11th Sunday after Pentecost 21 Aug 2022 Sermon

11^th Sunday after Pentecost 21 August 2022 Perceiving God

Our Lord heals the deaf man (today’s Gospel), and at another time He restores sight to a blind man (Jn 9,1-7).

The Church has always understood the healing miracles of Our Lord to have a symbolic value beyond their physical aspect.

As He makes the spiritually deaf and blind to hear and see clearly, He does the same for all who have lost the capacity to hear the word of God, or to perceive the presence and activity of God in their lives.

Much of our trouble in this world flows from the difficulty we have in perceiving God in His nearness to us, and our resulting lack of trust in Him.

We cannot see Him with the physical eyes so we say He does not exist.

We cannot hear His actual voice, so we say we do not know what He asks of us.

There are ways of knowing things other than through the physical senses.

St Paul, in today’s epistle (1 Co 15), speaks of the certainty of Our Lord’s resurrection.

We in our time have not seen the Risen Christ, but other people have, and many more have based their lives on the truth of this event.

We may be hesitant to believe because we have not seen Him, but He will ‘appear’ to us through the testimony of others, through the countless miracles that have been worked in His name, through the witness of the Church over twenty centuries.

We can sense St Paul’s anguish that there are still so many who do not believe. He has seen the Risen Christ, so he has no doubts, but how to bring others to the same certainty?

This has ever been the Church’s problem.

A combination of several factors will help the individual disciple to a stronger faith.

There is always Prayer, which opens up channels of communication otherwise closed. Prayer is like switching on the light, or the radio, making oneself open to whatever God wants to send.

Then there are Sacraments, direct encounters with the Risen Lord, whereby His power will act on us in various ways, and bring us to a stronger faith in Him.

Then there is the rich deposit of faith, accumulated over twenty centuries available to anyone who chooses to draw upon it.

This deposit of faith is summarised in our Creeds, which we recite frequently.

The words of the Creed are true, beyond the experience or perception of any individual, yet verified by the experience and perception of many.

The individual may falter but the whole Church never.

We can enjoy the certainty that comes from being surrounded by so many witnesses on all sides (Heb 12,1).

We can also sharpen our perception by avoiding sin and fully repenting of past sin.

This will also clear the cobwebs of doubt and fear which will otherwise hover about us.

We must resist the temptation to give up too soon. So many abandon the quest for faith because of some barrier they encounter. The Lord will make Himself known: Seek and you shall find.

Our Lord wants us to search for Him because it will be for our benefit if we do. He does not want us to be entirely passive but to take some share in our own salvation.

When we do this we are experiencing the healing of blindness, deafness, dumbness and all other barriers between us and Him.