Epiphany

My sermon for last Sunday, the feast of the Epiphany:

There are passages of the Old Testament which look forward to a time when God's gift of salvation will be offered not just to the Chosen People but to the whole of humanity. The great theme of today's feast, the Epiphany of the Lord, is that with the birth of Jesus that time has arrived.

The three wise men are symbols of all the men and women who come to Christ from outside of the Jewish faith, who recognise Jesus as the manifestation of God in history and who gladly embrace the salvation he brings.

The truth is, though, that while God wants to reach out to the whole human race, not every member of the human race wants to reach out to God, and that's been true from the beginnings of the Christian mission.

Individuals like St Paul and St Peter went off on their missionary expeditions full of zeal and enthusiasm, proclaiming the good news that salvation was open to everyone now. But in many places, as we know, their preaching met with rejection, not glad acceptance, and this rejection was one of the bitter facts of life that the first generation of Christians had to come to terms with.

It's a fact of life that we have to come to terms with too, in our time. Often it seems that, while people are ready to welcome the participation of church members in the innumerable good causes that exist in our society - even eagerly soliciting the churches' involvement in anti-bullying campaigns in schools, efforts to counteract global warming and so on - they remain sceptical and resistant to many of the basic aspects of the Christian faith. We make very little headway then in our task of evangelisation.

It seems there are times when public debate and discussion and the putting forward of arguments in favour of religion are effective, and there are times when these activities are completely ineffective.

It's a bit like the situation that parents often find themselves in with their adolescent children. There might be lots of things that parents want to teach or discuss seriously with their children, but sometimes the children are just not amenable to reason. They're preoccupied with other things, they get stroppy about "being told what to do", or they retreat into frivolity, refusing to take anything seriously. Perhaps they best thing parents can do, then, is withdraw for a while and wait for a more opportune moment.

There's something of that relationship between the church and modern culture. We might be convinced that the basic goal of every person's life is to discover God and to live the way of the Gospel, but many people are simply not open to a serious discussion about all that - and so it's a waste of time even trying to have a discussion, because they just get irritated and even more resistant. Again, the best thing for us to do is to withdraw and wait for a more opportune moment.

The model I'm thinking of is the model of the desert fathers during the early centuries of the Church's existence. These were the individuals who left the noise and bustle of the great centres of population behind, to go into the quiet and solitude of the desert, to concentrate exclusively on God, in prayer and contemplation.

This wasn't a case of abandoning the Christian mission, it was just a different way of going about it, and in the long term it was a very successful way. Because the retreat into the desert was the beginning of Christian monasticism.

These hermits, and the communities that they started, built up a body of spiritual wisdom and knowledge, which they got from their own experience of prayer and reflection, and in the long run that strengthened the faith of the whole Church community. From the desert, eventually, the monasteries became ther spearhead of a new Christian mission, which spread all over Europe and beyond.

I happen to think that today, if we're serious about reading the signs of the times and trying to discern what God is calling the Church to do today, we'll recognise the value of doing what the desert fathers did: withdrawing for a while, concentrating on prayer and silent reflection, and building up our commitment to the essentials of the faith. Then, either when the Church itself is spiritually stronger, or perhaps when the mood of society changes, we might find that we'll have a better opening for the Christian message.

And we can afford to wait, because the success or failure of evangelisation is in God's hands, ultimately, not ours. That's one of the first lessons we learn when we leave our urgent activism behind and concentrate on offering our own lives wholeheartedly to God, and not worrying about what anyone else is doing.

Those are some of the reflections that occurred to me, thinking about the theme of today's feast. Yes, God wills for everyone to enter into friendship with him and to embrace the salvation which his Son came to offer us. But on our part we always have to read the signs of the times carefully to see how we're meant to cooperate with God's will and proclaim his salvation.