9 Sunday Ordinary Time, Year A, Matthew 7:21-27

My first appointment after ordination was as curate to the Parish of Ss Peter & Paul, Athlone. As part of that appointment, I served the small community of Clonown, south of Athlone on the west side of the River Shannon. The road from Athlone out to Clonown is called simply: The Clonown Road. It is a road that was built by the army in the 1940s to gather turf during the emergency. The local people would have travelled into Athlone by boat at that time. Because the road was built in a rush, it is built in the middle of a floodplain, and it seasonally floods for about 4 to 5 months each year.

Amazingly, houses have been built along this road, although outside of the seasonal flooding zones. One such house, that  people told me was built about 25 years ago, was built on a raft foundation. As the house was coming to completion, the back of the house began to sink into the bogland that it was built on. Amazingly, because of it's raft foundation, the walls of the house have very few cracks. But the back of the house sits some 6 foot lower than the front of the house! It was like the leaning tower of Pisa on the shores of the River Shannon!

Today, we all know the value of building our house on a firm foundation. We know it in a literal sense, like the house that I just talked about in Athlone; but we also know it in a metaphorical sense, where 'house' is a term that means life, family, career. We know it also in the other metaphorical sense of 'house' as people and nation. At the moment, we are paying a high price for building our 'house' on the sands of greed.

Our Gospel today, with it's warning to build on a firm foundation, speaks to Ireland in 2011. Washed up on the sands of the values of greed, we are forced to take stock. We are standing there, angry, shocked, bewildered. But if we look around us, we will be able to see that what was missing was a firm foundation.

Our Gospel presents to us a core dynamic – that of listening and acting. Like children who listen to their parents, and then go and do exactly the opposite of what was explained to them; so too, in life, we may listen, but rarely act according to what we have heard.

We are to listen to God's Word – which is Jesus Christ. Listening is not simply about hearing. We have to hear God's Word, and then spend time pondering it in our hearts. This is why the core prayer of the Church is God's Word itself. Then, having pondered God's Word, we are to allow ourselves to be shaped by it. Eventually, our lives become so shaped by the Word, shaped by Jesus himself, that we can act in the way that God asks us to.

To listen and to act – none of us would like to be the person who is caught out by the rising flood waters, or by the shifting sands of fortune. Many of us will visit famous places like the tower of Pisa in Italy where the lack of a firm foundation has created a huge tourist attraction.

To be wise in the ways of God is to listen to God's Word, and to build our lives on it as the firm foundation that will never fail.