Sermons
December 10, 2017
Every year tens of thousands of people from Sub-Saharan Africa cross the desert on their way to Europe. Some drown in the Mediterranean, some die on the way through the desert because there are hardly any roads. You need a local guide to direct you or you risk getting lost. Knowing this helps us to appreciate today’s invitation of Isaiah and of John the Baptist to build, not just a road, but a highway in the desert. It is built for fast travelling. No valley, no hills, like the just opened rail line to Munich for trains travelling at 300 km/h. Today we don’t fill valleys or level mountains, we build bridges and tunnels. But the idea is the same: that people and goods reach other places as fast as possible. But the highway through the desert is not for trains or cars, it is FOR THE LORD, FOR GOD. We are very good at creating communication systems to connect people and towns and continents. We are less good at creating channels of communication each other or with God. In fact, our lines of spiritual communication lines are poor. Advent invites us to reflect on how we can improve them so that we can reach God and God can reach us. There are many ways of communicating between God and us. Let us look at two of them. When we want to tell someone far away something important or very personal we tend to write a letter. Well, God has written us many letters, mostly love letters. There is a whole collection of God’s love letters to different people over thousands of years put together in a book called the Bible. We do not read love letters only once. We go back to them many times to taste the joy of someone telling us over and over again: I love you, you are so precious to me. One way of rebuilding our communication highway with God would be to read some of His letters as if they were written to me personally today. There is another way to communicate we use very often these days. We use Twitter, send an SMS or a WhatsApp message when we have something urgent and brief to communicate like: My train is late. Let’s meet tonight. The film was wonderful. God also uses a kind of messenger service, short quick messages that flash through the brain for a moment. I walk along a busy street and something in me says: Look at that poor woman over there. Give her a smile and a coin. I had a quarrel with someone and I hurt the person. Later I get a strong inner urge saying: Why not go and say sorry. Those messages of God come and go in a flash. Growing spiritually means learning to pick them up and react immediately. Why do we have such a hard time reading God’s love letters or responding to God’s quick messages? Because there are traffic jams on our mental highway most of the time. Our communication lines are overloaded with an unless flow of useless information. God always gets the feedback: line is occupied. What do you do when you receive hundreds of emails daily? You switch on a spam filter which deletes the useless and keeps only important mails. Advent would be a great time to clear up our mental mess and give God a chance to get through to us.
Fr Wolfgang Schonecke
November 26, 2017
Last Sunday was not only the feast of Christ the King, it was also the last Sunday of the Church year! Advent begins, Sunday Dec 3rd! Some of us have been getting nervous about Christmas presents. About our Christmas family dinner. Or with whom to celebrate with. Yes, but let us look at today and not go too far in the future. For now, we need only ask why the churches have chosen to mark Christ as “king.” Did the churches think that we would understand the year that lies behind us better this way? Yes, I think that the image of Christ as the King is helpful. This image helps to look at the Christ we have seen in the Gospel readings over the past months! And a revealing way to look at Jesus Christ is offered to us in the readings heard on the feast of Christ the King. Look at the shepherd imagery of the first reading. God says, “I myself will look after and tend my sheep. The injured I will bind up, the sick I will heal.” This is a beautiful passage. Throughout history, God continually sought out his people, we are told, inviting them to a mutual relationship. This knowledge about God’s presence in our world is the foundation of our faith – in spite of all the terrible things we see and hear in the media: God is not far away in heaven, God suffers with us, God is helpless in his love for us. Is God still all mighty then? Yes – but God ties himself, binds himself to humanity, and in this way, becomes vulnerable and helpless. And yes: God wants to shepherd us today in the same way as God did then! Two and one-half thousand years ago, the Responsorial Psalm was written, “The Lord is my Shepherd.” This psalm 23 is the one I pray very often with the patients in the hospital where I am chaplain. Again: if we are paying attention we see that God is still being the shepherd, as he promised. God has us walk beside restful waters, through green pastures. Goodness and kindness are all around us – we just have to open our eyes and our ears. Then gratitude fills our hearts. In the letter to the Christian community in our second reading, St. Paul tells us about Christ, who is God’s shepherding made concrete. Yes, there is the rampage of death and sorrow and sin and terrorist attacks and shootings. But in spite of this, Christ wants to bring light and peace to the world – the light and the peace we were told of in the first reading, in the prophet Ezekiel! Finally, the Gospel according to Matthew tells us in a parable who will get to have this light and peace. Not everyone! Some people have been “bad goats” as the gospel calls them, not “good sheep”. All right, how do we become “good sheep”, in spite of our bad “goatish” tendencies? Or how do we become, at least sometimes, the good sheep? I think this is quite simple. We care for the Lord by caring for other people. Yes, certainly, we need goals for our lives, but if we take our own preferences as the only goals for our lives, then we become like those Jesus calls “goats”. So, instead of “goatishly” taking our own preferences as the only goals, we can join God as the One who cares for others. We dip into the restful waters with Jesus, we offer everything we can, like Jesus, for the poor and needy, they are the images of God in our world, not because it is simpler but because this is the way Jesus has taken among us as the very way of God…the way of the King. You see, the example is Jesus Christ who gives according to the many needs of the least of his brothers and sisters. Instead of sleeping restfully in the slumber of non-acting, we are to join with Jesus Christ as one among very many shepherds. We are asked to say “yes” to the God who loves without prejudice, yes to the Christ who spent life as a nobody in a negligible corner of the Roman empire, yes to the shepherd who would love his sheep to the very end. We will be cared for insofar as we care for the others!
Fr Wolfgang Felber
November 19, 2017
Jesus speaks about the mystery of God and the way God relates to us through stories, which have many layers of meaning and different possible interpretations. They are like an onion. When you have peeled off and understood one layer of truth a new layer become visible. Like many stories of Jesus, the Gospel of today is a provocation. God does not act justly. This master seems to discriminate his servants. To one he entrusts five “talents” (a huge amount of money at the time), the other one only one talent. It is an apt description of reality. That is the way things are. One child in the family is extremely gifted, the other one struggles through school. One is always healthy and great at sports, the other often sick. God seems very unfair in distributing his gifts. The parable also answers our question, at least partially. God gives to each one “according to his capacities”. More importantly, each one, whether he gets five or two talents as starting capital, will in the end receive the same reward: to “enter your master’s joy.” One may add another thought. If every human being would have the same qualities, would the world not become very boring? It is our differences that make life rich. Our big mistake is that we compare our gifts with each other and get jealous instead of developing whatever we have received. And that seems to be the second layer of the story. God wants us to grow and develop our gifts, few or many. Many stories of Jesus compare God’s kingdom to seeds that have the power to grow and produce a great harvest. The story of the talents challenges us whether we are still growing, not physically or materially in our possessions, but mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Do we trade with our talents? Even in old age we are still capable of growing, if we stimulate our brain, take up new ideas and initiatives. Do we grow in compassion for those who are in need? Pope Francis declared the 33rd Sunday of the Year as the Word Day of the Poor. What place do the poor have in our life? How do I look at the beggars and the homeless on the streets of Berlin? Do I take some time to phone a lonely person or to visit a sick friend? Or does my heart become insensitive like a stone to the suffering of others? The greatest talent we have all received is our capacity to relate to God and love God. But if we never pray personally to God, never read his word and a good book that encourages us to search for him, our spirit becomes dull, our spirit dies. Finally, the story of the talents questions us about the image we have of God. The third servant admits why he failed his master: because “I was afraid of you.” The other two trust their master and trust themselves. They are not afraid to take risks. Fear paralyzed the third. Many of us still carry within us an image of a God who judges and punishes which paralyzes us and kills our joy for life. Jesus wants us to look with total trust at God as He did: as our Abba, our loving Father.
Fr Wolfgang Schonecke