http://stcuthberts-durham.org.uk/homily/ Tony Currer\ en-us Nucleus CMS v3.24 © Weblog http://backend.userland.com/rss http://stcuthberts-durham.org.uk/homily//nucleus/nucleus2.gif http://stcuthberts-durham.org.uk/homily/ http://stcuthberts-durham.org.uk/homily/index.php?itemid=28 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.
]]> General http://stcuthberts-durham.org.uk/homily/index.php?itemid=28 Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:53:19 +0000 http://stcuthberts-durham.org.uk/homily/index.php?itemid=27
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.
]]> General http://stcuthberts-durham.org.uk/homily/index.php?itemid=27 Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:49:32 +0000 http://stcuthberts-durham.org.uk/homily/index.php?itemid=26
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.]]> General http://stcuthberts-durham.org.uk/homily/index.php?itemid=26 Sun, 1 Jun 2008 10:49:00 +0000 http://stcuthberts-durham.org.uk/homily/index.php?itemid=24
The backdrop to this gospel is the town. Now not all the manuscripts agree what the town is: the majority of the best manuscripts say Sychar (and that’s what we heard this morning), others say Shechem. So Shechem hasn’t an awful lot to recommend it other than the fact that there’s a well there which has been thought to be the well of the gospel since at least the fourth century which is about 70 yards out of the town.

So let’s at least imagine it like this: the well in the foreground, the town as the backdrop. That’s the way that John sets the scene. If it helps –and to be honest, it helps me- you can imagine it like one of those weather vanes with a little woman with a parasol, and a little man with an umbrella. That’s the Samaritan woman and the disciples. The Samaritan woman is out first and the disciples are in the town. Then they come out and she goes in.

We can keep this parallelism going: the disciples have gone into town to get food; the Samaritan woman has come out of town to fetch drink. And if we push a little further we realise that Jesus gives the woman a water metaphor and the disciples a food metaphor.

To the Samaritan Jesus offers Living Water,
Anyone who drinks the water that I shall give will never be thirsty again: the water I shall give will turn into a spring inside him/ her, welling up to eternal life.

To the disciples he talks of the food that is doing the Father’s work. And there seems is an implied criticism of the disciples here. Jesus asks them to look up and see the harvest ready for reaping, the fields already white. Doubtless there were fields of crops, but, I think, also in Jesus view is the town of Sychar or Shechem, the town that the disciples have just visited for food, as blinkered as the woman coming for her water. They went into that town, but without seeing the crop ready for the harvest. Probably that has a lot to do with the town being Samaritan, they didn’t perceive it as a harvest.

And right on cue, out comes the Samaritan woman again with the harvest. [Stage direction: Disciples with umbrellas withdraw].

Let’s now go back to that first question: “Give me to drink”. In the first paragraph we hear that Jesus is tired after a journey, he’s sat right down, and the disciples have gone for food. “Give me to drink” seems like a very direct and straightforward question. If we’re honest, it appears that Jesus only goes all metaphorical when he doesn’t get his drink.

But, the woman, at the end of the narrative has become this fountain of water, welling up to eternal life that Jesus has spoken of. Her witness has reaped the harvest of the town that the disciples didn’t even see. Notice that the titles by which she addresses Jesus get progressively more exalted: You a Jew, Sir, Lord, I see you are a prophet, perhaps he is the Messiah, and the highest title is the collective judgement of the town she has harvested, Saviour of the world. Notice she leaves her water jar when she hurries back.

Maybe that first question is key, maybe it isn’t so straightforward after all. “Give me to drink” is a challenge and an invitation to be a completely different person. “Give me to drink”: be someone who gives life, be someone who overflows with life. Don’t be someone blinkered and confined within the perimeters of one’s own needs.
“Give me to drink”: Give the Life of knowing Jesus.




]]> General http://stcuthberts-durham.org.uk/homily/index.php?itemid=24 Sun, 24 Feb 2008 15:11:00 +0000 http://stcuthberts-durham.org.uk/homily/index.php?itemid=25
We’re pretty sure that Matthew wrote his gospel with Mark in front of him. So what’s going on? Why does Matthew feel the need to edit Mark’s text and change “Rabbi” for “Lord”? Well, Matthew doesn’t like the word “Rabbi”. Matthew is both the most Jewish and anti-Jewish of the gospels. Matthew writes for a predominantly Jewish-Christian community, but one which has been expelled from the synagogue. It is very likely that “Rabbi” was a title used by synagogue leaders with whom Matthew’s community was in conflict. So in Matthew’s gospel and only here, Jesus teaches, call no one on earth “Teacher/ Rabbi”.

Why is that significant? Well, firstly, one of my tasks in preaching to you in Lent is to prepare you to celebrate Easter. On Palm Sunday you will hear the Passion from Matthew’s gospel, and you will hear hard words. You will hear the crowd shout to a man, “His blood be on us and on our children.” Remember when you hear those words that Matthew’s account is flavoured by the fact that his community has been expelled from the synagogue, and is in conflict with the local Jewish community. You’ll also hear the table talk of the last supper, and the disciples asking in turn, “Not I, Lord, surely?” All, that is, except Judas who asks, “Not I, Rabbi, surely?” Then I hope you recall that “Rabbi” is a dirty word in Matthew’s lexicon.

But there’s more to it than that. If “Rabbi” is a dirty word for Matthew, it certainly isn’t for other gospel writers. Mark, as we’ve seen, has Peter address Jesus as Rabbi. We have three gospels to go before Palm Sunday and all of them are from John, and guess what, in all of them Jesus is addressed as Rabbi. And on Easter morning, Mary Magdalene will recognise the Risen Lord with a simple word, “Rabbuni”. There are guest preachers for these next two Sunday’s so I want to alert you to this theme.

Rabbi, Teacher, is not an adequate title to describe Jesus. He is Lord, he is Saviour, he is the Christ, he is God’s beloved Son, but he is also still our teacher. This Lent the gospels invite us to come away with the Lord and to allow him to teach us. And in that private space he teaches us who he is and what he does for us.

This is not just the theme for the coming gospels. It is a theme, too, for this Sunday and for last. Matthew might not like the title, but he likes the idea. And the Church chooses gospels from Matthew that also invite us to come away to a private place with Jesus so that he might show us who he is.

When Jesus was baptised God’s voice spoke and announced, “This is my Son, the beloved, my favour rests on him.” The Gospel of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness explore and explain that identity: “If you are God’s Son …?” Satan asks. Peter identifies Jesus as “the Christ, the Son of the Living God”. Jesus then predicts his passion, his suffering and death. The transfiguration displays Jesus identity and makes clear just who it is who is offering his life for us.

Last week we were invited into the wilderness, into that private place of prayer with Jesus. This week, too, Jesus withdraws to a place of privacy. His public ministry in Galilee ended with the question on the road to Caesarea Philippi. Jesus withdraws with his disciples, and then again with a chosen few, just as he will on Gethsemane.
Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain where they could be alone.

Our faith has to be apostolic. It has to be a public thing, a thing put into action, it has to be a faith of moral choices and social conscience. But this Lent invites us to be the Lord’s disciples and allow him to teach us. He teaches us who he is, he teaches us that he loves us -“the disciples fall on their faces overcome with fear, but Jesus came up and touched them and touched them”- and he teaches us what this love promises: forgiveness, healing, sight and resurrection.
]]> General http://stcuthberts-durham.org.uk/homily/index.php?itemid=25 Sun, 17 Feb 2008 15:13:00 +0000 http://stcuthberts-durham.org.uk/homily/index.php?itemid=23 I’m told there was an old priest in Gosforth who would begin his midnight mass sermon by looking at his watch and saying, “Exactly nineteen hundred and seventy (fill in the given year) years and seventeen minutes ago …”
Tonight is about a meeting at a certain time and in a certain place, but, in truth, the time and the place are not certain. But that’s not to say the time and the place aren’t important. I want to talk about that time tonight. I could talk about the place as well, but I’m planning on having a good few Christmases here so it’s worth holding something in reserve.

Firstly, the Year
It would seem that Luke gives us very precise information: A census under Caesar Augustus, while Quirinius was governor of Syria. We know that Quirinius did hold a census, but that he was only made governor in 6AD. Moreover, Herod the Great –who Luke has given as a time signature already in his gospel, and who is integral to Matthew’s narrative- died in 4BC. (I’m sorry: perhaps you expect this sort of thing from the Archbishop of Canterbury. And here you are getting it from me too. Well the children’s mass is in the morning. This is the adult mass and we have to face facts.)
We don’t know, can’t know, the year when Jesus was born. It’s true that every few years there’s a seasonal news item that confidently proclaims: “Jesus born in 6BC, shock …etc.” The truth is that we can’t accurately know the year of Jesus’ birth. It’s just not accessible to us. The calendar beginning with the incarnation wasn’t adopted until the sixth century. It was speculation.

The Time of Year, the Season
Again, the adoption of the 25th December as the date of Christmas came late: in the fourth century in fact. Earlier, third century sources put the date as the 20th May. Choosing the 25th December probably had a lot to do with supplanting a pagan feast. There’s no mention, of course, of any date in the gospels. The only scholarly speculation is to say that shepherds would only be out in the fields between March and November.

The Time of Day
Here, at least, we have some scriptural information. After the birth of Jesus we are told about shepherds who take it in turns “to watch their flocks during the night”. It doesn’t say precisely that Jesus was born at any particular time, but the gospel suggests something taking place at night. It fits, too, with Matthew’s story of the magi being guided by a star. And so all our Christmas cards show night time scenes. We do it ourselves. Last year at the morning mass we had a little nativity with the children: I was the star, I mean I played the part of the star, and so the first thing we did was bring on a bit of the night sky, and there it is, hanging above the crib. In both gospel traditions of the birth of Jesus there is light appearing in a night sky: Matthew’s guiding star and Luke’s angelic host.
It’s thought that the tradition that Jesus was born at midnight, might come from the line from the book of Wisdom: “When all things were in quiet silence, and the night in its swift course was half spent, your all-powerful word leaped down from heaven’s royal throne.” Isn’t that a beautiful expression of the incarnation?

Time to do a little bit of rebuilding
Hosting an Australian through three autumnal and winter months makes one very conscious of the weather. And so, one particularly dull day I found myself saying to Denis, “You can see why we need to have a winter festival.” And for many Christmas has returned to that pagan winter festival to brighten the gloomy succession of short grey days followed by long black nights. Saturday was the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. And however non-Christian our culture becomes, no one is yet forecasting the demise of Christmas. The population at large is held in the grip of a collective urge to hang up lights, crowd around warm fires in cosy pubs or homes, and join in communal singing.
In this most unlovely times of year we fill our houses and our shop windows with pictures of angels and choir boys and a new born baby with an adoring mother. In this most cheerless of seasons we surround ourselves with Santa’s “Ho, Ho, Ho!” (hanging from not a few front doors around Durham).

A Christian Take on all this
The wintry season and long nights are powerful symbols. The year, the date and the time may be speculative, but they’re not arbitrary. Here we are at midnight, just on the right side of the shortest day of the year. We’re not yet saying, “Aren’t the days getting longer!” but we know that they are. We’re living through the same short grey days and long black nights as everyone else. And we’re gripped by the urge to light cheering lights, to gather together and indulge in some singing (which always has a dose of nostalgia). But for us the words of the songs hold true. For us the gathering is a community gathered by faith and in real hope. The candlelight recalls the words of Simeon meeting the child in the Temple: “my eyes have seen your salvation, a light to enlighten the nations.”
And so the short days, the long nights –midnight in one of the year’s longest nights- this too, becomes a powerful metaphor. It’s not without meaning that we celebrate at midnight on this long night. Tonight is about a meeting in a certain time and a certain place. God sends his Son and he meets us in our long dark nights. Jesus comes as light breaking into our longest, darkest of nights. Our experiences of despair, our experiences of unworthiness, our experience of sin is all held in this picture of the long, dark night. It is into human hopelessness, into human depravity, into human sin, it is into all this that light breaks, God’s Son breaks.
This meeting at a certain time: the certain time is the long dark night of our human experience, into which light breaks, Jesus breaks.
]]> General http://stcuthberts-durham.org.uk/homily/index.php?itemid=23 Tue, 25 Dec 2007 15:05:00 +0000 http://stcuthberts-durham.org.uk/homily/index.php?itemid=22 15th July, 2007

Monday morning: my day off.
Morning prayer and at 9:15am morning mass.
10am: Mass finished and I take a few minutes to read the Sunday readings for the coming week: the Good Samaritan.
Now this particular Monday, my regular golf partner was away, and so I spent an hour or so doing little jobs and choosing something for the reflection on the back of the bulletin (I was quite pleased with my efforts this week).
11:10 Enough business! This is a day off. So I take a large bowl of coffee (an affectation I picked up in Italy) and the newspaper into the garden, to sit in the sun.
11:30 I’ve been in the garden about 20 minutes when a young man comes through the iron gate. At first I assume that he’s come for a sandwich and a cup of tea. But he’s not the man I thought he was. He speaks with a strange mixture of accents and he asks for the parish priest. I’m wearing my check shirt of anonymity and so I have to confess that I am he.
“Oh, right,” he say, and sits down on a garden chair next to me. And now begins his story. It was the kind of story which would have glazed the eyes of many a more diligent and attentive listener than me. I did notice that he was smoking, but as quickly as I had noticed this he, too, must have felt a prick of conscience about this and flicked his cigarette into the flower beds. I hardly flinched.
The story, which involved many digressions into church politics, the papacy and married clergy, seemed to boil down to the following.
 He is travelling with a partner and small child who are currently waiting at the station.
 He has been on holiday to France and to Euro-Disney (it is later explained that this is because his daughter was, as an even smaller child, badly scalded and he wanted to treat her).
 He has travelled back through Belgium and Holland staying with friends and encountering a married priest.
 Ferries have been cancelled because of bad weather.
 He has been told to keep his receipt for a refund, but he is without money now to get home.
 He crossed from Holland to Hull and stayed in either York or Leeds or possibly both, where he sought the help of the SVP. (Much bigger in Ireland than over here, he informed me.)
 He has come up to Durham this morning on the train.
 He needs a ticket for he and his wife to Derry (Londonderry) which should cost £42:50 each. That will take him back via a ferry at Stranraer.
12:05 Wearying, I see my chance, now that he’s reached the point in the story where he says what it is that he wants. “Okay,” I say, “come back at 1pm, and I’ll take you to the station and I will buy you the tickets.” Shortly after this he leaves.
Now this is usually a good ploy. It says that I’m not going to give you money, and so if you want money you can leave now and not come back and your dignity is intact because I haven’t questioned your integrity. But if it is a genuine need then help is available. At this stage, I didn’t believe the man’s story.
I go back inside the house and decide to call the SVP in St. Joseph’s for a little advice (particularly because he has asked for the SVP).
12:50 He’s back. To my surprise, he’s back. Well, I have to be true to my word. So I take him to the station. When we arrive I tell him that we must go first and find his partner and child. At first he is disorientated, and takes me to an empty waiting room. I am very suspicious. But then he finds the right waiting room, and to my surprise a young woman and a small child who immediately jump up to tell him of some argument they have just had with another passenger.
So, I go to buy the tickets. To my surprise the man’s (Danny’s) story has checked out and so I’m happy to buy the tickets. Even if it is a con, I always buy the tickets on a card so that the money can only be credited back to the card and not refunded in cash.
All seems to be going well. The tickets are actually cheaper than predicted: not £42:50 each, but £40:50. I ask for two, and then comes the hitch. These tickets include a ferry journey from Stranraer, and so to buy them you must be able to book on to the ferry. The ferry is full. I can’t buy the tickets.
It’s 1:30pm. This man and his family have pretty much occupied the last two hours of my day. I now want to be free, but this man’s problem has become my problem. Now I have a small family in a waiting room at Durham station. They have two enormous suitcases, a pram, and various small bags. They have (Danny tells me) 80p. That morning I had read the gospel for the coming Sunday, the Good Samaritan.
I ring some of the SVP people I know, but no one is available. I ring Helen, the secretary, to let her know what’s happening.
I tell Danny and his partner what is happening. Danny kicks off and flies into a rage.
Danny thinks they might have better luck in Newcastle. I need to go to Newcastle. So we go to Newcastle. One suitcase fills the entire boot of the car. The other takes the place of one and a half adults on the back seat. The rest of us squeeze in around it. We set off for Newcastle.
In the car Danny is still angry. I have listened to plenty of his hard luck story, so I try out a little bit of mine: “Look, I’m willing to help you as much as I can, but I have things to do too. I have two elderly parents who are expecting me to cook them an evening meal and to sort out meals for them for the coming week.” This produces half a minutes silence and then Danny tells me that he and his family are starving.
2:15pm We pull in to the Cathedral car park. It install Danny and family in the restaurant and tell him to order what he wants.
I go into the cathedral office. Danny’s problem has become my problem. Now I have to tell the hard luck story, both Danny’s and my own. How I was sitting in the garden, just trying to enjoy a day off when … I’m hoping that none of the priests will be around, and that Colleen, the secretary, will know exactly who to call to get help.
Fr. Peter appears. He listens, bemused, but indulgently, to my tale of woe. I’m embarrassed and reddening to be bringing this complex mess all the way from Durham to his door step.
Colleen thinks she knows who to contact and Peter wants to give me a cup of tea and some biscuits. I’m uneasy because Danny has been accusing me of wanting to abandon him, but Colleen insists that she will go through and talk to Danny and send him on his way to this place that will find him somewhere to stay for the night. Meanwhile Peter sits me down with coffee. Two minutes later and Colleen is back. Danny has kicked off in the restaurant. I race through. By now Danny is pacing up and down outside shouting intermittently, his partner trying to reason with him, his child in tears.
In time we talk him down. He will go to this housing agency on Pilgrim Street, and I will go to Central Station to try to find a way to Derry.
3:15pm I’ve almost spent four hours with this problem now. I still can’t buy any tickets. Eventually Danny comes back from the housing agency, but they cannot help him.
It’s about this time that someone from the SVP gets back to me: “Put Danny and his family in a taxi,” they tell me, “and send him to SVP in Newcastle. Phone calls will be made and he’ll be taken care of.” And that’s almost the end of the story.

The thing is there is no end to these stories. The benevolent Samaritan promises to make good any extra expense on his return (though like me he gives his money to the innkeeper and not the man with the hard luck story!). These stories have no definite or satisfactory endings because people’s lives are not like that. And there is no end to these stories once we get involved. When Jesus says, “Go and do likewise,” he is ordering us into the complicated mess of people’s lives.

May the story of the Good Samaritan be both a blight and a blessing on your life this week.


]]> General http://stcuthberts-durham.org.uk/homily/index.php?itemid=22 Sun, 15 Jul 2007 15:02:00 +0000 http://stcuthberts-durham.org.uk/homily/index.php?itemid=21
On this Sunday twelve of our children received the Sacrament of Holy Communion for the first time at our 11am parish mass. At the 6:30pm student mass, four students were baptised, four received into full communion with the Catholic Church, and these eight with four others were confirmed. Fr. Christopher Jackson, our area Episcopal vicar, celebrated this mass.

Neither homily from those two masses can be reproduced here. Instead, I offer this short reflection. On the front page of Tuesday’s paper the headline read: “Potential link to health problems prompts advice to parents over diet.” It is the kind of story we are now well used to; warning parents about the harmful effects of food additives on the children’s health and behaviour. Parents are hit with such scare stories on almost a weekly basis.

So what should parents give to their children? This Sunday twelve children made their first Holy Communion, and a further eight adults received Holy Communion in the Catholic Church for the first time. This is a dietary watershed of epic proportions.

All twenty “first communicants” have deepened their relationship with the community of this parish, the communion of the diocese and the wider communion of the Church. The parents of our children have decided that they want their children to grow up as part of that communion. At the breaking of bread communion is formed. This is a food of relationship. The food that our “first communicants” receive today is food that belongs to the New Jerusalem, the holy city, that we hear about descending to earth in the second reading. It is a foretaste of the heavenly bouquet that we hope to enjoy there. Unlike the dire warnings of food scare stories, this is a food of promise.

The food received from this altar is the Lord Jesus made sacramentally present. As such, to receive it with an open heart is to invoke the promise of our gospel: “my Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make our home with him.” The Lord makes his home in us as he nourishes us with the Eucharist. This is the food of his presence.


]]> General http://stcuthberts-durham.org.uk/homily/index.php?itemid=21 Sun, 13 May 2007 12:56:00 +0000 http://stcuthberts-durham.org.uk/homily/index.php?itemid=20
I’ve always been someone who’s very ambitious. And part of that ambition has been the question: “When, I reach certain milestones in my life (forty, fifty, sixty, seventy etc.) will I be able to look back on what I have done, on my life thus far, with the satisfaction that I’ve done something worthwhile with it? That my forty or fifty or sixty years have been well spent?”

One experience radically altered for me what a life well spent would be. I’m pretty sure that it’s something I have spoken about here before; in fact, I’m pretty sure that I have given something like this homily before. But it’s back to these thoughts that this gospel reading takes me, and it’s these reflections that I need to hear again, so perhaps they will be of some help to you.

What a life well spent looked like changed for me at the funeral of my friend Luke. It was a non-religious funeral in a crematorium in Eastbourne. Luke was about a year into his doctorate when he died, and various people, including his supervisor and his girlfriend spoke about how important his research was. Someone else spoke about Luke’s humour. I suppose, I was dissatisfied with all that was being said. I had met Luke as a first year. I was gauche and awkward, he was the epitome of student chic: long hair, jeans and sports jacket. We both did history and knew lots of people in common. He would quite often knock on my door, but I was fairly sure that I was just an excuse for him to pursue his interest in the girl who lived on my corridor. Gradually, however, we got to know each other better, and by our third year, as we were taking the same special paper, we spent a lot of time together. Luke would come round after our seminar and we’d have tea and talk until it was time to go for a drink. Luke was very funny, and we shared a similar sense of humour, but he would also talk to me about some of the pressures he was under and the difficult things in his life, and he was genuinely interested in my faith and my discovery of vocation.

Going home on the train from that funeral, I felt that something very important had not been said. I wanted to say that I was a different person because I had had this unexpected friendship with Luke. I was less awkward, and more self-confident. It was the way that he had given us friendship, it was the way in which he had loved us all, that made his life so immensely valuable, so incalculably precious.

Judas has left the upper room. Darkness closes in on this group of friends, and Jesus asks them: what has my life been about? Why has it been important? It has been about loving people. And he commends them, love as I have loved: bring people my love.

When I look back on my life thus far from all those milestones, the only measure by which to judge it will be how much I have loved; how much I have been able to bring people the love of Jesus.
]]> General http://stcuthberts-durham.org.uk/homily/index.php?itemid=20 Sun, 6 May 2007 16:35:00 +0000 http://stcuthberts-durham.org.uk/homily/index.php?itemid=19
As we move from Easter Sunday towards Pentecost, through the Easter season, the readings take us from the resurrection itself, to the role of the Church to continue the mission of Jesus. The fourth Sunday of Easter is always Good Shepherd Sunday, and this is what it is about.

Georges Bernanos, in the opening pages of The Diary of a Country Priest, captures this shepherding mission of the Church. His eponymous hero tramps home across farmland, and sees the mean little houses that constitute his parish. He thinks of the cattle that he can hear coughing in the mist, and of the small boy who, coming back from school, will “soon be leading them over sodden fields to a small sweet-smelling byre”. “And my parish,” he continues, “my village seemed to be waiting too … for a master to follow towards some undreamed of, improbable shelter.”

There’s dilemma that this passage brings out for me. On the one hand there is great goodness here. The priest shares the pastoral heart of Jesus: think of Jesus having sailed across Lake Galilee to be alone with his disciples and finding the crowd have got there ahead of him, and setting out to teach them because, “they were like sheep without a shepherd.” There is a great goodness in the priest who shares this kind of compassion for people, there is great goodness in wanting to bring people who are needy to the safety and warmth of the Lord’s love. But there is also the apparent arrogance of the initial diagnosis. He is really very rude about his parish and, by implication, the lives of his parishioners. It is a demeaning analogy to see them as hopelessly lost, directionless, cattle coughing in the mist.

If we are to share the pastoral, the shepherding, heart of Jesus we need to know what it is that we are offering the world. Can we, in any way, lead people to a “sweet smelling byre”, to “some undreamed of, improbable shelter”? (It focuses our minds on this question: what do we as the Church offer to the world?)

It seems to me that we must offer it a taste, an experience, of the love of the Lord. And in the image of the Good Shepherd we have an exposition of what that love is like. It is a love which forgives, like the shepherd who leaves the ninety nine sheep to search out the lost. It is a love that is practical and provides for basic needs: Jesus, filled with compassion for the crowd because they were like sheep without a shepherd, not only taught them, but also fed them with loaves and fishes. It is a love that guides: Jesus teaches the crowd the values of the kingdom, and our personal experience of the Lord, gives us a wisdom and gives us a knowledge of the values of the kingdom that must be shared. We have a duty to offer guidance, sometimes as individual Christians, and as a Church. This is the kind of love it is: a love which forgives, a love which provides for needs, and a love which offers guidance. And underlying all of that, what we find in Jesus is his tremendous compassion for people.

For us as a Church to share in the mission of Jesus the Good Shepherd means giving the world a taste of this kind of love. Our duty as Christians is to offer to people this love. And perhaps for some the offer of this love will be a haven, a “sweet smelling byre”, “some undreamed of and improbable shelter”.
]]> General http://stcuthberts-durham.org.uk/homily/index.php?itemid=19 Sun, 29 Apr 2007 11:04:00 +0000