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