The fact that we have green vestments today after the white of Christmas is the liturgical equivalent of ‘back to auld claithes and purridge.’ It reminds me of the old saying that God must love ordinary people, because he has created so many of them, except that we’re talking about Sundays. There are fifty two of them in the year, thirty three of which the liturgy calls ordinary, and if we can understand the significance of this, the central importance of the ordinary in the life of anyone who is seriously seeking to know God, we will have understood something very important.
And yet it’s not always easy. There’s something in us, something quite deep and quite primitive, which expects to find God, not in the ordinary, but in the extraordinary. We see it in the Gospels. People are always asking for signs and you can sense Jesus’ frustration at this. At one point Philip asks him when he will show them the Father, to which he replies, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me.” And we see it down through the ages as people flock to see the sun spin or chase after the latest fad promising often good but naïve people a quick spiritual fix. It’s as if Jesus had never come into the world, as if the Word had never been made flesh and lived among us, as if Christmas had never happened. Like the people of Palestine two thousand years ago we rub shoulders with God every day, he is clos to us in the ordinary events of our daily lives, and we are too busy seeking him in the extraordinary to notice. And so I would like to offer to you this morning, not for the first time, a tool which can help us move beyond all this and begin to see what is staring us in the face. It’s called the Examen of Consciousness, it comes from St Ignatius, it helps millions find God in everything that is ordinary and there’s something about it this week on the back of your bulletin. But you can read that later.
For anyone who is serious about using the examen to unlock the mystery of God in the ordinary, there are five simple steps which need take no more than ten minutes to go through, usually towards the end of the day. And the first is to give thanks. This is something you might think would come at the end of prayer, but coming at the beginning of the examen it’s an act of faith in the fact that God has been present in this day whether I have been aware of it or not. The conviction that this is true, that God is active in our lives, is the whole basis of this prayer and without it there’s little point in going any further.
The second step is to ask for guidance or enlightenment. If we are to become aware of the movement of God in our lives each day it will not be by simply thinking about it. Only the Spirit of God can reveal to us what we are looking for in the examen and so we ask the Spirit to do this; to unpack the day for us and enable us to see and understand what was going on in it as we move on to the third step, the longest of the five, which is the reflection on the day itself.
Sometimes when talking to people about this stage I have used the image of replaying the video of the day. Recently, however, when I tried to buy some blank videos for my Dad, I was told by the man that they were now obsolete, so I suppose I will have to start talking about the DVD just as they, too, become obsolete in the face of all these new machines which do it all themselves. But whatever image we use, this third stage is about going over the day and allowing God to draw our attention to key moments or events, always bearing in mind that what the Spirit thinks significant may not be what we thought was significant. But what is it we do with these significant moments?
Well, we go more deeply into them by first of all acknowledging honestly to ourselves what exactly happened, how we were feeling and how we reacted to both the feelings and the events. Honesty and openness to this along with a developing self-knowledge are vital to the examen given that they are the key to what lies even deeper. And what lies even deeper is the movement of God in us along with what we could call ‘the counter- movement’ a movement which resists and opposes the movement of God, a movement which people down through the ages would have called the movement of Satan. Ignatius, of course, called the first consolation and the second desolation and it is evidence of these two at work that we are looking for in the examen. And at least in their more obvious forms it is not too difficult to tell the difference between them. Consolation, being from God, builds up faith, hope and love. It’s entirely consistent with Jesus and everything he stands for: compassion, refusal to judge, love for our enemies, reaching out to those in need and so on. Desolation, on the other hand, undermines faith, hope and love and grows out of everything Jesus calls us beyond: envy, hatred of self and others, selfishness in all its shapes and forms, rash judgment and all the rest. Both consolation and desolation will be at work deep within us in the course of any given day and the purpose of step three of the examen is uncover them and see them for what they are.
Steps four and five are quite simple. Four is to thank God for the times when we have been guided by consolation and express our sorrow or regret for other times when Satan has been our guide before moving to the last part of the prayer which is the future. For most of us, life is quite repetetive. We do the same things, meet the same people and generally react the way we have always done. But as we grow in knowledge of ourselves and how consolation and desolation are at work in us, there opens up before us the possibility that we can begin to change some of our destructive patterns of behaviour. And so the examen ends by asking God to help us do this.
Use it well, and, more and more often in the course of all that happens to you you will find yourself saying those words of John the Baptist: There he is! ‘There’s the lamb of God.’
BIDDING PRAYERS
Over Christmas we celebrated the mystery of the Incarnation by which God became part of our world and part of our human experience. And so, as we begin our journey through the Ordinary Sundays of the Year, we ask for the grace we need to recognize the God of the Incarnation in everything that happens in the course of our ordinary daily lives, leaving behind the primitive notion that God will be found in what is spectacular, extraordinary or miraculous…………..Lord hear us
In today’s Gospel, John sees Jesus walking towards him and immediately knows within himself that this is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. John did not know this because he had worked it out for himself. He knew it because the Spirit of God had revealed it to him. And so we pray for a profound openness to the movement of that same Spirit in ourselves, revealing things to us which, left to ourselves, we could never know………………….Lord hear us
The Examen of Consciousness is a way of praying designed to help us recognize the movement of the Spirit in our lives. It involves recognizing that there are other spirits at work in us too, tendencies and inclinations which are in direct conflict with the Spirit of God, and for this to happen we need to grow in self-knowledge. With God’s help we move beyond self-delussion and pretence, exposing to the light of truth the things deep within ourselves which move and motivate us. And so we pray for this grace for evryone present here today………….Lord hear us.
Consolation and desolation are at work, not just within the lives of individuals, but within society too. Deep within everything that happens God is calling humanity to new ways of living rooted in the Gospel. But there are other spirits at workd too, pulling us in the opposite direction. These are the spirits of atheism, consumerism, materialism and so on. And so we pray that the world will learn to respond to the movement of God and reject what, since it is fundamentally false, is inevitably harmful and destructive too……………………….Lord hear us
As he begins his First Letter to the Corinthians today, St Paul wishes the people of that city ‘grace and peace.’ The Mass each week often begins with that same greeting, recognizing that the grace and peace we speak of come from the Father, through Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit. The reason Jesus came into the world was to show us the Father and this is only possible because the Spirit lives and moves in us. And so we pray that, every time we come her for Mass, we will enter more deeply into this great mystery…………………………………………….Lord hear us
When we run after the latest story of a statue that moves or some other similar kind of apparent marvel, basing our faith on such things rather than on God himself, it is usually a sign that we continue to inhabit the world of religion rather than faith. And so we pray for all who are constantly caught up in such things which, by their very nature, never satisfy and so are always in search of the next miracle, that we or they will come to know the God of the Incarnation, the God of the ordinary……..Lord hear us
Saturday, 19 January 2008
Saturday, 12 January 2008
The Baptism of Jesus
The incident described in today’s second reading marked a very important moment in the life of the Apostle, Peter, and I hope we can all benefit from looking more closely at it this morning. It’s taken from chapter ten of Acts which begins with an account of how the Roman centurion, Cornelius, the first gentile to be converted to Christianity, initially hears the call of God. In a vision he is told by God to send to Jaffa for the man known as Peter who, without having heard of Cornelius, is having his own vision there. In it he sees a large sheet being lowered from heaven filled with every kind of animal, reptile and bird, whereupon he is told by God to kill and eat. But Peter refuses. ‘Certainly not, Lord’ he says, in what, for me, is one of the funniest sentences in the Bible, ‘I have never eaten anything profane or unclean.’ Just think of it. God himself is telling Peter to do this and, on the grounds that it is against his religion, Peter refuses. And so, contradicting everything Peter has been brought up to believe, God says, ‘What God has made clean, you have no right to call unclean,’ something he repeats three times just in case Peter didn’t hear it the first time. At which point, the men sent by Cornelius arrive and explain to Peter what has happened and why they have come. And so, to cut a long story short, Peter goes to Cornelius and utters those famous words I quoted to you last week and which we heard again today. ‘What I have now come to realise’ he says, ‘is that God does not have favourites and that anybody of any nationality who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to him.’
This was not the first time, however, that something like this had happened to Peter. Early in the Gospel story, when Jesus first speaks of his own impending suffering, Peter says, ‘Lord, this must not happen to you,’ words which provoked from Jesus the reply, ‘Get behind me Satan.’ And then, at the last supper, when Jesus tries to wash Peter’s feet, his response is,’You will never wash my feet, Lord.’ to which Jesus replies, ‘If I do not wash you, you can have nothing in common with me.’ On each of these occasions Peter meant well. He thought that what he was saying was right, in the same way that Paul thought that what he was doing was right when he left Jerusalem for Damascus to root out and arrest the Christians there, but, without realising it, they were both doing the very opposite of what God wanted. And as we come to the end of a period when we have been reflecting on the need to be people of vision, people who can envisage or imagine something new, people who are open to being led into new places and new ways of thinking, it is important that we consider the possibility that we might be doing the same. Certainly, in the years since the Second Vatican Council, which Pope John Paul called the single most important movement of the Holy Spirit in modern times, the response of many apparently pious people in the Church, loyal and traditional Catholics by their way of it, has been and continues to be, ‘Certainly not Lord.’ And it’s important that we understand how this happens.
At its root, of course, is a foolish and ultimately arrogant attachment to what we have always known or thought. And yet, if there is one thing we can say with absolute certainty about many of the ideas we have in our heads about God, the Church, theology, what it means to be a Catholic and so on, it is that they are wrong. This is true of all our knowledge of course. In all of us there is more ignorance than knowledge, more things we don’t know than we do know, more falsehood than truth. And if this is true of our knowledge in general, it is especially true about the things of faith. The only thing we can say with certainty about God is that he is not what we think he is. As the 14th C. German mystic Meister Eckhart famously put it: ‘Whatever God is, God isn’t.’ the added complication being that whoever God is he does not even think like us. Human wisdom is foolishness in God’s eyes, which is why people of vision, which is what we are called to be, must be constantly open to new ideas, new ways of thinking and not cling to what we have always known and what, by definition, can only be, at best, partially true. And I offer you today one particular example of this.
As I wrote in the bulletin last week, I am due to represent the Kilmarnock deanery at a meeting in the bishop’s house on Tuesday. The purpose is to begin to look at the next stage of the process we called Embracing the Future, an attempt to address the question of what we do in the face of a rapidly diminishing supply of priests. Already the effects are obvious. Of twelve parishes in this deanery, only six have resident priests, three of whom are over sixty, and only two parishes now have more than one Mass on a Sunday. And so, given that this trend will continue, we have to work out how we are going to respond to it. Before too long, for example, we could well be back to having just one parish in the town, as was the case until fifty years ago. But the change will be more radical than that, as, at long last, the dream of Vatican II become a reality and lay people begin to exercise the ministry which flows from baptism. And it will not just be running finances and looking after buildings. Lay people will lead liturgical worship, baptize, conduct funerals, attend to the dying, assist officially at marriages and so on as part of what has always been the theology of baptism even if we haven’t always understood it or put it into practise.
But how will we respond? Well, I can already hear the cry going up from all over the diocese: ‘Certainly not Lord,’ as we do what we have always done: resist change, refuse to cooperate, cling to what we know and convince ourselves that these things cannot be right because they are not what we are used to, a way of thinking which has already delayed by more than forty years the full implementation of Vatican II. Or, just think of it, we could do it differently this time, save ourselves years of hassle and and just go where God leads.
So what’s it to be?
BIDDING PRAYERS
St Matthew tells us in today’s gospel that, as Jesus emerged from the Jordan, a voice spoke from heaven saying, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, listen to him.’ And so, as we come to the end of the Christmas season, a time when we have celebrated the birth of the one who is God with us, we pray for the grace to truly listen to him and make everything he says the basis of our whole lives…………………....Lord hear us
Perhaps the central insight of the Second Vatican Council was the rediscovery of baptism and what it means in the life of the christian. To be baptized is to share in the priesthood of Christ, an idea that had been temporarily lost sight of in the aftermath of the Reformation. It means that lay people are called to active ministry in and for the world And so we pray that, no matter how many years it takes, this truth will finally be welcomed and understood by all of us……………………Lord hear us
In the kind of priest-centred Church we are struggling to escape from, the ordained priest did all kinds of things that should rightly have been done by others. As priests grow older, however, and there are fewer of them, system is becoming more and more impossible to maintain. And so we pray for ordained priests throughout the diocese that this new situation will enable them to rediscover what being an ordained priest really means so that they can focus on that and let go of things that rightly belong to others…………………….Lord hear us
The key ministry of the ordained priest, as defined by the Second Vatican Council, is to proclaim the Word of God, celebrate the Eucharist and exercise spiritual leadership within the christian community. And so we ask God to raise up in our parishes men, young and old, who willing and able to do this. The Council also called for the re-establishment of the permanent diaconate, and ancient ministry in the Church, and we ask God to raise up mature men, married or single, who can exercise this ministry of service among us……………….Lord hear us
Resistance to change is deep in human nature and we should never underestimate the power it has. But it does not have to control or dominate us, especially when the one calling us to change is the Spirit of God working deep within history. And so we pray for the courage we need to go where God leads, especially when, in the words of Jesus to Peter after the Resurrection, we ‘would rather not go.’………Lord hear us
All our knowledge is limited. The wise person is the one who knows this and so is always open to learning new things. The truly ignorant person is one who thinks he knows everything and so has nothing to learn. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to be certain about fewer and fewer things and less and less attached to what we are familiar with, so that, as a parish community, we can embrace the future with deep trust in the God who leads us ever onwards…………………….…..Lord hear us
This was not the first time, however, that something like this had happened to Peter. Early in the Gospel story, when Jesus first speaks of his own impending suffering, Peter says, ‘Lord, this must not happen to you,’ words which provoked from Jesus the reply, ‘Get behind me Satan.’ And then, at the last supper, when Jesus tries to wash Peter’s feet, his response is,’You will never wash my feet, Lord.’ to which Jesus replies, ‘If I do not wash you, you can have nothing in common with me.’ On each of these occasions Peter meant well. He thought that what he was saying was right, in the same way that Paul thought that what he was doing was right when he left Jerusalem for Damascus to root out and arrest the Christians there, but, without realising it, they were both doing the very opposite of what God wanted. And as we come to the end of a period when we have been reflecting on the need to be people of vision, people who can envisage or imagine something new, people who are open to being led into new places and new ways of thinking, it is important that we consider the possibility that we might be doing the same. Certainly, in the years since the Second Vatican Council, which Pope John Paul called the single most important movement of the Holy Spirit in modern times, the response of many apparently pious people in the Church, loyal and traditional Catholics by their way of it, has been and continues to be, ‘Certainly not Lord.’ And it’s important that we understand how this happens.
At its root, of course, is a foolish and ultimately arrogant attachment to what we have always known or thought. And yet, if there is one thing we can say with absolute certainty about many of the ideas we have in our heads about God, the Church, theology, what it means to be a Catholic and so on, it is that they are wrong. This is true of all our knowledge of course. In all of us there is more ignorance than knowledge, more things we don’t know than we do know, more falsehood than truth. And if this is true of our knowledge in general, it is especially true about the things of faith. The only thing we can say with certainty about God is that he is not what we think he is. As the 14th C. German mystic Meister Eckhart famously put it: ‘Whatever God is, God isn’t.’ the added complication being that whoever God is he does not even think like us. Human wisdom is foolishness in God’s eyes, which is why people of vision, which is what we are called to be, must be constantly open to new ideas, new ways of thinking and not cling to what we have always known and what, by definition, can only be, at best, partially true. And I offer you today one particular example of this.
As I wrote in the bulletin last week, I am due to represent the Kilmarnock deanery at a meeting in the bishop’s house on Tuesday. The purpose is to begin to look at the next stage of the process we called Embracing the Future, an attempt to address the question of what we do in the face of a rapidly diminishing supply of priests. Already the effects are obvious. Of twelve parishes in this deanery, only six have resident priests, three of whom are over sixty, and only two parishes now have more than one Mass on a Sunday. And so, given that this trend will continue, we have to work out how we are going to respond to it. Before too long, for example, we could well be back to having just one parish in the town, as was the case until fifty years ago. But the change will be more radical than that, as, at long last, the dream of Vatican II become a reality and lay people begin to exercise the ministry which flows from baptism. And it will not just be running finances and looking after buildings. Lay people will lead liturgical worship, baptize, conduct funerals, attend to the dying, assist officially at marriages and so on as part of what has always been the theology of baptism even if we haven’t always understood it or put it into practise.
But how will we respond? Well, I can already hear the cry going up from all over the diocese: ‘Certainly not Lord,’ as we do what we have always done: resist change, refuse to cooperate, cling to what we know and convince ourselves that these things cannot be right because they are not what we are used to, a way of thinking which has already delayed by more than forty years the full implementation of Vatican II. Or, just think of it, we could do it differently this time, save ourselves years of hassle and and just go where God leads.
So what’s it to be?
BIDDING PRAYERS
St Matthew tells us in today’s gospel that, as Jesus emerged from the Jordan, a voice spoke from heaven saying, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, listen to him.’ And so, as we come to the end of the Christmas season, a time when we have celebrated the birth of the one who is God with us, we pray for the grace to truly listen to him and make everything he says the basis of our whole lives…………………....Lord hear us
Perhaps the central insight of the Second Vatican Council was the rediscovery of baptism and what it means in the life of the christian. To be baptized is to share in the priesthood of Christ, an idea that had been temporarily lost sight of in the aftermath of the Reformation. It means that lay people are called to active ministry in and for the world And so we pray that, no matter how many years it takes, this truth will finally be welcomed and understood by all of us……………………Lord hear us
In the kind of priest-centred Church we are struggling to escape from, the ordained priest did all kinds of things that should rightly have been done by others. As priests grow older, however, and there are fewer of them, system is becoming more and more impossible to maintain. And so we pray for ordained priests throughout the diocese that this new situation will enable them to rediscover what being an ordained priest really means so that they can focus on that and let go of things that rightly belong to others…………………….Lord hear us
The key ministry of the ordained priest, as defined by the Second Vatican Council, is to proclaim the Word of God, celebrate the Eucharist and exercise spiritual leadership within the christian community. And so we ask God to raise up in our parishes men, young and old, who willing and able to do this. The Council also called for the re-establishment of the permanent diaconate, and ancient ministry in the Church, and we ask God to raise up mature men, married or single, who can exercise this ministry of service among us……………….Lord hear us
Resistance to change is deep in human nature and we should never underestimate the power it has. But it does not have to control or dominate us, especially when the one calling us to change is the Spirit of God working deep within history. And so we pray for the courage we need to go where God leads, especially when, in the words of Jesus to Peter after the Resurrection, we ‘would rather not go.’………Lord hear us
All our knowledge is limited. The wise person is the one who knows this and so is always open to learning new things. The truly ignorant person is one who thinks he knows everything and so has nothing to learn. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to be certain about fewer and fewer things and less and less attached to what we are familiar with, so that, as a parish community, we can embrace the future with deep trust in the God who leads us ever onwards…………………….…..Lord hear us
Saturday, 5 January 2008
Feast of the Epiphany
Part of the vision of Isaiah, son of Amoz, which has guided us through Advent and Christmas, was that the day would come when the whole world would flock to Jerusalem. We heard it on the very first Sunday:
"All the nations will stream to it, peoples without number will come to it; and they will say: ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the temple of the God of Jacob”
And it’s there again today.
“Arise, shine out Jerusalem, for your light has come.. All are assembling and coming towards you...camels in throngs will cover you… everyone in Sheba will come."
It’s an idea that runs right through the Old Testament and, since Matthew’s Gospel was written for Jews steeped in this message, it’s hardly surprising that he alone among the evangelists should mention the Magi in his Gospel. His purpose is clear: Jesus is the fulfillment of all these texts and the wise men are the nations flocking to him.
And yet, having said that, no prophet ever fully understands his own prophecy. His words always mean more than anyone at the time realised, and so St Paul is able to say in the second reading: "It was by a revelation that I was given the knowledge of the mystery..a mystery unknown to any men in past generations; it means that pagans now share the same inheritance, that they are parts of the same body, and that the same promise has been made to them in Christ Jesus through the Gospel." So what was it that Isaiah, despite all his insights, failed to understand? What is this mystery revealed to Paul? Well, it was the same thing that almost tore the early Church apart.
You see, although the prophets dreamt of the days when nations of the earth would come flocking to Jerusalem, the presumption was that this would mean their accepting the Jewish Law and all the requirements of the Jewish religion. And there were those in the early Church who continued to think this, insisting that pagans who converted to Christianity be circumcised. St Peter himself, as we read in Acts, had a hard time with this. Confronted by the Roman Centurion, Cornelius, it takes a vision from God, during which Peter initially refuses to do what God asks, to convince him that this narrow religious attitude is not acceptable. “You know it is forbidden for Jews to mix with people of another race” he says to the people after his vision, “But God has made it clear to me that I must not call anyone profane or unclean……I now really understand that God has no favourites, but that anybody of any nationality who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” And this is the fundamental message of the Epiphany. The era of nationalism is over. In the Magi God reveals himself as the God of every human being. There is no more distinction, Paul writes, between Jew and Greek, male and female, slave and free man. We are all one in Christ, a message we might give notional assent to, but which, two thousand years on, we are still struggling to come to terms with. And it’s not hard to know why. It’s because this most radical of ideas touches into humanity’s most ancient fears and prejudices. It confronts head on our tribalism, our nationalism, our fears about people whom we don’t know, people who come from far-away places, people whose skin is a different colour from ours, people who speak languages we don’t understand, people who don’t eat the same food or wear the same clothes as we do. All of these are primitive fears, a relic of humanity’s infancy. I will never forget the first time I saw a black man. I was three years of age, standing on my tip-toes with my chin on the window-sill when he went past, and I was utterly terrified, convinced he had come to take me away. And I have no doubt black children in Africa felt the same the first time they saw a white man. But primitive and infantile as they may be, they are real and powerful, and at the very centre of history Jesus stands like a beacon challenging us to move beyond them and recognize every human being, without exception, as our brother and sister. And at this particular moment in history, more so than at any other time in the past, we have the opportunity to make this great historic leap. And the reason is globalization.
Globalization is fundamentally the fruit of our ability to travel to and communicate at great speed with people in other parts of the world. Out of it have grown huge, global businesses for whom national barriers mean nothing. Many of them are more powerful than the countries they operate in, and, given this imbalance, the whole process has involved a lot of abuse and exploitation of the poor. But there is no fundamental reason why it has to be that way. Only in the last week we have seen a multi-national from India, a country we have traditionally thought of as poor, enter into talks with a view to buying Jaguar and Range Rover from Ford, having already bought, last year, what used to be British Steel.
But the other side of Globalization is the massive movement of peoples around the world in search of work and a higher standard of living for their families. We experience it as immigration, a word which, thanks to unscrupulous politicians and newspaper owners eager to make money, is being used to stir in us all those primitive fears about foreigners and those different from ourselves. When we go to their countries to exploit their resources and their cheap labour it’s fine. But when the flip side of that coin comes into play and they want to come here, they are portrayed as bogey-men, threatening our way of life. And the Feast of the Epiphany invites us to reflect on all of this. It invites us to recognize our deep-rooted fears and prejudices around what is foreign. It challenges us to face our completely groundless feelings of superiority over people who come from other countries and speak other languages. It calls the whole world at this time to see the huge potential for good in what we call globalization provided we can eliminate from it the injustices and inequalities currently built into it. But none of this is easy. Ancient, primitive fears and prejudices aren’t easily got rid of. But unless we at least want to be free of them we cannot claim to be followers of Jesus.
So how willing are you to move beyond your fears and prejudices about what is foreign and, like Jesus, reach out to the peoples of the world.
BIDDING PRAYERS
As a new millennium begins, we stand at a crossroads, facing choices which will shape the future of the world. Division and enmity between nations has been the way for centuries. But in a nuclear age a new way of resolving tensions and disagreements between peoples is vital if humanity is to have any kind of future. And so we pray that the prophetic words of Isaiah will be fulfilled as we hammer our swords into ploughshares and our spears into sickles………….……………………....Lord hear us
To embrace a new way of relating to people different from ourselves is not easy. It means confronting primitives fears which are deep-rooted and difficult to shift, a process which begins with a willingness to acknowledge our prejudices and move beyond them. And so we ask God, through the power of the Holy Spirit living in us, to stir this willingness in is along with a desire to reach out to every human being as a brother or sister……………………………....Lord hear us
So many of our prejudices about people from other parts of the world are based on appearances. Whether it is the colour of peoples skin, the clothes they wear, the food they eat, the language they speak, we quickly turn them into reasons for not liking them. If he had lived in the world of today, Jesus, with his dark skin and eastern appearance, would have been seen as a potential terrorist wherever he went. And so we pray for the wisdom to see the stupidity of all this……………Lord hear us
Irrational divisions between people exist a very local level. It can be New Farm versus Onthank, Ayr versus Kilmarnock, Glasgow versus Edinburgh, Scotland versus England and so on. It can even be one school against another or one parish against another. In our immaturity we seem to need someone to be against in order to define who we are ourselves. And so we pray for the wisdom to see how pointless and infantile it all is…………Lord hear us
As followers of Jesus, we are called to be signs of the Kingdom in the world, signs of the new way of living and thinking introduced into our world by the coming of Jesus, symbolized today in the story of the Magi. And so we pray that at this time when there is so much movement of peoples around the world, Christians everywhere – and especially here in Scotland – will stand out for the way we welcome people from other countries and cultures who come among us………………………...Lord hear us
The potential for racism and xenophobia lies deep within us all and there are plenty around who, for their own political purposes, are prepared to stir these things up in us. Using the media to great effect, they peddle lies and half-truths about immigration, asylum seekers, migrant workers and so on in an attempt to turn us against them. And so we pray that the people of Britain will not be fooled by this propaganda but will see it for what it is…………………………………..Lord hear us
"All the nations will stream to it, peoples without number will come to it; and they will say: ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the temple of the God of Jacob”
And it’s there again today.
“Arise, shine out Jerusalem, for your light has come.. All are assembling and coming towards you...camels in throngs will cover you… everyone in Sheba will come."
It’s an idea that runs right through the Old Testament and, since Matthew’s Gospel was written for Jews steeped in this message, it’s hardly surprising that he alone among the evangelists should mention the Magi in his Gospel. His purpose is clear: Jesus is the fulfillment of all these texts and the wise men are the nations flocking to him.
And yet, having said that, no prophet ever fully understands his own prophecy. His words always mean more than anyone at the time realised, and so St Paul is able to say in the second reading: "It was by a revelation that I was given the knowledge of the mystery..a mystery unknown to any men in past generations; it means that pagans now share the same inheritance, that they are parts of the same body, and that the same promise has been made to them in Christ Jesus through the Gospel." So what was it that Isaiah, despite all his insights, failed to understand? What is this mystery revealed to Paul? Well, it was the same thing that almost tore the early Church apart.
You see, although the prophets dreamt of the days when nations of the earth would come flocking to Jerusalem, the presumption was that this would mean their accepting the Jewish Law and all the requirements of the Jewish religion. And there were those in the early Church who continued to think this, insisting that pagans who converted to Christianity be circumcised. St Peter himself, as we read in Acts, had a hard time with this. Confronted by the Roman Centurion, Cornelius, it takes a vision from God, during which Peter initially refuses to do what God asks, to convince him that this narrow religious attitude is not acceptable. “You know it is forbidden for Jews to mix with people of another race” he says to the people after his vision, “But God has made it clear to me that I must not call anyone profane or unclean……I now really understand that God has no favourites, but that anybody of any nationality who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” And this is the fundamental message of the Epiphany. The era of nationalism is over. In the Magi God reveals himself as the God of every human being. There is no more distinction, Paul writes, between Jew and Greek, male and female, slave and free man. We are all one in Christ, a message we might give notional assent to, but which, two thousand years on, we are still struggling to come to terms with. And it’s not hard to know why. It’s because this most radical of ideas touches into humanity’s most ancient fears and prejudices. It confronts head on our tribalism, our nationalism, our fears about people whom we don’t know, people who come from far-away places, people whose skin is a different colour from ours, people who speak languages we don’t understand, people who don’t eat the same food or wear the same clothes as we do. All of these are primitive fears, a relic of humanity’s infancy. I will never forget the first time I saw a black man. I was three years of age, standing on my tip-toes with my chin on the window-sill when he went past, and I was utterly terrified, convinced he had come to take me away. And I have no doubt black children in Africa felt the same the first time they saw a white man. But primitive and infantile as they may be, they are real and powerful, and at the very centre of history Jesus stands like a beacon challenging us to move beyond them and recognize every human being, without exception, as our brother and sister. And at this particular moment in history, more so than at any other time in the past, we have the opportunity to make this great historic leap. And the reason is globalization.
Globalization is fundamentally the fruit of our ability to travel to and communicate at great speed with people in other parts of the world. Out of it have grown huge, global businesses for whom national barriers mean nothing. Many of them are more powerful than the countries they operate in, and, given this imbalance, the whole process has involved a lot of abuse and exploitation of the poor. But there is no fundamental reason why it has to be that way. Only in the last week we have seen a multi-national from India, a country we have traditionally thought of as poor, enter into talks with a view to buying Jaguar and Range Rover from Ford, having already bought, last year, what used to be British Steel.
But the other side of Globalization is the massive movement of peoples around the world in search of work and a higher standard of living for their families. We experience it as immigration, a word which, thanks to unscrupulous politicians and newspaper owners eager to make money, is being used to stir in us all those primitive fears about foreigners and those different from ourselves. When we go to their countries to exploit their resources and their cheap labour it’s fine. But when the flip side of that coin comes into play and they want to come here, they are portrayed as bogey-men, threatening our way of life. And the Feast of the Epiphany invites us to reflect on all of this. It invites us to recognize our deep-rooted fears and prejudices around what is foreign. It challenges us to face our completely groundless feelings of superiority over people who come from other countries and speak other languages. It calls the whole world at this time to see the huge potential for good in what we call globalization provided we can eliminate from it the injustices and inequalities currently built into it. But none of this is easy. Ancient, primitive fears and prejudices aren’t easily got rid of. But unless we at least want to be free of them we cannot claim to be followers of Jesus.
So how willing are you to move beyond your fears and prejudices about what is foreign and, like Jesus, reach out to the peoples of the world.
BIDDING PRAYERS
As a new millennium begins, we stand at a crossroads, facing choices which will shape the future of the world. Division and enmity between nations has been the way for centuries. But in a nuclear age a new way of resolving tensions and disagreements between peoples is vital if humanity is to have any kind of future. And so we pray that the prophetic words of Isaiah will be fulfilled as we hammer our swords into ploughshares and our spears into sickles………….……………………....Lord hear us
To embrace a new way of relating to people different from ourselves is not easy. It means confronting primitives fears which are deep-rooted and difficult to shift, a process which begins with a willingness to acknowledge our prejudices and move beyond them. And so we ask God, through the power of the Holy Spirit living in us, to stir this willingness in is along with a desire to reach out to every human being as a brother or sister……………………………....Lord hear us
So many of our prejudices about people from other parts of the world are based on appearances. Whether it is the colour of peoples skin, the clothes they wear, the food they eat, the language they speak, we quickly turn them into reasons for not liking them. If he had lived in the world of today, Jesus, with his dark skin and eastern appearance, would have been seen as a potential terrorist wherever he went. And so we pray for the wisdom to see the stupidity of all this……………Lord hear us
Irrational divisions between people exist a very local level. It can be New Farm versus Onthank, Ayr versus Kilmarnock, Glasgow versus Edinburgh, Scotland versus England and so on. It can even be one school against another or one parish against another. In our immaturity we seem to need someone to be against in order to define who we are ourselves. And so we pray for the wisdom to see how pointless and infantile it all is…………Lord hear us
As followers of Jesus, we are called to be signs of the Kingdom in the world, signs of the new way of living and thinking introduced into our world by the coming of Jesus, symbolized today in the story of the Magi. And so we pray that at this time when there is so much movement of peoples around the world, Christians everywhere – and especially here in Scotland – will stand out for the way we welcome people from other countries and cultures who come among us………………………...Lord hear us
The potential for racism and xenophobia lies deep within us all and there are plenty around who, for their own political purposes, are prepared to stir these things up in us. Using the media to great effect, they peddle lies and half-truths about immigration, asylum seekers, migrant workers and so on in an attempt to turn us against them. And so we pray that the people of Britain will not be fooled by this propaganda but will see it for what it is…………………………………..Lord hear us
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