Whenever I hear today’s passage from the letter of St James, I always think of Blairs where I spent six years from 1957 to 1963. Virtually every priest in Scotland of a certain age spent his formative years there and so there are things about the priesthood in this country which can only really be understood by those who have some knowledge of what Blairs was like. And so, having listened to what St James had to say about worldy ambition, something which should have no place in the Church, but sadly often does, I would like to tell you something about it.
There were about two hundred of us when I arrived there in 1957, and in the refectory we sat in long tables split into groups of six. At the head of the table sat the oldest boy, known as the divider. As the name suggests, his job was to divide up the food, a position which gave him great power over everyone else at the table. Beside him sat the sub-divider. His job was to divide out the bread pudding we ate every day in life, and it was not unusual for the divider and sub-divider to eat half the food between them. Seniority was everything. The youngest boy at the table was known as the lowest and the second youngest as the second lowest. And if the numbers were uneven and a seventh boy had to be squeezed in at the end, he was known as the sub-lowest and spent half his life falling off the end of the bench. And so if you were a lowest, or even worse a sub-lowest, your one ambition in life was to live long enough to become a second lowest, a mindset which ran right through the whole system. Those who had power used it and those who hadn’t looked forward to the day they would have, when they, too, could eat half the pudding while those below them watched and dreamt of the day when it would be their turn to do the same. It was, of course, a totally un-christian way of living, the opposite of everything the Church is meant to be about, and sadly it didn’t end with Blairs.
Throughout most of Scotland, curates, with a few exceptions, are a thing of the past. But there was, of course, a time when most parishes had them. In Glasgow, for example, until not that long ago, many priests celebrated their silver jubilee as curates, and the stories of how they were treated can only be understood in the light of what went on in Blairs. Parish priests acted like dividers and sub-dividers and the youngest priest, known as the junior curate, was the grown up version of the lowest. It’s often said that the order of importance in most presbyteries was the parish priest, the housekeeper, the housekeeper’s dog and the curate. Often the curates did all the work with the result that when they became parish priests themselves they virtually retired, lived in their rooms and treated the curates the way they had been treated themselves. It was ingrained in generations of clergy and helps us understand the traditional importance attached to getting bigger parishes, being canons or monsignors, having important jobs and so on. Much has been written in recent years about this kind of thing, about the effects of what’s known as clericalism and its power to block what God is calling us to in today’s Church, but the question I would like to explore very briefly with you now is this: how did we get from ‘If anyone wants to be first, he must make himself last of all and servant of all’ to being a Church so dominated by rank and hierarchy.
Well, of course, that’s a long, sad story. But those of you who did the history course last year may remember that one absolutely key moment in it was the conversion of the Emperor Constantine at the beginning of the fourth century, one of the effects of which was explained very well to us by Fr John Hughes who gave that part of the course. And what he explained was that, faced with the task of controlling his vast empire, Constantine saw that there was no point setting up a vast system of civil servants when there was a ready-made one already there in the form of the Church and its bishops. And so, from being a persecuted minority, the Church, almost overnight, became part of the very structure of government with what many would see as catastrophic long-term consequences for the spread of the Gospel. Gradually the Church and those in it began to imitate the world around them. Bishops became princes, acquired both riches and power and were called ‘Lord.’ In time there emerged Popes who were no more than political leaders and slowly but surely power did what it always does. It corrupted the Church at every level until, far from being a sign of the kingdom of God in the world, it was no more than a reflection of a society filled with all the things St James speaks of this week: jealousy, ambition, disharmony and wicked things of every kind. The whole history of the Church is littered with these evils and, if we are to become again what we were always meant to be, a sign of the kingdom, these things must be addressed.
And it’s happening. The God who works in strange ways and who writes straight with crooked lines is hard at work in our time. All around us, as secularism and atheism make more and more inroads into our modern society, the Church is being stripped of the status and power it once enjoyed. It once controlled people’s lives. Now few even listen to it. Even the scandals of recent years have played their part, destroying illusions, exploding myths and knocking clergy from the pedestals we occupied for so long. This has been a painful process and continues to be so, but what I invite you to see today is that, in all this, God is at work, calling us back to the simplicity and humility that characterized the Church for the first three hundred years of its history.
History, in the end, can only be understand when we stand back and look at it as a whole. And when we do that, what seems bad often turns out to be good and what looks like a disaster proves in the long run to be a blessing. And so my prayer today is that we will understand this. And that, in understanding it, we will be filled both with a sense of gratitude for the times through which we are living and a deep sense of hope and trust in God about the future.
BIDDING PRAYERS
Lord Acton famously wrote in 1887 that all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, the whole of human history confirming the truth of his statement. And yet, despite the fact that Jesus was born without power and died without power, the Church down through the ages has succumbed over and over again to the temptation of power. And so we ask God to give us at this moment in history the courage we need to embrace powerlessness as Jesus did........Lord hear us
When the disciples in today’s Gospel are found arguing about which of them is the greatest, they are falling into the same trap as many people in our own day. Led by the media and its superficial celebrity culture, many of our contemporaries are conned into believing that being famous or important in the world’s eyes will somehow bring happiness. And so we ask God to help the people of our time, especially the young, to see this for the lie it is.........Lord hear us
Faced with his disciples’ desire for worldly power, Jesus holds up a child before them as an example of what the kingdom of God is like. Elsewhere, he tells them that unless they become like little children they cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. And so we pray that this parish will always be one which not only welcomes children, providing an environment where their faith can deepen and grow, but strives to become like them in their openness, simplicity and trust....Lord hear us
For years, commentators have described our society as a ‘me first’ society. We have been encouraged to look after number one and to ‘go for it’ even if this means trampling over other people along the way. Politicians and others speak constantly about a breakdown in society and lament the lack of any sense of community in our towns and cities. And so we pray that the whole country will come to see that the answer to all this lies in what Jesus says in today’s Gospel........Lord hear us
In today’s second reading, St James speaks of how the battles that go on in society start with the desires fighting within ourselves. ‘You want something and you haven’t got it: you have an ambition which you cannot satisfy, so you fight to get your way by force,’ he says. And so we pray for the courage we need to confront the selfish desires in ourselves, recognize and accept that we cannot always have what we want, and so come to greater generosity of spirit towards other people.........Lord hear us
And we pray in a particular way for those who govern our country either at local or national level. Over the summer we saw just how much power can corrupt our politicians and it was a shocking experience for everyone concerned. And so we pray for all who were involved in this whole fiasco, that it will help them see things about themselves that they had previously chosen not to see and so prove to be a turning point in the way government itself functions in Britain.......Lord hear us
Saturday, 19 September 2009
Saturday, 12 September 2009
24th Sunday B
When the Bishop phoned me a week past on Tuesday and asked if I would come down and see him, I had a pretty good idea what was coming. I came here twenty four years ago this very weekend, on 13th September 1985, which makes me the longest serving priest in any parish in the diocese, and sure enough, as soon as we had sat down and exchanged a few pleasantries, he asked me if I would move to West Kilbride as parish priest. And, to his evident relief, I agreed, with the result that, if God spares us all, I will leave here on Monday, October 19th, and Father Martin Chambers, who spent a whole summer here as a deacon twenty years ago and has just returned from five years in Ecuador in South America,, will become parish priest of St Matthew’s. So how do I feel?
Well, my initial reaction as I left the Bishop’s house was one of deep peace and a sense that what was happening was right. It quite simply felt as if it was of God, a feeling which stayed with me for the rest of that day. But when I went to bed that night, it all changed. I couldn’t sleep, and as I lay there in the darkness waves of fear and panic came over me. I began to think of all the people and the things I would miss. My Dad and I had nipped up about 8.30. that evening to see where the Church was. There hadn’t been a soul to be seen anywhere, and, as I lay there, I pictured myself sitting in the house at night, growing old, with nothing happening and no one ever coming to the door, not even for a bag of messages. And in the darkness, ridiculous things, like the fact that there is no Marks and Spencer’s in West Kilbride, were doing everything they could to destroy the sense of God I had had earlier. In Ignatian terms, consolation had well and truly given way to desolation, as it so often does for us in the night. The voice speaking to me during that time was the voice of Peter in Matthew’s version of today’s Gospel. ‘This must not happen to you, Lord,’ was what he said to Jesus after Jesus had predicted his own passion and it was that same negative and ungodly voice that I was hearing during that long night from Tuesday through to Wednesday morning. But with the coming of morning it passed and today, although I know that, after twenty four years here, there will be difficult moments ahead for me which will involve an element of taking up my cross and going where God leads, I can say to you with utter confidence that God is in this move, that it is happening at the right time and that it will be, without question, the best thing both for me and for St Matthew’s. And I would like to tell you why.
For a long time, you see, I have been aware that sooner or later I would have to leave here, either in a box or to go to another parish. I’ve also been aware for a long time that, like the rest of you, I’m getting older. Next year I will be a pensioner and four years ago, when I was ill, the consultant told me I must take this fact into account and adapt to it. And I have been struggling to do this, giving up the prison last year and, as I explained to you then, trying to use a Thursday in a different way, being a tentative step in that direction. And now I see this move as a spirit-inspired part of that process. And then there’s the question of the kind of priest God is calling me to be. Ultimately the challenge facing us all is to be the people God created us to be. This is certainly true of priests and it can take many years to come to, the failure to do so being, I know, a source of deep unhappiness to many. And the thing that has become clear to me over the years is that at the heart of my own vocation is the call to the ministry known as Spiritual Direction, the purpose of which is to help and enable individuals to discern and recognize the presence and movement of God in their lives. And part of the Bishops’s reason for asking me to go to West Kilbride is that I should have more time and space to do this. And I welcome that and thank God for it.
And I have no doubt either than Fr Martin Chamber’s coming here will be a great blessing for you. He is a different person from me, called to be a different kind of priest and so will bring to the parish things I cannot bring and which have been missing for the last twenty four years. And the very fact that he is coming at all is a sign of God’s providence. One of the things that has made the whole question of moving difficult for me up to now has been the likelihood that I would not be replaced and you would be left without a resident priest. But at this precise moment that has not happened. This summer Martin has come back from Ecuador and Fr Willie McFadden from being rector in Scotus College. And their return has provided a window of opportunity for me to leave without this happening. And God, in his providence, has grasped it. And if further proof of God at work is required, there’s the way in which our plan to employ a youth worker has dove-tailed so well with the move. Because one of the things Martin has been asked to do is take on responsibility for youth throughout the whole diocese, suddenly leaving St Matthew’s at the centre of the diocese in this respect. And for me God just shines out of this. And I thank him for it.
Of course there will be some difficult times ahead for me, for Martin, for you and for the people of West Kilbride. Change is never easy and few of us really like it. But what is far worse than change is stagnation. This change, if we all embrace it with faith and trust in God will be the beginning of something new and God-filled. There will be challenges. Fr Chamber’s will need time to adjust to the enormous change in his life as he moves from the Third World back to the first. And it will be your task to welcome him and support him through this time of transition.
And with any luck, the people of West Kilbride will do the same.
BIDDING PRAYERS
When Peter remonstrates with Jesus and objects to what he has just said about his having to suffer grievously, to be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and to be put to death, arguing in Matthew’s account that this must not happen to Jesus, he is displaying a very deep tendency in human nature. The way he thinks is not God’s way but man’s. And so we pray for a willingness to move beyond the limits of human understanding and learn to think as God thinks...............Lord hear us.
When Jesus asks the question, ‘Who do you say I am?’ his words are addressed, not just to Peter, but to every single human being down through the ages. Jesus is either who we say he is or he is not. If he is not, then he is the greatest fraud in history. If he is, then he becomes the single most important person in history. There is no third way and no middle ground. And so we pray for the clarity of vision we need to see this and to answer this great question for ourselves...........Lord hear us
In Matthew’s account of today’s story Jesus tells Peter that it is not flesh and blood that has revealed the truth to him but his Father in heaven. Left to our own devices, the mystery of whoJesus is – God living among us – would be impossible to work out for ourselves. Jesus can only be known through faith, a gift from God which enables us to reach far beyond the limits of human thinking and know the unknowable. And so we ask God to pour this grace into our world................Lord hear us
To know Jesus and become a follower of his involves entering in some way into the mystery of death and resurrection. It is a mystery which lies at the very heart of creation. At every level of existence something always has to die so that what is new can be born. It is not possible to be born into what is of God without in some way dying to what is not of God: losing our life in some way so that we can save it. And so we pray for the courage we need to engage with this process................Lord hear us
In today’s second reading, St James tells us that Faith without good deeds is quite dead. There is no point in wishing the poor man well if we are not willing to engage with his poverty and do something about it. And so we pray that God will lead this parish deeper and deeper into this aspect of our faith. We pray that, with each year that passes, we will become more and more willing, not only to give to those in need, but to engage with the roots and causes of poverty itself............Lord hear us
Four priests and nine parishes are involved in the current round of changes happening in our diocese. And so we pray for the parishes, the priests and the people involved. We pray, above all, that all those concerned will have a profound openness to the providence of God deep within what is happening and that, with God’s help, we will accept whatever change is involved and face the future filled with trust and confidence in the God who is always with us and never moves.............Lord hear us
Well, my initial reaction as I left the Bishop’s house was one of deep peace and a sense that what was happening was right. It quite simply felt as if it was of God, a feeling which stayed with me for the rest of that day. But when I went to bed that night, it all changed. I couldn’t sleep, and as I lay there in the darkness waves of fear and panic came over me. I began to think of all the people and the things I would miss. My Dad and I had nipped up about 8.30. that evening to see where the Church was. There hadn’t been a soul to be seen anywhere, and, as I lay there, I pictured myself sitting in the house at night, growing old, with nothing happening and no one ever coming to the door, not even for a bag of messages. And in the darkness, ridiculous things, like the fact that there is no Marks and Spencer’s in West Kilbride, were doing everything they could to destroy the sense of God I had had earlier. In Ignatian terms, consolation had well and truly given way to desolation, as it so often does for us in the night. The voice speaking to me during that time was the voice of Peter in Matthew’s version of today’s Gospel. ‘This must not happen to you, Lord,’ was what he said to Jesus after Jesus had predicted his own passion and it was that same negative and ungodly voice that I was hearing during that long night from Tuesday through to Wednesday morning. But with the coming of morning it passed and today, although I know that, after twenty four years here, there will be difficult moments ahead for me which will involve an element of taking up my cross and going where God leads, I can say to you with utter confidence that God is in this move, that it is happening at the right time and that it will be, without question, the best thing both for me and for St Matthew’s. And I would like to tell you why.
For a long time, you see, I have been aware that sooner or later I would have to leave here, either in a box or to go to another parish. I’ve also been aware for a long time that, like the rest of you, I’m getting older. Next year I will be a pensioner and four years ago, when I was ill, the consultant told me I must take this fact into account and adapt to it. And I have been struggling to do this, giving up the prison last year and, as I explained to you then, trying to use a Thursday in a different way, being a tentative step in that direction. And now I see this move as a spirit-inspired part of that process. And then there’s the question of the kind of priest God is calling me to be. Ultimately the challenge facing us all is to be the people God created us to be. This is certainly true of priests and it can take many years to come to, the failure to do so being, I know, a source of deep unhappiness to many. And the thing that has become clear to me over the years is that at the heart of my own vocation is the call to the ministry known as Spiritual Direction, the purpose of which is to help and enable individuals to discern and recognize the presence and movement of God in their lives. And part of the Bishops’s reason for asking me to go to West Kilbride is that I should have more time and space to do this. And I welcome that and thank God for it.
And I have no doubt either than Fr Martin Chamber’s coming here will be a great blessing for you. He is a different person from me, called to be a different kind of priest and so will bring to the parish things I cannot bring and which have been missing for the last twenty four years. And the very fact that he is coming at all is a sign of God’s providence. One of the things that has made the whole question of moving difficult for me up to now has been the likelihood that I would not be replaced and you would be left without a resident priest. But at this precise moment that has not happened. This summer Martin has come back from Ecuador and Fr Willie McFadden from being rector in Scotus College. And their return has provided a window of opportunity for me to leave without this happening. And God, in his providence, has grasped it. And if further proof of God at work is required, there’s the way in which our plan to employ a youth worker has dove-tailed so well with the move. Because one of the things Martin has been asked to do is take on responsibility for youth throughout the whole diocese, suddenly leaving St Matthew’s at the centre of the diocese in this respect. And for me God just shines out of this. And I thank him for it.
Of course there will be some difficult times ahead for me, for Martin, for you and for the people of West Kilbride. Change is never easy and few of us really like it. But what is far worse than change is stagnation. This change, if we all embrace it with faith and trust in God will be the beginning of something new and God-filled. There will be challenges. Fr Chamber’s will need time to adjust to the enormous change in his life as he moves from the Third World back to the first. And it will be your task to welcome him and support him through this time of transition.
And with any luck, the people of West Kilbride will do the same.
BIDDING PRAYERS
When Peter remonstrates with Jesus and objects to what he has just said about his having to suffer grievously, to be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and to be put to death, arguing in Matthew’s account that this must not happen to Jesus, he is displaying a very deep tendency in human nature. The way he thinks is not God’s way but man’s. And so we pray for a willingness to move beyond the limits of human understanding and learn to think as God thinks...............Lord hear us.
When Jesus asks the question, ‘Who do you say I am?’ his words are addressed, not just to Peter, but to every single human being down through the ages. Jesus is either who we say he is or he is not. If he is not, then he is the greatest fraud in history. If he is, then he becomes the single most important person in history. There is no third way and no middle ground. And so we pray for the clarity of vision we need to see this and to answer this great question for ourselves...........Lord hear us
In Matthew’s account of today’s story Jesus tells Peter that it is not flesh and blood that has revealed the truth to him but his Father in heaven. Left to our own devices, the mystery of whoJesus is – God living among us – would be impossible to work out for ourselves. Jesus can only be known through faith, a gift from God which enables us to reach far beyond the limits of human thinking and know the unknowable. And so we ask God to pour this grace into our world................Lord hear us
To know Jesus and become a follower of his involves entering in some way into the mystery of death and resurrection. It is a mystery which lies at the very heart of creation. At every level of existence something always has to die so that what is new can be born. It is not possible to be born into what is of God without in some way dying to what is not of God: losing our life in some way so that we can save it. And so we pray for the courage we need to engage with this process................Lord hear us
In today’s second reading, St James tells us that Faith without good deeds is quite dead. There is no point in wishing the poor man well if we are not willing to engage with his poverty and do something about it. And so we pray that God will lead this parish deeper and deeper into this aspect of our faith. We pray that, with each year that passes, we will become more and more willing, not only to give to those in need, but to engage with the roots and causes of poverty itself............Lord hear us
Four priests and nine parishes are involved in the current round of changes happening in our diocese. And so we pray for the parishes, the priests and the people involved. We pray, above all, that all those concerned will have a profound openness to the providence of God deep within what is happening and that, with God’s help, we will accept whatever change is involved and face the future filled with trust and confidence in the God who is always with us and never moves.............Lord hear us
Saturday, 5 September 2009
22nd Sunday B
There are many reasons for the decline in church attendance throughout the developed world and we have reflected on some of them over the years. Last week’s Tablet carried a report of a recent study done in France, traditionally called ‘The eldest daughter of the Church,’ which shows that Mass attendance there has fallen to just 4.5% of the population. And reflecting on the causes of this, it identified as one of the major historical factors the Church’s opposition to things like the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. And we saw this last year in the Church History Course: how, for years, the Church in the form of various Popes bitterly opposed virtually everything that was modern, setting itself against such things as democracy, scientific research, social change, workers’ rights and virtually anything that was new. And those of you who attended the course will remember how this irrational fear of anything that was modern led at one point to the the banning of gas lighting and railways in what were then the Vatican States. And we are still suffering from the effects of all this as we struggle to regain the kind of credibility in the eyes of the world which would make it possible for the message of the Gospel to be taken seriously again by the men and women of our modern scientific age.
But this catastrophic error on the part of the Church isn’t the only reason why the Churches are so often dismissed as irrelevant by so many of our contemporaries There’s another very important one and it’s what millions today see, sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly, as our hypocrisy; the very thing St James is talking about in that second reading. ‘Do not’ he says, ‘try to combine faith in Jesus Christ with the making of distinctions between classes of people,’ which was, as is clear from the passage, what some people in the early Church were doing. And so we have that whole thing about welcoming the well-dressed man and giving him the best seat while the poor man is ignored and made to stand in the corner or sit on the floor by the president’s foot rest. And this snapshot, taken 2000 years ago, if have the honesty to really look at it, tells us everything we need to know about the fundamentally middle class nature of our Churches today, then, as now, the opposite of everything Jesus and the Gospel stand for.
The truth we have to face up to is that we are a Church which, in our part of the world at least, has lost virtually all contact with the poor man in the story. We are OK with the poor man who lives far away. We can send him money and romanticize about him. But the poor man on our doorstep is much more challenging. In James’ story he was told to sit on the floor. But at least he was there. In our day he is simply not in our churches and would rarely, if ever, think of attending one. He would not feel welcome among us. He would be embarrased and uncomfortable, sensing, as he would undoubtedly do, our own embarrassment and our own uncomfortableness with him. This is so obvious whenever someone from the prison or someone looking for help does happen to find his/her way in here, as they do from time to time. From my position up here I can see people gripping their handbags and squeezing along the bench to avoid contact with the man dressed in shabby clothes. And while this is a very understandable human reaction, the truth we have to face is that it is a contradiction of everything the Eucharist is about. Just as it is a contradiction of everything the Eucharist is about when, on special occasions, we invite the Lord or Lady Provost, our MPs and MSPs, the local ‘cooncillors’ and, on really special occasions, even the Lord Lieutenant, making sure someone is at the door to welcome them and lead them to the seats specially reserved for them at the front. And there they sit during the Mass, which often means nothing to them, secure in the knowledge that there will be a couple of members of the St Vincent de Paul at the door to deal with any folk in shabby clothes with a drink in them who might want to slip in at the back. Which, incidentally, is why, when we celebrated the Silver Jubilee of this church seven years ago, there wasn’t a ‘cooncillor,’ an MP or an invited guest anywhere.
And so what we need is for Jesus to do to us what he did to the man in the Gospel. We need him to put his finger into our ears and touch our mouths with spittle. We need to hear, very often for the first time, what Christian morality is really about as opposed to what we think it is about. For most people, christian morality is virtually synonymous with sexual morality, but there is no evidence whatsoever for this in the actual text of the New Testament. Jesus himself has almost nothing to say about such things. He was not afraid to be seen in the company of prostitutes and on that one occasion when he was confronted by the woman caught in the very act of committing adultery he had not a single word of condemnation for her. Churches agonize today over homosexuality, but at no time does Jesus make any reference to it, even although there must have been gay men and women among his followers. And its not that there aren’t issues around sexual morality. There are many. But for anyone who takes a serious look at what Jesus says and does it is blindingly obvious that he put far far more emphasis on justice than he did on such things. And so we have the story of the poor man lying at the rich man’s gate – as he still does today right here in Kilmarnock – along with the parable of the final judgement where Jesus associates himself completely with the poor. ‘As long as you did this to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.’ Not a single word about adultery or fornication or homosexuality or couples living together. Only justice, feeding the hungry and reaching out to those in need. That, above all other things, is the heart of the Gospel, and, as followers of Jesus, we are called to be living, breathing witnesses to it in the midst of the world.
And so hear spoken in this church today, not a translation of the original Aramaic, but the very word, the very sound uttered by Jesus, spoken to this whole community today. ‘Ephphatha.’ May your ears be opened.
BIDDING PRAYERS
Perhaps the greatest challenge facing the Church at this moment in its long history is to move leave the shallow waters behind and launch out into the deep. This image from Luke’s Gospel and was used by Pope John Paul II towards the end of his life to describe the times through which we are living. And so we pray for the courage to do this: to be healed of the deafness which prevents us hearing the real message of the Gospel and so become genuine and authentic followers of Jesus...........Lord hear us
Human nature being what it is, we all have a vested interest in not hearing the full message of the Gospel. We know instinctively that to take it seriously will have profound implications for the way we live, and so we spend much of our lives keeping it at arm’s length, living lives of religion rather than faith and depriving ourselves of the fullness of life only God can give. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to see this for the profound mistake it is..........Lord hear us
The streets of Kilmarnock, like the streets of any other town, are filled with people like the poor man St James speaks of in today’s Gospel. Many of them are young people with a whole variety of problems in their lives which are beyond our experience and so beyond our comprehension. And so we pray for the grace to see them always as God sees them and not turn ourselves into judges – and iunjust judges at that........Lord hear us
The Gospels are not saying that somehow poverty in itself is a good thing. Poverty is an evil and as such we must do everything we can to eradicate it from our street and from the world beyond. But what is clear from the New Testament is that Jesus is always on the side of the poor and the oppressed and invites those who follow him to be where he is. And so we pray that the ligament of our tongues will be loosened so that we can speak up for oppressed people everywhere............Lord hear us
As a parish, of course, we do try to reach out to those in need both at home and abroad. Many come to us on a daily basis looking for help and this weekend we have the monthly ‘Homeless Lunch.’ But we pray that our giving will never be condescending towards those who are poor or in need. We pray for the grace we need to treat every person we meet with the profound respect they are due and to see each one of them as our brother and sister...Lord hear us
One of the things that has done most damage to the Church down through the ages has been the way it has often sought the company of those who wield power and influence in society rather than associating itself with tax collectors and sinners, as Jesus did. And so we pray that we will avoid this danger and treat every person who comes to us in the same way, never making distinctions between classes of people or having special seats for some and not for others......Lord hear us
But this catastrophic error on the part of the Church isn’t the only reason why the Churches are so often dismissed as irrelevant by so many of our contemporaries There’s another very important one and it’s what millions today see, sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly, as our hypocrisy; the very thing St James is talking about in that second reading. ‘Do not’ he says, ‘try to combine faith in Jesus Christ with the making of distinctions between classes of people,’ which was, as is clear from the passage, what some people in the early Church were doing. And so we have that whole thing about welcoming the well-dressed man and giving him the best seat while the poor man is ignored and made to stand in the corner or sit on the floor by the president’s foot rest. And this snapshot, taken 2000 years ago, if have the honesty to really look at it, tells us everything we need to know about the fundamentally middle class nature of our Churches today, then, as now, the opposite of everything Jesus and the Gospel stand for.
The truth we have to face up to is that we are a Church which, in our part of the world at least, has lost virtually all contact with the poor man in the story. We are OK with the poor man who lives far away. We can send him money and romanticize about him. But the poor man on our doorstep is much more challenging. In James’ story he was told to sit on the floor. But at least he was there. In our day he is simply not in our churches and would rarely, if ever, think of attending one. He would not feel welcome among us. He would be embarrased and uncomfortable, sensing, as he would undoubtedly do, our own embarrassment and our own uncomfortableness with him. This is so obvious whenever someone from the prison or someone looking for help does happen to find his/her way in here, as they do from time to time. From my position up here I can see people gripping their handbags and squeezing along the bench to avoid contact with the man dressed in shabby clothes. And while this is a very understandable human reaction, the truth we have to face is that it is a contradiction of everything the Eucharist is about. Just as it is a contradiction of everything the Eucharist is about when, on special occasions, we invite the Lord or Lady Provost, our MPs and MSPs, the local ‘cooncillors’ and, on really special occasions, even the Lord Lieutenant, making sure someone is at the door to welcome them and lead them to the seats specially reserved for them at the front. And there they sit during the Mass, which often means nothing to them, secure in the knowledge that there will be a couple of members of the St Vincent de Paul at the door to deal with any folk in shabby clothes with a drink in them who might want to slip in at the back. Which, incidentally, is why, when we celebrated the Silver Jubilee of this church seven years ago, there wasn’t a ‘cooncillor,’ an MP or an invited guest anywhere.
And so what we need is for Jesus to do to us what he did to the man in the Gospel. We need him to put his finger into our ears and touch our mouths with spittle. We need to hear, very often for the first time, what Christian morality is really about as opposed to what we think it is about. For most people, christian morality is virtually synonymous with sexual morality, but there is no evidence whatsoever for this in the actual text of the New Testament. Jesus himself has almost nothing to say about such things. He was not afraid to be seen in the company of prostitutes and on that one occasion when he was confronted by the woman caught in the very act of committing adultery he had not a single word of condemnation for her. Churches agonize today over homosexuality, but at no time does Jesus make any reference to it, even although there must have been gay men and women among his followers. And its not that there aren’t issues around sexual morality. There are many. But for anyone who takes a serious look at what Jesus says and does it is blindingly obvious that he put far far more emphasis on justice than he did on such things. And so we have the story of the poor man lying at the rich man’s gate – as he still does today right here in Kilmarnock – along with the parable of the final judgement where Jesus associates himself completely with the poor. ‘As long as you did this to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.’ Not a single word about adultery or fornication or homosexuality or couples living together. Only justice, feeding the hungry and reaching out to those in need. That, above all other things, is the heart of the Gospel, and, as followers of Jesus, we are called to be living, breathing witnesses to it in the midst of the world.
And so hear spoken in this church today, not a translation of the original Aramaic, but the very word, the very sound uttered by Jesus, spoken to this whole community today. ‘Ephphatha.’ May your ears be opened.
BIDDING PRAYERS
Perhaps the greatest challenge facing the Church at this moment in its long history is to move leave the shallow waters behind and launch out into the deep. This image from Luke’s Gospel and was used by Pope John Paul II towards the end of his life to describe the times through which we are living. And so we pray for the courage to do this: to be healed of the deafness which prevents us hearing the real message of the Gospel and so become genuine and authentic followers of Jesus...........Lord hear us
Human nature being what it is, we all have a vested interest in not hearing the full message of the Gospel. We know instinctively that to take it seriously will have profound implications for the way we live, and so we spend much of our lives keeping it at arm’s length, living lives of religion rather than faith and depriving ourselves of the fullness of life only God can give. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to see this for the profound mistake it is..........Lord hear us
The streets of Kilmarnock, like the streets of any other town, are filled with people like the poor man St James speaks of in today’s Gospel. Many of them are young people with a whole variety of problems in their lives which are beyond our experience and so beyond our comprehension. And so we pray for the grace to see them always as God sees them and not turn ourselves into judges – and iunjust judges at that........Lord hear us
The Gospels are not saying that somehow poverty in itself is a good thing. Poverty is an evil and as such we must do everything we can to eradicate it from our street and from the world beyond. But what is clear from the New Testament is that Jesus is always on the side of the poor and the oppressed and invites those who follow him to be where he is. And so we pray that the ligament of our tongues will be loosened so that we can speak up for oppressed people everywhere............Lord hear us
As a parish, of course, we do try to reach out to those in need both at home and abroad. Many come to us on a daily basis looking for help and this weekend we have the monthly ‘Homeless Lunch.’ But we pray that our giving will never be condescending towards those who are poor or in need. We pray for the grace we need to treat every person we meet with the profound respect they are due and to see each one of them as our brother and sister...Lord hear us
One of the things that has done most damage to the Church down through the ages has been the way it has often sought the company of those who wield power and influence in society rather than associating itself with tax collectors and sinners, as Jesus did. And so we pray that we will avoid this danger and treat every person who comes to us in the same way, never making distinctions between classes of people or having special seats for some and not for others......Lord hear us
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