A Long Engagement

Propers for Palm Sunday

Thoughts for Palm Sunday

Today, it is customary to let the Long Gospel speak its profound truths for itself.

Rather than hear a sermon, perhaps it is better to prepare ourselves to hear the message of the Long Gospel by looking at how we react to its words.

1) If we wave our palms with joy at the triumphal entry of Our Lord into Jerusalem, how do we then stand with the crowd and shout, "Crucify"? How does this happen?

2) How does Pilate make us feel? Do we see a governor pressured into killing an innocent man, or do we see one whose political ambition blinds him to the Truth standing in front of him? What would it take for us to come to the opposite conclusion? What would it take for us to forgive Pilate?

3) As we walk with the Lord to Golgotha, what do we hear from the crowd? Are these voices heard in our lives? Are these voices heard in our own hearts?

4) As we watch the Lord being crucified and hear His words of forgiveness, how far does our ability to forgive really extend? What is its limit? How often do we pray to go beyond that limit?

5) As we watch Our Lord die, how do we see our own death approach? Are we ready to go? If not, why not? If Death comes tomorrow, are we ready?

6) As we watch Our Lord being buried, are we willing to bury someone we love in the tomb we have prepared for ourselves?

When the present predates the past

Propers for Passion Sunday

Sermon for Passion Sunday

Today is a day of revelation. Today we find the answer to two questions which still are asked today. These two questions have the same answer and you know that answer for you hear it from the words of Our Lord Himself.

First question: why is Jesus killed?

Second question: who does Jesus think He is?

The answer: "Before Abraham was, I AM."

[PAUSE]

This one sentence from Our Lord brings out the murderous side of the Jewish leaders. Stones are picked up at the ready. Faces are contorted in incredulous anger. Fingers are stuck in ears in a vain attempt to shut out those terrible words.

"Before Abraham was, I AM."

Jesus has revealed the truth.

Jesus is God.

In one little sentence any idea that Jesus is just a good man, just a wise teacher, just a social revolutionary, are all overturned. 

"Before Abraham was, I AM."

[PAUSE]

You can tell that there is something odd about this sentence because it doesn't make grammatical sense. And then your ears are drawn back in time and you hear the same voice calling out of the burning bush, "I AM THAT I AM". 

This is the most holy name that God gives Himself to Moses so that the Jews might know Him. This is the Name that accompanies the God of Jacob, Isaac and Abraham. This is the Name that goes right back to the beginning. At the beginning of it all, before anything exists, God is.

And Jesus is saying that His present predates the past. His Now comes before our Then.

There is only one way for this to happen. Jesus Himself has always existed beyond Time. Not even the angels can say that. For now, for our sake, Jesus is made lower than the angels and soon, in our time, He will be crowned with thorns and spitting.

Still later on in our time is He risen, ascended, glorified, crowned with glory and honour above the angels.

[PAUSE]

A good man cannot predate the past.

A good teacher cannot predate the past.

A social reformer cannot predate the past.

Either Jesus is mistaken.

Or He is lying.

Or He is deluded.

Or He is telling a parable.

Or He is telling the truth.

The miracles He performs, His resurrection from the dead, His appearance to five hundred people after His death show very clearly that He is telling the truth.

Jesus Christ is God indeed!

It is for this truth that He suffers.

It is for this truth that He dies.

It is this truth that He came to us in the first place, to give us His good news.

Jesus is God and He loves us.

Do not be deceived by those who say that Jesus never claims to be God. 

"Before Abraham was, I AM"

You can't get clearer than that!

Findings your tradition with St Joseph

 A reflection on how we seek stability in our walk with God.

A mother's covenant

Propers for the fourth Sunday in Lent

Sermon for the fourth Sunday in Lent

What's the difference between a contract and a covenant?

It's easy to get bogged down in legal terms here, especially in a day and age in which everything we do is accompanied by a list of terms and conditions which we have to sign. Even accepting cookies requires a statement of consent. 

In many ways there is little difference as they produce more or less the same effect: an agreement between two parties.

The real difference between contract and covenant lies in how it affects the relationship between two parties. A contract exists only as a legal entity. It consists of an offer, the acceptance of that offer and the considerations of the implications of that offer. If the terms in the contract are met then there is nothing beyond it.

A covenant sets the context of a contract. A marriage may be legally expressed in terms of the contract but those terms carry with them the relationship between husband and wife with all the emotional details, the love, the kisses, the arguments, the better, worse, richer, poorer, sickness and health. The covenant is the stage on which the contract plays out.

And this is where Sarah and Hagar cone in.

[PAUSE]

St Paul uses these two mothers to illustrate the difference between the ways which we approach God's covenant.

Hagar represents the covenant of the Law. Everything is expressed in terms of a contract, the "thou shalt"s and the "thou shalt not"s. For the Pharisees, the Law is everything and any meaningful relationship with God is pushed to one side in order to fulfill what the Law says. But, when the Law is fulfilled there is nothing left. It is done and dusted. When the Law is not fulfilled then there is sin and punishment and sanction and condemnation. The Law can do nothing about the effects of sin. All it does is say what sin is.

[PAUSE]

Sarah represents the covenant in which the Law is set as an expression of God's love for His people and how He desires a relationship with His people. He gives us His blood of the New Covenant in order to drink into our bodies His life and love. In Him the Law means something - a contract that we love Him and our neighbour in order to deepen that relationship and rid ourselves of the evil that threatens our very existence.

Notice, it is God who starts the covenant. In each case, it is God who makes the offer, sets the terms and allows us to accept or reject those terms. We cannot begin to do what is good without first knowing what good is. And we cannot know what good is without God first showing us what it is by showing us Himself. This is the grace He gives us in a covenant which we didn't ask for.

[PAUSE]

You often hear the petulant teenager shout, "I didn't ask to be born!" This is true. We have a covenant put upon us by just being born. We have a covenant with our mothers simply by their pregnancy with us. They have a duty to see that pregnancy to the end. We have a duty to honour them and look after them in their old age. A mother's covenant is very powerful.

God's covenant is more powerful still for it is His Will not only that we come into being but that we should continue to be. But this covenant is expressed through Mother Sarah rather than Mother Hagar. We may not ask for this covenant but the benefits that it gives us are more than we can ever dream. 

In this covenant we are loved, we are sought, we mean something, we have a value beyond our wildest imaginings. And the contract of this covenant is written upon the Cross on which God is crucified and which we receive in the Sacrifice of the Mass through our membership of Mother Church.

Your opinion is not that important

 

A reflection on the nature of our opinions and how they relate to the worship of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Shutting the door on Sin

Propers for the third Sunday in Lent

Sermon for the third Sunday in Lent

How many temptations have affected you today? Have you kept count of them? Do you know what the biggest ones are?

[PAUSE]

Lent begins with the recognition of temptation in our lives as Christians. The Lord confronts the Devil who tries to tempt Him using His bodily needs, His mission to proclaim the Kingdom of God and His relationship with His Father. 

Every aspect of ourselves can be used for sin and we often find ourselves with "secret faults" - sins that we fall into that we don't recognise as sins in the first place. The trouble is that the Devil is very convincing and will use every means at his disposal to destroy us and those whom we love.

We can see this in the Pharisees who denounce Our Lord as possessed by a devil. They are steeped in the Holy Scriptures and fulfil all that the Law demands but this doesn't protect them from the temptation to be proud. They value their own observance of the Law above the worship of God. Pride knocks at the door of their hearts and they let it in because it has a familiar face that pleases them. 

If temptation didn't have a pleasing face then we wouldn't let it through the door of our hearts.

This is why Lent is hard.

[PAUSE]

Isaiah says of Our Lord that He is not beautiful to look at that we should be drawn to Him. He knocks on our door but He does not have a face that will allure us into opening up. He is concerned with what is true, not what looks good to us. He might not look beautiful but He looks true, authentic, the real deal.

He does not worm His way into our hearts with vain promises of fulfilling our hearts' desire. He wants to give us more than that but we can be so focussed on feeling comfortable that we simply do not appreciate the spiritual worth of Our Lord's love. 

Christianity is hard work and it is only after we put the effort in, make sacrifices and reject what is good for something better that we begin to see a glimpse of its true value.

[PAUSE]

The Devil will try to persuade us using vain words that we are not being tempted really and taking what we want is okay. He may even reason from the Bible! He will present something easy and immediately gratifying. However, his argument will always have a falsehood. 

You may even see churches fall into temptation and away from God. They have been tricked by arguments in which the values of today's society are being read into Holy Scripture. They have forgotten that the Church has been given the moral values to live by - values with which modern society struggles with. St Paul tells us that we have to walk apart from all those who are disobedient to God and seek to turn others to their way of thinking. That does not mean that we should stop loving them. This does not mean that we denounce them as being of the Devil. This does not mean that we browbeat them until they come back.

It means we pray for them, do all that's good for them, respect their free will, try to see Christ in then however marred. But we do not walk with them, preferring to stick to what the Church has always taught. 

[PAUSE]

Above all, we need to check carefully who is knocking at the door of our hearts. Sins have beautiful faces which they push right up to the peephole. But we recognise them as sins because God has told us that they are.

Then we lock, bolt and batten down the door and turn to God who is already here in our heart waiting for us to look for Him.

Standing up and being counted for the Love of God

 

Why Christians need to risk the "cancel culture" to promote the message of God's love.

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.

Combing out hard labour.

Propers for Septuagesima

Sermon for Septuagesima

We are now in an age in which we have major labour-saving devices: washing machines, microwaves, even self-cleaning glass in our windows. If our devices really do save labour, why are we still working so hard?

[PAUSE]

It doesn't really matter whether we are slugabeds or earlybirds, the work that faces each of us is hard and often we feel disheartened at facing our labours. Like the Red Queen on her run with Alice through the looking glass, we seem to put an enormous amount of energy into just staying still. If we don't, things just fall apart. Why?

[PAUSE]

When Humanity is cast out of the Garden of Eden, God tells us, "Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."

Notice God doesn't curse the ground. He tell us that it is cursed by us. Our hard work is as much a consequence of our disobedience as smashed china is a consequence of letting go of Grandma's favourite milk jug. God's creation is ordered and Humanity's free decision is to disorder it based on the Devil's lie. God tolerates this because He loves us enough to let us be free to choose.

It means that all of our lives follow paths like tangled hair. They knot and intertwine until our paths become hard and complicated. The more we look to do our own will apart from God, the more we knot and tangle not only our lives but the lives of everyone else! No wonder it hurts when we try to straighten things out. No wonder the prospect of God running a comb through our lives is frightening.

[PAUSE]

"It is but lost labour that ye haste to rise up early, and so late take rest, and eat the bread of carefulness : for so he giveth his beloved sleep."

In our hard work, we often lose sight of ourselves and our relationship with God. We work in vain, our lives tangling and snagging on the result of our brothers and sisters trying to live their lives. We cannot escape hard labour.

But we can look beyond it.

God gives His beloved sleep.

[PAUSE]

We live our lives for God. While that doesn't excuse us from Life's hardship, it does allow us to see ourselves as part of God's Creation and in the light of His promise of rest with Him. God labours six days to create and rests when His labour is complete. We, too, have the promise of His rest from our labours.

[PAUSE]

Labouring for God is hard work indeed, whatever time we pick up our shovel. But it's end is God Himself waiting like the prize at the end of the race. We will weep, we will struggle, we will hurt and be in agony, but all things - absolutely all things - work for good for those who love God.

We just keep calm, carry on and keep praying. It's all we can do, but God will do the rest.

When Controversy calls

 

A reflection on controversial saints and controversial decisions.

A bevy of bishops

A reflection on the nature of episcopacy.

Angrily Unable

Propers for the third Sunday after Epiphany

Sermon for the third Sunday after Epiphany

The first few weeks of 2021 tell us a good deal about the state of our political health. It's not looking good. There's a lot of noise, a lot of recriminations, a lack of respect for those in political office. There is much anger.

Much of that anger comes from the fact that our politicians won't do as we tell them to do. Surely, we elect them on the basis that they represent us at the level of government. But often, we don't feel as if we are being represented. When the opposing party gains power, we become angry. Why?

[PAUSE]

Much of our anger comes from the fact that we feel powerless, that no-one is listening to us, that things we know to be wrong are happening but we can't stop them. The Twentieth Century has seen many dreadful instances of inhumanity committed against God's children that we cry, "no more!" We have learned to stand up and shout. We have learned to resist. We have learned that we can stand up to bullies.

This is all well and good, but is everyone we oppose really a bully? Is everyone whose politics we oppose really like Hitler?

[PAUSE]

Often we can see parallels with history and surmise that, if we do nothing, atrocities will happen again. "Those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it," we say. This would be true if the conditions now are precisely the same as they were back then. But, no matter how proficient in history we think ourselves to be, our knowledge of the world is imperfect and we don't know all the facts. The future is not always going to be a complete repetition of the past. The temptation is to cling to our knowledge of history and be angry with those who don't see things the way we do. We are angry because we are powerless to make people know what we know.

[PAUSE]

We know how God wants us to be moral creatures, how we should revere life, how we should not tolerate the destruction of the innocent. Yet, the people in power seem utterly oblivious to the innocent and seek to put the rights of others above the needs of those who cannot speak for themselves. But they are in power and we are not. We become angry because we are powerless.

[PAUSE]

Our society is angry because we do not have the power to make things right. We can't heal the sick or let the oppressed go free. We can't admonish sinners or counsel the doubtful. We see Christian businesses suffer for holding Christian beliefs. We see Churches attacked for promoting good moral values and the worship of God. We see people who have nothing but distain for Christ come to power and influence and utter blasphemy upon blasphemy upon blasphemy.

And we become angry. And what does God do about it?

"Vengeance is mine," says the Lord.

And, to exact that vengeance, He gets Himself crucified.

[PAUSE]

St Paul says, "give place into wrath." That place is the cross. Our wrath comes from a lack of control. But God is in control.

If we berate our politicians for tolerating, or even promoting, the suffering of the innocent then we must remember that God tolerates the suffering of the innocent out of respect for all humanity. That does not mean that He actively wants the innocent to suffer but rather He, and only He, has the power to make that suffering more than worthwhile. His methods are far beyond our understanding and His love for every human being is beyond anything we can give.

We are utterly powerless to make this world a better place to live but that's a good thing because what we think is "better" is highly imperfect. If we want to make the world a better place then we need to start with oursrlves. If we want the world to be perfect then we need to be perfect first. 

Be angry and sin not.

[PAUSE]

The only way we can deal with the departure of politics from God's law is to recognise our limitations and do what we can. Once we have reached out limit, we must pray with tears and sorrow and let our impotence run its course. 

God's weakness is stronger than our strength. God's crucifixion is more glorious than our greatest achievement. In Him, the suffering of the innocent becomes their glory and the shame of those who caused it.

[PAUSE]

Be angry and sin not. Trust God to exact His vengeance in His way and know that justice will be done. Let us rejoice in our powerlessness rather than allow the Devil to use it to control us.

The value of Martyrdom

A reflection on Martyrdom in standing up to Sin.
 

Taking a cup of wine.

Propers for the second Sunday after Epiphany

Sermon for the second Sunday after Epiphany

The Lord offers you a cup of wine. Do you take it? 

If He turns water into wine for us then we have proof that God does not demand us to be teetotal. Why else would He use wine to be transformed into His blood at the Mass?

Of course, being teetotal is not a bad thing at all, but it's not something we should expect of everyone. True, it means that, if you're teetotal, you don't get drunk and thus fall into a multitude of sins. But there are other sins of excess - self-righteousness for example. 

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There are some people who use their personal discipline in abstaining from drink to take great pleasure in putting people down who enjoy a mug of beer or glass of wine. 

This is true of other forms of abstinence: there are vegans who will turn their abstinence from all animal produce into a show of greater moral character which they lord over others. While it is indeed a true and good thing to find better ways to treat animals and have a greater urgency to look after Nature, using it as a reason not to love your hamburger-munching neighbour shows that you worship a different god. 

We have to take care that, if we refuse the cup the Lord gives us, that we are not dashing it out of His hand.

Yet the cup the Lord offers is not always of wine.

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St James and St John say that they can drink of the same cup that Our Lord drinks. They drink the cup of suffering for Christ. This is something that we often forget in the comfort of our lives. Sometimes the wine that the Lord gives us is bitter or sharp, or pains us.  

Do we refuse that cup? Do we dash the cup of suffering for Christ from His hand?

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We Christians love Our Jesus. We would not willingly dash any cup from His hands. Instead, we run to Him begging Him to turn our water into wine. We  want to receive anything that He gives us gratefully because it is He that gives it to us. But often we do not recognise the wine we are given to come from Him.

We live in a depressing time where all seems dark and people seem sad and unkind. Some of us live in fear of coming darkness. Some of us fear the collapse of all that we love and hold dear. There are violence and harsh words. 

The cup we have to drink is to live in this world. The cup the Lord gives us is to tolerate living in a broken society and not turn our backs on it. The cup we are presented with is the harsh reality of being human beings separated from God by sin. This is what's in the cup and it looks horrible.

But this is just water. 

Watch as the water Jesus gives us becomes wine.

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The wine that Jesus gives us means that we can have joy despite all the troubles in this world. Even in the darkest pit, even in the deepest fear, even in the sharpest pain, there can be joy. Jesus shows us this by His death. The holy martyrs show us by the way they willingly embrace their suffering. It can be done. We, too, can have joy and laughter and love and peace and see the glory of God even in persecution if we receive fully the cup of wine God gives us. The wine is His Spirit - it is His very self! And it means we can laugh at the Devil in his very face in amidst all the sufferings that He would use to wrest us from Christ. The wine that we receive gives us the power and strength to laugh in the faces of irritation, annoyance, fury, grief and despair, and all we need to do is drink deeply of Christ's cup. We need to drain it, not taste it, spit it out and return to comfortable despair.

All this darkness will pass. All pain and suffering will pass. The wine of God gladdens our hearts and draws us to Him. Our Lord offers you His cup? Will you take it?