What the Dog taught me about God! My sermon for Advent Sunday 2021

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Advent Sunday Sermon 2021

Intending to raise cattle, a family from New York bought a ranch out West. When their friends visited and inquired about the ranch’s name, the would be rancher replied: “I wanted to name it the Bar-J. My wife favored Suzy-Q, one of our sons wanted the Flying-W, and the other liked the Lazy-Y. So we’re calling it the BAr-J-Suzy-Q-Flying-W-Lazy-Y.”

“But where are all your cattle?” the friends asked.

“None survived the branding.”

That is a perfect example of the consequences of disagreement and a lack of unity. The longer I live the more I believe that Unity and Oneness is essential to living productively and faithfully on this Earth. The growing crisis of climate change is teaching us that and there is an urgency to find a true unity of purpose that acknowledges our unity interdependence on one another and for us as Christians on God.

One of the consequences of believing in the fundamental unity of all things and the centrality of Unity to the message of the Gospel is that one is inclined to look for and discern moments and experiences in everyday life where we are given a glimpse of the Sacred/Holy in our World, where that fundamental unity is demonstrated most explicitly.

One that occured to me recently comes from my experience as a doggie person. Anyone who has a dog (especially a male dog I'm told) knows well the twin dreads of dog ownership.

The first is that bark at 3am on a freezing winter night which means that I/you have to get out of our lovely cozy bed and go out into the garden so that the dog can do his business.

The second flows from the first and that is standing there freezing while your dog does everything but do his business and spends his time sniffing every square inch of the lawn or chasing cats or hedgehogs as you wait interminibly for him to finally circle in on the chosen spot and do the necessary so that you can go back to your lovely warm bed before you become hypothermic.

All very well but where you ask is the glimpse of the Sacred/Holy in that?Particularly as yours truly may have uttered some very unholy words while waiting for the canine parambulations to end?

But that same experience seems to me to present so well two sides to the experience that we all share throughout our lives and that is the process of WAITING.

First the anxious wait for something that we do not want to happen and then the impatient waiting for something that we want to be completed or fulfilled.

Advent is a time of Waiting and it two has both those aspects:

If we understand Advent not simply as a preparation and a lead in to Christmas but as the expectation of the return of Christ in Glory then there may be a sort of trepedation or anxiety about that long anticipated event – we may be in no hurry for this life or this world as we know it to come to an end and in the words of St Augustine may be thinking:

'Give me Chastity – But not yet!'

We have plans and are not quite ready for Jesus' return!

Or alternatively we be counting the days till the end of Advent which will signal the arrival of the infant Jesus on Christmas day and the joy and happinness that comes with the Incarnation.

The reality is that we have to live with that tension – Waiting is a part of our witness – Waiting is a part of our human condition and waiting is intrinsic to the Gospel.

We live in an inbetween world and an inbetween time – we see glimpses of the Kingdom in our lives and it is those glimpses that give us the strength to live in the moment and to acept the tension and sometimes even the seeming contradiction in our lives. But to that we must seek the Unity that is all around us and be reconcilers and healers in a world which is so divided by those who would deny that unity and interdependence.

That I believe was and is fundamental to Jesus message as articulated in his prayer to the Father in John 17:

20 ‘I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, 21 that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us,[a] so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, 23 I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

I want to finish with another prayer written by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ who was a very influential theologian and died in 1955. He had a particular understanding of the inate sacredness of Waiting and his prayer may be helpful to us as we wait, not alone for Advent and Christmas and Christ's return in glory but also I am sure I speak for all of us an end to the pandemic which has cast such a long shadow on our lives:

Patient Trust—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete. AMEN.

COVID19 - NO SURRENDER!

Like most people I am utterly fed up (that's putting it very politely) with COVID. It has sucked the joy and pleasure out of life. It is like a dark cloud hanging over our lives and even on the brightest Summer day that cloud is there – It may not be visible but you can feel its presence nontheless. I would consider myself relatively compliant when it comes to the necessary public safety restrictions – indeed I previously argued publically that the churches should not be lobbying for an early return to public worship.

However the recent bad news re the D variant and the pulling back from planned easing of Covid measures caused something to snap and I took to social media and had a rant about what I called the 'Stockholm Syndrome' that appears to be affecting our national psyche. When I cooled down I had to acknowledge that caution is required at this point and that until most of the adult population is fully vaccinated it is probably wise and necessary to hold back on indoor dining and other social pleasures that we once took for granted. In saying that I am hugely cognisant of the high price that those in the hospitality sector have paid and continue to pay due to these measures. For them especially I long for a return to 'normality'.

What disturbs me most though now is the common response when I or others express this desire to get our old lives back and usually it goes like this: 'O but this is the new normal – you'd better get used to it' – Or when I say I am looking forward to ditching the face mask I have heard the response from more than one person that they quite like the mask and are in no hurry to stop wearing it – 'At least it keeps the colds and flu at bay'! I find this not only mind boggling but also very sad. For me it signals a loss of Hope and a resigned acceptance of the status quo and I for one am not prepared to go down that road – Hope is a vital component of our humanity and when we give up on that I think we may as well give up full stop.

As a Christian priest Hope is also central to what I do – I try to witness to the Resurrection, Hope not only to that of Jesus and our own ultimate destiny but also to the hope of a better tomorrow and the hope that our yesterdays and today's do not determne or limit our tomorrows.

That same hope is what keeps me going as I currently witness my 24 year old son with special needs rapidly going blind – I hope that if not a miracle in the short term that in the longer term medical science will provide a way for him to regain that most precious gift of sight. I don't know but I will contine to hope till my last breath on this earth.

Covid may not have taken our sight away but in many circumstances it has deprived us of the sense of touch which is equally essential to our humanity. The skin is the biggest organ in the human body and it is made for touch as we are made for touch. That touch may be everything from a handshake to a warm embrace, the exchange of the Peace in the liturgy, a hug of comfort for the bereaved or the passionate embrace of a lover. The contemporary author and poet Margaret Atwood said of touch: 'Touch comes before sight, before speech - It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.'

I still hope for that truth and I still hope for a return to the messy, tactile, touching and cold and flu-ridden world that I took for granted and I will never give up on that hope. I know for now I must be patient but I will not surrender my life to Covid 19!

The New Puritanism! Throwing the Statues out with the Bathwater

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/shelbourne-hotel-removes-153-year-old-statues-of-slave-girls-from-its-plinth-1.4315733

This strikes me as a classic example of the increasingly pervasive Neo-Puritan iconoclasm (mostly but not exclusively focused on statues) which while well motivated runs the risk of turning into a Talibanesque random destruction of the artifacts of history and culture which like the society from which they have sprung will always contain ambiguities and even things that are unpleasant and uncomfortable. That however IS our history and our heritage, a mixture of good and bad, light and dark, appropriate and inappropriate. Any attempt to airbrush it is like the common contemporary practice of photoshopping model's bodies (mostly women) in glossy magazines. It is false, dishonest and only results in alienating those who do not conform to increasingly narrower criteria of acceptability. I wonder how many of us would have stood up against slavery when it was the accepted norm in certain parts of the world? We are products of our time and to impose our modern enlightened standards to the art, architecture and iconography of another time is a mono-cultural fundamentalism no more helpful or wise than trying to read the Bible as literal history - indeed if the same logic that provoked the removal of theses statues was applied to the Bible or the Koran for that matter then both would be banned if not burned! There is of course the additional argument that those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it. The original Puritans while also well intended in overturning the excesses of the pre-Reformation Church threw away much of the richness and aesthetic beauty of church life and worship and created a form of Christianity that was strict, sterile and monochrome.It is only in latter years that some forms of Protestant Christianity have rediscovered the importance of the aesthetic in worship - Some still haven't! Let's be very careful before we throw the baby out with the bathwater again - he or she may not survive this time!

Lockdown Leadership?

 I like many am getting very weary of the lockdown. I feel that perhaps the unlocking is too slow and at times arbitrary in its progression. However I don’t pretend to be an expert epidemiologist and would not (despite my frustration) presume to second guess such eminent experts such as Tony Holohan and his colleagues who have spent a lifetime of research into infectious pandemics such as we now face.

However I am increasingly concerned by what the journalist Ian O’Doherty succinctly described this morning on the Pat Kenny Show on Newstalk as ‘Narrowcasting’ – In using this phrase he clearly was referring to the narrow focus of the response to the pandemic which is focussed only on the infections and direct deaths from Covid19 with no reference to the broader picture which of course includes the thousands of undiagnosed cancers, heart conditions, pulmonary disease, children in agony awaiting scoliosis surgeries, transplant patients, mental health patients with suicidal ideation and a growing waiting list of urgent surgeries which will take years to catch up with and on which many will die because help came too late! Not to mention of course the ongoing destruction of our economy, Sport and the Arts and a recession greater than any in our history which will further hamper us in rebuilding our health services in order to minimise the numbers of ongoing casualties which most predict will (if it has not done so already) far outnumber the direct deaths from Coronavirus.

Do I blame Tony Holohan and his colleagues for this? No – not for a moment – he is doing his job very well – he was asked to flatten the curve and he and his colleagues with our cooperation have done that – He wasn’t asked to look at the bigger picture, the side effects on other areas of medicine or the devastation of the economy and society. And rightly so because he wasn’t qualified to do so. The problem is that nobody on NPHET (which he chairs) – the group  appointed to coordinate the State’s response to COVID 19 is qualified to look at the economic and social consequences of their policy – They are all medical!

The sad truth of this is that the Taoiseach and his ministers, have abrogated their responsibility to lead. It started well with a truly statesmanlike speech from the Taoiseach and initially it seemed a broad government ministerial involvement but as the weeks have gone on we have heard less and less from the Taoiseach and the only visible leadership figure in the country is Tony Holohan whose daily updates have become the closest thing we have to governance in the country. This is neither fair on him or on us. He is not elected or qualified to lead our country through this crisis. Of course one might argue that in the present political shambles the Taoiseach himself has a very fragile authority – but at the moment he is all we have got and he needs to step up to the plate and take this burden off Tony Holohan’s shoulders and put it on his own and give a broader leadership to this country which takes account of the broader consequences of this pandemic and the disastrous effects of the counter measures. If the lockdown must continue so be it – I would prefer to hear that from the Taoiseach and know that other factors including but not exclusively the advice of Tony Holohan had been taken into account in making the decision. I know that these are not easy decisions and that lives literally hang on what is decided but that is the responsibility of Government not the chief medical officer.

Worship from Home on our Parish Website

PARISH WEBSITE

An open letter to fellow clergy and bishops of the Church of Ireland and other religious leaders of all faiths.

Dear friends – I write to you as the rector of a County Kildare parish within the commuter belt of Dublin city and the Diocese of Dublin and Glendalough. This weekend I took the difficult decision to close all of our churches until the end of the month or indeed until advised that the current Coronavirus threat has passed. This was not an easy decision and not one I took lightly but I did it because I was conscious that ANY public gathering increases the risk of spreading infection within the community.

It is not just those who might attend church that are vulnerable but everyone they subsequently interface with which will inevitably include the aged and the immuno-compromised. I like many in the Church of Ireland am rector of a parish where the age profile is very high and so a significant number of my parishioners are in a category (80+) where if they catch the virus, one in eight of them will likely die! Please dwell on that for a moment! These are people who have served our church all their lives and have sustained it through thick and thin and now we are wilfully risking them these precious twilight years!   This is not a chance I am willing to take! In addition to this I have a number of recovering cancer patients, transplant patients and those with respiratory issues who are extremely vulnerable to this virus.

And I am also conscious that it is not just my parishioners that I have a responsibility towards but also those in the wider community – My church is part of that community and if we are negligent we risk not only our own health but also those who we interface with in our daily lives and we have an equal duty of care to them.

I am aware that the Government in neither jurisdictions has demanded that we close and so those churches that remain open are not in breach of the law but that does not mean that there is no moral imperative to do otherwise!

Is our piety really more important than the health of the most vulnerable members of society?

Do we believe in a God who demands that we sacrifice the vulnerable in order to maintain public worship during a temporary crisis such as this?

If we can say hand on heart that continuing public worship will not increase the risk of infection then all is well but the reality is we cannot and all is not well! This is a chance for those of us of religious faith (no matter what creed or denomination) to stand up for the vulnerable – It’s in the Gospels as far as I recollect…….

NB: I am aware that the bishops of Cashel, Ferns & Ossary & Limerick & Killaloe Dioceses  have advised church closures and welcome the wisdom of their respective decisions

Sermon for Epiphany - A shared Vision for 2020

Sunday by Sunday clergy of all denominations get up into pulpits like this one, the length and breadth of this island, and deliver a message or a reflection that hopefully resonates with their congregation - something to takeaway - something to mull over - something perhaps to disagree with - but hopefully something for the week ahead or perhaps something that speaks to the experience of the week just past.

The reality is that despite these efforts less and less people see the importance of coming to our church buildings to participate in the liturgy or to listen to whoever it is that is nominated to preach and reflect on the scriptures.

There are other voices however that they do listen to and engage with and this weekend the nation mourns in Marian Finucane one who had become not just a voice but the voice of the weekend - her influence every bit as great as the combined outpourings of hundreds and even thousands of preachers across the various churches. That is the reality - One voice did that - and yes she had the advantage of broadcasting on the National radio service and therefore the potential to be heard by every soul on this island. But there is more to it than that - In a world of huge choice where live media is under threat she managed to achieve the highest figure for an individual broadcaster with a listenership of 374 thousand people on a regular basis.

Why and how? - Those are questions I have been puzzling over the last 48 hours and in listening to the extensive commentary on her legacy I think I know the answer.

She had huge empathy (having lost her daughter of eight years old) she knew what suffering was, she had an interest in people and didn't just look for the facts when she was interviewing someone but also a sense of the person - who they were and what motivated them - she also had no time for spin or waffle - she valued the truth and integrity in others.

And she walked the talk - I had no idea of the huge amount of voluntary work she did on the ground in Africa and how she was loved there by locals who had no knowledge of the other Marian we all thought we knew.

        And she was a true friend to those who needed her - so many having come forward in the last few days. I was particularly moved by Fr Brian Darcy's account of how Marian had reached out to him after an interview she had done with him at a time when he was going through his own dark night of the soul - she was so worried about him when he left the studio that she got hold of his mobile number and left a text message to ring her without disclosing her name - when he did she counselled him to get help and not try to cope on his own - no doubt speaking from her own personal experience - he said that nobody had ever done something like it for him before and was obviously hugely grateful. He the priest had been ministered to by the radio personality - no reason why not but it is still hugely significant and I think marks a very important moment of both crisis and opportunity.

        All of that and more besides is I think why her death has left such a void - For people who had no other Church Marian created a community around her founded on empathy, interest and compassion in and for the other and she motivated people to be kind to each other.

        I think her death can be a teaching moment for those of use who used to think of ourselves as the voice of the weekend (or at least Sunday) - We are not as important as we think!

This is a wake up call for churches across this island. I'm not suggesting that we are so arrogant as to think we can fill the void left by Marian - there may well be another voice waiting in the wings to carry the baton and that would not be a bad thing but we can still learn something by observing what it is that connects with the people of today.

This is the Eve of the Epiphany - the manifestation of Jesus the Christ to the wider world - How are we to share the Good News and connect with people in a world where so many churches are inclined to withdraw and isolate themselves from a world in which there are no longer the 'voice of the weekend'? There is an increasing tendency to keep Jesus safe from all that would taint and disturb.

Within our own Anglican Communion we see a move towards a New Puritanism which narrows and chokes the path of God's Grace in the Church and the World and finds comfort in the tidiness and security of absolute unity in doctrine within communities where diversity is aggressively discouraged.

That to me is not a viable way for the Church to be in the World - so what is the alternative?

It seems to me that its a case of back to basics and that means back to life and earthly ministry of Jesus Christ which was far more radical than the Gospel we are inclined to preach and live and one which no church on this planet could hope to control or circumscribe.

So unpredictable and even dangerous as this may be we do need to set this Jesus free.

The famous classic 'The Brothers Karamazov' by Dostoyevsky contains a poem within the book called the Grand Inquisitor - In it  Christ comes back to Earth in Seville at the time of the Inquisition. He performs a number of miracles (echoing miracles from the Gospels). The people recognize him and adore him at Seville Cathedral, but he is arrested by Inquisition leaders and sentenced to be burnt to death the next day. The Grand Inquisitor visits him in his cell to tell him that the Church no longer needs him. The main portion of the text is devoted to the Inquisitor explaining to Jesus why his return would interfere with the mission of the Church.

Everything is under control and the people have been made compliant and do not need the messiness of Free Will or any of Jesus' other radical ideas to make things untidy.

If Jesus is released he will as Archbishop Michael Curry of the American Episcopal Church commenting on the same poem says "mess things up". Curry also observes the irony that "there stands Jesus of Nazareth whose life and teachings are a threat not only to the surrounding society but, sadly, to a church that professes his name but tries everything possible to keep him and his message hidden away from view......it has been so easy for the church in various generations, including our own, to disregard, disarm and domesticate Jesus to the point that he may not even resemble the Jesus of the New Testament.....Whenever Jesus of Nazareth - his actual teachings, his lived example, and his loving, liberating and life-giving way - takes centre stage, a revolution of love, a reformation of life and a renewal of our relationship with God, each other and all of Creation is at hand"

And so what is a daunting challenge can also become an opportunity - we in this parish cannot change the world but we can make a big difference in our little corner of it. And I'm not just talking in the abstract here - this is something that must come to more than words if we are to play an effective role in working for the Kingdom of God here on Earth.

So where do we start - I think it must be again with the basics:

Scripture and Prayer

Could I suggest that we consider that portion of Matthew Chapter 5 containing the Beatitudes and the passage on Salt and Light  which I think point to the radical roots of Jesus teaching - I have printed them out for everyone along with a prayer (see below) that we might say together in the weeks and months ahead as we try to discern how we can together as Church in this parish more fully present and reflect the person and love of Jesus Christ in all our relationships and encounters. I have some ideas but the Church is not me - it is all of us and following a time of reflection and prayer I would love that we could share our thoughts and ideas together.

To conclude with the words of Archbishop Michael Curry:

'This crisis may be a genuine opportunity to reclaim our roots, our origins, our true identity as Christians, by reclaiming Jesus of Nazareth and his way of love'.

Amen.

Matthew 5

The Beatitudes

5 When Jesus^[a] saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. ² Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

³ ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

⁴ ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

⁵ ‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

⁶ ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

⁷ ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

⁸ ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

⁹ ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

¹⁰ ‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

¹¹ ‘Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely^[b] on my account. ¹² Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Salt and Light

¹³ ‘You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.

¹⁴ ‘You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. ¹⁵ No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. ¹⁶ In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.

PRAYER

Lord Jesus who taught us to pray 'Thy Kingdom Come', give us we pray a fresh vision of your Kingdom in this place and a sense of our shared and individual callings to discipleship. Give us courage to let you into our lives, and faith to follow you wherever you lead us. Forgive us for those times we have not responded to your calling and those occasions we have been obstacles to your loving purposes. You have called us to be Salt and Light - Renew us in this calling and where we have lost our saltiness and light restore us so that we may commit ourselves afresh to serving you. We wait on you Lord - Lord Hear our Prayer. Amen.