6th Sunday A 15 February 2026 Sermon

6^th Sunday A  15 February 2026 Choices

From Sirach - you have a choice fire or water. One will burn, one will refresh. Which will you take?  (Sirach 15,16) One will do  you good; one will do you harm, which shall it be?

Adam and Eve had a similar choice. They could eat from any tree in the garden, except that one. That should have been easy to decide, but we know we do not always want the most appropriate thing. So it has ever been since with the human family. How to make the right decision?

It is all part of the ongoing battle between good and evil. Good is the right way of looking at a question; evil the wrong.

Many would say that it is impossible to choose the good every time. It can be hard certainly, but never impossible with God's grace assisting.

We choose water over fire, right over wrong. If we do this in small everyday things it will strengthen us for big decisions when they come.

We become more accurate in our decisions, complying more often with what God Himself would decide.

Some things are easy to decide. The evil in these cases does not appeal to us. For example we are not going to burn down the town  hall, or steal the crown jewels.

We will always choose rightly in such cases.

But when it comes to something I want to do, like talk unkindly of my neighbour, or tell lies to gain some kind of advantage, or perform an action I would rather avoid - then I have to work on my response.

As with any difficult thing we face, we can get better with practice. So we ‘practise’ our faith in doing or refraining from whatever is required.

As we do this the probability of getting it right will increase.

We eventually reach the point where we prefer the right action to the wrong one., so it is no big deal.

As this right-choosing increases we come more and more into the light of Christ.

We are coming to see things the way God sees them.

When He says , Come follow Me it means follow Him in the way that He thinks, He desires, He decides.

The Church proclaims this to the world. We point out the right choice. Fire or water, happiness or misery.

We are not just trying to stop everyone have a good time. We are offering the word of life.

Some human desires can be very entrenched, turning into addictions, compulsions, bad habits. They might need more work. With the Lenten season approaching we resolve to work on these deeper faults. We will come to prefer the good.

We call on Our Lady, who never committed a single sin, because she always saw the will of God as preferable to anything else.

We seek from God all the wisdom  that He can grant to us.

This will give us a foretaste of Heaven. The reason Adam and Eve chose the forbidden fruit is that it was  that it looked good to eat. Heaven will contain a lot more than one tree, and more beautiful than anything we have seen so far.

In the second reading we heard that the Holy Spirit reveals the depths of everything, even the depths of God (1 Co 2,10).

These are deep waters, and we need help to get all this right, and that help is available.

5th Sunday A 8 February 2026 Sermon

5th Sunday A   8 February 2026 Good Works                                                                                                                                                                                                                              There is a practical side of the faith, as expressed in the first reading, Share your bread with the hungry…(Is 58, 7-10 Treat well those under your power, and you will see good things happening.

Your prayers are more likely to be heard and generally everything will run better, because we are grounded firmly in the love of God, and He will make His presence felt.

Think of the world as like a finely tuned machine which might or might not run well.

Sin brings discord and the machine does not run well, and we have seen a great deal of that in human history.

Then, on the bright side, consider the saving presence of Jesus Christ and that presence is in Him and permeates among us, as we place all our actions under His patronage.

His presence is healing itself  and cannot but do good when properly invoked.

It is no great mystery. It comes to saying, Do the right thing and other right things will follow.

Do not hide your light under a bushel (today’s Gospel, Mt 5,15)  We show  by our example the power of Christ to do good in every kind of way.

This is a medicine for every  illness, a light for every path, food for the journey - whatever is not going well can be lifted to higher things.

We might think we would not be much good at giving Christian example to people around us, but such example can take many forms.

The key is how much we love God, how close we are to Him.  We offer all our actions to God's glory, and let Him do what He will with our offerings.

We want to behave as well as possible, for our own sake (it feels good to be good); and for others wherever they may be in the faith world.

A  chance word or action from us may set off other things, and then other things again.

It is all co-ordinated by the Holy Spirit who can use anything good for a good purpose.

Some will do good deeds but ignore God, thinking that they can work out for themselves what needs to be done.

‘Religion’ to them is just an impediment.

But it gets back to the question of union with God. If we are close to God things will  happen for the better. If away from God we are a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal  (1 Co 13,1-3)

Many would be impatient with prayer, thinking that this time could be spent elsewhere.

But we need time to immerse ourselves in God's view of the world.

God wants us to identify with His Body, the Church. He wants us to look after each other. He could do it Himself - feed the hungry, rescue the lost etc, but He wants us to activate His power, to benefit ourselves as we help others benefit.

We need to be both Mary  and Martha (Lk 10,38-42).

Good deeds do not displace prayer but blend in with them, and everything gets better..

We seek to please God for his own sake. Good works - as good as they are - are not the best thing. The best thing is to please God.

The Church attracted early converts of that time (Ac 5,12-14).

And  the Church has seen various renewals, eg monastic life, religious orders, scholarship of popes,  teachers,  saints in great number.

At any point we can pick up the pieces, and resume the great quest for finding Heaven. We help each other by word and example, prayer and practice.

4th Sunday Ordinary Time A 1 February 2026 Sermon

4^th Sunday A  1 February 2026 Humility

A privilege of being human as distinct from say, being an animal, is that we have the power to reflect on abstract matters, such as the meaning of life.

A dog cannot do that. He cannot say, Why did God make me a dog? I would rather be something else!

For all that, sometimes we might wish God had not given us so much capacity to think, in our wishing for a simple life, without too many pressures.

It is doubtful, however, that many people would trade their human identity for an animal’s life.

It is not only about complaining. Humans can glorify God, and that is a great thing. We can praise God for works of nature, such as a sunset, a mountain range, a raging sea. We can praise God also for spiritual works such as listed in the Beatitudes (today’s Gospel) – humility, gentleness, being peacemakers…(Mt 5,3-12)

It is a great privilege to have this ability to admire the works of God, to have an increasingly clear grasp of who God is, and what He is wanting from us.

It is easy to take wrong turnings here, as we see from our own lives and the general history of humanity.

Any way in which a person defies God in rejecting His laws, or refusing to bow down before Him, or even to deny His existence. These are an abuse of the privilege that He has entrusted to us – to know, love and serve Him.

Some will dare to criticise God, to put His judgments to scrutiny  and say, Lord why is it so? To which we can reply, Does the pot say to the potter why have you made me thus. (Rom 9,20-21)

We can question God's ways as long as we do it respectfully and always ready to see that Hs is going to be right.

Accepting God's will does not mean that we have to be pleased about everything that happens. It means that we put our trust in God to make whatever is wrong come right. And we can hasten that process of coming right if we are humble, Especially, humble because that means we will not oppose God's will making everything a lot harder.

We humans can get it right or wrong, and that is our privilege and burden.

Our prayer, sacraments and good works will help us be grateful for the privilege, and not to succumb under the burden.

It is a good thing to be alive. I did not ask to be born, but I am glad I was.

We should all be able to say that.

The humans have not used their privilege of understanding as faithfully as they should have.

The loss of so much potential goodness can be recovered if we repent and start again.

We are already basically happy but would  like to be a lot more happy, in our own lives and in the world in general.

The privilege of being human enables us to become more aware of the closeness of God, and His good intentions towards us.

We seek God. Other creatures cannot do that.

God did not make a mistake when He made me, or us.

Do I seek to be more than I am now, or less? On getting to Heaven we will have an expanding awareness of these things.

Then we shall know as we already are known. (1 Cor 13,12)