Last Sunday after Pentecost 26 Nov 2017 Sermon

Last Sunday after Pentecost 26.11.17 Warnings

At the end of the year we talk about the end of the world, rewards and punishments, the final judgment, and any related themes.

This is what it all comes to. We get used to things going on the same way, but there will be a distinct ending. History is not circular but linear. Time is running out. There will be a day of reckoning.

This fact does not have to be terrifying. The hope is that we would be aware of our need to be ready to face judgment; and that will remove most of the terror.

Admittedly we would have to be at least a little terrified about some of the cosmic events prophesied (such as stars falling from heaven).

But we will have a basic security in being united with Our Lord. We will be glad to see Him, rather than terrified.

The ‘threat’ passages (such as today’s Gospel, Mt 24) are a wake-up call to any who are not ready to meet their final end.

There must be a great many people who are not ready, if the general way of the world is any indication.

The Bible, taken as a whole, communicates to us God’s desire to unite us with Himself forever in Heaven. This is certainly good news.

The overall theme is a happy one. But it gets murky in the details. When sin enters the picture a great deal of trouble follows.

And that is where these threat passages come in.

God does not want to harm us, not so much as by one fiery missile, but He sees that often a wake-up is necessary.

The difficulty is how to get people to repent.

The fear factor is necessary sometimes. As with human affairs, health authorities will scare us with all the negative effects of a certain behaviour (such as taking drugs). If we weigh up those effects we will stay away from the dangerous behaviour.

This is the same in the spiritual order, only that the damage done by sin is not so easily traceable as in physical matters.

If we say: Don’t smoke - because it will do this and this to your body, even more so do we say: Don’t sin - because that will do far more damage.

Sometimes people need frightening, if it will save them from a greater evil.

It is an unpleasant necessity to warn people they might go to Hell. We would rather speak of more cheerful matters, but we have to keep beating this drum while so much of the world refuses to repent.

Punishment by God is not new. He has been doing it all along, beginning with Adam and Eve, expelled from the Garden; Cain sent wandering the earth; the great Flood. All this is in the very beginning.

When God punishes it is always for our good; only we do not always grasp the point.

So the punishments keep coming, with threats of even worse ones to follow.

If the punishments are simply to wake us up, let us be awakened! And we can make it a lot easier for ourselves.

We can remove the terror from the impending Judgment by making sure we are ready to meet the Saviour.

And we busily do all we can to help others to be saved.

As the Fatima prayer puts it: Save us from the fires of Hell. Lead all souls to Heaven, especially those who most need Thy mercy.

As God does not want to punish people, nor do we want them punished.

If enough people would repent, and align themselves with God, there would be no need for the terrors prophesied for the last times.

With a healthy fear, and a great deal of hope, we ask the Lord for mercy, and to bring to completion His plans for the human race.

24th Sunday after Pentecost 19 Nov 2017 Sermon

24^th Sunday of year (Readings 6^th Sunday after Epiphany) 19.11.17 Evangelisation

The tiny seed becomes a great tree – an image for the Church, which began very small, and has spread out all over the world.

Not, we must say, as far or as deeply at it should have spread, but still a long way. And we give thanks to God for that much progress, praying for what still needs to happen.

The Church offers the word of life to a world which otherwise is drowning in its own folly and darkness.

We offer the word of life when we talk to people, or at least give good example - all the while hoping we can convey something of the goodness of God to them; that they will see in us some resemblance to Jesus Christ!

It is hard to convince people of the faith, just by talking to them, as we have probably discovered. But we can sow seeds, which can grow into something later.

It helps, of course, the stronger our faith is. The more we believe in, and love God, the more likely we are to convince others.

If we had enough faith and charity we would achieve the sort of success the Church had in the early days after Pentecost.

At the cultural level we see we meet strong opposition. The recent ‘same sex marriage’ debate (in Australia) illustrates how forceful the wrong side of the argument can be.

People are so easily swept along by the currents. Remember the crowd on Good Friday, probably decent people for the most part, found themselves calling out Crucify Him.

The day will come when people who voted Yes in this recent debate will wonder how they could have been so foolish.

We must not despair at this recent defeat. Nothing has changed as far as God's reality and goodness is concerned.

We may be outnumbered, but remember the seed, and how big the tree eventually becomes.

We do not follow the crowd; we follow a lonely figure carrying a cross up a hill. We follow Him as far as dying for Him, if necessary.

Some of our evangelising is by the ‘front door’. This is our direct proclamation of what is what; of the truths in which we believe, and by which we live.

More often we come indirectly, ‘around the back’. This is when we seek to change the way people form their values, which will in turn make their conversion more likely, but maybe later.

For example, the Church’s constant efforts to defend unborn babies, leads in many cases to a change of attitude (regarding just that one topic), and this paves the way to a more complete conversion.

It was always God's plan to save people internally as well as externally; not just taking them to heaven when they die, but transforming the whole person to become an image of Christ.

And to transform the whole society, so that it will be truly the Kingdom of God.

This will complete the prophecies - that swords shall be turned to ploughshares (Is 2,4), and the wolf and lamb shall dwell together (Is 11,6), and the like.

Our words and deeds, if anointed by God, will achieve this over time, as surely as the seed becomes a tree.

In the meantime we can help expose the false notions that people hold, forcing them to look for something else to believe in – such as the Truth!

This means we can all help. Not everyone has to get up and give speeches, but everyone can do something to influence the surrounding culture.

Every good that we do, or evil we avoid, even if it seems in isolation. But nothing is isolated; it all holds together.

As sin unravels everything, so repentance puts it all back.

The more people we convert the easier it gets. It will be the new ‘normal’ to belong to the Church – the only logical choice when we see it all laid out before us. 

23rd Sunday after Pentecost 12 Nov 2017 Sermon

23^rd Sunday after Pentecost 12.11.17 Persistence in prayer

In childhood we hear stories which have happy endings. Then, as we grow older we learn that happiness does not come so easily.

This is part of the painful process of growing up, when we discover the jagged edges of reality, and experience various disappointments in our lives.

We learn that we cannot have everything we want.

We can, however, overdo this ‘growing up’, to the point of becoming cynical about life, rejecting happiness in all its forms, as even being possible.

Thus we lower our expectations, of how happy we can expect to be. We are glad for any improvement, but not daring to hope for much.

This can have an adverse effect on our faith, and our prayer. If we have only a limited expectation of how good things can be, we will not ask for much when we pray.

The Bible is full of exhortations for us to pray: Pray constantly…If there is anything you need ask for it in prayer… Ask and it shall be given to you … But we can be too much weighed down by ‘reality’ to pray. We have lost the childlike wonder that enables us to believe in miracles.

Things may not be perfect, but we are still allowed to want them to be perfect; in fact we are supposed to want it.

When we ask for things to be as they should be, we are doing no more than asking that God's kingdom come among us… and that is something He taught us to pray.

God wants things to run as they should, even more than we want it.

He wants us to be happy in this life as well as the next; to experience the happiness that comes from living in union with Him; from cooperating with Him in establishing His kingdom in the world.

Happiness, or God's order – it comes to the same thing.

The Kingdom of God: where every sickness is healed, every injustice is set right, peace reigns everywhere.

Never say it is no use praying for these things. Prayer is precisely the way to bring them about.

This leads to another point of disillusionment – that we are tempted to blame God for what goes wrong in the world; or at least for not doing more to fix things.

People who are angry with God for some misfortune are not likely to pray to Him, or at least not with much conviction.

We have to re-assert at such a point: God never changes, or loses any perfection. He is always the same; always available to help us. No misfortune can in any way subtract from His goodness and glory.

So we train ourselves to focus on God as He is; not on our misfortunes, but His perfections.

If we would trust Him more we would behave better, commit less sin, and a sense of order would return to our world, meaning less things going wrong, less suffering.

If our faith were strong and straightforward enough we would simply ask and receive (Mt 7,9-11). Bread not stone, fish not serpent, egg not scorpion.

We should be asking Him for blessings all day long (Pray without ceasing, 1 Th 5,17).

It is the discouragement that allows the problems to continue. Lack of vision, lack of hope, lack of prayer. So we languish.

We can still believe in miracles. The more we want, the more we pray, the more likely to see miracles happening.

Our Lord responded simply and directly to requests for miracles. He invites from us the same simplicity and directness. So we can be like the woman who reasoned that any contact with Our Lord would be enough (Mt 9,21).

All we can do is pray, as the saying goes. And that is doing a lot!

22nd Sunday after Pentecost 5 Nov 2017 Sermon

22^nd Sunday after Pentecost 5.11.17 Readiness for death

Certain people, we say, are alive, and other people are dead. The ones still walking around are alive.  It may be debatable just how alive they are.

Physically yes, spiritually maybe not.

In terms of knowing what is really going on, beyond what we can physically see, the dead probably know far more than we do about the true state of things.

The one thing all the dead could tell us (the saved and the lost) is that God is supremely important. Having Him or not having Him is the difference between life and death, happiness and misery.

We, the living, can be distracted from the main event.

We can learn a lesson, from contemplating death, that we should not wait till we die to discover how important God is. Why not discover that now, and apply the knowledge to our present lives?

We have the gift of time. The dead have no time; they cannot add or subtract from whatever they did in their earthly life.

But we can add a great deal to our lives while the time lasts.

Thus we prepare for death, so that it will not take us by surprise. We might be surprised physically by death (accident, sudden illness etc), but not spiritually. We will be like the wise bridesmaids keeping their lamps lit; or the servants who were at their post when the Master returned.

So it does not all flood in on us when we die, we can start doing these things now - like valuing the people around us, forgiving consciously those who have offended us, developing our prayer life, using our talents in God’s service, generally seeing the urgency of the task.

There will still be things that surprise us at death, but we will at least be familiar with the main points.

The more actively we pursue a life of holiness, the more likely we can be comfortable with the idea of dying, and of making the transition from one state to another.

Thus death will not be seen as an ‘interruption’, rather a fulfilment.

Time passes so quickly. We get used to certain events coming and going, and one rolls into the other – Christmas, New Year, Easter, various sporting events, and memorial days…and around we go again. We can just barely keep up with the way things whizz past.

Many things we can ignore, but the one thing nobody can afford to ignore, is the certainty of death and judgment.

Every person has to stand before the judgment seat of Christ, and answer this question: did you take Me seriously or not? (or words to that effect).

Every day of all the seasons He is supremely important. Every day of our lives.

He is our first thought, obligation, hope, destination. First and Last.

This is normal. The people who do not do this are the strange ones!

So we do not let death take us unawares. We come to terms with the Master now (cf Mt 5,25), seek His mercy for not doing it better, or earlier, and we pray that His grace will move as many people as possible to the same state.

Death does not have to be as mysterious as it presently seems. We can take the sting out of it. The sting of death is sin (1 Cor 15,56). Remove the sin, and we become like the saints.

The saints could teach us much about death. Far from fearing death they longed for it; not out of depression, but out of joy, wanting to be with God.

The saints, and the holy souls, probably all wish they could have their time again to do more. We still have the time. Let us use it with the help of the saints and holy souls, to be as ready as we can be for the next phase of our lives.

Feast of Christ the King 29 Oct 2017 Sermon

Feast of Christ the King 29.10.17 Dominion

A certain priest has suggested that same-sex ‘marriage’ should be allowed civilly, but not in the Church. This is an example of exaggerated distinction between Church and State.

That Church and State should be kept separate is actually a false idea. We can separate things for the sake of order and efficiency. The Church does not have to be visibly involved in every activity. We do not expect the Pope or Bishop to be running the Treasury or the Law Courts.

However, no part of the universe is outside God's authority, and no one who is running things has the right to act in a way contrary to God’s laws.

He rules it all by virtue of having made it, and keeping it in being. It is His universe!

It may look like things run themselves, but that is only because God has designed them so well. Being infinitely intelligent, the processes He puts in place are naturally very efficient. Still He has the right and the power to intervene at any point, and in any way.

Therefore no law of the state can go against the law of God. Same-sex ‘marriage’, abortion, euthanasia, IVF, and all similar issues are answerable to God, not just the civil authorities.

Today is the Feast of Christ the King. On this day especially we acknowledge that God the Son has dominion over all creation. All authority has been given to Me (Mt 28,18).

As God, He is creator. So He has complete power in that capacity.

As Man, He has changed the whole script, re-fashioning the human race in Himself. This gives Him far more right to rule the world than winning an election, or inheriting a throne would do.

It falls to those who know how important He is to proclaim that importance; to worship Him (that is, to express His worth, which is infinite).

At least someone is taking Him seriously on this crazy planet! While others are saying He does not exist, or does not count; or that He has no say in this or that part of the world - we uphold His importance, and will proclaim it. Most of all, we will live by it.

It is vital that we who profess to be His subjects must obey Him ourselves.

Our disobedience has done great damage to the cause. This has enabled so many errors to take hold; and so much disenchantment with the true faith. Rival religions and philosophies have sprung up everywhere, which just makes it harder for the Truth to be discovered.

(On the matter of false philosophies, we note the hundredth anniversary of Communism, a massive evil, based on the denial and hatred of religion.)

The power of Christ is infinite but it can be impeded by human resistance. Our Lord respects our freedom of will, and will not necessarily override us when we choose wrongly.

He wants His people to be His disciples, friends even; to obey Him in all things, but not grudgingly, as though it were a burden, but willingly and joyfully. He wants us to rule with Him, in a derivative way, to make the earth better than it was at Eden. And with still better to come in Heaven.

He waits on our free response. He could easily override us at any point, even to bring the world to an end.

He holds back, to give us time to repent (cf Mt 13,24-30 the wheat and the tares).

And if we do repent, then to give us time to build up His kingdom.

Eventually, He will come to claim what is His. Everything is His but He will claim only that which acknowledges Him. Those who reject Him to the last, will be themselves rejected.

We want to be in the right state to receive Him then; but we receive Him already insofar as we align with His will.

And meanwhile we pray for the conversion of those who presently oppose or ignore Him.

That they will see Him whom they have pierced (Jn 19,37), and proclaim Him Lord of all creation; not just of Church property, but all places and all times.