Homily Collection

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.

The second reading gives us Paul, arrested and facing persecution: “As for me, my life is already being poured away as a libation, and the time has come for me to be gone.” Christian tradition fills in some more of the detail about the executions of both Peter and Paul.

In 64 AD there was a great fire in Rome, the fire through which Nero fiddled. Nero blamed Christians for the fire and so the first serious persecution of the Christians in Rome began. It is during this persecution that we think Peter and Paul were martyred. Paul was beheaded at the place we now call Tre Fontane (a name which comes from a legend about his death) and Peter was crucified, upside down in Nero’s Circus. Both were buried near to the site of their execution by Christians: Peter on the Vatican hill, and Paul on the via Ostiense. These sites seem to have remained important to the Christian community and when Constantine converted to Christianity, large Basilica churches were built over the tombs. One we call St. Peter’s, and the other St. Paul’s outside the walls.

Both Peter and Paul were executed outside the city walls (all executions were outside the ancient city). Both were buried outside the old city. Strange then, that we call one church St. Peter’s and the other St. Paul’s outside the walls. The Pope lives at St. Peter’s, and he goes to St. Paul’s when he’s being ecumenical, to open the holy door with the Archbishop of Canterbury and ecumenical Patriarchs. He is there this weekend opening this Pauline year with the ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I.

The geography and the language of these two churches reflects the way we feel about the two saints. With Peter we are at home, as the Pope is at home. With Paul we are playing away from home, St. Paul’s outside the walls is a place to meet the other. We are very at home with the simple, flawed fisherman disciple. We are away from home with the cerebral, irascible apostle to the Gentiles. Why on earth, we are tempted to think, has the Pope dedicated a year to a major Protestant theologian?

The year dedicated to St. Paul will demand that we move away from home, away from our comfort zone. We will preach about Paul, and reflect about Paul. We’ll have to wrestle and tussle with him as the communities he founded did. We’re very at home with the gospels, but we struggle with the epistles. And just as the Pope goes to the church outside the walls to meet ecumenical Patriarchs, and bishops and leaders of other Christian communities, so studying St. Paul will take us beyond the safety of home to meet, and better understand other Christians who know this saint better than we.

Matthew 7:21-27

What rains will come?
What floods will rise?
What gales will blow?
What slings and arrows of outrageous fortune will hurl themselves against your houses?

I was in my previous parish for three years. Towards the end of my time there I looked out across the sea of faces at mass and I remember thinking: This is a different crowd of people than the people I had seen here three years ago. They were the same people, of course, but what I saw was different because now I knew what the suffering of each one was.

There was the woman whose husband had died of a heart attack in the next room –only in his mid fifties- as she cooked his tea in the kitchen.
There is the family who lost their child in a road accident.
There are the elderly couple that worry about their mentally ill son and who will look after him when they die.
There is the family living with the shame and humiliation of bankruptcy.
There is the mother who never comes to communion because of a disastrous first marriage and now she brings up her family with a new partner.
There is the family that lives with addiction.
There is the family that lives with the bereavement of suicide.

I haven’t made any of those up. Some of those descriptions could equally well apply to people in this parish as to the people I’m thinking of back in Washington. I could keep going with the list. There were moments (admittedly not on a Sunday) when I would sit in church and think, “I know the great sadness in the life of every person here”. The shocking thing is that tragedy isn’t a rare occurrence. Our churches are packed with wounded people.

And look at you, so young and hopeful. The bad news is, guys, that if we bring you all back in thirty or forty years time, you’ll be a crowd of people like that. What rains will come? What floods will rise? What storms will hurl themselves, wrecking havoc, into your lives? The newspapers don’t report the same things that they used to: fewer ocean liners sink, there are no pit disasters, at least in this country, any more, people don’t die of all the old diseases, and yet we haven’t written tragedy out of the human story. The bad news is that tragedy will find its place in the lives of many of us here.

Our parish churches are filled with people who suffer, people whose lives have been marked by great and tragic sadness. But, the good news is this: our churches aren’t full of people who have been flattened, who’ve been defeated by life and its rains and floods and storms. Thank God, our churches are full of people who are alive, who still have the courage to have hope, who still find it in their hearts to love generously, even recklessly.

The people who fill our churches: when you first look at them they seem normal enough, an average crowd you might think. They don’t display publicly the scars that life has laid upon them. There’s little way of knowing what rains, what floods, what storms have thrown themselves at that crowd. And they look normal, they look all right, because they are still standing, because as well as the hidden scars there are also the hidden foundations. These are people who have faith. These are people who have found hope in the resurrection of Jesus. These are people who, despite the hurt, have found the strength to love again, and to love like Jesus, in a generous gift of themselves.

The great gift of being a priest is being given this insight into people’s lives. The thing I wish I could share with you is the love for God’s people which those insights give you. Sometimes I’m so moved by the people who are part of the life of our parish. You are growing into that people. You’ll have all the tragedies, I’m afraid, but you’ll also develop the foundations: faith, the strength to hope, and the courage to love.