17th Sunday after Pentecost
27.9.20 One God
There is one God. That fact forms the centre of all our beliefs and practices.
Historically people have had many gods, of their own invention, to cover all the different areas of need - like love, war, food.
It took a long time to dawn on people that there is in fact only one God, who is powerful enough for all needs. Everything comes under His authority.
The unity of God, means we should have unity of people.
Unity of people is not so easy to achieve; people find ways of hating each other and getting into disputes.
God's intention was that we would draw our identity from Him, and share in the perfect unity of His own inner life.
The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have perfect unity; there is no cross word there; no contradiction.
They do not have wars, so why do we? .
There is no good reason why we do not live in peace and concord.
Human efforts to be at one do not work because there is too much malice in the human heart.
People try to be one, but excluding of God. This never works for long because there is so much sin and disorder in circulation. They try to be nice but run out of goodwill.
To achieve the desired oneness we have to go to God, so that we are all absorbed in Him and not ourselves.
It is said often: It does not matter what race you are, or what religion you have…
We can agree about the ‘race’ part; but the ‘religion’ part is a little more complicated.
Religion deals with the whole question of relating to God. As there is only one God, it follows logically that there can be only one fully true religion.
This we believe to be the Catholic faith. We do not claim any personal superiority on the basis of being Catholic, only that we believe it is the religion revealed by the one true God.
People will say that is not possible that one religion can be all right, or that even if there were such a religion we would not know which one.
But our religion is simply believing what God has Himself revealed. We did not make it up.
We do not discriminate insofar as we do not mistreat anyone who is not of our faith.
We wish everyone to know the great happiness of being one with God and discovering the true charity that follows from that.
We seek to propagate the truth about God, as that will help people to come into right order in every other part of their life.
It is said that ‘Religion’ causes all the wars. Not true religion, when it is the right beliefs and the right actions.
The absolute unity of God within Himself is something we can imitate. We are so far from achieving it in practice, but He is helping us in that direction.
We are humbled by our sense of smallness, but also exalted in knowing that we are valuable to God.
It is not by appeal to people in their own strength that we will make progress. We appeal not to strength but humility. You can have all the peace you want if you will kneel before Him.
There is a potential oneness between all people and for that we pray; in the meantime we respect others at least for the fact that they are invited to share in God's life.
We thank God for creating us in His image and for teaching us how to share in His eternal oneness.
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