaiah could imagine that.
BIDDING PRAYERS
Called to be a people of vision, we ask God to fan that vision into a flame in us. We ask him to open us up the the truth we celebrate tonight; the truth of the Incarnation by which Jesus, true God and true man, enters into our history, giving it the most profound new meaning and showing in his own person the heights of love and self-giving human nature is capable of when it is filled with God’s grace and led by the power of the Holy Spirit…………………………..Lord hear us
The word which appears most in the preaching of the prophet Isaiah during Advent is the word ‘peace.’ It expresses the deepest longing of humanity while, at the same time, demonstrating our inability to bring about the thing we most desire. And so on this Christmas night, as the world hears again the message of peace announced by the angels, we ask God to lead us at this moment in our history towards the peace Jesus speaks of, a peace the world cannot give…………………………….…...Lord hear us
If there is to be peace in the world then there must be justice too. The poor, not the rich, must become humanity’s priority. Jesus was born in poverty and throughout his life he cared for and was associated with the poor. He mixed with prostitutes and sinners. reached out to those on the margins of society and in every way possible showed, in his own person, God’s special concern for those whom the word despises and rejects. And so we pray that, as a parish, we will be like him……….Lord hear us
St Luke tells us that Mary ‘treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart.’ And so we pray for the grace to be like her this Christmas; to reflect deeply on the mystery we celebrate; to see beyond the superficial aspects of the story and enter into what they mean; to recognize God in the celebrations we have with our families and friends, so that, by our pondering them in our hearts, everything we do may become an experience of faith for us…………....Lord hear us
Throughout the world on this day, many people will attend Church who, for all kinds of reasons, do not normally do so. And so we pray for them, especially those who in the past have felt disappointed or let down by God or the Church, that what they find will be a source of encouragement to them and enable them to continue on their personal faith journey throughout the rest of the year…………………….Lord hear us
Christmas can be a lonely time for many people. It is also a difficult time for those who are bereaved, especially when the death of a loved one has happened during the previous year. And so we pray for all for whom this is the case. We pray, too, for all those whose loneliness and isolation is the result of homelessness and who live in hostels or in the street. And we pray, finally, for those in prison and for their families………..Lord hear us
Sunday, 23 December 2007
4th Sunday of Advent A
The Homeless Lunch had hardly begun last Sunday when one of our guests engaged me in conversation about the meaning of Christmas. ‘Father Boland,’ she said, ‘Christmas is all about the birth of Jesus, isn’t it?’ And before I could answer, she went on, ‘Mind you, the thing I cannae get is the Immaculate Conception an’ a’ that.’ It hardly seemed the time for a theological discussion, especially as the soup had just arrived, so I didn’t bother pointing out that, like many distinguished people on TV and elsewhere who should know better, she was confusing the dogma of the Immaculate Conception with the Virgin Birth. You hear it all the time in the media and it would not surprise me if some of us here were still a bit confused about the difference. And so let me explain. The Immaculate Conception is about Mary’s conception in the womb of her own mother. It was defined as a dogma of the Church on 8th December 1854 by Pope Pius IX and says quite simply that Mary, as part of God’s preparation for her to be the mother of Jesus, was conceived free from all stain of original sin. What that means exactly is a question we cannot go into now. The Virgin Birth, on the other hand, is about the fact that Mary conceived and gave birth to Jesus, not through normal sexual intercourse, but by the power of the Holy Spirit. And although she might have had similar problems with the Immaculate Conception, it was the Virgin Birth my young friend could not get her head round last Sunday.
And, of course, she’s not alone in that. In a world where, as I say so often, we have reduced truth to what makes sense to us, such things are very easily dismissed as impossible. We don’t understand them, so they can’t be true, is the logic behind this. But at the very heart of Christianity is a completely different approach to truth. It’s called ‘Revelation’ the idea being that God shows us truths we could never know or work out for ourselves. In the face of these ‘revealed truths,’ our job is not to understand them. It’s to believe them. As the Act of Faith many of us learned as children put it. ‘My God, I believe in thee and all thy Church doth teach, because thou hast said it and thy word is true.’And, while this does not mean abandoning reason or accepting everything the Church has ever said - history shows how foolish that would be - I do think there is a need for us today to be a bit more humble, a bit less cynical, a bit more open in our attitudes to the ancient truths of our faith. Many of them need new forms of expression more suited to the age in which we live and that is the job of theologians, but I remember years ago, when I was a curate in St Michael’s, a doctor in the town coming for what we used to call ‘instructions.’ He wanted to become a Catholic and, since this was before the RCIA, he and I met every week to go through together the teachings of the Church. And I remember well the evening just before Christmas when we looked at the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. I was a bit afraid he would think I was daft and, given his familiarity with the mechanics of the human body, dismiss the whole idea out of hand. But to my surprise he didn’t. All he said was that if God wanted to do that then he could do it. He was a very humble man and I will never forget him.
In that sense, of course, he was like St Joseph whom we meet in today’s Gospel. If Mary’s greatness lies in the fact that she believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled, Joseph’s lies in the fact that he was willing to let go of his own way of thinking and go where God led him, even when he did not understand. Faced with the fact that Mary was pregnant, Joseph had a choice to make. He could have denounced her and exposed her to public disgrace, as most people in those days would have done, the advantage to himself being that he would have been allowed to keep her dowrie. St Matthew tells us, however, that, being a man of honour – in other words, a good decent man - he had decided to divorce her informally, saving her from public disgrace. But then, in what Matthew calls a dream, but which was much more likely to have been a moment of deep spiritual consolation, it dawns on Joseph that God is asking him to take Mary home as his wife. And so he does it. And deep within the modern culture we are living in today, I believe God is inviting us to something similar: to move beyond the obvious and the logical and enter the world of faith, the world of revealed truth, truth we cannot understand, truth which seems ridiculous, impossible, absurd to us, but which is nonetheless true.
And in the coming days, as we contemplate the Christmas story, we face one of Faith’s great challenges. Who is this child whose birth we commemorate? Scripture and Tradition tells us that he is God living among us, true God and true man, and for centuries people believed and accepted this. They were not stupid people. It wasn’t a case of naivete. Among them were some of the greatest minds of history. But what they had was a sense of ‘revealed truth.’ In sharp contrast to the mood of our own time they were open to the idea that God could and did show us truths that, left to ourselves, we could never know. Today, even in the Churches, many have abandonned the idea that Jesus was God and reduced him to the level of a great teacher, a great religious leader, a great visionary but no more than that.
But if this is true then I, for one, want nothing to do with it. If Jesus is just a great religious leader then what’s all the fuss about? What makes his birth special? The Romans crucified many thousands of people. The only thing that could make Jesus different from all the rest would be if he were God. It’s the divinity of Jesus which makes his birth death and resurrection the most important events in history. Take that away and you have nothing.
And so, as we contemplate the crib this year, the question is not what we think or what makes sense to us. It’s much more important than that. It is, what do we believe? Now that goes much deeper.
BIDDING PRAYERS
It is not that the modern world has no reason for being humble in the face of truth. The more we learn about the world around us the more we realise how little we actually know. Whether in the fields of physics, astronomy, cosmology, biology or any other branch of human knowledge, the universe we live in is filled with mystery. And so we pray that this growing realisation of our own limitations will lead us, as it already has many at the frontiers of science, to rethink our attitude to the whole notion of revealed truths beyond our grasp………………….Lord hear us
If humanity is to be open again to the notion of revealed truth, then we must let go of the illusion that science can finally explain everything. The world is filled with acts of love and generosity which make no sense to cold science. They are signs of a love greater than ourselves, signs of something far beyond our comprehension, signs of the presence of God all around us. And so we pray that the world will come to recognize these signs of God for what they are……………….………….Lord hear us
One of the main ways in which people experience God without recognizing him is through a sense of wonder and amazement at the marvels of creation. Whether it is the immensity of the cosmos, the sheer beauty of the world we live in or simply the delight and wonder on the face of a child at Christmas, these experiences have the potential to lift us out of ourselves for a few moments. And so we pray for the grace to be open to such experiences over the coming days………………….Lord hear us
For an increasing number of people today, unable to accept what they cannot understand, Jesus has become no more than one great religious leader among many. For some, even, he has become little more that a figure from a fairy story we tell our children each Christmas. And so we pray that as we contemplate the crib this year we will have the grace we need to recognize Jesus for who he really is, God, the Word made flesh and living among us…………………………………………..Lord hear us
In the second reading St Paul speaks of how he has received from Jesus his mission to preach what he calls ‘the obedience of faith’ to all the pagan nations. And so we pray for the grace we need to do that today in a Scotland where, if we are to believe what we read in the papers, large numbers of people don’t know even the basis facts of the Christmas story……………Lord hear us
There will be much eating and drinking over the comings days. Jesus tells us, however, that when we have a party we should invite the crippled, the lame and the blind. The fact that they cannot repay us, he says, means that we will get our reward in heaven. And so we pray that somewhere in our celebration these days we will all find room for those who are in need in Kilmarnock……………………..Lord hear us
And, of course, she’s not alone in that. In a world where, as I say so often, we have reduced truth to what makes sense to us, such things are very easily dismissed as impossible. We don’t understand them, so they can’t be true, is the logic behind this. But at the very heart of Christianity is a completely different approach to truth. It’s called ‘Revelation’ the idea being that God shows us truths we could never know or work out for ourselves. In the face of these ‘revealed truths,’ our job is not to understand them. It’s to believe them. As the Act of Faith many of us learned as children put it. ‘My God, I believe in thee and all thy Church doth teach, because thou hast said it and thy word is true.’And, while this does not mean abandoning reason or accepting everything the Church has ever said - history shows how foolish that would be - I do think there is a need for us today to be a bit more humble, a bit less cynical, a bit more open in our attitudes to the ancient truths of our faith. Many of them need new forms of expression more suited to the age in which we live and that is the job of theologians, but I remember years ago, when I was a curate in St Michael’s, a doctor in the town coming for what we used to call ‘instructions.’ He wanted to become a Catholic and, since this was before the RCIA, he and I met every week to go through together the teachings of the Church. And I remember well the evening just before Christmas when we looked at the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. I was a bit afraid he would think I was daft and, given his familiarity with the mechanics of the human body, dismiss the whole idea out of hand. But to my surprise he didn’t. All he said was that if God wanted to do that then he could do it. He was a very humble man and I will never forget him.
In that sense, of course, he was like St Joseph whom we meet in today’s Gospel. If Mary’s greatness lies in the fact that she believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled, Joseph’s lies in the fact that he was willing to let go of his own way of thinking and go where God led him, even when he did not understand. Faced with the fact that Mary was pregnant, Joseph had a choice to make. He could have denounced her and exposed her to public disgrace, as most people in those days would have done, the advantage to himself being that he would have been allowed to keep her dowrie. St Matthew tells us, however, that, being a man of honour – in other words, a good decent man - he had decided to divorce her informally, saving her from public disgrace. But then, in what Matthew calls a dream, but which was much more likely to have been a moment of deep spiritual consolation, it dawns on Joseph that God is asking him to take Mary home as his wife. And so he does it. And deep within the modern culture we are living in today, I believe God is inviting us to something similar: to move beyond the obvious and the logical and enter the world of faith, the world of revealed truth, truth we cannot understand, truth which seems ridiculous, impossible, absurd to us, but which is nonetheless true.
And in the coming days, as we contemplate the Christmas story, we face one of Faith’s great challenges. Who is this child whose birth we commemorate? Scripture and Tradition tells us that he is God living among us, true God and true man, and for centuries people believed and accepted this. They were not stupid people. It wasn’t a case of naivete. Among them were some of the greatest minds of history. But what they had was a sense of ‘revealed truth.’ In sharp contrast to the mood of our own time they were open to the idea that God could and did show us truths that, left to ourselves, we could never know. Today, even in the Churches, many have abandonned the idea that Jesus was God and reduced him to the level of a great teacher, a great religious leader, a great visionary but no more than that.
But if this is true then I, for one, want nothing to do with it. If Jesus is just a great religious leader then what’s all the fuss about? What makes his birth special? The Romans crucified many thousands of people. The only thing that could make Jesus different from all the rest would be if he were God. It’s the divinity of Jesus which makes his birth death and resurrection the most important events in history. Take that away and you have nothing.
And so, as we contemplate the crib this year, the question is not what we think or what makes sense to us. It’s much more important than that. It is, what do we believe? Now that goes much deeper.
BIDDING PRAYERS
It is not that the modern world has no reason for being humble in the face of truth. The more we learn about the world around us the more we realise how little we actually know. Whether in the fields of physics, astronomy, cosmology, biology or any other branch of human knowledge, the universe we live in is filled with mystery. And so we pray that this growing realisation of our own limitations will lead us, as it already has many at the frontiers of science, to rethink our attitude to the whole notion of revealed truths beyond our grasp………………….Lord hear us
If humanity is to be open again to the notion of revealed truth, then we must let go of the illusion that science can finally explain everything. The world is filled with acts of love and generosity which make no sense to cold science. They are signs of a love greater than ourselves, signs of something far beyond our comprehension, signs of the presence of God all around us. And so we pray that the world will come to recognize these signs of God for what they are……………….………….Lord hear us
One of the main ways in which people experience God without recognizing him is through a sense of wonder and amazement at the marvels of creation. Whether it is the immensity of the cosmos, the sheer beauty of the world we live in or simply the delight and wonder on the face of a child at Christmas, these experiences have the potential to lift us out of ourselves for a few moments. And so we pray for the grace to be open to such experiences over the coming days………………….Lord hear us
For an increasing number of people today, unable to accept what they cannot understand, Jesus has become no more than one great religious leader among many. For some, even, he has become little more that a figure from a fairy story we tell our children each Christmas. And so we pray that as we contemplate the crib this year we will have the grace we need to recognize Jesus for who he really is, God, the Word made flesh and living among us…………………………………………..Lord hear us
In the second reading St Paul speaks of how he has received from Jesus his mission to preach what he calls ‘the obedience of faith’ to all the pagan nations. And so we pray for the grace we need to do that today in a Scotland where, if we are to believe what we read in the papers, large numbers of people don’t know even the basis facts of the Christmas story……………Lord hear us
There will be much eating and drinking over the comings days. Jesus tells us, however, that when we have a party we should invite the crippled, the lame and the blind. The fact that they cannot repay us, he says, means that we will get our reward in heaven. And so we pray that somewhere in our celebration these days we will all find room for those who are in need in Kilmarnock……………………..Lord hear us
Saturday, 15 December 2007
3rd Sunday of Advent A
The John the Baptist we meet today in chapter eleven of Matthew’s Gospel is a very different man from the one we met last week in chapter three. Then he was at the peak of his powers as people from Jerusalem, Judaea and the whole Jordan district came to hear his preaching. Now he is a prisoner, and as he lies alone in his cell he is tormented by doubts. Has he got it all wrong? Has his whole ministry been a mistake? Was Jesus really the one the prophets had spoken of or had he, John, completely misread the situation? These were deeply disturbing questions for John, and yet they are questions we all have to face in one form or another as we journey through life.
They often confront us during the period pyschologists call ‘mid-life.’ It comes to different people at different times and in different circumstances, but essentially it is about doing what John did in his prison cell and coming to terms with the reality of our lives as opposed to the hopes we might have once had about them. When we are young we have plans and ambitions, dreams even, most of which don’t turn out as we had envisaged. There are failures and disappointment along the way and ‘mid-life’ is a time for coming to terms with these and learning to live with and accept things as they are as opposed to what we had hoped they would be. It’s vitally important that we do this because the way we live the rest of our lives depends on it. If we can successfully negotiate this critical moment in our lives then we have every chance of living the rest of them more or less happily and at peace. Bad things will happen, but we will deal with them. If, however, we fail to come to terms with reality, making peace with what has actually happened, the danger is that we will grow into bitter and resentful old people, impossible to please and never happy. I know such people and feel great sadness whenever I meet them.
But there are other ways, too, in which we face the kind of questions and doubts John faced in his prison. At a personal level I live with them all the time. I have explained to you before how sometimes when I am praying there before the Blessed Sacrament I find myself confronting the possibility that all I am doing is talking to myself. And if I am, if I am deluded about all this God stuff, then, like John the Baptist, what has my whole life been about? Somebody told me recently that my obvious faith in the resurrection when I speak at funerals encourages him and helps him believe. But there are moments now and again when the whole idea seems absurd to me. But I can live with that just as I can live with the fact that all those hopes I had as a young priest, ordained just after Vatican II, will not be fulfilled until long after I am dead. If Isaiah could do it with something that was eight centuries in the future then, with God’s help, so, hopefully, can I. Although I have my moments.
But for many in the Church it is all too difficult. Some have lost patience with the slowness of change since Vatican II and have walked away. Others, unable to accept or understand what is going on have, without realising it, also walked away. Clinging to the past and claiming loyalty to traditional Catholicism, they seek refuge in a Church which no longer exists except in their own minds. The first group are afraid the Church has got it all wrong, the second, trapped in their own little world think they know it has. And, as we contemplate John’s struggle in prison and try to see the parallels with our own experience, it’s important that we understand the nature of this struggle. One way or another it has been like this all through history and if we are to be men and women of faith at this time then we must face these questions the way John the Baptist did in his own life.
It was the same, of course, all through the Old Testament. We began Advent with the vision of Isaiah son of Amoz concerning Judah and Jerusalem. But as the centuries passed and nothing happened, many lost faith in what the prophets had said. Only those whom the Bible calls the ‘Anawim’, the poor of Yahweh, remained faithful, represented in the Christmas story by Simeon and Anna who were in the Temple day and night convinced that one day the words of the prophets would be fulfilled.
The very word Advent of course means waiting, a notion that lies at the very heart of what it is to be a man or woman of faith. But central to any waiting is an element of uncertainty. A woman standing at a bus-stop canot be sure the bus will come. A businessman waiting for his lunch-companion to arrive may wait in vain. And it’s the same with faith. The man or woman of faith in the world today has to be able to live with not-knowing and uncertainty. He or she has to be able to live with doubts and questions, accepting that often there are no answers, and avoiding the temptation to invent them. Whether people are liberal or conservative in the way they see things in the Church today is largely a matter of personality. The important thing is our willingness to go where God leads, letting go in the process of our own ways of thinking, and doing so because, without knowing what the future holds, we put our trust in him.
And that’s exactly what St James says in the second reading today. ‘Be patient brothers until the Lord’s coming. Think of the farmer: how patiently he waits for the precious fruit of the ground. You too have to be patient. Do not lose heart.’ words which speak directly to the time we are living through. And the words of Isaiah too are profoundly relevant: “Strengthen all weary hands, steady all trembling knees and say to all faint hearts, ‘courage, do not be afraid.’” The simple truth is that there is too much fear around today whether in the Church or in the wider world. There are many complex reasons for this, some of them not without foundation, but at their root is the fact that the world has stopped trusting in God and in his promises.
Well, next week, we will meet the one whose greatness lies precisley in the fact that she believed the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled, in her own person the very personification of Advent.
BIDDING PRAYERS
We have heard much in recent days about the United Nations Climate Change Talks in Bali, Indonesia. It is a subject around which there is much pessimism and where prophets of doom abound. But fear and pessimism will get the world nowhere. And so we pray for a deep sense of how God is at work in this crisis, calling humanity to conversion. And we pray, too, for much more confidence in the capacity of the human race to respond to this movement of God and turn the whole crisis into a new beginning for everyone on the planet…………………..Lord hear us
‘Come Lord and save us’ was the response to the psalm today. And so we pray that that cry will go up from more and more people in the world at this moment in our history: that we will all come to recognize that God has already saved us in Jesus and that all we have to do is listen to him and learn to live by his teaching. And we pray in particular that those of us who, by baptism, are called to proclaim this message to the world will have a deep faith in it ourselves…………………………...Lord hear us
God’s timescale is not the same as ours. For God, in fact, there is no time. Everything is present to God and we are the ones who, living within the restraints of time and space, experience what it is to wait. And so we pray for the maturity we need to live with the doubts, questions and uncertainties which are an integral part of all waiting. We pray, too, for the wisdom we need to see the folly of inventing artificial answers which we then become attached to and turn into absolute truths…………Lord hear us
In the second reading today St James uses the image of a farmer waiting for his crops to grow. But Jesus had already used this image in the Gospel, talking of how the kingdom of God is like a seed which grows even when the farmer is asleep. How it grows, Jesus says, the farmer does not know. And so we pray for the insight we need to recognize the signs of the kingdom growing all around us…………….Lord hear us
Speaking of John the Baptist today, Jesus says that he was no reed swaying in the breeze. He was, in other words, a mature man who knew what he was about and was not blown about public opinion or anxiety about what others thought of him. He was a genuine prophet, a man who heard the word of God deep within himself and proclaimed it in season and out of season, regardless of the consequences. And so we pray for the grace we need to be even a little bit like him………………..Lord hear us
What confirmed for John that Jesus was indeed the one the prophets had spoken of was the fact that the Good News was being proclaimed to the poor. This is what all the prophets had said would happen and it was what reassured John and gave him peace of mind in his prison. And so we pray that this parish will proclaim Good News to the poor this Christmas by the way we reach out to them, beginning with the Homeless Lunch this Sunday………………………………………….….Lord hear us
They often confront us during the period pyschologists call ‘mid-life.’ It comes to different people at different times and in different circumstances, but essentially it is about doing what John did in his prison cell and coming to terms with the reality of our lives as opposed to the hopes we might have once had about them. When we are young we have plans and ambitions, dreams even, most of which don’t turn out as we had envisaged. There are failures and disappointment along the way and ‘mid-life’ is a time for coming to terms with these and learning to live with and accept things as they are as opposed to what we had hoped they would be. It’s vitally important that we do this because the way we live the rest of our lives depends on it. If we can successfully negotiate this critical moment in our lives then we have every chance of living the rest of them more or less happily and at peace. Bad things will happen, but we will deal with them. If, however, we fail to come to terms with reality, making peace with what has actually happened, the danger is that we will grow into bitter and resentful old people, impossible to please and never happy. I know such people and feel great sadness whenever I meet them.
But there are other ways, too, in which we face the kind of questions and doubts John faced in his prison. At a personal level I live with them all the time. I have explained to you before how sometimes when I am praying there before the Blessed Sacrament I find myself confronting the possibility that all I am doing is talking to myself. And if I am, if I am deluded about all this God stuff, then, like John the Baptist, what has my whole life been about? Somebody told me recently that my obvious faith in the resurrection when I speak at funerals encourages him and helps him believe. But there are moments now and again when the whole idea seems absurd to me. But I can live with that just as I can live with the fact that all those hopes I had as a young priest, ordained just after Vatican II, will not be fulfilled until long after I am dead. If Isaiah could do it with something that was eight centuries in the future then, with God’s help, so, hopefully, can I. Although I have my moments.
But for many in the Church it is all too difficult. Some have lost patience with the slowness of change since Vatican II and have walked away. Others, unable to accept or understand what is going on have, without realising it, also walked away. Clinging to the past and claiming loyalty to traditional Catholicism, they seek refuge in a Church which no longer exists except in their own minds. The first group are afraid the Church has got it all wrong, the second, trapped in their own little world think they know it has. And, as we contemplate John’s struggle in prison and try to see the parallels with our own experience, it’s important that we understand the nature of this struggle. One way or another it has been like this all through history and if we are to be men and women of faith at this time then we must face these questions the way John the Baptist did in his own life.
It was the same, of course, all through the Old Testament. We began Advent with the vision of Isaiah son of Amoz concerning Judah and Jerusalem. But as the centuries passed and nothing happened, many lost faith in what the prophets had said. Only those whom the Bible calls the ‘Anawim’, the poor of Yahweh, remained faithful, represented in the Christmas story by Simeon and Anna who were in the Temple day and night convinced that one day the words of the prophets would be fulfilled.
The very word Advent of course means waiting, a notion that lies at the very heart of what it is to be a man or woman of faith. But central to any waiting is an element of uncertainty. A woman standing at a bus-stop canot be sure the bus will come. A businessman waiting for his lunch-companion to arrive may wait in vain. And it’s the same with faith. The man or woman of faith in the world today has to be able to live with not-knowing and uncertainty. He or she has to be able to live with doubts and questions, accepting that often there are no answers, and avoiding the temptation to invent them. Whether people are liberal or conservative in the way they see things in the Church today is largely a matter of personality. The important thing is our willingness to go where God leads, letting go in the process of our own ways of thinking, and doing so because, without knowing what the future holds, we put our trust in him.
And that’s exactly what St James says in the second reading today. ‘Be patient brothers until the Lord’s coming. Think of the farmer: how patiently he waits for the precious fruit of the ground. You too have to be patient. Do not lose heart.’ words which speak directly to the time we are living through. And the words of Isaiah too are profoundly relevant: “Strengthen all weary hands, steady all trembling knees and say to all faint hearts, ‘courage, do not be afraid.’” The simple truth is that there is too much fear around today whether in the Church or in the wider world. There are many complex reasons for this, some of them not without foundation, but at their root is the fact that the world has stopped trusting in God and in his promises.
Well, next week, we will meet the one whose greatness lies precisley in the fact that she believed the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled, in her own person the very personification of Advent.
BIDDING PRAYERS
We have heard much in recent days about the United Nations Climate Change Talks in Bali, Indonesia. It is a subject around which there is much pessimism and where prophets of doom abound. But fear and pessimism will get the world nowhere. And so we pray for a deep sense of how God is at work in this crisis, calling humanity to conversion. And we pray, too, for much more confidence in the capacity of the human race to respond to this movement of God and turn the whole crisis into a new beginning for everyone on the planet…………………..Lord hear us
‘Come Lord and save us’ was the response to the psalm today. And so we pray that that cry will go up from more and more people in the world at this moment in our history: that we will all come to recognize that God has already saved us in Jesus and that all we have to do is listen to him and learn to live by his teaching. And we pray in particular that those of us who, by baptism, are called to proclaim this message to the world will have a deep faith in it ourselves…………………………...Lord hear us
God’s timescale is not the same as ours. For God, in fact, there is no time. Everything is present to God and we are the ones who, living within the restraints of time and space, experience what it is to wait. And so we pray for the maturity we need to live with the doubts, questions and uncertainties which are an integral part of all waiting. We pray, too, for the wisdom we need to see the folly of inventing artificial answers which we then become attached to and turn into absolute truths…………Lord hear us
In the second reading today St James uses the image of a farmer waiting for his crops to grow. But Jesus had already used this image in the Gospel, talking of how the kingdom of God is like a seed which grows even when the farmer is asleep. How it grows, Jesus says, the farmer does not know. And so we pray for the insight we need to recognize the signs of the kingdom growing all around us…………….Lord hear us
Speaking of John the Baptist today, Jesus says that he was no reed swaying in the breeze. He was, in other words, a mature man who knew what he was about and was not blown about public opinion or anxiety about what others thought of him. He was a genuine prophet, a man who heard the word of God deep within himself and proclaimed it in season and out of season, regardless of the consequences. And so we pray for the grace we need to be even a little bit like him………………..Lord hear us
What confirmed for John that Jesus was indeed the one the prophets had spoken of was the fact that the Good News was being proclaimed to the poor. This is what all the prophets had said would happen and it was what reassured John and gave him peace of mind in his prison. And so we pray that this parish will proclaim Good News to the poor this Christmas by the way we reach out to them, beginning with the Homeless Lunch this Sunday………………………………………….….Lord hear us
Saturday, 8 December 2007
2nd Sunday of Advent
If I can compare the development of this week’s homily to a child growing in the womb, then the moment of conception came last Sunday evening. Earlier that day, at Mass, we had been talking about the need to have a vision like that of Isaiah, of the need to be people who can imagine something different from what is currently happening and so offer people a future filled with hope based on a new way of thinking, the theme, as it happens, of the Pope’s latest encyclical. At the heart of this, of course, is the journey from religion to faith which, for years, has been the cornerstone of our Sunday liturgy. The kind of religion condemned so powerfully today by John the Baptist has failed the world. It is falling about our ears as, everywhere we look, the axe is laid to the roots of this tired old tree, and the only way forward now is faith, the struggle to embrace it being, arguably, the greatest of the many challenges facing humanity today. And so imagine the dismay I felt last Sunday evening.
I was watching ‘The Blair Years’ which has been running for several weeks now on the BBC. Last Sunday’s programme was the one where Tony Blair was to talk about his faith and most of the papers had already told us what he would say: that although his faith meant a lot to him and had underpinned everything he had done, he had played it down while in office for fear that, if he revealed it, people in Britain would think he was, as he put it, ‘a nutter.’ Now that I had no problem with. What filled me with dismay, and has had me shaking my head all week in disbelief, was Alistair Campbell’s utterly infantile and pathetic contribution to the discussion. This is a man who, for years, was at the heart of government, helped shape New Labour and played a crucial part in the lead-up to the Iraq war. And I’ll quote verbatim what he said. “He’s, you know, pretty irreverent. He swears a fair bit and he, you know, if he sees a very attractive woman his eye will wander and all that stuff. He doesn’t look like your classic religious sort of guy.’ I just couldn’t believe it. How was it possible that a man in his position, with so much influence over government policy could show such abysmal ignorance. At Mass that day we had been talking about having vision. Here, just a few hours later, was the complete lack of it. And yet, even as I felt these things, I knew he was not entirely to blame. We all are. The end result of offering people religion, when what they need is faith, is that Alistair Campbell and millions like him think that being ‘a religious sort of guy’ is about not swearing or not looking at women. They don’t even know what sin is.
And yet, they are not alone in that. Over the last forty years, the number of people going to confession has fallen so much that virtually nobody goes now. And the main reason for this, I believe, is that folk simply don’t know what to say. Some are happy to repeat the old formulas we learned as children – swearing, not saying our morning and evening prayers, being disobedient and so on - but for most people these things no longer make any sense. If there is such a thing as sin it surely has to be more than that. And so on the Sunday of Advent, when John the Baptist urges the people to repent, when they confess their sins at the Jordan, when John attacks the Pharisees and Sadducees for the superficiality of their religion and when the Advent Penance Service is just ten days away, I invite you to consider this very important question; What is sin?
Well, as it happens, Isaiah is talking about it that first reading. Yes, he dreams of the day when the wolf will live with the lamb and the panther lie down with the kid, but the reality confronting him every day was violence and turmoil. Isaiah believed, however, that none of this was what God had in mind when he created the world and so he dreams of the day when God will return things to their original state, destroyed by sin, and restore to creation the original peace and harmony it had lost or, more accurately, humanity had thrown away. And so sin can be defined as anything that gets in the way of God’s dream for the world; anything that undermines the fundamental harmony of God’s creation, introducing into it a dischord which does not belong there. The opening prayer of the Mass today spoke about the ‘lure of greed which impedes the hearts of those who seek God’ and prays that the ‘darkness will not blind us to the vision of wisdom which fills the hearts of those who find him.’ But this darkness comes in many shapes and forms. Human greed brings division into the world, driving apart people created for love. Tribal and racial conflicts, the lust for power and the desire to dominate others stir in us the dark forces of hatred and envy which in their turn give birth to the violence we see all around us. All of this and much more is what sin is, and when we come before God to confess our sin and seek healing from its effects, whether here in church or in the privacy of our own homes, all of this. what we might call ‘social sin,’ the sin of humanity, is what we are called to bring. Salvation, as the Pope says in his new encyclical, is’nt a private matter. It involves the whole of humanity.
But we are also called to bring before God the particular ways in which, as individuals, we share in this social sin. Greed affects us all and influences the way we live. The lust for power and the desire to dominate others is in all of us and often shows itself in the way we live as sexual persons. We are all riddled with prejudice and envy. Hatred, the antithesis of God, can lurk in the heart of every person. Called to be instruments of God’s love in the world we can so easily be the very opposite, sowers of dischord and disharmony in the world around us.
And so I invite you this Advent to leave behind childish ways of thinking about sin. Make a mature, adult examination of your life. Identify the sin in it. Give it a name and bring it here to the Penance Service on December 19th. Then, instead of it being destructive, it will become the place where you meet Jesus.
BIDDING PRAYERS
In his new Encyclical letter, Saved by Hope, Pope Benedict praises the modern world for the emphasis it puts on freedom. The mistake it makes, he says, is to forget sometimes that freedom can be abused and misused and, despite its fundamental goodness, become the cause of evil. And so we pray that the world of our time will learn to use freedom well and never lose sight of the responsibilities which go with it……….Lord hear us
Speaking of the need for hope in the world today, the Pope criticises the modern idea that humanity’s final happiness can be the fruit of science, politics or one particular way of organizing society. Without God there can be no real hope is his basic message, and that hope is founded ultimately on the the promise of eternal life we have received in Jesus. Utopia, heaven on earth, does not exist. And so we pray that the people of our time will come to know the truth of this……………….Lord hear us
When we seek happiness in things other than God, the inevitable consequence is diappointment and disillusionment. The modern world is filled with people who, having sought happiness in money, power, possessions, drugs, sexual promiscuity and many other substitutes for God, have found this out the hard way. And so we pray for all whose lives are broken in this way that, in their brokenness, they will meet God……………………..Lord hear us
In the first reading this week the Prophet Isaiah speaks of integrity. The dictionary defines integrity as ‘the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles.’ And so we pray for the grace we need from God to be people of integrity ourselves and that God will raise up all over the world today many men and women of integrity who will cooperate with each other in building up the just and harmonious society Isaiah describes so beautifully…..……….Lord hear us
The prophet also speaks of the day when ‘the country will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord.’ To know God in this sense is to leave behind for ever the world of religion – the world occupied in today’s Gospel by the Pharisees and Sadducees – and enter the world of faith. If we can make this journey then the future is filled with hope. If we fail to make it, then future generations will suffer from our failure and have to face the same challenge over again. And so we pray that we will not let them down…………………………..Lord hear us
Advent, like Lent, is a time of repentance and conversion. And so we pray for the grace to enter deeply into this process. We pray, especially, that our Penance Service a week on Wednesday will be a time of deep faith when we recognize and acknowledge the sin in ourselves and allow God to transform it into a place of grace and encounter with the Risen Jesus who forgives sin and calls us to new and deeper ways of living………..Lord hear us
I was watching ‘The Blair Years’ which has been running for several weeks now on the BBC. Last Sunday’s programme was the one where Tony Blair was to talk about his faith and most of the papers had already told us what he would say: that although his faith meant a lot to him and had underpinned everything he had done, he had played it down while in office for fear that, if he revealed it, people in Britain would think he was, as he put it, ‘a nutter.’ Now that I had no problem with. What filled me with dismay, and has had me shaking my head all week in disbelief, was Alistair Campbell’s utterly infantile and pathetic contribution to the discussion. This is a man who, for years, was at the heart of government, helped shape New Labour and played a crucial part in the lead-up to the Iraq war. And I’ll quote verbatim what he said. “He’s, you know, pretty irreverent. He swears a fair bit and he, you know, if he sees a very attractive woman his eye will wander and all that stuff. He doesn’t look like your classic religious sort of guy.’ I just couldn’t believe it. How was it possible that a man in his position, with so much influence over government policy could show such abysmal ignorance. At Mass that day we had been talking about having vision. Here, just a few hours later, was the complete lack of it. And yet, even as I felt these things, I knew he was not entirely to blame. We all are. The end result of offering people religion, when what they need is faith, is that Alistair Campbell and millions like him think that being ‘a religious sort of guy’ is about not swearing or not looking at women. They don’t even know what sin is.
And yet, they are not alone in that. Over the last forty years, the number of people going to confession has fallen so much that virtually nobody goes now. And the main reason for this, I believe, is that folk simply don’t know what to say. Some are happy to repeat the old formulas we learned as children – swearing, not saying our morning and evening prayers, being disobedient and so on - but for most people these things no longer make any sense. If there is such a thing as sin it surely has to be more than that. And so on the Sunday of Advent, when John the Baptist urges the people to repent, when they confess their sins at the Jordan, when John attacks the Pharisees and Sadducees for the superficiality of their religion and when the Advent Penance Service is just ten days away, I invite you to consider this very important question; What is sin?
Well, as it happens, Isaiah is talking about it that first reading. Yes, he dreams of the day when the wolf will live with the lamb and the panther lie down with the kid, but the reality confronting him every day was violence and turmoil. Isaiah believed, however, that none of this was what God had in mind when he created the world and so he dreams of the day when God will return things to their original state, destroyed by sin, and restore to creation the original peace and harmony it had lost or, more accurately, humanity had thrown away. And so sin can be defined as anything that gets in the way of God’s dream for the world; anything that undermines the fundamental harmony of God’s creation, introducing into it a dischord which does not belong there. The opening prayer of the Mass today spoke about the ‘lure of greed which impedes the hearts of those who seek God’ and prays that the ‘darkness will not blind us to the vision of wisdom which fills the hearts of those who find him.’ But this darkness comes in many shapes and forms. Human greed brings division into the world, driving apart people created for love. Tribal and racial conflicts, the lust for power and the desire to dominate others stir in us the dark forces of hatred and envy which in their turn give birth to the violence we see all around us. All of this and much more is what sin is, and when we come before God to confess our sin and seek healing from its effects, whether here in church or in the privacy of our own homes, all of this. what we might call ‘social sin,’ the sin of humanity, is what we are called to bring. Salvation, as the Pope says in his new encyclical, is’nt a private matter. It involves the whole of humanity.
But we are also called to bring before God the particular ways in which, as individuals, we share in this social sin. Greed affects us all and influences the way we live. The lust for power and the desire to dominate others is in all of us and often shows itself in the way we live as sexual persons. We are all riddled with prejudice and envy. Hatred, the antithesis of God, can lurk in the heart of every person. Called to be instruments of God’s love in the world we can so easily be the very opposite, sowers of dischord and disharmony in the world around us.
And so I invite you this Advent to leave behind childish ways of thinking about sin. Make a mature, adult examination of your life. Identify the sin in it. Give it a name and bring it here to the Penance Service on December 19th. Then, instead of it being destructive, it will become the place where you meet Jesus.
BIDDING PRAYERS
In his new Encyclical letter, Saved by Hope, Pope Benedict praises the modern world for the emphasis it puts on freedom. The mistake it makes, he says, is to forget sometimes that freedom can be abused and misused and, despite its fundamental goodness, become the cause of evil. And so we pray that the world of our time will learn to use freedom well and never lose sight of the responsibilities which go with it……….Lord hear us
Speaking of the need for hope in the world today, the Pope criticises the modern idea that humanity’s final happiness can be the fruit of science, politics or one particular way of organizing society. Without God there can be no real hope is his basic message, and that hope is founded ultimately on the the promise of eternal life we have received in Jesus. Utopia, heaven on earth, does not exist. And so we pray that the people of our time will come to know the truth of this……………….Lord hear us
When we seek happiness in things other than God, the inevitable consequence is diappointment and disillusionment. The modern world is filled with people who, having sought happiness in money, power, possessions, drugs, sexual promiscuity and many other substitutes for God, have found this out the hard way. And so we pray for all whose lives are broken in this way that, in their brokenness, they will meet God……………………..Lord hear us
In the first reading this week the Prophet Isaiah speaks of integrity. The dictionary defines integrity as ‘the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles.’ And so we pray for the grace we need from God to be people of integrity ourselves and that God will raise up all over the world today many men and women of integrity who will cooperate with each other in building up the just and harmonious society Isaiah describes so beautifully…..……….Lord hear us
The prophet also speaks of the day when ‘the country will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord.’ To know God in this sense is to leave behind for ever the world of religion – the world occupied in today’s Gospel by the Pharisees and Sadducees – and enter the world of faith. If we can make this journey then the future is filled with hope. If we fail to make it, then future generations will suffer from our failure and have to face the same challenge over again. And so we pray that we will not let them down…………………………..Lord hear us
Advent, like Lent, is a time of repentance and conversion. And so we pray for the grace to enter deeply into this process. We pray, especially, that our Penance Service a week on Wednesday will be a time of deep faith when we recognize and acknowledge the sin in ourselves and allow God to transform it into a place of grace and encounter with the Risen Jesus who forgives sin and calls us to new and deeper ways of living………..Lord hear us
Saturday, 1 December 2007
First Sunday of Advent A.
How appropriate it is that the first words we hear from Scripture on this First Sunday of Advent are: “The vision of Isaiah son of Amoz concerning Judah and Jerusalem.” Because, as we begin yet another journey through the Church’s year – a journey that will take us once again through Christmas, Lent, Easter, Pentecost and all those Ordinary Sundays of the Year we have just completed, right back to where we are today – what we are all called to be is men and women of vision in the midst of the world. But what does this mean? What is this thing we call vision? What is a man or woman of vision like? Well, a brief look at Isaiah’s life will help us answer these questions.
As most of you know by now – I have certainly said it often enough – the prophet Isaiah lived in the eighth century BC during a time of great upheaval for the Jewish people. He saw the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians, a fierce pagan people from what is now part Iraq part Iran, and the great question of the day was how to save Jerusalem from the same fate. Politicians argued about whether they should defy or appease the invaders, but Isaiah opposed both of these solutions. Convinced that the weakness of Judah came from its moral depravity he was able to see beyond the immediate political crisis. He could see possibilities that others could not see and looked forward to an entirely new future for Jerusalem, one in which, as we heard today, swords would be hammered into ploughshares, spears into sickles, nations would not lift sword against nation and there would be no more training for war. His whole preaching is filled with poetic images like this, many of which, like these, have become part of our language. But the truth is that even Isaiah did not fully understand what he was saying. What he was able to do, however, was envisage something new. He knew that things did not have to be the way they were or the way they had always been. He could see beyond the present, what seemed the only option to others, and it was this that made him a man of vision, a vision, the fulfillment of which, even now, lies in the future. And that is what we, as men and women of faith, fed and nourished each week by the Word and the Eucharist, are called to be for the sake of all those with whom we share this particular moment in history.
But what is it we are called to see beyond? What is God inviting us to see that others cannot see? Well, the simple answer to that is that, as men and women of faith, we are called to recognize the signs of the Kingdom all around us and help others see the futility and inadequacy of so much that passes for accepted wisdom in our modern culture. And much of this is familiar to us given that we often reflect together on these things. There is, for example, the way we so often today reduce truth to what we think it is or, worse still, what we want it to be. But truth is not just what makes sense to us or what we can understand, and we are called to show the world this by our constant openness to the truth that comes from God, the truths of faith, the truths revealed to us in Jesus. To do that is to be people of vision.
And then, of course, there is consumerism, that most profound of all illusions which drives our society today, the illusion that, if we can only acquire more and more material things, we will find the happiness we crave. On Friday, Pope Benedict published an Encyclical letter, his second, on the subject of Hope. And one of the things he says is that when people have travelled the road of consumerism and materialism, seeking happiness in possessions and finding only disappointment at the end of that road, we have to be ready with an alternative vision, one which offers genuine happiness and fulfillment. And that alternative is the Kingdom of God which Jesus tells us to seek above all other things because it alone can satisfy us.
And then there is the way we relate to each other. Faced with the same tendencies which afflict us today, the tendency to divide the world into friends and enemies, rejecting or even hating and making war on foreigners or those whom we perceive in some way to be different from ourselves, Isaiah, in a passage we will hear next Sunday, looks forward to a time of harmony when, again using the language of poetry, the wolf will live with the lamb, the panther lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion cub feed together and so on. And in a world dominated by social divisions between rich and poor, wars and conflicts between nations and the xenophobia which is rising up everywhere in the face of a mass movement of people which is the flip-side of globalization, we are called to embrace an alternative vision based on equality and be signs of it in the world.
But there is a problem about having this kind of vision, an inevitable consequence of being able to envisage something new, something different, and it is this: the further ahead you can see, the longer your vision, the less likely you are to live long enough to see it fulfilled. The vision of Isaiah, three thousand years later, is still in the future. In our own time many visionaries who laid the foundations of Vatican II didn’t live to see it and the same is true in many other walks of life. I often say to priests who are frustrated at the depth of resistance to change in the Church that the real challenge is to be able to live with the fact that our hopes will not be fulfilled until fifty years after we are dead. After twenty two years in St Matthew’s I can see my own vision for the parish unfolding, but only very slowly. And even when our vision is realised, it is never the way we imagined it.
And so, to be men and women of vision involves both trust and patience. As we come here each week we must, as Jesus says this morning, stay awake. Only the Spirit of God can open our eyes and minds and broaden our vision. That is why we come; to hear the Word of God, be changed by it and become more and more like the one we receive in Holy Communion. Because ultimately it is his vision we are talking about, not our own.
BIDDING PRAYERS
Men and women of vision, the prophets in every age, have always been persecuted or rejected in some way. Often they have been considered dangerous or even mad because they dared to imagine a situation different from the one people were familiar with and so never thought of questioning. And so we pray for men and women of vision in the world and in the Church today that they will continue to challenge us, even when we don’t like it………………………….Lord hear us
Without people of vision who could imagine something new, the human race could never have made the progress it has. The instinct to resist change and keep things the way they have always been is deep in human nature and is even necessary to maintain stability in society. But we also need those who can see beyond the present and open up to us new ways of thinking. And so we thank God for visionaries in every age, especially those in the Church who laid the foundations of the Second Vatican Council, even when our response is reluctant and slow……………..……Lord hear us
Men and women of vision are also desperately needed in the world of politics. If swords are to be hammered into ploughshares and spears into sickles; if nations are to stop lifting sword against nation and there is to be no more training for war, then we need leaders with the vision to break out of traditional ways of thinking and embrace a radically new way of doing things. And so we pray that God will raise up such leaders in the world today……..………………….Lord hear us
Today both the Jesus and St Paul tell us to stay awake. And so we pray for the grace to do this; to be always alert to what the liturgy calls ‘the signs of the times’ so that we can respond to them in a faith-filled and discerning way. And on this First Sunday of Advent we pray for the grace to come her each week over the next year with minds and hearts open to hear the Word of God and be changed by it, until we become more like the Jesus who comes to us in Holy Communion…………. Lord hear us
The danger is that, when we come back to this point in the liturgical cycle next year, we have made no progress and find ourselves in the same place we are now, having failed to enter deeply into the realities we celebrate . And so we pray that this will not happen to us. We pray that the coming year will see us entering more deeply than ever before into the story of Jesus birth, death and resurection and that, by doing so, we will become more effective witnesses to him in the world……Lord hear us
In the weeks before Christmas we will all be bombarded by the phenomenon we call consumersim. Advert after advert will tell us that, to have a happy Christmas, we must spend more and more money buying more and more things. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to see through this lie so that our enjoyment of the Christmas season is heightened rather than diminished…...…………Lord hear us
As most of you know by now – I have certainly said it often enough – the prophet Isaiah lived in the eighth century BC during a time of great upheaval for the Jewish people. He saw the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians, a fierce pagan people from what is now part Iraq part Iran, and the great question of the day was how to save Jerusalem from the same fate. Politicians argued about whether they should defy or appease the invaders, but Isaiah opposed both of these solutions. Convinced that the weakness of Judah came from its moral depravity he was able to see beyond the immediate political crisis. He could see possibilities that others could not see and looked forward to an entirely new future for Jerusalem, one in which, as we heard today, swords would be hammered into ploughshares, spears into sickles, nations would not lift sword against nation and there would be no more training for war. His whole preaching is filled with poetic images like this, many of which, like these, have become part of our language. But the truth is that even Isaiah did not fully understand what he was saying. What he was able to do, however, was envisage something new. He knew that things did not have to be the way they were or the way they had always been. He could see beyond the present, what seemed the only option to others, and it was this that made him a man of vision, a vision, the fulfillment of which, even now, lies in the future. And that is what we, as men and women of faith, fed and nourished each week by the Word and the Eucharist, are called to be for the sake of all those with whom we share this particular moment in history.
But what is it we are called to see beyond? What is God inviting us to see that others cannot see? Well, the simple answer to that is that, as men and women of faith, we are called to recognize the signs of the Kingdom all around us and help others see the futility and inadequacy of so much that passes for accepted wisdom in our modern culture. And much of this is familiar to us given that we often reflect together on these things. There is, for example, the way we so often today reduce truth to what we think it is or, worse still, what we want it to be. But truth is not just what makes sense to us or what we can understand, and we are called to show the world this by our constant openness to the truth that comes from God, the truths of faith, the truths revealed to us in Jesus. To do that is to be people of vision.
And then, of course, there is consumerism, that most profound of all illusions which drives our society today, the illusion that, if we can only acquire more and more material things, we will find the happiness we crave. On Friday, Pope Benedict published an Encyclical letter, his second, on the subject of Hope. And one of the things he says is that when people have travelled the road of consumerism and materialism, seeking happiness in possessions and finding only disappointment at the end of that road, we have to be ready with an alternative vision, one which offers genuine happiness and fulfillment. And that alternative is the Kingdom of God which Jesus tells us to seek above all other things because it alone can satisfy us.
And then there is the way we relate to each other. Faced with the same tendencies which afflict us today, the tendency to divide the world into friends and enemies, rejecting or even hating and making war on foreigners or those whom we perceive in some way to be different from ourselves, Isaiah, in a passage we will hear next Sunday, looks forward to a time of harmony when, again using the language of poetry, the wolf will live with the lamb, the panther lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion cub feed together and so on. And in a world dominated by social divisions between rich and poor, wars and conflicts between nations and the xenophobia which is rising up everywhere in the face of a mass movement of people which is the flip-side of globalization, we are called to embrace an alternative vision based on equality and be signs of it in the world.
But there is a problem about having this kind of vision, an inevitable consequence of being able to envisage something new, something different, and it is this: the further ahead you can see, the longer your vision, the less likely you are to live long enough to see it fulfilled. The vision of Isaiah, three thousand years later, is still in the future. In our own time many visionaries who laid the foundations of Vatican II didn’t live to see it and the same is true in many other walks of life. I often say to priests who are frustrated at the depth of resistance to change in the Church that the real challenge is to be able to live with the fact that our hopes will not be fulfilled until fifty years after we are dead. After twenty two years in St Matthew’s I can see my own vision for the parish unfolding, but only very slowly. And even when our vision is realised, it is never the way we imagined it.
And so, to be men and women of vision involves both trust and patience. As we come here each week we must, as Jesus says this morning, stay awake. Only the Spirit of God can open our eyes and minds and broaden our vision. That is why we come; to hear the Word of God, be changed by it and become more and more like the one we receive in Holy Communion. Because ultimately it is his vision we are talking about, not our own.
BIDDING PRAYERS
Men and women of vision, the prophets in every age, have always been persecuted or rejected in some way. Often they have been considered dangerous or even mad because they dared to imagine a situation different from the one people were familiar with and so never thought of questioning. And so we pray for men and women of vision in the world and in the Church today that they will continue to challenge us, even when we don’t like it………………………….Lord hear us
Without people of vision who could imagine something new, the human race could never have made the progress it has. The instinct to resist change and keep things the way they have always been is deep in human nature and is even necessary to maintain stability in society. But we also need those who can see beyond the present and open up to us new ways of thinking. And so we thank God for visionaries in every age, especially those in the Church who laid the foundations of the Second Vatican Council, even when our response is reluctant and slow……………..……Lord hear us
Men and women of vision are also desperately needed in the world of politics. If swords are to be hammered into ploughshares and spears into sickles; if nations are to stop lifting sword against nation and there is to be no more training for war, then we need leaders with the vision to break out of traditional ways of thinking and embrace a radically new way of doing things. And so we pray that God will raise up such leaders in the world today……..………………….Lord hear us
Today both the Jesus and St Paul tell us to stay awake. And so we pray for the grace to do this; to be always alert to what the liturgy calls ‘the signs of the times’ so that we can respond to them in a faith-filled and discerning way. And on this First Sunday of Advent we pray for the grace to come her each week over the next year with minds and hearts open to hear the Word of God and be changed by it, until we become more like the Jesus who comes to us in Holy Communion…………. Lord hear us
The danger is that, when we come back to this point in the liturgical cycle next year, we have made no progress and find ourselves in the same place we are now, having failed to enter deeply into the realities we celebrate . And so we pray that this will not happen to us. We pray that the coming year will see us entering more deeply than ever before into the story of Jesus birth, death and resurection and that, by doing so, we will become more effective witnesses to him in the world……Lord hear us
In the weeks before Christmas we will all be bombarded by the phenomenon we call consumersim. Advert after advert will tell us that, to have a happy Christmas, we must spend more and more money buying more and more things. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to see through this lie so that our enjoyment of the Christmas season is heightened rather than diminished…...…………Lord hear us
Sunday, 25 November 2007
Christ the King C
The Feast of Christ the King is not one of those that goes back centuries. It was established by Pope Pius XI in 1925 in the aftermath of the First World War and in the midst of poverty and deprivation all over Europe the likes of which we can hardly imagine today. Like the doctrine of the Assumption in 1950, after the Second World War, it was meant to give encouragement to those who had lived through those terrible years, our own parents and grandparents, and, in the light of the way things are today, it’s interesting to hear what the Pope had to say at that time. Proving once again that there is nothing new under the sun, he wrote in 1925 that ‘the manifold evils’ in the world of his day are due to the fact that, ‘The majority of men had thrust Jesus Christ and his laws out of their lives; that these had no place either in private affairs or in politics,’ and that as long as this state of affairs continued, ‘there would be no really hopeful prospect of lasting peace among nations.’ So much, then, for the idea that the world is in a worse state today than in the past. Human nature is the same in every age and what Pius XI offered the world in 1925 is the same thing we offer it today, Jesus; the Jesus we have been meeting throughout this latest journey through the Church’s year; the Jesus we will meet again next year; the Jesus St Paul speaks of so eloquently in that second reading.
And what he says about Jesus – what we have to say about him to the world today – is that, ‘in Jesus, God has brought us out of the power of darkness and created a place for us in the kingdom of the Son that he loves, and in him we gain our freedom, the forgiveness of our sins’ And how important that message was in 1925. The First World War had been an experience of the most profound darkness. Never before in history had man’s inhumanity to man been seen on such a scale. Millions had died in the trenches and those who were left were struggling to come to terms with the enormity of what had happened. And to that world Pius XI offered the only hope he had to give; the Feast Christ the King. And who could say that in the age of Iraq, Palestine and the world-wide threat of terrorism, we are in any less need of it than people were in 1925. The whole world needs hope and, as Christians, we believe it’s to be found in Jesus.
Mind you, the use of the word ‘king,’ to describe Jesus is a strange one given that the Jesus of the Gospels has nothing in common with the kings and queens we read about in history books. We see that in the first reading today where David, already king in the Judah, is invited, in the absence of any other candidate, to become king of Israel as well. Several years earlier, however, when David’s predecessor, Saul, was made king, Samuel had warned the people against this and told them what having a king would involve. A king, he had said, would take their sons as soldiers. He would make them plough his fields and gather in his harvest. He would take their daughters as perfumers, cooks and bakers and demand the best olive groves and vineyards for his own use. They would have to pay tithes and taxes on everything they had and would become his slaves. And how right history has proved Samuel to be. Kingship as we have known it over the centuries has meant all that and much more. It has become part of a political system in which powerful, ambitious people have pursued a predominantly male desire, it has to be said, to dominate others and satisfy their almost insatiable lust for power and riches. There has been the odd good monarch down through the centuries, but in general their record is one of exploiting the poor and abusing power for their own ends. Our own queen, for all her years of service to the nation, remains one of the richest people on the planet, surrounded by privilege. And we, for all our democracy, three thousand years after Samuel, remain subjects, not citizens.
And into this world comes Jesus, ‘The image’ Paul says,’ of the unseen God and the first-born of all creation. Before anything was created’ the second reading said, ‘he existed and he holds all things in unity.’ And yet, as we celebrated at the beginning of this latest journey through the Church’s year and will celebrate again soon, he came among us, not as an earthly king, but as a helpless child born in the midst of poverty. And as he came into the world so he left it, in poverty, hanging on a cross between two criminals jeered at and mocked by the passers-by. And what all this is telling us, the whole point of today’s feast, is that, if we are to enter the kingdom of God as opposed to all the other kingdoms the world has seen, if we are to share in Jesus’ death and resurrection, then we must abandon the road of ambition, power-seeking and the domination of others – the very things that caused the tragedy that had engulfed the world between 1914 and 1918 – and embrace a whole new set of values which make no sense in traditional human terms but which offer the world a way out of the vicious circle of war and violence which is our history. And as we end another year in the Church’s never-ending journey through the story of Jesus’ birth, death and resurrection, I think it is worth asking ourselves a few questions about all this.
First and foremost, do we believe it? Maybe we don’t put in into practice all the time, but do we recognize the rightness of it, do we desire it deep within ourselves, or is our coming here each week an empty ritual which has ultimately no real impact on our lives? The consumer society we live in promises us happiness and fulfillment through the acquisition of more and more material things along with the illusion of power they bring. Are we swallowing this lie, doing what everyone else is doing, or are we struggling, even if not always successfully, to swim against this tide of materialism? Many of us have made the annual journey through the Church’s year many many times. Are we moving? Are we changing? Or are we no further forward than when we started?
These, I believe, are the kind of questions the Feast of Christ the King is inviting us to ask ourselves today.
BIDDING PRAYERS
Everything that is happening in the world today shows the need for a profound and radical re-think of the way we live and relate to each other. Unless we learn to respect every human being plus the planet we live on, we are in serious danger of pressing a self-destruct button which will have long-term consequences for the whole of humanity. And so, on this Feast which holds up Jesus as our hope and inspiration, we pray that the world will listen to his teaching………..………...Lord hear us
Most of us never acquire great riches or exercise power the way kings, queens, emperors and rulers of every kind have done over the centuries. But that does not stop us seeking to do so. Responding to the values of a consumer society we are conned into thinking that the more we possess the happier we will be and that having possessions will somehow give us status or power and make us important people in the world. And so we pray for the insight to see through this lie………....Lord hear us
The seeking of power and the desire to dominate others and lord it over them has been a characteristic of men throughout history. And so we pray that as women begin at last to take their rightful place in politics and public life, they will show us a new way of doing things rather than imitate the ways of men down through the ages. And we pray that boys and young men today will see all that is wrong in traditional male behaviour and choose something new for a new age………………….….Lord hear us
Throughout history, those with power have expected to be served rather than serve. Along with power have always gone privilege and status. Jesus, however, tells us that the greatest among us must become the servants of all. He himself washed his disciples feet, called us not servants but friends, and gave his life on the cross for every single one of us. And so we pray for the grace we need to exercise any little power we may have in a Christ-like way.…………………...Lord hear us
All power, we are told, corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Many good men and women go into politics filled with ideals and good intentions, only to be led astray little by little until they finally lose sight of what initially inspired them. And so we pray for politicians of every party, especially our MP and MSP, Des Browne and Willie Coffey, that God will preserve them from being corrupted in any way by the power we have given them……………………Lord hear us
And as another year in the life of the Church comes to an end, we pray for a deep sense of gratitude for all we have celebrated together here in this church over the last year. There have been happy times, like baptisms, weddings, First Communions and so on, and there have been sad times as we have celebrated the funerals of loved ones. But we pray for the grace to see God in all of these experiences and ask him to lead us into even deeper faith in the weeks and months ahead…………...Lord hear us
And what he says about Jesus – what we have to say about him to the world today – is that, ‘in Jesus, God has brought us out of the power of darkness and created a place for us in the kingdom of the Son that he loves, and in him we gain our freedom, the forgiveness of our sins’ And how important that message was in 1925. The First World War had been an experience of the most profound darkness. Never before in history had man’s inhumanity to man been seen on such a scale. Millions had died in the trenches and those who were left were struggling to come to terms with the enormity of what had happened. And to that world Pius XI offered the only hope he had to give; the Feast Christ the King. And who could say that in the age of Iraq, Palestine and the world-wide threat of terrorism, we are in any less need of it than people were in 1925. The whole world needs hope and, as Christians, we believe it’s to be found in Jesus.
Mind you, the use of the word ‘king,’ to describe Jesus is a strange one given that the Jesus of the Gospels has nothing in common with the kings and queens we read about in history books. We see that in the first reading today where David, already king in the Judah, is invited, in the absence of any other candidate, to become king of Israel as well. Several years earlier, however, when David’s predecessor, Saul, was made king, Samuel had warned the people against this and told them what having a king would involve. A king, he had said, would take their sons as soldiers. He would make them plough his fields and gather in his harvest. He would take their daughters as perfumers, cooks and bakers and demand the best olive groves and vineyards for his own use. They would have to pay tithes and taxes on everything they had and would become his slaves. And how right history has proved Samuel to be. Kingship as we have known it over the centuries has meant all that and much more. It has become part of a political system in which powerful, ambitious people have pursued a predominantly male desire, it has to be said, to dominate others and satisfy their almost insatiable lust for power and riches. There has been the odd good monarch down through the centuries, but in general their record is one of exploiting the poor and abusing power for their own ends. Our own queen, for all her years of service to the nation, remains one of the richest people on the planet, surrounded by privilege. And we, for all our democracy, three thousand years after Samuel, remain subjects, not citizens.
And into this world comes Jesus, ‘The image’ Paul says,’ of the unseen God and the first-born of all creation. Before anything was created’ the second reading said, ‘he existed and he holds all things in unity.’ And yet, as we celebrated at the beginning of this latest journey through the Church’s year and will celebrate again soon, he came among us, not as an earthly king, but as a helpless child born in the midst of poverty. And as he came into the world so he left it, in poverty, hanging on a cross between two criminals jeered at and mocked by the passers-by. And what all this is telling us, the whole point of today’s feast, is that, if we are to enter the kingdom of God as opposed to all the other kingdoms the world has seen, if we are to share in Jesus’ death and resurrection, then we must abandon the road of ambition, power-seeking and the domination of others – the very things that caused the tragedy that had engulfed the world between 1914 and 1918 – and embrace a whole new set of values which make no sense in traditional human terms but which offer the world a way out of the vicious circle of war and violence which is our history. And as we end another year in the Church’s never-ending journey through the story of Jesus’ birth, death and resurrection, I think it is worth asking ourselves a few questions about all this.
First and foremost, do we believe it? Maybe we don’t put in into practice all the time, but do we recognize the rightness of it, do we desire it deep within ourselves, or is our coming here each week an empty ritual which has ultimately no real impact on our lives? The consumer society we live in promises us happiness and fulfillment through the acquisition of more and more material things along with the illusion of power they bring. Are we swallowing this lie, doing what everyone else is doing, or are we struggling, even if not always successfully, to swim against this tide of materialism? Many of us have made the annual journey through the Church’s year many many times. Are we moving? Are we changing? Or are we no further forward than when we started?
These, I believe, are the kind of questions the Feast of Christ the King is inviting us to ask ourselves today.
BIDDING PRAYERS
Everything that is happening in the world today shows the need for a profound and radical re-think of the way we live and relate to each other. Unless we learn to respect every human being plus the planet we live on, we are in serious danger of pressing a self-destruct button which will have long-term consequences for the whole of humanity. And so, on this Feast which holds up Jesus as our hope and inspiration, we pray that the world will listen to his teaching………..………...Lord hear us
Most of us never acquire great riches or exercise power the way kings, queens, emperors and rulers of every kind have done over the centuries. But that does not stop us seeking to do so. Responding to the values of a consumer society we are conned into thinking that the more we possess the happier we will be and that having possessions will somehow give us status or power and make us important people in the world. And so we pray for the insight to see through this lie………....Lord hear us
The seeking of power and the desire to dominate others and lord it over them has been a characteristic of men throughout history. And so we pray that as women begin at last to take their rightful place in politics and public life, they will show us a new way of doing things rather than imitate the ways of men down through the ages. And we pray that boys and young men today will see all that is wrong in traditional male behaviour and choose something new for a new age………………….….Lord hear us
Throughout history, those with power have expected to be served rather than serve. Along with power have always gone privilege and status. Jesus, however, tells us that the greatest among us must become the servants of all. He himself washed his disciples feet, called us not servants but friends, and gave his life on the cross for every single one of us. And so we pray for the grace we need to exercise any little power we may have in a Christ-like way.…………………...Lord hear us
All power, we are told, corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Many good men and women go into politics filled with ideals and good intentions, only to be led astray little by little until they finally lose sight of what initially inspired them. And so we pray for politicians of every party, especially our MP and MSP, Des Browne and Willie Coffey, that God will preserve them from being corrupted in any way by the power we have given them……………………Lord hear us
And as another year in the life of the Church comes to an end, we pray for a deep sense of gratitude for all we have celebrated together here in this church over the last year. There have been happy times, like baptisms, weddings, First Communions and so on, and there have been sad times as we have celebrated the funerals of loved ones. But we pray for the grace to see God in all of these experiences and ask him to lead us into even deeper faith in the weeks and months ahead…………...Lord hear us
Monday, 19 November 2007
33rd Sunday of the Year C
Those of you who have been to the Holy Land will have visited the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. I haven’t been there myself, but have seen it many times on Television. It’s all that remains of the Temple we read about in today’s Gospel, the temple Jesus knew well and which dominated Jerusalem in his day. It was not, however, the original temple of Solomon. It had been destroyed by the Babylonians in 580BC and rebuilt sixty years later by Ezra after the return from exile in Babylon. Desecrated by King Antiochus, one of those Greeks who came after Alexander the Great, in the second century BC, it was reconsecrated by the Maccabees, a story we can read in the two books that bear their name. But its real glory days coincided with the time of Jesus. During most of Jesus’ life, in fact, the Temple in Jerusalem was undergoing enormous expansion and renovation under Herod the Great, and, when the scaffolding was finally removed to reveal the fruits of this work, people, like those in today’s passage, came in the first century equivalent of bus-loads to look at it and be amazed by its magnificence. This magnificence was to be short-lived, however, and many of those who came to gaze would have lived long enough to see its final destruction by the Romans in 70AD, leaving only the wall which tourists visit today.
What’s hard for us to grasp, of course, is just how shocking an event this was for both Jews and Christians at that time. The Temple had been for centuries a symbol of God’s presence among his people and it’s hard to think of a modern equivalent. Maybe 9/11 was for some Americans, although I’m tempted to invite you to imagine Al Quaeda taking over Rome and burning down the Vatican. By the time St Luke wrote his Gospel it had all already happened, of course, which is why Jesus’ prediction of it in Luke is more sobre than in Matthew or Mark’s account. There was no need to lay it on thick. The event itself was horrific enough and in Luke’s own time people were still struggling to recover from it. It seemed like the end of the world to many, and yet, seen from our perpsective today, it was, in fact, a catalyst for all kinds of new things. It helped push the early Church out into the world and forced it to think more deeply about what it was about. Yes, there were persecutions, many were brought before kings and governors and a lot of them died in the amphitheatres of Rome. But in many ways the blood of those martyrs proved to be the very foundation of the Church and the endurance of so many did indeed win them their lives. Death and resurrection, after all, is the fundamental dynamic at work at the heart of everything that exists, from the most primitive form of life imaginable to the mighty cosmos itself, and what I invite you to reflect on this morning is how it is also at work in the Church today
Last Sunday evening, here in my house, a group of priests met for our regular monthly to six weekly meeting and one of those present used an image which I really liked. He told us how he had met someone who used to work in our diocese and who asked him if there were any signs of new life here. And without knowing exactly where the words came from, he found himself saying that there could not be any new life because we had not died yet. And he took the image further, describing how we are, in effect, on a life-support machine, being kept artificially alive, and that, until someone turns the machine off, there will be no new life. So what on earth was he talking about?
Well, he was talking about the situation we are facing with regard to parishes and the lack of younger priests to replace those of us who are growing older. Just a few years ago, through the process we called ‘Embracing the Future’ people all over the diocese were were asked to consider what would happen when we had one priest less in our area, two priests less and eventually half the number we had then. Many thought such a situation was years away. It’s now with us. We had nine priests in this deanery then. We now have five, one of whom one is eighty four years of age, and the present trend is set to continue into the foreseeable future. And so the bishop has asked the priests of the diocese to meet before Christmas and begin to chart a way forward. All we are doing currently is trying to keep alive a way of doing things which has no future. Some would say it is already dead and that, to mix our metaphors, we have stretched the elastic far beyond breaking point, evidenced by the fact that a friend of mine had to make a round trip of more than a hundred miles last weekend to say an evening Mass in Dumfries for seventy people. And so things will simply have to change. The traditional model of parishes with resident priests has already broken down in many places, including Mount Carmel, and the speed of change is accelerating. The question is do we embrace it or resist it. Do we recognize the movement of God in it or do we sit around waiting until not one stone of the old structure is left on another And so I leave you with some questions.
How would you feel if there were only two parishes in Kilmarnock instead of four? Suppose you had to travel sometimes to other parts of the town for Mass. Would you be willing to do it.? Would you take the huff or walk away if your favourite Mass, the one you have always gone to, had to be done away? Supposing there were no Mass in your parish while the priest was ill or on holiday and there were Eucharistic Services instead? Would you be willing to play your part in a much more lay-centred parish structure where people took real responsibility? Where these things are already happening many people have initially buried their heads in the sand or thrown their toys out of the pram, but gradually something new has begun to develop. Can you see yourself being part of that in time.
Of course change is difficult. Few people like it and something deep in us resists it. But if we have the courage to face it something new and surprising will develop. And the change happening here is nothing compared to what those people in Jerusalem faced in 70AD when the Romans were finished with them.
BIDDING PRAYERS
Your ‘endurance’ says Jesus at the end of this week’s Gospel. will win you your lives. In the early centuries of the Church ‘endurance’ often meant martyrdom. At different times throughout history it has meant different things to different people. But we pray for the grace of ‘endurance’ in our own day, the grace to remain faithful to the fundamental values of the Gospel at a time when the structures of the Church as we have known them are undergoing rapid change…………Lord hear us
Change is never easy. Something deep inside most of us resists it. We prefer things to remain the same, the way we have always known them. And so, at this moment in the long history of the Church, a history that has involved constant change, we need the courage to face the changes that are taking place around us now. We need, too, the grace to trust the God who is working deep within these changes and who longs to do a new thing in our time. And so we ask for all what we need……………Lord hear us
There are twelve places in our deanery where Mass is celebrated. In only two of these is more than one Mass celebrated each weekend and five of them are now without a resident priest. This has meant change for the people involved and some have found it hard to adapt, not fully understanding or accepting the reasons behind the change. And so we pray for all who are struggling in this way that they will come to see the good things already emerging from these changes……………………….Lord hear us
While we can often see the need for change in theory, many of us suffer from the NIMBY mentality, the not-in-my-back-yard syndrome. And so we pray that, for the people of the Kilmarnock deanery, change will not be something that just affects others. St Matthew’s is one of the two parishes in the deanery which still has more than one Mass at the weekend and we pray that, when change comes, whatever shape or form it takes, we will learn to accept it and adapt to it..………………Lord hear us.
Persecution comes in many shapes and forms. Many people in today’s world continue to be persecuted for their beliefs. whether religious, political or personal. And so we pray for them. We pray, too, for the insight we need to see how our own prejudices can often contribute to this persecution, especially in our attitudes to those whose lifestyles are very different from our own…………………………...……Lord hear us
In the second reading this week, St Paul speaks to those in Thessalonica who were sitting around doing nothing waiting for the Second Coming of Jesus which they believed was imminent. Paul tells them that, as followers of Jesus, it is their responsibility to engage with the world and its affairs, bringing to it the insights and values of the Gospel. And so we pray for the grace to do that today, to live as men and women of faith in the midst of the world…………………………….Lord hear us
What’s hard for us to grasp, of course, is just how shocking an event this was for both Jews and Christians at that time. The Temple had been for centuries a symbol of God’s presence among his people and it’s hard to think of a modern equivalent. Maybe 9/11 was for some Americans, although I’m tempted to invite you to imagine Al Quaeda taking over Rome and burning down the Vatican. By the time St Luke wrote his Gospel it had all already happened, of course, which is why Jesus’ prediction of it in Luke is more sobre than in Matthew or Mark’s account. There was no need to lay it on thick. The event itself was horrific enough and in Luke’s own time people were still struggling to recover from it. It seemed like the end of the world to many, and yet, seen from our perpsective today, it was, in fact, a catalyst for all kinds of new things. It helped push the early Church out into the world and forced it to think more deeply about what it was about. Yes, there were persecutions, many were brought before kings and governors and a lot of them died in the amphitheatres of Rome. But in many ways the blood of those martyrs proved to be the very foundation of the Church and the endurance of so many did indeed win them their lives. Death and resurrection, after all, is the fundamental dynamic at work at the heart of everything that exists, from the most primitive form of life imaginable to the mighty cosmos itself, and what I invite you to reflect on this morning is how it is also at work in the Church today
Last Sunday evening, here in my house, a group of priests met for our regular monthly to six weekly meeting and one of those present used an image which I really liked. He told us how he had met someone who used to work in our diocese and who asked him if there were any signs of new life here. And without knowing exactly where the words came from, he found himself saying that there could not be any new life because we had not died yet. And he took the image further, describing how we are, in effect, on a life-support machine, being kept artificially alive, and that, until someone turns the machine off, there will be no new life. So what on earth was he talking about?
Well, he was talking about the situation we are facing with regard to parishes and the lack of younger priests to replace those of us who are growing older. Just a few years ago, through the process we called ‘Embracing the Future’ people all over the diocese were were asked to consider what would happen when we had one priest less in our area, two priests less and eventually half the number we had then. Many thought such a situation was years away. It’s now with us. We had nine priests in this deanery then. We now have five, one of whom one is eighty four years of age, and the present trend is set to continue into the foreseeable future. And so the bishop has asked the priests of the diocese to meet before Christmas and begin to chart a way forward. All we are doing currently is trying to keep alive a way of doing things which has no future. Some would say it is already dead and that, to mix our metaphors, we have stretched the elastic far beyond breaking point, evidenced by the fact that a friend of mine had to make a round trip of more than a hundred miles last weekend to say an evening Mass in Dumfries for seventy people. And so things will simply have to change. The traditional model of parishes with resident priests has already broken down in many places, including Mount Carmel, and the speed of change is accelerating. The question is do we embrace it or resist it. Do we recognize the movement of God in it or do we sit around waiting until not one stone of the old structure is left on another And so I leave you with some questions.
How would you feel if there were only two parishes in Kilmarnock instead of four? Suppose you had to travel sometimes to other parts of the town for Mass. Would you be willing to do it.? Would you take the huff or walk away if your favourite Mass, the one you have always gone to, had to be done away? Supposing there were no Mass in your parish while the priest was ill or on holiday and there were Eucharistic Services instead? Would you be willing to play your part in a much more lay-centred parish structure where people took real responsibility? Where these things are already happening many people have initially buried their heads in the sand or thrown their toys out of the pram, but gradually something new has begun to develop. Can you see yourself being part of that in time.
Of course change is difficult. Few people like it and something deep in us resists it. But if we have the courage to face it something new and surprising will develop. And the change happening here is nothing compared to what those people in Jerusalem faced in 70AD when the Romans were finished with them.
BIDDING PRAYERS
Your ‘endurance’ says Jesus at the end of this week’s Gospel. will win you your lives. In the early centuries of the Church ‘endurance’ often meant martyrdom. At different times throughout history it has meant different things to different people. But we pray for the grace of ‘endurance’ in our own day, the grace to remain faithful to the fundamental values of the Gospel at a time when the structures of the Church as we have known them are undergoing rapid change…………Lord hear us
Change is never easy. Something deep inside most of us resists it. We prefer things to remain the same, the way we have always known them. And so, at this moment in the long history of the Church, a history that has involved constant change, we need the courage to face the changes that are taking place around us now. We need, too, the grace to trust the God who is working deep within these changes and who longs to do a new thing in our time. And so we ask for all what we need……………Lord hear us
There are twelve places in our deanery where Mass is celebrated. In only two of these is more than one Mass celebrated each weekend and five of them are now without a resident priest. This has meant change for the people involved and some have found it hard to adapt, not fully understanding or accepting the reasons behind the change. And so we pray for all who are struggling in this way that they will come to see the good things already emerging from these changes……………………….Lord hear us
While we can often see the need for change in theory, many of us suffer from the NIMBY mentality, the not-in-my-back-yard syndrome. And so we pray that, for the people of the Kilmarnock deanery, change will not be something that just affects others. St Matthew’s is one of the two parishes in the deanery which still has more than one Mass at the weekend and we pray that, when change comes, whatever shape or form it takes, we will learn to accept it and adapt to it..………………Lord hear us.
Persecution comes in many shapes and forms. Many people in today’s world continue to be persecuted for their beliefs. whether religious, political or personal. And so we pray for them. We pray, too, for the insight we need to see how our own prejudices can often contribute to this persecution, especially in our attitudes to those whose lifestyles are very different from our own…………………………...……Lord hear us
In the second reading this week, St Paul speaks to those in Thessalonica who were sitting around doing nothing waiting for the Second Coming of Jesus which they believed was imminent. Paul tells them that, as followers of Jesus, it is their responsibility to engage with the world and its affairs, bringing to it the insights and values of the Gospel. And so we pray for the grace to do that today, to live as men and women of faith in the midst of the world…………………………….Lord hear us
Sunday, 11 November 2007
32nd Sunday C
This week’s readings, given that we are in November, the month of the Holy Souls, are, I think, a clear invitation to reflect for a moment on the subject of death and what lies beyond it. Clearly the Sadducees, like many today, did not believe there was any life beyond death and we know that their question to Jesus about the woman and the seven brothers was no more than an attempt to ridicule the whole notion and make fun of it. The mistake they made, however, was to imagine that life beyond death is like life as we know it now and it’s this fundamental misunderstanding that Jesus addresses in his reply, pointing out that things in the resurrection are not the same as they are here. And that is something I suggest we need to be very clear about ourselves if we are to express the christian belief in life after death in a way that even begins to make sense to the men and women of our time. Because it’s obvious from the way we talk sometimes about life after death that we make exactly the same mistake as the Sadducees did.
So what do I mean by this? Well, if you were to ask me what kind of life those who have gone before us are living, I would have to say that I have no idea. I may be able to offer some thoughts on the matter, and will do so in a moment, but, essentially, I don’t know. After all, as many of us learned as children, ‘Eye hath not seen nor ear heard what God has prepared for those who love him.’ And yet, despite these words from Sacred Scripture, unable it would appear to live with not knowing, we do what the Sadducees did and speak as if it were little more than an extension of what goes on here. And so we talk sometimes as though our loved ones who have died are sitting around in heaven drinking cups of tea, reminiscing about old times and waiting for us to join them. But while this way of thinking and the idea that when we die we will see people again in the same way we see them now can be consoling sometimes, it is also, I would suggest, one of the main reasons why so many today find the whole idea of life beyond death incredible. They simply don’t believe in these cosy images and, consoling as they may be at times for us, they are basicaly right not to believe them. And this is because the life our departed relatives and friends are living now is something far beyond and infinitely greater than this. It is quite simply beyond both our comprehension and our imagination at this stage, and would make much more sense to people nowadays if we just admitted that. It is what happens anyway when death strikes those near to us, We just stand there, lost, bewildered, not knowing, not comprehending, not understanding. We are in the presence of a mystery far beyond us and the only thing that can we can rely on at that point is faith. And even that is not enough sometimes.
And if we could just settle for that; if we could just live with the not-knowing, feel the depth of the mystery and call out to God from that painful place of not-understanding, would our witness not make so much more sense to people who have no faith. They, after all, feel all those things too. They feel the pain and bewilderment just the same as people of faith do and it is surely by standing shoulder to shoulder with them in that place that what we have to say about God will eventually make some sense to them.
And there is further common ground we share with the men and women of our time. With or without faith, an experience common to most human beings on the planet today is an immense sense of wonder and awe at the sheer immensity of the cosmos. Hardly a month goes by without some new photograph of the universe or some new discovery which leaves our minds reeling. And it’s by plugging into this kind of experience, rather than by hanging on to out-dated ways of thinking and talking about life after death, that we can help nurture faith in today’s scientific and technological world. Ultimately all we can do is substitute one inadequate image for another, but modern theories in physics about perhaps up to nine dimensions, only two of which we are aware of and which could involve parallel worlds occupying the same space as we do without our being even aware of them, at least shake our old certainties and force us to re-examine a lot of the ideas we have up to now taken for granted. And although it made as much sense as the one the Sadducees asked in today’s gospel, in other words none, science has also answered the old chestnut about how there could be enough space for everybody in heaven. Even on our terms, there are enough stars out there for us all to have one each.
But there is one other image – and like all the others, it is only an image - that I invite you to think about today. And it is the one Jesus himself uses. The children of the resurrection, he says, ‘do not marry, because they are sons and daughters of God.’ So what does this mean? Well, it takes us to the very heart of what it means to say that marriage is a sacrament, an outward sign of something much deeper. And what I understand by that is that the love and intimacy which marriage, at its best, brings to people is no more than a sign, a glimpse of what awaits us all in the future. To love in this way is to glimpse in one person what God sees in every human being. Given the limitations of our present existence, of course, it is no more than a glimpse and even now we often lose sight of it. In the fulness of the kingdom, however, there will be no need for the sacrament of marriage because, set free from these limitations, we shall see the whole world and every person in it as God sees them. And what an experience that will be!
So, without understanding it, let’s look forward to it. And as we think of those who have died, whether recently or many years ago, let’s say together that great prayer of the Church down through the centuries.
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them, May they rest in peace. Amen.
‘Eternal rest.’ Now there’s an image for you.
BIDDING PRAYERS
We begin our prayer today by holding up before God all our relatives and friends who have died over the years. Without understanding exactly how it will happen, and without needing to understand it, we ask God to do in them everything he has promised: to share his own life with them, to fulfil all their deepest longings and desires and to give them eternal rest………………………..…Lord hear us
And we pray, too, for all who live on a daily basis with the pain of bereavement. We pray, in a particular way, for all those for whom that pain is recent and the wound still raw. We pray that, in the midst of this most fundamental of all human experiences, when we feel what men and women have felt since the beginning of time, they will meet God and find comfort in the promise of resurrection and eternal life which he has made to us in Jesus……………….Lord hear us
Millions of our contemporaries say that they no longer believe in life after death. The whole idea makes no sense to them and so, in a world where truth is so often defined by what we can understand, they have rejected the whole idea. And yet, when death strikes, people today experience the same feelings and the same questions faced by our ancestors in every age. And so we pray that, by our facing up to these questions in a new way, the modern world will come again to faith………….Lord hear us
If we are to be able to say something helpful to the men and women of our time, then we must be willing to let go of images which belong to another time and and confront in ourselves the not-knowing, the not-understanding, the not believing even at times which characterize the world today. And so we pray for the courage to do this so that we can experience something of the immense mystery that is death, trusting not in human thinking but in God thinking………………….Lord hear us
The discoveries being made today about the nature and size of the cosmos are truly mind-blowing. As a result, humanity is starting to realise how little we actually know about these things. At the frontiers of science and technology we are confronted over and over again by the limits of our knowledge, and we pray that this experience will help us become more humble in the face of truth in all its forms……..….Lord hear us
This Sunday is Remembrance Sunday, when we pray for all those who have died, not only in the two great wars of the twentieth century, but in the many other conflicts which have afflicted and continue to afflict our world. And so we pray for them all, regardless of who they were or on whose side they fought. And we pray, too, that the world of the third millennium will finally put an end to war as a way of dealing with conflict among nations………………..Lord hear us
So what do I mean by this? Well, if you were to ask me what kind of life those who have gone before us are living, I would have to say that I have no idea. I may be able to offer some thoughts on the matter, and will do so in a moment, but, essentially, I don’t know. After all, as many of us learned as children, ‘Eye hath not seen nor ear heard what God has prepared for those who love him.’ And yet, despite these words from Sacred Scripture, unable it would appear to live with not knowing, we do what the Sadducees did and speak as if it were little more than an extension of what goes on here. And so we talk sometimes as though our loved ones who have died are sitting around in heaven drinking cups of tea, reminiscing about old times and waiting for us to join them. But while this way of thinking and the idea that when we die we will see people again in the same way we see them now can be consoling sometimes, it is also, I would suggest, one of the main reasons why so many today find the whole idea of life beyond death incredible. They simply don’t believe in these cosy images and, consoling as they may be at times for us, they are basicaly right not to believe them. And this is because the life our departed relatives and friends are living now is something far beyond and infinitely greater than this. It is quite simply beyond both our comprehension and our imagination at this stage, and would make much more sense to people nowadays if we just admitted that. It is what happens anyway when death strikes those near to us, We just stand there, lost, bewildered, not knowing, not comprehending, not understanding. We are in the presence of a mystery far beyond us and the only thing that can we can rely on at that point is faith. And even that is not enough sometimes.
And if we could just settle for that; if we could just live with the not-knowing, feel the depth of the mystery and call out to God from that painful place of not-understanding, would our witness not make so much more sense to people who have no faith. They, after all, feel all those things too. They feel the pain and bewilderment just the same as people of faith do and it is surely by standing shoulder to shoulder with them in that place that what we have to say about God will eventually make some sense to them.
And there is further common ground we share with the men and women of our time. With or without faith, an experience common to most human beings on the planet today is an immense sense of wonder and awe at the sheer immensity of the cosmos. Hardly a month goes by without some new photograph of the universe or some new discovery which leaves our minds reeling. And it’s by plugging into this kind of experience, rather than by hanging on to out-dated ways of thinking and talking about life after death, that we can help nurture faith in today’s scientific and technological world. Ultimately all we can do is substitute one inadequate image for another, but modern theories in physics about perhaps up to nine dimensions, only two of which we are aware of and which could involve parallel worlds occupying the same space as we do without our being even aware of them, at least shake our old certainties and force us to re-examine a lot of the ideas we have up to now taken for granted. And although it made as much sense as the one the Sadducees asked in today’s gospel, in other words none, science has also answered the old chestnut about how there could be enough space for everybody in heaven. Even on our terms, there are enough stars out there for us all to have one each.
But there is one other image – and like all the others, it is only an image - that I invite you to think about today. And it is the one Jesus himself uses. The children of the resurrection, he says, ‘do not marry, because they are sons and daughters of God.’ So what does this mean? Well, it takes us to the very heart of what it means to say that marriage is a sacrament, an outward sign of something much deeper. And what I understand by that is that the love and intimacy which marriage, at its best, brings to people is no more than a sign, a glimpse of what awaits us all in the future. To love in this way is to glimpse in one person what God sees in every human being. Given the limitations of our present existence, of course, it is no more than a glimpse and even now we often lose sight of it. In the fulness of the kingdom, however, there will be no need for the sacrament of marriage because, set free from these limitations, we shall see the whole world and every person in it as God sees them. And what an experience that will be!
So, without understanding it, let’s look forward to it. And as we think of those who have died, whether recently or many years ago, let’s say together that great prayer of the Church down through the centuries.
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them, May they rest in peace. Amen.
‘Eternal rest.’ Now there’s an image for you.
BIDDING PRAYERS
We begin our prayer today by holding up before God all our relatives and friends who have died over the years. Without understanding exactly how it will happen, and without needing to understand it, we ask God to do in them everything he has promised: to share his own life with them, to fulfil all their deepest longings and desires and to give them eternal rest………………………..…Lord hear us
And we pray, too, for all who live on a daily basis with the pain of bereavement. We pray, in a particular way, for all those for whom that pain is recent and the wound still raw. We pray that, in the midst of this most fundamental of all human experiences, when we feel what men and women have felt since the beginning of time, they will meet God and find comfort in the promise of resurrection and eternal life which he has made to us in Jesus……………….Lord hear us
Millions of our contemporaries say that they no longer believe in life after death. The whole idea makes no sense to them and so, in a world where truth is so often defined by what we can understand, they have rejected the whole idea. And yet, when death strikes, people today experience the same feelings and the same questions faced by our ancestors in every age. And so we pray that, by our facing up to these questions in a new way, the modern world will come again to faith………….Lord hear us
If we are to be able to say something helpful to the men and women of our time, then we must be willing to let go of images which belong to another time and and confront in ourselves the not-knowing, the not-understanding, the not believing even at times which characterize the world today. And so we pray for the courage to do this so that we can experience something of the immense mystery that is death, trusting not in human thinking but in God thinking………………….Lord hear us
The discoveries being made today about the nature and size of the cosmos are truly mind-blowing. As a result, humanity is starting to realise how little we actually know about these things. At the frontiers of science and technology we are confronted over and over again by the limits of our knowledge, and we pray that this experience will help us become more humble in the face of truth in all its forms……..….Lord hear us
This Sunday is Remembrance Sunday, when we pray for all those who have died, not only in the two great wars of the twentieth century, but in the many other conflicts which have afflicted and continue to afflict our world. And so we pray for them all, regardless of who they were or on whose side they fought. And we pray, too, that the world of the third millennium will finally put an end to war as a way of dealing with conflict among nations………………..Lord hear us
Saturday, 3 November 2007
31st Sunday of the Year C
One of the things people often say is that, although they speak to God in their prayer, he never seems to say anything in reply. The great German theologian Karl Rahner’s response to this is that we spend our lives talking and God’s reply comes in eternity, but, while there is truth in this, it’s only one way of looking at the issue. At another level, the God of that first reading is constantly communicating with us: the God who, as we heard, loves everything that exists, holds it in being and works tirelessly to draw every human being to himself. But how does God do this? How do we recognize his voice? How do we know what he is saying? Well, it isn’t always easy? There’s nothing more dangerous than someone who thinks every thought he or she has is from God. The country’s psychiatric wards are filled with such individuals and they are the root of the religious fanaticism we see causing so much trouble all over the world. And yet, while every thought we have – no matter how holy or religious it might appear – is not from God, and while we have to be very careful about what we think God is saying to us, it’s also true that God is speaking to us all the time. Mind you, if you ever hear actual voices, contact your doctor immediately. The God who communicates with us is not a God out there who speaks the kind of words we hear with our ears. He’s a God who speaks deep within us and whose words are ‘heard’ in a different way altogether. So how do we hear at this deeper level of ourselves? Well, we can at least begin to answer that question by looking again at the Zacchaeus story.
I think we can safely say that what moved Zacchaeus to climb that tree was the same thing that drew so many others to Jesus. Fundamentally it was a sense of ‘dis-ease,’ the sense that something in himself or in his life was not right. For Zacchaeus it wasn’t physical illness, as was the case with many, but something was clearly wrong. Maybe he was no longer happy in his job, maybe it was just a vague sense of discontentment, but something in Zacchaeus’ life was not right and he could feel it. Now, of course, all kinds of things could have caused this. It could have been something as simple as his age. But there is something in the story which makes it absolutely clear that, whatever the immediate cause of his ‘dis-ease,’ God was speaking to him through it. And I wonder if you spotted what it was…Well, it’s simple really. There is something going on in Zacchaeus that makes him want to see Jesus and whatever else lay behind it all, only the Spirit of God can stir that desire. Deep down in Zacchaeus, in the midst of all that was going on in his life, God was at work, speaking to Zacchaeus’ heart and it’s into that same place in ourselves that we must go to hear what God is saying to us. So let’s go there.
The first thing to look out for is any sign of ‘dis-ease’ in ourselves. As with Zacchaeus, it can come in many shapes and forms. Maybe you are showing signs of stress. Maybe you are worried or anxious about your health. Maybe you are tired, needing a holiday, fed up with your job, bored, irritable, looking for a new challenge, anxious about growing old or feeling angry all the time. ‘Dis-ease’ comes in all shapes and forms, but at the root of it all is a discontent which, if properly understood, can be a positive force for change in our lives. Cows in a field do not feel this kind of ‘dis-ease.’ They are all the cow they will ever be. As human beings, however, we can never say that we are all we will ever be. We are always capable of more and therein lies the root of our discontent. Our ‘dis-ease,’ more often than not, is a desire for this ‘more,’ and so, far from seeing it as a problem, we should listen carefully to what it is telling us. In many ways it is our best friend.
But while this is true, in itself it does not tell us what God is saying. To discover that, we must be much more precise in out observation of what is going on inside ourselves and identify our own personal version of what made Zacchaeus want to see Jesus. And this, too, comes in many shapes and forms. For many today it starts with disappointment and disillusionment with the Church or the kind of faith they have grown up with.What in fact is happening is that God is inviting us to something deeper, questioning and an apparent loss of faith being among the first signs of this. For others of a different personality type it manifests itself in things like anger at injustice or, to quote Jesus himself in the Beatitudes, ‘a hunger and thirst for what is right.’ a hunger for something better. To want to know Jesus is to feel an attraction of some kind to the things of Jesus, a desire, at some deep level of ourselves to be like him. This, of course, is what happened to Zacchaeus. But there is another feeling, too, which gives us a clue to what God is doing in us, and it’s a feeling of resistance to that very attraction or that very desire. My friend who knew I was trying to take religion away from a Sunday into the rest of the week but ‘didnae want it’ – preferring still, all these years later, to cling on to a very narrow understanding of what it is to be a Catholic - is a classic example of this. But there are many others. Many of us know what God is saying to us. We know what the right thing to do is and just refuse to do it.
And there are external factors, too, which make it difficult. The voice of God is always gentle. It never forces itself on us. And so, unless we find time in the midst of the modern world to be silent and reflective, the voice of God will always be drowned out. Consumersim, too, is our enemy in this respect. Hearing the voice of God in ourselves involves being in touch with our deeper feelings, whereas consumersim panders all the time to our superficial ones. And that makes things more difficult too. But these things are all part of the challenge of living a discerning and faith-filled life in today’s world.
The question is; do we want to do it? Zacchaeus did and his whole life changed.
BIDDING PRAYERS
In the second reading today, St Paul prays that the people of Thessalonica will be worthy of their call and that God, by his power, will fulfil all their desires for goodness. What is good is of God and so when we long for what is good it is ultimately God we are longing for. And so we pray for the maturity we need to recognize the movement of God in our deepest desires and the insight to recognize what he is saying to us in that deepest part of ourselves………………….Lord hear us
In a consumer-driven society, people have little time or inclination to listen to their deepest desires. We are far too busy feeding our superficial ones in an ultimately futile attempt to keep at bay the deep ‘dis-ease’ which, if we took time to listen to it, would tell us so much about what is wrong with the way we are currently living our lives. And yet the very planet we live on cries out, urging to us to change before it is too late. And so we pray for the grace to hear this cry……………....Lord hear us
In order to see Jesus, Zacchaeus climbed a sycamore tree. Trees are living things and we can see in what Zacchaeus did a symbol of his willingness to leave behind a lifestyle that was dead to embrace a new one that was alive. He was willing to take a risk, do something different, and was rewarded when Jesus came into his home. And so we pray for the grace to be like him, whatever that means in the circumstances of our own lives……….…………………..Lord hear us
Once again in today’s Gospel, the people complain that Jesus has gone to the house of a sinner. It reminds us of the story we heard last week about the Pharisee and the Tax-collector. And so we ask God to open our hearts and minds today to hear, yet again, those words of Jesus from the Zacchaeus story. “The Son of Man has come to seek and save what was lost”……Lord hear us
The first reading this week tells us that God, little by little, corrects those who offend so that they can abstain from evil and put their trust in him. And so we pray for the grace to become more and more aware of our faults and of the areas in our lives where God is calling us to change and conversion so that. like Zacchaeus after his encounter with Jesus, we can live more full and more just lives……...….Lord hear us
The book of Wisdom also spoke of a God who loves everything that exists and holds nothing of what he has made in abhorrence. And so we ask God to stir in us through the power of the same Spirit through whom he brought everything into existence, a deep appreciation of the gifts of creation and a deep respect for everything that lives and moves on the face of the earth……………………………………..…Lord hear us
I think we can safely say that what moved Zacchaeus to climb that tree was the same thing that drew so many others to Jesus. Fundamentally it was a sense of ‘dis-ease,’ the sense that something in himself or in his life was not right. For Zacchaeus it wasn’t physical illness, as was the case with many, but something was clearly wrong. Maybe he was no longer happy in his job, maybe it was just a vague sense of discontentment, but something in Zacchaeus’ life was not right and he could feel it. Now, of course, all kinds of things could have caused this. It could have been something as simple as his age. But there is something in the story which makes it absolutely clear that, whatever the immediate cause of his ‘dis-ease,’ God was speaking to him through it. And I wonder if you spotted what it was…Well, it’s simple really. There is something going on in Zacchaeus that makes him want to see Jesus and whatever else lay behind it all, only the Spirit of God can stir that desire. Deep down in Zacchaeus, in the midst of all that was going on in his life, God was at work, speaking to Zacchaeus’ heart and it’s into that same place in ourselves that we must go to hear what God is saying to us. So let’s go there.
The first thing to look out for is any sign of ‘dis-ease’ in ourselves. As with Zacchaeus, it can come in many shapes and forms. Maybe you are showing signs of stress. Maybe you are worried or anxious about your health. Maybe you are tired, needing a holiday, fed up with your job, bored, irritable, looking for a new challenge, anxious about growing old or feeling angry all the time. ‘Dis-ease’ comes in all shapes and forms, but at the root of it all is a discontent which, if properly understood, can be a positive force for change in our lives. Cows in a field do not feel this kind of ‘dis-ease.’ They are all the cow they will ever be. As human beings, however, we can never say that we are all we will ever be. We are always capable of more and therein lies the root of our discontent. Our ‘dis-ease,’ more often than not, is a desire for this ‘more,’ and so, far from seeing it as a problem, we should listen carefully to what it is telling us. In many ways it is our best friend.
But while this is true, in itself it does not tell us what God is saying. To discover that, we must be much more precise in out observation of what is going on inside ourselves and identify our own personal version of what made Zacchaeus want to see Jesus. And this, too, comes in many shapes and forms. For many today it starts with disappointment and disillusionment with the Church or the kind of faith they have grown up with.What in fact is happening is that God is inviting us to something deeper, questioning and an apparent loss of faith being among the first signs of this. For others of a different personality type it manifests itself in things like anger at injustice or, to quote Jesus himself in the Beatitudes, ‘a hunger and thirst for what is right.’ a hunger for something better. To want to know Jesus is to feel an attraction of some kind to the things of Jesus, a desire, at some deep level of ourselves to be like him. This, of course, is what happened to Zacchaeus. But there is another feeling, too, which gives us a clue to what God is doing in us, and it’s a feeling of resistance to that very attraction or that very desire. My friend who knew I was trying to take religion away from a Sunday into the rest of the week but ‘didnae want it’ – preferring still, all these years later, to cling on to a very narrow understanding of what it is to be a Catholic - is a classic example of this. But there are many others. Many of us know what God is saying to us. We know what the right thing to do is and just refuse to do it.
And there are external factors, too, which make it difficult. The voice of God is always gentle. It never forces itself on us. And so, unless we find time in the midst of the modern world to be silent and reflective, the voice of God will always be drowned out. Consumersim, too, is our enemy in this respect. Hearing the voice of God in ourselves involves being in touch with our deeper feelings, whereas consumersim panders all the time to our superficial ones. And that makes things more difficult too. But these things are all part of the challenge of living a discerning and faith-filled life in today’s world.
The question is; do we want to do it? Zacchaeus did and his whole life changed.
BIDDING PRAYERS
In the second reading today, St Paul prays that the people of Thessalonica will be worthy of their call and that God, by his power, will fulfil all their desires for goodness. What is good is of God and so when we long for what is good it is ultimately God we are longing for. And so we pray for the maturity we need to recognize the movement of God in our deepest desires and the insight to recognize what he is saying to us in that deepest part of ourselves………………….Lord hear us
In a consumer-driven society, people have little time or inclination to listen to their deepest desires. We are far too busy feeding our superficial ones in an ultimately futile attempt to keep at bay the deep ‘dis-ease’ which, if we took time to listen to it, would tell us so much about what is wrong with the way we are currently living our lives. And yet the very planet we live on cries out, urging to us to change before it is too late. And so we pray for the grace to hear this cry……………....Lord hear us
In order to see Jesus, Zacchaeus climbed a sycamore tree. Trees are living things and we can see in what Zacchaeus did a symbol of his willingness to leave behind a lifestyle that was dead to embrace a new one that was alive. He was willing to take a risk, do something different, and was rewarded when Jesus came into his home. And so we pray for the grace to be like him, whatever that means in the circumstances of our own lives……….…………………..Lord hear us
Once again in today’s Gospel, the people complain that Jesus has gone to the house of a sinner. It reminds us of the story we heard last week about the Pharisee and the Tax-collector. And so we ask God to open our hearts and minds today to hear, yet again, those words of Jesus from the Zacchaeus story. “The Son of Man has come to seek and save what was lost”……Lord hear us
The first reading this week tells us that God, little by little, corrects those who offend so that they can abstain from evil and put their trust in him. And so we pray for the grace to become more and more aware of our faults and of the areas in our lives where God is calling us to change and conversion so that. like Zacchaeus after his encounter with Jesus, we can live more full and more just lives……...….Lord hear us
The book of Wisdom also spoke of a God who loves everything that exists and holds nothing of what he has made in abhorrence. And so we ask God to stir in us through the power of the same Spirit through whom he brought everything into existence, a deep appreciation of the gifts of creation and a deep respect for everything that lives and moves on the face of the earth……………………………………..…Lord hear us
Monday, 29 October 2007
30th Sunday of the Year. C.
The parables of Jesus, as I have said to you many times over the years, are mirrors in which we are invited to see a reflection of ourselves. The parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, however, is a veritable hall of mirrors in which it is difficult sometimes to know what exactly we are looking at. As soon as we see ourselves as the Pharisee we are on the way to becoming the tax collector, and no sooner have we begun to think of ourselves as the Tax Collector than we are back to being the Pharisee again. It’s really quite subtle, difficult to pin down, and the reason is not hard to find. This parable is not about good or bad actions. It has nothing to do with what is visible and external. It’s about what motivates us, why we do things rather than what we do, and at that level we are very complex creatures indeed. It’s virtually impossible, for example, for a human being to act out of one pure motive. There are always hidden levels of motivation and these can lie undetected or unacknowledged, sometimes for years, and sometimes for a lifetime. The most generous looking actions on the outside can come from a deeply selfish and manipulative place inside us and many an apparently pious and holy exterior hides a bitter, frustrated and hard-hearted interior. And so Jesus warns us never to judge. This is because we can never see into any person’s heart and so can never be sure why they do what they do. God, on the other hand, is described sometimes as the one who, because he understands all, forgives all. God sees into the heart and so is not misled, as we are, into harsh judgements based on mere actions or on what is happening on the outside.
Which brings us to the the most basic and fundamental theme of all our reflections together, the difference between religion and faith, a difference which itself has its roots, not in actions, but in what motivates them. It’s not about what we do. It is about why we do it, and the Pharisee and the Tax Collector represent the extremes of this. On the one hand we have the Pharisee, the religious man. He’s not a bad person by human standards; far from it. Everything he says about himself is true. But he has a fatal flaw. As people have done since primitive times, and as religious people, including ourselves perhaps, if we were to examine closely what motivates us even to be here today, still do, he performs religious actions to please God and so gain salvation by his own efforts. The Tax Collector simply cries out for mercy, and so, without necessarily understanding why – there is a sense, even, in which, if he did understand it and so were doing it in a manipulative way, he would be back to being the Pharisee - finds himself at rights with God, a phrase which simply means that the relationship between the two reflects reality; God is in his proper place and the creature is in his. And if you are struggling to follow the logic of this, maybe its because of that hall of mirrors we enter when we read this parable.
In the end, of course, the Pharisee and the Tax Collector are each one of us. The journey from the front of the temple, where we are doing something for God, to the back, where God is doing something for us, is one we are all engaged in. It is that journey from religion to faith, and, like people on one of those great medieval pilgrimages to Rome or Compostela, we are stretched out at various stages all along the way. But whether we are near the beginning or near the end, central to the whole journey is the experience of weakness and failure which brought to tax collector to the Temple that day. They come to us in all shapes and forms and are rarely welcome at the time. But, in reality, they are our best friends as they slowly but surely strip us of illusions about ourselves and force us to confront the ultimate truth about who we are, the truth of our creatureliness and our utter dependence on God. In a word, they teach us humility, the key thing lacking in the Pharisee and the thing which rendered his prayer meaningless. ‘The humble man’s prayer,’ however, as the first reading put it, ‘pierces the clouds.’
Many of you, of course, will have been exploring aspects of this journey in recent days during the Week of Prayer, and, even if you were not involved in the week, you will have your own struggle with it. And so I want to end by drawing to your attention a thought that was triggered in me by a poster someone left in the porch during the week. It reminded me of a journey I made to the now non-existant Smith’s book shop in St Vincent Street in June 1963. I had just learned I was going to Spain in three months time, in September of that year, and so was delighted to find a book entitled ‘Spanish in Three Months.’ Perfect, I thought in my naivete, I can learn Spanish over the summer. Needless to say, it didn’t happen. I got stuck at page one with the polite form of you, Usted in Spanish, written as Vd. I could not make head nor tale of it and and arrived in Spain that autumn without a word of the language. And I recalled that experience because of what it said on the poster. It was announcing an eight week course of meditation for everyone. For a mere £45, it promised to bring a window of calm into your life, improve your health, build inner confidence, set you free to be yourself, sleep better and improve your relationships – to mention just a few. It was like all those books you see piled up nowadays in the Mind, Spirit, Body section of Waterstones or Borders which promise to maximise your potential, unlock your creative mind or do a thousand other wonderful things to your inner self. And all you have to do is buy the book and maybe send away for the tapes.
But it’s all an illusion. The really important changes in us do not happen in six weeks. It’s not possible to buy them. The journey from religion to faith is a life-long journey. It means struggling with our basic weaknesses on a daily basis over years. There is no quick solution, no magic formula, no silver bullet. There is only death and resurrection.
But if, like St Paul in the second reading, we fight the good fight to the end, it will be well worth it.
BIDDING PRAYERS
By far the harshest words spoken by Jesus were addressed to the Pharisees. He called them whited sepulchres, all clean and tidy on the outside and filled with dead men’s bones in the inside. He clearly saw that, unless he could open their minds to deeper ways of relating to God, they would remain forever stuck in their traditional, shallow and totally inadequate ways of thinking. And so we pray for the insight we need to recognize any signs of the Pharisee in ourselves………………………....Lord hear us
Today’s parable, St Luke tells us, was addressed to some people who prided themselves on being virtuous and despised everyone else. In telling this story, Jesus is drawing attention to a temptation faced by religious people in every age; people like ourselves who go to church and yet, without even recognizing it sometimes, look down our noses at others. And so we pray that, as a community, we will be open to all who come here regardless of their position in society………………...Lord hear us
Throughout his life, Jesus was criticised by the polite, religious people of his day for mixing with prostitutes, tax collectors and sinners. And yet he was completely at home in their company, explaining that it was not the healthy who needed the doctor but the sick. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to see that, in every Eucharist we celebrate here, Jesus continues to be present among sinners………….Lord hear us
One of the reasons many people no longer go to Mass is that the sense of obligation which went with doing so no longer has the power it once had. And so, never having had any other reason for doing so except the keeping of a rule, they have drifted away. And so we pray that we will all discover new and deeper reasons for being here. We pray that our weekly celebration of the Word and the Eucharist will, in time, take the central place in our lives it deserves…………………….....Lord hear us
The modern explosion of books and courses promising to do all kinds of wonderful things for our inner selves shows that there is a deep need in us for genuine spirituality. And yet, lost and with little idea of where genuine truth lies, millions today are wide open to exploitation by those who sell all kinds of promises which can never possibly be fulfilled. And so we pray that the world will rediscover the great christian spiritual tradition we have temporarily lost touch with…………Lord hear us
And we pray for all those who have just completed the Nineteenth Annual Week of Prayer in the parish. God will have worked in a unique way in every individual. For some it will have been a happy experience and for others it will have been a struggle. But we pray that each one of them will be faithful to the experience and never doubt the presence and movement of God in whatever happened………………Lord hear us
Which brings us to the the most basic and fundamental theme of all our reflections together, the difference between religion and faith, a difference which itself has its roots, not in actions, but in what motivates them. It’s not about what we do. It is about why we do it, and the Pharisee and the Tax Collector represent the extremes of this. On the one hand we have the Pharisee, the religious man. He’s not a bad person by human standards; far from it. Everything he says about himself is true. But he has a fatal flaw. As people have done since primitive times, and as religious people, including ourselves perhaps, if we were to examine closely what motivates us even to be here today, still do, he performs religious actions to please God and so gain salvation by his own efforts. The Tax Collector simply cries out for mercy, and so, without necessarily understanding why – there is a sense, even, in which, if he did understand it and so were doing it in a manipulative way, he would be back to being the Pharisee - finds himself at rights with God, a phrase which simply means that the relationship between the two reflects reality; God is in his proper place and the creature is in his. And if you are struggling to follow the logic of this, maybe its because of that hall of mirrors we enter when we read this parable.
In the end, of course, the Pharisee and the Tax Collector are each one of us. The journey from the front of the temple, where we are doing something for God, to the back, where God is doing something for us, is one we are all engaged in. It is that journey from religion to faith, and, like people on one of those great medieval pilgrimages to Rome or Compostela, we are stretched out at various stages all along the way. But whether we are near the beginning or near the end, central to the whole journey is the experience of weakness and failure which brought to tax collector to the Temple that day. They come to us in all shapes and forms and are rarely welcome at the time. But, in reality, they are our best friends as they slowly but surely strip us of illusions about ourselves and force us to confront the ultimate truth about who we are, the truth of our creatureliness and our utter dependence on God. In a word, they teach us humility, the key thing lacking in the Pharisee and the thing which rendered his prayer meaningless. ‘The humble man’s prayer,’ however, as the first reading put it, ‘pierces the clouds.’
Many of you, of course, will have been exploring aspects of this journey in recent days during the Week of Prayer, and, even if you were not involved in the week, you will have your own struggle with it. And so I want to end by drawing to your attention a thought that was triggered in me by a poster someone left in the porch during the week. It reminded me of a journey I made to the now non-existant Smith’s book shop in St Vincent Street in June 1963. I had just learned I was going to Spain in three months time, in September of that year, and so was delighted to find a book entitled ‘Spanish in Three Months.’ Perfect, I thought in my naivete, I can learn Spanish over the summer. Needless to say, it didn’t happen. I got stuck at page one with the polite form of you, Usted in Spanish, written as Vd. I could not make head nor tale of it and and arrived in Spain that autumn without a word of the language. And I recalled that experience because of what it said on the poster. It was announcing an eight week course of meditation for everyone. For a mere £45, it promised to bring a window of calm into your life, improve your health, build inner confidence, set you free to be yourself, sleep better and improve your relationships – to mention just a few. It was like all those books you see piled up nowadays in the Mind, Spirit, Body section of Waterstones or Borders which promise to maximise your potential, unlock your creative mind or do a thousand other wonderful things to your inner self. And all you have to do is buy the book and maybe send away for the tapes.
But it’s all an illusion. The really important changes in us do not happen in six weeks. It’s not possible to buy them. The journey from religion to faith is a life-long journey. It means struggling with our basic weaknesses on a daily basis over years. There is no quick solution, no magic formula, no silver bullet. There is only death and resurrection.
But if, like St Paul in the second reading, we fight the good fight to the end, it will be well worth it.
BIDDING PRAYERS
By far the harshest words spoken by Jesus were addressed to the Pharisees. He called them whited sepulchres, all clean and tidy on the outside and filled with dead men’s bones in the inside. He clearly saw that, unless he could open their minds to deeper ways of relating to God, they would remain forever stuck in their traditional, shallow and totally inadequate ways of thinking. And so we pray for the insight we need to recognize any signs of the Pharisee in ourselves………………………....Lord hear us
Today’s parable, St Luke tells us, was addressed to some people who prided themselves on being virtuous and despised everyone else. In telling this story, Jesus is drawing attention to a temptation faced by religious people in every age; people like ourselves who go to church and yet, without even recognizing it sometimes, look down our noses at others. And so we pray that, as a community, we will be open to all who come here regardless of their position in society………………...Lord hear us
Throughout his life, Jesus was criticised by the polite, religious people of his day for mixing with prostitutes, tax collectors and sinners. And yet he was completely at home in their company, explaining that it was not the healthy who needed the doctor but the sick. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to see that, in every Eucharist we celebrate here, Jesus continues to be present among sinners………….Lord hear us
One of the reasons many people no longer go to Mass is that the sense of obligation which went with doing so no longer has the power it once had. And so, never having had any other reason for doing so except the keeping of a rule, they have drifted away. And so we pray that we will all discover new and deeper reasons for being here. We pray that our weekly celebration of the Word and the Eucharist will, in time, take the central place in our lives it deserves…………………….....Lord hear us
The modern explosion of books and courses promising to do all kinds of wonderful things for our inner selves shows that there is a deep need in us for genuine spirituality. And yet, lost and with little idea of where genuine truth lies, millions today are wide open to exploitation by those who sell all kinds of promises which can never possibly be fulfilled. And so we pray that the world will rediscover the great christian spiritual tradition we have temporarily lost touch with…………Lord hear us
And we pray for all those who have just completed the Nineteenth Annual Week of Prayer in the parish. God will have worked in a unique way in every individual. For some it will have been a happy experience and for others it will have been a struggle. But we pray that each one of them will be faithful to the experience and never doubt the presence and movement of God in whatever happened………………Lord hear us
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