Sunday, 30 August 2015
Sunday, 23 August 2015
21st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
The Gospel text and today’s first reading give us two of the most powerful Scriptural accounts of choosing for or against the Lord.
In the Gospel we heard how the people WALKED AWAY from the Lord Jesus. They had heard Him give His promise to feed them with His flesh in the Eucharist and they said, “this is too much, who can accept this intolerable language”. And they walked away. Walked away from the Lord, right there before them.
In the first reading we heard of Joshua, who succeeded Moses in the Old Testament. Joshua was the one who led the Jewish people into the Promised Land. And he told them that they had to choose: in this NEW land would they follow the gods of that land, the false gods of the Canaanites etc, or would they hold with the one true God, the God who had rescued them from slavery in Egypt, led them through the Red Sea waters, feed them as they wandered in the desert, and finally brought them to this new land?
WHO would they choose to follow? Joshua said, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (24:15)
And all “the people answered, ‘We have no intention of deserting the Lord’ ”(Josh 24:16)
The truth, however, as the years ahead would show, was that the people were repeatedly unfaithful to the Lord, constantly mixing a bit of worship of the true God with a bit of worship of the pagan gods.
When we read the Old Testament the need to be faithful to the ONE God, and to not mix it up, and to not serve false idols, is a continual refrain. It is the FIRST of the Ten Commandments that God gave them, “You shall have no false gods”. And yet it was a commandment that He had to repeat to them many times. They served false gods (1) by sacrificing to them, and also (2) they served false gods, as the Old Testament prophets protested, by serving the false idols of money, gluttony, and sexual immorality. And the Lord Jesus would later put it, “You cannot serve both God and money” –you have to choose.
The question I would have you consider today is this:
Which are the false gods you are most frequently tempted to serve in your own life?
Let me suggest two:
First, “the god of being middle class”. This god manifests himself in the pursuit of a certain lifestyle, with defining your life, and defining the success or failure of your life by whether you meet certain middle class criteria, rather than defining the success or failure of your life by whether you live the life the true God calls you to.
This might manifest itself in your concern about your house, or your car, or the school your child goes to, or the exam results your child obtains.
In this and other concerns do you think of them asking by yourself (1) whether you are achieving the middle class dream. Or, (2) do you ask yourself what God would be asking you: have you used the talents He gave you to full effect, but then been humble and content with the results that came.
The middle class god is, I suggest to you, the dominant false idol of Shaftesbury and we need to ask if it is him we serve, or the real God.
Second, a very different god, another god who is much around in this land: “the god of non-commitment”. I hear what the Bible says, what the Church says, and I just don't commit. Non-commitment is another dominant idol of our day: not hostility to the Gospel, but a refusal to engage one way or the other.
Does this God rule your life? Is that where you offer your worship?
To conclude, what are we to do if we realise we have been serving a false idol, either one of these two or another?
Well, the true God, the God who is worshipped in THIS shrine, is a God who offers us many second chances. He has manifested His authenticity in His miracles, His deeds, His gracious words in Scripture. And as often as we turn back to Him with sincere hearts, He will accept us.
So, hearing the call of Joshua, “choose this day who you will serve”, let us make the words of Joshua our words too: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord”.
Sunday, 16 August 2015
Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary (transferred from the 15th August)
For today’s feast of the Assumption (when we recall that at the end of her earthly life Our Lady was taken up into heaven, taken up body and soul), for today’s feast I’d like to focus on our first reading, which was from the book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse.
In the vision described in that reading, as we just heard, two ”signs” appeared in the heavens, two signs that characterize the Christian life.
One sign was of the “dragon”(Rev 12:3), and the battle with the dragon is a symbol of our lifelong struggle against the Devil. Now, as we all know, its not very fashionable to talk about the Devil, people often get embarrassed if a preacher refers to him as something real. What you might not know, however, is how frequently Pope Francis speaks about the devil: he mentions him almost daily in his homilies. You can Google this quite easily: “Why does Pope Francis talk about the Devil so much?”. The Pope has a very clear awareness that our daily struggles in life have the devil as their ultimate cause. As the Bible puts it, we battle not against earthly powers but spiritual ones (e.g. Eph 6:12).
In acknowledging this we confront the reality that much of life is tough, much of life is suffering, much of life is a battle. But there is a battle BEHIND the visible battles: In my temptations, in my afflictions, and so forth, who is the one who is seeking my downfall? The Devil. Satan.
Back to our first reading: There was another sign referred to as appearing in the skies: “a woman, adorned with the sun, standing on the moon, with the twelve stars on her head as a crown”(Rev 12:1). In fact, this is not just ‘another’ sign but the “great” sign.
This ‘woman” has a twofold symbolism.:
On one level she is the Church, the Bride of Christ. And, as the next verses (which we didn’t hear read) say, the dragon pursues the woman and her descendants (Rev 11:13,17). The dragon makes war against the woman, but is defeated. The woman, however, does not fight in her own defence. Rather, the Lord raises up those who fight to defend her. We didn’t hear it in the short excerpt we were given, but: St Michael and his angels fought against the dragon (Rev 11:7-9); the earth itself opened up to swallow a river sent to drown the woman(Rev 11:16); the woman was given wings to fly to safety (Rev 11:14); and, as we heard in the text, the woman was given a place of safety, “a place prepared by God”(Rev 11:6).
This woman, as I said, is a symbol of the whole Church, of all of us, but at another level, the most IMMEDIATE level, she is Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin, the Mother of the Lord Jesus. The Church sees this text as one of the definitive signs that Our Lady has already been taken up to heaven, as we celebrate on today’s feast of the Assumption. She has been lifted above us, as a sign of hope for us who struggle on. And yet, as Pope Francis noted in a sermon a couple years ago, she also “walks with us always”. She is in travail with us, not distant from us, “struggles with us, sustains Christians in the fight against the forces of evil”. In this context Pope Francis particularly encouraged his listeners to use the Rosary daily in our spiritual warfare. As is often noted, though she is the weak humble woman chosen by God, she has also become, by His power, the mighty powerful woman who crushes the serpent’s head, fulfilling the prophecy made to Eve at the dawn of time (Gen 3:15).
To sum that up:
Our Lady has been assumed into heaven, the woman who is the “great sign” which appeared in heaven.
As an image, she is a symbol of us, the Church.
In hope, she is the sign of the destiny that we are called to pursue.
The battle the woman waged against the dragon is an image of the Blessed Virgin’s victorious struggle against the devil.
And, finally, she is the strong woman who is our assistance in our lifelong battle against the spiritual powers of darkness. So in our daily struggles let us be sure to call upon her.
Sunday, 2 August 2015
18th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
As most of you know, I’ve had some minor surgery recently, for a hernia. Even with a few complications, a hernia is a MINOR problem, and I don’t intend to exaggerate my suffering, but, the unpleasantness of the process was grim enough to remind me of a few lessons.
I remember lying on the hospital bed and just wanting the experience to be OVER:
wanting the pain to stop,
wanting the nausea to stop,
and I won’t give you other details, but I just wanted the symptoms to stop.
It was only later, when those symptoms subsided, that I remembered what it was to feel normal and well again.
When I was sick I’d had this yearning to not be sick, but without a clear thought of what it felt like to be normal again.
I offer that to you as an image of how we yearn for God, but don’t really appreciate what it is that we are yearning for.
We yearn for something more in life, even when we don’t quite know what more we are seeking
-just as I yearned to not be sick, even while I’d lost that clear awareness of what it felt like to be well.
Or, let me put it this way:
The SAINT who has FOUND God, realises what he was looking for
even more than the SINNER who knows he is looking for something but has forgotten what the experience of finding God is like.
I can realise that I am sick in my soul, but not quite be sure what I need to be healthy.
(pause)
In our Gospel text today we heard the Lord Jesus warn the people that they were yearning for the wrong thing, “for food that cannot last”(Jn 6:27).
The people knew they were hungry, but the Lord told them that they were hungering for the wrong thing.
They were hungering for a WORLDLY fullness,
not the eternal heavenly fullness that He alone can offer.
You and I, likewise, can realise that we are hungering, can realise that we are seeking something more in life:
But are we looking for a passing, earthly, feeding?
in comfort, in pleasure, in riches, in a career?
or looking for a feeding that will satisfy us for eternity, in completion?
in a life of cheerful self-sacrifice, in holiness, in grace, in the sacraments?
To return to my analogy with my being sick:
when I was sick I didn’t know what I was seeking for in wanting to be well,
I couldn’t remember what it felt like to be well,
I couldn’t remember because I was sick
and I relied on the nurses and doctor -they got me well again.
The Lord is like the doctor.
He still knows what its like to be normal and healthy,
and He knows the food I need to eat in order to get healthy.
And what is that food?
Nothing less than Himself. HE is the “Bread of life”(Jn 6:35), He says.
If we would be satisfied with the Bread that is Him,
we must choose to NOT be satisfied with this earthly life. We must choose, as St Paul said in the second reading, “not to go on living the aimless kind of life that pagans live”(Eph 4:17),
and instead to choose to trust the words of Him who has shown in His own resurrected glory the vision of what it means to be well again, what it will look like if we feed ourselves on Him.
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