I can never make up my mind whether it’s a blessing or a curse, but one of the things nature has given me is very sharp hearing. The result is that I sometimes hear things I am not supposed to hear and there have been times over the years when it would have been better if I hadn’t heard them. But it can be an advantage too. One of the obvious benefits is that you get insights into what people really think. And there have been one or two examples of this since I came here to St Bride’s. The words have not always been the same, but what they have boiled down to are things like, ‘I’m not sure about this man’ or ‘I don’t know what I think about the new priest.’ And I have no problem with this at all. In fact I welcome it and am pleased to hear it. As I told you the very first week I was here, I have not come to West Kilbride to please you, seek your approval, tell you what you want to hear or live up to your expectations of what a priest should be. I had a hard enough time with all that nonsense twenty four years ago in Kilmarnock and one of the reasons I am so happy here is that those issues no longer trouble me. I know now that I am here to be the priest God is calling me to be, ultimately whether you like it or not, and that will always be my aim. And so, to the person who said, ‘But we’ll soon knock him into shape’ my answer is. ‘Oh no you won’t.’ And to explain why I must never allow this to happen I will turn in a moment to a fundamental truth about the Christian life contained in today’s readings. But before that, I remind you of another important truth which underpins the one that follows.
And this first truth, one I have already spoken about several times, is that the world is a place filled with the splendour of God. There is no place in the heart of any person who claims to believe in Jesus for the negativity and pessimism found in so many pious, Church-going people who sit in judgement on the world every day and find it wanting. Salvation is not something awaiting us in the future. As St Paul says in the second reading, we are already saved by the death and resurrection of Jesus. God loved the world so much that he sent his only Son. God in the Genesis myth of creation looked at what he had made and saw that it was good and one of the first signs of the Spirit at work in us is a growing capacity to recognize that goodness and rejoice in it. Indeed, a sign of someone without faith, as described by Jeremiah in the first reading, is that ‘if good comes he has no eyes for it.’
But having said all that, it’s important to recognize that, although the world is filled with the goodness of God, not everything that happens in the world is good. This is very clear in today’s Gospel where Jesus, in St Luke’s version of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, contrasts the values of the world with those of the kingdom. And it’s very clear that they are not the same. The Second Vatican Council, in arguably its greatest document, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, committed itself totally and completely to the world saying, famously, that ‘the cares and concerns of the men and women of our time are the cares and concerns of the followers of Jesus too.’ But such a deep involvement with the world, along with the conviction of its fundamental goodness, makes it all the more important tha twe know the difference between what is of God and what isn’t. As followers of Jesus there’s a sense in which we will always be in the world but not of it. Deeply committed to the world, we will never be entirely at home in it. In one of his parables Jesus tells the story of the farmer who sowed good seed in his field only to have an enemy come along and sow darnel among the wheat. And as men and women of faith it is our task to live totally in the world while at the same time sifting through everything that happens to discern what is good seed and what is darnel. The person who does this, Jeremiah told us, is like a tree planted by the waterside while the person who does not is like a dry scrub in the wasteland. And it’s because there is so much darnel, so many areas covered in dry scrub, so many patches of wasteland in our otherwise fundamentally God-filled world that the preaching of the Gospel will always challenge and disturb us and, at some level, come into conflict with the culture of our time.
Not everything we hear on the Tele or read about in the papers, for example, is true. There are forces at work in our society which are deeply ungodly, the most obvious current example being the worship of money and the pursuit of material things at almost any cost which have almost brought the developed world to its knees and may still do so. Just look at Greece. Another area is the whole question of what constitutes truth. Truth in our day has almost become what any given individual wants it to be. Any concept of a truth which is greater than we are is in danger of being lost and as men and women who believe in a God who is the source of all truth we simply cannot allow ourselves to be seduced by such thinking Morality, too, what constitutes right and wrong, has become a kind of free-for-all in today’s society and anyone who dares to take a stand on anything is immediately vilified and treated as if they were some kind of dinosaur. And so it takes a person of genuine courage to do so. But, of course, the greatest manifestation of darnel in our field is the scandal of poverty and hunger in the world. In today’s Gospel, Jesus not only promises that the hungry will be satisfied. He also warns those who are rich – and on a world scale we all are – that we are having our consolation now.
And so the preaching of the Gospel can never be entirely comfortable. It cannot always be what we want to hear. It will challenge us. It will disturb us. And so there’s one thing I can promise you. I will always try to speak the truth to you, even if you don’t like it.
BIDDING PRAYERS
As followers of Jesus, men and women of the Gospel, we are called through our baptism to be in the world but not entirely of it; to be deeply committed to the world but to work at all times to bring about the coming of the kingdom within it. And so we pray for the grace we need to do this: to love the world and its people with a deep love but, at the same time, to challenge the world and, by the way we live, show them new ways of living and open up new possibilities rooted in the teaching of Jesus.....Lord hear us
To love the world begins with a deep sense of its fundamental goodness. In the first reading, Jeremiah reminded us that the man without faith is like “a dry scrub in the wastelands: if good comes he has no eyes for it,” words which are too often true in the lives of pious, church-going people. And so we ask God to lead us beyond the pessimism and negativity of many in today’s world and enable us to recognize all around us a world filled to overflowing with the splendour and goodness of God........ Lord hear us
To be able to see God in the world does not mean being naive about what is going on around us. To live discerning lives today means being able to see what is of God in the world without being blind to what is not of God and so deeply unhealthy and harmful for the world and its people. It is to be able to tell the difference between the wheat and the darnel and we pray, not only for the wisdom we need to do that, but for the courage to challenge what is not of God whenever we encounter it.........Lord hear us
The great sign today that something is profoundly wrong with our world is the economic chaos we see everywhere along with the still growing gap between rich and poor. For years we have worshipped the goddess money, lived by her commandments and sacrificed the lives of millions of our fellow human beings on her altar. And now we are paying the price for so much avarice and greed. So we pray that the world of today will come to see what it is we have been doing see the need for radical change.....Lord hear us
Lent begins on Wednesday when millions throughout the world will come to receive their ashes. But there is nothing special about these ashes. Since the earliest days of the Church they have been a sign of willingness to be converted and embrace change through prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Without this commitment, to receive ashes is little more than superstition and religious mumbo jumbo. And so we pray that the ashes we receive on our foreheads this week will be a sign of something much deeper.....Lord hear us
In just two weeks our parish Week of Guided or Directed Prayer will begin. Over the last twenty years, hundreds of people just like ourselves from all over the diocese have taken part in such weeks and benefited greatly from them. For a significant number of people they have become like an annual retreat. And so we pray that fear will not prevent anyone in this parish from taking part. We pray that those whom God is inviting to do so will recognize the invitation and have the courage to respond to it.............Lord hear us
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