A couple of weeks ago an interesting suggestion came out of the congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Chief Doctrinal bureau in the Vatican. Its prefect, Joseph Ratzinger suggested, urged a return to a Mass in Latin rather than in the language of the people. What a startling proposal, I thought. If you go back to the times of the second Vatican Council, when the vernacular was introduced into the Liturgy and to look at that history, it is very interesting. It was the first thing that all the bishops of world got together and decided it needed to change in the Church, because as you know Vatican II was a reform Council. That was what John the 23^rd said in his introductory talk that the Church needed to be updated. So, they took to the heart of the Christian thing the celebration of the Eucharist, and they changed it into English. It was in the experience of most Catholics, an enormously liberating experience. That is, for the first time the mass seemed to be not just the province of the priest, who was always facing the wall,  never the people, and speaking in a language, usually mumbled, which nobody could understand. Now we have the priest facing everybody. And in the experience of most people, the church was in a sense given back to us. That sense of belonging to the Church was doing what the Vatican Council, above all in its document on the Church, said: that we are not some kind of great pyramidal, hierarchical structure primarily but we are, first of all, the people of God. And the simple shift like moving from Latin to Spanish or Chinese or German, was an enormously significant moment in the life of the Church. And so, you have to think seriously when a man in cardinal Ratzinger's position, makes his proposal. So you look at his reasons, and his reasons were very simple. They refer to that he has been talking about for the past several years: that we need to go back to some sense of mystery. Mystery is a Greek word that means "hidden". If you want to talk about the meaning of the text being hidden either by priests mumbling or being in a foreign language, then you could say yes that is mysterious. But I don’t think that’s the sense of mystery that Paul talked about in this passage to the Corinthians. Mystery is not just something obscure or puzzling or spooky. Mystery in the biblical use has a long and halloed tradition. So I thought that it might be useful to talk about what mystery in the biblical sense as opposed to what seams to be in the mind of Cardinal Ratzinger when he made that proposal.

Paul talks about proclaiming the mystery, and not doing it in lofty words or plausible words of wisdom. In other words, Paul proclaims Jesus, who was crucified and raised by God from the dead, and by this proclamation attempts to convince people in a way that was radically different from the way people were normally convinced. Convincing was usually done by smooth talkers, rhetoricians, people who practiced the art of persuasion using elegant language. If we wanted to convince people we would probably hire a big PR firm, or we would take ads out on TV, and hire some psychologist. We would poll people and have focus groups and see what turned people on. And then we would pitch everything precisely toward that. That is what normally impresses us and what normally influences us and determines our response to things. But Paul reversed the whole process. None of that glitz. And we know at the same time, that there were people from head quarters, Jerusalem, doing miracles and carrying letters of approbation and credentials from Peter and James and John and preaching on wonderful smooth and elegant language. But Paul said; No folks I am just here, and not as a particularly prepossessing human being, certainly with no great oratorical skills, doing what? Testifying by my life to the reality of this man and His vision of human life. Paul did not see Jesus as Divine. That came much later in Christian history. But he certainly saw Jesus as God’s absolutely privileged and primary agent tyring to live a life that was faithful to God. Paul said: here I am with no pretence, no bravado, no big bells and whistles, just me, being who I am with, my life in the process of being transformed into the image of this man that I am preaching. That is what he means when he says that I did not come with plausible words of wisdom but with a demonstration of the spirit and the power. Power of what? Of a man who simply stood there, unpretentiously telling the truth. That is the power of the spirit. It is a highly mysterious way of going about things. Just being there, flat out, with people, for people, telling the truth. He was not there to con anybody. And I put it to you, that given the way I normally work, given the way my world normally works, that Paul's method an extraordinarily different and mysterious kind of process. It obviously worked with the Corinthians. And I don’t think that it is too far fetched to appeal to our own experience. I hope we are able to distinguish people who come with their brass band and their big self trumpeting to promote themselves or some cause, from people who simply tell the truth and who are really present to me, for me.

But the sense of mystery is much larger than that. Now we can go to this extraordinary passage from Isaiah. "Loose the bonds of injustice, undo the thongs, let the oppressed go, break every yoke, share your bread with the hungry, bring the homeless poor into your house, cover the naked". Well OK, lets look at that a little more. Is Isaiah some kind of social worker before his time? Or was he talking about needing a big social programme, or promoting social amelioration. Or did Isaiah have these big principles that he wanted to enunciate and that are embodied in all this kind of stuff? Or is it as we in London so often take it, it made Isaiah feel good to do good. (The great London theme; it is nice to be nice and other people will like me if I am nice.) Isaiah's word can be understood within that frame of reference. But that is not what Isaiah is talking about. So why does Isaiah talk about all this stuff? Because he is interested in social justice, as some kind of big abstract programme? No. Because he believes in this God who favours everybody, above all, the people whom nobody favours. Because he believes in the God of the Exodus who said to Moses; "I have seen the opression of my people and I have come to do something about it". Because he believes in this mysterious other whom we call God, and who was unlike any other God in Isaiah’s own world. It is a God who says that "I am, for the sake of everybody." I put it to you that God, and Isaiah's response, is coming closer to the heart of mystery. Because lets face it folks, life doesn’t work that way. Isaiah directs us. I mean, most of us survive, nourished by being able to oppress somebody else in one way or another. That sounds very harsh, but when I introspect, it is certainly not far from the truth. I have to know more, I have to be more powerful, I have to have more of something and that more always involves somebody having less of whatever. Meanwhile, here is Isaiah saying No to all that, because God is this God that he knows to be truly on the side of everybody, indiscriminately. Now that is mystery. Isaiah is not saying what he says because he is getting paid by some politician, or some social agency, or, because he has some sweet idea in his own head, but because he believed that that is what life is to be and the Lord of the universe is on the side of the forgotten others. That is mystery. That is mysterious because this is so alien to the way the world really wags on and the way that at least I operate my life.

And that can move us to the Gospel, to this passage that always made me feel kind of queasy when I read it. "you are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world". On one hand, my Christian training said: no, you are supposed to bad mouth yourself because that is the apogel of virtue. To say that I am no good. That is supposed to be humility. Or is gets worse for us Canadians, who believe that that could not possibly be said about us. And as soon we hear it, we say "oh you must have somebody else in mind. That can’t be us, we are not the salt of the earth." Because most of us are embarrassed about the thought of blowing our own horns in this way, or so it would seem. But think about being able to walk consciously through the world in which this God in whom we believe, is active in the world, and who is transforming this world. And imagine living out of that belief and saying that that is the thing that really illumines the world: it is me and this God working together, not for any virtue of mine, but because this God works with all of us. To really believe means that I can truly say  "I am the salt of the earth and the light of the world", and say that in a non-self-conscious, non-self-aggrandizing fashion. I would like to suggest that that is the mystery as well. And it is only because we are so accustomed to being defrauded or propagandized, or because we know our own double mindedness that so often we find ourselves doing the right thing for the wrong reason.

Mystery pervades the life of faith but the heart of the mystery is this mysterious other that we call God and when that becomes the heart of my own thinking, feeling, desiring, living, then I become mysteriously the light of the world.