18th Sunday after Pentecost 23 Sep 2018 Sermon

18^th Sunday after Pentecost 23.9.18 Purpose of Amendment

The man healed in today’s Gospel was lying on a stretcher, a good place from which to reflect on what is really important in life.

Our Lord knew where to go first as far as providing help. He started with the man’s sins. Most people would have started with the physical sickness.

We can see ourselves ‘on a stretcher’ as far as coming into the Lord’s presence. We may be physically well, but if we are still sinning we are laid low until we receive the Lord’s forgiveness.

We receive this forgiveness primarily in the Sacrament of Penance. We are healed spiritually, though we realize there is much more to be done.

Can we achieve a sinless life?

We have the saints to inspire us, especially Our Lady. In her we find perfect harmony with the will of God, every desire in the right place and the right amount.

Sin could find no place in her. She was lost in adoration of God. As we contemplate her we make the same transition. Our desires, where we look, what we look for… all these will be purified.

One prayer we make in Confession, and other times, is the Act of Contrition. It comes in various forms, but part of its content is a promise not to sin again... and I promise with the help of Thy grace never more to offend Thee and to amend my life, Amen.

When we realize the goodness of God and the ugliness of sin we want to make an absolute break with sin once and for all, and embark on new life in union with Christ.

We are aware of our human weakness and realize that a certain amount of sin is highly likely. Even if we do love God it seems impossible to avoid a few slip-ups.

So we are saying: I will not sin again; but also saying: I probably will sin again. How can we make sense of this?

My intention is not to sin again. While it is highly likely I will sin again, I cannot rest with that as though because sin is common, it is somehow acceptable.

We are never tested beyond our strength, as St Paul says elsewhere (1 Co 10,13). And think how hard we work on other areas of our lives to keep things clean: tolerating no weeds in the garden, or dirt on the floor... Yet we accept stain on the soul.

We need to detest sin.

If we set ourselves for the total removal of sin we will sin a lot less, and that is worth something. Ten sins is better than twenty etc.

We learn from our falls (like a football team... we lapsed in the third quarter etc). We can bounce back from defeat.

We take the moral life seriously enough to adjust our behaviour where necessary; but not so downcast at our failures that we give in to despair.

We can get better at meaning that act of contrition. We can at least reduce the number and severity of the sins we commit.

I am a better person today than yesterday; tomorrow better still.

Even if there is a sudden lapse, I pick up and overall make progress.

It is all made possible by His grace. If we ask we will find what we need. His grace will heal us as well as forgive us; will give us a new understanding of what happens when we sin; of how the evil one tricks us; of how we will be happier if we take God’s way; always remaining vigilant.

That vigilance means lots of prayer and meditation. We will close the gaps on temptation, giving it less ways of getting at us.

We become stronger and better people – moving from darkness to light; able to get off that stretcher.

17th Sunday after Pentecost 16 Sep 2018 Sermon

17^th Sunday after Pentecost 16.9.18 Love from the heart

We are to love God with our whole heart, and soul, and mind. This is the greatest commandment encompassing all the others. Any breach of any commandment must be a failure to love God.

We can have various problems with loving God.

We might see love as simply a matter of obedience. If we keep God's commands should that not satisfy Him? Certainly we should obey Him, but He wants more than that.

He does not want us to serve Him as slaves or servants, but as sons (Ga 4,7), or friends (Jn 15,15).

He does not want us to keep Him at arm’s length, or regard Him as a business partner with whom we do transactions.

He does not want us to fear Him. There is ‘Fear of the Lord’ but that means reverence and awe. Certainly we should be reverent before Almighty God, but He does not want us to be quaking with fear. He wishes only to bless us, not harm us.

It has to be love from the heart – something we actually want to do. As we do for the people we love, so we want to please God, for His sake.

It has to be love in action; so that it is not just a matter of theory, or a concept.

God can seem remote. We are so busy just keeping our heads above water, we may think we cannot give much time to contemplation. We cannot simply click into higher levels of prayer, but God can lift us to higher things, to a deeper communion with Him.

As we draw closer to Him we grow in trust and understanding. We no longer want to argue with Him, or complain about His treatment of us. We no longer think He is remote, beyond the clouds, impersonally watching us.

We can do certain things to become more familiar with Him, to make our way towards Him. There is always prayer, the Mass, the Sacraments, good spiritual reading/viewing; and of course good works, acts of charity.

But the real momentum comes from God. The way for us to love Him is to let Him love us.

We do not resist. Like a flower opening up to the sun, we let God's love work on us.

Our hearts are changed as we are exposed to the love of God. We lose the rough edges, the hardness of heart, any and all of the negative qualities we may have accumulated so far.

If we stand in the sun long enough there has to be an effect.

Some are called further than others, according to how God has designed each person.

We still obey Him in the practical everyday things. This is where we can find whether we really love God or not.

But it should get easier to obey and to trust. That would indicate our hearts are developing in the right direction.

I want to be whatever God wants me to be. I don’t care if I am higher or lower than others, as long as I am in the right place with Him.

For each one of us: Be as good as you can be; love as much as you can; and, for others, pray that each of them find where he is supposed to be.

It is much easier to deal with obligations if we have an overall sense of how it all holds together. Our faith is not just an arbitrary collection of rules, outdated ones at that!

Everything that comes from God is perfectly coordinated and harmonious, including His commands. It is all designed to purify us of sin and bind us to Him in everlasting joy.

16th Sunday after Pentecost 9 Sep 2018 Sermon

16^th Sunday after Pentecost 9.9.18 Humility

St Paul prays that people grasp the greatness of Christ, the full extent of His goodness and glory (epistle); and in doing that they will find everything else fall into place.

For many, even to acknowledge Christ as having any importance at all would be a step forward. How much ignored, denied, blasphemed against He is. And this is the Saviour of the world. It is a strange way to treat someone who has come to rescue us!

How should we regard Him? In the Gospel image today, we should take the lowest place before Him. This will mean that we do not ‘exalt’ ourselves to tell Him what to do; but rather humble ourselves to listen to Him; to trust Him; to obey without question whatever He asks of us.

Then He can call us up higher, as in the parable. Only if we are truly humble before Him can we make progress.

We are tempted to seek our security in the things of this world. Christ is too far away, it might seem.

But all earthly things are fragile and can disappear in a moment: money, friends, success, status…

We can find security only in Jesus Christ, the one true God. This is what St Paul is always telling us.

We will find security in Him, and also great happiness.

It is happiness to be healed of sickness, to be free of demons, to be raised from the dead.

Would you kill someone who can do all that?

They did already. But our present generation would do it again.

He has total goodwill towards us; He wants to heal, bless, save, guide us. He can provide everything we could ever dream of (more than we can desire or understand – today’s epistle Ep 3,20).

All we have to do is receive what He is giving; humble ourselves to the point of letting Him do what He wants. We concede defeat as far as any battle of wills is concerned.

Thus we are ‘exalted’. We find, if we are silent before the Lord, no longer complaining or arguing, we will actually get more of a say. The Holy Spirit will fill us with His gifts, and we will be able to speak, to rule, to be creative – all in due proportion.

This is how it is meant to work.

We are admitted into a share of Christ’s authority if we have first learned to obey.

In the world people grasp power, and often kill, lie and cheat to get there.

They are not obeying Christ first; they are bypassing Him completely.

What does frail mortal man think he is doing, trying to take over the whole world?

The devil has tricked us into turning things upside down.

We look in the wrong places for security, for happiness, and all the while there stands God Himself, waiting for a response.

We respond in humility and so we are exalted. Exalted through having greater security, greater happiness, and share more fully in Christ’s own saving work.

Thus we come to know the breadth and the length etc, of His greatness; or at least more than we knew before; enough to know there is more to know.

Faith in Christ is central, not peripheral, not optional, not a matter of minor importance. He is the All.

Believing this will not make us religious fanatics. It just means we become well-balanced people, able to deal with any sort of reality.

May Christ Himself forgive us all our past neglect, exalting us as high as Heaven.

15th Sunday after Pentecost 2 Sep 2018 Sermon

15^th Sunday after Pentecost 2.9.18 Conversion of sinners

There are parallels between the widow of Naim, and the Church, both having lost children.

Not many families are free of the sadness of losing members to the world. Look at a First Communion photo, and see how many of those faces would not be receiving Holy Communion now.

Some will return, but it is not something that happens automatically with the passing of time.

Conversion can take two senses - From error to the truth; from false religion to Catholic, where one’s beliefs were wrong, and now they are right.

Then there is conversion from bad to good - behaving badly to behaving well.

Conversion therefore encompasses belief and practice. One will help the other.

The clearer our thoughts are the more likely the behaviour will correspond. The better the behaviour the more chance the light has to get through to the intellect.

Existing Catholics need converting too. Many have false or mistaken beliefs. And everyone still commits sin of one kind or another, meaning that our behaviour needs to change.

It becomes clear that we all need mercy, and need it all the time - to be cleansed from past sins, to strengthen present resolve, and to make right choices for future action.

We never give up hope of conversion of any or every person; never write someone off. God can work miracles to the last, miracles of grace

And we do not want the devil to win.

So we keep the drum beating, in terms of maintaining awareness of this crucial matter of Conversion.

We hope that all will answer the promptings that God sends them.

God's mercy never runs dry but the time for receiving it might run out – we might die first.

Then there is the danger that one habitually living in sin could become too hard of heart to be able to convert; too much in darkness to climb out.

Conversion has to come from within, in the sense that each of us has a conscience and only I can operate my own conscience. I cannot be saved unless I want to be.

The young man had no say about being brought back to life. But we all have a say about being forgiven.

Do you want to be forgiven? Everyone would want that if it is free, and no strings attached.

But we need to have true contrition, and firm purpose of amendment. These are not so easy to come by. They will come, by the grace of God, but only by the sinner’s consent, which God will never force. He works only by the force of persuasion.

The Church as Mother, in the aggregate faith and charity of all her members will make a ceaseless prayer for conversion of sinners.

We surround the wavering sinners with our prayer, calling on the subtlety of the Holy Spirit to exploit some weakness in their resistance, leading them to conversion.

And for ourselves, we know we still have a lot to do, to cement the permanence of our own conversion, and to chip away at remaining areas of sin.

We never declare ourselves to be ‘good enough’, to be saved already. We have a cunning and vicious enemy and we have to be vigilant, as we are warned constantly in the New Testament (eg the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. 1 P 5,8)

At the same time we develop a concern for other sinners. It affects us personally whether or not another person accepts the mercy of God. We share the joy of Mother Church when a son is restored

We come to see others as Our Lord sees them, lost children needing rescue; dead, needing to be brought back to life.