ONE YEAR OLD
by Bishop David Chislett SSC

Readings: Deuteronomy 4:1-2,6-8; James 1:17-18,21-22,27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

On Sunday 28th August, 2005, a group of us turned up to Cheers' Tavern in Spring Hill, wondering what Mass in a pub would be like. Well, before long we got into a routine of setting up and dismantling all the bits and pieces. We also got to know each other better, and then began welcoming new people into our fellowship. On 1st September I moved from the All Saints Wickham Terrace Rectory into the property we now rent and know as "Patmos House."

Since then, the chapel at Patmos House became operative, and the daily Mass was instituted. Over the past twelve months we have preached the Gospel, taught the Faith, prayed together, offered Mass, worshipped at Evensong and Benediction, had blockbuster parish picnics, working bees, weddings, baptisms and funerals. Just recently we shifted to Shafston International College for Sunday Mass.

We have given sacrificially to support this new venture of faith; we have supported ministry projects both at home and abroad. We witnessed Father Tony's ordination (can anyone these days really picture him NOT being a priest?) and we have learned to be brothers and sisters together in Christ.

Perhaps most importantly, we have anchored more deeply than ever before into the reality that CHURCH IS THE PEOPLE GATHERED AROUND JESUS who meets us in his Word (the Bible) and in the Sacraments (especially Holy Communion). We have tried to make him the centre of all that we do.

Naturally we look forward to the time when we have a church building as a stable location for worship and a base for outreach and evangelism. (One of the significant steps towards this is today's launch of the PATMOS HOUSE TRUST for the purpose of receiving the kind of gifts and bequests that will undergird our parish's future.) Nevertheless, I believe that we will all look back on this pioneering phase as a precious time in our walk with God in which he helped us to understand what really matters and what the Church really is.

This makes me think of the first reading set for today's Mass. Around 1450 BC the Old Testament people of God, freshly liberated from their Egyptian taskmasters, had to begin a journey through the wilderness - the desert - in order to reach the Promised Land. It was a terrible journey for them, an arduous treck packed full of inconveniences and problems. The Bible tells us that this adventure of faith got so tough at times that some of them even longed nostalgically for the safe predictability of life as slaves in Egypt! But by the time of the 8th Century (BC) prophets, the nation looked back on these years in the wilderness as a kind of honeymoon period in their relationship with God.

According to Moses, a leader who really struggled with his calling, the Law was given to enable the people to relate to God and to each other in real community. It was a great privilege - no other nation had been blessed in this way.

Look at today's Gospel Reading. Jesus says something really powerful. He criticizes his hearers for failing to understand the Law in terms of loving God and loving each other, for reducing the Law to mere outward observance!

They were earnest first century practioners of Judaism. But even Christians - of every tradition - face the temptation to turn the Gospel into mere outward observance of rules and regulations.

For example: Baptists and Brethren with their genuine desire to live holy lives easily succumb to excessive puritanism and a judgmental attitude toward everyone else.

Pentecostals find themselves making rigid rules out of spontaneous spiritual experiences, which so easily become "fads" or, worse still, benchmarks that everyone else has to measure up to in order to be accepted.

We in the Catholic tradition have our own temptations. One of them is to become so focused on the correctness of ceremonial minutiae, liturgical detail and musical excellence that worship loses its soul and degenerates into a "high camp" exercise in one-upsmanship!

Furthermore, leadership in any Christian tradition can end up becoming manipulative and self serving (like so many of the religious authorities who crucified Jesus), rather than an expression of him who "came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life . . ." (Mark 10:45)

I would never denigrate a genuine concern for holiness, a passionate desire to know the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, a sincere vocation to make the worship of God glorious using all the means at our disposal, or the development of leadership that is confident and inspiring. But I do believe that taken out of their rightful context these things become grossly distorted. They lose their meaning. They become ugly and end up actually turning people away from Jesus.

To guard against this we need to remind ourselves that the word religion comes from the Latin word 're-ligiare' which means "to bind together again, to reconnect." We have seen that God and the people of God being bound together in love was the vision underlying the old Law. In fact, the Law was powerless to bring it about. So Jesus came. The vision of God and the people of God being bound together in love is what drove him to the cross where he bled for you and me, suffering the consequences of our sins.

The vision of God and the people of God being bound together in love is at the heart of our life as the PATMOS HOUSE COMMUNITY. We gather at the altar this morning reconnected to God through the cross of Jesus, reconnected to one another as brothers and sisters in him, and reconnected in loving service to a world so desperately in need of God's healing.

So, our special Mass intention today as we celebrate our first birthday is that the Lord would renew us in his grace and give us a fresh vision of our freedom to love, for, as St Paul reminds us, "Love is the fulfilling of the law" (Romans 13:10).

Happy birthday everyone! May God bless you.

From the Patmos House Pew Bulletin 3rd September, 2006