Some of you may have read a book by David Lodge, published in 1980, called How Far Can You Go. Written as a humorous reflection on what it was like to be a young Catholic born in the 1950s and living through the sixties, it looks at how, during that period, traditional Catholic ways of thinking went through a time of immense upheaval and, through the experiences of the characters in the book, examines the effect these changes had on those who lived through them. And this idea was very much with me on Thursday evening as I sat watching the Summer Show at St Matthew’s Academy. Seeing the happiness on the faces of those young people was a real experience of God for me and as I listened to their screams of delight at the finale, I was so aware that the question How Far Can You Go – one every good Catholic boy or girl was familiar with in the 1950s – would mean absolutely nothing to them today. So what kind of world lay behind David Lodge’s question, which, just in case anyone is still wondering, was about sex, and what are we to make of the enormous changes that have happened in the intervening years? Well, there is a passage in the book which describes the Catholicism of my youth perfectly and I would like to quote it to you.
Many things, the author says, have changed, but the biggest change has been the fading away of a particularly Catholic way of seeing the world which – and here I quote directly from the text - “situated individual souls on a kind of spiritual Snakes and Ladders board and motivated them with equal doses of hope and fear and promised them, if they persevered in the game, an eternal reward. The board was marked out very clearly and governed by intricate rules. Heaven, hell, Purgatory, Limbo. Mortal, venial and original sin. Angels, devils, saints, and Our Lady Queen of Heaven. Grace, penance, relics, indulgences and all the rest of it.” the author’s point being that very few people believe in this vision any more and very few under fifty would even have heard of many of its elements. So what are we to make of this? Is it a good thing or a bad thing that those children in St Matthew’s on Thursday would not even know what the question ‘How Far Can You Go’ was about? Well, on balance, I believe it’s a good thing and in defence of that position would like to take you back to what St Paul was saying in the second reading.
As a former Pharisee who had spent too much of his life enslaved to the rigid system which was the Jewish Law, Paul believed passionately in freedom. And so when he says in today’s passage from the letter to the Galatians that now that Christ has freed us he meant us to remain free, he is speaking from the heart. The Law had been Paul’s equivalent of the Snakes and Ladders board the novel speaks of and after his encounter with the Risen Jesus on the road to Damascus he wanted nothing more to do with it. Meeting Jesus had set Paul free and for the rest of his life his one desire was that others should come to that same freedom. As he said today: ‘When Christ freed us he meant us to remain free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery, by which he meant preferring the security of rule-keeping to the freedom of living according to the Spirit with the uncertainty, and therefore need to trust God rather than the keeping of rules, which genuine freedom involves. And that is why I believe that the ignorance in those young people of the rules and regulations which some of us lived by in the fifties and sixties is, on balance, a step in the right direction. But we still have a long way to go before we reach our destination, the mature, genuine freedom that Paul speaks of. And he says that himself in the passage. ‘But be careful,’ he says, ‘or this liberty will provide an opening for self-indulgence.’ And, of course, that is exactly what has happened. We live in a world which has confused liberty with self-indulgence and the result is the ‘if it feels good do it’ society we live in with all the injustice, self-centredness and unfairness that goes with it. And so the question facing us is this: What is freedom without self-indulgence like, the freedom Paul speaks of and the freedom we are all called to?
Well, the classic way of putting it is that genuine freedom is not freedom from but freedom for. An example of freedom from would be what happened when the repressive Snakes and Ladders approach gave way to the permissiveness of the sixties. It was like letting a crowd of school children loose in a sweetie shop and what has happened in the Church and in society since then has not only been perfectly understandable but utterly inevitable. But now we are being called beyond that to something much more profound. When we live by law, we do the minimum to get by, like going to Mass on a Sunday or putting a pound or two in a SCIAF box. But when we enter the world St Paul is speaking about and discover the meaning of freedom for we discover a whole new dimension. Religion exists at the margins of our life. Faith which is freely chosen becomes our whole life. Discover it and it’s like moving from an old 15” black and white TV to a new 52” high definition 3D model.
And in the first reading this week we have a wonderful example of this. Challenged by Elijah to leave everything and follow him, Elisha slaughters his oxen and cooks them with a fire made from his plough. He is now free to go where God leads and as a result his story will be read by people for as long as human beings exist. In the Gospel, however, we meet two men who would like to follow Jesus but lack that freedom for. Like St Augustine who wanted to be pure, but not yet, they would like to follow Jesus, but not yet. They have one foot in the narrow world of religion and another in the rich world of faith and they lack the freedom to make the next step. And somewhere in there, I think, lies each one of us.
And yet it’s so important that we confront this challenge. Not just for our own sake. Not even primarily for our own sake. But for the sake of those young people I spoke about and thousands of others like them.
BIDDING PRAYERS
Many of us here belong to a generation which has lived through times of great change in the Church. Central to this has been the second Vatican Council which Pope John Paul II called the single most important movement of the Spirit in modern times. In calling it, his predecessor, Pope John XXIII spoke of opening up the doors and windows of the Church to let light and fresh air in and even now, more than forty years after the event, we pray for a real openness to this long and sometimes painful process....Lord hear us
Inevitably, the process of renewal in the Church has had its casualties. For some, the changes were too much to take and they walked away. For others the same changes did not go far enough and so they, too, walked away. And so we ask God to be with them all today and heal them of any anger or disappointment they still feel. And for ourselves, we ask God to give us the wisdom we need to understand the times through which we have lived and see the providence of God at work deep within them.....Lord hear us
Radical changes have taken place in the course of the second half of the 20th century, not just in the Church, but within society at large. The old certainties about what is right and what is wrong, about what is true and what is not true, have given way to uncertainty and confusion about so many things. The generations born into this world have often been left to find their way through the moral maze of life without any signposts or landmarks. And so we ask God to give them the guidance they need........Lord hear us
To leave law behind and experience the freedom St Paul speaks of in this week’s second reading is by no means an easy option. To abandon the security that goes with living according to law and begin to live by conscience and personal decision can feel risky. It means trusting God with our decisions without ever knowing for certain that they are the right ones. It will sometimes mean doing what is right rather than what the law says. But we ask for the courage and maturity we need to travel this road..........Lord hear us
In that second reading, St Paul tells us that, if we are led by the Spirit, no law can touch us. The whole of the law, he says, is summarised in a single command: Love your neighbour as yourself. This is why, in another place, he tells us that, if we love, we have kept all the commandments, an idea reflected in St Augustine’s famous remark: ‘Love and then do what you will.’ All these sayings belong, of course, to the world of faith rather than religion and we ask God to teach our whole parish what they mean.........Lord hear us
On Wednesday, we had the latest meeting about the religious education of children in the parish. The meeting was extremely well attended and the commitment of the parents and those who will support them in the months and years ahead was clear for all to see. And so we thank God for his presence at the meeting – which was almost tangible – and ask him to continue to guide us in the future, so that, having put our hand to this particular plough, we will be faithful to it and not turn back.........Lord hear us
Saturday, 26 June 2010
Saturday, 19 June 2010
12TH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR
More than once over recent months we have had occasion to reflect on what Jesus’ invitation to take up our cross and follow him has meant to people at different moments in history. We have seen how, throughout the first three centuries of the Church’s life, it had a very literal meaning for the people who lived through that period. Martyrdom was seen as the pinnacle of the Christian life and in the persecutions that broke out from time to time during those early centuries many really did take up their cross and died violent deaths in the arenas of Rome.
With the conversion of Constantine, of course, all that changed. Martyrdom as it had been known for three hundred years was now a thing of the past and so people had to reinterpret the words of Jesus which we heard today in a way which made sense in a world where Christianity, instead of being a persecuted minority was now part of the imperial court. And the end result of that process was, as we have seen, the invention of the monastery, where, in a new way of taking up their cross and following Jesus, men and women began to withdraw from the world to live lives of prayer and austerity.
But as the centuries passed, there soon developed another way of understanding Jesus’ words which had a huge influence on the spirituality of generations of people right up to our own day. For most of history, the vast bulk of ordinary men and women have, as millions still do today in the developing world, lived lives of unremitting hardship, poverty and drudgery. And in the face of this, the idea of taking up our cross came to be seen by generations of believers as synonymous with accepting their lot in life without complaining and looking forward to the day when the drudgery would end and the happiness they longed for but, could never have in this life, would finally be theirs. And to a certain extent his idea worked. Many got comfort from it, reflected in many of the old nineteenth century hymns we knew as children. A classic example is the hymn ‘Sweet Heart of Jesus’ with the lines ‘there in thine ear all trustfully we tell our tale of misery.’ and ‘within thy shelter blest soon may we reach the shore,’ a hymn which, like others written at the time, only makes sense against the background of the poverty our ancestors were encouraged to think of as the cross they had to carry behind Jesus.
But while this interpretation worked in the short-term, it had a very serious flaw built into it. It sounded very much like pie in the sky when you die and was used for centuries by those in power to keep the masses down. It was the reason why Karl Marx famously called religion the opium of the people, encouraging them to accept their lot instead of doing something about the poverty and the exploitation they were being subjected to by those who ruled them. And that, in the end, is why we don’t sing those old hymns so much now. We may love the tunes. I know I do. They may stir all kinds of memories in us. But the theology behind them is deeply flawed and totally out of touch with the times we are living through. The truth we have to realise is that, despite our current economic problems, we enjoy a standard of living and a level of affluence no one in the whole history of humanity has ever known and it’s against this background that we have to re-interpret for our own time those two thousand year old words of Jesus. So in this consumer-driven, materialistic society, what does it mean to take up our cross and follow him? Well, essentially, I think, it means going back to the beginning and doing now what the martyrs did two thousand years ago. What they did was have the courage to stand up for what they believed in the midst of a hostile world which totally failed to understand what they were about and that, I suggest, is what we are called to do today.
When I describe our world as materialistic I don’t just mean that we have lots of material things. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with having material things apart from the fact that they are so un-evenly distributed throughout the world. The real evil of materialism as a philosophy is that it denies the very existence of the spiritual and tells us that the only thing that exists is the material world. For Christians, of course, the material world matters. Faith in God is not about pie in the sky when you die and religion is not just the opium of the people preventing Church-goers from addressing the real issues which face the world, one of the great insights of the Second Vatican Council being its deep commitment to the world and everything that goes on in it. But a world which denies the very existence of the spiritual and seeks happiness in the purely material is a society doomed to deep and lasting disappointment. And we can see that all around us. Here in the West we have more material things than we know what to do with and yet there is deep unhappiness in our society which lies at the root of both our culture of drug abuse and the alarmingly high suicide rates we are currently experiencing, especially among the young. And yet, instead of recognizing the spiritual poverty that lies behind these things, we try to solve the problem by acquiring even more material things, a response which, in its turn, leads to the massive credit and debt problem which even now could bring down about our ears the very prosperity we all take for granted.
And it’s against this background that we, as Christians, are called to do what the early martyrs did and show the world that there is an alternative to the paganism that surrounds us. Surrounded by material things on a scale unknown to previous generations, we have to show the world that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. In a society fed on a daily diet of superficiality by the media, we are called to go deeper and live lives of prayer and reflection in the midst of the world. And in a world which has swallowed the lie that acquiring more and more material things will bring happiness, we have to show the people around us how to use material things without worshipping them.
It may not seem much compared to what the early martyrs did. But try it and I promise you: someone, somewhere will crucify you.
BIDDING PRAYERS
We begin our prayer today by holding up before God the world at this moment in its history. As a new century and a new millennium get under way, the men and women of our time are facing a whole series of important choices about the way we live which will have a profound influence on the way our society develops in the years ahead. And so we ask God to give us the wisdom we need to make good choices based on a solid grasp of the truth of who we are in relation to himself...........Lord hear us
Faced with so many historic choices about the kind of society we want to be, one of the great dangers we face is the superficial nature of so much that fills our lives. Our capacity to concentrate on serious issues is diminishing in the face a daily diet of rubbish on TV and a News coverage which focuses less and less on the big issues facing the world and more and more on the lives of footballers and pop stars. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to see the danger in this and do something about it........Lord hear us
At the heart of the issues facing our world is the question Jesus asks in today’s Gospel: ‘But you, who do you say that I am?’ The answer we give is fundamental to everything that goes on in the world today. If Jesus is not who we say he is, then the quicker we forget him the better. But if he is who the Christian faith claims he is, he is the most important person in history and his teaching is the key to everything that happens in the world. And so we pray for the grace we need to see this...........Lord hear us
In the second reading this weekend, St Paul tells us that there are no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female. We are all one in Christ, an idea which goes to the heart of the challenge facing our modern world. We can either continue along the path of separate nations with all the conflicts that have gone with this way of thinking, or we can forge a new world built on the common humanity St Paul speaks of. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to make this choice...........Lord hear us
There is a very real sense in which religion has been over the centuries the opium of the people. It has sometimes been used as a form of control by those in power. The Church itself often colluded in this idea by encouraging the poor to accept their lot and justifying the position of the rich and powerful as somehow the way God intended things to be. But those days are over now. Christians today are deeply committed to changing unjust social structures and we pray for the grace to be part of that...Lord hear us
On Wednesday of this coming week, we have a very important meeting about the religious education of children of this parish. The primary responsibility for teaching them about God lies fairly and squarely with their parents, a responsibility they took on at baptism. But it is the job of the parish to support the parents and be the kind of faith-filled community where what begins in the home can grow to maturity in the world. And so we pray that God will bless this week’s meeting.........Lord hear us
With the conversion of Constantine, of course, all that changed. Martyrdom as it had been known for three hundred years was now a thing of the past and so people had to reinterpret the words of Jesus which we heard today in a way which made sense in a world where Christianity, instead of being a persecuted minority was now part of the imperial court. And the end result of that process was, as we have seen, the invention of the monastery, where, in a new way of taking up their cross and following Jesus, men and women began to withdraw from the world to live lives of prayer and austerity.
But as the centuries passed, there soon developed another way of understanding Jesus’ words which had a huge influence on the spirituality of generations of people right up to our own day. For most of history, the vast bulk of ordinary men and women have, as millions still do today in the developing world, lived lives of unremitting hardship, poverty and drudgery. And in the face of this, the idea of taking up our cross came to be seen by generations of believers as synonymous with accepting their lot in life without complaining and looking forward to the day when the drudgery would end and the happiness they longed for but, could never have in this life, would finally be theirs. And to a certain extent his idea worked. Many got comfort from it, reflected in many of the old nineteenth century hymns we knew as children. A classic example is the hymn ‘Sweet Heart of Jesus’ with the lines ‘there in thine ear all trustfully we tell our tale of misery.’ and ‘within thy shelter blest soon may we reach the shore,’ a hymn which, like others written at the time, only makes sense against the background of the poverty our ancestors were encouraged to think of as the cross they had to carry behind Jesus.
But while this interpretation worked in the short-term, it had a very serious flaw built into it. It sounded very much like pie in the sky when you die and was used for centuries by those in power to keep the masses down. It was the reason why Karl Marx famously called religion the opium of the people, encouraging them to accept their lot instead of doing something about the poverty and the exploitation they were being subjected to by those who ruled them. And that, in the end, is why we don’t sing those old hymns so much now. We may love the tunes. I know I do. They may stir all kinds of memories in us. But the theology behind them is deeply flawed and totally out of touch with the times we are living through. The truth we have to realise is that, despite our current economic problems, we enjoy a standard of living and a level of affluence no one in the whole history of humanity has ever known and it’s against this background that we have to re-interpret for our own time those two thousand year old words of Jesus. So in this consumer-driven, materialistic society, what does it mean to take up our cross and follow him? Well, essentially, I think, it means going back to the beginning and doing now what the martyrs did two thousand years ago. What they did was have the courage to stand up for what they believed in the midst of a hostile world which totally failed to understand what they were about and that, I suggest, is what we are called to do today.
When I describe our world as materialistic I don’t just mean that we have lots of material things. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with having material things apart from the fact that they are so un-evenly distributed throughout the world. The real evil of materialism as a philosophy is that it denies the very existence of the spiritual and tells us that the only thing that exists is the material world. For Christians, of course, the material world matters. Faith in God is not about pie in the sky when you die and religion is not just the opium of the people preventing Church-goers from addressing the real issues which face the world, one of the great insights of the Second Vatican Council being its deep commitment to the world and everything that goes on in it. But a world which denies the very existence of the spiritual and seeks happiness in the purely material is a society doomed to deep and lasting disappointment. And we can see that all around us. Here in the West we have more material things than we know what to do with and yet there is deep unhappiness in our society which lies at the root of both our culture of drug abuse and the alarmingly high suicide rates we are currently experiencing, especially among the young. And yet, instead of recognizing the spiritual poverty that lies behind these things, we try to solve the problem by acquiring even more material things, a response which, in its turn, leads to the massive credit and debt problem which even now could bring down about our ears the very prosperity we all take for granted.
And it’s against this background that we, as Christians, are called to do what the early martyrs did and show the world that there is an alternative to the paganism that surrounds us. Surrounded by material things on a scale unknown to previous generations, we have to show the world that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. In a society fed on a daily diet of superficiality by the media, we are called to go deeper and live lives of prayer and reflection in the midst of the world. And in a world which has swallowed the lie that acquiring more and more material things will bring happiness, we have to show the people around us how to use material things without worshipping them.
It may not seem much compared to what the early martyrs did. But try it and I promise you: someone, somewhere will crucify you.
BIDDING PRAYERS
We begin our prayer today by holding up before God the world at this moment in its history. As a new century and a new millennium get under way, the men and women of our time are facing a whole series of important choices about the way we live which will have a profound influence on the way our society develops in the years ahead. And so we ask God to give us the wisdom we need to make good choices based on a solid grasp of the truth of who we are in relation to himself...........Lord hear us
Faced with so many historic choices about the kind of society we want to be, one of the great dangers we face is the superficial nature of so much that fills our lives. Our capacity to concentrate on serious issues is diminishing in the face a daily diet of rubbish on TV and a News coverage which focuses less and less on the big issues facing the world and more and more on the lives of footballers and pop stars. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to see the danger in this and do something about it........Lord hear us
At the heart of the issues facing our world is the question Jesus asks in today’s Gospel: ‘But you, who do you say that I am?’ The answer we give is fundamental to everything that goes on in the world today. If Jesus is not who we say he is, then the quicker we forget him the better. But if he is who the Christian faith claims he is, he is the most important person in history and his teaching is the key to everything that happens in the world. And so we pray for the grace we need to see this...........Lord hear us
In the second reading this weekend, St Paul tells us that there are no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female. We are all one in Christ, an idea which goes to the heart of the challenge facing our modern world. We can either continue along the path of separate nations with all the conflicts that have gone with this way of thinking, or we can forge a new world built on the common humanity St Paul speaks of. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to make this choice...........Lord hear us
There is a very real sense in which religion has been over the centuries the opium of the people. It has sometimes been used as a form of control by those in power. The Church itself often colluded in this idea by encouraging the poor to accept their lot and justifying the position of the rich and powerful as somehow the way God intended things to be. But those days are over now. Christians today are deeply committed to changing unjust social structures and we pray for the grace to be part of that...Lord hear us
On Wednesday of this coming week, we have a very important meeting about the religious education of children of this parish. The primary responsibility for teaching them about God lies fairly and squarely with their parents, a responsibility they took on at baptism. But it is the job of the parish to support the parents and be the kind of faith-filled community where what begins in the home can grow to maturity in the world. And so we pray that God will bless this week’s meeting.........Lord hear us
Saturday, 12 June 2010
Just before I left to give last week’s retreat in Oxford, we had a meeting of the PPC designed to help us reflect together on the seven months which had elapsed since I came here at the end of September. Personally, I found the discussion very helpful, and in the course of it two particular things were said which encouraged me. The first was that people find what I say challenging. I was delighted to hear this, because it’s meant to be. I warned you when I came that I am not here to please you or speak pious platitudes. My job as a priest is to proclaim the full message of the Gospel which, properly understood, challenges us to the very depths of our being.
And the second thing was that the fundamental theme people were hearing was the difference between religion and faith. That without doubt is the issue which defines my ministry, although it wasn’t always that way. The key moment came in 1982 when I was in Sanquhar. I had already been a priest for thirteen years at the time, but during that period God taught me so many things which have shaped everything I have done since. I had the sense at that time that he was putting into my hand books which would teach me something he wanted me to know and it was while reading one of these, a book entitled ‘Redemptive Intimacy’ by a man called Dick Westley, that a light came on inside me which shines still. The book has a chapter which lists the symptoms of the evil the author calls ‘religion without faith’. They are simple enough, but what was different that day was the clarity and depth of the insight God gave me about them as a result of which my understanding of what it means to be a priest changed forever. And what God showed me was the utter absurdity of a religion which taught people to fear God and spend their whole lives performing religious actions in an attempt to please him and keep him happy so that he wouldn’t send them to hell when they died.
Sometimes this fear was the result of sins committed in the course of people’s lives, even when, in many cases, these had been confessed over and over again. But as often as not it was simply because of a vague feeling of guilt and fear in the face of a critical, judgemental God whom they had been taught to believe was watching them, keeping a record of everything they did and just waiting to pounce on them. In the course of forty one years as a priest I have seen it so often and, having been taught the same thing very early in my own life, I am not completely free of it either. But whenever it happens it’s a tragedy and a travesty of everything God is. I mean, how could anyone fear the God who, in today’s liturgy, speaks words of instant forgiveness to David who had not only committed adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, but having tried to cover it up, then committed the ultimate act of betrayal for a soldier by ordering his troops to pull back in the midst of battle and leave Uriah to die at the hands of the enemy? And in the Gospel he not only forgives the woman with the bad name in the town but holds her up as an example to those who accuse and condemn her. So if this is what God is like, why have so many millions of people down through the ages been afraid of him? Well, I think I have an answer to that question, and it takes us again to the heart of religion without faith.
When we move in this world, you see, we are actually worshipping a God who does not exist except in our own heads. He’s not the God who created us in his image and likeness but a god whom we have created in our image and likeness. This god thinks like us, judges like us and treats people the way we treat them. He is, in effect, a projection of ourselves and that, in the end, is why we fear him so much. The real God is the one who, because he understands all, forgives all. The god of religion is one who, like us, constantly sits in judgement on others and finds them wanting. And the place where God taught me this most clearly was Kilmarnock prison during the ten years I was chaplain there. I have never been anywhere where God was as tangible as he was in that place. The prison was full of people who had done all kinds of things, but as you moved around it you could feel the presence of the God who understood, who knew the story of each prisoner’s life intimately, who would have understood why the woman in the story lived the life she did, who felt the pain at the heart of her life and the lives of so many of those prisoners and whose one desire was to love them into life. And from such a God we have nothing to fear.
And central to the way this God forgives is a willingness to allow people to change and move on. I love the story of the man who went to speak to God about a sin he kept committing over and over again. And when the meeting was over and the man was on his way home, the same old thing happened. And so he went back to God and said, ‘I’ve done it again.’ To which God replied, ‘Done what again?’ But how unlike God we and the god we have created in our own image and likeness is. It is the God of religion, not the real God, who keeps a record of all we have ever done. In his world, as in ours, no offence is ever forgotten. Like a video or a DVD on pause, the moment of failure is frozen and the person’s life is not allowed to develop or move on. In my ten years in Kilmarnock prison, for example, I can safely say I never met a murderer. I met many people who had committed murders, some of them truly horrific, but there was always much more to those men than that one moment in their lives. They had families, people they loved and often astonished me by their goodness.
All of this is what the real God sees when he looks at each one of us. Never be afraid of him. Ask him to help you see the world as he sees it and it will become a much brighter and happier place for you.
BIDDING PRAYERS
One of the worst symptoms of religion without faith is the doing of psychological harm to people in God’s name. And so we pray today for all who have suffered in this way. We pray for those whose religious up-bringing has left them with deep-rooted feelings of guilt. We pray for those whose sexual development has been affected by unhealthy ways of thinking about the human body. And we ask God to lead the world beyond all narrow-minded ways of thinking which masquerade as faith.........Lord hear us
To forgive others can be very difficult, but there are also times when we do not even want to. We nurse our resentment and take a dark kind of pleasure in it. We feel self-righteous and use our sense of grievance to justify our own ungodly attitudes and feelings, blaming others rather than face up to our own faults. And so we pray for the insight we need to recognize the ways in which we do this and the grace to move beyond them and reach out to those whom we find difficult to forgive............Lord hear us
To see the ultimate effects of our inability or unwillingness to forgive, all we have to do is look around the world. Everywhere we see people caught up in ancient feuds which have gone on for centuries, killing and slaughtering each other as their ancestors have always done. The Middle East in particular, the place where Jesus lived and where the great events of the Bible took place, have hardly seen peace in two thousand years. And so we ask God to pour the gift of healing into that part of the world.........Lord hear us
There are few things in life more sad than a family torn apart by arguments and disagreements over things that happened in the past. Some of us will know this in our own families and may even be the cause of it. And even if we are fortunate enough not to have experienced such things close at hand, we will know of other families who have. And so we pray for all who are caught up in this kind of tragedy that God will pour into them the desire to forgive and the grace they need to do so.....Lord hear us
There are no such things as foreigners, prisoners, immigrants, Hindus or any other group to which we try to attach a label. In the end, there are only individual people with individual lives. The tendency to lump them together, however, and make general statements about them which cannot possibly be true of everyone is very deep in us and forms the basis of our many prejudices. And so we ask God to help us see every human being on the face of the earth as the unique individuals they are................Lord hear us
We live in a society which can be extremely severe in its judgement and very unforgiving in its attitude to human weakness. Day after day, the Tabloid Press dig up stories of human frailty and proceed to crucify people in the pages of what pass for newspapers. And they do it because it makes money, making us who buy the newspapers collaborators in this evil. And so we pray for all who have suffered in this way, especially those who will be suffering from it this weekend in the gutter press.........Lord hear us
And the second thing was that the fundamental theme people were hearing was the difference between religion and faith. That without doubt is the issue which defines my ministry, although it wasn’t always that way. The key moment came in 1982 when I was in Sanquhar. I had already been a priest for thirteen years at the time, but during that period God taught me so many things which have shaped everything I have done since. I had the sense at that time that he was putting into my hand books which would teach me something he wanted me to know and it was while reading one of these, a book entitled ‘Redemptive Intimacy’ by a man called Dick Westley, that a light came on inside me which shines still. The book has a chapter which lists the symptoms of the evil the author calls ‘religion without faith’. They are simple enough, but what was different that day was the clarity and depth of the insight God gave me about them as a result of which my understanding of what it means to be a priest changed forever. And what God showed me was the utter absurdity of a religion which taught people to fear God and spend their whole lives performing religious actions in an attempt to please him and keep him happy so that he wouldn’t send them to hell when they died.
Sometimes this fear was the result of sins committed in the course of people’s lives, even when, in many cases, these had been confessed over and over again. But as often as not it was simply because of a vague feeling of guilt and fear in the face of a critical, judgemental God whom they had been taught to believe was watching them, keeping a record of everything they did and just waiting to pounce on them. In the course of forty one years as a priest I have seen it so often and, having been taught the same thing very early in my own life, I am not completely free of it either. But whenever it happens it’s a tragedy and a travesty of everything God is. I mean, how could anyone fear the God who, in today’s liturgy, speaks words of instant forgiveness to David who had not only committed adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, but having tried to cover it up, then committed the ultimate act of betrayal for a soldier by ordering his troops to pull back in the midst of battle and leave Uriah to die at the hands of the enemy? And in the Gospel he not only forgives the woman with the bad name in the town but holds her up as an example to those who accuse and condemn her. So if this is what God is like, why have so many millions of people down through the ages been afraid of him? Well, I think I have an answer to that question, and it takes us again to the heart of religion without faith.
When we move in this world, you see, we are actually worshipping a God who does not exist except in our own heads. He’s not the God who created us in his image and likeness but a god whom we have created in our image and likeness. This god thinks like us, judges like us and treats people the way we treat them. He is, in effect, a projection of ourselves and that, in the end, is why we fear him so much. The real God is the one who, because he understands all, forgives all. The god of religion is one who, like us, constantly sits in judgement on others and finds them wanting. And the place where God taught me this most clearly was Kilmarnock prison during the ten years I was chaplain there. I have never been anywhere where God was as tangible as he was in that place. The prison was full of people who had done all kinds of things, but as you moved around it you could feel the presence of the God who understood, who knew the story of each prisoner’s life intimately, who would have understood why the woman in the story lived the life she did, who felt the pain at the heart of her life and the lives of so many of those prisoners and whose one desire was to love them into life. And from such a God we have nothing to fear.
And central to the way this God forgives is a willingness to allow people to change and move on. I love the story of the man who went to speak to God about a sin he kept committing over and over again. And when the meeting was over and the man was on his way home, the same old thing happened. And so he went back to God and said, ‘I’ve done it again.’ To which God replied, ‘Done what again?’ But how unlike God we and the god we have created in our own image and likeness is. It is the God of religion, not the real God, who keeps a record of all we have ever done. In his world, as in ours, no offence is ever forgotten. Like a video or a DVD on pause, the moment of failure is frozen and the person’s life is not allowed to develop or move on. In my ten years in Kilmarnock prison, for example, I can safely say I never met a murderer. I met many people who had committed murders, some of them truly horrific, but there was always much more to those men than that one moment in their lives. They had families, people they loved and often astonished me by their goodness.
All of this is what the real God sees when he looks at each one of us. Never be afraid of him. Ask him to help you see the world as he sees it and it will become a much brighter and happier place for you.
BIDDING PRAYERS
One of the worst symptoms of religion without faith is the doing of psychological harm to people in God’s name. And so we pray today for all who have suffered in this way. We pray for those whose religious up-bringing has left them with deep-rooted feelings of guilt. We pray for those whose sexual development has been affected by unhealthy ways of thinking about the human body. And we ask God to lead the world beyond all narrow-minded ways of thinking which masquerade as faith.........Lord hear us
To forgive others can be very difficult, but there are also times when we do not even want to. We nurse our resentment and take a dark kind of pleasure in it. We feel self-righteous and use our sense of grievance to justify our own ungodly attitudes and feelings, blaming others rather than face up to our own faults. And so we pray for the insight we need to recognize the ways in which we do this and the grace to move beyond them and reach out to those whom we find difficult to forgive............Lord hear us
To see the ultimate effects of our inability or unwillingness to forgive, all we have to do is look around the world. Everywhere we see people caught up in ancient feuds which have gone on for centuries, killing and slaughtering each other as their ancestors have always done. The Middle East in particular, the place where Jesus lived and where the great events of the Bible took place, have hardly seen peace in two thousand years. And so we ask God to pour the gift of healing into that part of the world.........Lord hear us
There are few things in life more sad than a family torn apart by arguments and disagreements over things that happened in the past. Some of us will know this in our own families and may even be the cause of it. And even if we are fortunate enough not to have experienced such things close at hand, we will know of other families who have. And so we pray for all who are caught up in this kind of tragedy that God will pour into them the desire to forgive and the grace they need to do so.....Lord hear us
There are no such things as foreigners, prisoners, immigrants, Hindus or any other group to which we try to attach a label. In the end, there are only individual people with individual lives. The tendency to lump them together, however, and make general statements about them which cannot possibly be true of everyone is very deep in us and forms the basis of our many prejudices. And so we ask God to help us see every human being on the face of the earth as the unique individuals they are................Lord hear us
We live in a society which can be extremely severe in its judgement and very unforgiving in its attitude to human weakness. Day after day, the Tabloid Press dig up stories of human frailty and proceed to crucify people in the pages of what pass for newspapers. And they do it because it makes money, making us who buy the newspapers collaborators in this evil. And so we pray for all who have suffered in this way, especially those who will be suffering from it this weekend in the gutter press.........Lord hear us
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