Feast of the Holy Family, Shaftesbury

Mt 2:13-15.19-23
We keep today a beautiful feast, that of ‘The Holy Family’. Having celebrated, just a few days ago at Christmas, the birth of the Lord as a baby, we now recall the life of that perfect family: St Joseph, Our Lady, and the child Jesus.
We know it wasn’t a typical family:
the child was the Lord God Almighty Himself in human form;
the mother was sinless from the first moment of her existence, the ‘Immaculate Conception’;
and even St Joseph was a ‘saint’ –so not exactly run-of-the-mill either.
But even though it was not a TYPICAL family it is put before as THE ‘normal’ one because of the example of Christian living, and Christian FAMILY living, that it lays before us.

I’d like, this year, to focus on the figure of St Joseph, in part because this year’s Gospel places him before us more than the other years, but also,
because placing the father before our focus is something that might, in itself, be notable as being rather counter-cultural for us today in that our post-Christian society: Our society has increasingly made fathers an optional part of family life –even though repeated studies have shown that children grow up differently, more healthily, if their fathers are around.
A man and a woman, a husband and a wife, each bringing something different and yet complementarily, so that the two together form one whole, committed to each other for life, looking to bring for a life beyond their own –this what we see in Our Lady and St Joseph, their common love and life ordered towards the child they bring into the world.

All this would sound sexist, maybe patriarchal, to many in our modern world.
So, let us consider two things about the form of leadership that St Joseph offers, because it’s the very opposite of what feminist critiques of patriarchy condemn:
First let us note that St Joseph is a man who LISTENS:
There are three big decisions that the Gospels record him making, and in each case he does not do what HE wants, but what he is told to do –told by an angel:
(1) He takes Our Lady home as his wife, despite her not being pregnant with his child;
(2) He flees to Egypt to avoid Herod’s slaughter of the infants –because this is what the angel tells him to do;
(3) He returns from Egypt –again, in obedience to the angel.

Second, let us note that St Joseph is a man who is never recorded as having ever said ANYTHING. He isn’t recorded as being mute, so he presumably spoke, but it somehow seems more characteristic of him to be DOING things, not talking:
taking them to Bethlehem,
taking them to Egypt,
returning them to Israel.
NOT running around bossing and telling other people what to do.

So, as we today celebrate the feast of the Holy Family, and think about how they can be a role model for modern families, let us think in particular what St Joseph shows us:
A family in which there is LISTENING rather than self-assertion is a family capable of being open to God’s will, capable of being loving and happy, capable of bringing Christ into the world.

Christmas, Shaftesbury

I've been to the post office rather a lot recently, going to get stamps to post my Christmas cards. And I've had to go there so many times because Shaftesbury post office hasn't had stamps. I went there with a huge pile of cards, only to be told that they didn't have any foreign stamps, and didn't have any second class stamps, that they hadn't had any for over two weeks, and they didn't know when they would get any in.
I was tempted to get ANGRY and demand to know what a post office was for if not for posting things,
and to demand to know how on earth Cousin Doky in Iowa was going to get her card?!!
But, actually, I didn't get angry. I was very polite. I was very English. I just said, "Oh dear. I'll just have to come back another time”.

But what struck me as significant was the fact that the post office still somehow was BUSY.
Now, a post office is for posting things. And yet, somehow, even when they can't do that, they somehow stay busy with other stuff, selling decorations, cello tape etc
And I though that church can be like that too, and you as Christian families can be like that too.
We can fail to have the thing that makes us what we are, the loving Christ-child, and yet stay busy with other churchy or Christmassy things.

So, what is Christmas like without the core, without Jesus Christ?
Busy. There is still turkey. Still presents to be found, and bought, and wrapped. Still cards to be sent (if you can get stamps).
But without Christ, it doesn’t have a MEANING, it doesn’t have it’s purpose.
It becomes a celebration of His birth that forgets the One who was born.

And, of course, we can also lose Christ at Christmas by a lack of love.
He came from heaven to earth because He loves us, because He wishes to save us.
Yet, we can have the celebration without love.
Eating turkey, but not being kind,
Gathering with family, but not patient and forgiving.
We can be like the post office: busy, but not busy with what it is supposed to be about.

In contrast, Christmas WITH Christ is a very different affair.
It remembers Christ, remembers the One who gives meaning to it all:
That the Lord God Almighty, in His infinite love for each and every one of us, formed a plan long ago:
He promised it at the dawn of creation, that the Son of Eve would crush the head of the serpent (Gen 3:15).
He called and formed a Chosen People to be the place of His birth.
He prophesied it through the lips of His many prophets that they might be ready.
And then, finally, God entered His world, as one of us, out of love for us.
And He still comes to us today, to hearts willing to receive Him.

And our celebration of that, at Christmas: If we let what we believe inspire our actions then it becomes a beautiful sight:
If we are patient and laugh when Uncle Bert tells us joke, again, that isn’t very funny -just as the Lord was patient in planning for His birth.
If we are forgiving with little faults and failing as the Lord came to forgive us and die for us on the Cross.
If we are loving as Christ loved us enough to be poor and humble, born in the stable.
Then we will have the CORE of what Christmas is about: the loving Christ-child.
A celebration with meaning, and activity with its core purpose,
something even better than a post office with stamps.

4th Sunday of Advent, Year A, Shaftesbury

Mt 1:18-24; Isa 7:10-14
We have just 3 days to go now before Christmas, and so we’re in our final stage of preparation: both physically and in the Church’s liturgy.
This Sunday, the final one before Christmas, the Church always turns our focus to Our Lady, to look to her to help us bring the Christ-child into our lives. But this year, Year A in the 3-year lectionary, we also have the figure of St Joseph. And both of them give us simple but vital examples of what we must do, what we must be like, if we are to let Christ in this Christmas.
I’d like to point out, in particular, the way that the two of them behaved towards each other.

First, St Joseph. As we heard in that account, he found out that Our Lady was “with child” –and not by him. As any of us can imagine, that would have been a tough thing for him to take.
I’d like to point out his forgiving and tolerant response to this. He could have sent her away in public disgrace, but he “wanted to spare her publicity” and so was going to do so “informally” (Mt 1:19).

Second, Our Lady. Let us note that she doesn’t seem to make any great deal of justifying herself before St Joseph. Defending ourselves, self-justification, are common human actions, often linked with selfishness in how we seek to defend our honour.
But Lady takes another path, and the Lord steps in for her before St Joseph, just as the Lord had stepped in to ask her to receive the child.

Thirdly, ourselves. Christmas, and family and other personal interactions, can sadly be time of the opposite of what we just heard.
In frayed tempers over organising things with others,
in mistakes that we make,
in the little things in which people let us down,
we can be unforgiving and self-justifying:
“It wasn’t ME who forgot to buy the Brussels sprouts…”
“It’s not my fault the shop was out of sprouts –you should have reminded me beforehand!”
[Apparently a recent TV show and survey showed that nobody actually likes Brussels sprouts away, we just eat them at Christmas because it’s traditional. Regardless…]

So, let’s remember in these days ahead to be like Our Lady, and not be overly keen seek to justify ourselves before others in our various failings;
And to be like St Joseph, and be forgiving and tolerant of what seem to be the faults of others –for one thing, maybe there are explanations we don’t know about, just as St Joseph found.

And if we do that, then we can expect to find that for us too, “the maiden [will be] with child”(Isa 7:14) and a child will be born for us, Emmanuel, ‘God is with us’.

No Sermon This Sunday

There is a pastoral letter from our retiring Bishop today, available on the Diocesan website

33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C, Shaftesbury

Lk 21:5-19
This week our Diocese had a major gathering, a 'symposium', on what is called 'The New Evangelisation’ -concerning our need, as believers, to give witness to the people of our modern secular society. The call to give witness runs repeatedly through the Scriptures; and in our Gospel today we heard what might seem an unlikely example of it: the Lord Jesus said that when believers will be persecuted at the End of Time, in trials, and brought before their persecutors, this will be "an opportunity to bear WITNESS"(Lk 21:13).
But, to WHAT are we to give witness? Or, rather, to WHOM?

Bearing witness is all about HIM. The symposium was looking at a document of the 2012 Synod of Bishops on Evangelisation, it's Instrumentum Laboris, which talks in its introduction about what the whole thing is about, which can be summed up in three points:
It's about (1) having "a personal relationship" with the Lord, a relationship with Him that begins when (2) someone proclaims Him to us in such a way that we can say that (3) we truly MEET Him, "encounter" Him (nn.17-18; Introduction). This parallels the manner in which we meet anybody, encounter anybody, get introduced to anybody, and thus start to have a relationship with him/ her.

It may be that to some of you the language of "having a personal relationship with Jesus" sounds foreign, sounds like American terminology imported from Evangelicals. Certainly, for myself, as a teenager, it was from such people that I first came across this phrase. But, as a matter of fact, it is common in the documents of the Catholic Church, rooted in our tradition; and the entirety of everything we believe as Catholics, from the personal love of Jesus for us in the Sacred Heart, to the motherly care bestowed on us by our Heavenly Mother Mary -these and countless other things are only coherent as part of a Faith that believes in "personal relationship" with the Lord.

Let me make the point using another term: 'friendship', countless ancient devotions remind us that Jesus is our ‘friend’; theologians like St Thomas Aquinas tell we must listen to Him because He is our “best and wisest friend” (ST I-II q108 a4). And, mystics like St Teresa of Avila, in describing what prayer is, says: “it is nothing but a frequent heart-to-heart conversation with Him by whom we know ourselves to be loved”.
He is a friend who transcends all others, in a friendship, a personal relationship that transcends all others. He loves me, He forgives me, He strengthens me, He consoles me.
He is with me: in prayer, in the Holy Mass, in Holy Communion.
He is with me in the way my neighbour loves me, and in me when I love my neighbour.
He, like all friends, is with me in my joys, and shares my rejoicing.
And, even better than any friend, He is with me in my problems, so that I do not bear the burden alone -even if my problems are not the tribulations of the End Days.
The friend I can talk to about my whole life, who listens; and, if I am sensible, the friend whose wise advice I listen to hear.
Finally, He shows His perfect friendship in the way that He is with me even though I am so often only imperfectly with Him. He is my best friend even though I am not faithful enough to say the same for Him.

To have such a friend, to be in such a wonderful "personal relationship", is a beautiful and precious thing.
If we have such a thing, even if we only have it imperfectly, if we have such a thing we surely need to want others to have it.
And it is for such a sharing that we are called to "bear witness"(Lk 21:13).

You can't force someone to come to faith; just as you can't force someone into a friendship. But, by presenting Christ to others we create a situation where that initial "encounter" with Him, and sometimes a re-encounter with Him, becomes possible. We have a duty to give people this possibility, and to do it often. The Church teaches us that the PRIMARY duty of charity is to proclaim Christ to others (Novo Millennio Ineunte n.50): Others deserve too have this friend too.
To close with a quote from a saint who lived through the Reformation persecutions, who stood before trials and sufferings such as those Jesus described in the Gospel: how do we describe Jesus?
"First friend He was,
Best friend He is,
All ages will find Him true."(St Robert Southwell)

32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C, Remembrance Sunday, Shaftesbury

2 Macc 7:1-14; Lk 20: 27-38
Today our nation keeps Remembrance Sunday, when we remember all those who have died in the wars. The Scripture readings that the Church gives us today are not chosen with that in mind, they are on a different cycle, but by a happy coincidence they also speak to us of death, and, more particularly, of our hope in a resurrection after death.

Our Gospel text described how a group of Sadducees came up to Jesus with a trick question. You may not have heard the old joke: "Why were the Sadducees sad? Because they didn't believe in the resurrection!" Both modern Judaism and ancient Judaism were divided over the question of whether there was life after death. The Pharisees said there was. The Sadducees said there wasn't. And they brought what they thought was a trick question to Jesus, with the tale of a woman who had been married to seven men who had all died in sequence, and which of them would she be married to in heaven, if there was a 'heaven'?

There are some key things we need to note about this passage, because it teaches us some very definite things about life after death.
First, we might note the Sadducees' concern that the woman produce a child -thus she needed to keep marrying. This was rooted in the thought that the only 'after life' is to have a child who keeps living when you die, who keeps your name and memory going.
Second, we might note the contrast that exists between such a vague existence-as-being-remembered-after-death and existence-as-having-a-resurrected-BODY. Jesus speaks very clearly about the BODY being resurrected. Not just a vague spirit, not just a vague memory. But a BODY. You REALLY do live after death if there is a new body!

The Sadducees, however, mocked the idea of a resurrected body. What would it be like?! Or, as some modern people who sometimes think they are being clever imply: all this talk of 'bodies' is rather crude and primitive and foolish.
The Lord Jesus, however, is emphatic: there is a resurrection of the body. And, of course, He ultimately made this a reality in His own physical Resurrection.
The foolishness is to think that the new body will be just like the old. It will not! And perhaps nothing makes this clearer than the fact that there will be no marriage in heaven. The 'new heaven, and new earth'(Rev 21:1) that the book of the Apocalypse describes is truly 'made new' (Rev 21:5). It is real, it is bodily, but it is different.

To conclude, however, what difference does any of this really make to us?
Well, we heard a good example in our first reading, with the description of the bravery of the Maccabees. They were Jews in what became 'the Pharisee tradition', not Sadducees. The Maccabees believed very exactly in a resurrected body. And, as, today, we think of the bravery of many soldiers, we might note that many of these Maccabees were soldiers, and it was faith in the resurrection that empowered these Maccabees to be so brave in the face of death: "Heaven gave me these limbs, and for the sake of His laws I disdain them; from Him I hope to receive them again" (2Macc 7:11) in the resurrection of the body. Thus the Maccabees were brave in fighting their pagan overlords. We might note, in comparison, that the Sadducees were not known for bravery against the Roman oppressors, but known rather for cooperating, in order to keep their power and the Temple cult in place.

The simple point is this: believing in life after death CHANGES how we live on earth.
It gives you hope while you live, it inspires you to bravery and feats that you would otherwise not achieve.
To come back to that opening quip: Why were the Sadducees sad? Because they didn't believe in the resurrection.
Believing in the resurrection CHANGES us. From sadness to hope. From weakness to bravery.

31st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C, Shaftesbury

Lk 19:1-10
We just heard the Lord Jesus make a rather important statement about WHY “the Son of Man has come”(Lk 19:10). If you recall, the title, “The Son of Man” is one that Jesus had applied to Himself as one of the titles used of the long-awaited Messiah, the one who was to SAVE the Chosen People. The name ‘Jesus’ itself means “The Lord [YHWH] is salvation”[1], and we heard in that passage the Lord say that “salvation has come to this house” of the tax-collector Zacchaeus.

Jesus comes to bring salvation, and He says salvation has come to this man, but, WHAT is this thing called ‘salvation’?
You may recall that last year Pope Benedict came out with his last book, The Infancy Narratives, and in that book he commented on this very question. And he noted that for some of the people, what Jesus claimed to bring seemed too much, and to others it seemed too little. But in either case, it was not the ‘salvation’ they were expecting.
Jesus came to save us from our sins, whereas many of the Jewish people were expecting a this-worldly salvation, a political messiah to liberate them from the Romans. Such people were disappointed that Jesus was offering something else.
Others, the Pharisees and Sadducees, heard what Jesus claimed but thought it was too much, because only GOD can forgive sin, so who was Jesus claiming to be? [Well, He was claiming to be God.]

Pope Benedict commented on this issue of the type of salvation that Jesus came to bring by commenting on the occasion when some people brought a paralytic to Jesus and lowered him down to Him through the roof. What did Jesus say to the sick man? “My son, your sins are forgiven”(Mk 2:5). As Pope Benedict noted, “This was the last thing anyone was expecting [Jesus to say]. This was the last thing they were concerned about. The paralytic needed to be able to walk, not to be delivered from his sins”![2]

Yet, this is what Jesus claimed to be about: the forgiveness of sins, the saving of us from our sins, and this was a deeper and more profound healing that that of the body from illness.
Thus, Zacchaeus, who was physically well, and materially rich, he still NEEDED saving. And it was only because Jesus ‘sought out’ this man declared to be a “sinner”(Lk 19:7), and that this sinner likewise sought out Him and welcomed Him into his home, that Jesus was able to say, “salvation has come to this house”(Lk 19:9).

Still today, however, many people think this too little a thing. Still today there are people, and let me be blunt and say especially the wealthy, still today there are people who value the body and material welfare in a manner that declares ‘sin’ to be something not really to be what Jesus is about. And they re-make Jesus into another image by ignoring these and other passages of the Scriptures.
But WHY is being saved from sin the most important thing? WHY is it the greatest salvation Jesus comes to bring? To quote Pope Benedict again, because “man is a relational being”[3] and our “first, fundamental relationship” is with God our creator, and as long as this relationship is disturbed all my other relationships are disturbed too. I cannot properly love my neighbour, who is made in God’s image, if I am out of kilter with God.
Sin is the heart of the human sickness and if we are not healed in this then “no matter how many things you may find, you are not truly healed”[4].
And, conversely, when we ARE saved from sin, saved in this deepest relational core of our being with GOD, when we are saved here it brings great JOY. Thus, as we heard, Zacchaeus welcomed Jesus “joyfully”(Lk 19:6), as joy accompanied the forgiveness of sin elsewhere in the Gospels too.

So, this is the greatness of what Jesus comes to us to bring. To put us at right in the core of our being.
It was for this that He came, it was to achieve this that He died, and it is still today for this that He “seeks out and saves that which is lost”

[1] Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth. The Infancy Narratives (London: Burns and Oates, 2012), p.42
[2] Ibid p.44
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid