21st Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year B

Joshua 24:1-2, 15-18; Ephesians 5:21-32; John 6:60-69

My father went to see the priest about the Baptism of his first child. He had not been looking forward to the interview. He wasn't practising the Faith.

The priest asked him to go home and pray and to ask God to help him decide whether he believed or not. He told my father to consider:

• If you don't believe, stop pretending!
• If you do believe - practise your faith!
• Don't drag your faith around like a dead cat on a piece of string.

This question of choosing is just as much a crucial question for you and me as it was for my father, or for Joshua and the Hebrews at Shechem.

Joshua called the People together and said: ... choose today whom you wish to serve ... .

As Bob Dylan sings in Gotta Serve Somebody - 'It may be the devil,or it may be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody.'

All we have to do is choose - but this is not as easy as it sounds - even when the People say with one voice: We ... will serve the Lord, for he is our God.

Their decision to serve (we will serve) goes hand in hand with their statement of belief (for he is our God). It makes it very clear that the modern distinction between believing and serving (practising) is totally unscriptural.

'Oh, of course, Father, I believe, and so does my husband. It's just that, well, we don't go to Mass because we don't believe it's necessary. We pray at home. We have our faith.'

Note what the couple is really saying: 'We believe ... it's just that ... well ... we don't believe.'

Ok, so what's going on here? Let me ask this couple some questions:

• Do you believe you have a grave obligation to attend the Eucharist with the faith community each Sunday? - NO!
• Do you believe it's a mortal sin to miss Mass on Sunday? - NO!
• Do you believe you need to confess missing Mass deliberately before you can go to Holy Communion? - NO!

So now at least we know one thing clearly - this couple do not, in fact, believe what the Church teaches. This is why they do not practise. They may be baptised, they may have been brought up in a Catholic home, they may have attended a Catholic school, but they do not believe what the Church believes.

Please understand me, this is not an accusation! I'm not judging this couple. I have no idea of their spiritual journey and what has brought them to this point. I am merely making a very important diagnosis. This couple does not hold the faith of the Church.

They are living according to their faith but not according to the Faith.

Well, what now? What are some of our options?

• Go ahead and baptise the child and hope the parents will find faith at some later time and raise the child as a practising Catholic?
• Give the parents an hour's worth of instruction on the meaning of being a Catholic and then hope for the best and baptise the child?
• Tell the parents how important it is to attend Mass on Sundays and then baptise the child?
• Delay the Baptism till the parents come to some faith of their own?
• Refuse the baptism because they have no intention of raising the child in the practice of the Faith?

My own answer to this very difficult question is that we should offer this couple an opportunity to choose.

This is what my father was offered; this is what Joshua offered the People; this is what Jesus offers his followers in today's Gospel: What about you, do you want to go away too?

On a practical level this will involve a prolonged, prayerful, gentle catechesis similar to the Catechumenate - during which couples can be renewed in their understanding of the Catholic Faith.

Somewhere within this process the couple will choose.

If they choose not to enter the process they have still chosen. All concerned will find this a difficult decision to accept but it must be respected. Jesus, too, experienced the disappointment of watching people walk away.

Faith is a grace-filled choice. We cannot make it for others, nor can we insulate people from the need to make it. This has been one of our most unhelpful tactics in the determination we have to keep people somehow attached to the Church at all costs. We sacramentalise them because we don't know how to evangelise them.

My father chose for the Church he knew so well but which he had left. The faithfulness with which he lived his decision over the years was an example and an encouragement for each one of his children, all eight of whom still practise the faith.

I thank that priest for allowing my father to choose.

The Baptism of the Lord - Year A

Isaiah 42:1-4.6-7; Acts 10: 34-38; Matthew 3:13-17

Atheists and believers are not always dissimilar, especially the non-practising ones. Atheists claim life is ultimately without meaning but most live as though it were not so. They are like the believers who claim faith in an afterlife but live as though their true home was here, on planet earth.

It’s difficult to fully live what we believe and few people actually do so. The great saints are exceptions, as are the great sinners. Teresa of Calcutta, John Paul II, Mary MacKillop are at one end of the spectrum while Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot are at the other.

Between these two extremes we find – ourselves - drifting on the fringes of the huge whirlpool of life, slowly rotating in the little eddies of our private lives, at a more or less safe distance from that violent centre which so preoccupies the true believer as well as the true atheist. Too many of us have somehow convinced ourselves that coasting along is really how it’s meant to be. We conveniently forget, though we deny that we do so, that we, too, will one day be claimed and drawn into the vortex of that great mystery at the heart of things. But that’s only one day and, in the meantime, we have such a lot of living to do.

At heart, the true problem of our religious lives is not faith as much as faithfulness to faith, or to put it in the words of today’s Opening Prayer faithfulness to our Baptism. Let me pursue this thought.

Baptism is many things but in the first place it is a rebirth. We have actually been born again. We have been regenerated. We are new, really and truly, new, and therefore we are different.

The philosophers speak of the foundation of our being as our ontological being. Ontologically we are men or women, ontologically we are human. No scalpel, however sharp, can change a man into a woman or a human into an animal. Our ontological foundation is inviolable – unreachable - except to the Sacraments.

We who have been baptised have been born again into a new life, the divine life of God, in Christ. This life was lost through Original Sin and with it the possibility of friendship with God. Baptism does not restore us, like a house is restored with a coat of paint, but we are made altogether new – ontologically. Now the very Spirit of God lives within us, in the core of our being; now we are ontologically sons and daughters of God and, therefore, members of his people on earth; now we are pointed towards, orientated to, destined for heaven.

The Opening Prayer puts it all in neat summary and adds a further thought: Keep us, your children born of water and the Spirit, faithful to our calling.

Baptism is also a calling. We have been born again into a new life which we, in our turn, are called to live. It is not a no-strings-attached gift from God but calls us to a whole new way of life.

The call is not an invitation; it is a command. The call to Baptism is an invitation; the call to live the Baptism we have received is a command, and unfortunately therein lies the crisis of the times we live in.

It is my firm belief that we do not, generally speaking, live our Baptism because we do not understand what it is we have received and what it has caused us to become.

The remedy for this sad state of affairs is, of course, clearer catechesis from the pulpit and a courageous repetition of the teaching even when some cry ‘Enough!’.

On the other hand, there is the matter of your, yes your, personal responsibility. I was speaking to someone, a Catholic in good standing, who expressed some surprise on learning that the Church does, in fact, still teach that to miss Sunday Mass without adequate reason is a mortal sin. He rightly criticised the priests for not telling him this was still the case, when others were saying it had all changed. He said: It would be better to get rid of the teaching than to keep it quiet like this because it confuses people and brings the teaching into disrepute. I agreed.

However, there is the matter of the responsibility of every lay person to educate himself in the faith and to make himself a catechetically mature Christian. The Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Compendium of the Catechism, are freely available in Catholic bookshops and on the Internet. Everyone should have a copy of the Catechism and everyone who is able should read it. The Internet abounds with good audio talks for those who find reading difficult. CDs and tapes are also freely available.

God has a plan for each one of us. We do well to understand this plan. It is a wonderful plan; a plan for peace. It begins with Baptism and leads, through a life of faithfulness to faith, to an eternal happiness in heaven with God. It is not impossible that your Christian life may touch the jaded heart of an atheist somewhere and lead him to reconsider whether he might not finally subscribe to God's plans for him.