One of the things that I’m sometimes very surprised at are the things that people, committed Christians, say about their faith which betrays either a lack of understanding of the Christian faith, or at least a very strange understanding of the faith. As a priest, I’d like to say that these comments come from the laity, but I must admit that over the years I’ve heard some rather curious things being said by the clergy too.

For example, in one diocese in which I served, a Lenten leaflet was produced, by the diocese, for distribution to the parish congregations during Lent. The subject of the leaflet was the difficulty of finding God in a graceless world. When I read that, straight away, my hackles were raised. We may say that God’s grace often goes unseen and unrecognised in the world, but we simply can’t say that the world is graceless because to say that is to imply that God is not present and active in the world and that the Holy Spirit is not present and active in the world. To be blunt, to say that the world is graceless is heresy. But what made that statement even worse was that it was endorsed by a bishop.

On another occasion, I heard a priest, in his Midnight Mass sermon, say that God sent his Son into the world so that we could love him, love God that is, because God needs our love. There’s nothing wrong with the first part of that statement but to say that God needs our love, or anything else for that matter, is to imply that there is a deficiency in God. It’s to imply that God is not whole or complete in himself but needs something from outside himself to be whole and complete. We may say that God wants our love because he wants us to be saved, that’s why he sent his Son into the world. But to say that God needs our love is to imply that God is in some way diminished if we don’t love him. Again, this is heresy and heresy made all the worse because it was preached by a priest of the Church.

So it’s not only lay people who say strange things about their faith but, as you might expect, I have heard some pretty strange things from lay people too. Such as the person in one parish in which I served who told me they wanted to ‘Come back as a horse.’ This person had been going to Church all their life, but it seems they thought Christians believe in reincarnation. I pointed out that we don’t, to which they responded, ‘Oh. What do we believe in then?’ ‘Resurrection’, I said. To which they replied, with a very puzzled look on their face, ‘Isn’t that the same thing?’

But when it comes to misunderstanding the Christian faith, perhaps one of the most revealing things I’ve ever heard anyone in the Church say was about the person whose life and example we remember today, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and her son, our Lord Jesus Christ. What this person, again someone who’d gone to Church all their life, said is that the reason Jesus was so much better than us is because Mary was so different to us. And what that statement reveals is a complete lack of understanding, or complete misunderstanding, about the essentials of our faith, including the two great pillars of our faith; the Incarnation, the birth of God’s Son as a human being, and the foundational event of our faith, Jesus’ Resurrection.

To be fair to the person who said these things, they did go to a very high, extremely Anglo-Catholic church. If I were to tell you that, as you walked through the front door of that Anglican parish church, on the wall in front of you was a very big portrait photograph of the then Pope, John Paul II, I’m sure you’ll get the idea. And given what the Roman Catholic Church teaches about Mary, and especially what some elements within that Church would like the Church to teach about Mary, a misunderstanding like the one this person had is perhaps not so surprising.

As I’m sure you all know, the Roman Catholic Church teaches as dogma, that is, as irrefutably true and something that we must believe in order to be saved, the Immaculate Conception of Mary; that Mary, unlike the rest of the human race was born without original sin. The Roman Catholic Church teaches as dogma, the Assumption of Mary, that at the end of her life, Mary was taken, body and soul, directly to heaven and entered into glory. And there are those who would like the Church to teach other things about Mary as dogma too. Mary as Mediatrix, the mediator of all divine graces. Mary as Co-Redemptrix, which refers to Mary’s essential role in the salvation of all people through her acceptance of God’s call to be the mother of his Son. And Mary as Advocate, the one who pleads our cause to Jesus, her son, who then mediates between God and humanity.

As most, if not all of you will know, I’m a regular pilgrim to Mary’s shrine in Walsingham. That’s something I’ve been for the best part of 30 years now, and it’s something I’m keen to encourage others to do too. So I have a great personal devotion to Mary. But if we’re not careful, we can, I think, go a little overboard in what we say about Mary. Whilst the Church does teach Mary’s importance in the story of our salvation, the Church is also very keen to emphasise that she is subordinate to Jesus, her son. But popular piety, what people think and believe, doesn’t always follow what the Church actually teaches. A very good example of that is the number of people who think and believe that the Church of England is a Protestant Church when, in fact, the Church of England does not and never has claimed to be a Protestant Church. The Church of England claims to be, and has only ever claimed to be, a reformed Catholic Church. And if we take what the Church teaches about Mary simply at face value, don’t some of these teachings suggest that Mary has roles that are the same as those of Jesus? Mediator of divine grace, Redeemer, heavenly Advocate? So is it any wonder that people can start to think that Mary is very different to the rest of us?

But whatever we say about Mary, one thing we must always remember is that Mary was not different to us, except perhaps in her devotion to God. Mary was just as human as you, or I, or anyone else. She had to be because Jesus‘ humanity came from Mary and if her humanity was not the same as ours then neither was his.

In the Letter to the Hebrews we read that Jesus,

‘… had to be made like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.’

So if Jesus’ humanity was not the same as ours then our faith comes tumbling down in ruins. If Jesus’ humanity was not like ours, the Incarnation is meaningless to us because God’s Son was not made man. If Jesus’ humanity was not like ours his sacrifice on the Cross is meaningless to us because he didn’t die as one of us. If Jesus humanity was not like ours his Resurrection becomes meaningless to us because he wasn’t raised as one of us. If Jesus’ humanity was not like ours his Ascension is meaningless to us because he wasn’t raised to heaven as one of us. And if Jesus’ humanity was not like ours his role as our heavenly Advocate is at least severely limited because how can one who doesn’t know what it is to be human in the same way that we’re human possibly be a ‘merciful and faithful high priest’ for us, one who is able plead our cause to God the Father?

So Jesus’ humanity had to be like ours, and for his humanity to be like ours, Mary’s humanity had to be like ours too. That doesn’t mean we can’t venerate Mary for her very great role in the story of our salvation. It doesn’t mean we can’t venerate Mary as the mother of our Lord Jesus Christ and, by extension, the Mother of God. It doesn’t mean we can’t ask Mary’s prayers to aid and assist us in our prayers. It doesn’t mean that we can’t honour Mary in the way the Church has done throughout its history. But it does mean that we can’t say that Mary was any different to us as a human being.

Whatever titles we want to give Mary and whatever roles, attributes or greatness we want to ascribe to Mary, we always have to remember that she was every bit as human as the rest of us. But that doesn’t diminish Mary in any way. We know how hard it can be to be a Christian and to follow God’s will. But if Mary, who was just like us, could do that in such a great and exemplary way, so can we. Mary’s example to us then becomes all the more shining and relevant in and to our lives. And in that sense, remembering Mary’s humanity can actually her give even more honour.

Amen.

---

The Propers for The Blessed Virgin Mary (The Assumption) can be viewed here.

Anyone who takes their faith seriously will know that to be a Christian, and especially to grow in faith and to be more Christ like, involves quite a lot of practice and self-reflection. I think that’s simply a matter of common sense. If we want to improve and be better at anything we do, the first thing we have to do is to do that thing regularly, in other words, we have to practice. And another essential part of improving at anything is to compare ourselves to those who are better than we are at what we’re doing. We do that both so that we can see how good we actually are at what we’re trying to do and so that we can learn from those who are better than we are at what we’re doing, how to be better at it.

So to be a Christian, the first thing we have to do is to try to be a Christian, in other words, we have to try our best to practice what we preach. But even when we do that, we also have to engage in some self-reflection from time to time. We have to take an honest look at how good we are at being a Christian and compare ourselves to those who are better at it than we are so that we know where we need to improve and how to improve. I’m sure we all know this because, as I’ve said, I think it’s simply a matter of common sense. The problem we can have though, is in putting these things into practice.

One difficulty we can have is in over emphasising our faults and failings, and under estimating, or even ignoring the good things we do and the things we do well. For example, an examination of conscience is a very useful tool that we can use as an aid to self-reflection. For those who haven’t used one, an examination of conscience is a step-by-step way of helping us to call to mind the wrong we’ve done and the good we haven’t done. But, if you think about it, if the examination helps us to do those things, it also helps us to do the opposite and recall the good we’ve done and the wrong we haven’t done.

Unfortunately, most people seem to use the examination in a negative way and see it as simply a means of identifying how bad they are at practicing their faith. I know that because it’s exactly what I did the first time I used an examination of conscience. I was given an examination of conscience by a priest who asked me to use it and then meet with him again to go through it with him. This morning, we read about Elijah asking the Lord to take his life because he was no better than his ancestors. And I can identify with that because, after I’d used an examination of conscience for the first time, I thought I must be the worst person, and the biggest sinner in the world. Later though, when I went to see the priest and discuss it, he said that whilst what I’d done with the examination was good in that I’d used it to pick my faults and failings, I’d completely ignored the positive side of the examination because I hadn’t used it to identify the good things I was doing and the things I was doing well. And I know other people do the same thing because, now that I’m a priest myself, I’ve had the same conversation with those who’ve come to me after they’ve used an examination of conscience.

So an examination of conscience is a good aid to self-reflection. It can help us to grow in faith and be better Christians and for that reason it’s something I do recommend that all Christians use from time to time. But it has to be used in the right way. It has to be used to pick up our good points as well as our bad because if it’s not used in that way, it can lead people to think that they’re worse than they really are. So terrible and sinful perhaps that they’re tempted, as Elijah was, to simply give up.

Another problem we can have, and one that’s far more common, and far more dangerous in terms of hindering our ability to grow in faith is in emphasising the good we do and under estimating or ignoring our faults and failings. In fact, people who do this can often give the impression at least that they think they don’t have any faults and failings!

As we know, we do find people in the Church who think, and say, that no one does as much for the church as they do. But don’t we also find that these are the people who are the most likely to be involved in arguments in the Church? The people who are most likely to fall out with and call and criticise other members of the Church? And this usually stems from a belief by the people who say they do so much for the Church that what they do is more important than what anyone else does. And by implication, doesn’t this mean that they think they are more important to the Church and in the Church than others?

And yet in the Beatitudes, the very first thing Jesus tells us is that the kingdom of heaven belongs to the humble, the poor in spirit. So pride, and especially spiritual pride, is one of the worst sins of all. And in this morning’s reading from his Letter to the Ephesians, St Paul says that we should

‘Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.’ 

Or, depending on which translation we’re reading, that we should

‘Never have grudges against others, or lose your temper, or raise your voice to anybody, or call each other names, or allow any sort of spitefulness.’

And in his preface to these statements, St Paul identifies them as things which

‘… grieve the Holy Spirit of God.’

In other words, all these are things that are incompatible with the Christian faith. They shouldn’t be found in the lives of Christians and must be ‘put away,’ they must be renounced and discarded from our lives.

I think what really lies at the root of this problem though, is a lack of honest self-reflection. If we’re unwilling to do something like an examination of conscience, we don’t pick up on our faults and failings, our sins, and so we don’t see ourselves as we really are. As we really are as measured by the standard of Christ’s example, that is. If we can’t do that, we can lose sight of what being a Christian is all about. We can become so wrapped up in what we do, especially if we do it well, that what we do becomes the be all and end all of what Christianity and the Church is all about. What it’s all about to us, and also what we think it should be all about to everyone else too.

I well remember one occasion, for example, when the enrolling member of the Mother’s Union in one parish in which I served, quite literally, ranted and raved at me in church one morning, in the presence of a number of other people, when I turned up in church to take a funeral. The cause of her anger, was that I had arranged a funeral in church that morning and she wanted to set out some tables for an afternoon tea party the Mother’s Union were having at 4pm that afternoon. In her eyes, I had been totally inconsiderate in arranging the funeral that day and she told me, in no uncertain terms, that I should have consulted with her before I arranged anything in church that day. She would have told me that we couldn’t have a funeral in church that day and I could then have told the funeral director and the bereaved family that they would have to have the funeral on another day. But, she said, as I had arranged the funeral, I needed to get a move on with it and clear everybody out of the church as soon as possible so that she could get on with setting up for the tea party.

There’s nothing wrong with the Mother’s Union having an afternoon tea party, and that lady did a very good job as the enrolling member of the Mother’s Union in that parish, but I ask you, as Christians, which was more important, conducting a funeral, commending a departed soul into God’s keeping and bringing some comfort and reassurance to a bereaved family, or the Mother’s Union having the sole use of the church for a whole day to set up a tea party? Which do you think was the right thing to do, in the Lord’s eyes, conducting a funeral in a dignified and respectful manner and leaving the Mother’s Union a few minutes less than the 5 hours or so that they were going to have to set up for their tea party, or rushing through the funeral and rushing the bereaved family out of church so that the Mother’s Union could have a few minutes more than the 5 hours or so they were going to have to set up their tea party?  

People can become so wrapped up in what they’re doing that what they’re doing becomes more important than anything else, and it can lead them to think that what they’re doing should be more important than anything else to everyone else too. But isn’t this a problem Jesus himself encountered? Didn’t he ask people to follow him but found that they were too concerned with other things to follow? And didn’t he tell the scribes and Pharisees that they were so concerned with the minutiae of the law, that they were neglecting it’s weightier matters? And isn’t that tantamount to saying that they were so wrapped up in their own particular concerns that they’d lost sight of what the law was really all about, and of what was really important about their faith?

In our Gospel this morning, Jesus tells the Jews, which in John’s Gospel means the religious authorities, to stop complaining to each other and to come to him to learn the teaching of God the Father. And that is what we are called to do too. The most important thing for us to do as Christians is to learn from Christ, from his teaching and example, and then to reflect on our own lives to see how well we measure up to his teaching and example. If we don’t measure up very well, we’re called to make our best effort to be and do better. Where we do measure up well, we can carry on with those things. But we can’t allow those things we do well to go to our heads and allow us to think that we’ve no faults and failings to address because we do, we all have. So we have to carry on doing what we do well without neglecting to do our best improve where we need to. And we have to remember too that the business of running the Church and all the peripheral activity that goes on around the Church in connection with that business, is not what being a Christian is all about, nor is it what the Church is all about. So no matter how much we do in that respect, we can’t allow ourselves to think doing a lot of that business absolves us from the need for that self-reflection that brings us closer to the teaching and example of Christ and to fulfilling what Jesus called the weightier matters, justice, mercy and faith, and above all, love of God and of our neighbour.

Amen.

---

The Propers for the 19th Sunday of Ordinary Time can be viewed here.

One of the hardest things about the undoubtedly hard business of being a Christian, is that it’s a very counter intuitive thing to do and to be. If we think about the way human society usually works, we find that it operates on the basis of working for rewards. And from a very early age, we’re taught to think the world works like that. We’re conditioned by everyone around us to believe that the world works like that. How many of us, when we were children, were told, for example, that we had to eat our dinner if we wanted a pudding? How many of us were told that, if we weren’t good, Father Christmas wouldn’t come? And as we get older, so it goes on. At school and college we’re told to work hard to get good grades so that we can get into university or get a good job. And at work we’re told to work hard so that we can get a pay rise, or a promotion, or a better job. At the moment, in the Olympic Games, we’re seeing athletes from all over the world who’ve worked hard for many years in the hope of competing in the games and, hopefully, winning a medal in the games. In fact, in any area of life we can probably think of, we’re taught to believe that hard work brings rewards. And the rewards that hard work brings are measured in very tangible terms, whether they’re in material things that we can actually hold in our hands, or in the nice, comfortable standard of living that our hard work allows us to enjoy.

But being a Christian isn’t like that. Being a Christian involves a lot of hard work, a lifetime of hard work but, unless we abuse our position in the Church, for example, and in some way use our faith for selfish purposes, that hard work doesn’t come with the promise of any tangible reward, at least in the way rewards are usually measured. No matter how hard we work at being a Christian, it probably won’t get us any more money. It probably won’t get us a better job. We’re highly unlikely to win any medals for being a good, hard-working Christian. And it’s unlikely that working hard at being a Christian will get us a better standard of living as that’s usually measured, because to be a Christian we’re called to deny ourselves some of the pleasures of earthly life, and to share the earthly riches we do have with those who have less, rather than keeping and enjoying them simply for ourselves. Of course there is a reward on offer for working hard at being a Christian, a very great reward, the greatest of all rewards in fact, the promise of eternal life.

But that’s obviously not a reward we can have and enjoy in this life. And, as human beings, we’re taught to work for rewards we can enjoy in this life, and we’re conditioned by the world to expect tangible, earthly rewards for our hard work. So being a Christian and working hard to be a better Christian, is a very counter intuitive thing to do because it doesn’t fit in with the ‘work for reward’ way we expect things to work.

This isn’t a new problem for disciples of Christ though because it’s surely what we’re seeing in this morning’s Gospel. Our Gospel reading this morning follows on directly from the story of Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000 which we read last Sunday. We read then that a large crowd was following Jesus because they’d seen the ‘signs’ that he was giving by curing the sick. We know that Jesus often asked people to follow him, and these crowds certainly were doing that. But this morning’s Gospel tells us that cut no ice with Jesus. The crowds had gone looking for Jesus and had eventually taken to their boats and put out to sea to find him. So they’d gone to quite some trouble and hard work to follow Jesus. But, when they found him, Jesus’ response was to tell them, to all intents and purposes, that all that effort was for nothing, because they were following him for the wrong reasons. They weren’t following Jesus because what they’d seen had brought them to faith. They weren’t following Jesus because they wanted to learn anything from him. They weren’t following Jesus because they were looking for any kind of lasting, spiritual nourishment. No, they were following Jesus because they were looking for another free nosh-up. In other words, they were prepared to go to some trouble to follow Jesus, but they wanted something immediate, physical and tangible in return for their hard work.

Jesus makes it quite clear, that those who really want to follow him, need to follow him for a different reason. They need to work for an eternal reward, not a perishable, earthly reward. And they need to follow him so that he can give them that eternal reward, the bread that God has sent from heaven to give life to the world. And that bread of life is Jesus himself.

In many ways, this Gospel story is very similar to the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well, which we also read in St John’s Gospel. There Jesus speaks of himself as ‘living water’ and says,

“… those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” 

In this morning’s Gospel when Jesus speaks about himself as the ‘bread of life’, he says,

“Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” 

These statements obviously can’t be taken as referring to physical hunger and thirst. No matter how closely we follow Jesus, no matter how hard we work at being a Christian, we still need to eat and drink because we still get hungry and thirsty in a physical sense. And they can’t be taken as referring to another type of hunger and thirst either, the hunger and thirst for an end to the world’s problems. The hunger and thirst that following Jesus satisfies is a deep, spiritual hunger and thirst. Following Jesus satisfies our spiritual hunger and thirst to know God. It satisfies our hunger and thirst to know that there is a purpose in life and to life. Following Jesus satisfies our hunger and thirst to know that this life is not all there is to life because it satisfies our hunger and thirst to know what happens to us, when this life ends.

Once we have faith in Jesus, there’s no need for us to hunger and thirst for the answers to these eternal, and spiritual things because we have the answers. What we need to do then, is to work for the promised reward, which as Jesus tells us, as he told the Samaritan woman at the well, and the crowds who followed him after they’d been fed with bread and fish on the mountain, is to be raised to eternal life. And if we have faith in Jesus, knowing what the promised reward is, then no matter how counter intuitive the hard work we have to do to achieve a reward we can’t see and touch might be, we ought to be prepared to put that hard work in, surely? Because there can be no greater reward.

If we’re not prepared to do that, if we prefer to put our efforts into achieving earthly rewards, then we’re simply going to be like the rich fool in the parable in St Luke’s Gospel. I’m sure we all know what happened to him. He worked hard to make and store up earthly riches for himself and then, at the very moment he felt satisfied, he finds out his life is going to end and so, in the end, all his hard work has been for nothing. When he died, his reward died with him because he hadn’t worked for anything of eternal value.

I’m sure none of us want to be rich fools. So let’s not simply look to short term rewards for our work by putting all our efforts into seeking earthly rewards. Let’s not simply work for the kind of food that perishes but, as Jesus urges us, let’s work for the food that lasts to eternal life by putting our best efforts into following him.

Amen.

---

The Propers for the 18th Sunday of Ordinary Time (Trinity 9) can be viewed here.