16th Sunday after Pentecost 20 Sep 2020 Sermon

 

16^th Sunday after Pentecost 20.9.20 Humility

 The pharisees were preoccupied with the rules and missed the forest for the trees.

Or, as Our Lord put it, they strained the gnat and swallowed the camel (Mt 23,24).

It is always possible in the spiritual life to become bogged down on a detail while missing the overall vision.

The pharisees’ carping over cures on the sabbath day was certainly a case of missing the main point.

The sabbath is special because it enables us to deepen our link with God, and that is the main point.

Not doing work enables us to have a more reflective time to contemplate the glories of God.

We do not overplay the rules, nor do we go to the other extreme of declaring that rules don’t matter.

Our Lord was not saying: throw out all the rules – but to see the inner meaning of such rules as there are, and live by the spirit of the rule, not just the letter. The letter kills, the spirit gives life (2 Co 3,6).

Some think of Our Lord as a kind of hippy who went about ignoring the rules. He did not ignore them; He revealed their deeper meaning.

The sabbath is to glorify God. What better way to glorify God than by bringing His healing power into operation?

The rules are not meant to stifle us, but rather to bring out different aspects of our faith and how we should live.

For example, the rule that all Catholics should attend Sunday Mass. This is meant to help us realize how much we need the Mass. Ideally everyone would come to Mass without being told, but the Church knows that people can be weak, and so gives them a prod to take advantage of such a blessing.

The rules are still there but we should reach a point that we do not need to be told.

In today’s permissive times many argue that the Church should do away with what rules still remain, and leave everything to the individual to decide.

This is to exaggerate greatly the wisdom of the average person.

It is pride to say: I don’t need the Church, or the sacraments, or any of that. I have my own communication with God.

True humility will be willing to admit one’s own limitations – of knowledge, of will power. We sometimes need  help to know the right path to follow.

We always need help to put our good intentions into action.

Humility is needed, and above all, charity.

Our humanity is sorely tried in seeking to have charity for all around us. We see imperfections at many levels.

Whether it be parishes, groups, religious orders, seminaries, convents…. Always there are difficulties with agreeing and getting along. Catholics are never as good as they should be.

This does not mean we abandon the whole project. We recognise the failings, we repent of them, and we do better in the future. We make sure that the internal purity of intention matches the external visible elements.

If we look humble, we must be humble. If we preach charity, we must be charitable.

It has to be every day of the week, not just Sunday. It has to be in everyday places, not just inside churches. We must be the same in private as we are in public.

We keep the rules at whatever level they apply, never stopping just with externals.

There are many potential difficulties but they can all be overcome.

Christ soars over all of it, and draws us towards Himself. To love God with our whole hearts and minds is the greatest rule, and the one from which all others take their place.

15th Sunday after Pentecost 13 Sep 2020 Sermon

 

15^th Sunday after Pentecost 13.9.20 Reclaiming the lost

The widow of Naim symbolizes the Church as a mother reclaiming her children.

We seek to claim or reclaim lots of people, not least members of our own families.

The task of conversion is complicated by the fact that people presently far from God will not usually want to be converted. They may not be happy where they are, yet they distrust any idea of a religious solution.

Nobody wants to be told what to do, especially by their mothers, or other close people.

Nor, very likely, do they want to hear from God; or the Church either.

It is ironic that we offer good news, the gateway to eternal life, the happiest way to live in this earthly life – all this, but we cannot give it away.

So much so that when we go to tell people how good it all is they might try to kill us! A great many have been killed just for doing that - Our Lord Himself being the most notable case.

This desire to kill the bringer of good tidings indicates the deeper, darker presence of the evil one. He wants people to think they cannot or do not need to change.

We greatly desire the conversion of others. And God wants it more than we do. But He will not force it. He wants to win people through love.

He will exert force on our will by way of trying to steer us into better paths; but not to the point of overriding free will. The decision to become a disciple of Christ needs to be voluntary, to achieve its main point. It has to be voluntary to be a free act of love on our part.

God does not want a lot of sullen people in Heaven, who have been forced to go there!

God has many strings to His bow. He can give us a taste of His goodness, and of the joy that awaits those who accept His offer. Taste and see that the Lord is good. (Ps 33(34),8)

Or He can let people suffer the frustration or futility of any attempt to live without Him.

Either we see the desirability of God, or the hopelessness of being without Him, or a bit of both.

This is how conversions happen, and young men are restored to their Mother.

Whose children will be converted? We grieve together for those presently lost, and we pray together that they may be found.

We can pray for each other’s children, praying as the whole Church.

The path of conversion ought to be the obvious choice, but it gets back to the same reason as people kill the bearers of good tidings.

The evil one deceives. One’s present life may be miserable but at least it is familiar.

Sin appears to offer happiness, however many times we have seen that it does not do so.

Then someone will say that churchgoers are all hypocrites, or paedophiles, etc.

They will say they are good enough as they are and do not need Church.

And so on.

We, for our part, will say with the Church, that salvation is found only in Christ.

They can resist or even kill us but the word of God, and the will of God do not change.

People without God will have moments of self-doubt, and these are times when the grace of God can make inroads.

If the Gospel is given to disturb the comfortable, then we pray that those taking comfort in this life only will be sufficiently disturbed to make a change.

We pray that the plain truth will be seen plainly, and the response be as the truth indicates.

We hope they do not kill us for pointing out the obvious, but if they do we will at least know why!

May the Lord restore thousands of sons to Mother Church in our time.

14th Sunday after Pentecost 6 Sep 2020 Sermon

 

14^th Sunday after Pentecost 6.9.20 Ordered desires

We might envy the plants who have everything put out for them but then they have a lot simpler lives than we have.

And we would not really change places with them, or with animals who graze all day.

We like good things delivered to us but we would not want to sacrifice our freedom and understanding.

It is our glory as humans to be able to reflect on what we do; to exercise free choices as to whether we do right or wrong.

God knew that giving us this power would lead to a lot of disasters, but He hopes to bring us around where we can still have the power but not the disasters!

This is why He teaches us things, expects things from us, helps us to do those things. He does not want us to be merely passive recipients of His blessings but rather to cooperate actively in His plans.

We are stewards of His creation; we share in His authority and power.

This is our full dignity, waiting to be discovered. We possessed it for a time, until the first sin. Now to retrieve it we have to learn how to regulate our various desires and passions.

Presently these desires are often not in harmony with each other. We want opposing things, sometimes more noble things, sometimes vile and base things. We do things which we know are going to cause harm but we still do them. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. (Rm 7,15)

We need rescuing from ourselves in that we complicate things so much. Sin makes it ten times worse.

To want the right things, in the right way, and the right amount - this is the task.

Even non-religious thinkers can see the need for restraining one desire for the sake of achieving another. For example, the athlete who sacrifices comfort to do the training which will enable victory.

All the more so when we are talking of spiritual things. The saints teach us how easily they would make sacrifices for the sake of gaining eternal glory.

We can train ourselves in recognizing the higher goals, and to put the lesser desires at their service.

It is not wrong to want pleasure, or for things to go smoothly, but it may be necessary to sacrifice these things for the final result – that God's kingdom come among us.

Sinful desires especially must be overcome. Sin can never get us very far.

Even legitimate desires need monitoring.

Doing penance will help us develop the discipline needed to forego one pleasure for a greater one. For example, denying ourselves some legitimate pleasure may advance the salvation of someone else. We give up one thing to gain something better.

We might settle for less than the highest ideals, but these are where God wants to take us:  hence Thy will be done.

The complexity of our lives as compared with plants means that we will have to balance things over time. We want what God wants no matter how long it takes, or how hard it is.

It will be worth it.

Is it so hard to do it God's way? We make it seem hard, but that is the result of too much sin.

Free of sin we will start to see things the right way up, maybe for the first time ever.

We see that God's providence goes way beyond supplying food and clothing. He gives us the ability to appreciate the full range of how He has provided for us so far, with much more still to come.

13th Sunday after Pentecost 30 Aug 2020

 

13^th Sunday after Pentecost 30.8.20 Thanksgiving

 Give thanks to God in all circumstances (1 Thess 5,18). This must mean that we thank God for when things go wrong as well as when they go right!

 How can one be thankful when things go wrong? In such cases we are thanking God Himself for being who and what He is.

We are expressing trust in Him that whatever has gone wrong, or appears to be so, can be brought to a proper resolution by Him.

If I did not get what I wanted I will get something else, equally satisfactory, or better.

The main thing is to be in a state of union with God. He is the Source of all goodness (James 1,17). If we are at the Source we must be in the best place.

We do not judge God by the last thing that happened. He is not like the stock market which can go up or down from one day to the next.

If a graph were to be made of God's reliability it would not be up and down, but a perfectly straight line across the top of the page at the highest level and for the longest time.

We give thanks for this state of affairs. Overall things are going well, if God is in command.

But we still have to deal with details, and some of them can be very painful.

As we give thanks to God in all circumstances we can mention the things that are not going well. We do this with a sense of quiet trust that God will know what to do. As Our Lady did at Cana: Son, they have no wine. Not a complaint, just a minor problem that can be swept away in God's creative power.

The leper who came back saw further than the other nine, recognising where the healing had come from. The other nine were not sufficiently focused on God. They took the blessing in their stride, taking it for granted, as one can do. The nine lepers needed more work on the spiritual level.

The one leper was able to connect his physical healing to a spiritual source. He was thanking God, not his ‘lucky stars’ or equivalent, but the true source of all blessing.

His faith made him ‘whole’ because it was well-rounded and solidly based.

We ask for everything that we need, large or small, but we come to see that what we need most of all is a true sense of God's goodness.

I will not try to out-think God or come up with a better answer than He could find. Sufficient that He guide the course of our lives and guide also the whole Church.

Giving thanks in all circumstances could even go as far as being thankful that God sometimes punishes us, by way of bringing us to see what is really needed – which is that we should obey Him at all times.

God does not like things going wrong any more than we do, but the way to get clear of such situations is to obey Him, to align ourselves with His holy will. Until we do that we will have trouble.

We become more familiar with God and His ways, as we learn from experience. We cannot claim to know all about Him but we grasp the general idea that He has great love for each person and desires the salvation of all.

Trust will increase as we make proper thanksgiving. We can look back on our lives and see  times when the activity of God has become clear, even if it was not so clear at first.

The thanksgiving has to be deep enough that it takes hold on us; such that it makes us stronger for whatever comes next.

As we say in each Mass: Let us give thanks to the Lord our God!