It's my body... isn't it?

Propers for the second Sunday in Lent

Sermon for the second Sunday in Lent

Why do we refer to a human being as somebody or address lots of people as everybody? We used to say things like, "poor soul" and we still have All Soul's Day. We also send up a sign of distress with an SOS - save our souls.

The way we talk about ourselves is significant. We know that a human being has two bits - a body we can see and a soul that we can't. Even then we get confused. Some like to say that you don't have a soul but you are a soul. Others like to say that we are made of body, mind and spirit.

This is interesting: we have moved away from talking about souls and focus more on bodies. Because souls are not obvious and really the most personal aspects of who we are, we have difficulty talking about them and our language reflects that.

And it has consequences.

[PAUSE]

The more we focus on our bodies the more we believe that we are just bodies. We forget about the needs of our soul. We begin to think that as long as our bodies are happy, our souls must be happy too. And when our body needs something then we think that what it needs is good for the soul.

And St Paul says, "rubbish!"

[PAUSE]

He will tell you that the wants of your body are at war with the wants of your soul. That's not saying that they are always in direct opposition: we need to eat, drink, sleep and keep warm to keep body and soul together and stay alive. But what the body thinks it needs are often completely at odds with what the soul needs to thrive.

What we do with our body affects our soul.

What we fail to do with our soul affects our body.

[PAUSE]

When the Gentiles are first welcomed into the Church, they are told that they must not eat food sacrificed to idols not must they engage in fornication. Look at that! Both these conditions are to do with the conduct of our bodies. Gentiles do not have to keep the whole of the Hebrew Law but they do have to keep themselves pure. They have to see that what we do does affect who we are. Impure actions start in our soul and are strengthened when we carry out those actions in our body. 

It matters what we eat and it matters who we sleep with. It may feel right in our bodies, but it may not be right in our souls.

[PAUSE]

But we don't know our souls very well. You know already that we have difficulty in understanding and talking about them. This means that we have to trust God and what He tells us about our souls. God gives us moral standards to live by because He can see our souls and bodies.

If He tells us that we must not sleep with people outside marriage and that marriage exists only between a man and a woman, then we have to take Him at His word. To do otherwise damages the soul.

Of course, if we have forgotten about the soul then we are tempted to see sex as one of God's good gifts to be enjoyed without understanding the limits of how it is good for us. We are now seeing people so focussed on the needs of their bodies that they become depressed when those needs are met. Meeting those needs is being confused with Love: how can it be Love if it satisfies the body and not the soul?

[PAUSE]

Lent gives us an opportunity to listen to what our body says it needs and take it with a pinch of salt. We put aside in satisfying bodily needs completely in order to listen to our souls and, most importantly, to God Who knows us better than we know ourselves.

[PAUSE]

Perhaps also we need to stop talking about everybody and begin to start talking about everysoul instead. Perhaps in doing so, we shall turn our gaze back to the Holy Spirit and realise we don't have a body - it is being lent to us by God.

Apostles for all

Propers for the first Sunday in Lent

Sermon for the first Sunday in Lent

The bishops are the successors of Our Lord's first Apostles, those eleven men who sit at His table, who hear Him in the synagogues and then go out giving up everything, even their very lives, for the truth of His Resurrection. Those eleven become twelve with the addition of St Matthias, and then fourteen with St Paul and St Barnabas and so on...

The earliest Christians chart these Apostles and their successors and they show that, for the good of the Church, these Apostles are to be succeeded in our bishops so that the whole Church throughout Time may receive the grace of God that the Disciples receive.

But what of us who aren't bishops. Do we just sit there like sheep and let the bishops do all the work?

[PAUSE]

There is a tendency among certain sorts of Christian to be lazy. These say, "I'm okay. I'm saved. There's nothing for me to do except sit in the congregation and bask in God's love." These will sit and criticise their bishops or priests and question their message and not do anything other than do what they want to do in smug self-satisfaction.

These are the Christians that St Paul encounters at Corinth.

[PAUSE]

Having written his beautiful first letter to the Church in Corinth, St Paul receives a reply in which his credentials as an apostle are called into question. They think that his message to them doesn't suit them.

We see St Paul demonstrate that he is better qualified for apostleship than any of their false apostles but that he glories only in the Cross of Christ. What we see now is that he turns the tables on these false apostles. If they truly glory in the Cross of Christ, then they will pick up their cross with enthusiasm.

[PAUSE]

For St Paul, apostleship is a perpetual Lent. It means giving up what is good for Christ. It means receiving unjust punishment for Christ. It means being willing to put your head above the parapet to proclaim the Gospel and risk a cannon ball to the face. 

And this is not restricted to the bishops. As Catholics we are to participate in the ministry of our bishops. We aren't to sit there and let them do all the work. We aren't to sit glued to Facebook and watch them get abused for the Gospel they preach. We aren't to see them as figures to snipe at. We are to share their work. The bishops are bidden to give God's grace to you in order for you to do something with it. The sacrament of Confirmation is open to all Christians and in it we receive the grace to work actively as Christians in the world. If we don't then we receive God's grace in vain. We bury our talent and will have to receive the consequences when the Master comes to collect His talents once more with interest.

[PAUSE]

Our Lent should be looking to give up ourselves for the good of the Church. We should look at ways in which God through His bishops sends us out to work for good for those who need to hear and receive the good news and God's hope in their pain, sorrow, fear and doubt. We should listen carefully to God this Lent and hear how He sends us.

And then, when He sends us, we pick up our cross and walk with it into the world for the love of all.

A fast reflection

A reflection for Ash Wednesday on the nature of fasting.

Identifying Love

Propers for Quinquagesima

Sermon for Quinquagesima

St Paul talks of love and we know that it's this unconditional love that we can have for each other. We also know that God is love and that He commands us to love Him and to love our neighbour.

How can love be a commandment? Can God be such an insecure tyrant as to demand that we love Him?

[PAUSE]

Ah! He commands that we love Him. He does not demand that we love Him.

Just as He commands the universe to be, just as He commands fire to be hot, just as He commands gravity to hold planets and galaxies together and electricity to power motors and just as He commands human beings to be a fusion of body, mind and spirit, so does He command us to love because He wants us to share His life with us.

If God is love then love needs to be shared and God has created us to share it. Love unites us to God. There is nothing that can separate from God's love for us except our own non-existence. His love for us is unconditional. If we are to know what love is then we must begin with God. This is why this commandment is first. In order to love our neighbour, we must first love God.

Can human beings love anything unconditionally?

[PAUSE]

What stops us from loving unconditionally is sin. A conditional love is not the love from God because God's love is unconditional. Thus any restriction on love must be the consequence of sin somewhere down the line, either directly our fault or the consequence of others' sins. The fact that we need marriage vows in the first place arises precisely because they can be broken.

There is a further trouble. We might not put conditions on our love for someone else but we can and do put conditions on what it means for someone to love us. Sometimes we claim that we cannot be loved unless we are loved for who we are.

Sometimes we claim that unless we are not accepted as we are, we cannot be loved.

[PAUSE]

The trouble is that, actually, we don't get to say who we are: God does. God gives us being but we shape our being with what we do. If we sin then we distort ourselves and must return to our Creator. If we make sin part of ourselves and demand that people accept that sin, then we deprive ourselves of God because we are separating ourselves from Him.

[PAUSE]

We hear people say, "God loves me for who I am!" This is true. But when we say that, what we often mean is, "God loves me for who I say I am!' and that is not true. God does not love us for who we say we are. He loves us for who we are. 

If we want to be loved for who we say we are then God will give us what we want. It will be so much less than what He offers. It will be less than unity with Him. It will be separation - eternally so. It will be Hell. 

God's love can only be fulfilled by returning to Him and allowing ourselves to be loved for who we really are. This means a sacrifice of things which stand in the way. This means a rejection of things which tell us that we are something less than who we really are. This means a fast from good things in order to find better things. This means a fast from seeking the fulfillment of the lusts of the flesh in order to find reunion with God through the humanity of Christ Jesus Our Lord.

[PAUSE]

Our actions do shape ourselves which is why we are justified by faith and works together. Our Lenten fast must be an action that turns us to the Light of Christ so that we can strip away the conditions that we put on loving and being loved. The result will be a fulfillment of God's commandments to love and an Eternity of knowing exactly how God loves us. 

Why should the Anglican Catholic Church grow?

 A reflection on what we are trying to achieve when we say we want the church to grow.

How to win followers and influence people.

Propers for Sexagesima

Sermon for Sexagesima

You may have noticed that the world of Social Media has brought forth a new type of person - the Influencer. These are people who gather such a following that businesses pay them to advertise their products and thus influence their followers. These are the superstars of Instagram: social media royalty. Their voices are heard across the internet.

Whose is the most influential voice you hear? What makes them influence you so?

[PAUSE]

St Paul finds himself faced with the Church at Corinth who doesn't really take him seriously. The Corinthian Influencers don't think highly of St Paul and looking down upon his teaching. They have a different message for Corinth based on their success and status and St Paul is rather low in their estimation.

The question that St Paul is asks the Corinthians is what is it about these influencers that makes what they say of better value than what he says. Is it their education? Well, Paul is well-educated. Is it their Jewish heritage? Well, St Paul's is impeccable. Is it the exciting life they lead? Well, St Paul's life has been a roller coaster since the road to Damascus. In fact, anything that makes the Corinthian Influencers worthy of their influence, St Paul has in spades. 

But it's all worthless.

St Paul says that his position as an Influencer is utterly irrelevant. The Corinthians are not listening to the right people because the people who influence them most do not preach the Cross of Christ.

The Influencers speak from their status, their learning, their heritage, their life experience. The Cross of Christ speaks of embarrassment, humiliation, pain and death. Anything that has given these Influencers is shown to be worthless when nailed to the Cross.

What St Paul glories in is the Truth and nothing less. Away with all earthly authority authority! Away with power, status, charm and good looks! Away with degrees, education and learning. It is the Cross of Christ that is to be preached of its own weight, not because someone tells you to.

[PAUSE]

Our Lord wants us to follow Him from our own choice and conviction, not because people tell us to follow Him. We weigh the words of St Paul and we find that they are supremelyvaluable based on what he says not on who he is. The Bishops of the Church have the ministry of teachers but they are duty bound to teach only the truth of the Gospel. Even if we dislike our priest or our bishop intensely, we must put that dislike aside and weigh what they say.

[PAUSE]

In recent years, we have had bishops telling us that the Resurrection is just a story. One very senior woman has recently accused St Paul of being wrong to cast out a demon. If we listen to what these people say, we can hear that they have corrupted the teaching of the Church. They have become Corinthian Influencers seeking to preach a popular, fashionable Gospel which lacks any substance. Their gospel is a gospel of earthly justice. It is not the Justice of God.

[PAUSE]

God has given us a brain to use to weigh up what we hear and see, so that we might find Him. The existence of the Church and her teaching is His gift to us for all time so that we are not blown about by the winds of doctrine puffed out by Corinthian Influencers. 

[PAUSE]

The words of St Paul point solely to the Word of God by Whom we shall be judged. Let the Word speak for Himself in His Gospel, in His Church and in your lives.

Captain Tom and the Light to lighten the Gentiles

 

A reflection on the life of a remarkable old soldier and the encouragement of Christ.