9th Sunday A:House built on the rock

What we read today as our gospel is a conclusion to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. He concludes it saying: “Anyone who listens to these words of mine and obeys them is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.” Let us analyse these words. Who is the wise man here? Wise man is the one who builds his house on a solid rock. In this context, wise man is the one who listens to 'these words of mine' (Jesus' words) and obeys them. So, listening to the words of Jesus and living them, is like building your house on solid foundation. Obeying or living Jesus’ sermon on the mount or his manifesto is like building your house on a solid rock.
Tell a modern young man that following Jesus' sermon on the mount is like building your house on the rock? He will stare at you and will say:
Are we building our houses on rock if we are poor in spirit or rejoice in our poverty, if we are meek and humble rather than asserting ourselves in this world of competition, and allow ourselves to be persecuted for righteousness' sake and rejoice in it? Are they strong foundations?
Are we building our houses on rock in this modern world by turning the other cheek, walking the extra mile, and forgiving as our heavenly father forgives?
Or are we building our houses on solid rock when we stop worrying about what we will eat or wear tomorrow, avoid judging other people, and ask God for those things that we need?
Enough, he will say. It is a strange rock to build your house upon. Indeed, following words such as these in our modern times is more like building a house on quicksand. How will we ever get on in life if we build on this foundation? Friends, this is the genuine concern of the modern man? Sometimes even we wonder and say “Is it really possible to obey the Sermon on the mount today?”
I'll say “yes”. How? If we understand them properly. Often the problem is not with the principles that Jesus taught us, but it is with the way we understand them. Let me give you an example to illustrate my point. It is a Sardarji joke. Sardarji is a character used to make fun of stupid or less intelligent people. The story goes like this:
One day when Sardarji visited his GP for his obesity problem the doctor told him “if you run eight miles a day for 300 days you will lose 10 stones of weight.” Wonderful. He went away. And at the end of 300 days, Sardarji rang up to the doctor to report that he lost the weight but he has a problem. Doctor asked him “what is the problem?” He said “I’m 2400 miles away from home.”
In this story when doctor told him to walk 8 miles a day he did not ask him to walk 2400 miles away from home. He could have easily walk up and down 8 miles from his house. But our Sardarji understood it as walking away from home. That was his problem. So also for example, when Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount asks you to turn you left cheek when some one strikes you on the right you can understand it as a call to be submissive or a call be master of your emotions. (i.e)Don’t be a slave to other’s emotions. Let me explain. Suppose someone is angry and strikes you on your cheek, you get angry and you strike him back. What is happening here is you are reacting to the action of the other. You are being influenced by his emotion and you react. You are not the master of your self. Where as when you turn the other cheek when some one strikes you, you are not reacting to his action but you are acting and saying “I will not be controlled by your emotion of anger but I will be a master of my self. You cannot influence me. I am what I am and not what you want me to be.”
Now, this principle that Jesus taught 'that you be the master of yourself'; is it not a strong rock on which you can build your house or life upon? Yes it is. It’s a wonderful and fantastic principle of life on which you can build your whole character. We can analyse every other principle contained in the Sermon on the Mount; it ultimately comes up to character-building based on strong principle of Jesus. It is this building of character that is referred to in the gospel today. Build your character based on the principles laid down by Jesus in his Sermon on the mount. It is this building that cannot be shaken by storms of doubt, gales of scientific onslaught on religion, winds competition from other religious traditions. It will not fall because the principles laid down by Jesus are far above all religions and sciences. Knowing this is the beginning our salvation. Amen.

Corpus Christi 2008

Today we celebrate the solemnity of the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. This feast began in the 1200s as a result of two miracles, two interventions of the Lord. The first occurred in the early part of the century, when the Lord Jesus began to appear to a contemplative nun in Belgium, Blessed Juliana of Mont Cornillon (1193-1258). Beginning from the time she was 16, a moon would appear to her throughout the day with a black band in it. She wondered what it meant and the Lord Jesus appeared to her in a dream and mentioned that the moon referred to the liturgical year and the black band to the fact that the liturgical year lacked one thing, a day in honour of His Body and Blood in the Eucharist.
Up until that point, the Church had marked the institution of the Eucharist each year on Holy Thursday, when the Lord gave the apostles his body and blood for the first time and instituted the priesthood. But on Holy Thursday, the focus of most Christians is on the imminent betrayal that will occur after the Last Supper. Even the Gospel of the Mass of the Last Supper does not focus on the Eucharist, but rather on the Lord’s washing his apostles’ feet and commissioning them to do the same in loving, humble service of others. Missing from the liturgical calendar was a feast specifically dedicated to rejoicing in the incredible gift of the Eucharist and thanking God for it. Blessed Juliana went to the local bishop, Bishop Robert of Liège, and asked him to institute a feast in their diocese in Belgium, which he did beginning in 1246. The second intervention happened in the life of a Czech priest, Father Peter of Prague, who had lost his faith in the reality of Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist. He used to ask how can this mere bread and wine in my hands can change, after a few sacred words, into the body and blood of the God-man, Jesus, even though all the appearances of the bread and wine remain. Father Peter felt like a hypocrite celebrating the Eucharist while having some doubts about whether the Lord Jesus were truly there. In 1263, he decided to make a pilgrimage to Rome, to pray at the tomb of his patron, St. Peter, for the gift of a renewed faith in the Eucharist. To make a pilgrimage from Prague to Rome in 1263, however, would have meant WALKING 851 miles. Walking twenty miles a day, it would have taken a month-and-a-half, one way. Despite the hardship and sacrifice, however, Peter went out of desperation to save his priesthood and save his faith.
He finally arrived after a long and lengthy journey. He prayed for a few of weeks in front of the tomb of his patron, St. Peter but after all of that, it seemed as if nothing had happened. So, crestfallen, he began on his journey up north, now with very little faith at all. He was travelling in a group of returning pilgrims, because there was safety in numbers in warding off bandits who would wait in hiding to ambush individual travellers. When it came to be Sunday, members of the group asked Fr. Peter if he might celebrate Mass for them. More out of courtesy than faith, he said “yes!”. They stopped at a small Church dedicated to St. Christina in Bolsena, Italy, and celebrated Mass on a side altar. Right before the “Lamb of God,” when Father Peter broke the host, as a priest always does to put a particle into the chalice, the host in his hands began to bleed profusely. It bled over his hands. It bled on the corporal and on the altar cloths. It started to pour down the altar onto the steps. The people, beholding the miracle in front of their eyes, started to shriek. The priest of St. Christina’s came to see what all the commotion was about and beheld the miracle with his own eyes. They had to decide what to do with the miracle. The local priest knew that Pope Urban IV was at that time in Orvieto, a papal city only about 10 miles up hill from where they were, and they decided to take the miracle to Orvieto to see what the Pope would instruct them to do. When they arrived, Father Peter told his story, about how he had lost his faith in the Eucharist, made a pilgrimage to Rome, thought that the Lord hadn’t heard his prayer, but then made his real presence incontrovertibly present during the celebration of the Mass in Bolsena. Father Peter punctuated the truth of the Lord’s presence in the Eucharist by saying, “Holy Father, bread can’t bleed.” That particular Holy Father, Urban IV, was the former archdeacon of bishop of Liège, Robert, and he took that miracle as a sign that Christ wanted a feast to His Body and Blood celebrated not just in his home diocese in Belgium, but throughout the whole Church. The first one was celebrated in 1264 and it has been celebrated ever since. The Lord worked both of those miracles so that we might fittingly celebrate his body and blood today, right here, in this Church!
What should our reaction be to so great a feast, to so mind-blowing a reality? Every time we celebrate Mass, what occurred in Bolsena — and in so many other Eucharistic miracles across the centuries — can occur here. Regardless of whether he chooses to do so or not, the reality is the same: we receive the same Christ who bled on the Cross, who bled in Father Peter’s hands 744 years ago. And our reaction to the Eucharist should be the same, whether a dramatic manifestation occurs or not, because it is Christ, God, whom we receive. Knowledge of that reality should influence our actions with respect to the God-man in the Eucharist.
((Excerpts from Fr. Roger J. Landry’s brilliantly written Homily on the Feast of Corpus Christi. ) )

Trinity Sunday: Celebration of God who is love.

My friend sent me a joke. “One fine evening Jesus was walking down the streets of heaven and he met St. Peter and a theologian at a café having a cup of tea. He joined them at their request. As a part of the conversation Jesus asked them the same question which he asked Peter when he was on this earth. ‘Peter! Now that you are with me so many years: Who do you say that I am?’ Peter gave the same old answer ‘You are Christ, son of the living God.’ But the theologian interrupted and said “Wait! that is not complete answer” and he continued "Thou art the Logos, existing in the Father as His rationality and then, by an act of His will, being generated, in consideration of the various functions by which God is related to his creation, but only on the fact that Scripture speaks of a Father, and a Son, and a Holy Spirit, each member of the Trinity being coequal with every other member, and each acting inseparably with and interpenetrating every other member, with only an economic subordination within God, but causing no division which would make the substance no longer simple."
And Jesus seems to have said “What?”….. (The joke is over, laugh if you can)
Friends, today we are celebrating the feast of the holy Trinity.
I tell you this story only to let you know that the doctrine of the Trinity cannot be fully understood in all its fullness. That does not mean that the doctrine is wrong but our human minds cannot comprehend divine realities fully. Human words fall short of concepts to describe divine realities.
Somebody asked me last year “do you find the doctrine of the trinity in the Bible?” The doctrine of three persons in one God and in fact the very word “Trinity” is not found in the Bible. But that does not mean that it is not in the Bible. Father, son and the Holy Spirit are very much part of the Bible. Unity of their purpose and existence is very well described in St. John’s gospel Chapters 14 to 16. And the church is commanded in all the gospels ‘to go and baptise in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit.’ Not just of any one person. So trinity is not and invention but revelation.
The importance of this doctrine for me lies in this: we are made in the image of God, therefore, the more we understand God the more we understand ourselves. Therefore, the more important question for us to ask today is: What does the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity tell us about the kind of God we worship and what does this say about the kind of people we should be? On this, we have two points to reflect upon.
(1) God does not exist in solitary individualism but in a community of love and sharing. God is not a loner. Our God is not an hermit who loves being lonely but he lives in community. What does it mean for us? This means that a Christian in search of Godliness (Matthew 5:48) or holiness must not run away from the world. The ideal Christian spirituality is not that of flight from the world like that of certain Buddhist or even old Christian monastic traditions where the quest for holiness means permanent withdrawal to the Himalayas or deserts away from contact and involvement with people and society. One thing that strikes me in the life of Jesus is that he was not living in the desert asking people to come there but he went to them because he found the kingdom of God in them.
(2) True love requires three partners. God is love. Love always involves others. Taking an example from the human condition we see that when a man A is in love with a woman B they seal their love by producing a baby C. Father, mother and child -- love when it perfected becomes a trinity. Here again I am using inadequate terms to define divine reality.
We are all made in God’s image and likeness. Just as God is God of ‘Trinitarian relationship’, so also we can be fully human only in a relationship of three partners. The self needs to be in a horizontal relationship with others and a vertical relationship with God. In that way our life becomes Trinitarian like that of God. Then we will be able to come our of our shell of individualism. I and I , nothing else. No. The doctrine of the Blessed Trinity challenges us to adopt rather an “I-and-God-and-neighbour principle.” I am a Christian insofar as I live in a relationship of love with God and other people. May the grace of the Holy Trinity whom we honour today, help us to banish all traces of self-centeredness in our lives and make us live in love of God and of neighbour.
Amen

Pentecost: Birthday of the Church

Friends, first of all let me wish you a “Happy Birthday”. Today is the birthday of the church . It is today, the day of the Pentecost when the disciples after receiving the Holy Spirit went and preached the word of God, 3000 men were converted and received baptism and the church was born.
All those who are baptised: that is all of us are members of the church. And we are the church and it is our birthday today. On this auspicious day I want to talk to you about our mother church. What it is? What is its dignity? Whenever we recite the Nicean creed, we say “We believe in One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.” That is the dignity or these are the characteristic features of the church of which we are all members.
Today I want to talk to you about these four characteristic features of the church. The events that happened on the Pentecost day reveal this.
First, Church is ONE. Don’t laugh at me when I say church is one. Because obviously you come across so many different churches in Lewisham itself: Roman catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Baptist etc to name a few. None of them are connected to each other. I know that. But still what do I mean when I say the church is one. It means that Christ is the head and all of us (including the different churches) are the different parts of the body, each different from the other but all connected to the head. ( Refer CCC 790& 791)Unfortunately each part thinks that it is superior to the other. Not realizing that they only do what the head commands. (You can think of the famous story of body parts fighting with each other and refusing to work.) So church is one professing one Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord.
Secondly, Church is Holy. Is it holy? Do we have only saints in the church? If only saints are allowed to be in the church, I thinks not many of us including me will be worthy to be here. Then what does it mean when we say the church is holy? It does not mean it is full of saints although it is they who shine like bright stars, but it means that church is the agent or means of holiness and sainthood. Look at the all the sacraments which is part of the church. What do they do? What are they for? Baptism welcomes a man /woman washing him clean and filling him with grace. Confirmation strengthens him/her, communion nourishes him, confession cleanses him periodically matrimony or holy orders gives him a path of achieving this holiness and anointing comes to him at the last moment to prepare him for heaven.. So church is full of opportunities or graces for those who want to become and be holy. Church is holy.
Third, Church is Catholic. The word catholic means “universal”. It is that ‘mustard seed which is smallest as the seed but when it grows up many birds can come and build their nest.(Matt. 13:31-32)
"The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches"
It is that net which caught 153 fish. John 21:11 “Simon Peter climbed aboard and dragged the net ashore. It was full of large fish, 153 [of them]…” Remember the famous homily of Deacon James here last year. How he said that 153 fish stood for 153 varieties of fish believed to be existing that time. And how he explained that church includes members of all nations, languages and cultures. Church is universal. He even took time to explain how our Lewisham church itself is universal. There is a person from the country of every alphabet of English in our parish. A to Z. That is what it means when we say church is catholic. It is universal. Jesus said “Go to the whole world and make disciples of all the nations. Make it universal. Make it catholic.
Fourth and final, church is Apostolic. It means two things for us. It means that it is founded on the rock of the apostles and its successors. We believe that Apostles and their successors are the foundations of this church. Because often we read in Apocalypse that the new city had twelve gates, or twelve or twenty four thrones or elders referring to patriarchs and apostles. So apostolic succession is an important feature of the church. We all trace back the origin of our church to apostles and Jesus Christ. Secondly it also means that the ‘apostle’ is one who is sent to proclaim. That is the root meaning. So church by nature is ‘apostolic’ which means ‘proclaiming’ or ‘witnessing.’ It is an important feature of the church. You are called to proclaim.
This is the nature of the church. One, holy, catholic and apostolic church. And we are all members of this church. And we are proud to profess it in Christ Jesus the Lord. Amen

Somebody asked me “why did Jesus take forty days to ascent to heaven? Any technical problem to his rocket-launcher?” Funny but good question to begin with. Why forty days? Let us read a quotation from Venerable John Henry Newman. He said “"Moses brought out of Egypt a timid nation, and in the space of forty years trained it to be full of valour for the task of conquering the promised land; Christ in forty days trains his apostles to be bold and patient instead of cowards. They mourned and wept at the beginning of the season, but at the end they are full of courage for the good fight;”
Yes, after his resurrection this is what he did for forty days appearing to them and strengthening them in their faith. All his three years of hard work in choosing them and training them to continue his work would have been a waste if he had not spent these forty days with them. It filled them with courage, purpose and conviction. And then after forty days he ascended to his Father. And this is what we celebrate today. The feast of ascension. In the Apostles creed we say “He ascended into heaven and seated at the right hand of the Father.”
Now let me ask you, why did he ascend into heaven? Why did he go to the place where he went? Funny or ridiculous question, is it not? But it has got some important answers for our faith. What ascension means? What it is all about?
First, it means that Jesus going back to the place where he came from. That is our initial thought. He came from the father on a mission. And after accomplishing his mission he is going back to his place. That is it. Is it all? No there is something more to it. That is our second point.
Secondly, ascension is the reward he got for his humility. In St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians he writes 2/6ff “Though he was in the form of God he did not count equality with God, a thing to be grasped but he humbled himself taking the form of a servant being born in the likeness of man. He humbled himself to death, even death on the cross, therefore God has highly exalted him. And given him a name which is above every name that at the name of Jesus Every knee should bow in heaven, on earth and under the earth and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.” So what is ascension here. It is a reward for his humbling himself. It is a sharp contrast to Adam and Eve. Humans working out to become like God, here god becoming man. So is this reward.
Thirdly, Jesus’ ascension has a purpose. He himself says it. We read it as our gospel last Sunday. In John 14/2ff he says “ In my Father’s house there are many rooms……… I am going to prepare a place for you.” The gates of heaven that were closed because of the sin of Adam have to be opened by some one and Jesus Christ the first-born from the dead should be the first one to go and open the gates to invite everyone in. So he says “I have to go and open the gates to invite you all in.”
Finally, in John 16/7 Jesus says “Nevertheless I tell you the truth; it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counsellor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.” Friends, this has got lot of meaning. It is not that Counsellor who obviously is the Holy Spirit and he cannot work together but it means that it is the mission of the Holy Spirit to lead the Church. So he says I need to go and send the Holy spirit to lead you. If we look at the whole of the Bible we can see God the Father playing the dominant role in the Old testament and Jesus Christ playing the dominant role in the gospels and the Holy Spirit taking over the church from Acts to the end of New Testament.
It is not that the other persons of the trinity are absent during those time, but the particular person of the trinity plays predominant role according to the plan of God. So Jesus says I will go and Send you the Holy Spirit who will take control of the Church.
So this is what ascension means for us too. Heaven is our home and the Spirit leads us to this home and makes us long for this home. And our hearts are restless un till they rest in him.