Author: Simon Sleeman

Fr Simon Sleeman OSB

Sometimes I wonder about God. Especially on days like this.  Maybe you do too. I wonder about the risk God took using words, language, and story, to tell us his truth.  Words can be so ambiguous and stories unclear.

He could have given us a cosmic fireworks display.

He could have used math, hard data, information, facts, geometry, algebra. Maths is the most precise, unambiguous language we have –  you can dismiss stories as kids stuff, but your sum is either right or wrong.

But No…God revealed himself through story and who am I to question the Holy Spirit’s genre of choice.

The truth is, that we are not a collection of facts or an assemblage of data  –  we are storied people; there is a narrative structure to our lives – a beginning,  middle and an end, characters, plot.

And here we are Sunday after Sunday, getting you to dress up, asking you  to sit on those hard benches, and do our best to tell you the story of God – creator of the universe. The greatest, vastest story ever told. The truth is, we probably don’t tell it very well or don’t even get it ourselves.

If a story is working well, it get’s you  into it…..doesn’t it? You are right in there…in a good novel or murder mystery, turning the pages when you should be turning out the light and going to sleep…

And here is the very weird thing that I have learnt preparing this sermon – God wants us in his story…and he has written the bestselling story of all time to get us into – 73 books with a huge cast of characters and many plots – and with a  beginning, a middle and the End.

Prophets.. major and minor

Gospels and letters

Parables and prophets

Psalms and prayers..

Not even Agatha Christie, with her 74 books or Shakespeare, have sold as many.

The truth is… God is not interested in us knowing the right things or doing the right things – he doesn’t want to be reduced to a nice idea or fine theology, or us tipping our hats to him at the weekend. He doesn’t want us on the side line, spectators at the match – he wants us on the field and for the full match.

He desperately wants us in his story – a love story.

So we can choose.

We can opt into God’s story, like Abraham, take the plunge, let go of control,  watching for the hints and nudges in the unfolding chapters of a life with God.   

We may opt out, go my own way – prefer the facts, the data, fold my life into a neat bundle of me… Give me the GPS co-ordinates if I am to go anywhere and enough food. Stick with geometry, algebra…

God’s story – a huge, vast love story.

He speaks…… revealing himself,

‘I love you’ he says.

You say, ‘Yes’ …and the plot thickens.

My story – small and cramped.

Facts, data, information. The plot weakens.

I speak

but how will I ever manage to say …‘I love you’…in algebra.

Fr. Henry O’Shea OSB.

Many years ago, when teaching a junior class about Frederick the Great of Prussia, I asked the group if anyone knew the meaning of the word ‘martinet’. One young man, a budding naturalist said, excitedly ‘Yes, yes, I know, it means a female pine-marten.’ The King of Prussia was indeed a martinet but not a pine-marten. Though, maybe he was a pine-marten in a figurative sense. Figurative does not automatically mean that a term is not truly applied.

Until a very few years ago, the words ‘Tick-tock’ meant only the sound of a clock – and even then, not of all clocks. Now TicToc, as part of social media, has become not only predominant in huge sections of the world’s population, but a necessity to the point of addiction.

Arguably, one of the effects of this dominance, as in most of the social media, has been a dumbing down of discourse, a flattening in our use of words, a narrowing down of meaning and possible meanings, a draining of our capacity to understand figures of speech, a limiting of our capacity to see, a contraction of our horizons. All that matter is now. History has been abolished along with joined-up writing.

In the opening sentence of his Rule, St Benedict asks us to ‘open the ears of our hearts’ to what he has to say. But many Tictocers might ask, ‘How can a heart have ears.’   

In today’s gospel, we hear that Jesus is allergic to the scribes with their minute knowledge of the Law and its 613 rules and regulations, swanning around in long robes and basking in public adulation and prominent in the front seats of the synagogues. Martinets. This insidious attitude of the knowers-better is a universal phenomenon, which has always been present, in every culture, in every religious, artistic- business- and political culture. It is particularly corrosive when linked to our relationship with God and to the way we relate to other people, that flows from how we see and treat God.

Christ’s great insight and change of emphasis lie in his placing of what is in the heart above outward conformity to rules, above any ticking of the boxes of conformity, above all superficiality of observation. ‘Heart’ means, that instrument and facility that is and can be in us, in me, that active combination of seeing, knowing, getting-it and loving, that engagement of our minds and our capacities for love.

This is why Jesus uses the example of the widow and her tiny monetary contribution to the treasury, pointing out that as a gift of her heart, this tiny sum vastly outweighs the lavish donations of those who, in their abundance, hardly miss what they give. The widow, gives her heart, which ultimately is all that the Lord is interested in. And she give that heart freely. She is not forced. Because the Lord respects her freedom and does not want to force anyone. 

The second reading tells us how Jesus can dare to upset the apple-carts of the know-alls, of the omnicompetent, the movers-and-shakers. But how can Jesus be such an influencer?

 In the evening office of Vespers in the Churches of the East, there is a beautiful hymn in praise of the Light, sung while the evening candles are being lit. The opening words are:

Hail gladsome light,

Of his pure glory poured,

Who is the eternal Father, heavenly blessed.

Holy of Holies, Jesus Christ, Our Lord.

The author of the Letter to the Hebrews tells us that Christ is the definitive appearance of the Father’s revelation of himself. Christ is the only and final sacrifice that perfects and puts an end for all time to all human sacrifices. In abolishing these sacrifices, he has abolished all human altars and temples and is himself the sacrifice, the altar, the temple, the only true priest. He is the definitive Holy of Holies. 

Not only does this Holy of Holies make possible and offers to us an end to sin, but by making us part of himself in Baptism and feeding us with himself in the Eucharist, gives us access to true worship with and in the only Holy of Holies. Our only real future.

The heart is the organ by which we recognise, through which we are inhabited and cling to this Holy of Holies, Christ Jesus himself. ‘Heart’ is a dynamic and energizing giving and receiving of our emotional and intellectual capacities in an eternal learning-curve.  This is the part of us that the Holy of Holies wants for himself – and that forever. 

This is why the widow of Sidon and the widow at the treasury are, literally, an eternity removed from the misguided know-alls who see only as those men and women see, for whom outward appearances and instant thrills are all that matter.

 

Hail gladsome light,

Of his pure glory poured,

Who is the eternal Father, heavenly blessed.

Holy of Holies, Jesus Christ, Our Lord.

 

  

 

      

Fr. William Fennelly OSB

Today’s readings devote a lot of attention to the act of listening. In that first reading from Deuteronomy we heard Moses address the stern injunction to his people. “ Listen the, Israel, keep and observe what will make you prosper and give you increase. For Israel the source of their power and increase was the covenant and their whole history had been the story of their living faithfully and in rupture with this core element of their identity as a people. But before the covenant can begin to give life to God’s chosen people they must listen. And Moses goes on “Sh’ma Yis’ra’eil Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad.” Listen, Israel the Lord is our God and the Lord is one. The greatest dogmatic affirmation of the Jewish tradition is predicated on the necessity and by the necessity of listening. There is more at work here that the cry of an orator trying vainly to hold his audience’s attention. There is something more profound in question here. Jesus picks up on this in the gospel text from St Mark with his paraphrase when he says the most important commandment is “Listen Israel… you must love the Lord with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength”. Listening is the first thing that the Moses required of the people of Israel and Jesus as the fufilment of the Old Testament echoes this call. It is the same call that St Benedict uses to address his monks in the first words of his rule for monks “ausculta meii filii praecepti magistrii,” Listen my son to the precepts of the master. In other words be quiet, still your own torrent of words, turn your own inner cinema off, so that you can hear. Be attentive. This call has lost none of its relevance for us gathered here this evening. The challenge of removing distractions or trying to stop multitasking when something of consequence is being said or is taking place is no less difficult for us than it was for the people of Israel following Moses, or for those listening to Jesus and even for Benedict’s monks. Listening invites us into an act of imaginative empathy with the person who is speaking to us. We must be patient while we wait for them to speak and to stop speaking. And we must suspend our own personal judgment and prejudices so that we can actually be attentive to what’s being said. And indeed this rule applies not just to the act of listening but also to discernment or evaluating our lives. The text of our lives requires and the events that happen in them require a certain patient acesis in order to be understood or appreciated. It takes time to figure out what things mean and it takes patience to enable meaning to unfold, to manifest itself. When Jesus was transfigured on Mount Tabor he did not change but Peter, James and John when they gazed on him saw that he was filled with a radiance that they had not seen before.

Jesus says that once we have listened then the central act and truth in the life is love of God and love of neighbour. This is more important that any temple offering or material success or personal investment. But we do not dispense with liturgy just because the Temple is no longer the central element of Christian worship. The catholic imagination is deeply sacramental in that there is a very keen sense that all comes from God. And somehow everything bears an imprint of its divine origin. To speak of a sacramental vision means that we use words to speak of realities that are beyond words. Language cannot exhaust the depths of this reality. Food and drink will soon be used to express, to experience our unity with Christ and through him with each other. The whole of life is touched by this divine origin and so our Christian faith is not a merely spiritual or ethereal thing but it works itself out in our daily lives. And love is crucial here. The Latin anthem “Ubi caritas et amor deus ibi est” says it well where love is there is God.

Listening to the text of our lives and the word of God requires a patient and determined attention and the call is to live out this attention in a loving attention to the God we met in the neigbour, in the other, in our lives now.