I remember one year, when I was struggling to know what to say on Trinity Sunday, turning in desperation to a book which summarised what theologians have said about the Trinity over the centuries. And what I found there left me, I remember, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. And so I would like to do what I did then and quote you a sentence from the opening paragraph.
“A commonplace of contemporary Trinitarian theology is the priority it grants to the narrative and symbolic discourse of Christian worship and proclamation over the leaner, conceptual discourse of theological theory itself. Theology continues to employ conceptual forms of thought in probing the meaning of Trinity, but deepened appreciation of the more spontaneous discourse of lived Christian praxis suggests a more conscious subordination of Trinitarian theory to what might be called the ‘semantic aim’ of Christian proclamation and worship.”
And believe me, there’s plenty more where that came from, centuries more; tome after tome of big words and complicated sentences causing countless library shelves to groan under their weight. And yet, even if we read them all, we would be no closer to understanding the mystery of the Trinity. As St Thomas Aquinas, whose own writings run to many volumes, famously said:, ‘Everything I have ever written turned to straw compared with what I learned in one moment of contemplation.’ And St Ignatius of Loyola says something very similar about an experience he had one day beside the River Cardoner in Manresa, not far from Barcelona. Recalling it years later in Rome, he wrote that if he added together everything he had learned about God in the whole course of his life it was not as much as he learned at that one moment. So what do they mean?
Well, the first things they are saying – an idea you should be familiar with by now – is that nothing we say about God is ever completely true. Human language is just not capable of describing God. We have neither the vocabulary nor the concepts to do so. We can say that God is love. We can say that God is Father. But the words ‘Love’ and ‘Father’ can only be applied to God by analogy and will always be only partly true, and partly untrue, something which has immense implications for what it means to be people of faith in the world today. And the key is in the Eucharistic Prayer we use each Sunday.
In it, we ask God to “keep us alert in faith to the signs of the times, eager to accept the challenge of the Gospel and open to the needs of all humanity so that, by sharing in the struggles of the men and women of our time, we may faithfully bring them the good news of salvation and advance together with them on the way to the Kingdom.” But one of the main signs of the times we are living through – and therefore the place where we will meet God - is the phenomenon some call loss of faith but which is, in fact, something much more profound than that? Millions in the modern world have rejected the idea of God as we have understood it up to now. It no longer makes any sense to them and there are good reasons why. The seeds were planted in the days of Galileo when we discovered that we were not the centre of the universe. Later, when Darwin announced that, instead of being the pinnacle of God’s creation, we were actually descended from apes, that dented our sense of who we are even more. And what has exacerbated all this and brought it to a head has been the incredible development of science and technology over the last hundred years. The rate and depth of change has been phenomenal and the failure of Religion to respond adequately to this new world, resisting it rather than embracing it, has left us looking like dinosaurs to millions, relics of bye-gone pre-scientific age dominated by superstition and magic. So what do we do about it? How do we respond to this great sign of the times?
Well, we can weep and wail, looking around for someone or something to blame. Those who do this tend to retreat further and further into ways of thinking which are long past their sell-by date, hanging on, like children with a comfort blanket, to ideas and practices which no longer respond to the world we live in. And there is lots of this around, as instead of doing what the liturgy says and being alert to the signs of the times, eager to accept the challenge of the Gospel, we seek refuge in a past which no longer exists. Often the reason we do this is that we are afraid to look too closely at the questions being raised by those who no longer believe in God; in case what they say is true; in case there is no God; in case he is no more than a projection of our own need for a father figure; It’s as if our own grasp on faith is so tenuous that we are afraid to even look at it in case it turns to dust.
But there’s another way, the only really genuine response for those who are called to be a priestly people in the midst of the world. And it is to enter, like Jesus, deeply into the situation the men and women of our time are living through. It is to face up to and feel their questions in our own bodies. It is to experience their doubts. It is to experience in ourselves the atheism of our age, neither falling into its trap nor retreating into the false security of explanations which were only ever partly true. To believe in God today is to live with the constant possibility that he may not exist. To pray is to enter into clouds of unknowing and, as I do every day in life, take the risk that the God we pray to is no more than our own voice echoing in the darkness. That’s the nature of the age we live in and we can only be bearers of the Good News to such a world if we are willing to walk in its shoes, feel its doubts and enter into its struggles.
God cannot be understood. God can only be worshipped. Our vocation is to be signs of that for the people of our time and, in the midst of all the confusion and uncertainty, continue, on behalf of all around us to pray those ancient words: Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be world without end. Amen.
BIDDING PRAYERS
For many, the age through which we are living is a threatening one, stirring fears and anxieties about the widespread loss of faith in God which we see around us. And yet, for men and women of faith, there is nothing to fear. The key is to understand what is happening. When we do this, the situation is transformed. Instead of being frightening, it becomes a challenge, a great opportunity, and invitation to deeper faith. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to see it in this way…….Lord hear us
During a time of confusion and rapid change, the likes of which we are living through at this moment in history, there will always be casualties. Many good people, influenced by but unable to understand the roots and causes of modern atheistic ways of thinking, have lost their faith in the very existence of God or had it seriously undermined. And so we pray for them today, that this often painful experience will become the place where they meet God again in new and much deeper way........Lord hear us
Many today complain that they cannot pray the way they used to, and, discouraged by this experience, give up trying. And yet the experience of not being able to pray as we used to is very often a sign that the way we used to pray is no longer appropriate and that God is calling us to different ways of praying. Prayer is a great journey which takes us through many stages and we ask for the grace to keep travelling until we finally meet the one true God face to face and see him for who he really is.........Lord hear us
Tradition, one of the pillars of Catholicism, has been described as the living faith of the dead; traditionalism, on the other hand, as the dead faith of the living. And so we pray for all who are trapped in the past, floundering around in a world which no longer exists except in their own minds, that they will have the courage they need to engage with a modern Church in a modern world and so become a truly priestly people for the sake of the men and women who share this moment in history with us.........Lord hear us.
We pray in a particular way for the children and young people of our parish. For many of them, the world of faith seems alien and of little or no relevance to their lives. We pray, however, that the efforts we are making to develop a programme of religious education suited to their needs will, in time, help them grow into men and women of faith able to take their rightful place in the Church as it works out how to be faithful to Jesus’ command to make disciples of all the nations in the world of the 21th Century.........Lord hear us
In today’s Gospel, Jesus promises that the Spirit will lead us into the complete truth. Created in the image and likeness of God and blessed with intelligence, we can explore and unravel many of the great mysteries of creation, a process which is accelerating rapidly in our own time. But there are truths hidden from even the greatest minds. These, like the mystery we celebrate this weekend, can only be known through faith. And we ask God to pour that faith into the world at this moment in its history.....Lord hear us
Saturday, 29 May 2010
Saturday, 22 May 2010
PENTECOST SUNDAY
There are several reasons why it never crosses my mind to go anywhere other than Spain on holiday every year. For one thing, I have good friends there whom I look forward to seeing every summer. But the main reason I can’t imagine myself ever going anywhere else is the language. I love speaking Spanish. I could, of course, go to Central or South America. Spanish, after all, is spoken there too. But they are a long way off, and, in any case, I have a problem in principle with the idea of holidaying in a third world country.
So what is it I enjoy so much about the language? Well, it’s hard to describe, but in the midst of all the things I love about being in Spain, the weather, the history, the culture, the food, the wine and so on, the greatest pleasure of all comes from sitting around a table full of Spaniards for hours on end talking; about politics, football, God, religion, the family and a thousand other things. People in Spain spend hours doing this and I just love being part of it. It’s the sheer pleasure of being able to understand what people of another culture are saying and be part of their conversation. I love understanding the structures of the sentences; knowing why they use the subjunctive here and not there, why they use this word and not that one. Often in these situations my mind turns to Bishop McGhee who sent me to Spain as a student in 1963 and I quietly thank God for him. Without him I might have spent my whole life here in Scotland and missed out on so much.
And I tell you this today because of the link I see between everything a second language has meant for me and the Feast of Pentecost. I realise, of course, that not everyone has had the opportunity I had to live abroad for a few years and learn another language, but I would go so far as to say that to have never been exposed to any serious contact with a second language – something, sadly, that is more common today given the decline in the teaching of foreign languages in our schools – is to run the risk of being trapped in one particular very limited way of seeing the world. And who could argue against the proposition that we in Britain suffer more than most from this given that so many people in the world learn English and make it ‘unnecessary’ for us to learn their languages when we venture abroad. This ‘why don’t the foreigners speak English’ mentality is surely one of the main causes of the arrogance, xenophobia and downright ignorance we so often display towards people from other countries and one antidote to this is to learn a language.
Learning a language teaches us that there’s more than one way of seeing the world. And this is the beginning of wisdom. I think of my friend Enrique’s mother-in-law, Jovita. She’s ninety three now and will go to her grave convinced that people who speak any language other than Spanish are mad. She simply cannot get her mind round the idea that this object in my hand could be anything else but ‘un libro.’ The idea that someone else could call it ‘a book’ totally mystifies her. And while this is a fairly harmless example, trivial even, it is, I suggest, a sign of something much deeper and more far-reaching, which is the inability we all have to one degree or another to think, as people say today ‘outside the box.’ We are all trapped in the limitations of our own thinking, our own way of seeing things, and one of the functions of the Spirit of Pentecost in our lives – symbolized in the story, of course, by the speaking of many languages – is to enable us to break out of the little boxes we live in and open ourselves up to bigger and previously unknown truths.
No one language, you see, can describe the fullness and complexity of the reality all around us. No single way of thinking can contain in itself all there is to know about anything. Book and libro are simply sounds which a parrot could imitate. What they are describing, however, is something no parrot could ever understand. We think that because we have a word to describe it that we know what a tree is. But people who spend their lives studying trees are still learning about them. Inside each of us there is a small amount of truth and an indescribably large amount of ignorance. There is so much still to be learned and even the truths we think we have grasped are never complete. To explore the fullness of truth we have to begin to question and doubt the very words we think describe reality. But they are only our version of it. And above all, we must be willing to leave behind our prejudices and opinions which we have turned into absolute truth.
And if this is true of the world around us, how much more true must it be about God. No word or human idea can pin God down or fully describe who God is. Forgive me if I quote again the 14th Century German mystic Meister Eckhart, but when he famously said that whatever we say God is God isn’t, he was telling us something of immense importance. And it’s only when we understand this, understand the limits of all our thinking and all our language that the Feast of Pentecost can really make sense. Because what the Spirit of God longs to do in us is lead us beyond our narrow and incomplete ways of thinking into the mystery of who we are. The Spirit broadens and stretches our minds to their limit and then, through the gift of faith, takes us beyond even those limits into places we never imagined existed. And it’s my own deep conviction about this which lies behind the things I say to you each week.
I know, of course, that some of you struggle with them. Challenging is the kindest word I have heard to describe what I say. But understand this: I don’t say what I do to be difficult or upset you. I say it because some of the flame which burned in the heart of Peter on the day of Pentecost burns in my heart too. There are so many things I want to share with you about God, about the Scriptures, about spirituality, about the Church, about that wonderfully journey from religion to faith. But if that is what you want, if you want to make that journey too, then be in no doubt. We are going to have to learn to speak a whole new language.
BIDDING PRAYERS
If we are to learn to speak the language of the Spirit, then we need the grace of humility. We need to be willing to recognize the limits of our own understanding and the depths of our own ignorance. We need a deep sense of truth as something far greater than ourselves and we need a willingness to go where truth leads, leaving behind, where necessary, even our most cherished ways of thinking. And so we ask God to stir in us this Pentecost a real willingness to learn and broaden our understanding...Lord hear us
To let go of our most cherished ways of thinking, not to mention our deep-rooted prejudices, requires courage as well as humility. We need to be ready to pass through a land of confusion and uncertainty if we are to come to new and deeper truths about ourselves and God. The danger is that we cling to what we know even when it is untrue and only men and women of real courage can move beyond this. And so we pray for this grace for ourselves and everyone in this parish............Lord hear us
On the Day of Pentecost, people from every nation on earth heard the gospel proclaimed in their own language. Now we are called by God to proclaim that same message to the men and women of the 21st century in a language they too can understand. And yet so often we speak a language filled with pious, holy, religious words which make no sense to anyone. And so we ask God to show us how to speak to the world of our time in a language which makes sense to people and helps them come to know God....Lord hear us
The world today is a very small village in which peoples from many different countries and cultures are having to learn to live with and understand each other. This is causing racial tension in many places and stirring in many of us a xenophobia we may not even have known was there. And so we ask God to guide the world at this time and help us see the tremendous possibilities for good that all this coming together of the world’s peoples holds for the future of humanity.........Lord hear us
The existence of different languages and ways of thinking can make communication between peoples more difficult. But here in Britain we have a particular problem. As an island people in a world where, because of our imperial past, English is spoken as a second language by so many, we have always shown an unusual reluctance to learn other peoples’ languages. As a result, we are more trapped than many others in narrow, jingoistic ways of thinking. And so we ask God today to lead us beyond these.........Lord hear us
On Wednesday we have our meeting where people who have stopped coming to church over the years are invited to join us for a cup of tea and a chat. Then, on Thursday, we have a meeting of the Parish Pastoral Council which every person in the parish is invited to attend. And so we pray that God will move deeply among us during the coming days and that we will experience in ourselves something of the joy, hope and enthusiasm which filled the Church on the day of Pentecost................Lord hear us
So what is it I enjoy so much about the language? Well, it’s hard to describe, but in the midst of all the things I love about being in Spain, the weather, the history, the culture, the food, the wine and so on, the greatest pleasure of all comes from sitting around a table full of Spaniards for hours on end talking; about politics, football, God, religion, the family and a thousand other things. People in Spain spend hours doing this and I just love being part of it. It’s the sheer pleasure of being able to understand what people of another culture are saying and be part of their conversation. I love understanding the structures of the sentences; knowing why they use the subjunctive here and not there, why they use this word and not that one. Often in these situations my mind turns to Bishop McGhee who sent me to Spain as a student in 1963 and I quietly thank God for him. Without him I might have spent my whole life here in Scotland and missed out on so much.
And I tell you this today because of the link I see between everything a second language has meant for me and the Feast of Pentecost. I realise, of course, that not everyone has had the opportunity I had to live abroad for a few years and learn another language, but I would go so far as to say that to have never been exposed to any serious contact with a second language – something, sadly, that is more common today given the decline in the teaching of foreign languages in our schools – is to run the risk of being trapped in one particular very limited way of seeing the world. And who could argue against the proposition that we in Britain suffer more than most from this given that so many people in the world learn English and make it ‘unnecessary’ for us to learn their languages when we venture abroad. This ‘why don’t the foreigners speak English’ mentality is surely one of the main causes of the arrogance, xenophobia and downright ignorance we so often display towards people from other countries and one antidote to this is to learn a language.
Learning a language teaches us that there’s more than one way of seeing the world. And this is the beginning of wisdom. I think of my friend Enrique’s mother-in-law, Jovita. She’s ninety three now and will go to her grave convinced that people who speak any language other than Spanish are mad. She simply cannot get her mind round the idea that this object in my hand could be anything else but ‘un libro.’ The idea that someone else could call it ‘a book’ totally mystifies her. And while this is a fairly harmless example, trivial even, it is, I suggest, a sign of something much deeper and more far-reaching, which is the inability we all have to one degree or another to think, as people say today ‘outside the box.’ We are all trapped in the limitations of our own thinking, our own way of seeing things, and one of the functions of the Spirit of Pentecost in our lives – symbolized in the story, of course, by the speaking of many languages – is to enable us to break out of the little boxes we live in and open ourselves up to bigger and previously unknown truths.
No one language, you see, can describe the fullness and complexity of the reality all around us. No single way of thinking can contain in itself all there is to know about anything. Book and libro are simply sounds which a parrot could imitate. What they are describing, however, is something no parrot could ever understand. We think that because we have a word to describe it that we know what a tree is. But people who spend their lives studying trees are still learning about them. Inside each of us there is a small amount of truth and an indescribably large amount of ignorance. There is so much still to be learned and even the truths we think we have grasped are never complete. To explore the fullness of truth we have to begin to question and doubt the very words we think describe reality. But they are only our version of it. And above all, we must be willing to leave behind our prejudices and opinions which we have turned into absolute truth.
And if this is true of the world around us, how much more true must it be about God. No word or human idea can pin God down or fully describe who God is. Forgive me if I quote again the 14th Century German mystic Meister Eckhart, but when he famously said that whatever we say God is God isn’t, he was telling us something of immense importance. And it’s only when we understand this, understand the limits of all our thinking and all our language that the Feast of Pentecost can really make sense. Because what the Spirit of God longs to do in us is lead us beyond our narrow and incomplete ways of thinking into the mystery of who we are. The Spirit broadens and stretches our minds to their limit and then, through the gift of faith, takes us beyond even those limits into places we never imagined existed. And it’s my own deep conviction about this which lies behind the things I say to you each week.
I know, of course, that some of you struggle with them. Challenging is the kindest word I have heard to describe what I say. But understand this: I don’t say what I do to be difficult or upset you. I say it because some of the flame which burned in the heart of Peter on the day of Pentecost burns in my heart too. There are so many things I want to share with you about God, about the Scriptures, about spirituality, about the Church, about that wonderfully journey from religion to faith. But if that is what you want, if you want to make that journey too, then be in no doubt. We are going to have to learn to speak a whole new language.
BIDDING PRAYERS
If we are to learn to speak the language of the Spirit, then we need the grace of humility. We need to be willing to recognize the limits of our own understanding and the depths of our own ignorance. We need a deep sense of truth as something far greater than ourselves and we need a willingness to go where truth leads, leaving behind, where necessary, even our most cherished ways of thinking. And so we ask God to stir in us this Pentecost a real willingness to learn and broaden our understanding...Lord hear us
To let go of our most cherished ways of thinking, not to mention our deep-rooted prejudices, requires courage as well as humility. We need to be ready to pass through a land of confusion and uncertainty if we are to come to new and deeper truths about ourselves and God. The danger is that we cling to what we know even when it is untrue and only men and women of real courage can move beyond this. And so we pray for this grace for ourselves and everyone in this parish............Lord hear us
On the Day of Pentecost, people from every nation on earth heard the gospel proclaimed in their own language. Now we are called by God to proclaim that same message to the men and women of the 21st century in a language they too can understand. And yet so often we speak a language filled with pious, holy, religious words which make no sense to anyone. And so we ask God to show us how to speak to the world of our time in a language which makes sense to people and helps them come to know God....Lord hear us
The world today is a very small village in which peoples from many different countries and cultures are having to learn to live with and understand each other. This is causing racial tension in many places and stirring in many of us a xenophobia we may not even have known was there. And so we ask God to guide the world at this time and help us see the tremendous possibilities for good that all this coming together of the world’s peoples holds for the future of humanity.........Lord hear us
The existence of different languages and ways of thinking can make communication between peoples more difficult. But here in Britain we have a particular problem. As an island people in a world where, because of our imperial past, English is spoken as a second language by so many, we have always shown an unusual reluctance to learn other peoples’ languages. As a result, we are more trapped than many others in narrow, jingoistic ways of thinking. And so we ask God today to lead us beyond these.........Lord hear us
On Wednesday we have our meeting where people who have stopped coming to church over the years are invited to join us for a cup of tea and a chat. Then, on Thursday, we have a meeting of the Parish Pastoral Council which every person in the parish is invited to attend. And so we pray that God will move deeply among us during the coming days and that we will experience in ourselves something of the joy, hope and enthusiasm which filled the Church on the day of Pentecost................Lord hear us
Saturday, 8 May 2010
6th SUNDAY OF EASTER
At the heart of today’s liturgy is an important question about how we see the world. The story begins with the death in Jerusalem in 37AD of Stephen, the first martyr. This was followed by a clampdown on the Christian community there and as a result of this a number of individuals fled Jerusalem and sought refuge in Antioch, part of what we now call Turkey. In Antioch they began to preach the Gospel, but initially this was restricted to the Jews in the city. One day, however, a really amazing thing happened. Some of the more bold and imaginative among them, whose names, sadly, have not come down to us, made a truly historic decision, the consequences of which were to prove far-reaching. Instead of just preaching to the Jews, they began to preach to the Greeks too. And, to their delight and astonishment, these welcomed the Gospel with open arms. And so began a process of reaching out beyond Judaism to the pagan world, which 250 years later reached Scotland and has led directly to our being here today.
The next thing that happened in Antioch, however, was that the Christians there, wondering what to do next and who might be the man to guide them, decided to send Barnabas to Tarsus to look for Paul. He brought him back to Antioch and, as the NT tells us, they spent a whole year together there. Then, at the end of that year, in 45AD, they set off on the first of three great missionary journeys made by Paul around the Mediterranean world. It lasted three years and in 48AD, they returned to Antioch filled with stories of how, in the words of Acts, God had opened the door of faith to the pagans. And there was great joy in Antioch over it.
But as we heard this morning, not everyone was happy with this. Some men, including members of the Pharisees’ party who had been converted to Christianity, came down from Judaea and began insisting that the pagan converts had to conform to the Jewish tradition and be circumcised before they could become part of the new Church. Only in this way, they claimed, could they be saved. This led to a disagreement, and, after a long argument, it was decided, as we heard, that Paul and Barnabas should go up to Jerusalem to discuss the problem with the apostles and elders. For some reason which I don’t quite understand, the passage which describes what happened in Jerusalem has been omitted from today’s reading, but suffice it to say that it was a long and difficult meeting.
On what we would call nowadays the liberal or progressive side were Paul and Barnabas. Their case was based on the fact that they had seen with their own eyes how God had given the pagans the gift of the Holy Spirit in exactly the same way they themselves had received it. To insist now that these should be circumcised and take on the traditions and practices of Judaism would, they argued, be a deeply backward step. It would be to deny the new thing God was doing in the lives of these people and impose on them burdens which were unnecessary. Christianity wasn’t a sect of Judaism or an extension it. It was something new, something fresh, something fundamentally different. Judaism was national. Christianity was international. It was for everyone and no-one was excluded.
For the conservative side of the argument, however, this was very difficult to accept. They were Jews and their parents and grandparents before them had been Jews. God was their God, they were his people, and the idea that the pagans could be saved without becoming Jews and going through the same process that they had gone through was too much for them. God was doing something new and they were unable to accept it. God was opening the door of faith to the pagan nations and they were not able to rejoice in it. At that meeting in Jerusalem in 48AD, however, the Church as a whole, faced with this conflict and guided by the Holy Spirit, chose the way of freedom over law and accepted that faith in Jesus made the rules and regulations of the Old Testament redundant. It was a truly great day for the Church – reflected in the second reading’s vision of a new Jerusalem devoid of a temple which symbolized the old ways and with gates facing outwards in every direction, north, south, east and west – and I invite you, even now, 2000 years later, to be thankful for it.
But, of course, today’s liturgy is about more than just remembering what happened all those centuries ago. The conflict between the open-mindedness of people like Paul and Barnabas and the ‘but we’ve always done it this way’ approach of their opponents is an eternal one and it is worth reflecting for a few moments on where we ourselves might have stood on the matter had we been present that day in Jerusalem. The Jewish converts of Paul’s day, despite everything Jesus had said and done, continued to consider themselves superior to foreigners and looked down their noses at them. But do we do the same? How do we feel about people different from ourselves? What is our attitude to immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers and migrant workers? When we go abroad on holiday, do we respect the people we meet there? Do we try to speak their language and eat their food or do we expect them to speak English and serve fish and chips every day? And if a group of foreigners suddenly arrived on our doorstep and wanted to come to Mass each week, do you think we would welcome them and adapt what we do to accommodate them or would we expect them to fall in with what we have always done?
And what about our attitude to change in the Church or in the way we think about God and the things of God? The Scriptures speak over and over again about a God who is always doing a new thing. Because we are on a journey of faith, it follows that we have never arrived at our destination, and so, like our nomadic ancestors in faith in the Old Testament, we have to be always moving on, breaking camp every morning, and going where God leads. But how willing are we to do this? In Jerusalem that day in 48AD, would we have been with Paul, the innovator, or would we have been with the ‘But we’ve always done it this way’ party. Spend some time this weekend thinking about these questions and answering them for yourself.
It was about embracing the future with courage or clinging to the past in fear. So what side would you have been on?
BIDDING PRAYERS
The meeting which took place in Jerusalem in 48AD is sometimes called the Council of Jerusalem, the most recent Council being the Second Vatican Council held in the 1960s. This Council, too, was about reaching out to the world. Pope John XXIII spoke at the time about opening the windows of the Church, after years of being tightly shut, to let in light and fresh air. The Council wanted to embrace the modern world with God’s love and we pray that the Church will remain faithful to that movement now.........Lord hear us
The letter sent to Antioch after the meeting in Jerusalem spoke, as we heard this morning, about not placing burdens on people apart from what was essential. And so we pray for the Church today that it will have the wisdom it needs to apply that same principle in our own time. We pray especially that we will always know how to distinguish what is merely human regulation, and so open to change, from what is from God and so remains true regardless of current thinking or the latest fashion.......Lord hear us
The Book of the Apocalypse offered us today a beautifully poetic vision of the Church, the New Jerusalem. It glittered like a jewel of crystal-clear diamond and had twelve gates facing north, south, east and west, a symbol of the fact that Christianity, unlike everything that had gone before it, is a world-wide faith which recognizes no barriers between peoples. And so we ask God to lead us beyond narrow nationalism, xenophobia and racism and stir in us an internationalism based on the teaching of Jesus........Lord hear us
Part of the vision of the New Jerusalem in the first reading was the fact that there was no temple in the city. The temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70AD, had been, for the people of the Old Testament, the sign of God’s presence among them. But in the New Jerusalem, the Church, there is no temple. The Risen Jesus himself is the temple and he is not confined to any one place. He is everywhere, in everything that happens, and in every person we meet. And so we pray for the wisdom to recognize him........Lord hear us
The Gospel passage today speaks about how the Holy Spirit will teach us everything we need to know and remind us of everything Jesus has said to us. Left to themselves, those early Christians could never have carried out Jesus’ command to teach all nations. They would not even have known where to begin. But with God all things are possible. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to recognize how the Spirit has always been at work in the Church and still is today despite our human weakness........Lord hear us
On Thursday, the people of Britain elected a new parliament and in the coming days we will find out who is going to form a government. And so we pray for all those who have been elected, especially our own MP, Katy Clark. We pray that the Holy Spirit will stir in the hearts of all who exercise political power in Britain today a desire to act in the interests of the poor and needy both at home and abroad and a willingness to reach beyond national boundaries to work with people from every part of the world..............Lord hear us
The next thing that happened in Antioch, however, was that the Christians there, wondering what to do next and who might be the man to guide them, decided to send Barnabas to Tarsus to look for Paul. He brought him back to Antioch and, as the NT tells us, they spent a whole year together there. Then, at the end of that year, in 45AD, they set off on the first of three great missionary journeys made by Paul around the Mediterranean world. It lasted three years and in 48AD, they returned to Antioch filled with stories of how, in the words of Acts, God had opened the door of faith to the pagans. And there was great joy in Antioch over it.
But as we heard this morning, not everyone was happy with this. Some men, including members of the Pharisees’ party who had been converted to Christianity, came down from Judaea and began insisting that the pagan converts had to conform to the Jewish tradition and be circumcised before they could become part of the new Church. Only in this way, they claimed, could they be saved. This led to a disagreement, and, after a long argument, it was decided, as we heard, that Paul and Barnabas should go up to Jerusalem to discuss the problem with the apostles and elders. For some reason which I don’t quite understand, the passage which describes what happened in Jerusalem has been omitted from today’s reading, but suffice it to say that it was a long and difficult meeting.
On what we would call nowadays the liberal or progressive side were Paul and Barnabas. Their case was based on the fact that they had seen with their own eyes how God had given the pagans the gift of the Holy Spirit in exactly the same way they themselves had received it. To insist now that these should be circumcised and take on the traditions and practices of Judaism would, they argued, be a deeply backward step. It would be to deny the new thing God was doing in the lives of these people and impose on them burdens which were unnecessary. Christianity wasn’t a sect of Judaism or an extension it. It was something new, something fresh, something fundamentally different. Judaism was national. Christianity was international. It was for everyone and no-one was excluded.
For the conservative side of the argument, however, this was very difficult to accept. They were Jews and their parents and grandparents before them had been Jews. God was their God, they were his people, and the idea that the pagans could be saved without becoming Jews and going through the same process that they had gone through was too much for them. God was doing something new and they were unable to accept it. God was opening the door of faith to the pagan nations and they were not able to rejoice in it. At that meeting in Jerusalem in 48AD, however, the Church as a whole, faced with this conflict and guided by the Holy Spirit, chose the way of freedom over law and accepted that faith in Jesus made the rules and regulations of the Old Testament redundant. It was a truly great day for the Church – reflected in the second reading’s vision of a new Jerusalem devoid of a temple which symbolized the old ways and with gates facing outwards in every direction, north, south, east and west – and I invite you, even now, 2000 years later, to be thankful for it.
But, of course, today’s liturgy is about more than just remembering what happened all those centuries ago. The conflict between the open-mindedness of people like Paul and Barnabas and the ‘but we’ve always done it this way’ approach of their opponents is an eternal one and it is worth reflecting for a few moments on where we ourselves might have stood on the matter had we been present that day in Jerusalem. The Jewish converts of Paul’s day, despite everything Jesus had said and done, continued to consider themselves superior to foreigners and looked down their noses at them. But do we do the same? How do we feel about people different from ourselves? What is our attitude to immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers and migrant workers? When we go abroad on holiday, do we respect the people we meet there? Do we try to speak their language and eat their food or do we expect them to speak English and serve fish and chips every day? And if a group of foreigners suddenly arrived on our doorstep and wanted to come to Mass each week, do you think we would welcome them and adapt what we do to accommodate them or would we expect them to fall in with what we have always done?
And what about our attitude to change in the Church or in the way we think about God and the things of God? The Scriptures speak over and over again about a God who is always doing a new thing. Because we are on a journey of faith, it follows that we have never arrived at our destination, and so, like our nomadic ancestors in faith in the Old Testament, we have to be always moving on, breaking camp every morning, and going where God leads. But how willing are we to do this? In Jerusalem that day in 48AD, would we have been with Paul, the innovator, or would we have been with the ‘But we’ve always done it this way’ party. Spend some time this weekend thinking about these questions and answering them for yourself.
It was about embracing the future with courage or clinging to the past in fear. So what side would you have been on?
BIDDING PRAYERS
The meeting which took place in Jerusalem in 48AD is sometimes called the Council of Jerusalem, the most recent Council being the Second Vatican Council held in the 1960s. This Council, too, was about reaching out to the world. Pope John XXIII spoke at the time about opening the windows of the Church, after years of being tightly shut, to let in light and fresh air. The Council wanted to embrace the modern world with God’s love and we pray that the Church will remain faithful to that movement now.........Lord hear us
The letter sent to Antioch after the meeting in Jerusalem spoke, as we heard this morning, about not placing burdens on people apart from what was essential. And so we pray for the Church today that it will have the wisdom it needs to apply that same principle in our own time. We pray especially that we will always know how to distinguish what is merely human regulation, and so open to change, from what is from God and so remains true regardless of current thinking or the latest fashion.......Lord hear us
The Book of the Apocalypse offered us today a beautifully poetic vision of the Church, the New Jerusalem. It glittered like a jewel of crystal-clear diamond and had twelve gates facing north, south, east and west, a symbol of the fact that Christianity, unlike everything that had gone before it, is a world-wide faith which recognizes no barriers between peoples. And so we ask God to lead us beyond narrow nationalism, xenophobia and racism and stir in us an internationalism based on the teaching of Jesus........Lord hear us
Part of the vision of the New Jerusalem in the first reading was the fact that there was no temple in the city. The temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70AD, had been, for the people of the Old Testament, the sign of God’s presence among them. But in the New Jerusalem, the Church, there is no temple. The Risen Jesus himself is the temple and he is not confined to any one place. He is everywhere, in everything that happens, and in every person we meet. And so we pray for the wisdom to recognize him........Lord hear us
The Gospel passage today speaks about how the Holy Spirit will teach us everything we need to know and remind us of everything Jesus has said to us. Left to themselves, those early Christians could never have carried out Jesus’ command to teach all nations. They would not even have known where to begin. But with God all things are possible. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to recognize how the Spirit has always been at work in the Church and still is today despite our human weakness........Lord hear us
On Thursday, the people of Britain elected a new parliament and in the coming days we will find out who is going to form a government. And so we pray for all those who have been elected, especially our own MP, Katy Clark. We pray that the Holy Spirit will stir in the hearts of all who exercise political power in Britain today a desire to act in the interests of the poor and needy both at home and abroad and a willingness to reach beyond national boundaries to work with people from every part of the world..............Lord hear us
Saturday, 1 May 2010
5th SUNDAY OF EASTER
There are many reasons why fewer people attend churches these days, but one of the, without doubt, is our modern reluctance to join organizations. Political Parties suffer from it, Trade Unions suffer from it, as do smaller local groups like the Scouts, the Guides and many others. I bet there isn’t an organization in the whole of North Ayrshire which isn’t struggling with it in one way or another. And the Churches suffer from it too. It’s not uncommon nowadays to hear people say that they have no problem with belief in God, that they consider themselves ‘spiritual’, but that they struggle with the Church. So much so, that many who say they still have faith in God have given up attending Church, claiming they no longer have any need for it. To which all I can say is that I, too, struggle with what is known as the Institutional Church. Like them, I have no problems with God either, but the Church I am part of has always been the major source of pain in my life, as it constantly frustrates, disappoints and, not infrequently, appals me. So do we need Churches? Do we need organizations and structures? Could we manage just as well without them? Well, that is the question I would like to reflect on today. And my starting point is that first reading from the Acts of the Apostles.
In it, we find Paul and Barnabas at the end of the first of Paul’s three great missionary journeys. They had set out to spread the Good News of the Resurrection, but one of the things they very quickly discovered was that if the small groups of converts Paul made were to remain faithful to what they had heard and were to persevere in the faith, some kind of basic organization had to be set up. And so we heard how, in each of these communities they appointed elders, men of good character who would act as leaders and hold the group together. Within a few years, in fact, the early Church had developed quite complicated structures. Experts still argue about what exactly these were, but by the time of Pauls’ death there were already the beginnings of what we now know as bishops, priests, deacons, elders and so on. Quite simply, it had to happen. The new embryonic Church, just like any embryo, grew and developed its own equivalent of arms and legs without which it could not have survived. Like it or not, human society needs structure and organization, and if you want to see what happens when there are none or when they fall apart, just have a look at places like Afghanistan today.
With these structures, however, go dangers, and the whole history of the Church demonstrates this. With structures goes power and power corrupts. The structures set up by Paul were designed to provide those young Churches of 2000 years ago with the support they needed to survive and function effectively as communities of faith in the world. The basis of their life together was to be the Gospel, the idea being that, by living according to the teaching of Jesus, these communities would become living examples of the new heaven and new earth the second reading spoke of. “I give you a new commandment” says Jesus in the Gospel, “Love one another….. By this” he says, “Everyone will know that you are my disciples.” And this is what the Church was always meant to be. This is what we are meant to be as a parish community. Like the people in Paul’s day, we are called to be a community of faith, a people committed to living by the values of the Gospel in such a way that we become living witnesses to it. The second reading told us that the world of the past is gone and that God is making the whole of creation new. By the way we live we are called to model that new creation for the people around us and be living signs of it in the world.
Sadly, however, it has not always been like that. Structures designed to enable this to happen have time and time again been used to produce the exact opposite effect from what was originally intended. Called to wash each other’s feet, called to be communities where the greatest become the least and where those in authority serve, the Church has far too often adopted instead the values and ways of the secular world. The result has been the abuse of power at every level in the form of corrupt Popes, Bishops lording it over people, living in palaces, expecting to have their hands kissed and dressing up in purple and fine linen like the nobility of their day. Titles like Cardinal and Monsignor and the absurd dressing up that goes with them, which had nothing to do with the Gospel and everything to do with human ambition and the desire for recognition and advancement, are a constant reminder to us of how far the Church has so often drifted away from the person and teaching of Jesus. And even these examples are fairly superficial compared to the deep rooted corruption which quickly finds its way into the Church when the people within it are moved by spirits other than the Spirit of God, perhaps the two most destructive been power and greed. If there is one thing everyone is agreed on around the issue of sex-abuse in the Church it is that at its root lies the abuse of power. And if we are to believe those who study these things and write about them, the next great scandal in the Church will be about money and greed. And if you want the equivalent of a tip on a horse, remember the name Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of a group known as the Legionaries of Christ.
And so the answer to our original question, Do we need structures? Do we need the Church?, has to be “yes, but.” To be a Christian is to live in community with others and, as Paul and Barnabas quickly discovered, it is not possible to do that without some kind of structure and organization. But these structures must be constantly monitored and renewed in the face of the dangers which are inherent in them. They are human structures and yet, at the same time, they are called to be something infinitely greater, signs of God himself, and given the human capacity to corrupt what is in itself good, this is only possible when those who make up the community are men and women of deep prayer and spirituality, committed to the Gospel and focused on the person of Jesus.
So pray that we will be such people and that together we may become such a parish.
BIDDING PRAYERS
Called to be living signs of the kingdom; vibrant communities of faith committed to the values of the Gospel; a people who show the world what it means to love as we have been loved by God; a Church where leadership and authority are about service and not power, we continue, as we have always done, to fall short. And so we ask God to stir in us today a deep understanding of what it means to be the Church and a profound desire to become all what we are called to be.......Lord hear us
We pray, in particular, for all who exercise authority in the Church. We pray especially for Pope Benedict and all those who hold senior positions in Rome. Such positions of power can be spiritually very dangerous. Power corrupts and no one who exercises power is immune from its evil influence. And so we ask God to give those who have power in Rome the grace they need to remain faithful to the example of Jesus who came into the world, not to be served, but to serve and to give his life for others.........Lord hear us
The Second Vatican Council called on the whole Church to develop the role of lay men and women in the Church and this has not been easy for many priests. It has meant a change in the way they see their own role in the Church, and many have not only resisted it, but have also struggled to understand the thinking behind it And so we pray for priests who, stuck in a way of thinking which is out of date, still want to hang on to the status and power which was once synonymous with the priesthood..........Lord hear us
Equally, however, the vast majority of lay people have, up to now, been reluctant to grow up and take their full place in the life of the local Church. Called by baptism to share in the priesthood of Jesus himself and to be his witnesses in the world, they have preferred to remain passive, even infantile, in the way they have exercised their membership of the Christian community. And so we ask God to raise up many men and women of mature adult faith in the Church today..............Lord hear us
The temptation to seek power and control over others is deep within us and is not the exclusive prerogative of the clergy within the Church. Lay people, too, can be corrupted in the same way. Even the simplest jobs which people exercise within a parish can, if we are not careful, become little power bases as we hang on to them, object when new people come along and treat them as our personal fiefdoms. And so we pray that this parish will always be free of such abuses........... Lord hear us
On Thursday of this week we will elect a new Government. And so we pray for all those who are standing for election both nationally and here in our own constituency. We pray that all who are elected will enter Parliament in a few weeks time filled with a desire to serve the people of Britain rather than line their own pockets or simply further their careers. And we pray that whoever forms the new Government will serve the whole people and always make the needs of the poor their highest priority...........Lord hear us.
In it, we find Paul and Barnabas at the end of the first of Paul’s three great missionary journeys. They had set out to spread the Good News of the Resurrection, but one of the things they very quickly discovered was that if the small groups of converts Paul made were to remain faithful to what they had heard and were to persevere in the faith, some kind of basic organization had to be set up. And so we heard how, in each of these communities they appointed elders, men of good character who would act as leaders and hold the group together. Within a few years, in fact, the early Church had developed quite complicated structures. Experts still argue about what exactly these were, but by the time of Pauls’ death there were already the beginnings of what we now know as bishops, priests, deacons, elders and so on. Quite simply, it had to happen. The new embryonic Church, just like any embryo, grew and developed its own equivalent of arms and legs without which it could not have survived. Like it or not, human society needs structure and organization, and if you want to see what happens when there are none or when they fall apart, just have a look at places like Afghanistan today.
With these structures, however, go dangers, and the whole history of the Church demonstrates this. With structures goes power and power corrupts. The structures set up by Paul were designed to provide those young Churches of 2000 years ago with the support they needed to survive and function effectively as communities of faith in the world. The basis of their life together was to be the Gospel, the idea being that, by living according to the teaching of Jesus, these communities would become living examples of the new heaven and new earth the second reading spoke of. “I give you a new commandment” says Jesus in the Gospel, “Love one another….. By this” he says, “Everyone will know that you are my disciples.” And this is what the Church was always meant to be. This is what we are meant to be as a parish community. Like the people in Paul’s day, we are called to be a community of faith, a people committed to living by the values of the Gospel in such a way that we become living witnesses to it. The second reading told us that the world of the past is gone and that God is making the whole of creation new. By the way we live we are called to model that new creation for the people around us and be living signs of it in the world.
Sadly, however, it has not always been like that. Structures designed to enable this to happen have time and time again been used to produce the exact opposite effect from what was originally intended. Called to wash each other’s feet, called to be communities where the greatest become the least and where those in authority serve, the Church has far too often adopted instead the values and ways of the secular world. The result has been the abuse of power at every level in the form of corrupt Popes, Bishops lording it over people, living in palaces, expecting to have their hands kissed and dressing up in purple and fine linen like the nobility of their day. Titles like Cardinal and Monsignor and the absurd dressing up that goes with them, which had nothing to do with the Gospel and everything to do with human ambition and the desire for recognition and advancement, are a constant reminder to us of how far the Church has so often drifted away from the person and teaching of Jesus. And even these examples are fairly superficial compared to the deep rooted corruption which quickly finds its way into the Church when the people within it are moved by spirits other than the Spirit of God, perhaps the two most destructive been power and greed. If there is one thing everyone is agreed on around the issue of sex-abuse in the Church it is that at its root lies the abuse of power. And if we are to believe those who study these things and write about them, the next great scandal in the Church will be about money and greed. And if you want the equivalent of a tip on a horse, remember the name Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of a group known as the Legionaries of Christ.
And so the answer to our original question, Do we need structures? Do we need the Church?, has to be “yes, but.” To be a Christian is to live in community with others and, as Paul and Barnabas quickly discovered, it is not possible to do that without some kind of structure and organization. But these structures must be constantly monitored and renewed in the face of the dangers which are inherent in them. They are human structures and yet, at the same time, they are called to be something infinitely greater, signs of God himself, and given the human capacity to corrupt what is in itself good, this is only possible when those who make up the community are men and women of deep prayer and spirituality, committed to the Gospel and focused on the person of Jesus.
So pray that we will be such people and that together we may become such a parish.
BIDDING PRAYERS
Called to be living signs of the kingdom; vibrant communities of faith committed to the values of the Gospel; a people who show the world what it means to love as we have been loved by God; a Church where leadership and authority are about service and not power, we continue, as we have always done, to fall short. And so we ask God to stir in us today a deep understanding of what it means to be the Church and a profound desire to become all what we are called to be.......Lord hear us
We pray, in particular, for all who exercise authority in the Church. We pray especially for Pope Benedict and all those who hold senior positions in Rome. Such positions of power can be spiritually very dangerous. Power corrupts and no one who exercises power is immune from its evil influence. And so we ask God to give those who have power in Rome the grace they need to remain faithful to the example of Jesus who came into the world, not to be served, but to serve and to give his life for others.........Lord hear us
The Second Vatican Council called on the whole Church to develop the role of lay men and women in the Church and this has not been easy for many priests. It has meant a change in the way they see their own role in the Church, and many have not only resisted it, but have also struggled to understand the thinking behind it And so we pray for priests who, stuck in a way of thinking which is out of date, still want to hang on to the status and power which was once synonymous with the priesthood..........Lord hear us
Equally, however, the vast majority of lay people have, up to now, been reluctant to grow up and take their full place in the life of the local Church. Called by baptism to share in the priesthood of Jesus himself and to be his witnesses in the world, they have preferred to remain passive, even infantile, in the way they have exercised their membership of the Christian community. And so we ask God to raise up many men and women of mature adult faith in the Church today..............Lord hear us
The temptation to seek power and control over others is deep within us and is not the exclusive prerogative of the clergy within the Church. Lay people, too, can be corrupted in the same way. Even the simplest jobs which people exercise within a parish can, if we are not careful, become little power bases as we hang on to them, object when new people come along and treat them as our personal fiefdoms. And so we pray that this parish will always be free of such abuses........... Lord hear us
On Thursday of this week we will elect a new Government. And so we pray for all those who are standing for election both nationally and here in our own constituency. We pray that all who are elected will enter Parliament in a few weeks time filled with a desire to serve the people of Britain rather than line their own pockets or simply further their careers. And we pray that whoever forms the new Government will serve the whole people and always make the needs of the poor their highest priority...........Lord hear us.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)