15th Sunday of the Year A

This morning’s first reading has always meant a lot to me. With its promise that the word of God will not return to him without succeeding in what it was sent to do, it has often sustained me over the years and, despite many potentially discouraging experiences, has enabled me to remain enthusiastic about what it means to be a priest today. And so when I sat down last Sunday to look at this week’s readings and saw it there, I smiled to myself. Only the previous day I had celebrated the anniversary of my own ordination and two days before that had taken part in Philip Kitchen’s over in St Michael’s. And as I have reflected on these experiences I have felt, all week, a deep sense of gratitude to God for all that he has done for me over the years. But there’s one particular memory that has stayed with me and I would like to tell you about it today.

It happened twenty five years ago when I was living in Sanquhar. A young man from Kilmarnock here asked if a girl he knew could come and see me. And so she came, all the way from Dundee. I can’t remember now what we talked about, but what I do remember is letting her do something I would not normally have agreed to. I let her pray over me. She was very involved in the charismatic movement, something I have never been comfortable with. I would go so far as to say that, even now, I am deeply suspicious of it. But there was something about her that was different. She was very young, but I sensed God in her and agreed to let her do it. And so she did. Nothing special happened, except that God, as he is prone to do with charismatics, gave her a Scripture passage for me. Like today’s passage it was from the Isaiah, and I have thought of it often over the years and wondered what, if anything, it could mean. Was it really from God or was it just her imagination? I have, after all, seen too many people misled by such things over the years. But with the coming together of that reading, Philip’s ordination and the anniversary of my own ordination, the last week has been a confirmation that what happened was real and, twenty five years on, I am happy now about what it means.

So why am I telling you this? Well, my hope is that it can help us understand why Jesus, in the words of today’s gospel, always spoke to people in parables. Why, for example, when the scribe in Luke asked who his neighbour was, did Jesus not just tell him instead of coming up with the story of the Good Samaritan? Well, of course, any good teacher will give you the basic answer to this question, which is that telling people something is no substitute for their discovering it for themselves. You can tell a child something ten times and he will forget he ever heard it. Enable him to find it out for himself, however, and he will remember it all his life. But with the parables there is more to it than that. Having given us the gift of freedom, God never takes it back. He longs to share his life with us but we have to choose to accept it. And so, to use a phrase coined by a friend of mine while doing the Spiritual Exercises with me, we are invited to crawl about inside these stories, explore them, decide what they mean for ourselves and ultimately choose how we are going to respond to them.

But, while this is true, it is not my main point. What am really inviting you to recognize today is what I have seen so clearly myself this week as I have remembered the last thirty nine years as a priest and, in particular, that incident in Sanquhar twenty five years ago. And it is that the real parable Jesus tells us is not the story of the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son, but the story of our own life. Deep within everything that happens to us – and I mean everything – God is longing and struggling to communicate with us. No experience, no matter how insignificant, is without meaning, and so God invites us to crawl about inside it all, to explore it, to reflect on it, to pray our way through it and ultimately decide what it is we believe or don’t believe about it all. Each of us has to live our own lives in faith and stand or fall by what we make of them. And even when we do, God will not appear to us to reassure us or give us a certificate to say that we’ve got it all right. Having to decide and then trust is both the price and the reward of freedom and explains those strange words of Jesus when he tells us that those who have will be given more and from those who have not even what they have will be taken away. The more we explore our experience the more meaning it will have and the less we explore it, the more shallow our lives, the more meaningless they will become, a pain millions are struggling with in the world today. But how do we go about exploring our experience in this way? Well, the parable Jesus told today can provide at least the beginning of an answer to this question.

The farmers in Jesus day did not, as we know, prepare their fields for sowing the way modern farmers would. They just threw the seed everywhere, knowing that some of it would land on the edge of the path and be eaten by the birds or scorched by the sun. And so it is with us. Our lives are filled with wasted opportunities and graces from God that came to nothing because we failed to respond to them at the time. But there is no point in worrying about these. The are gone now. So let them go. Focus instead on the good God has been struggling to do in you throughout your life. Crawl about inside your experience. Sift through it. Examine it. Look for evidence of where God has been. Try to understand what he is trying to do in you now as, like the whole of creation, you, too, grown in one great act of giving birth to the person God dreams of you being.

I haven’t, of course, told you what the passage God gave the girl was or what he was saying to me through it. And I’m not going to. That’s something very personal. The important thing for you now is to explore your own story.


BIDDING PRAYERS


Many in the Church today talk as if the world were in terminal decline and God had somehow abandoned his people. Others seem to think that the Church itself is about to fall apart. But neither of these things can be true. The prophet tells us that the word which goes out from the mouth of God does not return to him without succeeding in what it was meant to do. And so we pray for a deep sense of the truth of these words at this point in the history both of the world and the Church.....................Lord hear us

The word which goes out from the mouth of God is, of course, Jesus and everything he teaches. He is the Word made flesh and living among us. And so we pray that, as politicians everywhere continue to try tired, old, failed solutions to familiar problems, the world will begin to see that something radical and new is required if we are to solve humanity’s problems, and that that new radical thing is the teaching of Jesus contained in the Gospe...Lord hear us

In the second reading St Paul speaks of how, from the very beginning until now, the whole of creation has been groaning in one great act of giving birth. And so we pray for the insight we need to see this process at work all around us. Birth is painful, but when the child is born the pain is forgotten and is soon replaced by joy. And so we ask God to stir in us a deep sense of hope in the midst of everything that is going on at this .................Lord hear us

The seed Jesus speaks of today is the word of God. All through our lives we have heard it and we are fed and nourished by it every week when we come here to Mass. Much of the time - perhaps even most of the time - that seed falls by the side of the path or among thorns and comes to nothing. But sometimes it falls on rich soil and begins to grow and produce fruit. And so we pray for the insight we need to recognize these areas of growth in ourselves and rejoice in them............Lord hear us

To live a shallow life: to look without seeing, to listen without hearing or understanding: this is the greatest tragedy that can befall any human being. We live only once. We have one chance to make the most of our lives and failure to do so, for whatever reason, is a terrible, terrible waste. And so we pray for the wisdom and courage we need to explore to the full every aspect of our personal experience in a prayerful and faith-filled way which enables us to find God in it...............Lord hear us

And we continue to pray for all in the community who are on holiday or will go on holiday over the summer months. We pray that the time spent away will be restful, refreshing and deeply enjoyable. We pray, too, that those who go abroad will be enriched by contact with other cultures and other ways of living and so will return with minds broadened and more open to what is new or unfamiliar.........Lord hear us