We expect instant results. God’s time is different.

As a keen gardener, I love the passage from Isaiah this week (61:1-2.10-11) where he says, “As a garden makes seeds spring up, so will the Lord make both integrity and praise spring up in the sight of the nations.” As I am sure you know, you cannot see plants grow, yet though they may seem slow to us impatient human beings who want instant results, they do grow surely and steadily, but very slowly. I had a dream recently in which I could play the piano beautifully. The problem is I can’t, because I never practised. I was too impatient. Great footballers do not become so by magic, they start young and they practise with the ball every day, and with a team on a regular basis from a young age. Patience and persistence are required in almost anything worthwhile that we do.

So when we pray, we need to recognize that God will respond to our prayers, but most of the time this happens slowly and often in ways that we do not expect. As someone once said, “God always answers our prayers, but not necessarily with the answer we want.”  The essential thing therefore that we should do when we pray is simply to offer ourselves to God. We will share with God the joys and the sorrows of our life, we may well tell him how we long for a solution to a problem we face, or some pain that never seems to go away; but more important than all this is simply to put ourselves into God’s hands and into his time.

This is certainly true when we try to be a better Christian. As a Catholic, part of the way I try to be a better person is by making my Confession to a priest a few times a year, as I will be doing this Tuesday.  The problem that all of us who do this face, is that each time we do this we find that we have to confess the same failings – in my case how I get irritable with other people etc etc.. Perhaps I am less irritable than I used to be when I was young, but if so it is difficult to notice the difference. All I can do is trust in God’s love and forgiveness and keep trying. But note this, and we get this from St Paul in our 2^nd Reading today, (1 Thess 5:16-24) the most important part of this process of becoming a better Christian is to put it into God’s hands.

St Paul certainly thinks that we should aim to be “perfect and holy” but he says very firmly, “May the God of peace make you perfect and holy.”  At the heart of becoming a better Christian must be our dependence on God, and an acceptance of his way of doing things. God is at work in us whether we realise it or not, so it is vitally important that we practice the presence of God, that we try to allow God’s Holy Spirit to penetrate every part of our lives. If we are too busy doing our own thing, thinking we have the answer, then we will probably be in danger, as St Paul says, in danger of suppressing God’s Holy Spirit.  So when I make my Confession on Tuesday, my main aim must be to celebrate God’s presence, God’s love and forgiveness for me. Christmas is not about what we do for others, but about what God does for us. 

In a world where if it gets dark we can turn on a light, we forget that the true light in the darkness is not of our making, but is the light that is God. That is what St John declares about John the Baptist in today’s Gospel (John 1:6-8.19-28) “He is a witness to speak for the light”, and thus he predicts the coming of Jesus. When I was a boy, street lights were not so good as they are now, and there were patches of darkness between each light. I remember finding those dark patches quite terrifying so I used to wait under one lamppost, pluck up courage, and then run like mad through the darkness to the next one. Then, when I was about 12, the good news that Jesus is alive and will always be with me suddenly became a reality for me, and to my astonishment I was no longer afraid of those dark patches between the lamps. It was still just as dark, but I knew Christ was with me, and I could walk without fear through the darkness.

Life is dark for many people, and there seems no sign of light at the end of the tunnel. We must feel this as we hear of all the sad things going on in the world where people are suffering. There seems so little we can do to put this right. It just goes on and on. All we can do is never give up doing good ourselves, allowing God’s love to work in and through us. Things may look dark, but little acts of love and goodness are going on even in the darkest places. As we hear every Christmas in that great 1^st Chapter of St John’s Gospel “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

 

 

 

On what being spiritual really means

This Sunday we are encouraged by St Paul in our 2^nd Reading (Romans 8:9-13) to be “spiritual”; but sadly in our modern world “spiritual” does not mean what it meant back then. In order to explain this, let me tell you a story.

I took an Assembly this week and got two children out the front to help me illustrate how God speaks to us. The girl acted the part of an old lady who trips and falls in the street. Down she crashed. The boy acted himself dashing down the street on the way to play football with his friends. He’s faced with a choice. Should he hope someone else will help the old lady so he can carry on to play football; or should he stop and cross the street to help her. “Now”, I said to the children, “He has these two thoughts in his mind. Which one is from God? Which one is God speaking to him?”

Actually it was a trick question. The children all put up their hands with one answer. God was telling him to help the old lady. “Yes” I said “You are right…. but not quite right.” The point is that playing football is a good thing too, so God was actually saying “Look after the old lady first, and then enjoy your game of football”.

The point is that for us Christians being spiritual does not mean simply doing good, or being religious. The religious people in the time of Jesus were shocked that he mixed with all sorts of people who were not very good or holy. He even went to their homes and ate and drank with them! Sometimes he even argued that they were nearer to God than the so-called religious people. Being spiritual does not mean shutting oneself off from the world in some kind of mystical haze, because being closer to God does not mean being distant from the world. Jesus did not stop being God when he went to a party.

Religious people, in the time of Jesus, and still today, also tend to think that being “spiritual” means setting oneself up as better or more holy than others. We heard Jesus criticise this in our Gospel (Matt 11:25-30) when he says that God is far away from “the learned and the clever”. Some people even think that because priests are meant to be more holy than others they must not get involved in ordinary things. I remember once shocking a very holy lady because she found me cleaning the church toilets! Despite all the teaching on Jesus washing the disciple’s feet (John 13:3-5) she had not realised that being holy means serving others. Jesus said? “The Son of Man (that’s Jesus talking of himself) came not to be served but to serve” (Matt 20:28) And it was in our 1^st Reading too from the prophet Zechariah (9:9-10) “See now, your king comes to you; he is victorious, he is triumphant” . But then comes the crunch. How is he shown to be triumphant? Because he is “humble and riding on a donkey”

Being spiritual like this in humble service of others is really quite hard, and this is one of the main reasons why we need to meet and pray together with our fellow Christians, to give them support and get support from them. Trying to be close to God by ourselves is what some modern people think being spiritual is all about, but it isn’t, because this so-called spirituality easily ends up being a rather selfish introspection that is a long long way from what we were taught by Jesus.

The problem is that many of us actually tend to feel closer to God, when there are no people around to distract us. Now we certainly need times like this, just as Jesus did when he went out alone in the hills to pray; but it does not follow that we are closer to God when we FEEL closer. It may be the case sometimes; but God will still be close to us even WE feel far away from him – times when life is getting too much for us, when we have too many worries, too many things to do or to think about. Then we need to hear the words of Jesus from today’s Gospel (Matt 11:25-30) “Come to me, all you who labour and are overburdened, and I will give you rest. Shoulder my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

So, being spiritual does not mean retreating into some cut-off holiness. Yes, it does mean avoiding things that are evil; but much more it means finding God speaking to us in the ordinary things of life. That may be helping someone in need; but it can also mean cleaning dirty toilets. It means knowing God’s presence in all things, both when we are having a good time, and when things are tough. As St Paul says, Jesus is “before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Col 1:17)

 

On death and life and tears and love

If you have experienced the death of someone you love, a parent or a brother or sister or a close friend, then you will know what Jesus felt at the death of his friend Lazarus, and as he saw the grief of the two sisters, Mary and Martha. The shortest sentence in the Bible is one of the most important, and we have it in our Gospel today (John 11:1-45) “Jesus wept.” (11:35) It is important because it tells us how human Jesus was. He knew the message of eternal life, because that was the heart what he came to bring us.  He says “I am the Resurrection and the Life”, but that does not stop him weeping at the death of his friend.

I watched a film on TV this week about the footballer Rio Ferdinand coping with the tragic death of his wife, and how he was trying to help his three little children cope with their loss. He realised, and it was this that reduced him to tears, that he needed to help them; and the film ends with the children writing and drawing their memories of their Mummy for a memory jar.

The Doctors and Psychologists tell us that crying when we are sad is good for us, but there is still an old idea among some Christians, that since we believe that our loved ones who have died are with God, we must not weep for them. This is not true, and we know that simply because Jesus wept for Lazarus. He gives each of us permission to weep when someone we love dies.

But we need to take this further, because when Jesus weeps, just as when he suffers on the cross, we are reminded that God is a God of love. God is not a remote power that doesn’t care about suffering and death. God is rather the power of love itself, the power that supports us when we are sad or troubled, but also the only power that can give life to our loved ones beyond death. If there is no God, then there cannot be anything beyond death. As St Paul says in our 2^nd Reading (Romans 8:8-11) it is in our interest as human beings to believe in spiritual things, so that as we trust in God, Christ may give our loved ones, and us, a life that takes us all beyond the death of our physical mortal bodies, and in some way beyond our understanding gives them and us a new kind of life with him.

Love, real love, is a spiritual thing. It is not mere physical attraction. And therefore when we experience love, the love of our parents hopefully, and later the love of a friend, or of a wife or a husband, then we experience God, whether we know it or not. But it’s not just their love for us, it is also our love for them. Rio Ferdinand actually said that it was his love for his little children that brought him tears, but also brought him the determination not to give up on them. All he wanted to do in his grief was curl up in a dark corner and end it all, but the power of love that brought him tears also brought him the power to go on into life for them. He did not say it, but I could have told him, that the power he experienced then, was the power of God working in him.

We heard in the story how strong the link between tears and love is; for those looking on said, as Jesus wept, “See how much he loved him”. It’s intriguing that in the Rio Ferdinand film we were shown one other clip of this great strong footballer weeping. It was at his marriage, as his loved one walked towards him at the beginning of the Marriage ceremony. I always say to a bride or groom that they must not worry if a few tears, fall at their marriage, for tears are a sign of love not just of sadness.  That is why the greatest sign of love for Christians is not even Jesus weeping, but Jesus dying on the cross. If we really love others, as Rio Ferdinand loves his children, then sometimes that will be very hard as well as very joyful. To know that love is to know God. As St John writes in one of his letters : “God is love and those who live in love, live in God, and God lives in them.” (1 John 4:16) Only that love, the power of love itself, can defeat death.