With God-talk we need less to know what
we’re talking about than to know who it
is we’re talking about!
I pray that in what I share I can be a window into the God I love and
serve and into his words just read to us at this eucharist.
The words were about holiness and love for Isaiah said one seraph called to
another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.” and John said God
so loved the world that he gave his only Son.
If we believers
are to be windows to God it’s through holiness and love that show we
don’t just know what we’re talking
about we know who we’re talking about,
for when we know God personally he shows through.
One of my
heroes is South American, not Guyanese though but Brazilian. He’s an icon of
holiness and love called Helder Camera whose cause for canonization as a Saint
has been opened this month by Pope Francis. As a bishop he spent his life in
the service of the poor, abandoning his palace and giving away Church property
to provide land for the homeless. When I
give food to the poor, they call me a saint, he used to say. When I ask why the poor have no food they
call me a communist.
He was, as
you can tell from that comment, a controversial Churchman, a pioneer of the
social gospel in our day, taking the church out of its buildings and sacristies
to be alongside hurt and need in the community.
Yet when Helder Camera tells the tale of his
life it’s the mystical rather than the practical which takes precedence. He
writes of how encounters with the Holy Spirit kept changing him and how a very
big change occurred near the start of his ministry through the visit of a
French friend. The two toured Rio’s shanty towns and Gerlier his friend suggested
Helder’s talents would be far more use in the service of the poor than anything
else. Camera writes of that
transformative conversation: And so the grace of the Lord came to me
through Gerlier’s presence. Not just
through the words he spoke: behind his words was the presence of a whole life,
a whole conviction. I was moved by the
grace of the Lord… thrown to the ground like Saul on the road to Damascus.
I thought of
this graphic description when I followed our first reading on how Isaiah’s
encounter with holiness had practical effect. The seraph [who had cried of God’s
holiness] touched my mouth with [a live coal] and said: “Now that this has
touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted
out.” Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and
who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!”
I wonder if today you recall the impact of
God’s holiness upon you in your recent life experience? Whether the Lord is
inviting from you that sort of painful cleansing as his springboard into a new
realm of service?
I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will
go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!”
Once or twice in my life that’s happened to me. It happened when I was
an undergraduate at Oxford studying Chemistry and stumbled across a Church with
holy worship and a holy priest which so impacted my life that I accepted a call
to priesthood. Or again when a letter from a priest called John Dorman came
rather as a surprise of the Spirit inviting me to consider training Amerindian
priests in the interior of Guyana. Or again when I encountered the spiritual
force of the lady who in the end became my wife through whom once again my life
moved forward in a new and more fruitful direction.
God is holy and loving. He is different to us and yet he is the same. It
is his sameness we encounter in
the love spoken of by St John. God so
loved the world that he gave his only Son. Whilst his holy difference from us
wakes us up and shakes us out of complacency his love is unconditional
and affirmative.
To use a bathing
analogy, one quality, his love, is like a hot bath. The other, his
holiness is like a cold shower bracing us for fresh action.
On this feast of the Holy Trinity we celebrate both qualities of God, holiness and love, difference and sameness,
and for ourselves the call to confidence in him and humility before him.
Confidence in God, knowing God’s love, is the basic treasure, which
undergirds all we are as godly folk. It’s among the most urgent needs of Church
members today. Those drawn into his service are moved to do so by finding such confidence, the confidence that the following
of God’s call will bring about God’s provision so you have to follow it, at
whatever cost.
I wonder
if you’re sensing such a call, such an invitation at this time from the Holy
Spirit? Don’t neglect it! Follow it!
If confidence in God is the one pole of godliness humility before God and people is the other pole, as 2 Corinthians makes plain
when it talks of believers having ‘treasure in earthen vessels’.
How can we be effective instruments of a holy God without humility,
readiness to attend to God in unfashionable lower places, witnesses to the humility of Christ present hidden away especially
in the hurting and needful? This is the
underpinning of all Christians are about as the servant hearted folk we are,
gifted with healing ministry from the Lord earthed in that under rated most
humble ministry of listening. The
holy, loving triune God wants to work in us and through us. We need both humility and confidence in him to be such instruments. As Christians hoping
to witness and point to a God who answers prayer we need to know what we are
talking about - we need to know who
we’re talking about and pointing others to. I believe it’s as we listen to God
faithfully in prayer that we’re best skilled up to listen to him speaking in
our needy sister or brother.
We can only point authentically to him if we ourselves are being
transformed into his likeness with
ever-increasing glory… coming from the Lord, who is the Spirit to come back
to 2 Corinthians (3:18). Such transformation comes from contemplation of
God as the holy friend he is and there’s no ‘quick fix’ about it.
Getting more of God in our life requires
dedication and determination, even if it will end up being a grace given from
above. But this much is clear, our apostolate, our sense of being ‘sent’ as
Christians, will be utterly ineffective unless it comes as an overflow from
what is growing within us.
What are we doing, then, I ask
you, to cultivate the interior life? We welcome God Sunday by Sunday in word and
sacrament. How are we savouring that gift in prayer day by day? In our discipline of bible reading, study,
self examination and service to those in need?
Where people
are meeting deep down with God in Jesus Christ and he is taking hold of them,
all that they say and do will be permeated with him. Think back on people whose
lives have touched your life and shaken you out of complacency and apathy, the
holy people who’ve influenced you for good and for God.
Is there a greater force or influence than
that of holiness?
The devil is
very keen to distract those of us who work hard for God from the prior work of
spiritual renewal. There is so much to
do – so much human need out there - that we want to sail out there and serve it
without giving the attention we need to give to the interior life.
Let Mother
Teresa have the last say. It’s not how
much we do that matters but how much love we put into what we do.
Come, Holy
Spirit, through this eucharist and show
us our need of the love and holiness which is yours alone so that together we
transmit it to others.
