Catholic Contextual urban Theology, Mimetic Theory, Contemplative Prayer. And other random ramblings.

Sunday 9 November 2014

Sermon at Parish Mass 3rd Sunday before Advent (Remembrance Sunday) 2014


Wisdom 6:12-16
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Matthew 25:1-13

Baden Powell may have come up with the boy scouts, but you might think from today’s gospel that it was Jesus who invented the girl guides, at least if the motto of the wise bridesmaids was “be prepared”.

On the face of it, the Gospel story we’ve read today appears to be about being ready for a future event, planning ahead, being prepared. But, it’s a parable. Parables are stories which are meant to lead us beyond their surface to a deeper meaning. There’s always something odd about them, something that doesn’t quite fit, for example in today’s story there are ten bridesmaids – but no bride. What’s that about?

Today’s reading is set near the end of Matthew’s gospel, three days before the betrayal and death of Jesus on Good Friday. These three days before are perhaps meant to mirror the three days after of the resurrection, but the disciples as yet have no idea of the events that are about to unfold. At this point, three days before his death, Jesus delivers his last public teaching. He delivers three parables: the wise and foolish bridesmaids, that we heard today, and the parables of the talents, and the sheep and goats, that we’ll hear over the next two weeks.

Through these parables Jesus is preparing his disciples for the events that are to come, his death and resurrection and his departure from them into heaven. The disciples must not give up when these things happen, but must learn to see that God is still present and at work.

How is God at work? This parable is about a wedding, a recurring theme in the Bible. The Old Testament prophets spoke of Israel as God’s “bride”, the people whom God had chosen for himself and married, so God is the “bridegroom” of his people. But his people, like an unfaithful wife, had constantly gone off after other gods, and not kept God’s covenant.

But the prophets always insisted that God would not abandon his people. The bridegroom would bring his bride back again, make her his own once more. In other words, God was not going to forget his people, no matter what they did. God would once again “marry” his people and restore them to a right relationship with him.

So the image of the bridegroom is that of God returning to claim his people as his own once more. The message of the gospels is that God in Jesus is returning to restore his people Israel, and in fact all people, to a right relationship with him. This is why there is no bride in the parable – the bride is the people as a whole, an image that Jesus’ hearers would have understood.

What the Gospel is saying is that the arrival of the bridegroom was something happening right there and then. It was through the death and resurrection of Jesus that God was reconciling the world to himself. So this is not a story about Christ returning in some remote future. It’s much more urgent than that: this is happening now, watch, stay awake.

The parable says to keep your lamps lit. What do the lamps represent? Well, the most important function of a lamp is to shed light, so you can see what’s going on. It’s about perception. The message of the parable is, make sure you can see what’s happening. And what is happening is that God is acting in Jesus.

But most people didn’t see. They had a different perception, a different mindset. They thought that God would return in power in a great final catastrophe, to punish the wicked and reward the good. And the wicked, of course, were always other people – Romans, the ritually unclean, the mentally ill, women – always the marginalised and the outsider, who were finally going to be thrust outside for ever, whilst only the pure and good, “people like us”, would be allowed in God’s kingdom.

What people were not expecting was that God was coming to die on a cross. God was coming to undo our violence and our exclusion of others by taking the place of the marginalised and outsider, the place of the victim. In Jesus our expectations are reversed, and we see that we, too, are “outsiders”. But we also see that, through God’s love and mercy alone, we and all the other outsiders are being invited in to the feast of God’s kingdom.

In order to see that, you need God’s light to switch on in your mind, so you can perceive things differently. You need a changed mind. One of the meanings of repentance in the Bible is changing your mind, having a completely new mindset.

St Paul says, in Romans, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds”. This means learning to see that God is at work in Jesus. It means learning to see that God is in the place of the victim and not the victimiser. The lamp of our consciousness will be lit, we will be awake.

Having a lamp is also about giving light to others. Jesus says in Matthew Chapter 5, “let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven”. We are to live in the here and now so that people can see the light of God in our lives. We share that light by being witnesses for Jesus and by caring for those in need. We tend that light through prayer, sacrament and study of the Bible.

And we are to do this in the here and now, the time that Jesus prepared his disciples for. The reconciliation of the world to God through Christ continues, and the good news continues to be proclaimed. After his departure Jesus entrusted this mission to the disciples. And this continues in every generation. In the parable it grows late, it is dark, but the wise bridesmaids keep awake through the night, watching for the bridegroom. So too must we, the disciples of today, however dark the night, however long the vigil.

On this 100th anniversary of the First World War we reflect on a time of great darkness that engulfed much of the world. Violence and evil seemed to be in charge. Killing had become industrialised on a massive scale. But even in that deep darkness many souls kept the light of faith burning, praying for God’s kingdom, ministering to God’s people. Many others did what they felt they must for the sake of freedom when all choices must have seemed evil. And many found that even in darkest night, even at the last extremity, God in Jesus is present to save if we turn to him in faith.

In the hundred years since 1914 the darkness has not gone away, as history and current events show all too well. But the message of Jesus does not change. Stay awake. Keep your lamps lit. Remember that our task is not to overcome the darkness, but to bear faithful witness to the light, however dark the night may be.


This applies in our own lives as well as in the world. We will all know times of darkness and waiting. We will all know times when God seems absent. The dark night of the soul, when all consolations seem to have been withdrawn, is where we learn to trust in God alone. So stay awake, keep your lamps lit, be faithful. The end of the long vigil will be to greet the bridegroom as he reveals himself as saviour, reconciling all people to himself. The reward of the long vigil is to go in with him to the eternal feast of the Kingdom of God.

Wednesday 5 November 2014

Homily at Parish Mass, All Souls 2014



Wisdom 3:1-9
1 Peter 1:3-9
John 5:19-25

Giles Fraser was writing recently in the Guardian on the difference between Christian and Humanist funerals. The latter tend to be eulogies, speeches about how good or kind the deceased was, or what they had achieved in their life.

But this assumes there is something good to talk about. What if there isn’t? Fr Fraser talked about his experience in conducting the Christian funerals of murderers and paedophiles. What would an atheist have to say?

Christian funerals are not primarily about eulogising the dead. In fact that is really a very modern custom. Christian funerals are mainly about mercy and hope, commending the departed to the love and mercy of God. Belief in the resurrection is belief in mercy, for resurrection is God bringing something new out of disaster and loss. This means also that we need to believe in judgement. Resurrection and judgement go together as Jesus tells us:

“Just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whomsoever he wishes. The Father judges no one but has given all judgement to the Son, so that all may honour the Son just as they honour the Father.”

Judgement means naming sin for what it is and not allowing it the final word. It means God not allowing his loving purposes to be lost. Judgement means everything being brought into God’s light and redeemed. Which as we saw on Sunday is also the meaning of All Saints day. All Saints and All Souls are two sides of the same coin.

Judgement, mercy and resurrection allow us to own the truth about ourselves and not despair. Judgement gives us hope, because we are judged by a loving God. God’s love is greater than our sin. Judgement, mercy and resurrection allow us also to own the truth about those we know who have died. When we admit that even the good are sinners in need of mercy, then we are free to admit the same about those who are not so good, and those about whom we can find very little good to say at all.

With God judgement and mercy go together. In God’s light we see the truth about ourselves, but that light also gives us the opportunity to turn to God and be saved.

So this day, All Souls, we own God’s judgement and claim God’s mercy for those we call the faithful departed. These are not just those who professed Christianity in this life but also those whose faith is known to God alone, who sought God according to the light they had received.

Scripture presents us with two big things we must never lose sight of: the presence of Jesus with us now, the risen Lord who calls everyone to repent and believe in the good news of the Kingdom of God. And the life of the resurrection at the end of time, the new creation when Christ will be all in all.

I think it is because the Bible wants us to focus on these things that it doesn’t say a great deal about the present state of the faithful departed in this inbetween time. But Jesus assures us that the souls of the departed are alive in God’s presence. He said to the Sadducees, who denied the resurrection, “have you not read what was said to you by God, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”? He is God not of the dead, but of the living.”


Death does not remove us from membership of the Church. The departed are alive in the Body of Christ, even though we see them no more. When we celebrate the Eucharist we stand with the whole Church, living and departed, in celebrating the saving death and resurrection of the Lord. With the whole Church we own God’s judgement and claim God’s mercy.  And so we pray with and for the faithful departed, that the purposes of God’s love may be fulfilled in them, and that they with us may be gathered into God’s kingdom of light and peace.

Sunday 2 November 2014

Sermon at Parish Mass, All Saints 2014


Revelation 7:9-14
1 John 3:1-3
Matthew 5:1-12

There is a wave of interest in the gothic at the moment, as you may have noticed from reruns of Dracula on the TV, and series about gothic art and architecture. There is currently an exhibition at the British Library that I went to see the other week, marking 250 years since the publication of the first gothic novel, “The Castle of Otranto”, by Horace Walpole. It’s a completely bonkers story of a haunted castle in Italy but it launched a genre in literature, architecture and art. 
The gothic movement had both a light and dark side. The gothic revival produced beautiful churches, luminous and mysterious spaces intended to lift you to the heavenly realms. But it also produced dark novels such as Dracula and Frankenstein, explorations of terror and fear.
What brought this about? Partly, according to the exhibition, this was a reaction against enlightenment rationalism and the advance of science. Of course science is a good thing and has given us countless benefits, but 300 years ago its enthusiasts thought that everything could be explained, everything ordered and brought into the light of reason. Mystery was banished. Religion had become very dull. Sunday sermons were social events in fashionable churches, but congregations didn’t really expect to hear about God or Christ. At best people would pay their respects to a distant deity who might have set the universe into motion but bore little resemblance to the passionate loving God whom Jesus called Father. There was no place for the supernatural, or miracles, or for lives transformed by grace. No place for saints. 
It’s no coincidence that the gothic arrived at the same time as various revivals in the church, such as the methodist and anglo-catholic movements, all of which reasserted the spiritual reality and power of faith. Something of this overlap could be seen at Strawberry Hill, the gothic mansion built by Horace Walpole, where his most treasured objects included a reliquary that contained a bone of St Thomas Becket. Relics are tangible links with mystery and holiness, and to celebrate this feast we have some on our altars today.
Andrew Graham-Dixon, in his series on BBC4, called the gothic movement a “re-enchantment of the world”. The gothic recovered a sense of mystery both in the world around and in the world within. Human consciousness is a bit like an iceberg, there is the surface in the sunshine where light and reason hold sway, and then there are the vast hidden depths beneath. 
The enlightenment couldn’t deal with those depths, and so had lost sight of the human. Pure reason by itself wasn’t enough to account for the complexity and mystery of what it is to be a human person. The Gothic revival sought to go back to the ages of faith, when people were in touch with mystery and the supernatural. And that meant acknowledging the darkness as well as the light. Gothic novels such as Dracula were about naming the hidden desires and fears that lurk within the human subconscious. 
This is not something that should be strange to us as Christians. God in Jesus shared our human life in all its complexity and depth, to redeem it all. We are not just rational machines. God has called us out of darkness into his marvellous light, and part of that means the depths of the unconscious coming into consciousness. 
What is in those depths within? Bishop Richard has spoken of the need to acknowledge “this thing of darkness that is mine”. Lurking secrets, parts of ourselves we have never explored, the source of our violence and hatred and uncontrolled desires, yes, all that is there. But deeper still is the source of being who is God himself. Go down deep enough and the clear pure spring is there. Redemption in Christ does not deny the darkness within but brings it into his light.
The Book of Revelation, part of which we heard this morning, is a very gothic book. There is light and darkness and terror and much laying bare of what goes on beneath the surface of things. But in the end it is about a movement from darkness into God’s light. The great multitude we saw today have been through the “great ordeal”, a terrible and destructive violence like that which Jesus suffered on the cross. But now they are robed in white and worshipping the Lamb. They followed his pattern of suffering and now share his glory. And he will guide them to the springs of the water of life, the source of being which is the truest and most abiding thing in the depths within.
In the face of the great ordeal, this is the only enlightenment that makes any sense. The convulsive violence that engulfs the world in Revelation is not rational, calm, or ordered. But it is how the world is, as we can very well see. And it comes from the depths of the human heart. God in Jesus has embraced that reality on the Cross, has drunk the cup of wrath to the full. In God’s light the world appears in the full horror of the truth, and in God’s light it is redeemed. The darkness is not explained away, not reasoned out of existence, not suppressed. The mystery of being human is not denied, but redeemed. 
This is the other meaning of the feast of All Saints: everything is made holy. We think of this as the feast of all the people who are alive in Christ and so are saints, and that is true. But it is also the feast of all sanctified, everything made holy. It is the feast of Christ who is the head of all creation, the fullness of him who himself fills all things. This means among other things everything from the depths within brought into the consciousness of God. Everything known and redeemed.
And this is what it is to be a saint. To be redeemed. For the darkness to be brought into God’s light. For the springs of living water to be opened even in those depths where we only dare to look because God is already there and sees all. The saints rejoice around the throne of the Lamb who alone can bring all of this world of sin, and all of the depths within, into his kingdom. The saints, who were part of that world of sin, suffered its great ordeal, but because they had faith in the Lamb they were not overcome. 
Jesus has opened to us the consciousness of God, and to enter into that consciousness is to become like God, as 1 John says. “What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” But this means purifying ourselves. This means allowing the light of God to shine in the depths and bring all into his light. It means leaving behind the darkness and violence of this world as God’s light discovers it in us.
The feast of All Saints is about everything within being brought into the consciousness of God. This is the meaning of the beatitudes, today’s gospel reading: let God’s light shine in you, and you will begin to live like this. You will be blessed. The beatitudes describe God’s light at work in those who have endured the great ordeal. They have known the suffering and violence of the world, but in God’s light they have emerged from it triumphant. 

And so the darkness does not have the final word. It has been redeemed and transformed. We look to the saints in glory to re-enchant the world, to recover for us the true and full vision of what it is to be a human person. “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” They are the poor in spirit, the meek, those who mourn, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted. Theirs is the kingdom of heaven; they are the saints in light. And by God’s grace so can we be too.