Generating hope

Sermon for the first Sunday in Advent

How long is a generation? Twenty-five years? Fifty years? We talk of Generation X and Generation Z as both beginning in the latter half of the twentieth century, so it's clearly not much more than fifty years. 

If this is true then how do we account for Our Lord's words when He says, "Assuredly, I say to you, this generation will by no means pass away till all things take place."? Of course, He is talking of all the frightening things that will happen before the Son of Man comes in glory. If that's true, wouldn't they have happened by now?

[PAUSE]

There are prominent biblical scholars who say that because Jesus says this, He is not the promised Messiah but just a prophet waiting for the end. They say He is not the Son of Man who is to come in glory. Do not listen to them! St John the Evangelist bears wireless to Jesus saying that He will be recognised as the Son of Man when He is crucified. 

Our Lord is saying quite clearly that He will come again before the end of the generation. And, yet again, we can ask ourselves, "if this is true have we missed it?"

[PAUSE]

Remember how tempting it is to worry that it's been too long and we should have seen something by now. This is a temptation of the Devil to make us downcast and despair. All through our lives, the Devil does his best to get us to focus on the earth and forget about Heaven. All the more reason for us to lift up our heads and look up! We need to wake up out of our despair at the brokenness of the World and see the coming dawn.

Yes, we're still here and the generation has not passed away. This is because there is another meaning to the word.

A mother and a father generate a family - that's what the word means, thus a generation belongs to a family. When the family is old enough, it becomes a race of people. The generation that Jesus is speaking of is the family of Abraham: the family that Abraham generates that will be as numerous as the dust of the Earth. 

And so, we see that Our Lord is saying that the family of Abraham will not pass away before His return. This is good news for our Jewish brothers and sisters! The Messiah is waiting for them! But don't forget that we Christians are also of the generation of Abraham grafted in to the family as St Paul says. 

[PAUSE]

When the Lord comes again, the children of Israel and the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church will be there waiting for Him. It is our duty and our joy to lift up our heads into the dark of the night to wait for His coming dawn. We have not missed it, for Man has not changed since the moment of his generation. There is still sin and there is still repentance. There is still hatred and there is still love. There is still pain and there is still an end to pain. The world may appear to be falling to all manner of war, famine, pestilence and death but Christ is still present to His People and Christ is still coming in glory: this generation has not passed away for we are that generation. This is our joy but it is our duty.

[PAUSE]

We have to show this world that the events of two thousand years in our past are still very much in our present and future. Our Faith is so old and we have been waiting a long, long time. But we are still here. The Gospel hasn't changed so we don't need to try change it for today. The grace of the sacraments hasn't changed so we don't need to try and change the way we administer them. God has not changed so we don't need to update the way we approach Him for this generation has not changed nor passed away. A church that rejects the old will never see the new.

[PAUSE]

So here we stand again at another one of two thousand Advent Sundays. And still we raise our heads from a dying world towards God's light. And still we say, "Come, Lord Jesus!" And then we have hope.

As we forgive those...

 

A reflection on the need to be a forgiving Church.

Comings and goings

Sermon for the Sunday next before Advent

"Behold! The days come...," shouts the prophet Jeremiah, and the days do come. The Messiah appears, teaches, works wonders, is crucified, dies, rises again from the dead and ascends to Heaven in glory. And we have missed it. The days have come and gone. And we look upon the words of Jeremiah only with hindsight.

[PAUSE]

The passage of time does happen. It isn't an illusion: we do truly grow up and grow old. We experience that and, further, this is an experience common to everyone. There is, however, an illusion we suffer from: this is the illusion that once something has passed it no longer has any part of our lives. Our great-great-great-great grandparents may be dead but our existence now depends on the fact that they will always exist in the records of Time. Indeed, if there were no first parent there would be no us!

The illusion that we have is that the past is not as important as the future. We can see that in today's throwaway culture. As soon as our phone outlives its use, it gets thrown away and is forgotten about. We forget our old school teachers because we grow up, and we forget what we are taught because we don't need that knowledge.

But this cannot be true for the Christian. To the world, Jesus is in the past and gone. To us, He is present here and now and we shall see Him with our eyes and touch Him with our tongues in the Blessed Sacrament. For us, the Past is as present as the Now is. The Christian needs to learn how to experience the past in the present. The Christian needs to learn how to help the children experience the past in the present. The Christian needs to be a child of Eternity.

[PAUSE]

Being a Child of Eternity means that we regard the testimony of the First Christians to be of as much important as the Christians of today. In fact, the First Christians are truly fortunate because the ministry of Our Lord is in their living memory, unlike ours. And yet, we are surrounded by the great cloud of saints who are still with us. They may appeared to have died but their death is only a death to this fleeting world. Their lives are in Christ and Christ lives now.

Being a Child of Eternity means we are to live the Christian life in which we grow in God. We may fail but we recognise our failures and make amends before Almighty God. Our time is spent growing, healing and becoming in Christ.

[PAUSE]

Today is the last Sunday of the Liturgical Year. Today we look back on the person we once were and see how far we have come. Next Sunday, we begin to look forward again to the coming of Christ once more. We begin the New Year with a new start but from the old place of where we are now. In Christ, all things are new because all things are now: this is what Eternity is. We may be bound to Time with its past, present and future, but the salvation that Christ promises us fills our past, present and future, shoring us up for Eternity.

To this world, we come and we go. To Heaven, we just are. We cannot live our lives rejecting our forefathers because we stand with them in Eternity. They are our neighbours in Eternity and we must love them and learn from them. We must be faithful to the Church Eternal.

Any church which believes that it has to alter the truth in order to minister to Christians of any age is in danger of losing its neighbours in Eternity. A church which seeks relevance in the present age will be stuck to this present age: it will lose both the past and the future by being unfaithful to the Church Eternal.

[PAUSE]

We do not seek to be relevant in any day and age but rather to be consistent with every day and age. At the end of this Liturgical Year, we prepare ourselves to bring the same Catholic Faith into the New Liturgical Year. The prayers will be the same; the rites will be the same; the sacraments will be the same; but we will be different through growth in Christ. Then, one day, freed from past, present and future, we will become Children of Eternity and participate in an Eternal Liturgy before the throne of God Himself.

Is the English Rite Right?

 

A few thoughts on how ethnicity affects the Church and how we should seek unity rather than uniformity.

Salvation and the twiddling of thumbs

Sermon for the twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity

Hooray for the Colossians! St Paul is clearly extremely thankful for what is happening in that church. He has heard of their faith in Our Lord; he has heard of their love for one another; and he has heard of their hope in the promise of Heaven. What more could he wish for?

And yet he does want more from the Colossians! They are not done yet.

[PAUSE]

St Paul wants the Colossians to be filled with the knowledge of God's will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; he wants them to walk worthy of the Lord and please Him; he wants them to be fruitful in all good works and increasing in the knowledge of God.

Why? Why does St Paul want more for the Colossians? Is their faith in the Lord not enough? If the Colossians have already been saved, then St Paul's prayers are irrelevant: they'll be answered in Heaven so there's no need to make any spiritual progress on Earth 

[PAUSE]

There is a temptation to see our salvation as a one-off event in our lives. If that's true then the moment we are saved we have to start twiddling our thumbs until the Second Coming. If we are saved at one moment in time then our life from then on is inconsequential - it doesn't matter. 

But then, you could say, isn't our life from then on just a case of helping others see the light of Christ and spreading the Gospel? That's hardly thumb-twiddling. This is a good point: if we have faith in God then we should love our neighbour as ourselves. But if we are saved, then it doesn't matter whether we do love our neighbours as ourselves. All the saved people could just cease to preach the Gospel and that would be the end of that.

It seems clear to say that we are saved from the moment we believe is not consistent with what St Paul understands nor what Christ's salvation means. The fact is that we are meant to grow and, as the Lord says, bear fruit that shall lasts. If our fruit is to last then it cannot be the fruit of this world which will pass away. If our fruit is to last then we are growing it for Eternity. We are becoming saved because we are becoming like Christ. It isn't enough for the man to believe that Jesus will raise his daughter, he has to ask Him. It isn't enough for the woman to believe that her flow of blood can be stopped, she must touch the hem of the Lord's garment. Faith demands action and that action will cultivate faith. In that sense, in choosing to follow God, we play our own part in our own creation and perfection. That creation and perfection depends absolutely on God's love for us, but it is God's love that gives us the choice as to how we grow in Him. Jesus saves us but we have a choice in precisely who we are for Him to save.

[PAUSE]

We have to see that our salvation in Christ is a process: a journey towards the horizon where God stands in His infinite light. The Colossians will bear the fruit of the Holy Ghost at the prayers of St Paul. And he will pray for us too - if we choose to ask him rather than twiddling our thumbs waiting for salvation.

Fear, St Martin and the Armistice

 

A reflection on the role that fear plays in destabilising us and why the acquisition of courage is vital for the Christian Faith.

What Caesar owns

Sermon for the twenty-third Sunday after Trinity

You've obviously got the idea by now. "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's." But then you've had that question in your head, "doesn't God own everything?" That means Caesar owns nothing and so we don't need to pay taxes after all! Hooray!

Except Jesus pays the temple tax for Himself and for Peter, so clearly there is something wrong with thinking that we don't have to pay tax because God owns everything.

So what does Jesus mean? Does Caesar actually own something that needs to be paid back?

[PAUSE]

The relationship between the Christian and the World is rather strained. We are to be in the world and not of it. All through His ministry to us, Our Lord makes it clear that material goods don't really mean much when we consider God's love for us. If someone wants our cloak, we give our tunic. If someone wants us to go one mile, we go two. We give them up because they don't matter as much to us as God does.

Of course, clothes, houses, food and money have uses. They are good to have so that the business of living isn't too hard: we are frail human beings after all. Even Our Lord makes use of clothes, houses, food and money because, in His Human Nature, He is as weak and frail as we are. But these things aren't our life. They aren't worth losing a walk with God.

[PAUSE]

We see around us a world raging because of the inequality of money and resources. There are revolutions and rebellions against the rich about whatever they are rich in. Claiming ownership over something material often leads to strife and hatred somewhere along the line. And Jesus tells us that paying taxes is not worth losing sleep over: all is God's and He will give and take away as He pleases. It is our own inmost love for Him that matters. 

[PAUSE]

If God has created us then we are His. The world forgets that. We have to learn to render our very selves to God. To whatever we render ourselves, that is what we worship. Whatever we spend our time, energy, pain and self on, that is the thing we truly worship. Where our treasure is, there our heart is also. Shouldn't our hearts be in the tabernacle with Our Lord?

Bound to the Dead

 

A reflection on the nature of praying for each other whether we are alive or beyond this life.