25th SUNDAY OF THE YEAR — 2016

Some years ago now there was a well-known British actor, who seemed to have everything: fame, looks, popularity, publicity, wealth, friends and charm. Yet to everyone’s shock, he one day, quite unexpectedly, committed suicide. His reason? As he put it in his suicide note: “I was so bored.”

What does it mean, to be so bored that life is not worth living? To have the world at one’s feet, and to find it bland and tasteless? This curious and rather sad story has a link with the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel.

“You are the salt of the earth.” That is part of the essence of Jesus’ message. Yet what a wealth of meaning and profundity is contained in this apparently simple phrase. Consider first what salt means in our lives. Anyone who has been put on a low-salt cardiac diet will understand precisely the implications of this question, because for all the inventive substitutes science has offered, like potassium salt, there is no substance to compare with sodium chloride, good old-fashioned table salt, for bringing life and taste to food. 

Food without salt is about the most boring and bland thing one can imagine! Salt, literally, brings flavour and thus variety to life.

Now consider what would happen if salt were suddenly to lose its flavour. What use would it be to us? Its one great purpose is in bringing out the flavour of food; if it could no longer do that, it would be less than useless to us, in the words of Jesus, “fit only to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.” In Jesus’ words, “You are the salt of the earth.” he says that the disciple has the same function in the world as salt has in food. Just as the task of salt is to bring out the fullness of flavour in food, so the role of the disciple of Jesus is to bring out the fullness of meaning in the world.

The world was created by God, and human beings can only really learn to understand, to love, to care for the world, if we become aware of the meaning and purpose with which God has invested it. When we grasp God’s plan for his creation, it ceases to be a bland or indifferent place, and comes alive with colour, meaning and excitement. In the words of Gerald Manley Hopkins, the English poet and Jesuit priest, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

This is at the heart of Jesus’ message “You are the salt of the earth.” It is God’s plan to reveal the purpose and destiny of his creation through the person of Jesus Christ. We are to be his presence in the world, through whom he reveals God’s presence to mankind. God wants us to be the means by which all men to see the glory, his glory, which shines out through creation, leading us beyond that which we see to the Creator himself.

Do you see yourself as one through whom the “grandeur of God” is revealed to the world? One has the uncomfortable feeling that we can be our own worst enemy in this task. Another British poet, Swinburne, wrote of Jesus: “Thou hast conquered, o Pale Galilean, and the world has grown grey with thy breath.” If this is the image the Church really projects, then we have much to answer for.

For we know of the great Creator of all, who saw that all he had made was good; we have been shown how any ugliness, any dullness in the world is not part of the nature of the creation itself, but the grey and dull ugliness of sin, which we have brought upon it. And we have been entrusted with the glorious news of its redemption through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ “for us men and for our salvation.” Finally, we know that God’s plan is for a renewal of creation, a restoration beyond even its initial beauty and goodness, to something unimaginably beautiful and holy.

If we are to be the “salt of the earth,” we must fulfill our God-given task of communicating the “grandeur of God” to those around us. May God bless each one of us, and may he make us, in word and deed, the “salt of the earth,” so that all men, in the words of the Psalmist, might “taste and see that the Lord is good.” Amen.

Fr Phillip

THE ORDINATION OF REV. STEPHEN ILECHUKWU

The Rev. Stephen Ilechukwu was ordained by Archbishop Nxumalo on Thursday 8th September at 12:00. He was presented by the Rev. Fr. Johnson, Provost-designate of the Bloemfontein Oratory-in-formation. Present was Fr. Henry Ezenwanne from the Port Elizabeth Oratory.

Music was provided by the Portuguese choir and Profs Viljoen from the University of the Free State, the organists of the Cathedral. 

The ordination was followed by a reception in the Donovan hall.   

24th SUNDAY OF THE YEAR — 2016

Paul’s letter to the Galatians gives us his great teaching on freedom. It is summed up in the words, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom”.

Some of us might remember the resonant Latin phrase: “Ubi Spiritus, ibi libertas.”

In Galatians, Paul makes an interesting contrast. He does not oppose freedom with slavery, or imprisonment, or oppression, or captivity; he contrasts it with self-indulgence. And by self-indulgence he does not mean what we usually mean; gluttony, lust or any of the other modern materialisms we hear about with such regularity. For Paul, self-indulgence means two things; lack of love for neighbour, and failure to be guided by the Spirit of God.

For Paul, we cannot love one another, nor can we live at peace with each other, without the freedom from self-centredness, from self-indulgence, which only God’s Spirit can bring about in us. He uses the most common example of this in our lives; our extreme willingness to find fault with others, to snap at people for the faults they have that annoy us. We recognise how intolerant we can be of others’ weaknesses, and especially of their criticisms. We are outraged that someone should dare to tell us we are wrong about something, especially when that person has faults of his own. And how often do we lash out in kind; we counter someone else’s criticisms by criticizing them, hoping to neutralise their words by revealing to them that, since they are no better than we are, they have no business criticising us. In this way, marriages, families, cities and countries are torn apart or reduced to tattered shreds.

This is what Paul refers to as self-indulgence. It is one of the worst characteristics of human beings. It is one about which we moralise, one which we try to rectify by human means, through endless counseling, group discussions and platitudes.

But there is no real human solution to it. We have no human ways to correct each others’ sins; in fact, we are not going to correct people’s sins at all. Each one of us can help only ourselves, in this regard, with the help of God. But, like God, and with his help, we can learn to live with the sins and weaknesses of others, and to find ways of building them up. We need not to indulge our resentfulness and anger towards others, but to be sources of healing to them. This we will only ever be if we are enfolded in the liberating power of God’s Spirit. Only when we are possessed of the freedom of God’s Spirit will we be truly free, free especially from the self-indulgence of a mean human spirit.

“Ubi Spiritus, ibi libertas.” It was in this Spirit that Jesus died for our sins with the words, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do” on his lips. Paul emphasises this by reminding us that “Christ Jesus died for us while we were still sinners,” in other words, before we had even shown sorrow for our sins. It is also true of the saints; they lived for God, not themselves, and in the same freedom of the Spirit. Through it, they were able to love their neighbour as themselves, no matter what their neighbour’s sins. May we, following the exhortation of Paul, find the source of our strength in God, that we too might enjoy that same freedom in his spirit, and love our neighbour as ourselves. Amen.

Fr Phillip

23rd SUNDAY OF THE YEAR — 2016

In this world there are two types of speaker. There are those who talk a lot, but seem to say very little for all their words. There are those, too, who say very little, but whose every word seems filled with meaning. Jesus was very much of the second type, and one has sometimes to listen very carefully to him to grasp the importance of what he is saying. The Gospel of the deaf man is very much about listening. And it requires concentrated listening for its message to be revealed. Let us listen carefully to just one sentence: “Jesus said to the man, ‘Effata!’ that is, ‘Be opened!’ and his ears were opened.”

Jesus acts here as a prophet, one who speaks the words of God to God’s people. And God is a God of the Word, which means that speech and hearing are the most important part of the way in which He reveals himself to us. “Hear the Word of the Lord!” is one of the most frequent sayings of the Old Testament prophets. The deaf man is more than just someone who cannot hear; he is, in Biblical terms, one who is cut off from hearing the Word of God. Jesus’ action is a sign for us. The word of the Lord is not just sound, but “something alive and active” It actually carries out what it says. The deaf man hears it while he is still deaf. Jesus’ words cut through his deafness, making him hear, and for the first time, the world around him becomes audible.

From the story there is also little doubt that the deaf man wanted to hear. Though he was deaf, how he must sometimes have struggled to hear what went on around him. It was because he listened in his deafness that he was able to hear the words of Jesus when they were addressed to him; “Be opened!” The deaf man in today’s Gospel is not simply a deaf man; he is every member of the human race. We are all deaf to the world without the Word of God. We cannot really know him, or his purpose for us and his creation, until we have heard him explaining it to us.

We all need to be hearers of the Word. And in order for us to hear the Word of the Lord, it is necessary for us to listen out for it. This means seeking the truth with all our hearts, and then accepting it and obeying it when we find it. For the voice of the opens our ears to the world, so that for the first time we are able to hear its sounds with meaning; the meaning he has given it. And that sound, heard through ears opened to it by God, is not a sound to put us at ease. Before the Lord opens our ears, the world has to reach out to us, to break into our self-centredness. Now, we have to reach out to the world and give of ourselves to it. No longer trapped in our own silence, we have to respond to the sounds to which God exposes us by healing our spiritual deafness. We must listen to and respond to the cries of the desperate around us. There is work for us in this world. We could say that, with our ears opened by the voice of the Lord, God is at last speaking to us through the cries of the world, for he has enabled us to hear them as he hears them.

Listen to the world; what you will hear is the cries of the spiritually deaf; those who cannot hear his Word. And they are crying out for love. The world today is more full of deaf people than it has ever been, people who have not heard the Word of God, and has become a world of people who take rather than give. But God, who opens our ears to the cries of his people, wants to change this. He wills us to go out, filled with his inexhaustible love, and to bring that love to others. And by that same love, he wants to use us to open the ears of others, that they too might hear his word, and his world, and be filled with his love, and in turn go out and fill others with his love.

You can be the bearer of that love; you can be the one through whom he says “Effata!” to others, as he has said it to us all. “Lord, open our ears, that our hearts may proclaim your love”. May it be so. Amen.

Fr Phillip