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