3rd Sunday of Easter, Year C, Vigil Mass

This was the sermon at the Saturday vigil Mass. There were Confirmations at the Sunday Mass.

Jn 21:1-14 c.f. Lk 5:4-11
In the account we just heard of the Lord appearing and working the miracle with the catch of fish, we have a model of how the Lord perseveres in reaching out to us in our lives, even when we we are slow to be aware of Him, and slow to be aware of what He is up to.

Let us note how the account begins: It begins with Peter and the others going out fishing.
It might be easy for us to fail to grasp the significance of this, after all, Peter and most of the apostles were fishermen.
The thing, however, is that they had STOPPED being fishermen. In fact, at this stage it seems that they hadn’t been fishing for three YEARS! At the very start of the Lord Jesus’s public life He had called them from their boats, called them to no longer be fishers of fish, but to be “fishers of men”(Lk 5:10).
They had then been with Him three years.
And then He had died.
Their returning to the fishing seems symbolic of their returning to their life BEFORE Jesus.

Now, the Lord had already appeared to them twice after rising from the dead.
But, it seems, they hadn’t really grasped the significance of this.
He had appeared, and then gone.
It somehow hadn’t fully sunk in WHAT they were to do in response to this.
So, they had returned to their OLD way of life: fishing.

How then does the Lord respond?
Does He get angry and impatient? Does He say, “I’ve already shown you the holes in my hands and my feet, what more do you need me to do?!!”
No, He reached out to them in a more patient way. The way a true teacher is patient with pupils who are slow to understand.
He worked a miracle with their fishing.
AND, the point is this: He works the SAME miracle that He had worked at the beginning when He called them.
When they were fishermen, at the beginning of His public life, the miracle had the same pattern: They had worked all night, caught nothing, He tells them to throw the nets to the other side, and they get a haul so HUGE it is miraculous.
And, recognizing the same miracle, by the same Jesus, John cries out, “It is the Lord!”(Jn 21:7).
And then the Lord calls to a new beginning, saying, “Follow me”(Jn 21:19).

At the first miraculous catch of fish they had followed Him while He walked on earth, for three years.
At the second miraculous catch of fish they were now to follow Him in a new way, sent out in a new way. But still to “follow” Him.

You and I can, likewise, be slow to appreciate what the Lord has done and is doing in our lives.
You and I can, so often, return to our former ways of life. Ignoring whatever the Lord has done for us previously: and He has given all of us many different new starts.
The point is this:
He reaches out to us again, as He did to Peter and the others even though they had returned to their old way of life.
He was there among them, even before they recognized Him.
He was working among them, miraculously, even before they recognized Him.
And He is with you, and with me, even when we forget Him and fail to recognize Him.
And He calls us, again, to “follow” Him, by living His resurrection power, by being forgiven for our sins, and by living His love in the midst of whatever “fishing” He calls us to do.

Divine Mercy Sunday, 2nd Sunday of Easter

Jn 20:19-31
This year, as you hopefully recall me saying many times, has been dedicated by Pope Francis to Mercy. And this Sunday, in particular, is the Divine Mercy feast day previously established by Pope St John Paul II. So, to help us think about mercy I want to use two images to try and show how the Lord God, because He is merciful, transforms dirty corrupt things into beautiful wonderful things.

My first image is the changing of water into wine, Our Lord’s first miracle at Cana. And I want to point out a detail that Pope Francis notes, namely, the type of water jars that were used. These weren't any random water jars. Rather, they were the water jars used for the ritual purifications of the Jews, the ritual purifications to purify them from their sins. So the Lord Jesus took this thing associated with sin and transformed it into wine, transformed it into something new, and wonderful, and celebratory. And not just any old wine, but, as you hopefully recall, the wine was called “the best”(Jn 2:10).
So, in mercy, the Lord doesn't discard what is associated with our sins, but transforms them into something glorious.

My second image relates more obviously to today’s feast: the pierced hands of our Lord. Our Lord had suffered on Good Friday. He had been crucified. His hands and feet had been pierced with nails. They had become things of ugliness and suffering and corruption. And, we might note, this piercing was because of our sins. As Isaiah says, “He was wounded for our sins”(Isa 53:5, c.f. “They will look on the one who, they have pierced”(Zech 12:10; c.f. Jn 19:37)
But, what does He do after His resurrection? He publicly displays them to Thomas and the others as signs of His triumph, as marks of His glory. He transformed something that had become gross and ugly into a thing of beauty, triumph, no glory. No longer bleeding and painful but alive –not discharged and hidden, but transformed
This, Pope Francis is reminding us, is our Lord’s continual pattern. He takes what is worst in our lives and uses it to make something glorious.

So, HOW does the Lord do this? In particular, how does He do this with our sins?
The answer is partly linked with His mercy, which CHOOSES to reach out to lowly things,
And partly linked with our HUMILITY, when we choose to acknowledge our need, and lowliness, and sin, and bring it to Him.
Our sin, our ugliness, can be something that leads us to recognise our need of a saviour, and lead us to therefore turn to the Lord Jesus as the definitive Saviour.
Whenever we do this, whenever our sin leads us to turn to God, His mercy transforms our rottenness into something good and glorious.
And, to repeat, this is our Lord’s continual pattern. That’s why Scripture speaks of His making a “new creation” out of the old, rather than of His discarding the old.

We, as humans, have a problem, repeatedly, in that we often forget that we NEED God.
Our sins remind us, if we are honest about them, our sins remind us that we DO need God.
And thus God can transform our sins into opportunities to call on Him and be transformed by Him.
Grace cannot work in the self-satisfied. It cannot work in the person who says, "I've not sinned".
It CAN work in the sinner who humbles Himself to come to the Lord.

To sum that up, at His first miracle at Cana the Lord made “the best wine” out of the water used for purification from the dirtiness of sins. After His resurrection He took the wounds that had been ugly and associated with sin and transformed them and displayed them as things of glory. And, now, for you and me, if we acknowledge our sins, and we confess them and bring them to Him, then our very weakness and lowliness and SIN will be not only be forgiven by Him but transformed into an opportunity of grace and glory –because His “grace is made perfect in weakness”(2 Cor 12:9).

Easter Sunday

Col 3:1-4 (first option for second reading)
Today we recall an event that changed the lives of the men and women who came to be called Christians. And if we recall its meaning, it can change our lives too.

That Easter Sunday morning they found the tomb empty. They weren't expecting it. No earthly explanation was sufficient.
Not only was the tomb empty, but Jesus Christ, the same one who had been crucified on the Friday, appeared in a new glorified state, in His resurrected body. He appeared not only to his followers, like Peter, but to his enemies, like Paul.

These two facts (the empty tomb and the witnesses who saw Him after His resurrection) testify to the beginning of a NEW CREATION that had been worked in His own flesh.
We live in a world of limitations, sufferings, difficulties. The Lord Jesus came from heaven and united Himself to all those problems we know in life, most particularly, He united Himself with them in His suffering on the Cross.
But what we recall today is that “Good” Friday was not the end, rather, it was a new beginning. It led to His resurrection, the act of new creation by which He began to “make all things new” (Rev 21:5) –as He declares in the book of Revelation.

His first followers realised that the existence of this “NEW creation” meant that they should no longer continue to live lives based on the “old” creation.
Lives based on the “old” creation are lives based merely on this material order we see around: money, property, food, etc. Those things are real, but they do not last, and any life we live based on them will not last. They will fade and die and rot in corruption. We can, if so so choose, cling to them, but if we do we cling to things that have no future, and barely have a present –there is no deep meaning in a materialistic life, no inner purpose.

The alternative is what was put before us in our second reading, from St. Paul to the Colossians. The Lord’s first followers knew that by being united to Christ they had both died and risen WITH Him. And, as Colossians put it, “Since you have been brought back to true life in Christ, you must look for the things that are in HEAVEN, where Christ is… Let your thoughts then be on heavenly things, not on the things that are on earth, because you have died, and now the life you have is hidden with Christ in God”(Col 3:1-3).

To live a life based on the things of heaven rather than on the things of earth is to live a life of HOPE, a life that looks forward, a life that realises that there is something MORE and GREATER that lies ahead.
Yes, I need to eat while I am on earth, and I can ENJOY eating on earth. And I can enjoy a house, and car, and money.
BUT I need to enjoy these things realising that the inner purpose of life lies BEYOND them, lies in what I am reaching for in heaven.
I need to relate to my money, and USE my money, in a way that reaches for heaven. In a way that loves as our loving Lord in heaven loves, in a way that thinks of others and not just of myself.

And the point about the resurrection is this: the Lord’s triumph over the sufferings of this world, the Lord beginning the new creation in the transformation of His own flesh, this is what enables me to look beyond all that I see around me. This is what enables me to live this new life of the new creation, even while I live amidst the things of the “old”.
He has triumphed. He is in heaven, with His transfigured resurrected body.
And if I live a life that looks towards that goal, then, to finish by quoting Colossians again, then “when Christ is revealed [at the end of time] and He is your life –you too will be revealed in all your glory with Him”(Col 3:4).

Requiem Mass Giancarlo Colombelli RIP

Lk 23:44-46.50.52-53;24:1-6
Giancarlo, as we all know, had a good sense of humour. In thinking of him, it is very easy and natural to remember him with a smile on his face.
Giancarlo, as we also know, liked England and admired the English. In fact, I can remember him during the parish youth pilgrimage to Rome that he organized, when the punctuality of the Roman buses was very far from being English punctuality, and we waited an hour and half for a bus that came “every 15 minutes” -but it was the Italian Giancarlo that was complaining about the Italians, not the English pilgrims!
So, we might feel it is fitting that he is being laid to rest here in England, not back in Italy.

But, the point I wish to remind you of today, is that the homeland that we think of for Giancarlo has to be a thought of a homeland that is neither Italy nor England, but heaven;
And our thoughts of Giancarlo have to reach beyond a smile, a sense of humour, or a happiness that is merely earthly, to the blessedness, the happiness that only heaven can bring.

It can often feel like there is never a good time to die, and with Giancarlo we might well feel that his departure from us was sudden -I think it was just two weeks ago that he was standing here at Mass, seeming in good health.
And yet, there are many ways in which this is a good time to mourn, namely, now as we are approaching Easter. Because the events of Easter are what give us hope, and hope for Giancarlo.

The Lord Jesus, as we heard in that Gospel text, died.
He came from His glorious heavenly throne, He who was life eternal.
He took human flesh.
And He allowed Himself to die. He hung on the Cross, as we heard, for three hours, and then breathed forth His spirit.
But that was not the end.
Three days later the tomb was found to be empty.
No one found His body, despite the Romans and Jews wanting to know where it was.
No one had motive for hiding His body -His followers were weak cowards, yet despite torture they never yielded in their affirmation that something that had never happened before in the history of the human race had happened in Christ:
He rose from the dead.
He was seen by both His followers, like Peter, and His enemies, like Paul.
The one who had said He could give “eternal life”(Jn 10:28) had shown in His own rising from death that He had the power to give what He promised.
THIS is what we hope now for Giancarlo. That, as Jesus said, “he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live”(Jn 11:25).

The Resurrection of Jesus gives us reason to believe He has the power to fulfill His promise.
While the death of Jesus is important for us to recall too. On one hand, to recall, as we will do shortly in our offertory hymn, that He did all this, suffered all this, out of LOVE for us -out of love for Giancarlo.
And, on the other hand, to see that as death was not the end for the Lord we have reason to hope that it is not the end for Giancarlo either.

Let us recall another thing, however, that gives us hope for Giancarlo, namely, the prayers of his family.
Our Catholic faith teaches us, following the pattern of the Jews of our Lord’s own time and the practice of the Church from its earliest days, that we should pray for the dead. And we pray for three things for Giancarlo:
for mercy in the judgment, when he meets the Lord;
for strength and consolation, to aid him in the purifications of purgatory;
and for speed, to help him reach the final goal.
Giancarlo is fortunate that he is able to depend on the assistance of his family to help him in this regard;
that he is able to count on their support to help him.
Not everyone is fortunate enough to have a family that will pray for them;
Giancarlo can truly be called blessed.

Before closing, let me note something for ourselves.
I have spoken about what we hope and pray for Giancarlo, but let us not forget about the Lord’s compassion for us who remain.
The Gospels record many times that the Lord Jesus wept, not least at the death of His own friend Lazarus. He came from heaven to earth to share our pain, to join us in our grief, and He is with you today, with you in your grief.
So, pray for Giancarlo. But also remember to pray for yourselves, and for each other, that the Lord will be with you and support you -He has experienced the tears you know.


To sum that up, Giancarlo had a smile and a sense of humour; and he had two homelands on earth, Italy and England.
But the homeland of heaven gives an even greater smile, a deeper joy.
And the reality of the Lord’s death and resurrection, that we recall at Easter,
with the assistance of our prayers,
is what gives us hope for Giancarlo, even as we weep to say goodbye.

No Sermon Palm Sunday

Someone else preached today

4th Sunday of Lent, Year C

Lk 15:1-3.11-32
Today, in reflecting on the familiar parable of the Prodigal Son, I'd like to draw something new from it by focussing on on one thing: the distance of the son from the father, note the comparison between that and ourselves, and linking it with some comments from Pope Francis in his book interview for the Year of Mercy.

So, the distance of the son from the father. Let me note the stage when he has taken his father’s money and gone off to a distant land, to spend it all on “debauchery”(Lk 15:13) and “women”(Lk 15:30).
Let us note that the son, at this stage, seemed quite oblivious to the fact that he was DISTANT from his father. There is no indication that he disliked his father, or resented him, rather, simply that he wanted to be elsewhere. His relationship with his father seems to have been of no concern to him.

I was thinking of this when I read some words of Pope Francis in his interview on the Year of Mercy, when Pope Francis commented that it was characteristic of the 20th Century, and commented on by Popes Pius XII onwards, that our modern world has lost its “sense of sin”.
It has lost the sense that what we DO with our lives affects our relationship with our Heavenly Father.
It has become rare for people to feel that their deeds offend God, rare for people to think that their deeds separate them from God.
It seems, to me, that this describes a scenario like the prodigal son, who is distant from his father, but seems to have no real awareness that this is the case, or that this is a problem.
In a Year of Mercy, sadly, mercy cannot reach those who do not know their need of mercy.


There is another phase in the parable. The son runs out of money, he is starving and desperate enough to eat the husks the pigs feed on.
Now, finally, he remembers his father.
He remembers the food his father’s servants eat.
He finally realises that he is distant from his father.
The question now is: what will the son will do? Does he think it is possible to return to his father?
Pope Francis ponders this dilemma when he notes that in the 21st Century, moving on from having merely denied the reality of sin in the 20th Century, it's seems characteristic of our own era to deny to possibility of salvation, to deny the reality of mercy.

We live in an era when our media and films and literature is almost entirely nihilistic, it believes in “nothing”.
Yes, it believes we've made a mess of our world. Yes, it believes that global warming will destroy it.
But little in the modern mindset has a belief in a “something” that gives reason for hope.
Pope Francis, in this Year of Mercy, notes that this is a denial of the reality of Mercy, a denial of what God has offered us in Christ.
In the parable, the Prodigal Son knew that he could go back to his father. We might note that he didn't realise the extent to which the father would accept him.
And God, our loving Father, wishes to accept us back, to offer His mercy, in just this manner.

To sum that up. I have pointed to two stages in the parable and noted the son’s distance from the father. Let us consider, for ourselves, how much each of those apply to ourselves.
In what ways am I like the son when he was left his father and gone to a foreign land, caring nothing for the fact that he has left his father behind?
In what parts of my life do I deny my sin? In what parts of my life do I not realise that I am far from my Father?
And, in what parts of my life am I hungry and alone amidst the pigs in their pen?
In what parts of my life do I see the mess I have made, but fail to recognise that there is a path to go back?
The mercy of God is real, it calls to us especially in Lent. Let us return to the Father.

Sermon at Requiem Mass for Admiral Sir William O’Brien

1 Jn 3:1-2; Mt 11:25-30


Introduction to the Mass:
It is good to see so many here to pay our last respects to the Admiral,
and to offer our support to his children: Tim, Susan, and Louise, and their wider family.

On their behalf I’d like to acknowledge and thank those who are here representing:
Her majesty the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh,
The Duke of York,
The Princess Royal,
And the Duke of Kent and Princess Alexandra,
your presence here is a fitting acknowledgment of the greatness of the man who we are here today to pray for and remember.

This was the church where Bill worshipped for more than a decade in the last part of his life.
He was a devout and pious Catholic, regular in his prayers, attending Holy Mass here not just on Sundays but on weekdays -something he was able to do until just the last month or so of his life, when frailty prevented it.
He prayed here often, and though we may be tightly squeezed in, it is fitting that we are gathered HERE today to offer our prayers for him.
The Catholic faith he professed holds that a funeral is not just an occasion to remember the past, but to look to the future:
we gather here in hope of the hereafter -a hope that is solidly founded, because the Lord promised that He would prepare a place for those who believe and trust in Him,
and that same Lord showed He has the power to fulfill His promises by His own rising from the dead;
and we gather here also to pray for Bill, to pray that the Lord will grant that what we hope for Bill will be brought to completion.

+++++++++++++++

Sermon:
Admiral Sir William O’Brien, or ‘Bill’, was referred to by everyone in this parish as ‘the Admiral’. We don’t live in an era when people’s titles and positions stand for much any more, and yet, the combination of humility and dignity that Bill possessed made it just seem natural for everyone to refer to him as ‘the Admiral’ in a very unaffected manner, and I think it says much good about him.

There will be people today who will be recalling his great naval career, and it is fitting that people should. I, however, wish to share with you another aspect of him, namely, that he was a man of faith, and a man of Catholic faith at that. That’s how he was primarily observed here in this parish, and if we recall some of the religious truths he believed and sought to live, they should also give us comfort and hope today as we say farewell to him.

One concern that the Admiral often voiced to me was that young men, teenage boys in the parish, need to see the connection between their manhood and the Catholic faith. It is common in our culture today to think of religion as weak and womanly. The truth, however, is that the Catholic faith gives a man a deeper vision of manhood than the one that contemporary society offers. Christian manhood is modeled on Christ Himself: on self-giving, on self-sacrifice, on endurance through suffering, on perseverance on the Cross, on running the race to the finish. Christian manhood is modeled on Christ as the “Son” of God, as one who has the dignity of “a first-born son”. To be a Christian is to be aware of your dignity, to be aware of the fact that you were called and chosen to share in the sonship of the Son. And, being aware of that dignity, to live the demands of such a high calling.

The Admiral manifested this dignity. Not in pomp, which as those who know him will know he found rather tiresome. He manifested it, rather, in a quiet and very dignified manner. He stood and walked with dignity, and genuflected with military precision even at the age of 99, back perfectly straight. Part of that manifested the extent to which his naval lifestyle was imbued into his manners, but, and this is my point: He saw the connection between this dignity and the dignity of a son of God. A supernatural dignity that managed both to complement and exceed the natural dignity of a naval career.
We heard in our second reading about how God calls us His children. But that reading also spoke of something that has not YET been revealed, namely, the glory of our life in heaven. It will be glorious, that reading said, because “we shall be like Him”(1 Jn 3:2), like Christ. The Admiral had a manner that displayed something of that glory on earth, but it pales before the glory and dignity we hope for him now in heaven.

Having noted the Admiral’s dignity, and noted the importance of CHRISTIAN dignity, not worldly pomp, let me now say a word about his humility.
There are some old men who tell you continually about their past glories, their victories, their achievements.
It was not so with the Admiral.
He spoke to me often, and I think it said much about him that when he looked back on his life he would talk often about his faults, his failings. He did this with humility.
BUT, and I think this is important, he didn’t seem to do it with a sense of despair, but rather with a mark of Christian HOPE. It is a characteristic of a true Christian that he is able to know his weakness, know his sin, repent of his sin, confess his sin, and do all of this trusting in the loving mercy of our Saviour.

The Admiral died fortified by the sacraments of Holy Mother Church. He died confessing his sins and humbly trusting in the mercy of God. And, if we reflect on the words we heard in our Gospel text, it is to those who have imitated His call to be humble that the Lord offers final call to “come to me” (Mt 11: 28) when they die.

Let me note one final thing about the Catholicism we see in the Admiral’s life: The way he prayed for his dead wife Rita.
Rita passed away in 2012, and he obviously missed her greatly these few years. But, I would point out that he lived out his faith by PRAYING for her, not just pining her absence.
There is a manner in which some people gloss over the ‘difficulty’ of death by referring to their loved ones as if they were already in heaven, or as if they had never sinned, or as if they had nothing to worry about in the judgement seat before God.
The Catholic faith says otherwise.
The Catholic faith follows the practice of the Jews of our Lord’s time, the practice of the early Church, and it prays for those who have died. It feels no need to pretend that our loved ones didn’t sin, because we able to DO something about those sins: we can pray that God will have mercy on mercy. We feel no need to pretend that our loved ones are immediately ready to enter the perfection of heaven, because we can pray that they will be purged of their faults in Purgatory, and our prayers are able to help them in that process.
What this means, in practice, is that our prayers for the dead become a loving activity that continues to unite us to those who have died, and unites us to them with the vision of HOPE that it look towards.
This is something that Bill lived out in his love for Rita after she died.
And our love for him should lead us to do the same for him in days and years ahead.

To sum that up: The Admiral lived out his Catholic faith in a manner that points us to things that can console us today. He saw the dignity that a Christian possesses, and we can hope that he will inherent the greater dignity of that in its fullness in heaven. He manifested humility, so we can hope that the reward that God promises to the humble of heart will be granted to him. He had the love and supernatural confidence to pray for the dead, and so we should do the same, for him.