Posts filed under 'Homilies'
There’s a peculiar feeling about that first reading. I wonder about people who think so ill of God and yet want to draw close.
I thought, at first, I was disturbed by the way they place their disaster at God’s feet: ‘he has struck us down; he has torn us to pieces’. And that disturbance is at least partly recognition—I know the dark thread of my own unfounded fear of God. But what shakes me more, is that, even blaming God for their pain, the people go back for more—glutton for punishment, like an abused wife, like a confused hostage. ‘He has torn us to pieces’, they say, ‘but he will heal us … he doesn’t mean to hurt us really … maybe if we try harder, don’t annoy him quite so much, maybe’. And I wonder if, maybe, there isn’t a trace of that in me too … or in you. ‘If I do this, if I do that, then God will stop hurting me.’ And, if there is, what I need to hear I is here in the reading …
‘What am I to do with you, Rob? What I want is love, not sacrifice; relationship, not empty offering. Love, Rob’.
March 9th, 2002
“It was the stone rejected by the builders that became the keystone.” What does that teach us?
What about this: “The Word became flesh and lived among us; He came into his own and his own did not accept him.”
Words and stones: what do we build with them but lives? Lives and poems.
Words, stones, lives, poems: each has a gravity we do well to respect. Here’s Rainer-Maria Rilke:
How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.
(more…)
March 1st, 2002
Body, bridge and blessing—that’s what we reckoned earlier was how to read these scriptures in the context of this weekend. Body. Bridge. Blessing.
What Jesus did for us he did in the body. His joy, his labour, his love, his passion—all in his body. His transfiguration—in his body.
And what we do for him—we always do in the body. Our joy, our labour, our love, our passions—all in our bodies. Our transfiguration too—in the body, of the body, for the body—the body we each are, the body of humanity we all form, the body of the earth we share.
But between the body of God in Jesus and our own bodies there is a breach, a space, a separation—something to be bridged. How do we bridge the gap of time and space and desire? … We build the bridge with our bodies. We let him do in our bodies what he wills. And we do through our bodies what he desires. We do as he did.
But, doing as he did, we often miss the obvious. Here’s the obvious. ‘Jesus came up and touched them. “Stand up”, he said, “do not be afraid”.’ …
See?! Let us be literal … Stand up … Stand up and do not be afraid. Can you feel that in your body—what it is like to stand tall and free from fear? Can you feel him touch you with power, with life, with blessing? Can you feel him bless you?
Here is the bridge. Can we be blessed? Can we then bless? Can we use our bodies to receive and to give?
Let me read again the first reading so we can hear once more the call of our ancestors. (music starts)
…
I invite you now to receive the blessing you have just witnessed and to give it, in the same way, to your neighbour. Let it be our sign of peace …
February 24th, 2002
OK What is the sign of Jonah … and why does Jesus claim it as his own sign?
Well the first reading narrates the nub of the thing—Jonah preached and the people of Nineveh jumped to it and repented, lock, stock, barrel—kids and cattle too. Is this the only sign for this generation? That Jesus will preach and the world will experience wave after wave of conversion?
I think more pertinent is who it is that hears and repents. Jonah was so angry at God’s call to go to Nineveh that he high-tailed it off in the other direction. Nineveh is the enemy. At the very least Nineveh is outside the flock, just gentiles. Let them rot in their sin.
When the fish-eaten prophet eventually gets there and mumbles his message against his will the whole city turn to God in their droves. And maybe that’s the experience of the early Jesus people. Gentiles in their droves were turning to God. Is this the sign of Jonah which Jesus claims as his own?
Let’s say it is for a moment. What does it say to us 2000 years on? Maybe just this: don’t be surprised if today the ones who hear and turn to God are not the ones inside the fold but the ones on the edge, on the outside, outside the churches. Don’t be surprised and don’t resent it—only look, only listen, only learn.
February 20th, 2002
Lent never starts at the right time. It always comes as an unwanted interruption. When did you last hear someone saying, “I can’t wait for Lent”? Or think to yourself, “I wish Ash Wednesday would hurry up!” No, we are just getting used to ordinary time and a rhythm of life when the whistle blows and we are wrenched from our routine and dragged here to dirty our faces, right in the middle of our busy pursuit of more important things.
Lent always comes from outside: we never choose it. Yet it won’t be avoided. Someone is blowing that trumpet; someone’s proclaiming a fast, gathering the people. They are urging us on to an urgency we don’t feel, to a repentance we hardly want, before a God we scarcely trust. And we don’t even get time off!
But we come. Here we are! … We come for ashes. Churches worldwide fill to the brim for those ashes. I like to think our bodies know better than our minds about these matters: that dust is calling to dust.
Why does God finally pay attention and take pity on the people in that last line of that reading from Joel? … Listen! “The LORD, jealous for the sake of the land took pity on the people.” For the sake of the land! You get the impression that God hardly notices all that trumpeting and fasting and assembling, until God notices the land. And I wonder … maybe it’s only our kinship with earth that gets us noticed at all. Is that why we come here year after year—to be soiled: with ash, with dust, with the dirt of the land? Not as camouflage but as talisman: our version of the Passover blood. “See, Lord, the land, and have pity on your people!”
Today we celebrate our kinship with dirt. “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” We are dust; we are dirt; we are ash; we are earth. We are earthlings, creatures formed from dust and the spittle of God. We are children of Adam—which meant, simply, earth creature before ever it became a personal name.
We are made of earth; we are made for earth. It is what we share. It is soil that unites us to each other, to every other creature of earth, to this very planet, and even to the heavens—since every atom of our bodies is dust and ash of long dead suns. And even here on earth, every atom of our bodies has been used before, countless times, in other bodies; human, animal, insect. We breathe the very breath of Shakespeare and Stalin. There is, literally, a little of Jesus in all of us—and something of the slime-mold.
But haven’t we always been uppity creatures. Since our clay was first fashioned we’ve been struggling to climb out of the dirt and clean up our act. We do so like to dress up; we cover our clay with finery; we hide our origins in the soiled earth under whatever mask we can find. We put on a polished face for the God who made us and project an image for all to see; one endless diversionary tactic lest we be revealed for who we are—and who we’ve always been. I reckon the original sin is not so much Pride as Shame. Shame! We were thrown out of Eden and we’ve been in the closet ever since. … But for the sake of the soil God took pity on the people—remember that!
So, this is our beginning, this Lent. Our end is some weeks away, with Jesus and that awkward drama of Holy Week. But what we do in between is what matters. The temptation is to dress up to be ready. But whether it is good deeds, or giving up, or getting clean, we need to be careful our Lenten trajectory matches Jesus’ own, or when we get to Holy Week we’ll be floating miles above the one we want to stand beside. Whatever comes later, Lent is first the season of his failing flesh and his own return to dust.
So let us fall back on humility this Lent: let us be humus, human. To be human is to be something made, and made of the same stuff as all other things. Made from dirt for a humble beauty God longs for us to accept. We are after all just soil—but soil singing a song of reconciliation for all creatures. Let us bear the mark of our making with humble pride.
February 11th, 2002
Have you ever, with a taste for roast lamb maybe, planted mint in your garden and found it taking over? ‘Invasive habit’ is the polite word the gardening handbooks use. Mint spreads, it multiplies, it proliferates. Its roots run wild so pulling it out just makes it thrive. It seeds itself, too, if you ever let it flower. Tough, hardy, invasive: God help the good seed that falls among mint!
Take all that and double it for the mustard of the gospel. What is the kingdom of god like? What parable can we find for it? It is a weed—a hardy, invasive weed the world fights a losing battle to control.
This weed can survive a David—lust, adultery, deceit, and murder—after all who was Jesus’ twenty-six-times-great-grandmother but Bathsheba? This weed can survive a crucifixion—failure, betrayal, death, and burial—after all who else do we celebrate tonight? And this weed can survive you and me—with all our pride and shame, our fear and love—after all here we are, still praying, still hoping, still loving, still loved.
February 1st, 2002
Isn’t there something deliciously, riskily attractive about the Jesus of the gospel today? When I was a callow youth studying chemistry I had a teacher who was always saying ‘well you’ll have learned X but the truth is …’ and then he’d go on to debunk whatever X was and show you how, impossible as it might seem, Y was the case. I lapped it up. Here was a guy who was breaking all the rules and getting paid for it. And somehow if I listened carefully enough, attended all the lectures, not only would I know that Y was better than X but maybe I too could be similarly, quirkily, rule-breakingly, ‘hip’ or ‘cool’ or … you add the adjective of the moment. And maybe, if I sat in the front row and smiled knowingly in all the right places and nodded sagely at his insights, well, maybe he might notice me and share and extra portion of his wisdom, might make me a disciple: a delicious and risky thought. Delicious … but risky—because I knew it would be hard work being so quirky, so insightful, so damned clever.
Now you are all probably thinking ‘loser’ – so let me say (a) you are right and (b) maybe the craving to be a disciple isn’t so foreign to you either if you find the right example.
And (c) discipleship in the kingdom of God isn’t like that at all. First the invitation comes from Jesus. Second it doesn’t come on merit—or if it does it is upside-down. I imagine us standing there like Eliab—“I’m big and strong—choose me”—or Abinadab—“I have the words—choose me”—or Shammah—“I am faithful—choose me”. The question is not whether we have what it takes to be chosen—the right assets—but whether we have all the right lacks, whether enough is missing, whether our weakness makes us vulnerable enough for so vulnerable a Master.
January 22nd, 2002
Here are two stories that don’t quite work out the way the heroes intend. Three if you include your own.
Anthony hears the gospel, ‘go, sell all you have, give the money to the poor, then come follow me’, and with the heroism of youth he does. Sells, gives, and follows a path out into the desert in search of solitude, austerity, and God. But God in her wisdom subverts his heroism by making the wilderness he loves into a little city as saints and sinners come by the drove to gawk, to wonder, to touch, to pray, to stay. Would he have chosen differently if he’d know how it would work out?
Jesus, in his own story, seems so moved with compassion for the leper that he heals without thought of doing otherwise. But it has a price. Against Jesus’ instructions the delighted man blabs and tells and Jesus gets so harried by the crowds who gather, saints and sinners alike, that he can no longer go openly into the towns he loves but has to stay outside in the wilderness. Would he have chosen differently if he’d known the way it would turn out?
I guess I wonder what it is that moves us each so much that we make those choices which change our lives in ways we can never know.
January 17th, 2002
“Here is my servant whom I uphold”. Here he is! But who is he? Who is it held before our eyes, dripping, half-drowned, dazzled?
It all began here says Luke in Acts: “God anointed him with Holy Spirit and power and because God was with him he went about doing good and curing any who had fallen into the power of the devil”. Who he is, is an issue of power: power received and power used.
Why does the Baptizer think it unfitting that he should be baptizing Jesus and not the other way around? Is that a matter of power, of precedence, too? Why does Jesus think it is fitting? And what kind of justice is being done when John plunges Jesus under the waves and holds him there until his breath is spent?
And why now? Why does the Spirit descend now? Why does God speak now? Declare now his love now, disclose his paternity now?
This is a gob-smacking moment for Jesus—but even more so for the God who breaks a 5000 year silence to mark it so. So, why now? Is this too an issue of power: power refused and power redefined?
“Here is my servant whom I uphold”. Can you see him, dripping, half-drowned, dazzled? “He does not cry out or shout aloud or make his voice heard in the streets. He does not break the crushed reed, nor quench the wavering flame but faithfully he brings true justice”.
January 13th, 2002
It isn’t the quality of our prayer that counts it seems—it isn’t even the quality of our ministry. What seems to count with God is how well we love—nothing more. So says John.
And just in case that scares you, makes you want to husband the meagre reserves of love you feel you have, Mark has a word or two of instruction.
Take stock of what you have, find it isn’t nearly enough and then give it away, all of it, completely, every scrap, to Jesus. And the little you no longer have will come back to you in abundance, more than enough for every need, enough to stuff you full and leave you bloated, enough to waste. Enough!
Love is like that.
January 8th, 2002
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