After twenty three years in St Matthew’s, which is over two thousand homilies, even I have got used to some of my own favourite sayings, one of which is that something or other ‘takes us to the heart of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.’ But today’s readings, I would suggest, take us, not only to the heart of what it is to follow Jesus, but to the heart of what it is to be a human being, regardless of what we believe or don’t believe. And it’s about making moral choices. Alone among the creatures on the earth, human beings have choices to make. In the Genesis account of creation God looks at everything he has made and sees that it is good. The exception is man and woman, and the reason is simple. ‘Good’ in the Genesis sense, means finished. The work of creation, in other words, is over. But with man and woman this isn’t true. We are not born finished. The process of becoming who we are goes on all through our lives and at the heart of this process lies an amazing truth. And it is that we, unlike every other creature, become who we choose to be. And therein lies the drama of human existence.
We see it this morning in the book of Deureronomy, a passage which is almost identical to one from the same book which we hear each year at the beginning of Lent. Today, Moses, as the people are about to enter the promised land, sets before them a blessing and a curse. In the other version he sets before them life and prosperity, death and disaster and invites them to choose life so that they may live in the land the Lord will give them. Their whole future is in the balance at this point and the outcome lies in their own hands. It will be what they choose to make it. And we see it in the second reading where St Paul tells the people of Rome that they cannot be justified by just doing what the Jewish law tells them. Salvation comes through faith in Jesus, a choice that is open to everyone, Jew or Gentile. And in the Gospel, Jesus tells us that it’s not those who say ‘Lord Lord’ who will enter the kingdom of heaven, but those who do his Father’s will. But we do what we choose to do. Our destiny is in our own hands. We can choose the heaven God offers or we can create our own hell.
But, of course, it was not always like that. Making choices is something we learn to do as we grow older. When we were children other people made our choices for us and it is only with the coming of maturity that we begin the difficult task of learning to make them for ourselves. Sadly, however, it doesn’t always happen. There’s nothing automatic about maturity. It’s possible to live our whole lives and never come to it, remaining instead children in adult bodies, doing what others do, believing what others believe, running with the crowd and allowing our positions on every subject to be shaped by forces outside ourselves, like TV and the media. And for men and women of faith, the need to move beyond this childishness and come to maturity has never been greater. In an age of a thousand versions of the truth – another of my favourite sayings – it’s crucial that we learn to stand on our own two feet and make serious personal moral choices about all kinds of things: what values we are going to live by; what it is we really believe about God; how are we going to live as sexual beings in the modern world; what are we going to do about our carbon footprint; how we organize and use our financial resources in a world where millions live in poverty; where we stand on what people call the work-life balance and so on. The list is endless and it’s by addressing such issues and making personal moral decisions about them that we shape the people we end up being
But, belonging as we do to the Catholic Church, we have inherited a problem. In response to the Reformation and its rejection of traditional Church authority, Catholicism has gone through several centuries when the emphasis has been, not on personal choice, but on doing what we were told. ‘Don’t you bother making decisions,’ was the basic message. ‘That’s dangerous. We will tell you what to think and what to do,’ a system that is falling apart before our eyes in this world with a thousand versions of the truth and where the individual is king. And so men and women of faith are having to rediscover a much older tradition which, from the early Middle Ages, has taught us that conscience, not law, is the ultimate norm of morality. Allied to a re-discovery of the whole notion of discerning God’s will for ourselves as individuals, the Spirit is slowly but surely equipping us for a century in which, as I have been saying to you since 1985, only those with personal faith will survive in the Church. Personal faith at this time is the rock Jesus speaks of. Even if storms come it will not fall. Law and what others say is the sand which gives way as soon as pressure is applied, the results of which are all around us.
For some, of course, such talk sounds like an excuse for just doing what we like. But nothing could be further from the truth. To discern God’s unique will for ourselves is not about doing what we like. It’s about the imitation of Jesus and is far more demanding than any law could ever be. Law is satisfied with the minimum, discernment asks everything of us, one of the painful things being that others will not always understand what we do. The call to life-long commitment in marriage, for example, is God-given, but, in the world of personal discernment, there will be situations where, despite what the law says, an individual may decide to end a relationship, not because it’s the easy or selfish thing to do, but because in particular circumstances it’s the right thing to do. And since we cannot discern God’s will for others – only for ourselves – it’s not for us to judge. I have known many priests who have left over the years, often after much prayer and discernment, and have no doubt that many of them did the right thing and suffered for it.
To live in a world of personal faith where conscience and prayerful discernment guide us rather than law isn’t easy. It requires maturity and courage. But above all, it requires tremendous faith and trust in God.
BIDDING PRAYERS
In his infinite love and wisdom, God, the creator of everything that is, has taken the enormous risk of giving to human beings the gift of freedom. Made in the image and likeness of God and called to share in his own divine life, we are free to reject everything that God offers. Love cannot be forced. It is freely given and has to be freely received. And so we pray for a deep sense of the enormous mystery we are engaged in all through our lives……..Lord hear us
After centuries of living according to Law we are suddenly face with a world which sees things in a very different way. Millions have rejected traditonal moral principles, resulting in a much more permissive society where there are few objective guidelines and the individual is encouraged, or even forced, to make up the rules as he or she goes along. And so we ask God to guide us at this time so that we can develop a way of speaking about morality adapted to the age in which we live………...Lord hear us
It goes without saying that those most affected by the chaotic moral climate in which we live are the young. Born into a world which they themselves did not shape, many have no memory, even, of a time when clear moral guidance from society was both expected and accepted. Many things that those of us who are older once took for granted they have never even heard of. And so we ask God to guide the young at this time and protect them from the many moral dangers they face…………..Lord hear us
Sadly, a failure to understand the meaning of both conscience and the concept of discerning God’s will for ourselves as individuals has also contributed to the moral confusion of our time. At their best, they lead us to a way of responding to God that is infinitely more profound than any law. But they can also be used and abused to justify the doing, not of God’s will, but our own. And so we ask God to lead us to the greater moral maturity required for people living in the 21st century….…Lord hear us
In words that every church-going person should reflect on often, Jesus tells us today that it is not those who say ‘Lord, Lord,’ who will enter the kingdom of heaven, but those who do the will of his Father. And so religious actions which do not bear fruit in Christ-like living are worth nothing, no matter how pious or holy they may appear. And so we pray for the grace to really understand this…………………..Lord hear us
On 25th July 1968, Pope Paul VI published his encyclical letter Humanae Vitae. Thus began a period of great turmoil in the Church which some here will have lived through and experienced the pain of. But at the heart of this pain was the issue we have reflected on today. The Pope spoke about law and conscience to a Church which had been taught only about law and so did not understand the language of conscience and personal discernment. And so, all these years later, we ask God to heal those who were hurt so much by what happened at that time…………..Lord hear us
Saturday, 31 May 2008
Saturday, 24 May 2008
Corpus Christi
Last week, on Trinity Sunday, I reflected a little on a lecture I had heard Cardinal Walter Kasper give in Oxford the previous Monday. Well, today, on the Feast of Corpus Christi, I would like to begin by going back to that lecture and quoting, word for word this time, something the Cardinal said in it. It’s not the easiest of passages. But you are all intelligent people. So here goes! “Because the 19th and early 20th century promises of salvation in this world – the Western ideology of progress and the marxist utopia of a classless society – have proved deceptive, - in other words, they have not delivered the happiness they promised - the so-called ‘mega-narratives’ – by which the Cardinal means the big solutions or the big explanations – are no longer trusted, neither the idealistic nor the materialistic interpretations of reality. Instead, we find the ‘weak thought’ of post-modernism, which admits defeat in the face of mankind’s great questions, including the question of God, declaring itself to be incompetent or indifferent. The truth no longer exists, only truths. So the self-assuredness of militant atheism has turned into a resigned defeatism, scepticism, agnosticism, often even nihilism” (the idea that nothing has any meaning) all of which, the Cardinal says, “has left behind an inner spiritual void.” Or, as the first reading today put it, ‘Man does not live on bread alone but on everything that comes from the mouth of God.’
What Cardinal Kasper and the author of today’s first reading from the book of Deuteronomy are saying, each in his own way, is that nothing material; no ‘ism’ – neither Marxism, capitalism or any other theory that claims to be the answer to society’s big questions - can do what it says on the tin. They will all sooner or later let us down for the simple reason that we are made for something greater and only that greater thing will, in the end, satisfy us. We are spiritual beings, created to share the life of God, which means that anything based on material things alone will ultimately turn to dust and slip through our fingers if it does not have a spiritual element to it. And the evidence for this is everywhere. In the West, materialism and market forces have been allowed to run riot and, as a direct result, the very future of the planet is under threat. All over the world the rich become richer at the expense of the poor and those who ‘have’ dominate and exploit those who ‘have not’ causing tensions to build up which are already resulting in terrorism and violence and will do so increasingly as, in the future, countries fight to control the world’s diminishing resources. And in the midst of all this, deprived of genuine spirituality, people rush around frantically seeking meaning in things like fame, money, success, material possessions and so on. And when these fail to deliver, as they inevitably will, the void Cardinal Kasper speaks of deepens. And so we rush around, even more frantically, seeking refuge in the very things that have already failed us. And so, as the song says, ‘when will they ever learn?’ ..that we really do not live on bread alone: that there is so much more to life than that.
The more, of course, is Jesus. He is the Word that comes from the mouth of God, the Word made Flesh living among us, and it is his teaching, contained in the Gospels, which offers us the spiritual nourishment we need if we are to live fully human lives. And if, at this point, I tell a story against the Church of Scotland, there is no offence intended. The story, in fact, is about a Church of Scotland minister and when I have told other ministers about it they have always seen the truth in it.
The minister in question was Professor Allan Lewis who, at the time, was part of the theology faculty of Edinburgh University. For some reason he was in my house in Sanquhar for a meeting of the local ministers’ fraternal and in the course of the discussion said something about his own Church which I have never forgotten. ‘The Word was made flesh’ he said, ‘And the Church of Scotland turned it back into word again’ a comment which enabled me that day to see something with great clarity. There’s no doubt that the great debt we owe the Church of Scotland is the way, over centuries, it has kept bible, the Word of God, at the centre of Scottish life. But there is no doubt either that our own great contribution has been the Eucharist. The two, of course, belong together – Word and Eucharist, the two parts of the Mass – but only now, after centuries of emphasising one at the expense of the other – Protestants with their bibles and Catholics with our missals – are we learning to give each their proper place. And so, on this feast of Corpus Christi, I invite you to recognize the incredible gift which is the Eucharist, a gift that generations of Catholics here in Scotland have treasured and often suffered for. Some of my own earliest memories are stories about my mother’s mother trecking through three feet of snow to attend morning Mass, stories which undoubtedly planted in me the seeds of the vocation I exercise here each week.
Properly understood – and we don’t need to go into obscure explanations of it – the Eucharist is the most amazing gift from God. In it, Jesus, the Word made Flesh, continues to be present among us under the appearances of bread and wine. His flesh, as we heard him say today, is real food, his blood real drink. When we receive Holy Communion Jesus lives in us and because he lives in us, we draw life from him. He nourishes that spiritual part of us without which we cannot live fully human lives and, bearing in mind that not only does God work in mysterious ways but that the Spirit blows where it wills, only those who, in the very broadest sense, are nourished by him can have live in us.
I mentioned my Grannie a few moments ago. But her story is repeated all over Scotland. I think of the priests who, during penal times, risked their lives to provide Mass for Catholics in this country. I think of the people who, in their turn, risked so much to attend those Masses. Our ancestors in the faith really did hunger for the Eucharist and would do almost anything for it. It meant everything to them and, on the feast of Corpus Christi it’s important that we remember both them and the sacrifices they made. But above all, it is important that we honour their memory by treasuring the Mass which meant so much to them.
BIDDING PRAYERS
In an age where, for many people, seeing is believing and, in our arrogance, we think that a thing can only be true if it makes sense to us, we pray for something of the faith which, for more than a thousand years, made the feast of Corpus Christi a day of celebration and rejoicing all over Europe. We ask God to stir in us something of the sense of wonder at the mystery of Jesus’s real presence in the Eucharist which which filled the hearts of people over so many centuries………………...Lord hear us
The real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist is not something to be looked at from a distance. It is something dynamic and alive with power to influence the lives of those who share in it. In receiving the body and blood of Jesus in Holy Communion, men and women of faith become more and more like the one they receive. We are nourished and strengthened to go out into the world as witnesses to Jesus presence there and we pray for the insight we need to understand this today……...Lord hear us
To be a witness to Jesus in the world is to live according to his teaching. In this way, we are called to show the men and women of our time that this teaching is as relevant today as it has always been. It means reaching out to those in need. It means radical change in the way live. It means addressing the great problems of hunger and poverty throughout the world. It means working for peace. And so we pray that, every time we come here for Mass, we will have an ever deepening understanding of what it is we are doing……………………………Lord hear us
At the heart of Mass lie the Word and the Eucharist. Sadly, one part of the Christian Church in Scotland has spent centuries emphasising the Word while the other part emphasised the Eucharist. And so we pray that, in our own time, we will continue to discover the intimate relationship between these two great pillars of the Christian Life, so that, noursihed by both Word and Eucharist we can, together rather than apart be more effective witnesses to the Gospel in Scotland………Lord hear us
Although we can look back today with appreciation and gratitude to those who, often at great cost to themselves, kept the celebration of the Mass alive in Scotland during very difficult times, we also have to recognize that the world today has changed dramatically. Thousands of young Catholics in Scotland know nothing of the faith that sustained those heroic men and women. Born into a world dominated by materialsim and consumersim, Mass means nothing to them. And so we ask God to guide us as we struggle to come to terms with this new situation………...Lord hear us
And we pray in a particular way for the young people who come this year for Confirmation and First Communion. We pray for a deep sense of our responsibility to them and for the commitment we need to be faithful to the promises we so often make whenever children come to us for Baptism, Confirmation or Eucharist. May we never see their presence among us as an intrusion into our Sunday Liturgy but as a central part of what it means to be a parish community…………………..Lord hear us
What Cardinal Kasper and the author of today’s first reading from the book of Deuteronomy are saying, each in his own way, is that nothing material; no ‘ism’ – neither Marxism, capitalism or any other theory that claims to be the answer to society’s big questions - can do what it says on the tin. They will all sooner or later let us down for the simple reason that we are made for something greater and only that greater thing will, in the end, satisfy us. We are spiritual beings, created to share the life of God, which means that anything based on material things alone will ultimately turn to dust and slip through our fingers if it does not have a spiritual element to it. And the evidence for this is everywhere. In the West, materialism and market forces have been allowed to run riot and, as a direct result, the very future of the planet is under threat. All over the world the rich become richer at the expense of the poor and those who ‘have’ dominate and exploit those who ‘have not’ causing tensions to build up which are already resulting in terrorism and violence and will do so increasingly as, in the future, countries fight to control the world’s diminishing resources. And in the midst of all this, deprived of genuine spirituality, people rush around frantically seeking meaning in things like fame, money, success, material possessions and so on. And when these fail to deliver, as they inevitably will, the void Cardinal Kasper speaks of deepens. And so we rush around, even more frantically, seeking refuge in the very things that have already failed us. And so, as the song says, ‘when will they ever learn?’ ..that we really do not live on bread alone: that there is so much more to life than that.
The more, of course, is Jesus. He is the Word that comes from the mouth of God, the Word made Flesh living among us, and it is his teaching, contained in the Gospels, which offers us the spiritual nourishment we need if we are to live fully human lives. And if, at this point, I tell a story against the Church of Scotland, there is no offence intended. The story, in fact, is about a Church of Scotland minister and when I have told other ministers about it they have always seen the truth in it.
The minister in question was Professor Allan Lewis who, at the time, was part of the theology faculty of Edinburgh University. For some reason he was in my house in Sanquhar for a meeting of the local ministers’ fraternal and in the course of the discussion said something about his own Church which I have never forgotten. ‘The Word was made flesh’ he said, ‘And the Church of Scotland turned it back into word again’ a comment which enabled me that day to see something with great clarity. There’s no doubt that the great debt we owe the Church of Scotland is the way, over centuries, it has kept bible, the Word of God, at the centre of Scottish life. But there is no doubt either that our own great contribution has been the Eucharist. The two, of course, belong together – Word and Eucharist, the two parts of the Mass – but only now, after centuries of emphasising one at the expense of the other – Protestants with their bibles and Catholics with our missals – are we learning to give each their proper place. And so, on this feast of Corpus Christi, I invite you to recognize the incredible gift which is the Eucharist, a gift that generations of Catholics here in Scotland have treasured and often suffered for. Some of my own earliest memories are stories about my mother’s mother trecking through three feet of snow to attend morning Mass, stories which undoubtedly planted in me the seeds of the vocation I exercise here each week.
Properly understood – and we don’t need to go into obscure explanations of it – the Eucharist is the most amazing gift from God. In it, Jesus, the Word made Flesh, continues to be present among us under the appearances of bread and wine. His flesh, as we heard him say today, is real food, his blood real drink. When we receive Holy Communion Jesus lives in us and because he lives in us, we draw life from him. He nourishes that spiritual part of us without which we cannot live fully human lives and, bearing in mind that not only does God work in mysterious ways but that the Spirit blows where it wills, only those who, in the very broadest sense, are nourished by him can have live in us.
I mentioned my Grannie a few moments ago. But her story is repeated all over Scotland. I think of the priests who, during penal times, risked their lives to provide Mass for Catholics in this country. I think of the people who, in their turn, risked so much to attend those Masses. Our ancestors in the faith really did hunger for the Eucharist and would do almost anything for it. It meant everything to them and, on the feast of Corpus Christi it’s important that we remember both them and the sacrifices they made. But above all, it is important that we honour their memory by treasuring the Mass which meant so much to them.
BIDDING PRAYERS
In an age where, for many people, seeing is believing and, in our arrogance, we think that a thing can only be true if it makes sense to us, we pray for something of the faith which, for more than a thousand years, made the feast of Corpus Christi a day of celebration and rejoicing all over Europe. We ask God to stir in us something of the sense of wonder at the mystery of Jesus’s real presence in the Eucharist which which filled the hearts of people over so many centuries………………...Lord hear us
The real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist is not something to be looked at from a distance. It is something dynamic and alive with power to influence the lives of those who share in it. In receiving the body and blood of Jesus in Holy Communion, men and women of faith become more and more like the one they receive. We are nourished and strengthened to go out into the world as witnesses to Jesus presence there and we pray for the insight we need to understand this today……...Lord hear us
To be a witness to Jesus in the world is to live according to his teaching. In this way, we are called to show the men and women of our time that this teaching is as relevant today as it has always been. It means reaching out to those in need. It means radical change in the way live. It means addressing the great problems of hunger and poverty throughout the world. It means working for peace. And so we pray that, every time we come here for Mass, we will have an ever deepening understanding of what it is we are doing……………………………Lord hear us
At the heart of Mass lie the Word and the Eucharist. Sadly, one part of the Christian Church in Scotland has spent centuries emphasising the Word while the other part emphasised the Eucharist. And so we pray that, in our own time, we will continue to discover the intimate relationship between these two great pillars of the Christian Life, so that, noursihed by both Word and Eucharist we can, together rather than apart be more effective witnesses to the Gospel in Scotland………Lord hear us
Although we can look back today with appreciation and gratitude to those who, often at great cost to themselves, kept the celebration of the Mass alive in Scotland during very difficult times, we also have to recognize that the world today has changed dramatically. Thousands of young Catholics in Scotland know nothing of the faith that sustained those heroic men and women. Born into a world dominated by materialsim and consumersim, Mass means nothing to them. And so we ask God to guide us as we struggle to come to terms with this new situation………...Lord hear us
And we pray in a particular way for the young people who come this year for Confirmation and First Communion. We pray for a deep sense of our responsibility to them and for the commitment we need to be faithful to the promises we so often make whenever children come to us for Baptism, Confirmation or Eucharist. May we never see their presence among us as an intrusion into our Sunday Liturgy but as a central part of what it means to be a parish community…………………..Lord hear us
Friday, 16 May 2008
Trinity Sunday
Although I was busy enough seeing six people every day during the retreat last week in Oxford, I still had more free time than usual and found myself, among other things, attending the inaugural John Henry/Cardinal Newman Memorial Lecture in St John’s College. One of the sisters in the community I was living with tutors at the university and was able to get me a ticket, or more accurately in such a posh establishment, an invitation. The lecture was sponsored by the Jesuit, Dominican, Benedictine, and Oratorian communties in Oxford and the speaker was Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Commission for the Promotion of Christian Unity and a member of the International Theological Commission, an advisory body to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith whose job it is to keep people in the Church in line when it comes to matters of dogma. Cardinal Kasper himself is a very emminent theologian who was considered by some as a possible candidate for the papacy when his friend and countryman, Joseph Ratzinger, was elected Pope in 2005.
The title of the Cardinal’s lecture was, The Timeliness of Speaking about God, his central point, as I understood him, being that, instead of discussing what he would see as less central issues, by which I took him to mean things like women priests, celibacy and so on, theologians, and through them the whole Church, should be addressing themselves today, first and foremost, to speaking to the modern world about God. That, after all, is ultimately what we are about and the Church can only have relevance in the modern world, he argued, if it speaks about what it knows and about which the world has a right to expect that we have something meaningful and helpful to say.
But what did he want us to say about God? Well, essentially, he wanted us to speak about the real God. He didn’t exactly use words like superstition and religious mumbo-jumbo – the whole thing was too polite and academic for that – but I am sure that is what he had in mind when he said at one point, “In the piety of the Church God has often been tamed and made innocuous; the living God who appeared to Moses in the burning bush” and whom we met this morning in the first reading, “is barely recognizable in the ‘dear God’ of pious parlance.” words which made me wish you were all there to hear them so that you would know that I am not the only one who says these things. But before he spoke about this real God, he had a few words to say on the subject of atheism.
To be honest, I was slightly disappointed that he mentioned Richard Dawkins and his book, The God Delusion, at this point. But I suppose he did so because of the Oxford connection. Dawkins lives in Oxford. I don’t believe, however, that he deserves to be taken so seriously given that what he says and what he makes a great deal of money out of saying is so intellecually shallow. And Cardinal Kasper acknowledged this. He describes the kind of stuff Dawkins pedals as atheistic fundamentalism which, to quote his exact words, ‘reiterates in a heavy-handed and distorted manner 19th century positions which have long been considered a thing of the past.’ He also quotes a critic of Dawkins, himself a scientist, who speaks of the atheism delusion. But what I found most helpful in this part of the lecture was what the Cardinal had to say about what seems to me to be one of the great signs of times in which we are living. The actual quote contains some big words – you have to speak like that in Oxford – but basically what he was saying was that the two great promises of salvation the 19th and early 20th centuries had to offer the world – the idea of inevitable progress and the Marxist notion of utopia on earth - had failed to deliver, leading in our own day to the kind of defeatism, scepticism and agnosticism which many feel in the face of the great problems facing humanity and which seem to me to lie at the root of problems like drugs and violence in our society. And it is in the face of all this, the Cardinal argued, that the Church has to speak to the world again about God. But what God are we talking about and what exactly is it we have to say to people about him….or even her?
Well, essentially he is speaking of the God we hear about today. There are long difficult passages in the lecture about the Trinity, but what it boils down to is that we must speak to the world about a God who is close, a God who cares about the world and its people, a God who heals and forgives, the God, in effect, whom Moses, in the first reading, referred to as, ‘A God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness.’ There is no place in the Church today for the harsh God whom many of us met as children. He was always a projection of our own deepest fears, never did exist and does not exist now. The real God is the one Jesus speaks of today, the God who ‘loved the world so much that he gave us his only Son’ who came into the world,’not to condemn the world but so that, through him, the world might be saved.’ This is the deeply positive, hopeful, encouraging message we are called to proclaim at this time and so there can be no place in it for anything that event hints of condemnation of the world, young people or anyone else. As Cardinal Kasper said towards the end of his lecture; ‘If theology speaks in a new and fresh way of the living liberating God who is love then it will render a service to life, freedom, justice and love…and open up perspectives of hope.’
At this point I found my mind turning to, of all places, Kilmarnock prison. I was aware of what many would consider the rather strange pride I often feel in the fact that there are so many Catholics in our jails. And then, the next day, in a review of a book about a nun who belongs to the same congregation as the ones I was with, I found a lovely explanation of it. Speaking of why, born a Jew, she had become a Catholic while a student at Cambridge, she said that she felt there was room for her in this Church because it was ‘so studded with human failure and sinfulness…not a club for nice people.’ Well, all I can say to that is, ‘long may it continue.’
BIDDING PRAYERS
On this feast of the Holy Trinity we pray that the world of our time will come to know the only God who exists; The God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness whom we heard about in today’s first reading. We pray that, as the world makes its way through this new millennium, the human race will finally leave behind false gods who are no more than projections of our own deepest fears and come to know the God who loves us………....Lord hear us
There are very good historical reasons why atheism has become the religion of our time, but atheism itself is a deeply flawed way of thinking rooted in false understandings of what faith in God means. Largely it is a result of years when religion had more to do with superstition and magic than the real God and we pray for the grace to leave these harmful aberrations behind and learn to speak again to the world about the God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit and who loves the world more than it could ever know……………………………………………Lord hear us
The failure of the great ideologies of modern times, such as Marxism, capitalism, socialism, atheism, consumerism and others, to satisfy the deepest needs of humanity has left a huge void in our modern culture. Into this void have come the pessimsim, despair and hopelessness which lie at the root of so many of the problems we face today. And so we pray for the grace to understand the world we live in so that we can begin to speak words of hope and encouragement to it………Lord hear us
If we are to speak words of hope and encouragement to the modern world then there must be no hint of condemnation in the way we think about it. Jesus, we heard today, came, not to condemn the world, but that it might have eternal life, and any follower of his must have that same attitude. And so we ask God once again to heal us of the many negative, critical and pessimsitic ways of thinking about the world which are so often to be found in church-going people………………….Lord hear us
Many young people today have simply heard of so many things that we just take for granted. They know nothing about God or Jesus. Many have never heard simple things like the parable of the Good Samaritan or the story of the Prodigal son. What churches are about and what goes on in them is a complete mystery to them. And so we pray that, before they reject God and write off the things of faith, they will come to a deeper understanding of what they mean…..……………..Lord hear us
We have been hearing today about Cardinal Kasper, a senior figure in the Vatican and a man who has influence with the Pope himself. And so we pray for all who hold such positions of power and influence in the Church that, open to the movement of God’s Holy Spirit, they will do everything they can to make the Church at this time a more and more effective and credible instrument for the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the modern world………………Lord hear us
The title of the Cardinal’s lecture was, The Timeliness of Speaking about God, his central point, as I understood him, being that, instead of discussing what he would see as less central issues, by which I took him to mean things like women priests, celibacy and so on, theologians, and through them the whole Church, should be addressing themselves today, first and foremost, to speaking to the modern world about God. That, after all, is ultimately what we are about and the Church can only have relevance in the modern world, he argued, if it speaks about what it knows and about which the world has a right to expect that we have something meaningful and helpful to say.
But what did he want us to say about God? Well, essentially, he wanted us to speak about the real God. He didn’t exactly use words like superstition and religious mumbo-jumbo – the whole thing was too polite and academic for that – but I am sure that is what he had in mind when he said at one point, “In the piety of the Church God has often been tamed and made innocuous; the living God who appeared to Moses in the burning bush” and whom we met this morning in the first reading, “is barely recognizable in the ‘dear God’ of pious parlance.” words which made me wish you were all there to hear them so that you would know that I am not the only one who says these things. But before he spoke about this real God, he had a few words to say on the subject of atheism.
To be honest, I was slightly disappointed that he mentioned Richard Dawkins and his book, The God Delusion, at this point. But I suppose he did so because of the Oxford connection. Dawkins lives in Oxford. I don’t believe, however, that he deserves to be taken so seriously given that what he says and what he makes a great deal of money out of saying is so intellecually shallow. And Cardinal Kasper acknowledged this. He describes the kind of stuff Dawkins pedals as atheistic fundamentalism which, to quote his exact words, ‘reiterates in a heavy-handed and distorted manner 19th century positions which have long been considered a thing of the past.’ He also quotes a critic of Dawkins, himself a scientist, who speaks of the atheism delusion. But what I found most helpful in this part of the lecture was what the Cardinal had to say about what seems to me to be one of the great signs of times in which we are living. The actual quote contains some big words – you have to speak like that in Oxford – but basically what he was saying was that the two great promises of salvation the 19th and early 20th centuries had to offer the world – the idea of inevitable progress and the Marxist notion of utopia on earth - had failed to deliver, leading in our own day to the kind of defeatism, scepticism and agnosticism which many feel in the face of the great problems facing humanity and which seem to me to lie at the root of problems like drugs and violence in our society. And it is in the face of all this, the Cardinal argued, that the Church has to speak to the world again about God. But what God are we talking about and what exactly is it we have to say to people about him….or even her?
Well, essentially he is speaking of the God we hear about today. There are long difficult passages in the lecture about the Trinity, but what it boils down to is that we must speak to the world about a God who is close, a God who cares about the world and its people, a God who heals and forgives, the God, in effect, whom Moses, in the first reading, referred to as, ‘A God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness.’ There is no place in the Church today for the harsh God whom many of us met as children. He was always a projection of our own deepest fears, never did exist and does not exist now. The real God is the one Jesus speaks of today, the God who ‘loved the world so much that he gave us his only Son’ who came into the world,’not to condemn the world but so that, through him, the world might be saved.’ This is the deeply positive, hopeful, encouraging message we are called to proclaim at this time and so there can be no place in it for anything that event hints of condemnation of the world, young people or anyone else. As Cardinal Kasper said towards the end of his lecture; ‘If theology speaks in a new and fresh way of the living liberating God who is love then it will render a service to life, freedom, justice and love…and open up perspectives of hope.’
At this point I found my mind turning to, of all places, Kilmarnock prison. I was aware of what many would consider the rather strange pride I often feel in the fact that there are so many Catholics in our jails. And then, the next day, in a review of a book about a nun who belongs to the same congregation as the ones I was with, I found a lovely explanation of it. Speaking of why, born a Jew, she had become a Catholic while a student at Cambridge, she said that she felt there was room for her in this Church because it was ‘so studded with human failure and sinfulness…not a club for nice people.’ Well, all I can say to that is, ‘long may it continue.’
BIDDING PRAYERS
On this feast of the Holy Trinity we pray that the world of our time will come to know the only God who exists; The God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness whom we heard about in today’s first reading. We pray that, as the world makes its way through this new millennium, the human race will finally leave behind false gods who are no more than projections of our own deepest fears and come to know the God who loves us………....Lord hear us
There are very good historical reasons why atheism has become the religion of our time, but atheism itself is a deeply flawed way of thinking rooted in false understandings of what faith in God means. Largely it is a result of years when religion had more to do with superstition and magic than the real God and we pray for the grace to leave these harmful aberrations behind and learn to speak again to the world about the God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit and who loves the world more than it could ever know……………………………………………Lord hear us
The failure of the great ideologies of modern times, such as Marxism, capitalism, socialism, atheism, consumerism and others, to satisfy the deepest needs of humanity has left a huge void in our modern culture. Into this void have come the pessimsim, despair and hopelessness which lie at the root of so many of the problems we face today. And so we pray for the grace to understand the world we live in so that we can begin to speak words of hope and encouragement to it………Lord hear us
If we are to speak words of hope and encouragement to the modern world then there must be no hint of condemnation in the way we think about it. Jesus, we heard today, came, not to condemn the world, but that it might have eternal life, and any follower of his must have that same attitude. And so we ask God once again to heal us of the many negative, critical and pessimsitic ways of thinking about the world which are so often to be found in church-going people………………….Lord hear us
Many young people today have simply heard of so many things that we just take for granted. They know nothing about God or Jesus. Many have never heard simple things like the parable of the Good Samaritan or the story of the Prodigal son. What churches are about and what goes on in them is a complete mystery to them. And so we pray that, before they reject God and write off the things of faith, they will come to a deeper understanding of what they mean…..……………..Lord hear us
We have been hearing today about Cardinal Kasper, a senior figure in the Vatican and a man who has influence with the Pope himself. And so we pray for all who hold such positions of power and influence in the Church that, open to the movement of God’s Holy Spirit, they will do everything they can to make the Church at this time a more and more effective and credible instrument for the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the modern world………………Lord hear us
Saturday, 3 May 2008
7th Sunday of Easter A
As soon as I read today’s readings I became aware of a tension in them that runs through the whole of the christian life. Tension, in the strict sense of the word - as in, for example, a rope or a chain that is pulled tight - is the result of two opposite forces pulling in different directions. Used in the sense we are using it, the Oxford English Dictionary defines tension as, “the relationship between ideas or qualities with conflicting demands or implications,” examples of which abound in our society today. One very topical one at the moment among politicians is the tension between national security and the civil rights of the individual. Those who emphasise national security want to pass laws which would allow the police to hold terrorist suspects without charge for much longer periods than has been the case up to now, while those whose priority is civil rights are against this. There is truth on both sides and its when apparently conflicting truths enter into dialogue with each other that tension becomes creative. So where is the tension in today’s readings and how creative is it?
Well the basic tension is between the first reading and the psalm, but it is reflected in both the other passages as well. In Acts, St Luke tells us that after the Ascension the apostles went back to Jerusalem, a short distance away. But behind this deceptively simple statement lies a profound truth about the whole of Christianity. Jerusalem, with what one of the hymns we sing calls its shops and stalls and alley-ways and busy crowded streets, is a symbol of the world. We will not find Jesus, as the angel had earlier told the apostles, by staring into the sky. Faith is not, as Marx said it was, the opium of the people, a cunning plan designed to keep the minds of the poor off the causes of the poverty and so stop them doing something about it. Christianity, as is clear from Jesus prayer for his disciples in today’s gospel, is about the most profound involvement with the world and everything in it. I know I have quoted it many times before, but I want to do so again today. Because this is what the Second Vatican Council had to say on the subject in its final document, the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World: ‘The joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the men and women of our time, especially of those who are poor or afflicted in any way, are the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ as well. Nothing that is genuinely human fails to find an echo in their heart…That is why christians cherish a feeling of deep solidarity with the world and its history.’
No sooner had we heard this, however, than we were exposed in the responsorial psalm to another idea with what the Oxford Dictionary called ‘conflicting demands or implications.’ This time, instead of that deep commitment to the world, there is an expressed desire to leave it. ‘I am sure I shall see the Lord’s goodness in the land of the living’ we sang in the response, and the second verse said ‘There is one thing I ask of the Lord, for this I long, to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.’ And this is part of our tradition too. St Paul in one of his letters agonizes over whether it is better to carry on working in the world or leave it and be united with Christ. St Teresa of Avila too, in one of her poems, which obviously sounds better in the original Spanish than it does in English, writes, ‘I die because I do not die.’ And how often have you heard people at a funeral say, ‘Well, at least he or she has gone to a better place’ reminding us that, as Jesus himself says, we are in the world but not of it. So how do we manage this tension, this pulling in opposite directions, one towards this world and the other towards the next, and turn it into a tension that is creative? Well, there is one aspect of the recent history of the Church which shows us how this can happen, one which touched my own life in a way which could have meant that I never set foot in St Matthew’s.
In 1972, you see, I was within months of going to the missions in South America. But, at the very last minute, Bishop McGee, for reasons I have never fully understood, asked me if I would postpone it. And so it never happened. And looking back, I have to say I am glad it didn’t. Basically, I was too inexperienced at the time to go to a continent where the struggle between Rome and Liberation Theology was just getting underway. Faced with the abject poverty of millions, many in the Latin American Church turned to political action, and to Marxism in particular, as the solution. They were fed up with what they saw as pie in the sky religion and some, inspired as many were at the time by revolutionaries like Che Guevara, actually came to see violence as the solution and joined the guerilla movements. And so began a struggle with the institutional Church which is only resolving itself now. As far as Rome was concerned this was all wrong. Their argument was that true liberation can never come from any particular political philosophy and even less from the barrel of a gun. Many good men and women, like the ones St Peter is writing to in the second reading, suffered for their commitment to the poor, either at the hands of the Roman Curia or right- wing groups supported by the CIA, and for many years things were not good.
But gradually, as the years have passed, the tension has become more creative. The extreme positions taken up on both sides have softened, as Rome has learned about the demands for social justice and people in Latin America have seen the shortcomings of purely political solutions to problems. Slowly but surely, the Spirit has done his work, which is to keep moving us on. There are still many tensions in the Church, between conservatives and liberals, between those who want to control from the centre and those who want more local decision-making, between those who want married priests or women priests and those who don’t, and so on.
And I just invite you today to recognize this and understand that, in the end, all we can do with these tensions, whether in the world, in the Church or in our individual lives, is live with them and let them do their creative work in us.
BIDDING PRAYERS
We begin today by praying for the great and beautiful world in which we live. Science struggles to explain how it all began but faith tells us where it will all end. The whole of creation is engaged in an epic journey through time which will only end when everything that exists is brought together in Christ. And so we pray for a deep sense of the providence of God at work deep within everything that happens both in the world and in our own individual lives…………………Lord hear us
We pray, too, for the Church. Sent out into the world to be a sign of the presence of Jesus in every age, it travels through history struggling to come to terms with its own weakness, a weakness that is no more than a reflection of the weakness in each one of us. And so we pray that it will be always open to the renewing and healing power of God, striving at all times to be more and more like the Jesus whose face it is called to show to the world……………………………Lord hear us
Eternal life, we hear in today’s gospel, is to know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent. It is not something we only experience beyond death. It begins now as we come to know God and learn to love as God loves. Knowledge of the one true God transforms the way we see everything, and we ask the Spirit to stir this knowledge in us, enabling us to leave behind forever ways of thinking about God which have more to do with superstition and magic than genuine faith……….Lord hear us
In the second reading, St Peter is writing to first century christians who are suffering for their faith. He encourages them to remain faithful, reminding them that, as we heard him say last week, it is better to suffer for doing what is right than for what is wrong. And so we pray for the courage we need to do what is right in every circumstance regardless of what others around us may be doing, especially if this involves suffering or rejection of any kind……….Lord hear us
And we pray in a special way for people who live in poor under-developed parts of the world. We pray, too, for a deep sense of what life is like for them. We are currently complaining about the way the prices of food and oil are going up, but for millions of our fellow human beings these things means, not just inconvenience, but hunger and starvation And so we pray that the world will respond to their need before the world’s poor have no option left but violence……………….Lord hear us
The psalmist today longs to live in the house of the Lord. And so we pray this week for all who have died that the words of the psalm will be fulfilled in them. We pray, too, for a deep faith in the reality of the Resurrection, a faith which, far from being an excuse for not living our lives to the full here and now, will encourage us to engage with the reality of daily living, allowing the tensions and challenges which go with the human condition to become creative in our lives………..Lord hear us
Well the basic tension is between the first reading and the psalm, but it is reflected in both the other passages as well. In Acts, St Luke tells us that after the Ascension the apostles went back to Jerusalem, a short distance away. But behind this deceptively simple statement lies a profound truth about the whole of Christianity. Jerusalem, with what one of the hymns we sing calls its shops and stalls and alley-ways and busy crowded streets, is a symbol of the world. We will not find Jesus, as the angel had earlier told the apostles, by staring into the sky. Faith is not, as Marx said it was, the opium of the people, a cunning plan designed to keep the minds of the poor off the causes of the poverty and so stop them doing something about it. Christianity, as is clear from Jesus prayer for his disciples in today’s gospel, is about the most profound involvement with the world and everything in it. I know I have quoted it many times before, but I want to do so again today. Because this is what the Second Vatican Council had to say on the subject in its final document, the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World: ‘The joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the men and women of our time, especially of those who are poor or afflicted in any way, are the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ as well. Nothing that is genuinely human fails to find an echo in their heart…That is why christians cherish a feeling of deep solidarity with the world and its history.’
No sooner had we heard this, however, than we were exposed in the responsorial psalm to another idea with what the Oxford Dictionary called ‘conflicting demands or implications.’ This time, instead of that deep commitment to the world, there is an expressed desire to leave it. ‘I am sure I shall see the Lord’s goodness in the land of the living’ we sang in the response, and the second verse said ‘There is one thing I ask of the Lord, for this I long, to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.’ And this is part of our tradition too. St Paul in one of his letters agonizes over whether it is better to carry on working in the world or leave it and be united with Christ. St Teresa of Avila too, in one of her poems, which obviously sounds better in the original Spanish than it does in English, writes, ‘I die because I do not die.’ And how often have you heard people at a funeral say, ‘Well, at least he or she has gone to a better place’ reminding us that, as Jesus himself says, we are in the world but not of it. So how do we manage this tension, this pulling in opposite directions, one towards this world and the other towards the next, and turn it into a tension that is creative? Well, there is one aspect of the recent history of the Church which shows us how this can happen, one which touched my own life in a way which could have meant that I never set foot in St Matthew’s.
In 1972, you see, I was within months of going to the missions in South America. But, at the very last minute, Bishop McGee, for reasons I have never fully understood, asked me if I would postpone it. And so it never happened. And looking back, I have to say I am glad it didn’t. Basically, I was too inexperienced at the time to go to a continent where the struggle between Rome and Liberation Theology was just getting underway. Faced with the abject poverty of millions, many in the Latin American Church turned to political action, and to Marxism in particular, as the solution. They were fed up with what they saw as pie in the sky religion and some, inspired as many were at the time by revolutionaries like Che Guevara, actually came to see violence as the solution and joined the guerilla movements. And so began a struggle with the institutional Church which is only resolving itself now. As far as Rome was concerned this was all wrong. Their argument was that true liberation can never come from any particular political philosophy and even less from the barrel of a gun. Many good men and women, like the ones St Peter is writing to in the second reading, suffered for their commitment to the poor, either at the hands of the Roman Curia or right- wing groups supported by the CIA, and for many years things were not good.
But gradually, as the years have passed, the tension has become more creative. The extreme positions taken up on both sides have softened, as Rome has learned about the demands for social justice and people in Latin America have seen the shortcomings of purely political solutions to problems. Slowly but surely, the Spirit has done his work, which is to keep moving us on. There are still many tensions in the Church, between conservatives and liberals, between those who want to control from the centre and those who want more local decision-making, between those who want married priests or women priests and those who don’t, and so on.
And I just invite you today to recognize this and understand that, in the end, all we can do with these tensions, whether in the world, in the Church or in our individual lives, is live with them and let them do their creative work in us.
BIDDING PRAYERS
We begin today by praying for the great and beautiful world in which we live. Science struggles to explain how it all began but faith tells us where it will all end. The whole of creation is engaged in an epic journey through time which will only end when everything that exists is brought together in Christ. And so we pray for a deep sense of the providence of God at work deep within everything that happens both in the world and in our own individual lives…………………Lord hear us
We pray, too, for the Church. Sent out into the world to be a sign of the presence of Jesus in every age, it travels through history struggling to come to terms with its own weakness, a weakness that is no more than a reflection of the weakness in each one of us. And so we pray that it will be always open to the renewing and healing power of God, striving at all times to be more and more like the Jesus whose face it is called to show to the world……………………………Lord hear us
Eternal life, we hear in today’s gospel, is to know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent. It is not something we only experience beyond death. It begins now as we come to know God and learn to love as God loves. Knowledge of the one true God transforms the way we see everything, and we ask the Spirit to stir this knowledge in us, enabling us to leave behind forever ways of thinking about God which have more to do with superstition and magic than genuine faith……….Lord hear us
In the second reading, St Peter is writing to first century christians who are suffering for their faith. He encourages them to remain faithful, reminding them that, as we heard him say last week, it is better to suffer for doing what is right than for what is wrong. And so we pray for the courage we need to do what is right in every circumstance regardless of what others around us may be doing, especially if this involves suffering or rejection of any kind……….Lord hear us
And we pray in a special way for people who live in poor under-developed parts of the world. We pray, too, for a deep sense of what life is like for them. We are currently complaining about the way the prices of food and oil are going up, but for millions of our fellow human beings these things means, not just inconvenience, but hunger and starvation And so we pray that the world will respond to their need before the world’s poor have no option left but violence……………….Lord hear us
The psalmist today longs to live in the house of the Lord. And so we pray this week for all who have died that the words of the psalm will be fulfilled in them. We pray, too, for a deep faith in the reality of the Resurrection, a faith which, far from being an excuse for not living our lives to the full here and now, will encourage us to engage with the reality of daily living, allowing the tensions and challenges which go with the human condition to become creative in our lives………..Lord hear us
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