26th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C, Shaftesbury

1 Tim 6:11-16
As I think you all know, I’ve just been away on our parish pilgrimage to Rome, and it was a fantastic week, visiting all the holy sites we’d planned, with glorious weather, and good company! And I want today to say a few words picking up on our second reading with St Paul’s admonition to Timothy to “fight the good fight”(1 Tim 6: 12) –because it’s an image that was very much before us when we were thinking of the martyrs in Rome.

We saw the Circus Maximus where the majority of the martyrs of ancient Rome faced their final struggle, where many were eaten by lions or torn apart by beasts. Where the Emperor Nero set fire to Christians so that their bodies would be burning torches to light his palace. We went out to visit the grave of St Paul, not far from where he was beheaded. And we saw the obelisk where St Peter was crucified upside down. All of these sites reminded us of those who had “fought the good fight” when it was much tougher than it is for us today in England.

We might well wonder how we, ourselves, would cope in such a trial. We know of course, as St Paul says elsewhere, that “His grace is sufficient for me”(2 Cor 12:9) –so that we can be strong with Him in a way that we cannot be strong alone. He gives us the strength that we each need for our particular trials, such that as St Paul says elsewhere, “He will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.”(1 Cor 10:13).
In today’s reading, however, St Paul strengthens Timothy with a twofold motivation: “the Appearing” of the Lord Jesus. That Appearing had occurred once in humility in Galilee: being born, dying, and rising. The final Appearing will be in glory, at the Second Coming. The first appearing proved who He is, the second appearing is the promise to lead us on.

What of us, now? Do we realise that to be a Christian is to “fight”?
You are I are not being called to be martyred in Shaftesbury, but we are being called to “fight”.
I am being called to conquer MYSELF: my impatience, my laziness, my selfishness is not giving enough to the poor, my gluttony, my lust, my complaining about my cross, my grumbling and moaning and thinking about myself rather than about loving my neighbour.
If I don’t conquer myself, master myself, then I’m just defeated by my own selfishness.
All of these small mundane things are part of that same on-going battle that Christians have ALWAYS been fighting against “the world, the flesh, and the devil”(c.f. 1 Jn 2:16; Eph 2:1-13).
And, if you and I are not fighting, then it’s because we’ve already lost. In which case, we need to get with the program, get into the battle.

St Paul told Timothy, as he thus tells us too, of “the duty of doing ALL that you have been told, with no faults or failures”, and it’s not easy doing so, it’s a battle.
But like the martyrs of ancient Rome, and the Christians martyrs suffering today in Egypt, Syria, now Pakistan, and elsewhere, we do not “fight the good fight” alone.
We are in the same battle that they were in and are in.
We, like them, look to the same victor in the war: Christ, who triumphed in the Resurrection, and will be shown triumphant in His final Appearing.
And we, like them, have the promise of a share in the same crown.
But only if we wake up and join the battle.

No sermon today (again)

I am way in Rome leading a parish pilgrimage

No sermon today

This Sunday we had a pastoral letter from the Bishop (which can be read at the Plymouth Diocese website)

23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C, Shaftesbury

Wis 9:13-18; Lk 14:25-33
Our first reading poses a question that remains as relevant today as it was when it was asked thousands of years ago:
"Who can know the mind of God?" (Wis 9:13), or, to use the Jerusalem Bible in our lectionary, "What man can know the intentions of God?"
and, you might say, our Scripture readings for today give us at least two examples of how it is hard to know the mind of God, even when reading His own word in Sacred Scripture: We have our Gospel text in which we hear the Lord Jesus, the same Lord who commanded us to love, we hear Him insist that unless we "hate" (Lk 14:25) father, mother, brother etc we cannot be His disciple. And to round it all off, He says we must ALL “give up [our] possessions” (Lk 14:33) if we would follow Him.
These are just a two of many quandaries we face in seeking to know what God is about, what the mind of God holds. And there are three basic possible approaches people take:

First, there is the approach most common in our age, the agnostic approach, namely, to say that NO ONE can know the mind of God.
But this brings difficulties of its own. For one thing, it renders life meaningless if we cannot know its meaning. It also makes God rather odd, in that He would have created us but then not sought to have anything to do with us, not sought to communicate to us, to make His mind known to us.

Second, there is the Protestant approach –very close to the real deal, but not quite. This says that God has made Himself known, in speaking His one Eternal Word. Then the Bible appeared, in a mechanism that Protestantism fails to comment upon, and fails to explain how on earth we are to INTERPRET so many difficult texts in the Bible. So, although the Protestant approach comes very close to the real deal, and it does truly say that the mind of God has been made known, and it is written in the Bible, but it gives us no hermeneutical key to understand the Bible. Small wonder that the Protestant approach has given rise to countless split groups of rival interpretations, such that there are now 33,000 splinter denominations

Finally, there is the Catholic approach. This says: God has made Himself known in Christ, but the TRANSMISSION of what He has given, what St Jude's epistle calls "the deposit of faith"(1:3), was entrusted by Christ, at the very beginning, to His Church, under His popes as His vicars on earth, to pass on authoritatively and reliably. The Bible was written by the Church, and it was the Church that judged which books were to go in the Bible and which books were not, and it is that same Church that in every age has the task on interpreting that sacred word. And this interpretation is done not by a mere human agency, but with the promise of infallibility, the guidance of the Holy Spirit, so that the popes hand on that "deposit of faith" to us reliably. The Church wrote the Bible, and it is that same Church that knows how to interpret the Bible –using her living memory of "Sacred Tradition".

And because we belong to the same Church that wrote the Bible, we have access to how to interpret those tough texts I started my mentioning….
You can read a longer analysis on the internet, on my sermon for these texts the three years ago when these readings last came up, But in short, the Hebrew language lacked the ability to say, “the most” or “more”, so the way you say you must love Jesus “the most”, more than your family, more than money, more than avoiding suffering, to say you must “hate” your family, “give up all possessions”, and carry your cross.

So, the mind of God is no longer a mystery, He has made it known, and if we entrust ourselves to the teaching of His Church we can know that mind with certainty today, not know it in the fullness of His infinite wisdom, but know it in the fullness with which He has made it known, know it with the fullness of all we need to get to heaven, and all we need to live and love while on earth.

[The girl in the t-shirt is one of our parishioners, author of the blog, "Yes, I'm Catholic" http://yesimcatholic.wordpress.com/ ]

22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C, Shaftesbury

Lk 14:1.7-14
Sometimes it can take other people to point out to us certain things we don’t realise about ourselves, and sometimes children do this to us very directly and simply. I was struck by this some time ago, as a young priest, when a little child asked me why I did ‘that funny thing’ with my voice at the end of the long prayer. It took me a while to figure out what he meant, but it turned out that he was referring to the doxology at the minor elevation, and that ‘funny thing with my voice’ is what I had been thinking was ‘singing’!

The path to self-knowledge can be a hard lesson, but it is an essential one if we are ever to have the outward humility that we hear Jesus call us to in the Gospel today. If we mistakenly thing we’re better or grander than we are, then we simply end up looking foolish if we’ve been pushing ourselves forwards anyway. True self-knowledge prevents us making such fools of ourselves. And so a Christian is called to act humbly.

It might be replied, however, and I’ve frequently had people say this, and only recently had someone say this to me: but surely I AM better than some people, and so I shouldn’t behave as if I was lesser than EVERYONE.
Well, the saints say otherwise, and say so very emphatically. (e.g. The Imitation of Christ, Bk 1, chpt II).
But, what struck me while reading this Gospel text this week, is that I think the Lord Jesus deliberately by-passes this question.
Note, He doesn’t say: seat yourself lower because you are lower. If that was the reason then He would say, surely, analyse the room and figure out who is TRULY greater and lower than yourself, and rank your seating accordingly. No. He by-passes the reality of our true worth and rank and instead says we should sit AS IF we were lowest.
Behave as if you rank the least, regardless of whether or not you rank the least.

This is the better path, the surer path, the one that Christ has marked out for us.
He marked it out in His teaching, but most of all in His own example –“He was humbler yet, even to accepting death on a cross”(Phil 2:8).
In His own example He by-passed the question of whether He was more important (which, as God, He certainly was) and behaved AS IF we were more important than He was, as if our salvation mattered more than His suffering.
This, of course, is involved in all love. This is why humility is the essential foundation if the house of love is to be built. We must behave as if we were less important and others more important, as the earlier part of that text from Philippians that I just quoted said, “put other people’s interests before your own”(Phil 2:3-4)

Let me close by noting the fear that I think we all have here:
We don’t want to put ourselves down because we fear that if we do then we’ll be forgotten, neglected, and so forth.
But chasing after that quest to raise ourselves forward is a fool’s goal, as Jesus’s example of people who raise themselves and then get lowered by others shows us.
And, even if (in this world) lowering ourselves means that we get forgotten, well, isn’t it better to lower ourselves if it means that we thus raise others in loving them, in putting them higher?
And, ultimately, it is better for us too, so that on that final day of judgement, when that final seating of all people is established, so that the Lord Himself will say to us, because we have put ourselves lower, "My friend, come up higher"(Lk 14:10).

20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C, Shaftesbury

Lk 12:49-53; Jer 38:4-6.8-10; Heb 12:1-4
“I have come not to bring peace, but division [or a 'sword' to use another translation]”(Lk 12:51). We can often think of Jesus as just being “nice”, being gentle, meek and mild, but not much else. But, sayings like, “division”, remind us that the Lord Jesus was more than just mild. It wasn’t for being mild that they nailed Him to the Cross.

We heard in our first reading how the great prophet Jeremiah was sentenced to death by the king. And in fact almost all of the Old Testament prophets were deeply unpopular men, and many were martyred. Jeremiah was unpopular because he told the people they were sinning by breaking the commandments of God, and he warned them that they would perish in destruction if they did not repent. They didn’t repent, Jerusalem was destroyed, and the people were taken off into slavery.
And Jesus did the same: He also taught people about sin, and demanded that they change their lives, and He warned them about the eternal fires of Hell (Mt 10:28; Mt 13: 41-43; Mt 25:31-46; Mk 9:46; Lk 16:22-28)(–a warning as real today as it was then. And such warnings do not make a man popular. And as the great fulfilment of the line of Jewish prophets, they killed Him just like the killed so many of the prophets.

Jesus came to bring division, to bring “not peace but a sword”(Mt 10:34), not because He loves division, but because He wants to bring about a deeper everlasting peace –a sharing in the peace of Heaven. There is ALREADY a division within each of us, a division caused by the sinful inclinations of our hearts. True peace with God only comes by facing and overcoming that division.
We must do this in our own hearts, but also with others, and this is why Jesus warns that He comes to bring division within family and friends.

If we would cling to Christ, who is our salvation and hope, then we must reject the ways of the world, and we must call on others to do the same. And if we love our friends and family then we must call on them to live the moral life, BECAUSE we love them, not because we do not. Even when this brings division.

So a mother must tell her daughter that it is not right for her to sleep with her boyfriend.
A son must tell his father that he owes it to God to go to Mass each and every Sunday.
A worker must tell his boss that it is wrong for him to fiddle the books.
And among my many tasks, I must tell adulterers that it is wrong for them to live in sin and then just come up to Holy Communion anyway.

Such things do not make us popular. People can deride us as kill-joys, just as they derided Jeremiah and our Lord Himself. But if we cling to Christ’s teaching then we can also expect to cling to His consolation and strength.
I might note, that we must also always seek His guidance in what we say. We must seek not to be imposing our SELF-righteousness on others, but to be calling them to GOD’s righteousness. If it’s GOD’s will, and it is, then HE will help us find the time and the place to say the right thing –but we can’t just take that as an excuse to say nothing.

As we heard in our second reading, St. Paul says, “Let us not lose sight of Jesus”(Heb 12:2), let us keep running steadily in the race of faith that we have begun. Many people do give up in running the race, because the demands seem tough, and sometimes it’s hard to see how it’s possible to live them. But anything good takes working at, and there are many sacrifices needed to win the crown of eternity. “Think of the way [Jesus] [like Jeremiah and the prophets] stood such opposition from sinners and then you will not lack for courage.”(Heb 12:3)

But we must also never forget that the struggle to cast off sin starts and ends in our OWN hearts, it is THERE we must bring division, so that we can throw off the sin that clings so easily to us(Heb 12:1). And if we do so, then the blazing fire of His love will blaze in our own hearts, in the hearts of all freed from sin, and bring us all to perfection.

Chideock Martyrs and the Transfiguration, Parish Day Trip

We’re gathered here in this shrine on the feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord, for our annual parish day out, and I’d like to say a few words linking that feast and the martyrs who are commemorated here.

The 8 martyrs of Chideock were a mixture of people. Some were priests, some were laity. Some were wealthy, some were servants: two servants of the Arundells (John Carey and Patrick Salmon), a local carpenter who had converted to Catholicism (William Pike), as well as one of the aristocratic Arundell family (Thomas Bosgrave, a nephew of Lady Arundell). What did all these different people have in common? The fact that they all valued the Mass, and our Catholic Faith in the Mass. They all recognised that there is one supreme means that God has given us by which He comes to us and we can come to Him: the sacraments, especially the Mass, and thus they all valued the priesthood as the means by which the sacraments come to the people. The martyrs of that era were not the first to die for the Mass: Pope John Paul II quoted the 49 Fourth Century Martrys of Abitina, who knew the Roman law forbade it but celebrated Mass anyway: "Without fear of any kind we have celebrated the Lord's Supper, because it cannot be missed; that is our law"; "We cannot live without the Lord's Supper"; "Yes I went to the assembly and I celebrated the Lord's Supper with my brothers and sisters, because I am a Christian." (Martyrs of Abitina, quoted by John Paul II, Dies Domini, n. 46)

We keep today the feast of the Transfiguration, when we recall the great sign Christ gave of Himself in glory on the mountaintop. Two key things about that: first, the sight of Him in glory is sign of the glory we can all share with Him is we hold firm with Him, if we unite ourselves to Him. Second, he gave this sign to His special 3 (Peter, James and John) at a particular moment: just after He had predicted he coming crucifixion –He wanted to encourage and strengthen them for the trial ahead. Of course, as the Gospels record, they seem to have not dwelt on this much, because they weren’t very strong when He was arrested and taken away. It was only later, after His Resurrection, that things seem to have fully slotted into place, and they were strong for the future then, and all three faced a martyr’s trial. The trial that, in union with Christ, leads to glory, the glory of the Transfiguration.

These Chideock martyrs were also strong, strong no doubt with the hope of the glorious end in view. Strong enough to remain faithful to the Mass. Strong, also, I would point out, BECAUSE of the Mass: the grace of the Lord in the Sacraments strengthens us to bear trials, even trials such as these.

Those martyrs now enjoy glory in heaven.

What of ourselves? Well, surely, the thought of these martyrs should inspire us to be more devout and focussed on these sacred mysteries in the Mass, to treasure what is on offer here, to re-commit ourselves to it as something we would be willing to suffer rather than lose. So, let us think of their sacrifice, think what they value, and strive to value and treasure the same.