Homily Collection

If a Martian landed among us and watched what happens during this hour, he or she – or should that be ‘it’? – might be tempted to conclude that we are all hypocrites… The Gospel reading I’ve just proclaimed is fairly explicit: When you give alms, do not have it trumpeted before you… your almsgiving must be in secret… When you pray, go to your private room… when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that no-one will know that you are fasting except your Father…

Almsgiving, prayer, and fasting – three key disciplines we associate with the season of Lent. And the Lord’s instruction is to do these things in private – with the minimum of fuss and ostentation… no showing off or grand gestures. And, having heard these words…. and endured these reflections of mine… what will we do next? Fr Paul and I will daub great gaudy, messy blobs of ash on your foreheads… And so, any intention you might have had to keep your Lenten discipline private and unshowy will be thwarted as you go out from here, your foreheads mucky from the ashes!

So, what’s going on? Are we really hypocrites who read one thing in the gospel and then, just five minutes later, before we even leave the building, turn around and do the exact opposite?

I sincerely hope not! The only way I can think of reconciling the gospel’s instructions with this very public branding with ashes is to think in terms of motivation. We don’t line up and receive the ashes in order to show our recalcitrant family members, our unbelieving neighbours, or our sceptical or cynical college roommates how seriously we take our Christianity and how proud we are of our Catholicism. We don’t receive the ashes in order to show off, or even in order to bear witness before the world.

No… we receive the ashes in order to remind ourselves of something. These ashes are what was left when we burnt the palms we waved last Holy Week. Signs of triumph and adulation on Palm Sunday, they had since dried up. No longer were they signs of triumph. They are dust… desiccated…reminders of death.

One of the sets of words used when signing with the ashes is Remember, you are dust, and to dust you will return. Even when we use the somewhat less grim formula Turn away from sin and be faithful to the gospel, it’s hard not to be briefly reminded of our mortality and frailty, as that gritty, messy, smoky thumb makes contact with our foreheads. So… Make no mistake: The signing with ashes isn’t a hypocritical gesture for others to be impressed at… It’s a radically personal and intimate sign for ourselves…

But even that can sound unnecessarily negative… It can sound like the kind of good old-fashioned Catholic guilt that comedians take so much pleasure in sending up – Remember you are dust… Be guilty… Be afraid…But, it seems to me, that that startlingly powerful combination of words, eye contact and touch that occurs when the minister imposes the ashes on your forehead is a call not to terror, scruples, fear, or anxiety…
It is a call to remember what we are… who we are… who made us… in whom is our destiny… It is a call to remember that we are God’s creatures…

It is a call, expressed, so beautifully in the first reading from Joel, to return to him with all our hearts… not with big gestures, but with a change of heart – for he is all tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in graciousness, and ready to relent.

Of course that’s a daily call – or at least it should be – but the Church offers us this season of grace to do it in a more concentrated way, and to be conscious of one another while so doing. It is a great and most beautiful paradox, that the Lenten call is a radically personal and individual call to turn more closely towards God… and yet despite being personal and individual, it is something we do together as Christians.

Lent originally developed as a time of intense preparation for those who were preparing for baptism at Easter. It was, and still is, described as a ‘period of purification and enlightenment’ for them. With time, the rest of the Church joined them in this period of examination, conversion, and preparation… seeking to enlarge their own hearts by acts of prayer, fasting and almsgiving. And we continue to do that. Our RCIA group meets here on Wednesdays, and as the various members of the group prepare either for baptism, or for reception into full communion with the Catholic Church at Easter, we accompany them with our love, our support and our prayers.

The aim of Lent wasn’t – and isn’t – a reduced waistline or a detox of the system. The aim was – and is – a greater knowledge and experience of God – that the celebration of the Easter feasts might be a more fruitful, powerful and joyful one. We fast now that we may feast then. We remind ourselves of our human mortality now that we may revel then in the Eternal Life won for us and pledged to us by the passion, death, resurrection and ascension of the Incarnate Son of God. We refrain from singing alleluia now that we may sing it repeatedly and with abandon then. We come forward for ashes now, that we may splash in the waters of the font then. For, at its heart, Lent is a journey from ashes to the living font…

From ashes to the living font your Church must journey, Lord.
Baptised in grace, in grace renewed, by your most holy word.

Through fasting, prayer, and charity, your voice speaks deep within,
Returning us to ways of truth and turning us from sin.

For thirsting hearts let waters flow, our fainting souls revive;
And at the well your waters give – our everlasting life.

From ashes to the living font your Church must journey still,
Through cross and tomb to Easter joy, in Spirit-fire fulfilled.
(Words © Alan J Hommerding)

Now is the favourable time! This is the day of salvation!

I Corinthians 6: 12

“Freedom is everything,” they say in Corinth, “for me, no things are forbidden.” “Don’t you believe it,” says Paul. That’s verse 12, the verse before the start of our second reading.

Between leaving Washington and arriving here I was in Germany for two weeks for World Youth Day. I was with the diocesan youth pilgrimage, so Bishop Kevin was there, a number of priests of the diocese, and a good number of young people. Here was the diocese to which I belong, the universal Church to which I belong, here were friends and young people and new and interesting people to meet, and yet … and yet it was a very strange time.

It was a strange time because a whole web of relationships which had grown organically around me had been severed. I had been brutally cut free. Oh yes, of course I could go back, I would go back and people would know me, but they would not come to me to baptise their children, they would not call me to visit when they were sick, they would no longer expect me to listen and to love them when they were simply sad or distressed. A whole network of relationships had been severed. I wasn’t their priest any more. I had freedom. I owed them no debt of responsibility.

When I arrived here only two weeks later new relationships were created. My task was to get to know you, to show you that I was here for you, to minister to you and to love you. And that, I hope, has happened. A new network, a new web of relationships has been woven. I am held again within a matrix, within a community. You have expectations of me, and those expectations moor me, they hold me in place, and it’s good to be held.

The fortnight between Washington and St. Cuthbert’s was a strange time of being cast adrift: a strange, rootless, anchorless time, a frightening time. “Freedom is everything” say the Corinthians, “nothing is forbidden to me.” “Don’t you believe it,” say Paul. The freedom of not owing anything to anyone is rootless, anchorless and ultimately a terrifying place to be in. Who can live there and remain sane?

Freedom isn’t everything after all. It’s empty and lonely. And that is why we commit ourselves to relationships of debt, of owing love and time and care to people. We sacramentalise some of those relationships in ordination and marriage.

This is the basis of Paul’s argument about sexual ethics. The cry for freedom can pretend that we don’t owe anything to anybody, that we can do what we want. Paul says no: we owe God, and we owe his Church. Our bodies belong to God he says. It is in our bodies and through our bodies that we give the worship that we owe to God. There’s a link here to Romans 12 where Paul urges the Romans to make their bodies a living offering to God. In other words, our worship is the offering we make in the concrete, bodily acts of our lives.

Paul goes on to say this, “You know, surely, that your bodies are members making up the body of Christ.” Our bodies not only belong to God, but they belong to his Church, the Body of Christ. We are inserted into its fabric. It is the matrix, the web of relationships that hold us. I am not free to do what I please because I owe something to the rest of you. And it’s good to owe something to you, it’s good that you have expectations of me, that you need me to be here for you, and even (though I might not always feel it) that you make demands on me. Each of us owes something to, has responsibility for, the rest of us. If one is weakened, if one sins, the whole fabric, we corporately, this community, God’s Church is weakened.

Personal sin is never personal. It is always corporate. It weakens not only the individual, but the whole body. And individual forgiveness restores not just the individual, but the whole body, the whole people.

“Freedom is everything” say the Corinthians, “nothing is forbidden to me.” “Don’t you believe it,” says Paul. Being held within relationships of debt and responsibility, where care and love are owed, is the only sort of life worth living.

In the house there’s an old wooden chest. It was a bit paint-splashed and unloved when I found it, but we cleaned it up with wire wool and wax and now it sits in the centre of my sitting room upstairs room. Inside the chest are the following items:
Two cowboy hats, one black one shocking pink (the latter retrieved from the garage roof where it must have been thrown by a passing hen party)
One Venetian carnival mask
A box of sound effects: two coconut shells for horses hooves, a gazoo, a bicycle bell, various bird calls and animal noises, a train whistle a swany whistle and a contraption that simulates the sound of rumbling thunder.
A nativity star with a face sized hole in the centre
One very large sheep with detachable fleece on green background
Zacchaeus’s tree in felt (together with a miniature body)
A cut out figure of a WWF all-in-wrestler with movable mouth.

You could say that it’s my treasure chest. It’s a props cupboard. Some of its spoils come out regularly, maybe annually, whilst other productions are revived less frequently. I do take some pride in my treasure chest. This is pretty close, it seems to me, to the scribe described in the gospel: the scribe of the kingdom who is like the householder who brings out of his treasury things both old and new.

However, there are other things that I have in my house. There are a few prized pieces of furniture. These make the house look nice, classy, I like to think, and welcoming, of course. Yes, it’s not really for me, it’s to enable me to entertain well: the numerous visitors who come and stay in the presbytery, and home-sick students. Except that I wince when, at the end of a meal, the heavy framed, and now well-fed students lean back heavily, and the joints of the delicately made chairs groan in complaint. With Wall-E, my chairs make the rebuke of the inanimate to the over-consumption of humanity. Also, I inwardly seethe at a wet glass, or a hot mug placed on a polished wooden surface.

So there are things in my house that are at the disposal of others and at the disposal of the gospel, and there are things that are not, and a little inventory is not a bad exercise.

I’m highlighting this verse, and taking a break from my usual concentration on Paul, because it is such an important verse in Matthew’s gospel. All the scholars say if you want to understand Matthew, the gospel writer, forget the story about the tax-collector called from his tax booth: we have no real reason to think that has anything to do with the evangelist. The line that describes Matthew is this one: the scribe of the kingdom is like the householder who brings forth from his storeroom, his treasury, things both new and old. This, they say, is how Matthew understood himself and what he was doing. Matthew is the gospel writer who brings out the old to tell the new story of the good news of Jesus. It’s Matthew who uses the phrase, “All this happened to fulfil the words of the scriptures …” He pulls out the words of the Hebrew scriptures and brings them into the service of the gospel. It is in Matthew’s gospel that we hear the words of Jesus, “Not one jot, one iota of the law shall pass away until its purpose has been achieved.” Matthew is a Jewish Christian who sees the value of the old in telling the new story of the gospel.

I’ve always found the description of the scribe an important one for my vocation as a priest. At my ordination I lay face down on the floor in a symbolic gesture that signalled my desire to give my life to God, his people and his gospel. But how do I live that gesture? Well, partly by putting my life, in all its constituent parts at the service of God, his people and the gospel. Not just the physical items in my house, but my experiences, all the anecdotes, some old, some new, all the reading and learning that I have: all of it is in the service of, or at the disposal of the gospel and should be put to use in preaching the gospel message.

Lastly, there is more offered by this verse than an explanation of the evangelist and an explanation of your priest. At another point in his gospel, Matthew quotes Jesus, “When you pray go into your private room.” The word used is the same as the words used here for storehouse or treasury. Now that’s an interesting idea for all of us. When we pray we go into that same place, the place where our treasures are: the treasures of our most precious memories and experiences, and we pray out of them, we put all of that stuff at the disposal of our prayer and our relationship with God. In your prayer go into your treasury, your storehouse, and bring out things both new and old.