There are several reasons why I go to Spain on holiday every year and never think of going anywhere else. For one thing, I have good friends there whom I look forward to seeing every summer. But the main reason I can’t imagine myself ever going anywhere else is the language. I just love speaking Spanish. I could, of course, go to Central or South America where they also speak it, but they are a long way off, the flights are expensive and, in any case, I have a problem in principle with the idea of holidaying in a third world country. I’m not suggesting others should not do so, but, personally, I am not comfortable with the idea. And so Spain it is, year after year after year.
So what is it I enjoy so much about the language? Well, its hard to describe, but in the midst of all the things I enjoy about being in Spain, the weather, the history, the culture, the food, the wine and so on, the greatest pleasure of all comes from sitting around a table full of Spaniards for hours on end talking; about politics, football, God, religion, the family and a thousand other things. People in Spain spend hours doing this and even have a special word to describe it. And I just love being part of it. It’s the sheer pleasure of being able to understand what people of another culture are saying and be part of their conversation. I love understanding the structures of the sentences; why they use the subjunctive her and not there, why they use this word and not that one. Often in these situations my mind turns to Bishop McGhee who sent me to Spain in 1963 and I quietly thank God for him. Without him I might have spent my whole life here in Scotland and missed out on so much.
And I tell you this today because of the link I see between everything a second language has meant for me and the Feast of Pentecost. I realise, of course, that not everyone has had the opportunity I had to live abroad for a few years and learn another language, but I would go so far as to say that to have never been exposed to any serious contact with a second language – something, sadly, that is more common today given the decline in the teaching of foreign languages in our schools – is to be trapped in one particular very limited way of seeing the world. And who could argue against the proposition that we in Britain suffer more than most from this today given the fact that so many people in the world learn English and make it ‘unnecessary’ for us to learn their languages when we venture abroad. This ‘why don’t the foreigners speak English’ mentality is surely one of the main causes of the arrogance, xenophobia and downright ignorance we so often display towards people from other countries and the antidote to it is to learn their language.
Learning a language, you see, teaches us that there’s more than one way of understanding the world. And this is the beginning of wisdom. I think of my friend Enrique’s mother-in-law, Jovita. She is ninety now and will go to her grave convinced that people who speak any language other than Spanish are mad. She simply cannot get her mind round the idea that this object in my hand could be anything else but ‘un libro.’ The idea that someone else could call it ‘a book’ totally mystifies her. And while this is a fairly harmless example, trivial even, it is, I suggest, a symbol of something much deeper and more far-reaching, which is the inability we all have to one degree or another to think, as people say today ‘outside the box.’We are all trapped in the limitations of our own thinking, our own way of seeing things, and one of the functions of the Spirit of Pentecost in our lives – symbolized in the story by the speaking of many languages – is to enable us to break out of the little boxes we live in and open ourselves up to previously unknown truths.
No one language can describe the fullness and complexity of all that God has created. No single way of thinking can encapsulate it all. The truth that comes from God is always far greater than any individual or any one culture. Inside each of us there is a small amount of truth and an indescribably large amount of ignorance. There is so much still to be learned and even the truths we have grasped are never complete. To even begin to explore the fullness of truth we have to leave behind our limited ways of thinking, leave behind the very words, the very language we think describe reality but which are only our version of it and leave behind, above all, our prejudices and opinions which we have turned into absolute truth. And if this is true of the world around us, it is infinitely more true of God. No word or human idea can pin God down or fully describe who God is. As the 14th century German mystic, Meister Eckhart famously said – and I have quoted him to you before – ‘Whatever we say God is, God isn’t.’ And it is only when we understand this, understand the limits of all our thinking and all our language that the Feast of Pentecost can really make sense. Because what the Spirit of God does in us is lead us beyond these limits into the mystery of truth. The Spirit broadens and stretches our minds to their limit and then takes us beyond those limits through the gift of faith. The same Spirit opens us up to new possibilities and stirs in us hope that goes far beyond any evidence available to our senses or our intelligence. Two thousand years ago a small handful of men and women were charged with the task of taking the Good News of Jesus to the ends of the earth. It seemed absurd, impossible for such a small band, and yet, through the Spirit, it became a reality.
Today, many look to the future with a mixture of fear despair. We live under the shadow of global warming and international terrorism. Churches are emptying and atheism has become the new religion. But it is no more than a moment in a much longer story in which the Spirit of truth whom Jesus spoke about in today’s Gospel is slowly but surely leading us into the complete truth. But for that to happen, we must first let go of all our pre-conceived ideas about what truth is. We must go where the Spirit leads. Or to put it another way. We must learn to speak a new language.
BIDDING PRAYERS
the grace of humility. We need to be willing to recognize the limits of our own understanding and the depths of our own ignorance. We need a deep sense of truth as something far greater than ourselves and we need a willingness to go where it leads, leaving behind even our most cherished ways of thinking when that proves necessary. And so we pray for this humility in the face of truth………...Lord hear us
To let go of our most cherished ways of thinking, not to mention our deep-rooted prejudices, requires courage as well as humility. We need to be ready to pass through a land of confusion and uncertainty if we are to come to new and deeper truths about ourselves and God. The danger is that we cling to what we know even when it is untrue and only men and women of real courage can move beyond this. And so we pray for this grace for ourselves and everyone in this parish……………..Lord hear us
On the Day of Pentecost, people from every nation on heard the gospel proclaimed in their own language. And yet in our own time, we who are called by God to continue the work of Pentecost often speak a language filled with pious, holy, religious words which millions today do not understand. And so we ask God to show us how to speak to the world of our time in a language which makes sense to it. ..……….Lord hear us
Globalization is one of the great signs of the times. The world today is a very small village in which peoples from so many different countries and cultures are having to learn to live with and understand each other. This is causing racial tension in many places and stirring us a xenophobia that we may not even have known was there. And so we ask God to guide the world at this time and help us see the tremendous possibilities all this opens up for humanity…………….Lord hear us
The existence of so many different languages in the world does make communicatioin between peoples more difficult. But here in Britain we have a particular problem. As an island people in a world where, because of our imperial past, English is spoken as a second language by millions of human beings, we have always shown an unusual reluctance to learn other peoples’ languages. As a result, we are more trapped than many others in narrow, jingoistic ways of thinking and we ask God today to lead us beyond them…………Lord hear us
Jesus has promised to be with us until the end of time.The Spirit, he tells us in today’s Gospel, will lead is into the complete truth. And so we pray for a deep trust in the presence of God in history, a trust that will banish from our hearts all fear and pessimism about the world and its future………Lord hear us
Now let is be silent for a few moments.
Saturday, 26 May 2007
Saturday, 19 May 2007
7th Sunday of Easter C
There is a direct line from the martyrdom of Stephen, which we heard about in the first reading today, right up to our own time, and it passes right through this morning’s second reading from the book of the Apocalypse. Stephen, of courses, was the first christian martyr, stoned to death in Jerusalem during the winter of 36 to 37 AD. But there were many other martyrs in the course of the first three hundred years of the Church’s history and these are the people the author of the Apocalypse is referring to when he speaks about ‘those who have washed their clothes clean’ – a phrase which usually has the words ‘in the blood of the lamb’ added to it, ‘so that they will have the right to feed on the tree of life and come through the gates into the city.’ a reference to the New Jerusalem, a notion which came to signify the Kingdom of God after the destruction of the old Jerusalem by the Romans in 70AD. And so it is important that we have some understanding of the part martyrdom played in the early Church.
For three hundred years, in fact, it was seen by our ancestors in the faith as the pinnacle of the christian life. Jesus had told his disciples to take up their cross and follow him and those early christians could see no more perfect way of doing this than through martyrdom. Not all of them were martyred, of course, but a good number were in the course of the various persecutions that occurred in those first three centuries, and, strange as it may seem to us, many others aspired to be martyrs. It was seen as the ultimate in following Jesus and commentators at the time often describe how christians went to their death in the arenas of Rome singing hymns and praising God.
All of that came to an end, however, at the beginning of the 4th century with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine. Suddenly, from being a persecuted minority, christianity became the religion of the state. It was now fashionable to be a christian – in name at least – and the resulting dilution of the Church and the quality of its membership caused dismay among many. For them, the Church had gone soft and, deprived of martyrdom as a way of imitating Jesus, they looked around for an alternative. And they found it in the deserts of the Middle East. Many left behind what they considered a corrupt society and a Church doomed to extinction to follow Jesus through a life of penance and self-denial. And what they were doing, without realising it, was laying the foundations of Monasticism in the East. They were, in effect, the first monks. And then later, in the sixth century, St Benedict, the patron saint of Europe, did something similar in the West. Convinced that it was not possible to live the christian life in Rome where he was studying, with all its corruption and general decadence, he abandonned the city for a life as a hermit. To his surpise, however, others joined him, and in 528 he founded the first monastery as we would know it, at Monte Cassino, a place some of you will have visited. And the rest, as they say, is history as, over the centuries, monasteries grew up all over Europe becoming great centres of learning and spirituality.
But there was one serious problem with the monasteries. They laid the foundations of what can only be described as two-tier christianity. On the one hand, you had the monks and nuns, the successors of the martyrs, those who took the following of Jesus seriously, and on the other you had the masses, the ‘hoy polloi,’ the great unwashed, who, as the centuries passed, deprived of proper pastoral care and led by an uneducated and ill-prepared clergy, became more and more steeped in superstition and ignorance, a superstition and ignorance which was to prove one of the great causes of the Reformation and from which, even today, we have not yet entirely escaped.
Attempts were made to do something about this. One of these happened in the 12th century when St Norbert founded the Premonstratentions or Norbertines whom we knew here in Kilmarnock, in Mount Carmel, until a few years ago. They were an attempt to get the monks out of the monasteries and into the towns and villages where there was so much need for them In the 13th century there were another two great attempts at this as St Francis of Assisi founded the Franciscans and St Dominic the Dominicans with this same purpose in mind. But none of these attempts were completely successful as the Premonstratentions, the Franciscans and the Dominicans were all sucked back into the monastic system they were trying to break out of. And the reason for this was simple. Ever since the end of the persecutions, centuries earlier, noone had really been able to come up with an understanding of holiness, an understanding of what following Jesus really meant, which could be lived in the world and which did not mean having to withdraw from it and live in a monastery. And the person who did that, surprise, surpise, was St Ignatius in the 16th century. How that happened is an other story, a wonderful story as it happens, but suffice it to say at this point that Ignatius developed an understanding of God and the christian life which could be lived by anyone anywhere. It transformed the way we understand holiness and is reflected directly in one of the most important chapters of the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. The chapter is entitled ‘The Universal Call to Holiness’ and reminds us that, through our baptism, every single one of us here is called to be holy and to follow Jesus in the fullest sense possible. There is no longer any need to be martyred or enter a monastery. We can be holy anywhere and in any circumstance. Only one thing is necessary: that, as Jesus says in today’s Gospel, the love of God be in us. In other words, that we love the way God loves.
What that means we have reflected on many times and will, God willing, continue to do so. But just pray, today, that as we do, every single one of us here will come, through prayer and reflection, to know what holiness and the following of Jesus means in the concrete circumstances of our own lives. And that, as with God’s help we do this, we will have something of the committment of those who died as martyrs in those early years or dedicated themselves to lives of penance and self-denial over many centuries, all in the pursuit of holiness as they understood it in their own day.
BIDDING PRAYERS
To be a christian today, a follower of Jesus, is to live a life of faith in the midst of the world. It means reading the signs of the times, reflecting on the great issues of our time and entering deeply into the doubts, struggles and fears of the people around us so that, as men and women of the gospel, we may, through the power of the Spirit living in us, help shed the light of the gospel on them. And so we pray for the wisdom and maturity we need to do this………………………………………..Lord hear us
To be holy is to have the love of God in us. It means loving as God loves, not as the world loves, and we ask God today to show us what this means in the modern world. We ask him to stir in us a deep love for the world and its people, so that, even in the face of all that is worst in human nature, we may, like Stephen as he was being stoned to death, be able to imitate Jesus on the cross and speak only words of understanding and forgiveness………………………Lord hear us
To have the love of God in us in practical terms means feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, welcoming the stranger, doing good to those who hate us, reaching out to those whom the world rejects and finds unloveable and all the other things Jesus speaks of in the gospels. This does not come naturally. It is only possible when God lives in us through the power of the Spirit and we ask that Spirit to move deeply in this parish today and always………. Lord hear us
One of the sad consquences of the two-tier christianity which resulted from the limited understanding of holiness which dominated the Church for so long was the widespread superstition and ignorance which, for so many centuries, masqueraded as faith. We still suffer from it today and as a result millions have rejected God. And so we pray for the grace to move beyond this evil and come to a deeper understanding of every aspect of our faith…………………...Lord hear us
In the gospel today, Jesus prays that his followers may be one. “May they be so completely one” he says to the Father, “that the world will realise it was you who sent me.” Sadly, the unity Jesus prayed for has been shattered over the centuries and the resulting disunity is a serious obstacle to the men and women of our time coming to know Jesus. And so we ask God to show us the way back to the unity which once existed in the Church………………………..Lord hear us
As Stephen was being stoned to death, St Luke tells us that Saul entirely approved of the killing. And yet, within a short time, as he travelled to Damascus, Saul was to experience the most profound conversion and become the apostle of the gentile nations. And so we pray for the grace never to think of any person as beyond redemption, no matter what they may have done in their lives…………...Lord hear us
For three hundred years, in fact, it was seen by our ancestors in the faith as the pinnacle of the christian life. Jesus had told his disciples to take up their cross and follow him and those early christians could see no more perfect way of doing this than through martyrdom. Not all of them were martyred, of course, but a good number were in the course of the various persecutions that occurred in those first three centuries, and, strange as it may seem to us, many others aspired to be martyrs. It was seen as the ultimate in following Jesus and commentators at the time often describe how christians went to their death in the arenas of Rome singing hymns and praising God.
All of that came to an end, however, at the beginning of the 4th century with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine. Suddenly, from being a persecuted minority, christianity became the religion of the state. It was now fashionable to be a christian – in name at least – and the resulting dilution of the Church and the quality of its membership caused dismay among many. For them, the Church had gone soft and, deprived of martyrdom as a way of imitating Jesus, they looked around for an alternative. And they found it in the deserts of the Middle East. Many left behind what they considered a corrupt society and a Church doomed to extinction to follow Jesus through a life of penance and self-denial. And what they were doing, without realising it, was laying the foundations of Monasticism in the East. They were, in effect, the first monks. And then later, in the sixth century, St Benedict, the patron saint of Europe, did something similar in the West. Convinced that it was not possible to live the christian life in Rome where he was studying, with all its corruption and general decadence, he abandonned the city for a life as a hermit. To his surpise, however, others joined him, and in 528 he founded the first monastery as we would know it, at Monte Cassino, a place some of you will have visited. And the rest, as they say, is history as, over the centuries, monasteries grew up all over Europe becoming great centres of learning and spirituality.
But there was one serious problem with the monasteries. They laid the foundations of what can only be described as two-tier christianity. On the one hand, you had the monks and nuns, the successors of the martyrs, those who took the following of Jesus seriously, and on the other you had the masses, the ‘hoy polloi,’ the great unwashed, who, as the centuries passed, deprived of proper pastoral care and led by an uneducated and ill-prepared clergy, became more and more steeped in superstition and ignorance, a superstition and ignorance which was to prove one of the great causes of the Reformation and from which, even today, we have not yet entirely escaped.
Attempts were made to do something about this. One of these happened in the 12th century when St Norbert founded the Premonstratentions or Norbertines whom we knew here in Kilmarnock, in Mount Carmel, until a few years ago. They were an attempt to get the monks out of the monasteries and into the towns and villages where there was so much need for them In the 13th century there were another two great attempts at this as St Francis of Assisi founded the Franciscans and St Dominic the Dominicans with this same purpose in mind. But none of these attempts were completely successful as the Premonstratentions, the Franciscans and the Dominicans were all sucked back into the monastic system they were trying to break out of. And the reason for this was simple. Ever since the end of the persecutions, centuries earlier, noone had really been able to come up with an understanding of holiness, an understanding of what following Jesus really meant, which could be lived in the world and which did not mean having to withdraw from it and live in a monastery. And the person who did that, surprise, surpise, was St Ignatius in the 16th century. How that happened is an other story, a wonderful story as it happens, but suffice it to say at this point that Ignatius developed an understanding of God and the christian life which could be lived by anyone anywhere. It transformed the way we understand holiness and is reflected directly in one of the most important chapters of the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. The chapter is entitled ‘The Universal Call to Holiness’ and reminds us that, through our baptism, every single one of us here is called to be holy and to follow Jesus in the fullest sense possible. There is no longer any need to be martyred or enter a monastery. We can be holy anywhere and in any circumstance. Only one thing is necessary: that, as Jesus says in today’s Gospel, the love of God be in us. In other words, that we love the way God loves.
What that means we have reflected on many times and will, God willing, continue to do so. But just pray, today, that as we do, every single one of us here will come, through prayer and reflection, to know what holiness and the following of Jesus means in the concrete circumstances of our own lives. And that, as with God’s help we do this, we will have something of the committment of those who died as martyrs in those early years or dedicated themselves to lives of penance and self-denial over many centuries, all in the pursuit of holiness as they understood it in their own day.
BIDDING PRAYERS
To be a christian today, a follower of Jesus, is to live a life of faith in the midst of the world. It means reading the signs of the times, reflecting on the great issues of our time and entering deeply into the doubts, struggles and fears of the people around us so that, as men and women of the gospel, we may, through the power of the Spirit living in us, help shed the light of the gospel on them. And so we pray for the wisdom and maturity we need to do this………………………………………..Lord hear us
To be holy is to have the love of God in us. It means loving as God loves, not as the world loves, and we ask God today to show us what this means in the modern world. We ask him to stir in us a deep love for the world and its people, so that, even in the face of all that is worst in human nature, we may, like Stephen as he was being stoned to death, be able to imitate Jesus on the cross and speak only words of understanding and forgiveness………………………Lord hear us
To have the love of God in us in practical terms means feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, welcoming the stranger, doing good to those who hate us, reaching out to those whom the world rejects and finds unloveable and all the other things Jesus speaks of in the gospels. This does not come naturally. It is only possible when God lives in us through the power of the Spirit and we ask that Spirit to move deeply in this parish today and always………. Lord hear us
One of the sad consquences of the two-tier christianity which resulted from the limited understanding of holiness which dominated the Church for so long was the widespread superstition and ignorance which, for so many centuries, masqueraded as faith. We still suffer from it today and as a result millions have rejected God. And so we pray for the grace to move beyond this evil and come to a deeper understanding of every aspect of our faith…………………...Lord hear us
In the gospel today, Jesus prays that his followers may be one. “May they be so completely one” he says to the Father, “that the world will realise it was you who sent me.” Sadly, the unity Jesus prayed for has been shattered over the centuries and the resulting disunity is a serious obstacle to the men and women of our time coming to know Jesus. And so we ask God to show us the way back to the unity which once existed in the Church………………………..Lord hear us
As Stephen was being stoned to death, St Luke tells us that Saul entirely approved of the killing. And yet, within a short time, as he travelled to Damascus, Saul was to experience the most profound conversion and become the apostle of the gentile nations. And so we pray for the grace never to think of any person as beyond redemption, no matter what they may have done in their lives…………...Lord hear us
Saturday, 12 May 2007
6th Sunday of Easter C.
One of the things I like about the history of the early Church as we read it in the Acts of the Apostles during these weeks after Easter, is just how like ourselves the people in the story are. And so I think it would be worth our while looking more closely for a few moments at what exactly is going on in that first reading, convinced, as I am, that in it will see a reflection of ourselves.
In last week’s reading, we heard how Paul and Barnabas, on their return to Antioch at the end of Paul’s first missionary journey, told the community there how the pagans, in towns all over what we know today as Turkey, had accepted the message of the Gospel. Antioch, in northern Syria, had been founded about 300 BC and by the time we read about it in Acts, had become a kind of safe haven for christians who had fled from Jerusalem during the persecution that followed the martyrdom of Stephen. The community there were delighted to hear about what had happened to Paul and Barnabas, but their happiness was disturbed when some men arrived from Jerusalem and started telling them that the new pagan converts would have to be circumcised. This, as we heard in the reading, led to a disagreement, as a result of which Paul and Barnabas went to Jerusalem to meet the apostles and resolve the matter. And if we are to appreciate the relevance of today’s liturgy to our own situation, it is vitally important that we understand the forces at work here.
Elsewhere in this same chapter, St Luke tells us that those who disagreed with Paul were Pharisees who had converted to Christianity. And so they were, by nature, traditional and conservative in their thinking. For them, God was circumcision, the Law of Moses and everything they were used to as pious Jews and they simply could not envisage anything different from that. And it took the famous meeting in Jerusalem in 49 AD – often rather grandiosely called the Council of Jerusalem – to resolve the matter in favour of the more open position taken by St Paul. And yet, in the very letter sent from Jerusalem to Antioch to confirm this decision – part of which we heard this morning - we see signs of the very conservatism which had just been rejected. “It has been decided by the Holy Spirit and ourselves” the letter says, “not to saddle you with any burdens beyond these essentials. You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from fornication.” Now with fornication they maybe had a point, but if there is one thing the rest of this is not it is ‘essential.’ If it were, black pudding would still be off the menu for Christians. But it isn’t. And the reason is simple. All that stuff about blood and the meat of strangled animals is pure Judaism; no more to do with christianity than circumcision or any other precept of the Mosaic Law. So how did this happen? How could the early Church have such a moment of profound insight one day and then renege on it the next. Well, for the answer to that question, I would like to turn to my friend, Ignatius of Loyola, and his teaching on discernment.
At the heart of Ignatius’ great insight is the concept of ‘spiritual consolation.’ It is what happens when the Spirit of God moves in us, doing what the Spirit of God always does and what only the Spirit of God can do, which is stir faith, hope and love in the human heart. Most of us will have had one or two outstanding moments of consolation in our lives – my own most powerful one happened when I was only eleven – but the truth is that they happen to us all the time in all kinds of ordinary ways. And why wouldn’t they, given that, as Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel, God lives in us. We are temples of the Holy Spirit who never ceases to move in us, inviting us to let go of purely human ways of thinking and embrace the teaching of Jesus. There are in all our lives moments of clarity and insight when we see the rightness of what Jesus teaches and our hearts are drawn to it. This is ‘spiritual consolation.’ Such moments, however, do not last for ever. They are often, in fact, brief and short-lived, as they encounter another movement in us which cries out against what Jesus says. We are OK as long as the Gospel is compatible with our values and life-style and doesn’t challenge us. But as soon as it clashes with these and calls us beyond the limits of what we consider reasonable and acceptable – to love our enemies or confront our dearly-held prejudices for example - a battle begins inside us. And what St Ignatius saw so clearly is that, if we are to know the peace Jesus speaks of today, a peace the world cannot give, we must trust our moments of consolation and live out of them, even when they have passed and been replaced by other feelings and inclinations which would take us in entirely the opposite direction. It’s perfectly possible to have the most profound experiences of God and then live as if they had never happened. It’s even possible to forget them completely. I have seen it happen to many people over the years and it helps explain why for the Church two thousand years ago reneged so quickly on whst it had so recently decided. And so we must remember our consolations, our moments of clarity and insight, trust them and, above all, make all our decisions of the basis of them.
The great modern example of this at the level of the Church is, of course, the Second Vatican Council. It was a time of immense insight when the Spirit did things in the Church noone at the time thought possible. It was no sooner over, however, than the resistance began. People did not want to go where the Council was leading and forty years on we are still, in may ways, living as if it never happened. But the same can happen in our own lives. Cast your mind back over the years to moments of clarity and insight in your own lives. Maybe it was a Week of Prayer; maybe it was a retreat of some kind and maybe it had nothing to do with anything ‘holy’ at all. But whatever it was – and I have no doubt every person here has experienced such moments – do you remember them, have you trusted them, are you acting out of them or are you living as if they never even happened?
BIDDING PRAYERS
We begin our prayer today by asking God to stir in us memories of times when, in our individual lives, we have experienced moments of spiritual consolation; moments when we saw clearly the rightness of what Jesus teaches and felt drawn to it. We pray for the courage and commitment we need to trust these experiences and live out of them long after the experience itself has passed………………………….Lord hear us
Pope John Paul II, as we have heard so often, called the Second Vatican Council the most powerful movement of the Spirit in the Church in modern times. It was a profound moment of consolation for the whole Church and we pray that, even now, forty years after the event, we will learn to trust what happened at that time, be open to what the Council taught and make its teaching the basis of the way we live as a parish committed to Jesus and the Gospel………………………………..Lord hear us
The struggle we heard about in the first reading, which became the first great crisis to confront the Church, was a struggle between two very different ways of thinking. On the one hand there was an attitude of openness to the world and on the other there was a more traditional, narrow religious way of thinking. Led by the Spirit of God and inspired by St Paul, the early Church chose the way of openness and we pray for the grace to remain faithful to that decision throughout history………….Lord hear us
The letter sent to Antioch and the other young christian communities of the time spoke of placing no burdens on people apart from what was essential. And so we pray for the Church today that it will have the wisdom it needs to apply that same principle in our own time. We pray especially that we will know how to distinguish what is merely human regulation, and so open to change, from what is from God and so can never be changed no matter what the world thinks…………….Lord hear us
In the Gospel today Jesus speaks of a peace the world cannot give. This is the peace that comes from living by the values of the Gospel: loving our enemies, doing good to those who hate us, turning the other cheek and so on. It can never come from the barrel of a gun and is not the product of political wrangling or diplomacy. It is a peace that comes from God and we pray that the men and women of our time will learn to be open to it………………………………Lord hear us
Jesus also tells us in today’s Gospel that the Holy Spirit will teach us everything and remind us of all that he himself has told us. And so we pray that, as we gather here each week to be fed and nourished by the Word and the Eucharist, we will be open to all that the Spirit is saying to us and always willing to go where we are led, especially when we would rather not go…….Lord hear us
In last week’s reading, we heard how Paul and Barnabas, on their return to Antioch at the end of Paul’s first missionary journey, told the community there how the pagans, in towns all over what we know today as Turkey, had accepted the message of the Gospel. Antioch, in northern Syria, had been founded about 300 BC and by the time we read about it in Acts, had become a kind of safe haven for christians who had fled from Jerusalem during the persecution that followed the martyrdom of Stephen. The community there were delighted to hear about what had happened to Paul and Barnabas, but their happiness was disturbed when some men arrived from Jerusalem and started telling them that the new pagan converts would have to be circumcised. This, as we heard in the reading, led to a disagreement, as a result of which Paul and Barnabas went to Jerusalem to meet the apostles and resolve the matter. And if we are to appreciate the relevance of today’s liturgy to our own situation, it is vitally important that we understand the forces at work here.
Elsewhere in this same chapter, St Luke tells us that those who disagreed with Paul were Pharisees who had converted to Christianity. And so they were, by nature, traditional and conservative in their thinking. For them, God was circumcision, the Law of Moses and everything they were used to as pious Jews and they simply could not envisage anything different from that. And it took the famous meeting in Jerusalem in 49 AD – often rather grandiosely called the Council of Jerusalem – to resolve the matter in favour of the more open position taken by St Paul. And yet, in the very letter sent from Jerusalem to Antioch to confirm this decision – part of which we heard this morning - we see signs of the very conservatism which had just been rejected. “It has been decided by the Holy Spirit and ourselves” the letter says, “not to saddle you with any burdens beyond these essentials. You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from fornication.” Now with fornication they maybe had a point, but if there is one thing the rest of this is not it is ‘essential.’ If it were, black pudding would still be off the menu for Christians. But it isn’t. And the reason is simple. All that stuff about blood and the meat of strangled animals is pure Judaism; no more to do with christianity than circumcision or any other precept of the Mosaic Law. So how did this happen? How could the early Church have such a moment of profound insight one day and then renege on it the next. Well, for the answer to that question, I would like to turn to my friend, Ignatius of Loyola, and his teaching on discernment.
At the heart of Ignatius’ great insight is the concept of ‘spiritual consolation.’ It is what happens when the Spirit of God moves in us, doing what the Spirit of God always does and what only the Spirit of God can do, which is stir faith, hope and love in the human heart. Most of us will have had one or two outstanding moments of consolation in our lives – my own most powerful one happened when I was only eleven – but the truth is that they happen to us all the time in all kinds of ordinary ways. And why wouldn’t they, given that, as Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel, God lives in us. We are temples of the Holy Spirit who never ceases to move in us, inviting us to let go of purely human ways of thinking and embrace the teaching of Jesus. There are in all our lives moments of clarity and insight when we see the rightness of what Jesus teaches and our hearts are drawn to it. This is ‘spiritual consolation.’ Such moments, however, do not last for ever. They are often, in fact, brief and short-lived, as they encounter another movement in us which cries out against what Jesus says. We are OK as long as the Gospel is compatible with our values and life-style and doesn’t challenge us. But as soon as it clashes with these and calls us beyond the limits of what we consider reasonable and acceptable – to love our enemies or confront our dearly-held prejudices for example - a battle begins inside us. And what St Ignatius saw so clearly is that, if we are to know the peace Jesus speaks of today, a peace the world cannot give, we must trust our moments of consolation and live out of them, even when they have passed and been replaced by other feelings and inclinations which would take us in entirely the opposite direction. It’s perfectly possible to have the most profound experiences of God and then live as if they had never happened. It’s even possible to forget them completely. I have seen it happen to many people over the years and it helps explain why for the Church two thousand years ago reneged so quickly on whst it had so recently decided. And so we must remember our consolations, our moments of clarity and insight, trust them and, above all, make all our decisions of the basis of them.
The great modern example of this at the level of the Church is, of course, the Second Vatican Council. It was a time of immense insight when the Spirit did things in the Church noone at the time thought possible. It was no sooner over, however, than the resistance began. People did not want to go where the Council was leading and forty years on we are still, in may ways, living as if it never happened. But the same can happen in our own lives. Cast your mind back over the years to moments of clarity and insight in your own lives. Maybe it was a Week of Prayer; maybe it was a retreat of some kind and maybe it had nothing to do with anything ‘holy’ at all. But whatever it was – and I have no doubt every person here has experienced such moments – do you remember them, have you trusted them, are you acting out of them or are you living as if they never even happened?
BIDDING PRAYERS
We begin our prayer today by asking God to stir in us memories of times when, in our individual lives, we have experienced moments of spiritual consolation; moments when we saw clearly the rightness of what Jesus teaches and felt drawn to it. We pray for the courage and commitment we need to trust these experiences and live out of them long after the experience itself has passed………………………….Lord hear us
Pope John Paul II, as we have heard so often, called the Second Vatican Council the most powerful movement of the Spirit in the Church in modern times. It was a profound moment of consolation for the whole Church and we pray that, even now, forty years after the event, we will learn to trust what happened at that time, be open to what the Council taught and make its teaching the basis of the way we live as a parish committed to Jesus and the Gospel………………………………..Lord hear us
The struggle we heard about in the first reading, which became the first great crisis to confront the Church, was a struggle between two very different ways of thinking. On the one hand there was an attitude of openness to the world and on the other there was a more traditional, narrow religious way of thinking. Led by the Spirit of God and inspired by St Paul, the early Church chose the way of openness and we pray for the grace to remain faithful to that decision throughout history………….Lord hear us
The letter sent to Antioch and the other young christian communities of the time spoke of placing no burdens on people apart from what was essential. And so we pray for the Church today that it will have the wisdom it needs to apply that same principle in our own time. We pray especially that we will know how to distinguish what is merely human regulation, and so open to change, from what is from God and so can never be changed no matter what the world thinks…………….Lord hear us
In the Gospel today Jesus speaks of a peace the world cannot give. This is the peace that comes from living by the values of the Gospel: loving our enemies, doing good to those who hate us, turning the other cheek and so on. It can never come from the barrel of a gun and is not the product of political wrangling or diplomacy. It is a peace that comes from God and we pray that the men and women of our time will learn to be open to it………………………………Lord hear us
Jesus also tells us in today’s Gospel that the Holy Spirit will teach us everything and remind us of all that he himself has told us. And so we pray that, as we gather here each week to be fed and nourished by the Word and the Eucharist, we will be open to all that the Spirit is saying to us and always willing to go where we are led, especially when we would rather not go…….Lord hear us
Saturday, 5 May 2007
5th Sunday of Easter
As we make our way through the Sundays of Easter – this is the fifth – reading each week in the Acts of the Apostles the story of the Early Church, there’s a parallel between the journey we are making and the one our ancestors in the faith made two thousand years ago. Both we and they began with the great events of the Resurrection, but as the weeks pass for us and the years passed for them, the challenge became and becomes one of how to live out the implications of the Resurrection in the midst of daily life. Jesus’ final words to his disciples were about going out into the world to proclaim the Good News to the ends of the earth. But what that meant and how it was to be done were not at all clear in the beginning. Thinking of it this week, in fact, I was reminded, of all things, of the First World War. Not that I remember it, but I have read many times how, as it began in the summer of 1914, the general expectation was that it would be over by Christmas. But as Christmas came and went and Easter gave way to the summer of 1915, people began to realise that it was going to be a much longer haul than they had thought. And something similar happened in those early days of the Church. In the beginning, many expected the Second Coming of Christ to happen any day. But as time passed, it began to dawn on them that this, too, was going to take longer than they had thought. As Paul says today to the people of Antioch, ‘We all have to experience many hardships before we enter the kingdom of God.’ And so, as the initial Easter experience passed for those ancestors of ours, just as it has passed for us again this year, both they and we were and are forced to confront the enormous but generally mundane task of building up the Church in the world. And central to this two thousand years ago was St Paul.
Today’s first reading from Acts describes the end of what we know as Paul’s first missionary journey. It had started, as it ended, in Antioch in the year 45AD and had taken Paul and Barnabas on a four-year-long expedition through what we know today as Turkey and which included a visit to Cyprus. Paul, in fact made three missionary journeys which took him all over the Mediterranean. The second took him from Turkey into Greece and the third, by a very roundabout route, ended up in Rome, where Paul was executed by beheading in the year 67AD, twenty two years after he had begun his first journey and thirty one years after his conversion that famous day on the road to Damascus. On his way to Rome he spent time in Malta and during his stay in Rome may, in 63 AD, have travelled as far west as Spain, landing at Tarragona south of Barcelona next to the well-known holiday resort of Salou. Not that it was a holiday resort then of course. And what Paul did on these journeys was what we heard about in that first reading. He established small christian communities, encouraging them by letters and further visits over the years, and, most importantly for our reflection today, he set up structures which would support and sustain the life of those communities. What exactly these structures were is not entirely clear and continues to be disputed among experts today. We heard just now how he appointed elders but it would be a mistake to think that elders here means the same thing as it does today in the Church of Scotland for example. The Greek word was presbyter. That’s why I live in a presbytery and our friends across the road at St Kentigern’s are presbyterians, but whether they were bishops, priests, deacons in the modern sense we will never really know. There are all kinds of theories about it, including the theory that many more women were involved than today and that they have been airbrushed out of the story by later generations. But leaving all that aside, what I invite you to recognize today is that, right from the very beginning, Paul and others saw the need for structures of some kind.
And that, I think, is important for us at a time when many in the Church are rejecting traditional structures. ‘I can be a Christian or a spiritual person without going to Church’ is something we hear a lot nowadays. And, of course, there is some truth in this. Structures can be cumbersome and restrictive and the modern tendency to reject them exists far beyond the limits of the Church. From the major Political Parties down to the local youth club, fewer and fewer people are joining organisations of any kind. But the fact that, right from the beginning, St Paul himself felt it necessary to set up structures and appoint people to positions of leadership and responsibility tells us something too. And what it tells us, I suggest, is that we can only become truly effective bearers of Good News to others and witnesses to Jesus in the world in partnership with other people. What we can do together is far greater than what any of us can do as individuals and it’s because of that that the Church exists at all. We can feed the hungry more effectively together than we can on our own; witness this afternoon’s homeless lunch. We can reach out to the poor abroad better together than we can individually; witness the parish fairtrade stall available this weekend after Mass. And for all this to happen, we need structures. We need to know who is doing what. We need leaders and organisers and people who will do the day-to-day stuff that otherwise would not be done. And we need all this, not just at a local level, but at diocesan level, at national level and at international level, so that the claim that ‘I can be a Christian without a Church,’ which effectively means ‘on my own, privately,’ is deeply flawed. It sounds good, but it is actually an illusion.
Having said that, however, not all structures are good. They exist to facilitate, not block the living of the Gospel. We need leaders, but they don’t need to live in palaces or lord it over us. Any group of people needs rules and regulations to govern their life together, but they must never become ends in themselves. In today’s Gospel, Jesus gives a us a new commandment: we are to love one another the way he has loved us. Pray this weekend that the Church will develop for our time structures which enable this to happen rather than prevent it.
BIDDING PRAYERS
We begin our prayer today by holding up before God all those who hold positions of leadership and responsibility within the Churches. We pray, especially, for Pope Benedict and for all who work within the Vatican at whatever level. We pray that God will lead them beyond personal ambition or the desire for power so that they can exercise their leadership in a spirit of service and humility……………....Lord hear us
And we pray, too, for our own bishop, John Cunningham. We pray that God will give him the wisdom and courage he needs at this time to be a leader in our diocese. We pray, in particular, that he will be a deeply faith-filled and profoundly hopeful man who is not afraid to face up to difficult issues and take radical and far-reaching decisions at a time when the future is unclear and when many in the Church are paralized by anxiety about the future……………………………………..Lord hear us
Within our parishes, many lay men and women exercise leadership and responsibility in a whole variety of ways. And so we ask God to guide them and protect them from the kind of wordly ambition and desire for power which, even in small ways, can corrupt us and undermine the value of what we do. It is at its most destructive when we don’t even recognize it, and so we ask God to open our eyes to see any sign of it in ourselves or in our parish…………………..Lord hear us
There are many people in Kilmarnock who claim to be followers of Jesus. Sadly, we are divided and split up into different Christian denominations. We pray, however, that the Churches in our town will learn to work together more and more in response to Jesus command in today’s Gospel to love one another as he has loved us. We pray in particular that we will work together to reach out to all in the town who are poor or in need so that we can be for the people of Kilmarnock a living sign of Jesus’ presence in the world………………….Lord hear us
This weekend, the children of the parish who have been preparing for Confirmation and First Communion since last year start coming to celebrate these two great sacraments. And so we pray for them, that what they do will take deep root in their lives and and bear rich fruit in the future. We pray, too, for ourselves, that, as a parish, we will never fail the young who come to us in search of God……………………..Lord hear us
And we pray, finally, for all those who were elected this week to positions of power whether in the Scottish Parliament or in local government. We ask God to move deeply in them so that they, too, may exercise the power they have been given in a spirit of service and humility. We pray, too, for those who failed to be elected or who lost power, that they will have the wisdom they need to accept what has happened and get on with their lives…………….Lord hear us
Today’s first reading from Acts describes the end of what we know as Paul’s first missionary journey. It had started, as it ended, in Antioch in the year 45AD and had taken Paul and Barnabas on a four-year-long expedition through what we know today as Turkey and which included a visit to Cyprus. Paul, in fact made three missionary journeys which took him all over the Mediterranean. The second took him from Turkey into Greece and the third, by a very roundabout route, ended up in Rome, where Paul was executed by beheading in the year 67AD, twenty two years after he had begun his first journey and thirty one years after his conversion that famous day on the road to Damascus. On his way to Rome he spent time in Malta and during his stay in Rome may, in 63 AD, have travelled as far west as Spain, landing at Tarragona south of Barcelona next to the well-known holiday resort of Salou. Not that it was a holiday resort then of course. And what Paul did on these journeys was what we heard about in that first reading. He established small christian communities, encouraging them by letters and further visits over the years, and, most importantly for our reflection today, he set up structures which would support and sustain the life of those communities. What exactly these structures were is not entirely clear and continues to be disputed among experts today. We heard just now how he appointed elders but it would be a mistake to think that elders here means the same thing as it does today in the Church of Scotland for example. The Greek word was presbyter. That’s why I live in a presbytery and our friends across the road at St Kentigern’s are presbyterians, but whether they were bishops, priests, deacons in the modern sense we will never really know. There are all kinds of theories about it, including the theory that many more women were involved than today and that they have been airbrushed out of the story by later generations. But leaving all that aside, what I invite you to recognize today is that, right from the very beginning, Paul and others saw the need for structures of some kind.
And that, I think, is important for us at a time when many in the Church are rejecting traditional structures. ‘I can be a Christian or a spiritual person without going to Church’ is something we hear a lot nowadays. And, of course, there is some truth in this. Structures can be cumbersome and restrictive and the modern tendency to reject them exists far beyond the limits of the Church. From the major Political Parties down to the local youth club, fewer and fewer people are joining organisations of any kind. But the fact that, right from the beginning, St Paul himself felt it necessary to set up structures and appoint people to positions of leadership and responsibility tells us something too. And what it tells us, I suggest, is that we can only become truly effective bearers of Good News to others and witnesses to Jesus in the world in partnership with other people. What we can do together is far greater than what any of us can do as individuals and it’s because of that that the Church exists at all. We can feed the hungry more effectively together than we can on our own; witness this afternoon’s homeless lunch. We can reach out to the poor abroad better together than we can individually; witness the parish fairtrade stall available this weekend after Mass. And for all this to happen, we need structures. We need to know who is doing what. We need leaders and organisers and people who will do the day-to-day stuff that otherwise would not be done. And we need all this, not just at a local level, but at diocesan level, at national level and at international level, so that the claim that ‘I can be a Christian without a Church,’ which effectively means ‘on my own, privately,’ is deeply flawed. It sounds good, but it is actually an illusion.
Having said that, however, not all structures are good. They exist to facilitate, not block the living of the Gospel. We need leaders, but they don’t need to live in palaces or lord it over us. Any group of people needs rules and regulations to govern their life together, but they must never become ends in themselves. In today’s Gospel, Jesus gives a us a new commandment: we are to love one another the way he has loved us. Pray this weekend that the Church will develop for our time structures which enable this to happen rather than prevent it.
BIDDING PRAYERS
We begin our prayer today by holding up before God all those who hold positions of leadership and responsibility within the Churches. We pray, especially, for Pope Benedict and for all who work within the Vatican at whatever level. We pray that God will lead them beyond personal ambition or the desire for power so that they can exercise their leadership in a spirit of service and humility……………....Lord hear us
And we pray, too, for our own bishop, John Cunningham. We pray that God will give him the wisdom and courage he needs at this time to be a leader in our diocese. We pray, in particular, that he will be a deeply faith-filled and profoundly hopeful man who is not afraid to face up to difficult issues and take radical and far-reaching decisions at a time when the future is unclear and when many in the Church are paralized by anxiety about the future……………………………………..Lord hear us
Within our parishes, many lay men and women exercise leadership and responsibility in a whole variety of ways. And so we ask God to guide them and protect them from the kind of wordly ambition and desire for power which, even in small ways, can corrupt us and undermine the value of what we do. It is at its most destructive when we don’t even recognize it, and so we ask God to open our eyes to see any sign of it in ourselves or in our parish…………………..Lord hear us
There are many people in Kilmarnock who claim to be followers of Jesus. Sadly, we are divided and split up into different Christian denominations. We pray, however, that the Churches in our town will learn to work together more and more in response to Jesus command in today’s Gospel to love one another as he has loved us. We pray in particular that we will work together to reach out to all in the town who are poor or in need so that we can be for the people of Kilmarnock a living sign of Jesus’ presence in the world………………….Lord hear us
This weekend, the children of the parish who have been preparing for Confirmation and First Communion since last year start coming to celebrate these two great sacraments. And so we pray for them, that what they do will take deep root in their lives and and bear rich fruit in the future. We pray, too, for ourselves, that, as a parish, we will never fail the young who come to us in search of God……………………..Lord hear us
And we pray, finally, for all those who were elected this week to positions of power whether in the Scottish Parliament or in local government. We ask God to move deeply in them so that they, too, may exercise the power they have been given in a spirit of service and humility. We pray, too, for those who failed to be elected or who lost power, that they will have the wisdom they need to accept what has happened and get on with their lives…………….Lord hear us
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