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Thought for the
Week 1 June 2008 – Second Sunday after Trinity
I
thought we would begin the homily this week in a ‘bus shelter’. It may seem a rather strange place to
start, but lots of things begin in ‘bus shelters’, and not all of them are
journeys. In the village where I grew
up, in the depths of rural At the
end of our Road in Merville, there is a ‘bus shelter’, and several ‘buses’
stop there each day. It is very
modern, stainless steel and glass, more weather proof than the creosoted wooden one in Norfolk, and
not as chic as the thatched ones they have in some parts of the tidier
English Shires, but it does its job.
Above it is written “Le Conseil Géneral vous abrit” – “The Regional
Council shelters you”. In The
grumpy classes might even add something about the ways in which public money
is used to prop up failing private enterprises. Unfortunately,
our beautiful modern stylish and functional ‘bus shelter’ leans a bit,
because it has been based on clay, and clay shrinks and moves according to
its moisture content. But
actually, that ‘bus shelter’ is a sign of the extent to which the Christian
faith has permeated society, yes, even secular In our
Gospel today, Jesus tells a simple, but hard-hitting story about two men
building houses, one on sand, and the other on rock. Now, according to your taste, you might be
tempted to think, “Oh, I have based my life on the rock of the Church, or of
the Gospel, or of the Bible, or of the Teaching of Jesus, so I am all right!” Unfortunately,
it’s not that simple. Parables, so the
scholars tell us, always have one point, and clearly, this one is very
closely linked to the “big choice” with which we were faced last week –
loving your friends is good, but can you love your enemies? That is not a one-off choice, but involves
living your life like that all the time, and so does basing your building on
rock, not sand. Saint
Paul helps us enter into this more deeply, when he describes us as “living
stones” continually being built together to be the house of God , which is
the Church, with Jesus Himself as the chief cornerstone. Civil
engineers tend to look down on their Mechanical brothers: “How long is that machine going to last
then?” “Well, with regular servicing
every thousand hours, it should last about 15 years.” “Fifteen years! I have just built a bridge that should last
for about two hundred years with no major works!” But
that isn’t the sort of building we are talking about here. Our building is not static, but dynamic –
not a dead thing, but a living, loving, praying organism. Martin
Luther was the father of the Reformation.
As an Augustinian monk, he studied the scriptures, and was greatly
struck by the passage that we heard read today from the letter to the
Romans. Luther realised that there was
a huge gap between what he found in the letter to the Romans, and the
practice of the Church at that time.
He based his whole life on the idea of “Justification by Faith”, and
actually described it as the rock on which the Christian faith rested. This was no small challenge to the
authority of a church which had long taught that you could buy your way to
heaven with indulgences. Luther taught
that good works spring from faith, and not the other way round. Today, almost all Christians accept that as
the basis of our faith, but at the time not only was it a radical idea, it
also cut across much of the fund-raising for the Church, and in particular,
the Pope’s (first, Julius the Second, and then, in Luther’s time, Leo the
Tenth) grandiose plans to rebuild Saint Peter’s. In
fact, the planned western façade of Saint Peter’s could not be built, because
the ground was not stable enough. Not
only was Saint Peter’s based on the sand of dubious theology, but also on the
shifting sands deposited by the river Yet
paradoxically, it is believed by many to be the resting place of Saint Peter,
of whom Jesus said “You are my rock, and on you will I build my church.” Perhaps you can see where Popes Julius II
and Leo X were coming from! One of
the things that Luther said was that the Bible is the sole foundation of the
Christian faith. While the Bible
certainly contains everything needed for salvation, and while it is the most
important book in creation for Christians, as we saw two weeks ago, there are
other things which also help to make up our Christian faith, such as the
doctrine of the Trinity. However
Luther himself did not take the whole Bible as his rock, but one teaching
from it; the doctrine of Justification by Faith. That was his rock. Famously, Diana Princess of As you
set off again from the ‘bus shelter’, what is the rock on which you base your
life? Are you going to care for the
poor and the helpless, like our ‘bus shelter’? Or are you going to rely on the slogans and
the shifting clay of this world? May God
Himself be the rock on which all our lives, and our loves, and our prayers
are based. Amen. Father To return to main Thought for the Week page, click X at top right to close this window. |