Homily for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost, Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, November 9, 2014

Galatians 6.11-18 – Luke 8.26-39


Picture Saint Paul dictating his letter to the Church in Galatia. When his assistant has finished, Paul takes up the pen personally, and adds some final thoughts. He speaks of writing with large letters. Perhaps he is losing his eyesight, for he was once an expert writer and religious official himself; or, perhaps, writing as small as his scribe could, to get as much wording on the page of the expensive parchment as possible, was now too painful for him – he speaks of being unable to deal with the Church troublemakers, because he bears the marks of Jesus on his own body.


These are very interesting last few sentences, conveying the thoughts right at the forefront of St Paul’s mind. He compares and contrasts outward physical appearances with the inner truths that last because they mean something. He begins with the outsize appearance of his handwriting; and he ends with the outward appearance of wounds upon his skin. But he turns to attention to the greater fact of life that lies among and within what we experience as real in the world. Thus he questions the Galatian Christians, a community of Jews and Gentiles alike, if they have lost sight of what being a Christian is all about. Christ was circumcised not because it was a cultural convention, but because from time immemorial it had been a sacramental sign of the people’s faith in their covenant with God. “An outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,” it was the mark of an undertaking by the Hebrews and the Jews to take the law of God to their own hearts and keep it as the light of their lives. But here were people who did not take the law of God seriously themselves, yet insisted that the new people who wanted to follow Christ’s conform to an outward appearance, an appearance that on its own meant nothing without the inner meaning of love, obedience, and bonding with our God.


We are reminded of the words of the Prophet Micah, expressing the patience of God at humanity’s continual cycle of betrayal, disobedience and trying to buy back God’s favour with a surfeit of religion and sacrificial offering. The Lord asks, “O my people, what have I done to you? How have I wearied you?” The response is predictable: the offer of year-old calves, rams in their thousands, rivers of oil to burn the Temple lamps, even a human sacrifice. Wearily, Prophet Micah explains it all over again: “You have been told what would be good; you have been told what the Lord requires: to do justice, to love goodness, and to work humbly with your God.” (Micah 6. 3, 8)


It is, of course, easier to perform the outward appearance of religion – the customs, the behaviours; the fretting over the way other people bow, or make the sign of the Cross; the sharp eye on other people’s morals, while presuming forgiveness for one’s own shortcomings; the profession of righteous activity backed up with a word of criticism (a hint of our own insecurity perhaps) for those who we want to show are not up to the mark. There is nothing new under the sun; and St Paul was as worn down by self-righteous troublemakers as his successors have been right down the ages to this day. He told the Church at Corinth that people like that are like brass gongs – a lot of sound is made when the hammer strikes, but they make no music of their own: much reverberation, but no heart; much noise, but no love (cf. I Corinthians 13.1). Pope Francis says exactly the same about the poison of gossip, telling religious superiors this week that it actually be more honest to come to blows, so much more insidious and harmful is the hidden attack of pitiless, unloving gossip (Address to 54th National Assembly of Religious Superiors of Italy, 7 November 2014).


He has spoken, too, of Christians who are lukewarm and mediocre, people who look like Christians, but who are really worldly. He says, “They are enemies of the Cross of Christ. They take the name but they do not follow the responsibilities of Christian life. Do I like to brag? Do I like money? Do I like pride, arrogance?... These types of people get corrupted bit by bit and end up becoming pagan Christians” (Homily on 8 November, 2014, Santa Marta, Rome on Philippians 3.18). He is quoting St Paul, who saw the remedy to all this in self-giving love. For he points all those people who make trouble - all those obsessed with outward form, all those intruding their own anxieties into the souls of others - to the only thing that matters, to Jesus Christ on his Cross, the Cross that makes everything else beside the point. Appearance, law, immemorial custom, personal identity, self-realisation, individual spiritualities: all these mean nothing, unless we have become a new creation at the hand of Christ nailed to its Cross.


It is no accident that St Paul seizes on what must have seemed to be an endless and enervating fine argument about circumcision. It is as though he is saying, “Do you foolish Galatians not realise that when Jesus was circumcised, it was the first time He shed His blood for us? Do you not realise you are arguing about the Cross itself? Do you not see that all this argument about who gets to belong to the people of God - who can and can’t come in - has itself been crucified. With Christ’s death it has been killed off and, unlike Him it has not risen from the dead. Only Christ is alive and His resurrection is what has freed us to be made into new creations.


He tells them that marks he bears in his body are those caused by a Cross that ended his old life. They are also caused by the Resurrection freeing him to be made into something different now. “I have been crucified with Christ,” he has explained to them. “It is not any more I who live, but Christ who lives within me” (Galatians 2.20). His parting word is that this grace, the very living of Christ in a human soul, will be in their spirit too.


And what of us, with our conflicting thoughts, wants, feelings, grudges, self-pity, words, thoughts, excuses, dreams, conceit and sin? Are we the pagan Christians of which Pope Francis spoke, gradually corrupted by mediocrity, settling for less when we are free to have everything if, like the Lord we follow, we did but do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our God? The devil would certainly like us to think so, crowding into us so many of his unclean spirits, to make us feel defeated and overwhelmed, tormented even by the attempt of Christ at relief, neuralgic even at the thought of his touch.


Instead, let us be the ones who call out “Save us,” to the one we can see is not the Punisher but the Lover of Mankind (Kontakion of Sunday, Tone 5). Let us long even to endure that crucifixion with Christ that made St Paul into a new creation. Let it be that just one spirit casts out all else, one spirit that dwells in us richly: Christ who is God’s love, Christ who is our unbreakable bonding with His Father. 

Fr Mark Woodruff
 

Homily for the Twenty-Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, 14 December 2014

Here in our Byzantine church in London in December 2014, we seem for an hour to have stepped out of time. A few yards away Oxford Street is heaving with shoppers, engrossed as one mind in the drudgery of shopping for Christmas. Yet here we are keeping an ordinary Sunday, and our celebration of the Nativity of our Lord God and Saviour, Jesus Christ, according to the flesh is a month away.

It is true that two weeks ago we began the Nativity Fast, but it is only next week that we will begin to sing a chant that looks to the coming feast with an anticipation that we share with the expectant Mother of God. We are also a few weeks away from the Sundays that will honour the ancestors of Christ who prepared His coming. But coming out of the time around us, does not mean that we have put the world on pause. We are not at a stand-still. Yet standing is the theme taken by both the Apostle and the Evangelist today.

For St Paul (Ephesians 6.10-17), standing is readiness and resistance, holding your position against the coming struggle. He alludes to the prowess of the soldier, the champion standing head and shoulders above the rest, the athlete whose years of physical training have prepared him to go to, in the defence of peace. This spiritual warrior is confident in the Lord of hosts and assured in what he is to do. His standing is strong, and recalls to us the way St Paul talks about how we may all attain the fullness of the stature of humanity in Christ. With this stature, such a soldier of Christ may be like a coiled spring; but the image of him is static. He stands in the strength of waiting and resilience.

In St Luke’ story (Luke 13. 10-17), at first sight the standing comes after release for an old lady of her years of being bent double. It is healing; it is freedom from misery and the spirit-sapping energy of adversity and disability. We are drawn into a bewildering scene where a woman, who has not only been disabled for eighteen years but marginalised for it because her condition is blamed on a baleful spirit, is spectacularly healed. In the dramatic moment, we expect universal rejoicing and wonder at the power of God among us. But the magic of the moment is snapped, when a clergyman with an answer for everything declares that healing on the Sabbath is against the rules. It did not dawn on him that this was not earthly effort, but can only have come from the initiative of God. You can just hear him turning on Jesus, and saying, “It’s not what you did, it’s the way you did it”; or, “You should have consulted me first.” The Lord can readily point to the double standards and the failure to see the purpose of God: that God made the Sabbath to show off the completeness of the world and of humanity that was once achieved by creation, and now by healing and salvation. Ironically – again, you can picture it – the head of the synagogue congregation and the Lord have a “stand-up” row; and between them a dumbfounded woman, also standing up, but for her it the first time properly in two decades, her lips frozen in mid-praise to God, while the very person who should have been most glad for her, the man of God, is shown up and blames the Son of God for making the world a little more like the Kingdom of Heaven than it was before. Yet the image we have is still static; we and the old lady are not moving now; again things are static. There is a hint of it in today’s troparion (Sundays of the Second Tone): “When You went down to death, O Life immortal, You struck Hades dead…” There is something abrupt, and we hold our breath as we wait for something to happen next.

In our language, standing tends to give that impression – waiting, resisting (confronting, perhaps), talking, meeting, arriving, even holding things up. Standing is after the end of things, or before their beginning, or a pause in their midst. But to the first hearers of the Lord and the readers of St Paul, standing is all about an act that is in the process of being done, a dynamic movement on which there is consequence and progression.

When St Paul writes of standing, the word he uses is part of the same word he uses for the resurrection of Christ. Telling us to stand, he is telling us to live the life of those now risen from the dead, even before their deaths. Imagine if we in English never knew of the word “resurrection”. Imagine if all the time, like the Dutch and Germans, we referred to the Upstanding of Christ. In other words, St Paul is not telling us to train and arm ourselves for a fight, even a spiritual one, so that we can stand and be ready. He is telling us to stand up, just like Christ stood up from lying in His grave. St Paul is telling us to live not as those preparing to live out our days on earth, as we head towards our deaths, but with the capacity for living the life that is already ours – the life of resurrection that is already at work in us, countering the effects of evil and destruction, which did their worst until Christ rose up and stood over them and can now never separate us from Him. This is why we sing every Easter, “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death and to those in the tombs giving life”. In the famous hymn by Charles Wesley, “Soldiers of Christ, arise” (The Whole Armour of God, Charles Wesley, 1747), he speaks likewise of overcoming, of “tread[ing] all the powers of darkness down” – not by mere victory, but by living the resurrection life in which we “stand entire at last” – entirely filled with grace, entirely filled with freedom from sin, from the destroying limitations of earthly life, thus entirely human again, being filled with the Upstanding of Christ himself within us.

So look again at the Gospel. It is not just the story of a healing miracle. It is a description of Christ’s own resurrection and the new life that comes from it for all. Like Him, the woman is brought down to nothingness until, by the end of her own Good Friday and then the beginning of the Sabbath –do not forget that days begin on the sunset the closes the preceding day, the Friday evening – she is finally laid low and all her strength is drained. The miracle of the destruction of death is worked through her on the Sabbath, which means cessation – not merely cessation from work activity, but the enforced cessation of sin and evil’s activity too. While no act appears to be have been happening, the power of God to heal and set the earth-bound soul to the eternal liberty intended for it takes effect. Lo and behold, she rises; she stands up. It is not the end of an old infirmity. It is not the afterword towards the end of a life, whose most active years, once full of potential, have been lost. It is the Upstanding of Jesus at work in her.

As we look forward with those around us to the forthcoming celebrations, we have stepped out of their time but we have not frozen our chronology, or pressed the “pause” button. The fast of moderation and the entering of a saner, less frenzied dimension may come as a relief. But we are not here for respite. We are here because we know that the real hurry of humanity is not for material things that will pass on their way in a few weeks’ time. The real hurry of humanity that we are occupied with is to meet the timing of God, who started His standing up even before there was a resurrection to show for it, as the story of the old lady has shown us. His constant standing up in every day and season takes us by surprise too, because we entertain the notion that the Resurrection is a thing of the past; and then it comes up to us, stands before us, and reminds us that we belong not to this world - or even to this passing world’s next world - but to a new, enduring and eternal world that has been begun in the midst of us and our time, and of which we are the population. Living in such a world, it is possible for us not to sin. In such a world, dying, behold we live (II Corinthians 6.9), and yet it is not we who live, but Christ who lives within us (Galatians 2.20). In such a world, it is possible for us to realise the Kingdom of God. In such as world, standing is not a matter of waiting or keeping still, but of movement upon movement, energised by grace to aspire for the blessedness of living in the very heaven, and constantly to hurry to catch up with it and get into it.

St Paul tells us that “you will be able to stand, and after having done everything, to stand”. It is a strange phrase, if you think it is all about withstanding, holding ready and staying still. But if you remember that it is about Christ’s ceaseless moving to stand up, to stand up within us, to be our rising as well, our will is nothing other than to be one with our God, and to desire above all things His Coming Kingdom, saying,

Still let the Spirit cry
in all His soldiers, “Come!”
Till Christ the Lord descends from high
and takes the conquerors home.
The Whole Armour of God, Charles Wesley, 1747

Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, London

The icon depicting the events of this Sunday’s Gospel (Luke  5.1-11) shows the Lord standing on the shore of the lake. A crowd presses in on Him and there are too many, too close, for Him to make Himself heard. He sees Peter’s and James & John’s boats, and climbs in while the fishermen are mending their nets. He gets them to put out into the water just far enough, so that everyone can see Him and hear Him easily, using the surface of the lake to convey the sound of His voice.

At first, you might have thought He was putting some distance between Himself and the crowd, trying to get away from people’s demands. He has done this before, slipping through the crowds when accusers wanted to attack Him; or sensing someone in the crowd had taken power from Him, when it turned out that the woman with the bleed touched Him for healing.

But this is no act of escape. The true meaning of this story is not that He left the people behind on dry land, but that He “entered in”. He entered into a boat and from a vantage point actually turned back toward the crowd to drawn it into His world of the Spirit.

“Enter in” – where have we heard that phrase before? Think back to Christmas:

O holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray;
Cast out our sin, and enter in, be born in us today…

O come to us, abide with us, Our Lord, Emmanuel.

This story of the Lord, getting into a boat, coming among His people, is a story of the incarnation, of the God of heaven taking human form and voice, to be the Word of God living among humanity. The significance of the boat is that it alludes to another ark – the Ark that preserved God’s creation from the Flood and brought it to salvation. This Ark in turn alludes to the Ark of the Covenant, the throne of the Great King in the Temple, that held both the Law and the presence of God among His people. To us in the Church, both of these are vivid symbols of the Mother of God, who is often referred to as the Ark, on whom sits the Lord as God made Flesh, Emmanuel, God among us, and in Person the very arrival of salvation.

So it is that in the Theotokion for today we sing to the Mother of God,

“The Master of all became flesh in you, the Holy Ark … you have become wider than the heavens carrying your Creator. Glory to Him Who freed us through birth from you.”

We often think of heaven as our destination after life, and the world as the path of struggles we take to it. But truly the Kingdom comes to us here. Christians do not believe in life after death; we believe in eternal life now. “Death has vanished,” we declare, and Eve is “redeemed from bondage now” – now, not at some point in the future. We sing, “You arose … and gave life to the world” – here to the world, not hereafter to its faithful few survivors. This is what the fishermen saw, especially when the Lord told them, in that luminous phrase, to “put out into the deep water”, asking them too, like Him, to “enter in” to something; something now all round them, yet something they had never known to look for before. Because here, in the deep water, is the breadth of the heavens – don’t get confused by the story – carrying not more fish than the nets can haul out of the sea, but hauling out their Creator Whom they cannot contain. Simon Peter beholds what Jesus is, and what he himself is standing before Him, having beheld the deep. Here is humanity, inadequate, failing by its own efforts, frustrated by its limitations, undermined by its shortcomings, sinful and self-defeated. Yet here too is the Creator, Who does not steer clear of what He has made but enters into it.

Simon Peter and the sons of Zebedee - the crowds too - have seen the Word of God and heard Him. Just as this Word turn from heaven to face the people, so too these people have been made, by the very entry of God into their midst, to turn round and face themselves in the deep. They experience amazement, but also do not like what they begin to see about themselves. As St Luke puts it, they were filled, but “begin to sink”.

Simon Peter’s words speak for us all in the face of the Kingdom of God that constantly comes to us, not as some afterthought to our life on earth, but arriving whenever we too put out into the deep water and attend the Liturgy, say our prayers, or behold the majesty of the Creator and Redeemer set in comparison beside so much suffering and cruel disfigurement of the goodness and beauty He has made in the world and our humanity. Simon Peter, who has ventured beneath the surface of life, says, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man”. We join him at every moment when we say, “Lord, have mercy, Hospodi pomylui, Kyrie eleison”. But Simon Peter’s words are also prophetic, the gift of his realisation of the Kingdom standing before him in Person, that - he has also found - lies within. The Lord has entered in, and Simon Peter has begun to behold the Kingdom of God; so why does he ask the Lord to go away from him? He realises that there is more putting out into the deep to be done. If Jesus does not now go on His way, the fishermen have no way to go either. If Jesus does not move ahead, they have nothing and no one to follow.

So Christ enters in, casts out their sin. The boat that almost sank under the weight of a miracle of heaven, is the Ark of Salvation that bears God among us on earth, “born in us today”. The deep water is not in the lake, but the Kingdom of God that would well up from within us and flood us into being a superabundance of the coming of heaven to the world.

For it is we who are to be the Resurrection – this is why Christ turns to face us with it, eternal life entering in now, not after. For this the disciples left everything and followed Him.  For this we join the heavenly powers crying out, “O Giver of life, glory to Your kingdom; glory to Your saving plan, O only Lover of mankind.”

No life else but Christ’s eternal life! No one else but Christ loves us so much as to enter in, cast out our sin and be born in us today. “O Virgin … Glory to Him Who freed us through birth from you.”

Sermon for the Annual Feast of the Fraternity of Our Lady de Salve Regina, St Magnus the Martyr, London Bridge

20 September 2014

In early twenty-first century England we think of the Queen as a person of immense public and international esteem, a lifelong servant of the people, a model and guardian of constitutional democracy, and the embodiment of the rule of law. We are proud that in this kingdom, we are the last on earth to anoint our sovereign, not just crowning her head for the supreme office of just government, but consecrating it, body, mind and soul, to the obedience of Christ and his Kingdom.

When Pope Benedict made his State Visit to the United Kingdom in 2010, in the Palace Yard at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, he paid tribute to our Christian constitution, personified in England and Scotland by Christian monarchs, givers of divine law and holy justice, sinners though they be, continuously for fourteen hundred years. Uniquely among other nations, in Britain the Christian Church has both an official standing and is entwined with the active role and symbolic purpose of the reigning monarch, giving the spiritual dimension not just the opportunity but the expectation to influence our civic discourse and public decisions. In his remarkable address to Parliament in Westminster Hall, Pope Benedict identified the vital importance of the gift we have in our hands in this country. In our common society, the Church people, the people of other religions, politicians and parliament, the worlds of finance and commerce, and the citizens as a whole can rely on the long crafted awareness that each has a rightful part to play and a duty to play its part. He pointed out that here, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, faith and reason seen by faith’s light, religion and society can be related to each other, in the knowledge that they cannot do without each other and must remain engaged in a constant dialogue - if we are to make the decisions that answer the deepest questions that human beings face, and if we are to address the malaise in contemporary human living that has broken out in a fevered crisis in public and financial morality that still afflicts us.

In other words, the Church, the Lord’s own people, constantly says to the world’s rulers and hidden wielders of power, “Ecce Homo – Behold the Man.” “Who would you rather be released for you, this Man, or Barabbas?” We the Church are for ever asking the world, “Who is your King?” or, as the psalm puts it, “Who is the King of glory?” Many are the kings and leaders, even church leaders, who have been amazed at their own glory, only to see it slip their grasp because they forgot the reminder of the Franciscan friars who used to precede the Roman Pontiff on processions in the days of pomp, burning flax as they declared, “Sic transit Gloria mundi”; “Thus passes the glory of the world.”

The trouble is that the world has rather been allowed to think of our King as yet another leader whose time was up; thus too the influential public organisation that represents him, his Church. Perhaps it is our own fault for relying too heavily on imagery such as monarchy, because now it does not conjure up the distinct conviction of wide sway, commanding prestige and undeniable moral authority. If we were honest, I suspect even we, when we think of Christ the King and Our Lady, Queen of Heaven, picture a dignified and remote public servant, a constitutional monarch with no powers of their own and always acting on the advice of ministers. If we are even more honest with ourselves, we believe those ministers are us and Christ and His Mother are there, largely speaking, to be persuaded of what we tell them to do, however much we call it prayer.

The fresh-thinking young Australian writer, Matthew Tan has written a remarkable book to explain how we have got into this way of thinking and thus disempowered our own Church on earth. It is called Justice, Unity and the Hidden Christ, and describes how in the 1960s the Catholic Church at the Vatican Council decided that humanity had so grown up that it could be set free from the claims of the Church, Christ’s kingdom on earth, to rule it. Those who called for this new approach to the world saw it in terms of maturity and freedom, not compulsion, to choose the path of Christ. They assumed that with this spiritual liberty the human choice for God and the blessedness of the Kingdom, to which the Magnificat is a paean and which the Beatitudes map out, would be irresistible.

In the 50 years since, however, human society has opted not for the Kingdom of God but the market. Now instead of the “kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven”, all our transactions and relations are determined, not so much by our own selfish preferences, by the demands of the market to capture them. Matthew Tan even says that everything is now relative to it and human society has converted itself into a place, where every idea, value or principle has to pitch for custom and reduced to a matter of ever poorer choices, or what we are prepared to afford for them. He is astonished by how quickly the Christians have bought into this thinking, almost without hope, accepting it as “realism”. So we have the garrulous old Archbishop of Canterbury (a man who bears the distinction of interfering in the affairs of not just one successor but two) calling for the legalisation of euthanasia on the ground of supposed mercy - such a short step from expediency - without any regard in his argument for the absolute binding nature of the revealed truth of God that life is sacred and may not be harmed. I was also surprised to hear Archbishop Justin reported as saying he sometimes doubts the existence of God. Doubtless what he was saying was that he has complete faith in Jesus Christ and it was all taken out of context; but the incident illustrates how we have got ourselves into a position where we have to imagine meeting the thinking of people in the world in terms of packaging a commodity that they will be prepared to buy because it suits their tastes, assumptions and interests on this day if not on that.

Matthew Tan calls time on this: we are not competitors in a market. If the world has taken its freedom from the Kingdom of God and chosen instead the market as the milieu for human society and relations, so be it. But it is a disaster for the world and for humanity: time now to set ourselves up as a completely different way of being human; time now to declare the Church to be an alternative society. Instead of vying in competition, hoping that people will buy our idea in a multitudinous world of options where we are just one of the choices on offer, it is time to say that we alone represent the universe as it is, the created order built on loving relationships, unreserved mutual self-giving, of complete and unreserved sacrifice that alone leads to resurrection and renewal, through the radical power of forgiveness, service and worship. For the created order is not its own end – it is Christ who is its Lord and all else follows from that and falls in place behind it. His existence does not depend on my decision to believe he exists or not, though to hear most people think you would think English people imagine him to be Peter Pan’s tutelary spirit, depending on audience applause for survival.

If we think of Christ and His Mother as kindly European-style monarchs benevolently overseeing everything, hoping it will all turn out nicely in the end, and not getting too much involved, then nothing will change, and there is no point in our being Christian or worshipping in church; that would be just to meet our own emotional needs and calling the spiritual because they looked religious. Instead, we bear in mind centrally what St Paul told us in his letter to the Ephesians, that Christ fills the universe, and he intends us all to come to the full knowledge of faith in him, to reach such a true maturity in him that we reach his own stature.

So I cannot see why we say to people that we have doubts about whether God and his vision of heaven for us really exists. The question that faces us is this: “Do you believe that Christ is Lord of the universe, of everything that there is, or do you not?” If you do, then there are consequences and it truly does mean a transformation of our proclamation of what the Church is, why we have been made to belong to it – to reach our true human maturity – and how it is to be the true pattern for civil society founded on the sacrificial love of Christ, and the very endless living of the Trinity of three persons in one God.

It is in this universe that Our Lady of the Salve Regina stands as the Queen who is in power. She is no constitutional monarch, acting on the advice of ministers, merely benign towards our pleas and prayers, influential upon us and others only in so far as we can press her to be reactive to our interests, thus ever being conformed by us to our world. Instead, the hearer of prayers is effectual, the worker of change in individuals, and whole movements in society’s truest manifestation – the People of God – in a universe of which Christ rules, the Lord who is to be heard and obeyed, and whom our states, our civil societies and our market must likewise in the end come to obey.

This may be a “vale of tears” and “exile” for humanity according to this understanding, but it is not exile from God or his Kingdom; nor is it beyond the reach of his sovereign work. The Salve Regina declares our faith that a Queen has been appointed the advocate of this humanity as it is truly intended to be - an advocate who will turn the attention of all on the Lord of that Kingdom. Pope Benedict told us prophetically that our society is well placed to have the conversation in which faith illuminates our world, so that its kingdoms will be the Kingdom of the Lord and of his Christ. If all of us in the Church who are the People of God were to reject the falsely “realistic” barking at us in the market and to exist in and for the “Kingdom not of this world”, the “most gracious advocate” sustains our attention on what people are truly for and why nothing other than Christ is all that is to be said of the entirety of humanity and human living.

Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost & Beginning of the Indiction - Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family

Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Beginning of the Indiction, Venerable Symeon the Stylite and Martha his Mother
Ukrainian Greek Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family of London, 1 September/14 September 2014

1 Corinthians 1.21-2.4 - Matthew 22. 2-14


At the height of the Christian Roman Empire, the great legal reformer Emperor Justinian, issued a decree (that is, an indiction) to ensure that everyone use a common dating system for contracts, official acts and legal documents. This had the remarkable consequence of moving the date of the imperial new year from its date from time immemorial - the Birthday of Augustus, pagan founder of the Empire, on September 23rd - to September 1st.

You will recall that St Luke describes how the Birth of Jesus took place in the context of another administrative decree from that very same Caesar Augustus, at a time which St Paul identified (Galatians 4.4-7) as “the fullness of time”, when there was peace throughout the known world of the Empire. So it is significant that, by the mid sixth century, the prestige of the founding Emperor was no longer common ground for the citizens of the Empire, or part of its identity. Instead, it is Jesus Christ himself. To this day, September 1st is the first day of the monthly Calendar for the Byzantine Churches of the Christian East. It remains programmatic for us all, because September is still the beginning of our academic and school years, and all of us feel the new working year really begins after the summer, with the burden of work to be done with the coming of the season of the harvest. This is reflected in the chants for today, which celebrate the bounty of God’s providence towards the people in the fruits of the creation: “Fashioner of all creation,” we sing in the Troparion for today, “Bless the crown of the year, O Lord, with Your goodness…”. Recently, September 1st has thus become for a large part of the Byzantine tradition a day of celebration and prayer for the environment, its careful stewardship and protection.

But today is also Sunday, a day when we think not only of this world, and its chronology and destiny, but of the Kingdom that is to come. In this Sunday’s Kontakion, in praising Christ our God, we go one further than this creation to the next: “With Yourself … You raised the dead and shattered the sting of death, and delivered Adam from the curse, O Lover of Mankind”. As St Paul reminds us, we set our affection on the things that are above, and not the things of the earth, because likewise we have died and our life is hid with Christ, in God (Colossians 3.2). In other words, we have to be whole people, leading holistic lives. Just as we are not complete persons if we live only with our material preoccupations, ignoring the human dimension that is spiritual, our soul; so we cannot live in the Resurrection of Christ, which became our defining characteristic when we were baptised in him, if we withdraw ourselves from the physical fact of the world and the body, as though they do not exist.

We have a clue to managing this seemingly impossible dual identity of ours - being citizens of the Kingdom of God, at the same time as active participants in the bountiful, beautiful and hopeful world he has created - in the words of today’s other observance, the feast of St Symeon the Stylite, of whom we have sung: “Seeking things above, you joined yourself to those on high; you made your pillar a fiery chariot, through which, O venerable one, you became a companion of the angels. With them, unceasingly implore Christ God on our behalf.” (Kontakion of St Symeon). Living in the company of the beings of heaven, he was also dwelling into advanced old age in the world, facing God at the same time as being seen by people, inspiring them and never forgetting to intercede for them.



We can put it another way. The great country, blues, and Gospel singer Johnny Cash captured an old saying, when he wrote a song about people who let their own light shine, without shining the light for others; who go to stand on the spiritual high ground for themselves, but don’t take the hands of those reaching to be lifted up there too. He sings, “You’re so heavenly minded, you’re no earthly good” (The Rambler, 1977). This is precisely it: Christ wants it that, the more heavenly minded we are, the more earthly good we will be.

We can put it another way still. In today’s Gospel, we have the extraordinary tale of the guests who are too grand or ignorant to attend the wedding of their king’s son. The doors are thrown open for all to attend, not just the chosen few, even to the extent of gathering in the people who live on the streets. Then the king throws someone out of the banquet for not wearing the appropriate finery. At first sight, it looks unjust that the king rounds up last-minute guests in the middle of what they are doing, and then punishes them for coming unprepared. Many scholars explain this away by saying that St Matthew has just added together two separate stories with a wedding theme; but I think they are missing the point. For Jesus begins by telling a story with a popular theme, familiar to us from the Magnificat: the rich put down and sent empty away, while the humble and poor are exalted in their place – a typical “them-and-us” story. But then he gives it a twist to surprise us all out of our complacency and self-satisfaction, rich and poor, powerful and powerless alike. In the Epistle, St Paul explains what Jesus means: “God establishes you in the Anointed Christ, and anoints you by putting His seal on us, and giving us His Spirit in our hearts as a first instalment.” So there you have it: first, God the Father compels us to come into the wedding feast of His Son and seals our adoption as His own sons and daughters, co-inheritors with Christ of the whole Kingdom itself. Then the Spirit is bestowed in our hearts as the first instalment of our new way of living. But those who misuse or waste this first flow of grace will lose when it comes to the ensuing graces, whoever they are: “Many are called,” Jesus observes, “but few are chosen.”

What in us has become of this first instalment of grace? Has it simply got stuck in our hearts, or does it show in our minds in the way we decide things; does it show on the outside through the way we act? Where is the grace upon grace? Where are the signs of spiritual progress, after receiving not only the King’s invitation, but the honour of a new standing in His Kingdom? Why do we look and behave and think as before? In the case of that unchanged wedding guest, something showed the king that everything he had been given had made no difference, for there was no sign of new growth in grace beyond that “first instalment” from the Holy Spirit. Either he was living in the world, cutting himself off from the heaven that had been planted in his heart; or he was living on a personally fulfilled religious plane, with no sign to show for it in the world and for the world. The guest thrown out was not fit for the Kingdom, not because he had made no effort, but because he was enjoying heaven for himself, and living as though nothing had changed. He was not, as the Lord’s Prayer implores, seek the Kingdom to come “on earth, as it is in heaven”. He was not a whole person, living spiritually and holistically in the world. He was unable to be what the Christian must always be seen to be: a new creation in Christ, a different way of humanity.

So what is this difference to humanity that, for instance, an astonishing saint like St Symeon, or a new Church Year resolves us to seek and emulate? Well, first, St Matthew reports how, even when we fast and lament, we should not put on the act of sorrow and penitence for public consumption, but anoint ourselves with the oil of gladness (Matthew 6.17), just like at a wedding. Joy and confidence in Christ as the centre of all things, then, are the first signs to the world of the presence of God in our midst. Secondly, as we face the prospect of war and the vicious destruction of Christianity in the lands that cradled the Church from its birth, the only point of Christians is that we are people not of revenge and ancient hatreds, of self-pity and recrimination, but of persevering forbearance and inexhaustible forgiveness, people serving reconciliation and bringing healing, people of faith in Christ’s promises, hope in His ever coming Kingdom, and unconditional love for God and neighbour - and enemy.

These are the precepts of heaven for a new Church Year: the more heavenly minded we are, the more earthly good we will be in serving the coming of Christ’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

Homily for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, London: The Plight of the Church in Iraq

Sunday of Christ Walking on the Water , Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, 10^th August 2014, Ukrainian Greek Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family, London

Troparion of the Resurrection, Tone 8. You came down from on high, O Merciful One, and accepted three days of burial to free us from our sufferings.  O Lord, our life and our resurrection, glory be to You.

1 Corinthians 3:9-17              Matthew 14:22-34

It is difficult at the present time to think of the Church as being built, when daily news arrives of our ancient sanctuaries being destroyed, either as collateral damage in war, or as a direct act of intended destruction on the part of violent, jealous men, who hide behind religious zeal their true identity as bank robbers, as perverts that rape girls and disabled old ladies, and as psychopathic serial killers that are even now murdering our brothers and sisters in the Household of Faith, or condemning them to the searing heat of the desert without food, water or shelter. It looks like the Church is being destroyed in the lands where it first took root, Iraq - the cradle of civilisation, where different peoples (such as the  Assyrians,  Arabs, Turkics and Persians) and different faiths (such as Sunni and Shia Islam, Zoroastrianism, Assyrian and Syriac Christianity, Catholic and Orthodox) have lived in harmony side by side for centuries.

 

But somehow and somewhere in all this we are to see the work of the Lord who is faithful to his people and to all humanity, even when we are tested, as St Paul tells us, in the fire. The apostle’s words recalls to us the Lord’s own parable of the house built upon sand and the house built upon the rock.  The point he is making is not about the relative strength of faith, but the strength of the grace that we rely on, as opposed to our own efforts. It almost goes without saying that the House of the Lord which is the Church of God in Iraq, led so nobly by the Chaldean Catholic Patriarch of Babylon, Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako, is a house whose foundations are the gold and silver and precious stones that really have been tried in the fire. The buildings and everything they have may have been taken away - as St Paul says “the builder will suffer loss”; and did not our Lord say “from those who have nothing even what they have will be taken away”? – but the grace of God has been shown to be the foundation not just of an ethnic or religious identity, but of the house of their faith.

Compare this with the story of St Peter, bidden by Christ to walk on nothing more than water to meet him. Peter did not believe that it was possible, started out, thought again and began to sink. It was the Lord’s hand, not his own efforts and will power, that caught him.  Jesus questions the strength of Peter’s belief in him, yet at the same time makes it clear that everything that can be achieved and withstood depends not on our strengths but on the hand of God.

Paul speaks of testing construction handiwork by fire; the construction of Peter’s foundations in faith is flooded out by water. But it is the same story. In time, with the help and grace of the Holy Spirit, he rebuilt and became the Rock on which Christ was able to build his Church. Likewise the Christians of the old Roman Empire were able to face the onslaught, knowing what was to be demanded of them, because they saw that Christ is the centre and summit of all existence and of human society, whatever the appearances. Thus Paul clearly recognised the coming of a moment when God’s temple, where the Spirit dwells in Christ’s own people, would be destroyed.

I cannot presume to know what our brothers and sisters in Iraq are going through, having lost not only everything they have but, for the second time in a century for some of them, being driven out of their historic lands and holy places. I cannot begin to enter into their grief, bitterness, desperation and mourning: now is not the time for those in the comfort of Britain to exhort them to fortitude, courage and joy in adversity. But we and they can recognise in their suffering and destruction the Lord who trod this path before and who, as he passed through death, spoke somehow of forgiveness, redemption and the promise of paradise.

Because of this, we who are Christians pin all our hopes on the resurrection, knowing that it is not some far off after-life, or a dream to console us in our pain and misery. The resurrection of Christ back then, is the same as the coming of the Kingdom of God now. For as we sing today, “You came down from on high, O merciful One, and accepted three days of burial to free us from our sufferings.”

St Paul said that if anyone destroys God’s temple, the holy place which we Christians are, then God will destroy that person. So let our prayer today on behalf of all our suffering brothers and sisters in the temple of God, the House of Faith in which we all dwell in the Spirit, be that those who hate the Church and who hate the humanity made in the image of God’s Christ himself, may be brought not to the destruction of their lives but of all that is wrong in them. Let them now be put to the test – whether it be water or fire – so that all that is evil and vain, and resentful and unforgiving and merciless, may melt away and the underlying structure of God’s handiwork be revealed – a frame on which there can be more grace, more forgiveness, and more humanity. Let them be converted to the Lord and live.

And as for us, in this Cathedral of the Holy Family, under the patronage of St Joseph who provided a home for Our Lord and the Mother of God, which began as a Church for inspiring and consoling those in exile, and which now stands as a sign for nations and societies in whom the Temple of the Lord is being rebuilt, let us remember that we have nothing to stand on unless it is the Lord that reaches out his hand to hold us up. We stand because he has stood up having been beaten down by death. Now risen from the dead, he leaves nothing behind that calls out to him, “Lord save me.” For, seeing us, who call upon God’s help to be the human beings that God means us all to be – people of love, and grace, forgiveness and hope –the world recognises Christ and turns to him as Lord. So, hearing our words and our songs ringing true, could it be that those who do not know him and even now oppose him and would bring down his Kingship - could it be that they too - would sing:

O Lord, our life and our resurrection, glory be to You?

In hope of this, let us say with Patriarch Louis Raphael the prayer he has just written and issued to all the world that the cries of the Christians in Iraq will be our own in complete solidarity:

Lord, the plight of our country is deep
and the suffering of Christians is severe and frightening.

Therefore, we ask you, Lord,
to spare our lives, and to grant us patience,
and courage to continue our witness of Christian values
with trust and hope.

Lord, peace is the foundation of life;
Grant us the peace and stability that will enable us
to live with each other without fear and anxiety,
and with dignity and joy.

Glory be to You forever.

Homily for the Sunday of the Five Thousand: St Theodore's Greek Catholic Church, Cardiff

Eight Sunday after Pentecost, 3^rd August 2014, Ukrainian Greek Catholic Parish of St Theodore, Cardiff, Wales

Kontakion of the Resurrection, Tone 7. No longer shall the dominion of death be able to hold humanity, for Christ went down shattering and destroying its power. Hades is bound. The prophets exult with one voice.  The Saviour has come forth for those with faith, saying, Come forth, O faithful, to the Resurrection.

I Corinthians 1. 10-18                                    Matthew 14. 14-22

One thing that occurs to you, when you hear the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, is that it emerges our of an animated discussion between the apostles, who see themselves as practical men, and Jesus, Who, as the hours have passed by, seems to them to have lost all track of time and the physical endurance of His hearers.

But this is precisely it: He has not. For another thing strikes you. There are other people in the conversation and that have uttered not a word: the Five Thousand themselves. Their engagement with Jesus’ discourse has been completely absorbing and it is they who have lost all track of time. They hang on His every word; it has been sustaining them through the day and of this Jesus is perfectly aware.

What St Matthew in his Gospel is describing is the season of fasting, originally in the spring, that is common in different forms within the tradition of the Abrahamic religions that we know as Lent and Islam, for instance, knows as Ramadan. In the Rule of St Benedict for his monks, the complete fast from food is the same as subsequently adopted in Islam and lasts from rising until evening, when a light, nutritious meal of vegetable produce may be taken, together on holy days of feasting with some fish. So, here we have it. During the day, those who have gathered round Jesus close in order not to miss a single word come before God to contemplate His teaching, to seek his spiritual healing and, at the close of day, to eat with His blessing, giving thanks and dwelling in the heart on all that has happened in the day before. Thus drawn up into God’s presence it is not merely a meal during the time of fasting on earth, but a share in the Banquet of heaven as well – with the loaves of bread come also the fish for a celebration.

Now, talking of monks, I remember Cardinal Hume saying that obedience is not a blind submission to a superior’s commands, but means mutual listening – the word “obedience” comes from the same root as “audience”. Thus the young monk obeys the abbot, because he is bound to listen to the teaching of a father. In the same way an abbot remembers his time of listening to his own novice-master, to the abbot when he was a young monk, and to the many spiritual fathers that preceded them all. But St Benedict makes clear to the abbot that he is not there just to be listened to, because he must listen to the other monks – not least the younger monks, for the Lord’s will can sometimes make itself known in the fresh zeal and new pairs of eyes of the young, when older ones have grown weary, and jaded, or even hard of heart.

This is what Jesus is doing with His crowds of followers. Here is a pattern of mutual obedience. There is conversation, as with the disciples, but the communication is plain: He listens to them listening to Him. They wish for more and He pours out more and more.

Then there comes an intriguing detail in the story. The disciples propose sending the crowds into the villages to get food, so that the listening and being absorbed in the Lord’s word may go on into the night. We have seen this detail before; or rather we shall see it later, as St Matthew’s Gospel story unfolds. It is that the Lord Jesus found Himself outside. Next time, it would not be outside a village near the shore of Galilee: it would be outside the gate of the city of Jerusalem, on the rock of Calvary, dying on the Cross for our sins. Next time, the night before, He will again have taken bread, raised His eyes to heaven and given thanks. Once again He will break it and fill the lives and souls of those crowded round Him. Once again, few words will be recorded and at the centre is a stillness from which you cannot turn your ears or take away your eyes.

It is no wonder, then, that St Paul has just told us that preaching the Gospel does not need eloquent wisdom: it is the power of the Cross that says it all.

The crowds by the shore of Galilee listening, watching; the few disciples left at the foot of the Cross listening, watching: it is all the same. To anyone else, this “nothing happening”, is their hearts and minds and to the very edges of feeling in their bodies, to us it is the very presence of the action and the power of God.

This weekend we are remembering the way the powers of Europe fell into war a hundred years ago, a war whose consequences are still being played out. It changed European society for ever, and the attitude of ordinary people to religion and faith went through enormous changes, as state atheism, Marxist ideology and Nazi occultism set out to dismantle Christian civilisation after the self-inflicted failure of the old Christian empires. It is often said that in the unimaginable horrors and degradation of the trenches, decent, loyal, dutiful and patriotic soldiers abandoned their hope in God and lost any sense that Christ’s Church had anything to do with them. But this is far from the true picture. We know the stories of thousands of men who had lived their lives back home on the fringes of the Church, now turning to the chaplains to make their peace with God, seeking confirmation and Holy Communion. One of the most famous chaplains was Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, a magnificent Anglican pastor, preacher and poet, nick-named Woodbine Willie by the soldiers because of his unconditional service to anyone in their moment of greatest need, even if they had nothing but scorn for the Church, ready with words of God’s blessing and the assurances of faith at the same time as offering a draw on a Woodbine cigarette, a last human comfort in this world before turning to the next. The story of many Catholic chaplains is just as moving. At first the War Office sent the many Catholic recruits to the front with little thought to provide them with priests, because it did not understand the central place of the Eucharist, Confession and, should the time come, Unction in the practice of Catholic faith. But it did not take long for the authorities to realise that this was not just a question of morale but of the Catholic servicemen’s raison d’être. The Great War changed many people’s prejudices about Catholicism when they saw the unpretended devotion of their fellows and the brave, unstinting solidarity of the priests not just with their own men, but with all who were thrown together in the raw experience of inhuman death and degradation.

Unlike anything anyone had seen, here were Christians - and they were also needing to be Christians on behalf of those who could not evoke or declare a faith at all, yet face the same questions and horror as those who did – watching at the foot of the crucifixion of humanity again, and looking to see upon the Cross the figure of Christ. Here were Christians, amid the terror and the din of all reasonable explanation to the contrary, straining to hear Christ’s words - of peace and encouragement, and beatitude. As St Peter himself said, when many other disciples lost heart and turned away, “To whom else shall we go? You have the message of eternal life.” No wisdom can account for it; no eloquence is worthy of it. It is only the power of the Cross that interprets it, and the faith of the Christian is thus able to descry in the supreme sacrifice on the Cross not only the atoning death but the offering of life that must ultimately prevail and be our only hope (Ave Crux, spes unica).

So today we sing, in union with all who have placed their trust in Christ, with all who have hung upon his every word, watching, listening, hoping from every corner of their being:

No longer shall the dominion of death be able to hold humanity, for Christ went down shattering and destroying its power ... The Saviour has come forth for those with faith, saying, Come forth, O faithful, to the Resurrection.