Sermons
October 30, 2016
I would like to concentrate today on the first reading from the book of Wisdom. It is the youngest book of the Old Testament, written in the first century before Christ. The Jewish people, the people of Israel was living in the whole known world, but they already suffered certain kinds of persecution in spite of the guarantees they had received from Rome. Rome was ruling over the world around the Mediterranean and guaranteed religious freedom, but there were always movements that objected to religious freedom and tried to make everybody believe the same things they believed. Those who believed or celebrated or lived differently were a nuisance and were not well looked upon. Often they were silenced. It is in this context that the author of our book writes down what he believes. He writes down how he sees the world with the eyes of his faith, how he sees the relation of God to his creation, how he sees and evaluates the world around him, and he writes down how he sees himself in this world. A very touching book – because everything the author writes down he brings before God.…To bring one’s life before God. I am not sure that our religions and denominations and faith communities see this as a priority in their service. Often it is the formal fulfillment of rules that is the priority. Let us look again at our text: For me, some of these lines are the most beautiful lines in the Bible: “You love all things that are and loathe nothing that you have made” or in a different translation: “You love everything that exists; you do not despise anything that you have made.” The author does not make a distinction between good people and bad people, between right and wrong. Everything in this world is loved by God, every human being, every animal, the whole of creation and what human beings make of their lives. Everything (and everybody)!… No, the author does not judge! He does not say “This is good” - “This is bad”, “This is sin” - “This is not sin”, “This one believes in the right way” - “This one believes in a wrong way”. The author of the book of Wisdom does not judge. How relevant this is for us today! Because we do judge, we do put people down, we do reduce people’s value by telling them that they are deficient and sinful and unworthy. I am sorry that religion often betrayed people by telling them that they were unworthy. Religion betrayed people by refusing them happiness and freedom and the possibility of living their lives in peace with God, in peace with others, in peace with themselves. And here our author says: “You love everything that exists; you do not despise anything that you have made.” And he continues: “You spare all things, because they are yours, O Lord and lover of souls, for your imperishable spirit is in all things!” or in a different translation: “You have allowed everything to exist, O Lord, because it is yours, and you love every living thing. Your immortal spirit is in every one of them.” God’s spirit is in everything that is – isn’t this enormous and terrific? God’s spirit is in you and in me, in people we like and in people we do not like, in people near to us and in people far away, in people we understand and in people we do not understand or we do not want to understand. In all of them is God’s spirit. God’s spirit is in the whole of creation. “Think big” is a motto that comes to my mind: the author “thinks big” of God just as God “thinks big” of us. God wants our happiness and does not want us to feel small and inferior and bad. God is the friend of life – and as a friend of life he wants us to live in happiness. So now the story in our gospel with Jesus and Zacchaeus (Luke 19,1-10) receives a new aspect in its meaning for us: Jesus sees Zacchaeus on his tree and Jesus offers a new beginning to the life of Zacchaeus. Jesus offers a new chance to Zacchaeus through his presence, through his respect and love. This is the way God deals with our mistakes or: – if you prefer the religious jargon – this is the way God deals with our sins. This is the God I would like to believe in, this is the God I would like to talk of and live with and celebrate.
Fr. Wolfgang Felber SJ
October 9, 2016
I would like to talk about the experience Jesus makes with the ten lepers (Luke 17,11-19). Usually the text is presented in a way that the one leper who comes back to Jesus understands Jesus, thanks Jesus, is the only one really healed. The other nine are unthankful and do not understand anything. I don’t like this way of presenting the story. Why? Because Jesus does not put people down. Jesus never puts people down. So I would like to point to a different topic: ten lepers come to Jesus, the ten are healed, but only one remains with Jesus. Nine to one – this relation is still valid – generously calculated. I speak of the part of the population still remaining with the traditional Church and its message. Only ten percent may share the religious nearness to Jesus by continuing to go to church. But all the lepers have been touched, have been healed by Jesus. So, the ten are not so different from each other. They all have been healed, but only one re-mains with Jesus. It is the difference in reaction to the healing that makes them different. So many studies show that religiosity does no longer have this close link to the church, to the community of believers. To be far from the Church does not mean to be far from religiosity. The ways to experience God’s nearness do not necessarily lead through the church doors. Those who come to church on Sunday, like you, they live a special form of religiosity, marked by the commun-ion of the Church, marked by the wish to experience God’s nearness in the space of a church build-ing, of a church community. But there are many other forms where people are experiencing the nearness of God. The Church is seen as just one of these places. What does this mean for the Church? One way of dealing with the phenomenon is to continue as usual. Tradition, dogmas, doc-trine, neither looking to the right nor to the left, not perceiving the world that surrounds the Church – continue as usual. Then the Church, then we as a community may become a ghetto, a ghetto in which people with the same ideas and ideals gather, a ghetto on the edge of society. To find ten percent of the population here in this realm seems already a lot. So, the first way is to continue as usual. The second way would be to be totally open to everything we see in the modern world, to limit ourselves to the realm of giving good advices of how to succeed in life and in its crises. But here the Christian message would lose its specificity. The Church would not be more than a giver of good advices like so many other gurus. Thus – on one hand you find church leaders worried about what Rome says, worried abut correct liturgies, worried about the quality and the catholicity of the men and women coming to church – I mean catholicity in the sense of being conform to catholic rules and orders and requests and demands. A church occupied with herself, forgetting what happens around her. On the other hand you would find committed Christians asking themselves: “How do we go down well, how can we be well received? How to have fuller churches and how to have attractive events? How to produce and trigger good articles about the church in the news?” This is a real dilemma – a dilemma that keeps the church alive. The tension is a fruitful tension if the two sides approach each other, if ideas and visions are shared. In this process, there is not one side in the possession of the full truth. Not one side has a monopoly for salvation. The ten lepers make it clear: The story is not about the one single follower of Jesus and the nine renegades. No. They have all been touched and healed. But each one of them has his or her own way of dealing with it. It was the task of Jesus to handle this, Jesus had to live with this. It is our task to-day to handle this same phenomenon – we who are following Jesus, we who are the descendants of the ten lepers
Fr. Wolfgang Felber SJ
October 2, 2016
“Servants don't deserve special thanks for doing what they are supposed to do. And that's how it should be with you. When you've done all you should, then say: “ Jesus says this to the apostles, to his closest friends (Luke 17,5-10). Does he want to tell them: “You are good for slavish services; you are supposed to sacrifice your-self?” Does Jesus want to say that there is a better afterlife for them if they have a good perfor-mance in this life? I know that time and again this text has been used, has been misused to keep people down in the Church, to claim self-sacrifice and slavish services with the promise of a better afterlife. This is not what Jesus wants to do. He talks to his friends, to the apostles: they have given up eve-rything – so are they entitled to claim anything from God? This is certainly what the then main-stream of the Jewish religion thought: “We make a deal with God, we perform well and God grants us a good life. I give something to God and God rewards me.” Faith becomes performance. And Jesus makes it clear: “No, you have no right on which you can insist when dealing with God. You have no claims when it comes to God’s gifts to you. Faith is not a performance for which you can claim anything from God.” Jesus brings a different image of God: the loving father, the good shepherd – a God of uncondi-tional love. God gives more abundantly than we can imagine – and he gives perhaps more abun-dantly to those who - in faith - “perform” less than we. This we sometimes do not understand; this is sometimes quite hard to accept for us. Jesus also shows us a danger in this master-slave-relation. If I perform better than someone else, then I may begin to feel superior to the other person, then I may begin to feel like a master over others. This contradicts the fundamental message of the Bible that all human beings are equal, have the same dignity, the same value as sons and daughters of God, as images of God. If we make ourselves or others slaves of this performance thinking, then we take away the dignity of others, then we try to squeeze God’s infinite and unconditional love into human norms and rules. God does not want spiritual athleticism – God invites us to collaborate in his creation, invites us to take responsibility, to hand over to others what we received from God. All this, knowing that for our life we depend upon God and his love. This reminds me of a sentence by Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. The content is: “Put all your trust in God without ever forgetting co-operation in his creation. This co-operation is precisely what your trust in God requires. But in your activity be profoundly aware that only God is powerful.” Or: “When in action, never rely on your own contribution; when trusting, always realize that you are a collaborator co-operating with God." Or in the original words of Ignatius: “Trust in God, as if the whole course of events depends on you and not on God, but fully implement your plans as if nothing needs to be done by you, but only by God.” Difficult to understand? Try to meditate this sentence a bit – “chew it”, I am sure you can get some profit out of it.
Fr. Wolfgang Felber SJ