2nd Sunday after Pentecost 22 June 2014 Sermon

2nd Sunday after Pentecost 22.6.14 Too busy?

The Gospel portrays people who are too busy to come to the banquet. Too busy for prayer, too busy for the lesser duties to think of the greater one – which is to love God with our whole hearts.

We can have our vision set too low and forget to look up to the glory of God which is all around us.

While we must attend to practical needs we must never lose the spiritual perspective.

We have just celebrated the Feast of Corpus Christi. We also are invited to a banquet – to partake of the Body and Blood of Christ.

Those who take only a material view of the world will ask what difference a sacrament makes. Or what difference does prayer make?

It is hard to quantify these things. If we receive Holy Communion on a given day it may not make us feel any different, nor any more virtuous.

Yet over time, cumulatively, we can be sure that repeated Holy Communions (as with other sacraments and prayers) will make a difference to us.

Normally when we eat food it becomes part of us, but in this case we become part of the food! “I am the food of the mature: grow, then, and you shall eat Me. You will not change Me into yourself like bodily food; but you will be changed into Me”(St Augustine).
We are taken up into God’s domain, a new dimension.

We don’t know what He will do with us but we give Him permission for whatever it is. And if what He wants differs from what we want we express in advance that we will come to prefer His version.

We can see the Eucharist as a glorious banquet, celebrating Christ’s victory over sin and death, a foreshadowing of the Heavenly banquet.

Or we can see it as food for the weary pilgrim threading his way through a difficult and hostile world.

We will feel differently at different times, whether we are celebrating or just surviving.

On balance, the way things are in the world, and in the Church, there is probably more of the ‘weary pilgrim’ feel about our present position.

The general loss of faith, evident in the Church and the world, can leave us feeling very isolated and demoralised. But we won’t let that happen.

The Eucharist makes it all manageable. It sustains us in our faith and makes us resilient against all attacks. Do not be surprised if the world hates you. (Epistle) It is all part of the process – to be expected but not alarmed about.

Faith gives us sanity and enables us to cope if we have to be out of step with the world.

There is great happiness in being simply good (as God defines good). It is better to be a poor good man than a rich bad one.

In the Gospel parable only the poor come to the banquet. This does not exclude people who might have material riches. All must be poor in spirit, absolutely aware of their nothingness before God.

The whole world is invited to this banquet. At the present time most people refuse, either through ignorance or malice.

It is one thing to know one has a spiritual hunger, and another thing again to know how to relieve that hunger.

We are privileged to know what we know and to have (by God’s grace) enough wisdom to accept the invitation to the banquet.

In the violence and despair of much of the world’s behaviour we see what happens when people do not recognize their true hunger.

May the grace of the Sacrament work its way into the consciousness of those still in the by-ways, waiting to come in. And may those already in the banquet not be lured out of it by transitory temptations.

O Sacrament Most Holy, O Sacrament Divine, all praise and all thanksgiving be every moment Thine!