I wonder what you made of all that stuff in the first reading today: about the angel filling Peter’s cell with light and leading him past two separate guard posts, through the iron gate at the entrance to the prison and out into the street, having taken the time to stop and have him put on his belt and sandals and cover himself with his cloak. Do you believe all this? Do you think it really happened? Well, although they appear very similar, these are, in fact, two very different question. And so my own answer is yes, I do believe it and no, I don’t think it happened. So how is this possible? How can I say ‘yes’ to one question and ‘no’ to the other? Surely if I say I believe it then it must have happened. Well, no, and the reason takes us to the heart of the Catholic Church’s understanding of Scripture.
One of the great dangers of our time is religious fundamentalism, and at the heart of Christian religious fundamentalism lies a literal interpretation of the bible which leads to the kind of quite disturbing attitudes we have seen in recent years among, for example, people on the religious right in America including President Bush himself. And so it may come as a surprise to know that the Catholic Church also believes that our reading of Scripture must always be based on what the relevant documents call ‘the literal meaning.’ What the Church means by this, however, and what biblical fundamentalist mean by it are very different things. For the fundamentalists, the literal meaning is what the words say. For the Church the literal meaning is what was in the mind of the person who wrote the words, the most obvious example being the Genesis story of creation and the misunderstanding that has surrounded it over the years. In America, creationists want to ban the teaching of evolution in schools because, they say, it ‘contradicts’ the book of Genesis. But this is absurd since the author of Genesis was not remotely interested in this. His purpose, as we have seen many times before, was entirely different. It was not science he was writing, but theology, and so to look for answers to scientific questions in what he says is ridiculous. And that, when applied to the first reading, is why I can say ‘yes’ I believe what it says and ‘no’ I don’t believe it actually happened.
What the author, St Luke in this case, is saying is that the Word of God cannot be chained up. Today’s passage is from chapter twelve. But already, in chapter seven, we have heard of the death of Stephen, the first martyr, and in chapter nine of the conversion of St Paul on his way to arrest followers of Jesus in Damascus. Acts is filled with evidence of people who were determined to stamp out this new movement and the whole point of today’s story, with its two prison guards on either side of Peter, its double chains and two separate guard posts, is that these enemies of the Gospel are destined to fail, that they will never succeed in what they are trying to do. There is in fact a very similar story about St Paul in chapter sixteen of Acts where Paul is thrown into prison, only for an earthquake to shake the prison to its foundation, causing the gates to fly open, whereupon – and this is the real point of the story – Paul preaches to the gaoler and he and his whole household are baptized. And I have not the slightest doubt that what St Luke is telling us through these stories is true; that the Word of God cannot be chained up. On balance, however, I don’t believe in angels filling cells with light or earthquahes making doors fly open, although whether they did or not is, as I hope is clear by now, completely irrelevant.
And we see the same fundamental message in the second reading. In it, St Paul speaks of how he has fought the good fight and run the race to the finish. And it had not been easy. Between the years 45 and 67 AD Paul made three long, difficult missionary journeys all over the Eastern Mediterranian and in the second letter to the Corinthians he lists some of the hardships he had to endure: flogged three times, imprisoned several times, thirty nine lashes on five separate occasions, beaten with sticks three times, stoned and shipwrecked, also three times. And yet, as he says today, the Lord stood by him and gave him power, so that through him the whole message might be proclaimed for all the pagans to hear. Again, the message is clear. The Good News cannot be chained up. Jesus has promised to be with his Church until the end of time and, as we heard just now in the Gospel Acclamation, the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
But, for me, the real proof of this is in today’s Gospel where Jesus tells Peter that he is the rock on which the Church will be built. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that the others would have fallen about laughing at the idea of Peter, the most unpredictable of men, being a rock on which you could build anything, this story has always been seen as the beginning of a long line of Popes reaching right down to the present day. And what a motley crew they have been. There have been wonderful Popes, holy Popes, great Popes. But there have also been profoundly corrupt Popes, adulterous Popes, politically ambitious Popes. At one point there were three of them and on another occasion persistent, but probably unfounded rumours, that one was a woman. But far from worrying about this, we should, I suggest, see in it the ultimate proof that, deep within the sometimes shocking history of the Church, God is at work. If he weren’t, it would not have lasted two years let alone two millennia. No matter what happens, the Word of God cannot be chained up. Or, as the Pharisee Gamaliel put it two thousand years ago; “If this movement of theirs is of human origin, it will break up of its own accord; but if it does in fact come from God, you will not be able to destroy it.”
Sometimes nowadays people talk of a crisis in the Church. And without a doubt there are serious questions facing us. But one of the things I hope we will learn when we begin to look at the history of the Church next year sometime is that, compared with what has happened in the past, people today would not know a real crisis if it jumped up and grabbed us by the throat.
BIDDING PRAYERS
The history of the Church, like all history, is a story of human weakness mixed in with human greatness. There have glorious times and ignominious times. There have been great saints and great sinners. And so we pray for the maturity we need to recognize the reality of what it means to be the Church in the world today so that when, as will happen, we are confronted by the weaknesses of the Church, we will not be shocked or allow our faith to be undermined............................Lord hear us
And we pray on this feast of Saints Peter and Paul for Pope Benedict, the latest in a long line of leaders going back to Peter himself. We pray that he will be a man of deep personal faith, open to the movement of God in his own life, and so able to respond in a Spirit-filled way to the many challenges facing the Church at this moment in its history. And we pray, too, for our own bishop, John, that he too may have the wisdom he needs to lead our diocese forward at this time...........Lord hear us
Today’s feast was, in the past, a day for ordinations to the priesthood. As a result, many priests throughout Scotland will be celebrating the anniversary of their ordination this Sunday. And so we pray for them. We pray, too, for Philip Kitchen a native of Kilmarnock, who will himself be ordained to the priesthood in St Michael’s this Thursday. St Michael’s has seen six ordinations over the years and we pray that, before too long, St Matthew’s will see one too.........Lord hear us
In the second reading, St Paul speaks about having fought the good fight and run the race to the finish. And so we also remember this week the fast-growing number of retired priests in Scotland. We pray that, like St Paul, they will have a deep sense of how God has been with them all through their lives and that, even now, they will be a source of hope and encouragement to others.........Lord hear us
Fundamentalism in all its shapes and forms today arises out of an unwillingness or inability to face up to and deal with the complexities of faith in the modern world. Rather than confront difficult questions and work out new responses fit for the age we live in, it seeks refuge in old, tired answers which no longer make sense to people. It is the last refuge of narrow-minded, frightened people and we ask God for the grace we need to see it for what it is and have nothing to do with it..............Lord hear us
To be men and women of faith in the modern world, we must have a profound sense of the presence of God in what has gone before, in what is happening now and in what will be in the future. We must know deep within ourselves the truth contained in all three of today’s readings: that Jesus is with us every step of our journey, that it is the Spirit who guides us, and that, ultimately, the Word of God can never be chained up. And so we pray for this grace for the whole parish............Lord hear us
Saturday, 28 June 2008
Saturday, 21 June 2008
12th Sunday of the Year A
Although every Old Testament prophet suffered because of the message he proclaimed, there was no-one quite like Jeremiah whom we heard about today. Born near Jerusalem in 646 BC, about a hundred years after the death of Isaiah – yes these were real people with real lives – he began preaching in 626 when he was just twenty. At the time he was a supporter of King Josiah who had successfully brought about a religious reform, the seventh century BC equivalent of the Second Vatican Council. But when Josiah was killed in battle in 609 he was succeeded by King Jehoiakim who was more interested in politics than religion. Unfortunately, he was not very good at it, formed some unfortunate alliances – a bit, some would say, like Tony Blair in Iraq – and these led directly to the destruction of Jerusalem in 587, followed by the exile in Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon on whom, 2,500 years later, Saddam Hussein would model himself, left a man called Gedaliah as governor in Jerusalem and when he was murdered, Jeremiah, who had been his friend and supporter too, fled to Egypt where he died sometime later. His whole, life, however, had been filled with problems. His outspoken criticism of the leaders of his day got him into all kinds of bother and he was in constant danger from his political enemies. ‘I hear so many disparaging me’ we hear him say this morning...All those who used to be my friends watched for my downfall.’ And although he goes on to say that God is at his side like a might warrior, in reality he often complained bitterly that it was all God’s fault
But although Jeremiah suffered more than most during his life, his suffering was not, as we said earlier, unique. Indeed, being misunderstood and rejected by those whose way of thinking is at odds with the values of the kingdom, has always played a part, to one degree or another, in the life of any person who has taken the call of God seriously. And we see it in this morning’s Gospel passage where St Matthew, in words clearly written for second and third generation Christians already experiencing the persecutions which arose very quickly in the first century and were a common experience for our ancestors in faith until the conversion of Constantine early in the fourth century, has Jesus tell them not to be afraid of those who kill the body and cannot kill the soul. But despite this, the message, as we heard Jesus say, was to be proclaimed from the housetops and anyone who disowned him before others would be disowned by him before the Father, a sentence clearly designed to encourage faithfulness and perseverance in difficult times. The shape and form those difficult times have taken has changed many times over the centuries, but the challenge is always the same. It’s to live by the values of the kingdom, suffer the consequences, as Jeremiah and others before us have done, and play our part in the proclamation of a message which has never really sat well with the way the world thinks. The big question, of course, is what, in concrete terms, that means for us today. Well, it can mean many things, but there is one area which I think is well worth exploring today given how relevant it is to what’s currently going on around us.
The last few months have seen almost unprecedented economic turmoil, not just here, but all over the world. First of all, we had the crisis at Northern Rock, itself no more than the symptom of a much deeper crisis. We’ve heard all about the problems associated with the so-called sub-prime mortgage market in the United States and the effect it has had on the availability of credit in the money markets. It even threatened to bring down the whole banking system, and I have read – how accurate it is I don’t know - that the amount of money pumped in by the Federal Reserve Bank in the United States was twenty times more that it would take to solve the problem of world hunger. And then we’ve had the rise in the price of oil to previously unimaginable heights. This, we were told, was caused by an increase in demand from developing countries like China and India and resulted in politicians who had previously been telling that we needed to use less oil suddenly asking the oil producers to turn out more of it. And as if that weren’t enough, we’ve had the rise in food prices, one report I read claiming that this was largely the result of speculators moving out of the failing housing market into food. By manipulating prices, of course, they can make huge profits for themselves.
But the real point I want to make today lies beyond all this. And it’s the illusion we all have, and which politicians, afraid to tell us the truth, encourage us to have, that all this can be fixed and that we will soon be able to go back to the way we were. But it’s not true. The days of cheap credit, cheap oil and cheap food are over. Or at least they should be. And the reason for this is that they were always ultimately unsustainable, depending as they did on our continuing to live off the back of the world’s poor. We have not been paying a proper price for what we eat for years and the result has been poverty elsewhere. We have exploited other people’s resources, paying a mere pittance for them, convinced that we have some kind of God-given right to ever improving standards of living regardless of the effect on others. And it’s sad to hear people who should know better – and in their heart of hearts do know better – telling us that, if we just vote for them, we can have all this back againt. It’s all a massive lie and has to be challenged.
And who are going to challenge it if not those of us who claim to want to live by the values of the kingdom? But first, we need to understand and accept ourselves that the whole way we live has to change and that that change is beginning to happen all around us. Then we need, when the opportunity arises, to tell others about this. We need to encourage people in Britain to stop judging every crisis by how it effects us, by what is in it for us. Moved by the Spirit of God we need to broaden our horizons, learn to think of others first and support measures which help the poorest people even if it means having less ourselves.
Folk will not like it. They may even get angry at us. But what’s new? Just ask Jeremiah.
BIDDING PRAYERS
The danger facing Christians in every age is that we become comfortable in society, accept without question its values and its norms, and so cease to be signs of the radically new way of living Jesus calls the kingdom. And so we pray for the grace to become more discerning in the way we relate to the world so that, when appropriate and when necessary we can challenge what is not of God in it in a way that is positive and helps people grow in the truth.............................Lord hear us
It has been the role of the prophet in every age to challenge current thinking and speak unwelcome truths to the people with whom they share a particular moment in history. And so we pray for the prophets of our own day. They constantly tell us that we cannot go on living the way we do; that something has to change if the world is to become a more just place; and we ask God for the courage and openness we need to heed their message while there is still time.................................Lord hear us
One of the most difficult things for us to hear in the West is that our present lifestyle is ultimately unsustainable. We have become so used to it and, for a long time, now and have been taught to believe that, with each year that passes, we can expect our standard of living to grow and grow; But all of this has been based on exploitation of the poor, cheap energy and cheap food. It has all been an illusion and we pray for the grace we need to understand this now.........................Lord hear us
The problem with our understanding the unsustainable nature of the way we live is consumerism. Our whole economic system works of the premise that we have to keep buying things. And so, manipulated by the advertising industry, we confuse need with want. We buy what we have been conned into thinking we need. The reality, often, is that we don’t need it, we want it. And so we pray for the wisdom to see through this trick and so grow in personal freedom............................Lord hear us
Another problem facing us in the developed countries is that no politician who hopes to come to power can afford to tell us the truth about ourselves. We simply don’t want to hear it. And so politicians make promises they know they cannot keep. They tell us what we want to hear rather than what they know to be true. And so we ask God to raise up among us leaders who are also prophets and so have the courage to challenge us and take us where we would rather not go...................Lord hear us
If we are to play our part in the great work of proclaiming the values of the kingdom in the midst of the modern world, then we, too, need to be prophets. But at baptism, when we were anointed with the oil of chrism, we shared in the prophetic ministry of Jesus himself. And so we ask God to stir this baptismal gift into a flame so that we can proclaim the message from the house-tops and do so without fear of those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul..............................Lord hear us
But although Jeremiah suffered more than most during his life, his suffering was not, as we said earlier, unique. Indeed, being misunderstood and rejected by those whose way of thinking is at odds with the values of the kingdom, has always played a part, to one degree or another, in the life of any person who has taken the call of God seriously. And we see it in this morning’s Gospel passage where St Matthew, in words clearly written for second and third generation Christians already experiencing the persecutions which arose very quickly in the first century and were a common experience for our ancestors in faith until the conversion of Constantine early in the fourth century, has Jesus tell them not to be afraid of those who kill the body and cannot kill the soul. But despite this, the message, as we heard Jesus say, was to be proclaimed from the housetops and anyone who disowned him before others would be disowned by him before the Father, a sentence clearly designed to encourage faithfulness and perseverance in difficult times. The shape and form those difficult times have taken has changed many times over the centuries, but the challenge is always the same. It’s to live by the values of the kingdom, suffer the consequences, as Jeremiah and others before us have done, and play our part in the proclamation of a message which has never really sat well with the way the world thinks. The big question, of course, is what, in concrete terms, that means for us today. Well, it can mean many things, but there is one area which I think is well worth exploring today given how relevant it is to what’s currently going on around us.
The last few months have seen almost unprecedented economic turmoil, not just here, but all over the world. First of all, we had the crisis at Northern Rock, itself no more than the symptom of a much deeper crisis. We’ve heard all about the problems associated with the so-called sub-prime mortgage market in the United States and the effect it has had on the availability of credit in the money markets. It even threatened to bring down the whole banking system, and I have read – how accurate it is I don’t know - that the amount of money pumped in by the Federal Reserve Bank in the United States was twenty times more that it would take to solve the problem of world hunger. And then we’ve had the rise in the price of oil to previously unimaginable heights. This, we were told, was caused by an increase in demand from developing countries like China and India and resulted in politicians who had previously been telling that we needed to use less oil suddenly asking the oil producers to turn out more of it. And as if that weren’t enough, we’ve had the rise in food prices, one report I read claiming that this was largely the result of speculators moving out of the failing housing market into food. By manipulating prices, of course, they can make huge profits for themselves.
But the real point I want to make today lies beyond all this. And it’s the illusion we all have, and which politicians, afraid to tell us the truth, encourage us to have, that all this can be fixed and that we will soon be able to go back to the way we were. But it’s not true. The days of cheap credit, cheap oil and cheap food are over. Or at least they should be. And the reason for this is that they were always ultimately unsustainable, depending as they did on our continuing to live off the back of the world’s poor. We have not been paying a proper price for what we eat for years and the result has been poverty elsewhere. We have exploited other people’s resources, paying a mere pittance for them, convinced that we have some kind of God-given right to ever improving standards of living regardless of the effect on others. And it’s sad to hear people who should know better – and in their heart of hearts do know better – telling us that, if we just vote for them, we can have all this back againt. It’s all a massive lie and has to be challenged.
And who are going to challenge it if not those of us who claim to want to live by the values of the kingdom? But first, we need to understand and accept ourselves that the whole way we live has to change and that that change is beginning to happen all around us. Then we need, when the opportunity arises, to tell others about this. We need to encourage people in Britain to stop judging every crisis by how it effects us, by what is in it for us. Moved by the Spirit of God we need to broaden our horizons, learn to think of others first and support measures which help the poorest people even if it means having less ourselves.
Folk will not like it. They may even get angry at us. But what’s new? Just ask Jeremiah.
BIDDING PRAYERS
The danger facing Christians in every age is that we become comfortable in society, accept without question its values and its norms, and so cease to be signs of the radically new way of living Jesus calls the kingdom. And so we pray for the grace to become more discerning in the way we relate to the world so that, when appropriate and when necessary we can challenge what is not of God in it in a way that is positive and helps people grow in the truth.............................Lord hear us
It has been the role of the prophet in every age to challenge current thinking and speak unwelcome truths to the people with whom they share a particular moment in history. And so we pray for the prophets of our own day. They constantly tell us that we cannot go on living the way we do; that something has to change if the world is to become a more just place; and we ask God for the courage and openness we need to heed their message while there is still time.................................Lord hear us
One of the most difficult things for us to hear in the West is that our present lifestyle is ultimately unsustainable. We have become so used to it and, for a long time, now and have been taught to believe that, with each year that passes, we can expect our standard of living to grow and grow; But all of this has been based on exploitation of the poor, cheap energy and cheap food. It has all been an illusion and we pray for the grace we need to understand this now.........................Lord hear us
The problem with our understanding the unsustainable nature of the way we live is consumerism. Our whole economic system works of the premise that we have to keep buying things. And so, manipulated by the advertising industry, we confuse need with want. We buy what we have been conned into thinking we need. The reality, often, is that we don’t need it, we want it. And so we pray for the wisdom to see through this trick and so grow in personal freedom............................Lord hear us
Another problem facing us in the developed countries is that no politician who hopes to come to power can afford to tell us the truth about ourselves. We simply don’t want to hear it. And so politicians make promises they know they cannot keep. They tell us what we want to hear rather than what they know to be true. And so we ask God to raise up among us leaders who are also prophets and so have the courage to challenge us and take us where we would rather not go...................Lord hear us
If we are to play our part in the great work of proclaiming the values of the kingdom in the midst of the modern world, then we, too, need to be prophets. But at baptism, when we were anointed with the oil of chrism, we shared in the prophetic ministry of Jesus himself. And so we ask God to stir this baptismal gift into a flame so that we can proclaim the message from the house-tops and do so without fear of those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul..............................Lord hear us
Saturday, 14 June 2008
11th Sunday of the Year A
We have talked a lot in recent weeks about personal decision making, about the supremacy of conscience over law – the basis of Catholic morality since the Middle Ages - and about discerning the will of God for ourselves as individuals. Last week, we explored two of the basic requirements for discernment. The first was the inner freedom necessary to go where God leads. This means seeking from God the grace to move beyond the limits of our own thinking, and so be able to go where God leads especially when it’s where we would rather not go. In this way, we saw that conscience and discernment, far from being an easy option, an excuse for doing what suits us, represent all that’s adult and mature in human nature. And the second requirement was accurate information about the choices we face, a thought which led us to reflect briefly on our relationship with the teaching authority of the Church. But by far the most important part of discernment is what is known as ‘discernment of spirits,’ and given what we heard in this morning’s readings, I would like to say something about this today.
Essentially, discernment of spirits is about sifting through our day to day experience to identify what it is that is moving or motivating us to do what we do at any given moment. All kinds of thoughts, feelings, moods, desires and inclinations go on inside us and even as children we soon learn that some of these are unacceptable.. But when it comes to discerning God’s will, the job of sorting them out and deciding which ones are reliable and which are not is more serious. Discernment of spirits goes much further that what those around us may or may not find acceptable. It is based on the firm conviction that, somewhere among all these different and often contradictory movements, God is moving in us. And so, for the man or woman of faith, the aim is to identify this movement of God and act on it. If we do so, provided we have the necessary freedom and our discernment is honest and accurate, we can be confident that we are doing God’s will. And what today’s readings do is identify with the utmost clarity an attitude which will always be found in a person who is being moved by God. But, of course, the opposite is also true. Its absence makes genuine discernment impossible. And its there today, very clearly, in both the second reading and the Gospel.
In the gospel, St Matthew tells us that when Jesus saw the crowds, he felt sorry for them because they were harassed and dejected like sheep without a shepherd. This was not a passing reaction in Jesus. It was utterly fundamental to who he was. And so any person moved by the Spirit of Jesus will, of absolute necessity, have this same fundamental attitude of care and compassion towards the world and its people. It’s a common theme in our reflections each week, but that does not make it any the less true; that any tendency to sit in judgement on the world by pious, Church-going people, any bitterness, anger or hatred directed against those whose habits or life-style are different from our own, even when this is understandable at a purely human level, is not and cannot be of God. And so, to the extent that we are moved by such spirits of constant criticism and fault-finding we cannot discern the will of God in our lives. And St Paul, in the second reading confirms this in words which, again, you are very familiar with. ‘What proves that God loves us,’ he writes, ‘is that Jesus died for us while we were still sinners.’ This, too, is a statement of God’s fundamental attitude to the world and so will always be true in the life of a person who is doing God’s will and responding to the movement of God’s Spirit. It’s not the way the world thinks. But it is the way God thinks, turning human logic on its head.
And, of course, the reason for this is that the basic way in which human beings relate to each other is that we love those who love us and respond positively to those who, for whatever reason, we like or find attractive in some way. But with God it is not like that. In the mind of God, the distinction between people who are loveable and people who are not loveable simply does not exist. Every buman being is infinitely loved by God, not because of what we do or don’t do, but for no other reason than that we exist. Nothing we do can diminish God’s love for us and nothing we do can increase it. It is freely given with no strings attached, and although such love is ultimately beyond human comprehension, any person who is genuinely seeking to know God’s will will find themselves being inexorably drawn, sometimes kicking and screaming, into the orbit of this divine love. The whole history of the cosmos is the story of God drawing us to himself. The struggle between selfishness and self-giving, between hatred and love, between giving and taking underpins the whole of history as humanity struggles to respond to the call of the God who draws us to himself from deep within ourselves. And it is within the context of this universal call that we are called to be the Church.
The first reading this week speaks of Israel as a nation chosen by God from among all the nations on earth. And so they were a kind of pilot project, a model which would later extend, in Jesus, to every nation on earth. And that is what the Church is too. As humanity makes its way through history, we are also called to be a pilot project, a sign of what, one day, will be the reality for everyone. To extend the cosmic metaphor, we are called to boldly go where no-one has gone before, to break through the frontiers of normal human thinking and, empowered by the Spirit, to show the world what the love of God is like. We are called to love as God loves, reaching out to those whom the world considers unattractive or unloveable. We are called to open our doors to the whole of humanity, making no distinction between the so-called deserving and undeserving poor. Jesus did the unthinkable in his own day and touched the lepers of society. The Church – and that means all of us – are called to touch today’s lepers, those whom others shy away from in disgust.
The harvest indeed is rich and the labourers are few. So ask the Lord of the harvest to raise up many good, committed, hard-working men and women to do his work in the world today.
BIDDING PRAYERS
Faith is a journey from where we are now to a place God longs to show us. It means letting go of what is familiar, passing through periods of uncertainty and doubt, entering new and unexpected places, learning a whole new language, the language of the kingdom, and slowly but surely being led to the point where we begin to think as God thinks rather than as the world thinks. And so we ask God to give us the courage and inner freedom we need to make this great journey...........Lord hear us
Spirits other than the Spirit of God are at work in us and their name is legion. These include the spirits of selfishness, self-righteousness, self-importance, narrow-mindedness, and many others. Like the unclean spirits in the gospel they cry out to be left alone, undisturbed, so that they can carry on doing their ungodly work in us. And so we ask God to caste these unclean spirits out of us so that we can become more and more open to his will in everything that happens..............Lord hear us
When Jesus saw the crowds in today’s gospel he felt sorry for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. This compassion for the human condition is central to who Jesus is, revealing to us, as it does, the very nature of God and his relationship with the world and its people. And so we ask God to stir this same attitude of compassion towards the world in us, enabling us to move beyond the judgemental attitudes too often found in religious people...............Lord hear us
To love as God loves has nothing to do with having nice feelings towards people. The love we speak of is an act of the will which exists independently of how we feel. It begins by wishing others well, regardless of what they may or may not have done. It means holding them up before God, asking him pour into their lives all the graces and blessings they need. And it ends by treating them the way with the dignity and respect due to every human being. And so we pray for this grace..............Lord hear us
St Teresa of Avila famously said, ‘If you don’t love someone, treat them as if you did and you will learn to.’ And so we pray for the grace we need to do this with those living on the margins of our modern-day society. Often they behave in what, to us, are unacceptable ways. Many indulge in crime or anti-social behaviour. But we pray for the grace we need to begin to understand why they are the way they are and that, had we had their experience, most of us would be the same............Lord hear us
Jesus reminds us today that, although the need and the harvest are both great, generally speaking, the labourers are few. And so we ask God to stir in the hearts of many people in today’s world an awareness that something in the way we live has to change radically if we are to solve the many problems facing the world at this time. We simply cannot go on living the way we do and we seek from God the wisdom and courage we need to face up to this urgent reality.............Lord hear us
Essentially, discernment of spirits is about sifting through our day to day experience to identify what it is that is moving or motivating us to do what we do at any given moment. All kinds of thoughts, feelings, moods, desires and inclinations go on inside us and even as children we soon learn that some of these are unacceptable.. But when it comes to discerning God’s will, the job of sorting them out and deciding which ones are reliable and which are not is more serious. Discernment of spirits goes much further that what those around us may or may not find acceptable. It is based on the firm conviction that, somewhere among all these different and often contradictory movements, God is moving in us. And so, for the man or woman of faith, the aim is to identify this movement of God and act on it. If we do so, provided we have the necessary freedom and our discernment is honest and accurate, we can be confident that we are doing God’s will. And what today’s readings do is identify with the utmost clarity an attitude which will always be found in a person who is being moved by God. But, of course, the opposite is also true. Its absence makes genuine discernment impossible. And its there today, very clearly, in both the second reading and the Gospel.
In the gospel, St Matthew tells us that when Jesus saw the crowds, he felt sorry for them because they were harassed and dejected like sheep without a shepherd. This was not a passing reaction in Jesus. It was utterly fundamental to who he was. And so any person moved by the Spirit of Jesus will, of absolute necessity, have this same fundamental attitude of care and compassion towards the world and its people. It’s a common theme in our reflections each week, but that does not make it any the less true; that any tendency to sit in judgement on the world by pious, Church-going people, any bitterness, anger or hatred directed against those whose habits or life-style are different from our own, even when this is understandable at a purely human level, is not and cannot be of God. And so, to the extent that we are moved by such spirits of constant criticism and fault-finding we cannot discern the will of God in our lives. And St Paul, in the second reading confirms this in words which, again, you are very familiar with. ‘What proves that God loves us,’ he writes, ‘is that Jesus died for us while we were still sinners.’ This, too, is a statement of God’s fundamental attitude to the world and so will always be true in the life of a person who is doing God’s will and responding to the movement of God’s Spirit. It’s not the way the world thinks. But it is the way God thinks, turning human logic on its head.
And, of course, the reason for this is that the basic way in which human beings relate to each other is that we love those who love us and respond positively to those who, for whatever reason, we like or find attractive in some way. But with God it is not like that. In the mind of God, the distinction between people who are loveable and people who are not loveable simply does not exist. Every buman being is infinitely loved by God, not because of what we do or don’t do, but for no other reason than that we exist. Nothing we do can diminish God’s love for us and nothing we do can increase it. It is freely given with no strings attached, and although such love is ultimately beyond human comprehension, any person who is genuinely seeking to know God’s will will find themselves being inexorably drawn, sometimes kicking and screaming, into the orbit of this divine love. The whole history of the cosmos is the story of God drawing us to himself. The struggle between selfishness and self-giving, between hatred and love, between giving and taking underpins the whole of history as humanity struggles to respond to the call of the God who draws us to himself from deep within ourselves. And it is within the context of this universal call that we are called to be the Church.
The first reading this week speaks of Israel as a nation chosen by God from among all the nations on earth. And so they were a kind of pilot project, a model which would later extend, in Jesus, to every nation on earth. And that is what the Church is too. As humanity makes its way through history, we are also called to be a pilot project, a sign of what, one day, will be the reality for everyone. To extend the cosmic metaphor, we are called to boldly go where no-one has gone before, to break through the frontiers of normal human thinking and, empowered by the Spirit, to show the world what the love of God is like. We are called to love as God loves, reaching out to those whom the world considers unattractive or unloveable. We are called to open our doors to the whole of humanity, making no distinction between the so-called deserving and undeserving poor. Jesus did the unthinkable in his own day and touched the lepers of society. The Church – and that means all of us – are called to touch today’s lepers, those whom others shy away from in disgust.
The harvest indeed is rich and the labourers are few. So ask the Lord of the harvest to raise up many good, committed, hard-working men and women to do his work in the world today.
BIDDING PRAYERS
Faith is a journey from where we are now to a place God longs to show us. It means letting go of what is familiar, passing through periods of uncertainty and doubt, entering new and unexpected places, learning a whole new language, the language of the kingdom, and slowly but surely being led to the point where we begin to think as God thinks rather than as the world thinks. And so we ask God to give us the courage and inner freedom we need to make this great journey...........Lord hear us
Spirits other than the Spirit of God are at work in us and their name is legion. These include the spirits of selfishness, self-righteousness, self-importance, narrow-mindedness, and many others. Like the unclean spirits in the gospel they cry out to be left alone, undisturbed, so that they can carry on doing their ungodly work in us. And so we ask God to caste these unclean spirits out of us so that we can become more and more open to his will in everything that happens..............Lord hear us
When Jesus saw the crowds in today’s gospel he felt sorry for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. This compassion for the human condition is central to who Jesus is, revealing to us, as it does, the very nature of God and his relationship with the world and its people. And so we ask God to stir this same attitude of compassion towards the world in us, enabling us to move beyond the judgemental attitudes too often found in religious people...............Lord hear us
To love as God loves has nothing to do with having nice feelings towards people. The love we speak of is an act of the will which exists independently of how we feel. It begins by wishing others well, regardless of what they may or may not have done. It means holding them up before God, asking him pour into their lives all the graces and blessings they need. And it ends by treating them the way with the dignity and respect due to every human being. And so we pray for this grace..............Lord hear us
St Teresa of Avila famously said, ‘If you don’t love someone, treat them as if you did and you will learn to.’ And so we pray for the grace we need to do this with those living on the margins of our modern-day society. Often they behave in what, to us, are unacceptable ways. Many indulge in crime or anti-social behaviour. But we pray for the grace we need to begin to understand why they are the way they are and that, had we had their experience, most of us would be the same............Lord hear us
Jesus reminds us today that, although the need and the harvest are both great, generally speaking, the labourers are few. And so we ask God to stir in the hearts of many people in today’s world an awareness that something in the way we live has to change radically if we are to solve the many problems facing the world at this time. We simply cannot go on living the way we do and we seek from God the wisdom and courage we need to face up to this urgent reality.............Lord hear us
Saturday, 7 June 2008
10th Sunday of the Year A
Those of you who have sat there all these years listening to me will have noticed, I hope, that my basic position on God, the Church and the world is essentially the same as the prophet Hosea’s in today’s first reading. My deepest desire is that we should all ‘come to know the Lord’ – Hosea’s own words - and, like him, I believe that the fulfilment of that hope is, as he puts it this morning, ‘as certain as the dawn.…that God will come to us as showers come, like spring rains watering the earth.’
There are, of course, times when it’s hard to hang on to this vision, but at a deeper level I draw strength, like Abraham, from the fact that, as we heard in the second reading, ‘God has the power to do what he has promised.’ In any case, there are far more encouraging signs than discouraging ones, last weekend being an example of this. Based on all three readings, the homily was about Christian maturity, making moral choices, the supremacy of conscience over law and discerning God’s will for ourselves as individuals. And the response was very encouraging. Many recognized the truth in what was said and welcomed it joyfully, moving me in the days that followed to thank God for answering my constant prayer that, in our response to the call of God, we will, as a parish, have some of the spontaneity and openness of our patron Matthew in today’s Gospel.
But having said that, there was something about the way some of you responded that made me think that I should say a little more about it. People reacted with enthusiasm to the whole notion of personal choice and personal responsibility for the decisions we make. It is, after, all in tune with the mood of the time. But what I felt was a bit lacking was a fully developed sense of how demanding this can be: that conscience and personal discernment are in no way an easy alternative, an excuse for just doing what we want. There’s a good deal of this kind of thinking around today, but its real name is not conscience, but licence, not discernment, but self-delusion and self-indulgence. And so, as the week has gone on, I have felt a growing need to say more about what it means to discern God’s will for ourselves as individuals and how this relates to things like law and the teaching Church.
And at the heart of all genuine Christian discernment is the desire to do what St Ignatius calls ‘the more,’ the thing which is most consistent with our coming to know God and share his inner life. And no law can do that for us. Designed, not as a description of how the virtuous person might live, but as the basic requirements for order in society, law tells us what not to do: thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal and so on. But when it comes to questions like how do I love my neighbour as myself or how do I live justly in today’s consumer-driven society, there is no law which could ever adequately deal with such complex issues. The answers we are looking for will not be found in law but in prayer and reflection: in other words, through discernment. So how do we go about it? Well, let me spell out two of the basic requirements.
The first thing we have to do is seek from God the inner freedom we need to even begin the process. To the extent that we have already decided what we want the answer to be we simply cannot begin to discern God’s will. Nor can we approach the process with the idea that we will find out what it is first and then decide if we will do it. To discern the will of God in our lives, the course of action which, at a given moment, is most consistent with God’s dream for us, then there must be somewhere in us a willingness to go where God leads even if it’s where we ourselves would rather not go. If our minds are closed or already made up, discernment is a non-starter.
And the next thing we need is proper accurate information. We need to know the truth about the situation we find ourselves in. Sometimes that won’t be hard but sometimes it will be. Decisions, for example, about how best to use our material resources to help those in need will often require some research on our part to make sure that we don’t make foolish decisions which lead to money being wasted. There may be times when the knowledge we require is medical – as in cases where we need to decide whether to undergo certain treatments or not – or scientific – as in situations where we the environment is at stake – but whatever it is, prayer and reflection the most important part of the process, can never be a substitute for accurate knowledge and information. And it’s in this context that I want to say something about the Church.
One of the things I detected in some of your responses to last week’s homily was a tendency to reject out of hand almost anything the Church says. And from a historical perspective I can understand this. But it reminded me of what happens when we move from childhood into adolescence. One minute our parents know everything and the next they are the most stupid people on earth. And I think there is a bit of that happening these days with the Church. As mature Catholics, however, we should not allow ourselves to fall into this trap. Jesus has promised to be with the Church until the end of time. His Spirit guides us as we make our way through history. The institutional Church is not perfect, but nor is it stupid. After two thousand years it has acquired a great deal of wisdom and there will be times when, for the mature, adult Catholic, what the Church teaches will be a vital part of the discernment process. Some of the things written over the years are masterpieces and, although the final judgement comes from within, from prayer and reflection, only a very foolish and arrogant person would fail to take them into account when seeking to know God’s will in his/her life. So don’t be a moral adolescent. The Church isn’t perfect but beyond adolescent disillusionment with the parent we once thought could do no wrong lies a more adult relationship based on reality. And that, I suggest, is the kind of relationship with the Church that God is calling us to at this time.
Mature, adult discernment is demanding. Why else would so many good people have preferred to remain somewhere between childhood and adolescence for so long?
BIDDING PRAYERS
Over the last forty or fifty years, we have seen many of the things which once held society together unravel. There is no longer the same respect for authority. As traditional industries have disappeared, the communities which once surrounded them have been decimated. Work patterns have totally changed and the family structure itself has come under serious threat. Change is everywhere and many struggle to come to terms with it. And so we ask God to give us the wisdom and discernment we need to make sense of all that is happening around us at this time.....Lord hear us
The Church, like every other institution, has been deeply affected by the changes which have taken place in the modern world. It was once at the centre of community life. Now it functions at the margins of society, written off as irrelevant by many and even hated and despised by some. But Jesus has promised that he will be with us until the end of time. And so we ask God to give us today some of the courage shown by men and women of faith down through the centuries as they struggled in their time with challenges far greater than anything we face now........Lord hear us
Within the Church, too, people’s attitudes have changed. There was a time when the Church could do no wrong in people’s eyes. Its faults and failings were either hidden from us or, for our own understandable reasons, we chose not to see them. Now, however, those faults and failings are there for all to see, and many still struggle to come to terms with the reality rather than the fantasy. And so we ask God to give us the grace we need, not just to accept that reality, but to embrace it........... Lord hear us
The faults and failings of priests have also become more obvious to everyone. There was a time when they were a group apart, men who lived on pedestals with both power and status in the community. Even when their weaknesses were there for all to see people very often chose to ignore them, unable or unwilling to accept that these men were real human beings like themselves. Now all that has changed. The weaknesses are there for all to see. The days of living on pedestals are over and we thank God for this from the bottom of our hearts.................................Lord hear us
Faced with the situation today, many tend to lose faith, talking and acting as if God had somehow abandoned his people. And so we pray for something of the confidence of Hosea in the first reading and Abraham in the second. They knew that God’s coming was as certain as the dawn and that God had the power to do what he had promised, and we pray for something of their trust and confidence........Lord hear us
The reason we have patron saints is that the men and women concerned are held up to us as examples and models of how to live the Christian life. Our patron is Matthew, a tax-collector who became an evangelist and whose gospel has been read by millions of people down through the centuries. And so we pray for something of Matthew’s willingness to go where Jesus led and a share in his work of bringing the message of Jesus to the world...........................Lord hear us
There are, of course, times when it’s hard to hang on to this vision, but at a deeper level I draw strength, like Abraham, from the fact that, as we heard in the second reading, ‘God has the power to do what he has promised.’ In any case, there are far more encouraging signs than discouraging ones, last weekend being an example of this. Based on all three readings, the homily was about Christian maturity, making moral choices, the supremacy of conscience over law and discerning God’s will for ourselves as individuals. And the response was very encouraging. Many recognized the truth in what was said and welcomed it joyfully, moving me in the days that followed to thank God for answering my constant prayer that, in our response to the call of God, we will, as a parish, have some of the spontaneity and openness of our patron Matthew in today’s Gospel.
But having said that, there was something about the way some of you responded that made me think that I should say a little more about it. People reacted with enthusiasm to the whole notion of personal choice and personal responsibility for the decisions we make. It is, after, all in tune with the mood of the time. But what I felt was a bit lacking was a fully developed sense of how demanding this can be: that conscience and personal discernment are in no way an easy alternative, an excuse for just doing what we want. There’s a good deal of this kind of thinking around today, but its real name is not conscience, but licence, not discernment, but self-delusion and self-indulgence. And so, as the week has gone on, I have felt a growing need to say more about what it means to discern God’s will for ourselves as individuals and how this relates to things like law and the teaching Church.
And at the heart of all genuine Christian discernment is the desire to do what St Ignatius calls ‘the more,’ the thing which is most consistent with our coming to know God and share his inner life. And no law can do that for us. Designed, not as a description of how the virtuous person might live, but as the basic requirements for order in society, law tells us what not to do: thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal and so on. But when it comes to questions like how do I love my neighbour as myself or how do I live justly in today’s consumer-driven society, there is no law which could ever adequately deal with such complex issues. The answers we are looking for will not be found in law but in prayer and reflection: in other words, through discernment. So how do we go about it? Well, let me spell out two of the basic requirements.
The first thing we have to do is seek from God the inner freedom we need to even begin the process. To the extent that we have already decided what we want the answer to be we simply cannot begin to discern God’s will. Nor can we approach the process with the idea that we will find out what it is first and then decide if we will do it. To discern the will of God in our lives, the course of action which, at a given moment, is most consistent with God’s dream for us, then there must be somewhere in us a willingness to go where God leads even if it’s where we ourselves would rather not go. If our minds are closed or already made up, discernment is a non-starter.
And the next thing we need is proper accurate information. We need to know the truth about the situation we find ourselves in. Sometimes that won’t be hard but sometimes it will be. Decisions, for example, about how best to use our material resources to help those in need will often require some research on our part to make sure that we don’t make foolish decisions which lead to money being wasted. There may be times when the knowledge we require is medical – as in cases where we need to decide whether to undergo certain treatments or not – or scientific – as in situations where we the environment is at stake – but whatever it is, prayer and reflection the most important part of the process, can never be a substitute for accurate knowledge and information. And it’s in this context that I want to say something about the Church.
One of the things I detected in some of your responses to last week’s homily was a tendency to reject out of hand almost anything the Church says. And from a historical perspective I can understand this. But it reminded me of what happens when we move from childhood into adolescence. One minute our parents know everything and the next they are the most stupid people on earth. And I think there is a bit of that happening these days with the Church. As mature Catholics, however, we should not allow ourselves to fall into this trap. Jesus has promised to be with the Church until the end of time. His Spirit guides us as we make our way through history. The institutional Church is not perfect, but nor is it stupid. After two thousand years it has acquired a great deal of wisdom and there will be times when, for the mature, adult Catholic, what the Church teaches will be a vital part of the discernment process. Some of the things written over the years are masterpieces and, although the final judgement comes from within, from prayer and reflection, only a very foolish and arrogant person would fail to take them into account when seeking to know God’s will in his/her life. So don’t be a moral adolescent. The Church isn’t perfect but beyond adolescent disillusionment with the parent we once thought could do no wrong lies a more adult relationship based on reality. And that, I suggest, is the kind of relationship with the Church that God is calling us to at this time.
Mature, adult discernment is demanding. Why else would so many good people have preferred to remain somewhere between childhood and adolescence for so long?
BIDDING PRAYERS
Over the last forty or fifty years, we have seen many of the things which once held society together unravel. There is no longer the same respect for authority. As traditional industries have disappeared, the communities which once surrounded them have been decimated. Work patterns have totally changed and the family structure itself has come under serious threat. Change is everywhere and many struggle to come to terms with it. And so we ask God to give us the wisdom and discernment we need to make sense of all that is happening around us at this time.....Lord hear us
The Church, like every other institution, has been deeply affected by the changes which have taken place in the modern world. It was once at the centre of community life. Now it functions at the margins of society, written off as irrelevant by many and even hated and despised by some. But Jesus has promised that he will be with us until the end of time. And so we ask God to give us today some of the courage shown by men and women of faith down through the centuries as they struggled in their time with challenges far greater than anything we face now........Lord hear us
Within the Church, too, people’s attitudes have changed. There was a time when the Church could do no wrong in people’s eyes. Its faults and failings were either hidden from us or, for our own understandable reasons, we chose not to see them. Now, however, those faults and failings are there for all to see, and many still struggle to come to terms with the reality rather than the fantasy. And so we ask God to give us the grace we need, not just to accept that reality, but to embrace it........... Lord hear us
The faults and failings of priests have also become more obvious to everyone. There was a time when they were a group apart, men who lived on pedestals with both power and status in the community. Even when their weaknesses were there for all to see people very often chose to ignore them, unable or unwilling to accept that these men were real human beings like themselves. Now all that has changed. The weaknesses are there for all to see. The days of living on pedestals are over and we thank God for this from the bottom of our hearts.................................Lord hear us
Faced with the situation today, many tend to lose faith, talking and acting as if God had somehow abandoned his people. And so we pray for something of the confidence of Hosea in the first reading and Abraham in the second. They knew that God’s coming was as certain as the dawn and that God had the power to do what he had promised, and we pray for something of their trust and confidence........Lord hear us
The reason we have patron saints is that the men and women concerned are held up to us as examples and models of how to live the Christian life. Our patron is Matthew, a tax-collector who became an evangelist and whose gospel has been read by millions of people down through the centuries. And so we pray for something of Matthew’s willingness to go where Jesus led and a share in his work of bringing the message of Jesus to the world...........................Lord hear us
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