Fr. Alan's homily for Sunday September 17th 2006
Our Bishops have designated this day as "Home Mission Sunday." Intriguingly they subtitle it "Dying to live." The scriptures spoken today recall to memory the suffering of the righteous and their faith in final vindication by God. What is the Church's mission?
This week the Muslim world is roused by a remark of Pope Benedict. The question that fuelled Europe's nightmares of for 1000 years is back: how the Church and Islam will be towards one another.
It is uncomfortable. In 600 AD the Middle East and Asia east from Byzantium along the Silk Road almost to China, was Christian. There were Bishops and monks in Samarkand and Afghanistan. In North Africa and Egypt, giants like Augustine and Athanasius had ruled the Church. Today that whole swathe from the Pillars of Hercules to Kashmir is Moslem, Christians a minority under pressure.
With a growing Islamic community in Britain, and a general indifference to Christian faith, we should think carefully about our mission. The old Catholic culture is no use for the things that are confronting us now. "Keep your head down" might have been good sense in the days of Guy Fawkes, but not when we may be obliged to show ourselves as Catholic Christians. "Dying to live." The truth about mission is this: The seed of Christians is known to be the blood of their martyrs, true martyrs as opposed to those who kill both themselves and others. The Church has trained her martyrs to suffer with Christ. Dying to live is what lies at the heart of mission.
The sufferings of the righteous and their faith in their final vindication by God forms the stuff of much of Isaiah and Jeremiah's prophetical legacy. We use their speech and their imagination to tell the story of Christ, the suffering servant. Christ is obedient unto death because the Father also is obedient unto death, answering the martyrdom of his Christ with the power of the Spirit to raise and glorify his servant.
At the heart of Christian mission, at the heart of whatever God is calling his Church to do or to suffer in these days is that mutual obedience of the Father to the Son, in the Holy Spirit. Anyone who wants to save their life will lose it, but anyone who loses their life for my sake and for the gospel, will save it. And I shall walk in the presence of the Lord. Whether in life or death, whatever we suffer in the course of our mission, it is always here that we walk: in the presence of the Lord, in the land of the living.
Close