30th Sunday C 26 October 2025 Sermon

30th Sunday C    26 October 2025 Humility

The readings today present us with a closer look at a very important quality, namely humility.

Humility is not just putting oneself down, for example saying that I am no good at anything. It is not so much about what is wrong with me as what is right with  God. Not so much my weakness as His strength.

It is God's perfections which make us humble, as we realize we are a long way short of what He is (like an insect comparing itself to a mountain).

We are humbled as we consider that one so great can find  time for my conversation. World leaders would  not be so interested in my life as God Himself is!

We are dust and ashes by comparison but confidently expect to be glorified one day. To dust we shall return but after that we will rise in glory.

But all the while staying humble, because this would  not happen without God, who thought of the whole thing and watches over its progress.

We follow Our Lady who saw herself as the lowest of the low yet marvelled that God would lift her  so that all ages would call her blessed. Her humility can be likened to a very clean window letting in the full sunlight.  Or a clearing of a path of obstacles, enabling the entry of something desirable. Prepare ye the way of the Lord!

If we should take a false step and forget our humble status we become distorted and all manner of irregular things happen. The fallen angels thought they were equal to God or maybe better.

We can learn from the publican  God, be merciful to me a sinner. (Lk 18,13)

That’s all he said and all it needed. The prayer was probably better for being short, as even prayer can be a source of pride, as we see with the pharisee.

To find our true status is the necessary goal. We interpret everything that happens in terms of God's view of things, not our own view.

If a particular decision has to be made, or attitude adopted, or outcome to be sought – it is to God that we look. Thy will be done!  God's will is better for me than to follow my own will.

The prayer of the humble man will pierce the clouds (Sir 35,21) first reading). Humility will get further than pride because it is more harmonious with God. It is a meeting of like with like and will bring forth even better still.

Humility is power, a shock reversal of worldly thinking where military and economic might are considered the source of power.

Stalin is supposed to have said; how many divisions does the pope have? Meaning military strength. The humble Church will triumph over its persecutors. We can win another way.

When we click into our exact place with God, we will see miracles coming, good things happening, bad things averted.

Especially is this so when several people do this. A family, a parish, a diocese, the Church – all can do this. And be like the publican, in humble bearing.

The message is frequent through the New Testament – Clothe yourselves in humility: Ephesians 4:2

Colossians 3:12  believers should be completely humble, gentle, and patient, bearing with one another in love.

Philippians 2:3 Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself".

1 Peter 5:6 encourages, "Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time". 

And Our Lady herself: ‘He has brought down the proud and raised the lowly.’ (Lk 1, 52)

May she help us to be truly humble and contrite before the majesty of God: God, be merciful to me, a sinner.

29th Sunday C 19 October 2025 Sermon

 29 C  19 October 2025 Persistent Prayer

 The course of a battle depends on whether one man has his arms raised or not! A strange story (today’s first reading: Ex 17,8-13) but one which affirms the power and the importance of prayer.

In an age which looks for practical solutions and is impatient with prayer, the word of God reminds us that prayer is the beginning and end of all human activity.

Moses’ prayer has a direct, visible effect on the course of the battle. It is not always so obvious when we pray, but the same principle is always at work.

When we pray we are bringing the power and the love of God into action at the scene of our prayer.

And, yes, there is still a battle going one. The battle is at the spiritual level, between good and evil. God and Satan are fighting over which one will possess us for all eternity.

It is a furious battle and one which is mostly invisible, but no less real for that.

And being an invisible battle, it is easy for us to be distracted from attention to it.

Moses could see what happened when he prayed, and when he stopped praying. We are not so fortunate to see the results so clearly.

But we need to understand that while our arms are lifted up in prayer the forces of good are making progress, and if we relax our efforts and become complacent, the forces of evil make progress.

The prayer has to be continuous, and persistent. Like the widow in the Gospel (Lk 18,1-8), we keep knocking on the door of heaven. Lord help us, save us.

Even when there is nothing in particular going wrong, that we can see, we keep praying because the battle is still raging.

We might think of our prayer as an individual matter. I have said my prayers for today.

But think of a soldier going into battle. He does not say: I’ve fired my bullets for today, so now I can relax. He knows that while he is out there on the battlefield he is involved and committed, and must keep shooting.

This is our position. It is not bullets we fire, but prayer, while keeping a constant state of alertness. It is hard to keep up this attitude, but the Church itself helps us.

Just as Aaron and Hur help up Moses’ arms, so the whole Church holds us up when we grow tired.

Of course, we must sleep and rest, and must attend to other things. But somewhere in the world, someone is praying while we rest. The Church is always at prayer. There is always a Mass going on somewhere, always a rosary being said.

This is comforting, but we always need more prayer and more intensity.

Given some of the issues we face in our time, we cannot just rest with a few short prayers before we go to bed. We have some major problems on our hand and need to bring them to some serious prayer.

What about the young people? What about all the lapsed Catholics? The abortions? The divorces, the suicides, the drugs, the disasters, the terrorism.... and on and on.

There are more things to pray about than we have minutes in the day. No one person can address them all, but the more time and energy we do put into our prayer the better things will get.

We support each other here in this church, in this parish. It is easy to be discouraged, to give up, to feel alone. But see the tide of battle turning and realize that you could be part of that, as courage and energy return.

May the Lord sustain us in our prayer, as we call upon Him.

28th Sunday C 12 October 2025 Sermon

28^th Sunday C     12 October 2025 Gratitude

If we are rescued from a crisis our gratitude will be greater according to the size of the crisis.

An acute  need draws all our attention. Everything else seems unimportant at that moment.

For example being lost, wanting to find a reference point. Or in a struggling aeroplane – we are grateful if we can find solid land again. In difficult situations we might pray to God for help; and we might promise God that if He gets us out of this trouble, we will be especially good for the future!

Such promises may not be kept, once the focus shifts to other things.

But in essence that is what we are doing all the time in relation to God. We are grateful to Him for creating us, saving us, guiding us - all for our benefit and from His generosity.

We have received many  blessings from God, but we do not necessarily value those blessings.

In the spiritual world it is possible to miss the various snares we face and so think we have no particular problem, when really we have.

We need to cultivate gratitude and let that gratitude lead us to better understanding.

Take the story of the unforgiving debtor. Forgiven a large amount of money he then went out to throttle the other servant who owed him only a small amount (Mt 18,21-35). The first servant was not grateful enough to make him see anything differently.

We could thank God day and night and for a long time, and we would not get to the end of the blessings.

God does not need our thanks but we need to give thanks. He has made us to live in relationship with him. If we ignore Him we are losing part of ourselves, stunted in spiritual growth.

The primary way we can express thanks to God is to take part in the Mass.

In every Mass the Church speaks as one in thanksgiving, and benefits from the experience.  The Father and the Son are in constant exchange of offering, receiving, thanking, and they include us in the experience. We are taken up into their world, and we need to be grateful for that.

At each Mass we thank God the Son for His death and resurrection. These events lift us out of sin and death, a problem we may not have known we had. But as we discover the mercy of God and how much He has forgiven (first debtor) we become more grateful.

The prayers of the Mass make continuous references to God’s goodness to us. The psalms in particular express this response, which we need to make our own. We say lots of words with our voices; the next step is to say them in our hearts. For example: Forever I will sing the goodness of the Lord; praise the Lord, my soul. Praise the Lord who lifts up the poor.

Continuous praise and thanksgiving will melt hard hearts as we discover a new way of seeing things.

Finally, we will have a sense of gratitude proportionate for the magnitude of the occasion.

We realize what we could have lost, but we did not lose it; and here we are celebrating our union with God, and our hope of eternal life.

Each act of thanksgiving should make us more ready for the next one.

The one leper is immortalized because he came back to give thanks. We hope he stayed grateful. We hope we will ‘come back’ and stay grateful; it is a hope we can make certain.

 

 

27th Sunday C 5 October 2025 Sermon

 27^th Sunday C   5 October 2025 Obedience of faith

 “If you had faith as a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this sycamine tree, ‘Be rooted up, and be planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you. (Lk 17,6 Gospel)

Not many have that sort of faith, but we can move in that direction.

Our Lord expands the theme by likening it to a master-servant relationship.

Servants interpret everything in terms of what they must  do for the master.

The servant must obey the master at all times. So must we be on a permanent footing of obedience to our Master, Almighty God.

Obedience to a kind and just master will draw one closer to that master, in terms of wanting to please him, anticipating his wishes, making sacrifices for  his sake.

This is about us and our Master, Jesus Christ.

If we are obedient to Him He will entrust us with more (cf parable of talents – you have been faithful in small things, I will entrust you with greater Mt 25,14-30.)

God created us to share His life, to participate in His ruling of the earth.

The first man, Adam, enjoyed supernatural authority over creation. Had he not sinned he would have grown in faith and power, also love for God.

If the wind had been blowing too strongly, for example, Adam could have stilled the wind with a word (just as Jesus could calm the storm Mt 8,23-27).

We find ourselves a mixture of power which is still there, and power lost through sin.

If we would come back to a perfect relationship with God we would be working miracles too, or at least contributing to them.

The key is to obey, even if it is against our inclinations. If we do obey we will be coming into right order with God and all His creation.

Many have given up on prayer thinking that it does not ‘work’. It will work when the one praying makes a resolution to obey God in all things.

Increase our faith , say the apostles in today’s Gospel.

Every prayer, every good work can help us to grow in our understanding of God, and willingness to please Him.

This has to be every day. We are told in other spheres of life that we have to eat well, get enough sleep, enough exercise etc. Even more so, we have to get enough supernatural life - enough prayer, communing with the Divine, gradually coming into better relationship with all who seek union with God.

We make this world a place where God is taken seriously. This would be the ‘kingdom’ for which we pray.

We can tell God that we are not happy with the current state of affairs, provided we are humble and respectful. (today’s 1^st reading Hab 1,2-3 and 2,2-4). How long am I to cry for help, Lord, while You will not listen?

God does not tell us much, as in words we can hear. But He shows us a lot, leaving it for us to put two and two together, and adjust our position accordingly.

We are asking not because we are losing faith, but because we need help piecing it all together.

We know that the fault cannot be with God, so it must be somewhere else, maybe a lot of places, where God is not honoured.

Any way we can unravel the difficulties the better off everyone will be.

Just simple obedience will set things off in the right way. Do whatever He tells  you  (Jn 2,1-11).

And watch what happens! 

 

 

 

 

 

26th Sunday (C) 28 September 2025 Sermon

26^th Sunday (C ) 28 September 2025 Multiculturism.  Today is the 111^th world day of migrants and refugees, and we celebrate it here in this parish, combined with the main theme of the Jubilee year - Pilgrims of Hope.

In this parish we have a lot of evidence of different cultures blending harmoniously. We take the chance to pray for all the relevant and connected themes of the day.

That we can all live in peace is a constant prayer. Whenever we look at any country or region we see too many signs of discord.

Everyone should treat everyone with respect, but it does not always happen. Through our prayer we express the hope that it can be done differently; that the change brought about in the human condition by the coming of Christ will penetrate hearts and change will result at the ground level.

The place to start is to recognize the common humanity which binds us, either in an already established peace, or in a peace which is waiting to be realised.

St Paul tells us that now there is no Jew or Greek, but only Christ (Ga 3,28).

Christ made us one, and can keep us one if enough people will unite themselves with Him.

We can speak of two things that need to happen.

One, as we have been saying, is that we learn to live in peace, so that no matter how many people are in one area they can learn to get along.

Two, is that as many as possible, and potentially the whole world, can come to an explicit complete union with Our Lord Jesus Christ, through faith and baptism. This is the source of unity that St Paul was speaking about.

We offer to those of other religions, or no religion, the greatest gift of all – the knowledge of Jesus Christ, the pearl of great price (Mt 13,45-46), for which we should give up all we have.

Our primary method of influencing others to believe in Christ is to be the very best disciples we can be.

We are to be Pilgrims of Hope, one of the main themes of the Jubilee year.

We can achieve peace (important) through faith, hope and charity (even more important).

Christ is the overall source of culture, if we take ‘culture’ to mean the way people live, the way they set values, make decisions.

We can still celebrate our differences on less essential matters. So nations have different customs on matters of art, literature, food, clothing, music, language, history, geography, sport etc.

Being Christian does not mean we have to be the same on all points. As long as we have that unity with Jesus Christ we can then expand into other areas, never losing our focus on Him.

We are one when we need to be, and diverse when appropriate, but never forgetting where all this richness comes from.

We become more like Him, and meet in the middle, where He is found.

Mentally it is easy to see that we are all one, or should be, but who is going to live like that?

We have to forgive everyday, seeking a standard of holiness which is demanding but also rewarding.

History has been pushed out of shape many times, and the world we have now is very different from that which Christ would have wanted for us. But such is the marvel of God's mercy that from any position on the spectrum He can forgive us and give us a new start.

Genuine repentance, seeking the approval of God is the key. Always we are saying, Lord have mercy. Always He is granting it. Today, may He forgive all sins against unity in Him.