Sermon at Parish Mass Advent IV 2010

Isaiah 7:10-16

Romans 1:1-7

Matthew 1:18-end

Yesterday was a feast day which isn’t observed very much these days, the feast of the Expectation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. A week before Christmas, the Church as it were quickens the excitement by thinking about Mary looking forward to the imminent birth of Jesus.

That’s not all. Some old Church calendars listed the day as "S. Maria de la O", because (the Catholic Encyclopaedia tells us), ‘on that day the clerics in the choir after Vespers used to utter a loud and protracted "O", to express the longing of the universe for the coming of the Redeemer.’[1]

The whole creation has been waiting and longing from the beginning, for this, for the birth of the Son of God in human flesh.

We read today Matthew’s story about the conception of Jesus. Matthew is much briefer than Luke, we don’t have an annunciation scene, we are just told that Mary “was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit”. But Matthew and Luke agree in the essential points, which we shall affirm together in the Creed shortly, that “For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and was made man”.

The Virgin Birth of Jesus is inescapably there, in the scriptures and the Creed. It’s part of our faith. But sometimes it seems to be almost an act of defiance to the modern age. Is not this something which militant atheists love to attack as irrational and unscientific? Where does the Y chromosome come from? Isn’t it something of a stumbling block to belief? Even Christian preachers and pundits sometimes seem embarrassed to affirm this article of faith.

Well, I think we need to ask why this matters. In Christian belief, God is the creator of all things, visible and invisible, and therefore creation is good. God looked at all that he had made and it was very good, as we read in Genesis. But creation has a purpose which it can’t achieve by itself. The cycles of birth and death, of growth and decay, are closed in on themselves. Ultimately, left to itself, everything ends in death and futility. But God intends something more. St Paul says in Romans:

The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now.

So the labour of Mary, in bringing to birth the Son of God, has this deep connection with the labour pains of the universe as it awaits its redemption, which is the fulfilment of its created purpose.

Again, in Colossians we read:

All things have been created through Christ and for Christ. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

And in Ephesians we read of:

A plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth.

So nature awaits its fulfilment, its liberation from death and decay. And this is the work of the Holy Spirit in and through Christ. Just as in the beginning the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the deep, just as we are told in the psalm that God “sends forth his spirit and renews the face of the earth.”

Grace, the work of the Holy Spirit which is a free gift of God, perfects nature, bringing everything to fulfilment in Christ. Creation has been made for freedom, but cannot attain it without grace.

Nature down the ages has always been being perfected by grace, by the hidden work of the Holy Spirit. Everything in human life and culture which points to a goodness and truth that endures beyond death testifies to this. People have always been feeling their way towards God. More particularly, in the history of Israel God revealed himself in a definite way, through the law and the prophets, pointing to a future fulfilment of all creation in a personal relationship with a personal God, the coming of God’s kingdom of justice, love and peace. In all of that the Holy Spirit has been at work.

It is therefore entirely fitting that the birth of the Son of God, the coming of the Messiah through whom creation is to find its fulfilment, should be by a particular and unique act of the Holy Spirit, the culmination of all the work of the Spirit down the ages. Nature is perfected by grace, but here we have something more. As Newman puts it in his magnificent hymn:

And that a higher gift than grace
Should flesh and blood refine,
God's presence and His very Self,
And Essence all-divine

The fulfilment of all creation begins in the union of created nature with God himself, in the Incarnation of the Son of God in Jesus of Nazareth. This is therefore the supreme work of the Holy Spirit.

The Incarnation decisively breaks open the cycle of decay and death, and liberates creation to achieve its purpose in Christ. Therefore it is not only rational and fitting, but we might say even necessary, for the birth of Jesus to take place in a way which shows this to be true. The birth of Jesus from a virgin Mother is an interruption of the normal pattern of life doomed to decay and death, and shows that the liberation of the universe has begun.

So when we affirm in the Creed that the Son of God “was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary” we are not posing riddles about biology or indulging in something unscientific or irrational. We are making a statement that in the birth of Jesus creation begins to attain the freedom for which it was created. The new creation breaks into the old and a fulfilment begins which will take us beyond the knowledge of the senses to the life of God himself.

In this week before Christmas we rejoice that our redemption has begun in Christ, and we look forward to the fulfilment of all things in him. Mary’s longing for the birth of Christ gives voice to the birth-pangs of all creation, its yearning for God who is its creator and redeemer. In that yearning we, too, join, looking forward with unclouded hope to the day when Christ will be all in all.

---

[1] http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05712a.htm

Sermon at Parish Mass Advent III 2010

St Pancras Old Church

Isaiah 35:1-10

James 5:7-10

Matthew 11:2-11

“Lucia believed in God in much the same way as she believed in Australia, for she had no doubts whatever as to the existence of either, and she went to church on Sunday in much the same spirit as she would look at a kangaroo in the Zoological Gardens, for kangaroos came from Australia.”

That's from one of EF Benson’s delightful Mapp and Lucia books, Queen Lucia. Lucia is a snob and a social climber of great accomplishment, but it seems she could only cope with a God who kept a proper distance and didn’t make any inconvenient demands.

Not so John the Baptist. He was a prophet, like the prophets of old, and as we heard last week a bit of a fire and brimstone preacher, saying to the Pharisees and Sadducees, “you brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” He saw himself as preparing the way for the Messiah, God’s anointed deliverer, who would gather his chosen ones but, in John’s words, “burn the chaff with unquenchable fire”.

Time passes, and John has been imprisoned for making outspoken comments about Herod. He’s heard about what Jesus was doing, but curiously this seems to make him doubt whether Jesus really is the Messiah after all.  So he sends a message to ask, “are you the one who is to come?” Jesus does not give him a direct answer. He simply lists for him the things he has been doing over again, the things that John has already heard about:

The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.

This in fact summarises the miracles that Jesus worked in the previous section of Matthew’s gospel, in chapters 8 and 9 there are stories in which Jesus does all of these things. So why does John doubt?

Perhaps he doubts because this is not quite what he expects the Messiah to be doing. As we’ve seen John expects wrath, fire, punishment. And not without reason, because the Bible seemed to say that’s what he should expect.

The way that Jesus lists his miracles in fact refers to five different texts from the Prophet Isaiah which give the signs which will mark the coming of the Messiah. We heard one of them this morning from Isaiah 35, “the eyes of the blind shall be opened, the ears of the deaf unstopped, the lame shall leap like a deer and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy”.

But in each of these texts as Isaiah gives them the sign of healing and restoration is coupled with a promise of punishment and vengeance. Evildoers are going to get their comeuppance. So we had this morning “Here is your God, he will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense.” And there’s something like that in all five of the texts that Jesus references[1].

But Jesus only quotes the bits about healing and restoration. Now John knows the Bible. He knows that Jesus is giving some of the signs of the Messiah. But not all of them. The punishment of the wicked doesn’t seem to be happening. So can this really be the Messiah?

Jesus doesn’t say yes or no. He simply says, “blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me”. Actually in Greek it’s “blessed is the one who is not scandalised in me”. The concept of scandal runs right through the New Testament. Skandalon means an obstacle, a stumbling block, a snare, a trap. But it also has a mysterious attractive power. It has a kind of magnetic force that you can’t get away from, like something in your path that you can’t avoid bumping into. Jesus is saying that in what he is doing, in how he is proclaiming the Kingdom, people will respond to him like that.

The greatest scandal in the Gospels is the cross. That the Messiah should end up rejected, lynched by a mob, refusing to save himself, forgiving his murderers. That is a stumbling block, an obstacle to faith, if you expect God to descend with military might and destroy the wicked. As St Paul says in 1 Corinthians,

We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

In the Gospels nobody’s response to Jesus is ever neutral. They respond either with rejection or with faith. People are drawn to Jesus willy-nilly, and find in him either a stumbling block they can’t get round, or the corner stone and solid ground of God’s salvation. Either way, they can’t avoid the choice. You can’t treat Jesus like a kangaroo in the zoo, you can’t take him or leave him as you please. Lucia’s safe tame God is not an option.

To come up against Jesus is to be brought to the point where we must choose. Rejection, or faith. Stumbling block, or corner stone.

So Jesus does not say to John the Baptist, yes I am the Messiah. It is up to John to choose how he responds. But Jesus does say, blessed are you if you do not find in me a stumbling block. Blessed are you if your response is faith, not rejection[2].

The cross is not the only scandal in the Gospels. Jesus heals on the Sabbath. He criticises the religious authorities. He teaches in strange parables which reveal to us our own inner stumbling blocks, our own scandal.

And now in this time of Advent we are preparing for Christmas. Bethlehem has its own share of scandal, too. God revealed to us in the muck and mess of chaotic human lives. God coming to live with his people in the midst of upheaval caused by the arbitrary dictates of an occupying Imperial power. God born in improvised accommodation, dispossessed, vulnerable, marginalised.

And that is what we are preparing to celebrate. Every year we come up against the scandal of Christmas. And every year we are invited to renew our response of faith in the God who did not stay remote from us but came to share our human life as it actually is.

The season of Christmas parties and shopping is in full swing, and I wonder how much that really reflects the good news that God has drawn near to us in Jesus. I don't know if you've seen the "Christmas Tree" in St Pancras Station. It consists entirely of Champagne bottles, piled up in a great pyramid, with a sign in front saying that anyone found tampering with the Christmas Tree will be prosecuted. And a very merry Christmas to you, too.

Now there's nothing wrong with a party, and Champagne is nice, but I don't need a whole tree full of it. When pleasure becomes anaesthesia it can also be a denial that there is anything of value in our lives as they are. And that is to avoid the place where God comes to meet us, in life as it is, in our own situation whatever we are dealing with, amid our failure and mess and falling apart and making do.

But Christmas says that’s exactly where God meets us. And blessed are those who are not scandalised in Jesus. Blessed are those who find in him good news for the poor, healing for the sick, new life for the dead. Blessed are those who find in Jesus the Messiah, the Saviour, the hope of all the world.

---

[1] The references are: Isaiah 29:18 (“vengeance” verse 20); 35:5-6 (“vengeance” verse 4); 42:8, 17 (“vengeance” verse 13); 26:19 (“vengeance” verse 21); and 61:1 (“vengeance” part of verse 2).

[2] After preaching this it occurred to me that this may explain verse 11, “the least in the Kingdom of heaven is greater than” John the Baptist: at this moment John is still poised on the cusp of choice, has still to accept Jesus definitively as the Messiah. In fact, the Gospels do not tell us how John responded after this scene at all, or what choice he made. It is left to the Tradition of the Church to tell us that John’s beheading was an act of martyrdom, of witness to the truth.

Vigilate, Eversholt Street

The ordinary time is over.

Trumpet blast of ice wind, needle sharp
Grey bricks bare trees thrill to the

Deep sounding
Shard shivering
Silence shouting

Word too immense for any thing.

First and Last.

The ordinary time is over.

Anglican Covenant - Updates

I have had a couple of very thoughtful and helpful responses to my post below at More Than a Via Media:

First response: Covenant, Catholicity and Eucharist

Second response: Covenant, Catholicity and Instruments of Communion

This has also been picked up by Fr Dan Martins at Living Church here.

Anglican Covenant

Is the Anglican Covenant Catholic?

In November General Synod will be asked to approve a draft Act of Synod adopting the Anglican Communion Covenant. This is being presented primarily as a way of dealing with disputes and living together as a family of churches. But it is also an ecclesiological statement; it expresses a particular understanding of what it is to be the church, of what “church” and “communion” mean. As the Covenant text makes clear, accepting the Covenant entails accepting this understanding of the church. But is it an understanding that Anglican Catholics can recognise and accept?

As John Riches has pointed out[1], the Covenant, like the Windsor Report before it, draws on different and sometimes conflicting ecclesiologies. So its vision of what the Church is, and consequently what communion is, is incoherent. Above all, it is the lack of a clear Eucharistic ecclesiology, and the prevalence of other views which owe much to the Reformation, which is a serious obstacle for anyone approaching the Covenant from a Catholic perspective.

This is apparent from the beginning. The Introduction to the Covenant Text, which is said to have “authority in understanding the purpose of the Covenant” (Covenant 4.1.1) sets out its theological frame of reference. So paragraph 1 describes our calling into communion as a gift of God, a participation in the Life of the Trinity, and cites The Church of the Triune God (CTG) in support. So far so good. But then the Introduction makes no mention at all of the Eucharist – in a document setting out what communion means and how it is effected! One might ask what happened to CTG’s central thesis that it is the Eucharist which “reveals and realises the gift of trinitarian communion given to the Church by the Holy Spirit”[2]. Likewise ARCIC’s Church as Communion[3] occasionally appears in the Covenant, but with the complete omission of its emphasis that it is the Eucharist which is constitutive of the Church. These are important documents, agreed by Anglicans, about the nature of the Church’s communion; and yet the Covenant, whilst borrowing from them in passing (and not always with a citation), ignores their central message completely. (There also incidentally seems to be an odd bit of process theology in the statement that the life of the Holy Trinity “shapes and displays itself” through the church.)

So if the Eucharist does not make the Church, does not establish communion, what does? The Introduction lays heavy emphasis on the covenants of the Old and New Testaments. Significantly, this includes the first mention of baptism, and it is the new covenant of Christ into which we are said to be baptised, rather than His body. True, paragraph 3 of the Introduction does state that the universal Church is Christ’s Body, but in the context of common life and mutual responsibility, of the working out of covenant.

John Riches argues there is a strong thread of Reformation ecclesiology running through the Anglican Covenant. In classic Reformed theology the true Church is invisible; it is the believer’s personal relationship with Christ which is foundational to belonging to this Church; the local, visible, institutions which serve this Church are human constructs whose members may or may not be among the saved, and so need clear membership criteria to ensure as far as possible that only true believers get in. And the language of covenant – a covenant constructed by human beings – is not far away from such a view. This has to be the theology of the Anglican Covenant of course, because it is at heart a document about how to tell when people don’t belong to the visible institution, and only a Reformation ecclesiology can do this with sufficient clarity.

So, in the Introduction, the covenants established by God in Scripture segue seamlessly into the covenant which we are now to make together to maintain our communion. No qualification or explanation is supplied to let us know if we should understand the word “covenant” differently in this case. What is proposed is a functional structure that one has to opt into, if, that is, the existing members approve the applicant’s doctrinal and moral worthiness. It is church imagined as something that human beings construct in the service of the Gospel.

This is, indeed, what evangelicals have been campaigning for. Oliver O’Donovan, for example, in 2006 envisaged a “communion” where “Christians are not admitted as Christians by other Christians, only recognized as Christians on the basis of the Holy Spirit’s work in them” and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s role is “to give voice and effect to judgements the churches have reached about the work of the Holy Spirit in their midst, to speak and act on behalf of their common mutual recognition”[4]. There’s no room there for the catholic principle of recognising people as Christians (even if not very good ones) on the basis of their common baptism.

The Covenant is also marked by a continual confusion between the local and universal meanings of “church”. The Anglican Communion is, we are told in the Preamble (citing Revelation 7:9), “people of God drawn from ‘every nation, tribe, people and language’”. That seems rather universal, even eschatological. Likewise, 3.2.3 tells us that new and controversial matters “need to be tested by shared discernment in the life of the Church”; and that’s “Church” in the proper case, without qualification, even though what is being talked about is Anglican, that is local, churches. But as Anglicans we can claim to be no more than the historic local churches of the British Isles and their more recent descendants elsewhere in the world. As such we do indeed share a common life in which we belong to each other. But that common life must not be confused with that of the universal Church of which we are but part.

Vatican II’s understanding of local churches is, “legitimate local congregations of the faithful united with their pastors” sharing the Apostolic ministry and celebrating the one Eucharist (Lumen Gentium) [5]. The universal Church is present in all local churches but is more than the sum of its parts; it is, foundationally, a Divine reality which the local churches receive and participate in, not something constructed from below. In the Covenant this ought to follow on from the Trinitarian basis of communion mentioned in the Introduction, but the connection fails to be made.

When it comes to the structures of discernment and discipline proposed by the Covenant the local seems to be imitating the universal with the new centralised mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Are we here looking at other “communions” with envy? If so, we are making a basic mistake about Anglican ecclesiology. The Roman Curia has a universal competence precisely because Roman ecclesiology is universal: the Catholic Church subsists in the Roman. Likewise the Orthodox can have firm structures of discernment and discipline because they claim to be the universal Church and so, collectively, know the mind of the Church. Anglicans can make no such claim. So are we trying to imitate something we are not with this incipient quasi-Papalism? Or is it rather a local Protestant understanding of the church, a human club with membership rules, mapped globally?

As John Riches says, the Covenant and its predecessor the Windsor Report, “drink from diverse wells and the result is a mingling of ecclesiologies which sit quite uneasily alongside each other. The call for the strengthening of the so-called ‘Instruments’ [of Communion]… receives very uncertain support from the ecclesiological reflections which are offered here. In the end, most support comes from those traditions endebted (sic) to the Continental Reformation and there to its more radical wing.”[6]

The Covenant is a confused document. It incoherently references different ecclesiologies, but its overwhelming tenor and direction is Protestant. The statement in 2.1.2 that Anglican churches have been “reshaped” by the Reformation is a worrying clue to this. In May 2008 Cardinal Kasper called on the Anglican Communion to decide whether it belonged to the church of the first millennium or to the Protestant Reformation. The repercussions of the possible answers to that are of course very much still with us. But the Covenant, insofar as it is clear at all, points to an answer which Catholics will find very difficult to accept.

Matthew Duckett

matthew_duckett@yahoo.co.uk

November 5 2010

---

[1] J Riches, “Talking Points from Books”, The Expository Times, 2008; 119; 417. See also NT Wright’s reply in 119; 469 and Riches’ reply to Wright in 119; 521.

[2] The Church of the Triune God - The Cyprus Agreed Statement of the International Commission for Anglican - Orthodox Theological Dialogue, Anglican Consultative Council 2006, para 12.

[3] http://www.prounione.urbe.it/dia-int/arcic/doc/e_arcicII_communion.html

[4] O O’Donovan, A Conversation Waiting to Begin – the Churches and the Gay Controversy, SCM Press 2009, p 23

[5] See also Cardinal Ratzinger’s lucid exposition of the Ecclesiology of Vatican II,

[6] J Riches, Op. Cit., 420

Letter in the Church Times, 29 October 2010

Sir,

That the Diocese of Sydney persists in permitting deacons to “administer the Lord’s Supper”, even after this has been declared unconstitutional, will surprise no-one. For decades the usual teaching in Sydney has viewed sacraments merely as acted preaching, a subordinate adjunct to the ministry of the word. Indeed D Broughton Knox, principal of Moore College 1959-85, taught that water baptism was only an “apostolic custom” which might be replaced, for example, by converts giving their testimony (Selected Works, Volume II: Church and Ministry [Sydney: Matthias Media, 2003]). A friend in Sydney has told me of churches where this teaching appears to have been put into practice.

The stated reason for allowing deacons to “administer” the Eucharist is Sydney’s practice of restricting presbyteral ordination to rectors of parishes. This, it is claimed, is Biblical. But the New Testament describes local churches in which there were presbyters, plural. They can’t all have been the one in charge, so must have shared in the presidency and pastoral care of the community. This in plain common sense must have included the weekly synaxis and breaking of bread as its principal act. Likewise presbyters, plural, are to be called for if anyone is sick (James 5:14). The presbyterate in the New Testament is a collegial ministry of word and sacrament in which there is room for complementary roles. For Sydney, however, it is monarchical, and mainly about designating the man with the power.

For Anglicans faithful to universal tradition, a “Eucharist” presided by a deacon is no more than a simulated sacrament. Sadly this is now all that is on offer to Anglicans in Sydney’s hospitals and prisons, since chaplains can’t be priests. Even the dying can have no guarantee of receiving the “last and most necessary Viaticum” mandated by the Council of Nicea (Canon 13). Much has been said about the unconstitutional nature of Sydney’s actions, but little, as far as I know, about the spiritual harm that may result.

You report Archdeacon Narrelle Jarrett as saying, “it is a tragedy that deacons cannot fulfil the full sacramental ministry”. No; the tragedy is that Sydney refuses to give priestly ordination to those who need it for their ministry. It is a tragedy entirely caused by the revisionist and unscriptural theology of ministry which Sydney has embraced.

Yours sincerely,

The Revd Matthew Duckett

Sermon at Parish Mass and Baptism, 19th Sunday after Trinity 2010

Sermon at Parish Mass and Baptism, 19th Sunday after Trinity 2010 (St Pancras Old Church)

2 Kings 5:14-17

2 Timothy 2:8-13

Luke 17:11-19

Babette’s Feast is a film and a story set in a bleak area of Denmark in the 19^th century. Babette, a refugee from revolutionary upheavals in Paris, arrives in a small and very religious community where she takes up work as cook to two elderly spinster sisters, the daughters of the local protestant pastor.

Over many years she gains their trust and respect. Then one day she learns that she has won a large sum of money on a lottery ticket in France. Rather than return to her old life, she spends the entire winnings on a feast for the villagers. Unbeknown to them, Babette used to be the head chef in one of the finest restaurants in Paris.

The feast she provides is sumptuous and extravagant, full of rare delicacies and fine wine. The villagers are shocked as they see the preparations, fearing that such luxury will be a sinful indulgence of the flesh. They decide that they will have to eat the meal out of politeness, but are determined that they will not take any pleasure in it or even speak about it.

But it doesn’t work. Babette's feast is just too good. As they eat and drink together, they can’t help enjoy the feast. The pinched narrowness of their respectable, fearful religion gives way. A community that had survived by everyone remaining in their proper place rediscovers itself in love and openness. The diners are redeemed by the unexpected joy of a life rich beyond their imagining.

In today’s Gospel reading something similar happens. Ten lepers ask Jesus for healing, nine of them Jews and one a Samaritan. Lepers in Biblical times were outcasts from their communities, shunned by religious laws which decreed that they were unclean. Curiously this brings the Jews and the Samaritan together in a way they wouldn’t have been otherwise. Jews and Samaritans ordinarily regarded each other as outcasts, because of their religious differences. But now they are all outcasts together from their own communities.

Then they are healed by Jesus, as they had asked. What happens then? Well, Jesus has told them to show themselves to the priests. The Jewish law said that if you had been cured of leprosy you had to be examined by a priest who would certify that you were once again ritually pure, so you could rejoin your community. And this is exactly what the Jewish former lepers do.

But not the Samaritan. He couldn’t show himself to a Jewish priest; even if he was no longer a leper he would still have been an outcast Samaritan. Perhaps he might have shown himself to a Samaritan priest instead. But he does not. Instead, he turns back to Jesus, praising God in a loud voice, and falls at his feet. The Samaritan ignores the religious law, breaks through its restrictions, and finds in Jesus what really matters, God’s love and redemption.

It looks as though the Samaritan is disobeying Jesus, by not going off and showing himself to a priest. But in fact he has found in Jesus the one true priest who offers salvation, healing and wholeness to all.

The Jewish lepers had a choice. They could have made the same response as the Samaritan. They could have realised that in Jesus God was breaking open all the sacred boundaries and religious laws which had made them victims for so long, outsiders to their own people. But instead they chose to go back into that system, now that they could be on the inside again and return to their safe but narrow existence. They were ritually clean, back on the right side of the religious law, but missing out on the fullness of life and joy which made the Samaritan shout with praise.

Jesus himself was to end up an outsider to the religious law. Condemned to death for religious reasons, he was hanged on a tree which the law said meant you were under God’s curse. But the veil of the temple, the veil of religious law and sacred boundary, was torn in two when he died. And from the tomb where his body was laid new life has sprung up for all people. Life and love beyond our imagining, God surprising us with joy, breaking in to us from outside all the boundaries we draw to keep ourselves safe.

Religious laws and purity codes can take many forms, and some may not seem to have anything to do with religion. But distinctions of social class, race, and nationalism are really part of the same mechanism when they draw boundaries through human society and create outsiders and victims. Jesus shows the nullity of all these sacred boundaries.

In Jesus all the systems of fear and exclusion break down, and with them the narrow but safe existence which we thought was what God wanted. God, it turns out, is not some thing to be afraid of but some one who loves us, and that love surprises us with joy, transforms our lives beyond our imagining with the richness of the heavenly feast, the banquet of God’s kingdom.

Today we give thanks and praise to God as we celebrate this Eucharist, and in as fine a voice as we can manage I hope. Today the risen victim, Jesus our Master and our Priest, comes to us once more in bread and wine. Today Mia will be made a partaker, with us, of Christ’s death and resurrection through the waters of baptism.

In Christ there is no-one who is unclean, no-one who is an outsider. The light of the resurrection shines on our lives and calls us to follow Christ and to shine as lights in the world today and all the days of our life.

Sermon at Parish Mass, Ordinary 26

Sermon at Parish Mass, Ordinary 26 2010

St Michael's Camden Town

Amos 6:1a, 4-7

1 Timothy 6:11-16

Luke 16:19-31

A dentist and a priest died and presented themselves to St Peter at the pearly gates. St Peter asked them to introduce themselves.

The first said, “I am John Driller, I’m a very successful dentist famous for the number and speed of my tooth extractions.” St Peter replied, “Well done, good and faithful servant! Have this silk robe and golden crown and take up your residence for eternity in this luxury villa with swimming pool and landscaped gardens.”

The next said, “I am Father Jim Studious, I’ve been a faithful pastor of St Mary’s church for 47 years and I’m famous for the length and erudition of my sermons.” St Peter replied, “Well done, good and faithful servant! Have this cotton robe and paper hat and take up your residence for eternity in this small hut with an outside loo.”

“Hang on a minute!”, said the priest. “Why does the dentist get a better deal than me, when I’ve devoted my life to the church?” “Well,” said St Peter. “Up here we judge by results. When you preached, you sent people to sleep, but when the dentist was trying to put people to sleep, they prayed!”

There are lots of jokes and stories about people being surprised by what they find in the afterlife, and there were at the time of Jesus as well. What we’ve heard today is probably a story that was already in circulation and which Jesus took and adapted to teach his own lesson.

The story as used by Jesus and told in Luke is on one level a moral fable. It speaks of the “Great Reversal” which is one of Luke’s key themes: the humble are exalted, the rich and powerful cast down, as Mary announces in the Magnificat at the beginning of Luke. It also enlarges on a pair of Luke’s Beatitudes and Woes from earlier in his gospel: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the Kingdom of Heaven”; “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.”

The rich man’s purple and fine linen indicate that he was a member of the ruling classes. As such it was his responsibility to use his power and wealth to do good, to seek justice and equity, to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. The Old Testament prophets are quite clear about that, and it’s a tradition in which Jesus and Luke firmly stand. Riches and power are not something that indicate God’s special favour. They are rather a gift to be used for others, a test to see how we will use what has been given to us.

But this rich man uses his wealth in idle luxury. The description of him is extreme to the point of being comical: he does nothing except eat enormous banquets of rich food, stuffing himself with delicacies every day.

Meanwhile, Lazarus waits outside the gate, starving and ignored. Dogs lick his sores, unclean animals which further identify him as an outcast.

But when they die their situations are reversed. The rich man is buried – not a dignity that we’re told was afforded to Lazarus – but finds himself in torment in Hades. Lazarus is carried by angels to the bosom of Abraham, an expression which may mean that he is reclining at a heavenly feast.

But the rich man still doesn’t get what the problem is. Even in Hades he conceives of Lazarus as no more than a useful slave, someone who can be ordered to come and quench his thirst, or carry a message to his brothers. But now there is an impenetrable barrier between them, where once there was a gate, which the rich man could have passed through if he had wanted, though Lazarus could not.

So there is a warning here about social justice and the right approach to wealth.

But this is of course a parable, so there’s more to it than appears on the surface. For a start, as a parable it can’t be taken as a literal description of conditions in the hereafter. The Greek reference to Hades or the underworld is not part of Jewish or Christian belief.

As with many parables, the twist in the tale comes at the end, when the rich man wants his brothers to be sent a warning by means of Lazarus. And Abraham says, “if they will not listen either to Moses or to the prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone should rise from the dead.”

Beyond the basic lesson of the moral tale, this parable is about the Resurrection. Jesus, like Lazarus, was counted as nothing by the world which rejected him and put him to death. The rich man simply didn’t see Lazarus when he was alive, or if he did just assumed that he was getting what he deserved.

So too Jesus was treated as a criminal, a blasphemer, one who was under the curse of God, by people who really believed that this was true. They simply couldn’t see that Jesus was innocent. The resurrection was God’s vindication of that innocent victim. The resurrection reveals that God is for the victim and not against him.

The resurrection therefore also reveals the wrongness of the way human beings tend to live. Human society tends to seek its own security by creating victims and scapegoats, people who “don’t count” and so can be excluded and ignored.

A few months ago the Evening Standard launched a stirring campaign about the dispossessed in London which you may have seen. It revealed that all over London, on run down council estates and elsewhere, people are living in debt and poverty, without opportunities for jobs or education, trapped on the margins of society. And so often this is within a few hundred yards of posh houses, expensive restaurants, swish nightclubs.

This isn’t news to the Church which has been ministering in these areas all along, and it won’t be news to us here in Camden. But it’s amazing that it took a front page journalistic campaign to bring this to the notice of Londoners in general. So many people simply didn’t know, couldn’t see, what life was like for hundreds of thousands of people in the capitol. We don’t see the excluded people, the victims, so long as we are comfortable and safe.

The resurrection reverses all that. The humble and meek are indeed lifted up, raised even from the death that human violence inflicted. The resurrection is God’s judgement on a society which survives by creating victims. But it is also God’s inauguration of a new society, of his kingdom. The old order of sin and death gives way as God exposes and reverses the extent to which we have been complicit in it.

The Church always looks to Jesus. She is continually being taught by the Lord who was put to death for our sins and raised for our justification, and who sends his spirit to inaugurate his kingdom, his new life, in our lives.

The Church in this society in which there is so much exclusion, so much need, must be continually proclaiming and living the Gospel of the risen victim. Jesus risen from the dead alone undoes the sinful ordering of human society and makes new life possible for everyone – for the poor and dispossessed at our gates, and even, if they can but believe, for the rich and powerful.

Sermon at Parish Mass, 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time 2010

Sermon at Parish Mass, Ordinary 21 2010

St Pancras Old Church

Isaiah 66:18-21

Hebrews 12:5-7, 11-13

Luke 13:22-30

I’ve never been to the sale at Harrods, but I have seen the coverage on the news from time to time. Crowds of people camp outside, sometimes for days, wanting to be first in to grab the best bargains. And then the doors open and in they rush. And it seems as though some people simply grab whatever’s nearest, at random, just so they’ve got themselves a bargain and can say they bought something in the sale.

Probably very few of the people who do this really need the thing they wait so long for and then buy. But they do desire it. And they desire it because everyone else desires it, too. Human beings have this natural tendency to imitate one another’s desires. That’s how advertising works – if you can convince people that someone else wants the latest iPhone or aftershave or shower curtain, then you start to want it too, regardless of whether or not you actually need it.

In crowds, like the crowd outside Harrods, the imitated desire spreads, until everyone wants the same thing, but at the same time they’ve forgotten why they want it. The crowd converges on one object. That’s when desire can be dangerous, if it’s not controlled. It can lead to rivalry and violence. Like the crowd on Good Friday who, from one planted suggestion of what they might desire that started to spread, ended up all shouting “crucify him” with one voice.

Jesus knew about this dynamic of desire and the crowd, and it appears in today’s gospel reading. We are told at the beginning that he is on his way to Jerusalem, and that is one of the great themes of Luke’s Gospel, Jesus as the prophet, the new Moses, on his way to his exodus, his death and resurrection, by way of the crowd on Good Friday. And this frames what Jesus says next.

When he says, “Try your best to enter by the narrow door, because I tell you, many will try to enter, and not succeed”, the Greek conveys the sense of a large crowd, all trying to squeeze through the same door at once, and causing a log jam, so no-one can enter. So it is specifically "the crowd" that can't enter the narrow door.

This is in response to a question someone asks about whether only a few are being saved – and it’s the present tense in Greek. Jesus doesn’t answer that directly, but responds with this story about how desire works, and how being part of the rivalrous crowd, locked in imitated desire, can stop you entering the door of salvation. Just as the crowd on Good Friday driven by their own violence see neither the innocence of their victim nor their own guilt. It’s as though he’s passing the question back to the questioner, and saying, examine your desires. What does it mean to be saved? What is it that you desire? What is driving you?

Jesus then goes further with a parable that questions his audience’s assumptions. The master of the house has locked his doors and denies that he knows the people outside, even though they protest that they had eaten and drunk with him, and that he taught in their streets. Jesus had done these things. But it was not enough to have been to dinner with Jesus, as many Pharisees had. It was not enough to have had him teaching in your streets. Many people at the time were thinking, “a great prophet has appeared among us, God has visited his people”, and therefore we’re alright. This proves that God is on our side. This proves we still belong to the Covenant. So we can relax. Not so, says Jesus. His teaching has to be understood and followed.

Then his teaching gets quite shocking, when he says to his audience, “you will see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the Kingdom of God, and you yourselves shut outside”. In their place, says Jesus, will be people from east and west and north and south. People from foreign nations, Gentiles, taking their places and feasting in the Kingdom.

It is not enough to assume that you belong to the right crowd. That because you count Abraham and the prophets among your ancestors that you are therefore going to be saved, that you are safely on the inside. If you don’t understand and follow their teaching you may well find yourself on the outside and others you thought were outsiders taking your place.

This is another of Luke’s themes, the “Great Reversal”, the overturning of the criteria for who’s in and who’s out, the vindication of the outcast and the rejected who turn out to be the people whom God was closest to all along.

And this picks up the teaching of the Old Testament prophets, such as that from Isaiah 66 today, which foretells that Gentiles, all the nations thought of as unclean outsiders, will become the people of God. They will even become priests and Levites, says Isaiah.

That is truly radical. This part of Isaiah was written at the time when the Temple worship in Jerusalem was being developed and strictly codified. It was very boundaried worship, very clear about who was in and who was out. Elaborate purification rituals had to be followed by the priests before they could enter the holy place and offer sacrifices for the rest of the people who remained outside. And Isaiah blows open that boundaried sacred space and all the world comes flooding in. And those who enter, those who “get it” will be the people who understand the real meaning of the law and the prophets, whether they are Jews or Gentiles.

Are there only a few who are being saved? It is not enough to rely on being part of a group that you think is “safe” as a kind of insurance policy. Because that is defining ourselves over against other people, we know we are OK because those people over there are not. In the time of Jesus people defined themselves in this way by being descended from Abraham.

For us it may be different. This week I had a card through my letter box informing me that I would be going to hell unless I prayed the simple prayer that followed, which was about letting God into my life. And the message then said, “if you have prayed that prayer with sincerity, congratulations, you are now going to Heaven”. But the subtext of that, I think, was, "you can choose to be an insider or an outsider to our group, but we are quite clear about where the boundary is".

Lest it be thought that I'm having a dig at the Pentecostal community that sent that card, I wonder how much of our Catholic obsession with things like the apostolic succession and valid sacraments is really seeking a security which comes from defining ourselves as not being like other people. To the extent that it is, we are still being driven by the dynamic of the crowd. We are still missing that narrow door into the Kingdom.

Our identity is not something that we need to imitate or borrow from other people. Jesus offers us a way out of rivalrous desire and its relentless descent into violence. He offers us the truth that our identity is God’s free gift in creation. This identity is a mystery we can’t define or pin down because we are made in the image of God who is unknowable. We can therefore let go of our imitated desires and everything by which we try to construct our own identity. We can embrace the risk of that mystery, knowing that there, and only there, are we truly safe. It is in receiving God’s free gift of our true being that we are being saved.

Assumption of Our Lady 2010

Sermon at Parish Mass, Assumption of Our Lady 2010

Revelation 11:19a; 12:1-6a, 10ab

1 Corinthians 15:20-27

Luke 1:39-56

The children’s television programme Blue Peter has been on our screens for over 50 years, and so could well be part of the childhood memories of many of us here. If it is, you’ll remember the phrase, “here’s one I made earlier”. In each programme the presenter would make some useful object or improving toy out of bits of old rubbish, cardboard, offcuts of cloth, string, and of course sticky back plastic and rubber solution glue.

I don’t know about you, but somehow my efforts at reproducing these wonderful things always fell woefully short of the ideal that the presented showed us. But nonetheless there was always that type, that model – “here’s one I made earlier” – held up as the perfect example towards which I could struggle with my sticky fingers and glitter all over the living room carpet.

Today on this wonderful feast day of the Assumption of Our Lady, the Church’s attention turns towards Mary, and it’s as though God is saying to the Church, “here’s one I made earlier”. Here is the type, the example, of a life lived in perfect conformity to the will of God, a life transfigured and taken up into the glory of heaven because that is God’s will for each and every one of us.

The church lavishes so much attention on Mary, on this humble woman from the hill country of Galilee. Today, shrines all over the world will be decked with flowers and splendour in her honour. In more southern and fervent climates statues of Mary will be carried through the streets in baroque magnificence and greeted with rapturous enthusiasm.

She will be hailed by every title that the Church and popular devotion has bestowed upon her: Mother of God above all because she is the Mother of Jesus and we cannot separate Jesus from God; Our Lady of Guadalupe, of Lourdes, of Fatima, of Walsingham; Queen of Heaven, of Saints, of Martyrs, of Peace; Refuge of Sinners and Ark of the Covenant. Preachers far more erudite than this one will be reminding the faithful of the many doctrines the Church teaches concerning Mary: her immaculate conception, her perpetual virginity, her bodily assumption into heaven.

It’s all very splendid and unrestrained. But perhaps at the back of the reserved English mind there’s a little bit of doubt about all this. The protestant distrust of outward things has seeped into our culture. Is it not perhaps all a little excessive? Might it not tend just a little bit towards superstition and idolatry?

But to think that is to mistake what Mary is about, and indeed to mistake what God was about when he chose Mary to be the mother of his Son.

All the devotion, adornment and doctrine that Church lavishes on Mary do not turn her into a goddess. Rather, they bring out most truly what she is, a human being.

Our Lord Jesus Christ, of course, is both God and Man. Divine by nature, the second person of the Trinity, the Word of God from all eternity who was made flesh in time and space as Jesus of Nazareth. Not so Mary, or any of us. We are simply human, created out of nothing, receiving our being as God’s free gift.

And yet we are created out of nothing with a glorious destiny. The incarnation of God in Jesus was for us, and bestowed on human nature a Divine dignity which reveals our deepest calling. Human beings, as St Gregory of Nazianzen put it, are animals who have received the call to become God, not by nature, but by grace, by God’s free gift. We are dust and clay, bundles of animated earthiness, called to discover that our true life, our deepest being, is God.

God reveals himself in Jesus as creator and redeemer, the generous giver of our being and the one who calls us into union with him. He is therefore not a rival for the space we occupy, and we do not need to fear that honouring Mary or any saint detracts from God. The life into which God calls us in fact is a life beyond rivalry, beyond competing for space and drawing boundaries around what’s mine and what’s yours. The exaltation of the human does not displace God.

But God will not draw us into that life against our will. God has given us free will and we do need to co-operate with God at least to the extent of allowing him to align our wills with his. One of the mysteries of salvation is that we cannot save ourselves, but God will not save us without us being involved. God does everything for us, but by his generous gift the work of our salvation becomes ours also.

So it was with Mary. Her co-operation with God’s will for her salvation and ours was complete and instantaneous. “Be it unto me according to your word”, she said, a single act of her will made with her whole being and which she never took back. God had chosen her and foreseen from all eternity that she would be the one human creature in our history able to respond to his will in that way. And yet God prepared her for this role by his free grace, without which she would not have been able to respond. But God still waited for her response.

The doctrines of Mary’s immaculate conception and perpetual virginity are not meant to tie our minds up in speculation about biology. Rather, they embody the truth that Mary was completely open to God, and completely free from guilt and fear. She was a stranger to the hesitation and ifs and buts and clinging on to what’s mine that come bundled up with our sinfulness and our being closed in on ourselves. And her assumption into heaven points to the universal significance of this one human life.

In today’s Gospel reading Mary sings the Magnificat, the hymn of salvation for all God’s people in general which flows from what God has done for her in particular. We are saved because God’s handmaid said “Yes”, and not otherwise. And in that amazing vision from the book of Revelation the veils are stripped away and we see the great sign in heaven of a woman, a human being, an animal called to become God, who is clothed with the cosmos and appears as a universal sign of salvation because she has become the mother of the Redeemer.

As we gaze on that vision we see our own destiny. Our response to God’s grace indeed is hesitant, faltering. We know we are sinners. Perhaps we feel that we have even fallen back, rather than advancing towards that vision. No matter. God’s grace is there for us, and we begin again. We do not labour alone. We have before us the great sign in heaven of the woman whom God has already perfected and raised to Glory, she who points always to Christ, her redeemer and ours, she who never ceases to aid us with her prayers.

Because there is no space between her will and the will of God, because there is nothing essentially different in what God has done for her and what God wills to do for us, we can with confidence honour Mary and call upon her prayers. In the words of today’s preface to the Eucharistic prayer, we can receive her as “the beginning and pattern of the Church in its perfection, and a sign of hope and comfort for God’s people on their pilgrim way”. Mary accompanies us on our way, and with her we rejoice and sing because it is the way to glory.

Homily for the Feast of St Laurence, 2010

Weekday Mass, Feast of St Laurence

Matthew 6:19-24

The Church today doesn’t give us one of the usual Gospel readings for martyrs. So we don’t have encouragement about enduring under persecution, or taking up your cross and following Jesus. Instead we have a reading which reflects the incident of the “treasures of the Church” in the story of Saint Laurence.

But, in a way, this story about your true treasure is about martyrdom. Martyr in Greek means “witness”. It’s a word that the Church uses of those who have been killed in hatred of the faith because the greatest witness that someone can give is their life. But being killed doesn’t make you a martyr, it’s what you bear witness to that matters.

Martyrs are people who have discovered that the deepest truth of their life is founded and rooted in God and not in themselves. They have grasped this with such solidity and integrity that the whole of their life flows from this discovery and reflects this truth, even in the face of violent opposition. They have discovered the falsity of the idea that you can create your own life and fabricate your own personality.

I bought a shirt recently, which is quite a nice shirt, but unfortunately has a vacuous slogan stitched into the label, presumably as a fashion statement. It says, “remember life is all about creating yourself to be the best you can be”. Martyrs are people who have seen through nonsense like that. They bear witness to the truth that the ground of our being is in God who creates us and is not something we construct for ourselves.

This is at the heart of what Jesus is teaching us in today’s Gospel reading. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth.” “You cannot serve both God and wealth”. Treasures and wealth can be taken literally, of course. “It could be you”, runs the lottery strap line. Notice how ambiguous that is. It could simply mean, “you could win the lottery”. More insidiously, it could be suggesting that “you”, the unique unrepeatable person that is “you”, is something that might start to happen once you get your hands on all that money.

This applies to anything we cling on to by which we try to define ourselves, through which we try to construct our own life. Success, a good reputation, a high powered job, being the perfect partner or parent.

We may indeed have those things, or we may not. Either way, they do not determine who we are. We do not receive our being from them, so we don’t need to cling on to them as though we did. We don’t need to make them our treasures. Psalm 62 says “if riches increase, set not your heart on them”. Jesus says that if we seek after wealth, if we set our heart on it, far from it liberating us, it will become our master and we its slaves. The ways in which we try to possess and control end up possessing and controlling us.

So there are two approaches to life: one is a delusion which says we can create ourselves but actually takes us further and further away from the source of our being; and the other discovers the truth of our being in God, and receives that being as a gift. We simply exist because the creator calls us into being. We can therefore trust that our being, the truth of who we are, is safe, no matter what.

Once we grasp that, risk and contingency can be reimagined as part of the adventure of being created, and not something we need to guard against. We can renounce possession and control. We do not need to protect ourselves by building up treasures on earth. We do not even have to protect ourselves by clinging to life. Embracing death with integrity becomes a witness to the truth if we know that the source of our life is in God who is beyond death, and that the gift of our being is never going to be taken back or annulled. The martyrs knew this. The challenge of Jesus in today’s Gospel is for us to grasp that, too.

Sermon at Parish Mass, St Mary's Somers Town, Ordinary 19 2010

Wis 18:6-9

Heb 11:1-2, 8-19

Lk 12:32-48

“Jesus is coming. Look busy!” You can buy T shirts and bumper stickers with that slogan, if you want to. Hopefully they’re meant in a light-hearted way, rather than as a doctrinal statement.

Jesus teaches us to be alert and ready for what he calls “the coming of the Son of Man”. That’s not the same as being busy. If you’re too busy you can be rather inattentive, and may miss things that are important. Jesus says, be alert, be ready.

Ready for what? Is this a teaching about the end of the world and the final judgement? Certainly, a part of the teaching of Jesus and his Church is about the End, the last things when God will complete his saving work, when his judgement on all human life will be made known and the redeemed will be gathered into his Kingdom. We’ll say as much in the Creed in a few minutes.

It’s easy, though, to fall into the trap of thinking that all this talk of the End, of the coming of the Son of Man, is about something very remote from us. Something that may happen in an indefinitely postponed future, but doesn’t really have an immediate concern for us in the here and now. But to think that way is to miss completely the force of Jesus’ teaching.

Jesus is talking about something for which we need to be alert and ready now. The first clue to this is in the instruction to be “dressed for action”. What doesn’t come out very well in our translation is that this is a direct quotation from Exodus 12:11, and it’s the instruction for the Passover, and that first reading from Wisdom was a rather obscure reference to this.

The Passover, you’ll remember, was a meal to be eaten in haste, because it was that very night that the Israelites were to leave the land of Egypt. So the bread was unleavened, because it’s quicker to cook, and the dress code was: have your girdle round your waist, your sandals on your feet and a staff in your hand. The girdle round your waist was to hook up your long robes so you could actually run.

The Passover was urgent and hasty because God was coming to deliver his people right there and then, no time to waste. And Jesus is saying exactly the same thing to his audience in this passage. He is saying, here and now, God is delivering his people. Can you see what’s happening? Are you ready?

He then tells two parables to illustrate this point, and like all parables they’re stories in which strange and unexpected things happen, and our perception of the way things ought to be is challenged.

The master returns from a wedding very late, and expects to find his servants still up and waiting for him. So far that’s what we might expect, too. But then the master swaps roles with his servants, and serves them, waiting on them at table. That is not expected at all. Clearly the Kingdom that God is giving to his little flock is very different from human expectations. This Kingdom belongs to a new order in which the most important thing is service, not power. And Jesus will make exactly this point again at the last supper when he says “I am among you as one who serves”. We have to unlearn everything we know about how human society works if we are to enter the Kingdom.

Then Jesus shifts the imagery from that happy but unexpected scene to one which is quite unhappy and disturbing. Suddenly, there’s a burglar coming, but because this is a parable even the burglar behaves strangely. Instead of breaking through the door or a window or the roof – probably the weakest part of a first century Palestinian house – this burglar literally digs through the wall of the house. This is the Incredible Hulk of burglars!

This is where parables present us with a challenge, an obstacle to our understanding. Jesus tells these two stories, one which is strange but has a happy outcome, and the other which is strange but disturbing and upsetting. But both stories are about the coming of the Kingdom. Both stories are about being alert and ready, because God is rescuing his people, and doing it here and now.

In this Gospel passage we are at the scene of a break-in. God in Jesus is visiting his people, but unexpectedly, and in a way which shatters our pre-conceptions about how human society works. Just as the burglar demolishes the walls of the house, so Jesus breaks down the whole framework of how we thought we were meant to live. Masters become servants. Roles are exchanged, boundaries crossed. The Son of Man comes like a thief, like an outsider, to break down the walls which we thought we needed to keep the insiders in and the outsiders out.

We discover that our true life does not come from defining ourselves over against other people. The city “founded and built by God”, as Hebrews puts it, is very different from the city we human beings construct for ourselves if left to our own devices.

So, the story of the master who serves his servants, and the story of the burglar who comes crashing through the wall of the house, are about the same thing. They are both about leaving off the way we used to live, and beginning to live in the new and different life which Jesus reveals.

That can be a painful experience, of course, because it means letting go of what we are used to. But Jesus is not out to get us! It has pleased our Father to give us the Kingdom, and we are loved and welcomed. But the Kingdom is different from what we have known, and we need to be alert, to be ready, for how it is different.

St Peter, at the end of this passage, is starting to get it. He gets the point that the Kingdom is a new way of living. But he still wants to know who’s in charge, and specifically whether he and the other Apostles are the ones who are going to have authority. So Jesus has to repeat the lesson about service being the standard of authority in the Kingdom, and makes the point quite forcefully. Peter is beginning to be alert and ready, but not quite, at this point, alert enough.

We, too, have to be alert and ready. The Kingdom is upon us, here and now. We’re at the scene of a break-in. At this Mass, Jesus breaks in to the ordinary stuff of our daily lives, into a meal, into bread and wine. He gives us his body and blood so that we can live the life that he lives, the new life of the Kingdom.

The Eucharist is the sacrament of transformation, and the new life we receive here breaks in to the rest of our lives, too.

Bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. A motley collection of sinners is transformed into the Church, which is the new way of being human. Fear is transformed into love, authority into service. A life of rivalry and defining ourselves over against other people is transformed into a life which we don’t need to define because it is rooted in Christ, it is his gift.

The old life boundaried by sin and death becomes the new life of Jesus the Risen One. Life without limit, the life of joy in the Kingdom. Here and now. Do not be afraid, little flock, for it has pleased your Father to give you the Kingdom.