So what was that all about in today’s first reading? Did Abraham really have that conversation in which, like a merchant in an oriental bazaar, he haggles with God and, through a mixture of flattery and self-denigration, knocks the price of Sodom and Gomorrah’s survival down from fifty just men to only ten? Well, that’s a question which reminds me of an interview Terry Wogan did many years ago on his early morning programme on Radio 2. It was on Christmas Eve, and he was in Bethlehem, in the church of the Nativity. I have never been there, but those of you who have will be able to picture the scene as the two men stood at what pilgrims are told is the very spot where Jesus was born. And as they chatted, Wogan asked his guide if we could be sure that this really was the place where it had all happened. At which point the poor man simply burst out laughing. ‘Only a Westerner,’ he said, ‘could ask that question. It’s what you Westerners always want to know. You all think so literally. But for the oriental mind, such a question is of no importance whatsoever. We in the East’ he went on, ‘could not care less if this is the exact spot or not. What matters to us is another question entirely, which is: what does it all mean?’
And in saying this of course, the man was identifying one of the biggest problems we have with the bible. The bible was written, not by Westerners, but by people from the East, and to make sense of it we have to learn to move beyond the question ‘did this happen?’ ‘did Abraham really haggle with God the way the passage says he did?’ and move on to the much deeper question of what the passage is about. It’s a different mentality emerging from a culture very different from our own, and until we come to terms with that fact and adapt to it, we will always struggle with Scripture both in the New and in the Old Testament. So what does it mean?
Well, in a world dominated by religion rather than faith, where people lived in fear of their gods, grovelled before them, and would never have dreamt of addressing them the way Abraham does, today’s story, is a prophetic foretaste of what Jesus was to say to his disciples centuries later: ‘I do not call you servants any more, but friends.’ It reminds us that the relationship we are called to have with God is one of intimacy and friendship, that he is not a harsh God lording it over us and instilling fear in us, but a God whom Jesus in today’s gospel passage teaches us to address as Abba, the word we know small children used in those days when speaking to their dads. And yet how many of us really believe that? How many of us experience the intimacy and friendship God longs to have with us? And even if we wanted it, how would we go about finding it? Well, those are the things I would like to reflect on now and to help us do that I invite you to think what your answer would be if someone asked you if you knew God in much the same way as they would ask you if you knew a friend of theirs call Bob Smith. There are, of course, a number of possible answers to this question and I invite to consider a few of them.
The first answer is this. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of Bob, but I’ve never actually met him’ This is the answer millions in today’s world could give when it comes to God and I invite you to ask yourself if, at any level at all, it could be your answer too. We have all heard if God. Otherwise we would not be here. But have we ever actually met him?’
And the second possible answer is this: ‘Yes, I’ve met Bob once or twice, he goes to the same church as I do, but I don’t really know him and we’ve never had a proper conversation.’ There are all kinds of people on the fringes of our lives whom we vaguely know and with whom we sometimes exchange greetings. We may even pay them a visit at Christmas. But in reality, they are virtual strangers to us. So could this be the way you relate to God?
And a third possible answer I invite you to think about and see if you see any sign of yourself in it is this: ‘Yes, I know Bob well. Actually we grew up together, but in recent years we have gone our separate ways and we don’t see each other very often now. He was at our wedding and even came to our first child’s baptism. I often think of getting in touch with him again, but you know what it is like. Life is hectic and somehow I never seem to get round to it.’ This kind of thing happens with so many people in our lives and the same question applies. Could it describe in any way your relationship with God? Another version of this third answer, of course, is this: ‘Yes, Bob and I used to be friends, but we had a row years ago and haven’t spoken since. I still feel angry at him and as far as I am concerned nowadays he might as well not exist’
And so to my final answer, which is this: ‘Bob Smith. Of course I know him. How could I not know him? I’m married to him. We first met when I was only a child and as the years passed our friendship deepened and grew. We drifted apart for a while in our teens and I went out with one or two other people, but in the end I fell in love with Bob and we have been happily married since. The relationship has not always been easy – we’ve had our moments - but Bob’s love has never wavered and I could not imagine life without him now.’ So could this be you, and if it is not, would you like it to be? Because, this, you see, is the kind of deep intimacy and life-long friendship God longs to have with each of us?
But is it what you want? Do you find the idea attractive? Is this the kind of relationship you would like to have with God? Because if it is, all you have to do is ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you. It’s called mature, personal prayer. All you have to do is turn up and God will do the rest.
BIDDING PRAYERS
One of the greatest obstacles to the Second Vatican Council’s dream of a Church with the bible at the centre of its life is the difficulty we have understanding the passages we read each week. They come from a different period in history and a different cultural background, and the danger is that, because we can’t always understand them, we dismiss them as not worth reading. But the bible, properly understood, is the Word of God and we ask that same God to lead us to deeper understandings of its contents.................Lord hear us
The bible is filled with evidence that God is calling us to a relationship of intimacy and friendship with himself. The prophets constantly speak of it. The gospels are filled with it. The whole history of Christian spirituality confirms it. And yet we continue to resist, preferring gods who frighten us, gods who judge us and find us wanting, to the God who longs to share his own life with us. And so we pray for the grace to move beyond the idols we have created and come to the intimacy the bible speaks of..........Lord hear us
Many in today’s world speak about God, argue about God, write books about God, appear on television programmes about God and even give sermons about God, without actually knowing God. They have heard of God but have never actually met him. But God is not an intellectual idea to be discussed or argued over. God is a living being who loves us with an everlasting love and longs to make himself known to us. And so we pray that the world of our time will finally come to realise this.............Lord hear us
It is possible to spend our whole lives attending church and never meet God. We can spend our lives inhabiting the shallow world of religion and never know that the infinitely deeper world of faith even exists. We can have ears that never hear and eyes that never see. We can hear the Word of God and remain untouched by it. We can receive the body and blood of Jesus in Holy Communion but never become more like him. And so we pray that this will not happen to anyone here today........Lord hear us
In today’s gospel, the disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray. And so we ask him to do the same for us. Prayer is not something which remains the same over the whole of a person’s life. It develops as we ourselves develop and what suited us at one time will not suit us at another. One of the surest signs of God at work in us, in fact, is that we find we cannot pray the way we used to. Often it is a sign that he is calling us to something new, and we pray for the grace to recognize any sign of this in ourselves..............Lord hear us
In creating us and giving us the great gift of freedom, God has taken an enormous risk. His deepest desire is to enter into a relationship of friendship and intimacy with each one of us. But he cannot force us into this relationship. Love has to be freely chosen. If it is forced it ceases to be love. All God can do is plant deep within us the capacity for such a love, stir a desire for it in us through the power of the Spirit living in us and wait for us to respond. And so we pray for the grace to do so......Lord hear us
Friday, 23 July 2010
Saturday, 17 July 2010
16th SUNDAY OF THE YEAR . C.
Hearing Confessions is something priests, have been doing less of in recent years, although St Bride’s must be one of the few churches in the country which does not even have a confessional box. Over the last forty one years, however, I have heard a fair number of confessions, and without giving away any secrets or breaking any confidences, would like to tell you the thing I have heard most during that time. And it’s been from women who have confessed to being angry. Over and over again I have heard it, and as the years have passed have learned to ask a very simple question: “And do you have reason to be angry?”To which, time and time again the answer was a heart-felt ‘yes.’
I remember one old woman in particular who came to confession every week for years and never once spoke about anything she herself had done wrong. Instead, she talked about her husband, a crabbit and deeply selfish old man, who for years had given her a hard time. ‘Ye ken whit he did this week, Father’ she would say, before giving me a blow by blow account of everything that had happened since the previous Saturday. And I just listened, because there was such deep anger and resentment in her and telling me about it each week seemed to help. She was an extreme example, but I have listened to so many women of a certain generation who were sick and tired of being someone’s wife, someone’s mother or someone’s daughter. Women who, deep inside themselves, had had enough of cooking other folk’s meals, washing other folk’s clothes, tidying other folk’s rooms, picking up other folk’s rubbish, attending to other folk’s emotional needs, and rarely, if ever, getting anything back in return. Understandably, they felt angry and confession had become one of the few places where they could express it
So why do I tell you this today? Well, because today’s readings present us with two women who had themselves every reason to feel this way. In the first reading from the Book of Genesis, Abraham reminds me of my friend Alistair who was here a couple of weeks ago for spiritual direction. Over lunch I was telling him that I had six priests coming to watch the World Cup Final and have something to eat, to which he replied, ‘Our Sheila will make you something.” “But, you haven’t asked her” I said to him. “No, it will be alright” he said. And it was. Sheila made a lovely lasagne for us and brought it down all the way from Dumbarton. But what we will never know is how she really felt about it. I did ask her, but maybe only the next priest she goes to for confession will hear how she really felt. And it’s the same with Sarah. Abraham, in typical oriental fashion, rushes out, welcomes the three travellers and offers them food. But what does big hearted Arthur do then? He hastens to the tent to find Sarah and tells her to hurry and knead three bushels of flour and make loaves. The bible is silent on what happened next, but I leave you to imagine what Sarah was muttering under her breath as Abraham disappeared again to discuss the latest football results with his three guests. And we see something similar in the gospel, where Martha is mad at being left to do all the work in the kitchen while her sister Mary sits at Jesus feet doing nothing.
So, as they say on the radio sometimes, ‘What’s your point caller?’ Well, my point is that, no matter how generous and virtuous our actions may appear on the outside, to the extent that they are done out of a sense of obligation or duty or out of a sense of what we ought to feel rather than what we actually feel, and to that extent are not truly free acts in the full sense of the word, then we have a problem. And this lack of inner freedom is one of the great characteristics of religion without faith, which, if we can move for a moment from the personal to the international level, we can see in the recent history of two countries with which I personally have close links. Spain, my second home, and Ireland which I have never visited but from which three quarters of my ancestors came, have, historically, been thought of as two of the most Catholic countries in the world. And yet events have shown that in neither case was everything what it appeared. In the 1930s, Catholic Spain, for that is what it was called, erupted into an orgy of anti-clericalism and hatred for the Church which was truly shocking. All over the country, churches were burned and thousands of priests and nuns were brutally murdered, in many cases their bodies horribly mutilated. And in some cases, this was done by people who, until the week before, had dutifully turned up at Mass every Sunday and paid lip-service to the rules of the Church. And much more recently in Ireland, we have seen a tidal wave of anti-church and anti-clerical protest from a society which until not so long ago had seemed so pious and religious and so proud of its Catholicism. But again, all was not as it seemed.
And returning again to the personal level, we have seen it here in recent years as people who attended church with great regularity, often out of a deep-rooted fear of what might happen if they didn’t, have begun to rebel and gone in a very short time from seemingly practising Catholics to some of the Church’s most angry and most severe critics, an anger which, like the anger of people in Ireland or Spain had been building up for years. How many previously pious and Church-going people have I met in my life whose inner reservoir of resentment against a God whom they have seen as imposing restrictions on them, stopping them enjoying themselves and forcing them to do things they didn’t want to do, has resulted in an explosion of anger when someone close to them has died or something they had prayed for has not happened. The whole phenomenon of atheism and rejection of traditional religion in our day, in fact, can be seen as an angry reaction to centuries during which the whole idea of God was used by those in power as a way of controlling people’s lives and in many ways oppressing them
Martha, you see, is only the tip of the iceberg. Where there is religion rather than faith: where people are forced rather than enabled: where there is obligation rather than choice: where there is fear rather freedom, there will always be anger and resentment.
So how free are you?
BIDDING PRAYERS
Only God is truly free. Human freedom is an imperfect reflection of the freedom found in God and we can only come to experience genuine freedom when we receive God into our lives as a welcome guest and begin to share in his freedom through a deep attentiveness to the movement of his Spirit living in us. And so we pray that our coming here each week to be fed by the Word and the Eucharist will always be out of free choice rather than some sense of duty or obligation inherited from the past.........Lord hear us
The danger of anger and resentment is that we become trapped in it and so are unable to move on. Like Tam O’Shanter’s wife, we nurse it and keep it warm, until it colours our view of everything.It blinds us to any good that comes our way and severely limits our capacity to enjoy ourselves. It is like a dark cloud hanging over our whole lives and takes the edge off even the happiest occasions. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to see any way in which we ourselves are caught up in this evil.......Lord hear us
The Second Vatican Council dreamt of the day when the Word of God would again take its place at the centre of our lives. And so greater importance was placed on what is known as the Liturgy of the Word during Mass. But it was always part of the Council’s dream that, as individuals and as families, we would learn again to read the bible at home and, like Mary in this week’s gospel, sit at Jesus’ feet and be fed and nourished by God’s Word.. And so we pray that this will happen here in St Bride’.......Lord hear us
Part of the reason the Churches are suffering in today’s world is that we are paying the price for the past sins of religion without faith. For years, people have resented the power the Churches have exercised over their lives, the riches they had acquired, the hypocrisy they seemed to be guilty of and above all the harsh and legalistic god they had foisted on society. And so we pray that the men and women of our time will come now to know the real God and experience the joy such knowledge brings.......Lord hear us
Every day in life a whole army of people perform services without which we could not live the way we do. And so we ask God to stir in us today a deep sense of gratitude for those who cook our meals, wash our clothes, empty our bins, deliver the food we buy in the shops, and in all kinds of ways make it possible for us to get through each day. We pray that we will not fall into the trap of taking other people for granted, but will always be appreciative of what they do and, where possible, thank them.......Lord hear us
In August, we will be launching the new programme of religious education for the children of the parish. And so we continue to ask God to pour out his blessing on this whole project. We pray, in particular, that what we teach the children and the image of God we offer them will be deeply healthy and as free as it possibly can be from the kind of distortions many of us have picked up over the years. We pray that as a parish we will be willing to learn new and better things and pass them on to the children.........Lord hear us
I remember one old woman in particular who came to confession every week for years and never once spoke about anything she herself had done wrong. Instead, she talked about her husband, a crabbit and deeply selfish old man, who for years had given her a hard time. ‘Ye ken whit he did this week, Father’ she would say, before giving me a blow by blow account of everything that had happened since the previous Saturday. And I just listened, because there was such deep anger and resentment in her and telling me about it each week seemed to help. She was an extreme example, but I have listened to so many women of a certain generation who were sick and tired of being someone’s wife, someone’s mother or someone’s daughter. Women who, deep inside themselves, had had enough of cooking other folk’s meals, washing other folk’s clothes, tidying other folk’s rooms, picking up other folk’s rubbish, attending to other folk’s emotional needs, and rarely, if ever, getting anything back in return. Understandably, they felt angry and confession had become one of the few places where they could express it
So why do I tell you this today? Well, because today’s readings present us with two women who had themselves every reason to feel this way. In the first reading from the Book of Genesis, Abraham reminds me of my friend Alistair who was here a couple of weeks ago for spiritual direction. Over lunch I was telling him that I had six priests coming to watch the World Cup Final and have something to eat, to which he replied, ‘Our Sheila will make you something.” “But, you haven’t asked her” I said to him. “No, it will be alright” he said. And it was. Sheila made a lovely lasagne for us and brought it down all the way from Dumbarton. But what we will never know is how she really felt about it. I did ask her, but maybe only the next priest she goes to for confession will hear how she really felt. And it’s the same with Sarah. Abraham, in typical oriental fashion, rushes out, welcomes the three travellers and offers them food. But what does big hearted Arthur do then? He hastens to the tent to find Sarah and tells her to hurry and knead three bushels of flour and make loaves. The bible is silent on what happened next, but I leave you to imagine what Sarah was muttering under her breath as Abraham disappeared again to discuss the latest football results with his three guests. And we see something similar in the gospel, where Martha is mad at being left to do all the work in the kitchen while her sister Mary sits at Jesus feet doing nothing.
So, as they say on the radio sometimes, ‘What’s your point caller?’ Well, my point is that, no matter how generous and virtuous our actions may appear on the outside, to the extent that they are done out of a sense of obligation or duty or out of a sense of what we ought to feel rather than what we actually feel, and to that extent are not truly free acts in the full sense of the word, then we have a problem. And this lack of inner freedom is one of the great characteristics of religion without faith, which, if we can move for a moment from the personal to the international level, we can see in the recent history of two countries with which I personally have close links. Spain, my second home, and Ireland which I have never visited but from which three quarters of my ancestors came, have, historically, been thought of as two of the most Catholic countries in the world. And yet events have shown that in neither case was everything what it appeared. In the 1930s, Catholic Spain, for that is what it was called, erupted into an orgy of anti-clericalism and hatred for the Church which was truly shocking. All over the country, churches were burned and thousands of priests and nuns were brutally murdered, in many cases their bodies horribly mutilated. And in some cases, this was done by people who, until the week before, had dutifully turned up at Mass every Sunday and paid lip-service to the rules of the Church. And much more recently in Ireland, we have seen a tidal wave of anti-church and anti-clerical protest from a society which until not so long ago had seemed so pious and religious and so proud of its Catholicism. But again, all was not as it seemed.
And returning again to the personal level, we have seen it here in recent years as people who attended church with great regularity, often out of a deep-rooted fear of what might happen if they didn’t, have begun to rebel and gone in a very short time from seemingly practising Catholics to some of the Church’s most angry and most severe critics, an anger which, like the anger of people in Ireland or Spain had been building up for years. How many previously pious and Church-going people have I met in my life whose inner reservoir of resentment against a God whom they have seen as imposing restrictions on them, stopping them enjoying themselves and forcing them to do things they didn’t want to do, has resulted in an explosion of anger when someone close to them has died or something they had prayed for has not happened. The whole phenomenon of atheism and rejection of traditional religion in our day, in fact, can be seen as an angry reaction to centuries during which the whole idea of God was used by those in power as a way of controlling people’s lives and in many ways oppressing them
Martha, you see, is only the tip of the iceberg. Where there is religion rather than faith: where people are forced rather than enabled: where there is obligation rather than choice: where there is fear rather freedom, there will always be anger and resentment.
So how free are you?
BIDDING PRAYERS
Only God is truly free. Human freedom is an imperfect reflection of the freedom found in God and we can only come to experience genuine freedom when we receive God into our lives as a welcome guest and begin to share in his freedom through a deep attentiveness to the movement of his Spirit living in us. And so we pray that our coming here each week to be fed by the Word and the Eucharist will always be out of free choice rather than some sense of duty or obligation inherited from the past.........Lord hear us
The danger of anger and resentment is that we become trapped in it and so are unable to move on. Like Tam O’Shanter’s wife, we nurse it and keep it warm, until it colours our view of everything.It blinds us to any good that comes our way and severely limits our capacity to enjoy ourselves. It is like a dark cloud hanging over our whole lives and takes the edge off even the happiest occasions. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to see any way in which we ourselves are caught up in this evil.......Lord hear us
The Second Vatican Council dreamt of the day when the Word of God would again take its place at the centre of our lives. And so greater importance was placed on what is known as the Liturgy of the Word during Mass. But it was always part of the Council’s dream that, as individuals and as families, we would learn again to read the bible at home and, like Mary in this week’s gospel, sit at Jesus’ feet and be fed and nourished by God’s Word.. And so we pray that this will happen here in St Bride’.......Lord hear us
Part of the reason the Churches are suffering in today’s world is that we are paying the price for the past sins of religion without faith. For years, people have resented the power the Churches have exercised over their lives, the riches they had acquired, the hypocrisy they seemed to be guilty of and above all the harsh and legalistic god they had foisted on society. And so we pray that the men and women of our time will come now to know the real God and experience the joy such knowledge brings.......Lord hear us
Every day in life a whole army of people perform services without which we could not live the way we do. And so we ask God to stir in us today a deep sense of gratitude for those who cook our meals, wash our clothes, empty our bins, deliver the food we buy in the shops, and in all kinds of ways make it possible for us to get through each day. We pray that we will not fall into the trap of taking other people for granted, but will always be appreciative of what they do and, where possible, thank them.......Lord hear us
In August, we will be launching the new programme of religious education for the children of the parish. And so we continue to ask God to pour out his blessing on this whole project. We pray, in particular, that what we teach the children and the image of God we offer them will be deeply healthy and as free as it possibly can be from the kind of distortions many of us have picked up over the years. We pray that as a parish we will be willing to learn new and better things and pass them on to the children.........Lord hear us
Saturday, 10 July 2010
15thSunday of the Year C
Of all the groups we meet in the Gospels, from the Scribes and Pharisees to the Sadducees and Sanhedrin, there’s no group that comes out of the story as well as the Samaritans do. When Jesus, in John’s Gospel, met the Samaritan woman at the well and she went to tell the people of her village about him, many of them believed in him and wanted him to stay with them. When Jesus cured the ten lepers and only one came back to give thanks, the one who came back was a Samaritan. And as a direct result of today’s parable the Samaritans have given their name to one of the great helping agencies in the world today. So who were these Samaritans? There are about five hundred of them of them still left today in the Middle East, split between the Palestinian town of Nablus and the Israeli town of Holon. But who are they and what is their story? Well, I will try to answer those questions today in the hope that, doing so, will help us understand why, when he told that parable, Jesus put a Samaritan at the centre of it.
The story begins a thousand years before the birth of Jesus, during the reign of King David. That was Israel’s Golden Age, and under David and his son Solomon the people were united. After the death of Solomon, however, the Kingdom divided into two, Israel in the North and Judaea in the South, the latter centred on Jerusalem and the former in Samaria, on Mount Gerizim. This is what the woman at the well is referring to when she says to Jesus. ‘Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, though you say that Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship.’ But in 721 BC. disaster hit the Northern Kingdom. They were conquered by the Assyrians who took many of the most influential people off into slavery and brought in foreign workers to look after the land on behalf of the Assyrian king. The local people were still the majority – and so their religion survived – but crucially for our story, they inter-married with the immigrant population and so, as far as the people in the South were concerned, lost their pure Jewish blood. The People in Jerusalem despised the Samaritans for this and taunted them about it, while the Samaritans countered by claiming that they had an older copy of the Law than those in the South, still used in their worship today, and so were the real successors of Moses. And so a dispute developed which was still going on in Jesus’ day more than six hundred years later.
And it was made worse after the Jews in the South, having themselves been conquered and carried into exile in Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar in 589, returned from exile in in 538 and started rebuilding Jerusalem. In an impressive act of generosity, the Samaritans offered to help with this work. But the offer was refused. The Samaritans never forgave the Jews for this slight and as a result, the split between the two sides grew even wider. There was constant bickering and periodic violence and when the Samaritans built their own temple on Mount Gerizim in 330 BC, it was eventually destroyed by the Jews around the year 129 BC. And so, in Jesus day, a Jew would not even pass through Samaritan territory for fear of being contaminated. Significantly, however, Jesus did, showing that he had no truck with this kind of hatred and prejudice. And it was while doing this that he met the woman at the well whose story we read in chapter four of John’s Gospel.
But for the average Jew of the time, such a thing was unthinkable. The Samaritans were publicly cursed in the synagogues. They could not appear as witnesses in a Jewish court. They could not be converted to Judaism and were even, the Jews thought, excluded from the after life. So, in the light of all that, why, when he wanted to give what is in effect a picture of what lies at the very heart of his teaching, did Jesus choose a Samaritan as the hero of a story which, along with the parable of the prodigal son, has become the best known text from the whole of the New Testament? Well, there is a sense in which it is not up to me to answer that question. The parables of Jesus are like mirrors in which we are invited to see a reflection of ourselves. And so, in that sense, it is up to each one of us as individuals to look into the picture Jesus paints and see something of our own lives reflected there. But let me make some suggestions.
And the first is the utter absurdity of religion without, not just faith, but love. When the Samaritan woman talks about which of the two mountains God should be worshipped on, Jesus tells her that the day is coming when people will worship neither on one mountain or the other but in Spirit and truth. And to worship in Spirit and truth is to move beyond the world of religion, occupied in the story by the priest and the Levite, who did not want to be rendered ritually unclean by touching the man who had fallen into the hands of brigands, and do what the man in the story did. Performing religious actions like going to church and saying prayers without a love that is practical and real is of no value whatsoever.
And the second thing is to look again at the people we despise and look down on. Here, we really do have to speak for ourselves, but if I were to make one suggestion it would be the way we in Britain tend to view foreigners. We are not all racists or Xenophobes, but as an island nation we are probably more guilty of these things than most. At the heart of the dispute between Jews and Samaritans lay the question of racial purity and the superiority of one people over another. It’s an abomination, the results of which we saw under Hitler in the middle of the last century, and I invite you to see even the slightest trace if it in yourself today whether the victims of it are Jews, Moslems or even the English.
And the third thing I invite you to look at is your own family circle. The tragedy of the Jewish/Samaritan story is that the two sides were actually brothers and sisters of each other. History is littered with such tragedies and if there is even the trace of it in your family, see it for what it is and do something about it.
It was no accident that Jesus made the Samaritan the hero of this story.
BIDDING PRAYERS
In the first reading this week, we hear how the Word of God is not beyond the sea so that someone will have to cross over and bring it back to us. It is not in the heavens so that someone will have to climb up and bring it down us. It is very close to us. It is in our hearts and in our mouths. It is part of our daily lives. It is in every person we meet, especially in those who, like the man who fell among brigands, are in need of our help. And so we pray that our faith will bear fruit in a love that is real and effective....Lord hear us
The priest and the Levite were good religious people who observed every detail of the Law. But when they came across the man who had fallen among brigands, they passed by on the other side. To have touched him would have made them ritually unclean and unable to take part in worship. Religious observance had taken precedence over love, the letter of the law over the spirit of the law. And so we pray for the grace to see any sign of this in the way we function together as a parish..........Lord hear us
Modern insights into DNA show in a way we never understood before how closely connected we are with people all over the world. The things which separate us from each other – race, colour, nationality, religion – are nothing compared to the things which unite us as human beings. And so we pray that the world will come to see this more and more in the course of this century and, with God’s help, recognize the sheer absurdity and foolishness of the prejudices which divide us.........Lord hear us
Abraham is the father in faith of millions of Jews, Christians and Moslems throughout history. We believe in the same God and share many of the stories which form the basis of the Scriptures. And yet history is filled the sad and often tragic story of violence and conflict between these three great faiths. In particular, we have fought and squabbled over the land we call ‘holy’ and the city, Jerusalem, which lies at the heart of it. And so we ask God to lead us out of this never-ending tragedy........Lord hear us
The conflict between Jews and Samaritans which, given that he was a Jew, was part of Jesus’ own personal history was, in essence, a family dispute. And so we pray for families everywhere which are torn apart by arguments and disputes which have grown out of all proportion and got completely out of control. We ask God to pour his Spirit into all those caught up in such situations and give them the courage they need to stretch out a hand of friendship and accept it when it is offered by others..........Lord hear us
The Samaritans, of course, have given their name to an organization which provides a listening ear twenty four hours a day to anyone who is in need. Many of those who phone the Samaritans are desperate and alone with no one to talk to and in some cases close to suicide. And so we pray for all those mostly anonymous men and women who are willing to sit by a phone ready to listen without judgement to so many stories of human anguish, that God may bless them and guide them in what they say......Lord hear us
The story begins a thousand years before the birth of Jesus, during the reign of King David. That was Israel’s Golden Age, and under David and his son Solomon the people were united. After the death of Solomon, however, the Kingdom divided into two, Israel in the North and Judaea in the South, the latter centred on Jerusalem and the former in Samaria, on Mount Gerizim. This is what the woman at the well is referring to when she says to Jesus. ‘Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, though you say that Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship.’ But in 721 BC. disaster hit the Northern Kingdom. They were conquered by the Assyrians who took many of the most influential people off into slavery and brought in foreign workers to look after the land on behalf of the Assyrian king. The local people were still the majority – and so their religion survived – but crucially for our story, they inter-married with the immigrant population and so, as far as the people in the South were concerned, lost their pure Jewish blood. The People in Jerusalem despised the Samaritans for this and taunted them about it, while the Samaritans countered by claiming that they had an older copy of the Law than those in the South, still used in their worship today, and so were the real successors of Moses. And so a dispute developed which was still going on in Jesus’ day more than six hundred years later.
And it was made worse after the Jews in the South, having themselves been conquered and carried into exile in Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar in 589, returned from exile in in 538 and started rebuilding Jerusalem. In an impressive act of generosity, the Samaritans offered to help with this work. But the offer was refused. The Samaritans never forgave the Jews for this slight and as a result, the split between the two sides grew even wider. There was constant bickering and periodic violence and when the Samaritans built their own temple on Mount Gerizim in 330 BC, it was eventually destroyed by the Jews around the year 129 BC. And so, in Jesus day, a Jew would not even pass through Samaritan territory for fear of being contaminated. Significantly, however, Jesus did, showing that he had no truck with this kind of hatred and prejudice. And it was while doing this that he met the woman at the well whose story we read in chapter four of John’s Gospel.
But for the average Jew of the time, such a thing was unthinkable. The Samaritans were publicly cursed in the synagogues. They could not appear as witnesses in a Jewish court. They could not be converted to Judaism and were even, the Jews thought, excluded from the after life. So, in the light of all that, why, when he wanted to give what is in effect a picture of what lies at the very heart of his teaching, did Jesus choose a Samaritan as the hero of a story which, along with the parable of the prodigal son, has become the best known text from the whole of the New Testament? Well, there is a sense in which it is not up to me to answer that question. The parables of Jesus are like mirrors in which we are invited to see a reflection of ourselves. And so, in that sense, it is up to each one of us as individuals to look into the picture Jesus paints and see something of our own lives reflected there. But let me make some suggestions.
And the first is the utter absurdity of religion without, not just faith, but love. When the Samaritan woman talks about which of the two mountains God should be worshipped on, Jesus tells her that the day is coming when people will worship neither on one mountain or the other but in Spirit and truth. And to worship in Spirit and truth is to move beyond the world of religion, occupied in the story by the priest and the Levite, who did not want to be rendered ritually unclean by touching the man who had fallen into the hands of brigands, and do what the man in the story did. Performing religious actions like going to church and saying prayers without a love that is practical and real is of no value whatsoever.
And the second thing is to look again at the people we despise and look down on. Here, we really do have to speak for ourselves, but if I were to make one suggestion it would be the way we in Britain tend to view foreigners. We are not all racists or Xenophobes, but as an island nation we are probably more guilty of these things than most. At the heart of the dispute between Jews and Samaritans lay the question of racial purity and the superiority of one people over another. It’s an abomination, the results of which we saw under Hitler in the middle of the last century, and I invite you to see even the slightest trace if it in yourself today whether the victims of it are Jews, Moslems or even the English.
And the third thing I invite you to look at is your own family circle. The tragedy of the Jewish/Samaritan story is that the two sides were actually brothers and sisters of each other. History is littered with such tragedies and if there is even the trace of it in your family, see it for what it is and do something about it.
It was no accident that Jesus made the Samaritan the hero of this story.
BIDDING PRAYERS
In the first reading this week, we hear how the Word of God is not beyond the sea so that someone will have to cross over and bring it back to us. It is not in the heavens so that someone will have to climb up and bring it down us. It is very close to us. It is in our hearts and in our mouths. It is part of our daily lives. It is in every person we meet, especially in those who, like the man who fell among brigands, are in need of our help. And so we pray that our faith will bear fruit in a love that is real and effective....Lord hear us
The priest and the Levite were good religious people who observed every detail of the Law. But when they came across the man who had fallen among brigands, they passed by on the other side. To have touched him would have made them ritually unclean and unable to take part in worship. Religious observance had taken precedence over love, the letter of the law over the spirit of the law. And so we pray for the grace to see any sign of this in the way we function together as a parish..........Lord hear us
Modern insights into DNA show in a way we never understood before how closely connected we are with people all over the world. The things which separate us from each other – race, colour, nationality, religion – are nothing compared to the things which unite us as human beings. And so we pray that the world will come to see this more and more in the course of this century and, with God’s help, recognize the sheer absurdity and foolishness of the prejudices which divide us.........Lord hear us
Abraham is the father in faith of millions of Jews, Christians and Moslems throughout history. We believe in the same God and share many of the stories which form the basis of the Scriptures. And yet history is filled the sad and often tragic story of violence and conflict between these three great faiths. In particular, we have fought and squabbled over the land we call ‘holy’ and the city, Jerusalem, which lies at the heart of it. And so we ask God to lead us out of this never-ending tragedy........Lord hear us
The conflict between Jews and Samaritans which, given that he was a Jew, was part of Jesus’ own personal history was, in essence, a family dispute. And so we pray for families everywhere which are torn apart by arguments and disputes which have grown out of all proportion and got completely out of control. We ask God to pour his Spirit into all those caught up in such situations and give them the courage they need to stretch out a hand of friendship and accept it when it is offered by others..........Lord hear us
The Samaritans, of course, have given their name to an organization which provides a listening ear twenty four hours a day to anyone who is in need. Many of those who phone the Samaritans are desperate and alone with no one to talk to and in some cases close to suicide. And so we pray for all those mostly anonymous men and women who are willing to sit by a phone ready to listen without judgement to so many stories of human anguish, that God may bless them and guide them in what they say......Lord hear us
Friday, 2 July 2010
14th SUNDAY OF THE YEAR C
A helpful piece of advice for those who give homilies is to say something you need to hear yourself, and then at least one person in the church will benefit from it. That’s why, when a priest comes to see me for spiritual direction and is maybe not quite sure what to talk about, I sometimes ask him what he was saying to the people the previous Sunday. Often this proves to be the clue to what is going on in his own life and provides us with a place to begin our conversation. And so I would like to say something today that I have had to remind myself of many times over the years, in the hope that, today, it might help both of us. The thing which triggered off the thought is that gospel, but the issue itself goes back a long way. You could say it goes back sixty five years, but for the purposes of today’s reflection I will go back no further than 1985 when I arrived in St Matthew’s, Kilmarnock.
I went there filled with enthusiasm. But as things turned out, the first couple of years were to prove the most difficult of my life. It was just after the diocese had decided to do RENEW, and while the decision to be part of it had been made before I arrived, there were was a lot of opposition which, in the minds of some people, got all mixed up with the fact that they were struggling to come to terms with a change of parish priest. Caught in the middle of this – at least that is how I saw it at the time – I began to experience a sense of rejection the likes of which I had never known before, an experience which forced me to look seriously at what soon became clear was my own deep need for approval. I remember sometimes walking out of the sacristy at the start of Mass afraid to lift my eyes in case the gaps in the congregation were bigger than they had been the previous week. It really was a very painful time, and the pressure I felt inside myself to do and say whatever would keep people happy was very strong. Looking back, however, I thank God that this did not happen. Instead, through counselling and spiritual direction, I was able to confront what was going on and in the process learned something of immense importance about what God was asking of me as a priest.
And I shared some of that with you, in fact, the first weekend I was here, reminding you that I am not here to please you, tell you what you want to hear or be the priest you would like me to be. It’s not that I want to fall out with you, far from it, but in the end my job as your parish priest is to proclaim the message of the gospel as best I can. What you do about that is up to you. If you like it, fine. But if you don’t, then that’s not my problem. As Jesus says in today’s passage, ‘Whenever you enter a town and they do not make you welcome, go out into its streets and say. “We wipe off the very dust of your town that clings to our feet and leave it with you.” In recent years, many people have walked away from the Church and stopped coming, and this has sometimes left priests of a certain generation feeling guilty and disheartened, as if they themselves had failed in some way. And, of course, there was a time when priests saw it as their job to get people to Mass. Older people in Kilmarnock still talk about one particular priest who was famous years ago for going round knocking doors with his stick on a Sunday morning to get people out of their beds and up to Mass, not unlike a mother trying to get her children up for school in the morning. But those days have gone. We have all grown up since then and my own attitude as people have left in recent years has been based on and inspired by Jesus’ reaction in chapter six of John’s gospel when people find what he says intolerable and begin to walk away. At which point, rather than run after them and persuade them to stay, watering down and apologising for upsetting them, he turns to his disciples and says; ‘What about you? Do you want to go too?
So do I not care? Well, of course I do. I care deeply and passionately about these things. As I also told you at the beginning, I was no sooner appointed to this parish than I began to feel a real sense of love for the people in it. My deepest desire for you all is that, together, we should come to know God in ever deeper ways. I long to make that journey from religion to faith in the company of every single one of you. I know what St Paul means when he says in today’s second reading that what matters is that each one of us becomes an altogether new creature and that is what I want us all to be. I said last week that to move from religion to faith is like trading in an old fifteen inch black and white TV for a new fifty two inch, high definition, 3D model and I want us all to make that transition. In the first reading, the prophet compares God to a woman nursing a child at her breast and promises that he will comfort us as she comforts her baby. And that is the God I want us all to experience.
But we have to choose it. No-one can force this God on us, least of all, God himself. We spoke last week about how, when Christ freed us, he meant us to remain free, and that is always the way it will be with God. Each of us is responsible for our own choices and if, like so many others in recent years, you want to walk away, then there is nothing I can do about it. But if you choose to stay; if you want to make that journey from religion to faith; if you are experiencing in yourself a desire to go deeper; then there is nothing in the world I want to do more than support you in any way I can. I spend my life doing this with people. It is what I do. And in recent months, quite a number of you have said things like ‘I really must come and have a chat with you.’ So far, however, only a handful of you have come.
But I am sitting waiting.
BIDDING PRAYERS
In this week’s Gospel, Jesus sends out seventy two disciples through the towns and villages he himself is to visit. “The harvest is rich” he tells them, “but the labourers are few. So ask the Lord of the harvest to send labourers to his harvest.” And so we do that today. We ask God to raise up in our world men and women of deep, personal, adult faith, who are willing and able to proclaim the message of the Gospel to the people of our time in a way which makes sense to them and which they can understand.....Lord hear us
The seventy two, Jesus says, will be like lambs among wolves, an image which made perfect sense to persecuted Christians in the early centuries. And so they were to carry neither purse, nor haversack nor sandals. Instead, they were to rely entirely on God, recognizing that, left to their own devices, they would not survive for five minutes in the hostile world they were going into. And so pray that all who exercise ministry in the Church will see that this is still true today.......Lord hear us
When the seventy two go into a house, Jesus tells them, their first word has to be “Peace to this house.” Sharing our faith with others begins with profound respect for all whom we meet. There is no place in it for aggressiveness of any kind. It must respect the beliefs and traditions of others and recognize all that is good in them. There must be no arrogance or condescension. God is in every person’s life and so our starting position must be one of humility. And so we ask God to stir these qualities in the Church today.......Lord hear us
Jesus tells the seventy two disciples that, if they enter a town and it does not welcome them, then they have to shake the dust from their feet and move on. People are free to do what they want and the disciples must recognize this. People come to faith at different times and in different ways and long after the disciples have gone, God will still be there working deep within the lives of those people. And so we pray for the grace to understand this, do what we can, and leave the rest to God...........Lord hear us
There was a time when whole communities believed the same thing without question. Faith was passed from one generation to the next and those who did not conform to this pattern were seen as odd by those around them. But all that has changed. In a world filled with scepticism and a thousand version of the truth, faith will only survive today if it is rooted in personal experience and freely chosen. And so we pray that each person in this parish will come to such a faith...............Lord hear us
In recent years, many have walked away from the Church. But there have been many reasons for this. In some cases it has not been because people have lost their faith, but because they were dissatisfied with the faith they had, were looking for something deeper, and were unable to find it within traditional Church structures. Some, in fact, have felt profoundly let down by the Church. And so we pray for the grace to be the kind of parish where such men and women feel welcome and at home............Lord hear us
I went there filled with enthusiasm. But as things turned out, the first couple of years were to prove the most difficult of my life. It was just after the diocese had decided to do RENEW, and while the decision to be part of it had been made before I arrived, there were was a lot of opposition which, in the minds of some people, got all mixed up with the fact that they were struggling to come to terms with a change of parish priest. Caught in the middle of this – at least that is how I saw it at the time – I began to experience a sense of rejection the likes of which I had never known before, an experience which forced me to look seriously at what soon became clear was my own deep need for approval. I remember sometimes walking out of the sacristy at the start of Mass afraid to lift my eyes in case the gaps in the congregation were bigger than they had been the previous week. It really was a very painful time, and the pressure I felt inside myself to do and say whatever would keep people happy was very strong. Looking back, however, I thank God that this did not happen. Instead, through counselling and spiritual direction, I was able to confront what was going on and in the process learned something of immense importance about what God was asking of me as a priest.
And I shared some of that with you, in fact, the first weekend I was here, reminding you that I am not here to please you, tell you what you want to hear or be the priest you would like me to be. It’s not that I want to fall out with you, far from it, but in the end my job as your parish priest is to proclaim the message of the gospel as best I can. What you do about that is up to you. If you like it, fine. But if you don’t, then that’s not my problem. As Jesus says in today’s passage, ‘Whenever you enter a town and they do not make you welcome, go out into its streets and say. “We wipe off the very dust of your town that clings to our feet and leave it with you.” In recent years, many people have walked away from the Church and stopped coming, and this has sometimes left priests of a certain generation feeling guilty and disheartened, as if they themselves had failed in some way. And, of course, there was a time when priests saw it as their job to get people to Mass. Older people in Kilmarnock still talk about one particular priest who was famous years ago for going round knocking doors with his stick on a Sunday morning to get people out of their beds and up to Mass, not unlike a mother trying to get her children up for school in the morning. But those days have gone. We have all grown up since then and my own attitude as people have left in recent years has been based on and inspired by Jesus’ reaction in chapter six of John’s gospel when people find what he says intolerable and begin to walk away. At which point, rather than run after them and persuade them to stay, watering down and apologising for upsetting them, he turns to his disciples and says; ‘What about you? Do you want to go too?
So do I not care? Well, of course I do. I care deeply and passionately about these things. As I also told you at the beginning, I was no sooner appointed to this parish than I began to feel a real sense of love for the people in it. My deepest desire for you all is that, together, we should come to know God in ever deeper ways. I long to make that journey from religion to faith in the company of every single one of you. I know what St Paul means when he says in today’s second reading that what matters is that each one of us becomes an altogether new creature and that is what I want us all to be. I said last week that to move from religion to faith is like trading in an old fifteen inch black and white TV for a new fifty two inch, high definition, 3D model and I want us all to make that transition. In the first reading, the prophet compares God to a woman nursing a child at her breast and promises that he will comfort us as she comforts her baby. And that is the God I want us all to experience.
But we have to choose it. No-one can force this God on us, least of all, God himself. We spoke last week about how, when Christ freed us, he meant us to remain free, and that is always the way it will be with God. Each of us is responsible for our own choices and if, like so many others in recent years, you want to walk away, then there is nothing I can do about it. But if you choose to stay; if you want to make that journey from religion to faith; if you are experiencing in yourself a desire to go deeper; then there is nothing in the world I want to do more than support you in any way I can. I spend my life doing this with people. It is what I do. And in recent months, quite a number of you have said things like ‘I really must come and have a chat with you.’ So far, however, only a handful of you have come.
But I am sitting waiting.
BIDDING PRAYERS
In this week’s Gospel, Jesus sends out seventy two disciples through the towns and villages he himself is to visit. “The harvest is rich” he tells them, “but the labourers are few. So ask the Lord of the harvest to send labourers to his harvest.” And so we do that today. We ask God to raise up in our world men and women of deep, personal, adult faith, who are willing and able to proclaim the message of the Gospel to the people of our time in a way which makes sense to them and which they can understand.....Lord hear us
The seventy two, Jesus says, will be like lambs among wolves, an image which made perfect sense to persecuted Christians in the early centuries. And so they were to carry neither purse, nor haversack nor sandals. Instead, they were to rely entirely on God, recognizing that, left to their own devices, they would not survive for five minutes in the hostile world they were going into. And so pray that all who exercise ministry in the Church will see that this is still true today.......Lord hear us
When the seventy two go into a house, Jesus tells them, their first word has to be “Peace to this house.” Sharing our faith with others begins with profound respect for all whom we meet. There is no place in it for aggressiveness of any kind. It must respect the beliefs and traditions of others and recognize all that is good in them. There must be no arrogance or condescension. God is in every person’s life and so our starting position must be one of humility. And so we ask God to stir these qualities in the Church today.......Lord hear us
Jesus tells the seventy two disciples that, if they enter a town and it does not welcome them, then they have to shake the dust from their feet and move on. People are free to do what they want and the disciples must recognize this. People come to faith at different times and in different ways and long after the disciples have gone, God will still be there working deep within the lives of those people. And so we pray for the grace to understand this, do what we can, and leave the rest to God...........Lord hear us
There was a time when whole communities believed the same thing without question. Faith was passed from one generation to the next and those who did not conform to this pattern were seen as odd by those around them. But all that has changed. In a world filled with scepticism and a thousand version of the truth, faith will only survive today if it is rooted in personal experience and freely chosen. And so we pray that each person in this parish will come to such a faith...............Lord hear us
In recent years, many have walked away from the Church. But there have been many reasons for this. In some cases it has not been because people have lost their faith, but because they were dissatisfied with the faith they had, were looking for something deeper, and were unable to find it within traditional Church structures. Some, in fact, have felt profoundly let down by the Church. And so we pray for the grace to be the kind of parish where such men and women feel welcome and at home............Lord hear us
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