Friday, August 25, 2017

"CALL NO ONE ON EARTH YOUR FATHER."


Homily for August 26th, 2017: Mathew 23:1-12.
          “Call no one on earth your father,” Jesus says. Evangelical Christians charge that the practice of calling Catholic priests “Father” violates Jesus’ command. There is a simple response to this charge. Taking Jesus’ words literally would forbid us to use this word for our biological fathers. Nor can we take literally the following verse: “Do not be called ‘Master’; you have but one master, the Christ.” Taken literally this would forbid us to call anyone “Mister,” since this title is merely a variation of the English word “master.” If despite this passage, it is legitimate to call men in our society “Mister,” and to call our biological fathers “Father,” why should it be wrong to call priests “Father”?
          All this is true. But we make things too easy for ourselves if we leave the matter there. We need to see the principle behind Jesus’ rejection of titles like “Father” and “Master.” What Jesus is condemning is not the titles themselves but an underlying mentality. Jesus is warning against the temptation of those who have spiritual authority in his Church to forget that they are first of all servants; and that they will themselves be judged by the authority they represent to others. The scramble for titles is alive and well in the Lord’s Church. There is a saying in Rome which confirms this: “If it rained miters, not one would touch the ground.”
          Jesus’ warnings in today’s gospel have an obvious application to us clergy. Do they apply, however, only to Church leaders? Who are the people today of whom it could be said: “They preach but they do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens hard to carry and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them. All their works are performed to be seen.” 
          It is not hard to find people in public life to whom those words apply. Many public officials are truly public servants. Sadly there are also many exceptions. Hypocrisy, the yawning credibility gap between words and deeds, is a danger for all of us. The American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne writes: “No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”
          It is God’s love, and his love alone, that gives us the courage to throw away our masks, to stop pretending to be other than we are. That is what God wants for us. Deep in our hearts that is what we too desire: just to be ourselves; to know that we are loved not in spite of what we are, but for who we are: daughters and sons of our heavenly Father, sisters and brothers of Jesus Christ.
          Once we stop pretending and truly accept the love God offers us as a free gift, we begin to discover what Jesus called “the peace which the world cannot give.”

Thursday, August 24, 2017

THE GREATEST COMMANDMENT


Homily for August 25th, 2017: Matt. 22:34-40.

          “Teacher, which commandment is the greatest?” Jesus is asked in today’s gospel. It was a standard test question in Jesus’ day. Studying the Ten Commandments and disputing about how they should be lived in daily life, the rabbis by Jesus’ day had developed 613 commandments: 248 positive laws, and 365 prohibitions. If those numbers seem high, they are modest compared to the 1752 laws in the Church’s book of canon law today.  

          Jesus answers his questioners by citing the command to love God completely in Deuteronomy chapter 6, and the command to love one’s neighbor in Leviticus 19. There was nothing novel about this response. Any rabbi would have approved Jesus’ answer. What was novel was Jesus’ insistence that the two commandments were on the same level. Up to then, the rabbis subordinated love of neighbor to the primary duty of loving God.

          Important for us today is understanding what Jesus means by “love” in his summary of the law. When we hear the word “love” today, we immediately think of feelings. Not so Jesus. Feelings come and go. They are dependent on the weather, our digestion, our mood. In telling us we must love God completely, and our neighbor as well, Jesus is talking about an attitude.

          He is telling us that in every situation, God must come first for us. He must be at the center of our lives, not somewhere out on the fringe. And he is telling us that, in every situation, we must treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves. That is the so-called Golden Rule. ‘Love others as you love yourself,’ Jesus says. Do we always have warm loving feelings about ourselves? Of course not. But (unless we are mentally ill) we always wish the best for ourselves.

          Though we often experience tension between our duty toward God and neighbor, Jesus tells us later in Matthew’s gospel that in reality there is no tension. In the parable of the sheep and the goats (Mt. 25:31-46) Jesus tells us: ‘Whatever you do for others – or fail to do – you do, or fail to do, for me.   

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

"DO NOT CONFORM YOURSELVES TO THIS AGE."



Homily for August 27th, 2017: 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A. 
          Rom. 11:33-36; Mt.16:13-20.
AIM:  To help the hearers encounter God in the mystery of suffering.
 
Thirty-nine years ago, on August 26, 1978, a little known Italian bishop and cardinal, Albino Luciani, was elected Bishop of Rome. He took the name, John Paul I, becoming, according to Catholic belief, the successor of the fisherman Simon, to whom Jesus in today=s gospel gave the name APeter C the Rock.@
In reality, Peter was anything but rock-like. On the contrary, he was impulsive: quick to make great resolutions, but just as quick to abandon them under pressure. The rock on which Jesus built his Church was certainly not Peter=s strength of character or willpower. The Church=s foundation is Peter=s faith: his trust in God and in the One whom he calls in today=s gospel: ASon of the living God.@
Peter had to learn this trusting faith from mistrust of himself. Every one of Peter=s successors, our present Holy Father included, carries the heavy burden of Church leadership in this same spirit: mistrusting himself, trusting solely in God and in his divine Son Jesus Christ. Pope Benedict stated this explicitly in his first public appearance on the day of his election: AAfter our great Pope, John Paul II the cardinals have elected me, a simple, humble worker in God=s vineyard. I am consoled by the fact that the Lord knows how to work and how to act, even with insufficient tools, and I especially trust in your prayers.@ Pope Benedict said the same in different words in April, at the end of the Mass he celebrated in April 2008 in New York=s St. Patrick=s Cathedral. Responding to the tribute paid to him on the third anniversary of his election he said: AAt this moment I can only thank you for your love of the Church and Our Lord, and for the love which you show to the poor Successor of Saint Peter. I will try to do all that is possible to be a worthy successor of the great Apostle, who also was a man with faults and sins, but remained in the end the rock for the Church. And so I too, with all my spiritual poverty, can be for this time, in virtue of the Lord=s grace, the Successor of Peter.@
The man who became Peter=s successor thirty-nine years ago exercised his office for only thirty-three days. Early in the morning of September 29, 1978, Catholics the world over were shocked to learn that during the preceding night the man we had already grown to love as Athe smiling Pope@ had gone home to God.
Catholics the world over asked: Why? At the Pope=s funeral the cardinal who preached made no attempt to answer that question. Instead he cited the words we heard in our second reading: AOh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways!@
We cannot scrutinize God. We cannot analyze him. As we read in the prophet Isaiah: AMy thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.@ (Is. 55:8f)
How important it is for us to remember those words in our scientific, technological world. We are comfortable today with things we can count, measure, weigh, observe under a microscope, or analyze with a computer. God cannot be measured. He cannot be observed, analyzed, calculated. God is not like a computer.  God is the utterly other. He does not act predictably, automatically. God acts in sovereign freedom C and in love so strong, so passionate, that the greatest human love is like a child=s infatuation by comparison.    
All across this land there are families with a loved one serving overseas in the military. They share a common fear: a ring or a knock on the door announcing the visit of two figures in military uniform, one of them a chaplain, to tell them that a husband, a father, a son, or a brother has fallen in the service of his country. And now that the feminists have succeeded in getting women sent into combat, it may also be a wife, a mother, a daughter, or a sister. In the agony of such sudden and tragic bereavement, there is no one who does not ask, Why? Why him? Why her?
Perhaps there is someone here today who is asking that question. Maybe it is a grave illness: your own or that of a loved one. For someone else the blow may be the death of a relationship. A marriage, or a wonderful friendship, which once filled you with joy, hope, and love is turning to indifference, sullen resentment, or even hatred. For yet another the blow may be the collapse of great hopes and dreams. 
All of us have received such hard and bitter blows. I received such a blow when I was only six. It was the day after Christmas, 1934. My father came home from the hospital, to which my mother had been taken with pneumonia just a week before, and spoke the three most terrible words I have ever heard: AMummy is dead.@ That was almost eighty-three years ago. I still ask, Why? 
Does our Christian faith answer this agonized question? I must be honest and tell you: it does not. To try to give someone who is suffering bereavement, injustice, or illness reasons why it is all for their own good C why it all makes sense if only they will be reasonable and think about it C is an insult. It is especially insulting when such easy answers are clothed in religious language C as if God were somehow responsible for sickness, suffering, injustice, and death. Such seemingly religious answers insult those who are suffering. They also insult God.  God is not responsible for suffering, for sickness, for injustice. God does not kill people. People kill people. So do deadly diseases. Why those things happen is a mystery C a dark mystery.
I cannot tell you just when I discovered God in the darkness that descended on me at my mother=s death. But I know it was by age eight at the latest. It came home to me one day with blinding certainty that I would see my dear mother again, when God called me home. From that day to this the spiritual world of God, of the angels, the saints, and our beloved dead has been real to me. I know people who are there: my mother first, and now so many others who have gone home to God. 

Decades later I realized, looking back, that that childhood insight was the seed from which my call to priesthood grew. It planted in me the desire to be close to that spiritual world. At Mass I have the privilege, far beyond any man=s deserving, of leading you, the holy people of God, to the threshold of that world.  Heaven comes down to earth, and earth is lifted up to heaven as we praise our inscrutable yet passionately loving God with the angels= song: Holy, Holy, Holy; heaven and earth are filled with your glory. Amen. 

"ANGELS ASCENDING AND DESCENDING."


Homily for August 24th, 2017: John 1:45-51.

 It is a little disappointing to find, on this feast of St. Bartholomew, that the gospel reading is about a man named Nathanael. Scripture scholars believe that Bartholomew and Nathanael are actually the same person. The gospel writers wrote inspired by faith, and in order to instill faith in others, not in order to give us “just the facts.”

“We have found the one about whom Moses wrote in the law, and also the prophets,” Philip tells his friend Nathanael, “Jesus son of Joseph, from Nazareth.” Nathanael responds with skepticism: “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” Nazareth was then an insignificant village, never mentioned in the Old Testament.

          Despite this skepticism Nathanael is willing to accept his friend Philip’s invitation to “Come and see.” This attitude of openness is what causes Jesus to call Nathanael “a true child of Israel,” with no duplicity in him. Too many of Jesus’ own people lacked this openness. We see this in their frequent demands that Jesus produce some dramatic “sign” which would compel belief; and in their refusal to heed the signs Jesus did offer: his miracles.

          Philip was telling Nathanael, in effect, that he had found the one so long foretold by the Jewish scriptures: the Lord’s anointed servant, the Messiah. Nathanael responds to Jesus’ identification of him as “a true child of Israel” without duplicity by an explicit acknowledgment of what Philip has just told him: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel.”

          Acknowledging the faith expressed in Nathanael’s words, Jesus tells him that further blessings await him: “You will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.” The words are the climax of this brief reading, and the most important. They tell us that Jesus is the contact person between earth and heaven, between humanity and God.  

We contact God by offering prayers to our heavenly Father through his Son Jesus, in and through the Holy Spirit, who inspires us to pray and supports us as we do so. The ascending angels are carrying our prayers heavenward. And the descending angels are bringing us the Father’s blessings in answer to our prayers. 

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

BEGGARS AND BARGAINERS


Homily for August 23rd, 2017: Matthew 20:1-16.

          It seems terribly unfair, doesn’t it? The story is not about social justice. It is about God’s generosity. Here’s how it might go today. A rancher in one of the “salad factories” of California’s San Fernando valley is eager to harvest his crop before a threatened change in the weather. So at dawn he’s off to the hiring hall in town. The men he finds there bargain about the conditions of work, and their wages.

          At intervals during the day, the foreman tells the rancher that more workers will be needed to get in the whole harvest in time. So the rancher makes repeated trips to town to hire more help. Each time the workers he encounters are less promising. The men he finds lounging around in mid-afternoon are the dregs of the local labor market: drifters, panhandlers, winos. There is no bargaining with men like that. “Get into the truck, fellows,” he says. “There’s work for you out at my place.”

          At quitting time, those hired last are first in the pay line. The first man rips open his pay envelope — and can’t believe his eyes. It contains a whole day’s pay! Meanwhile, news of what the first men in line are receiving is being passed back to those in the rear. They calculate how much they will receive at the same hourly rate. Imagine their indignation when they receive exactly what they had bargained for in the early morning.

          We are left with the injustice. The story begins to make sense only when we ask: who was happy? who was disappointed? and why? Those who were happy were the men hired last. They had not bargained. They were little better than beggars. It was these beggars, however, who went away happy, while the bargainers were unhappy.

          What are you, with God -- a bargainer, or a beggar? If you want to experience God’s justice, be a bargainer. He’ll never short-change you. When you discover, however, how little you deserve on any strict accounting, you’ll probably be disappointed, perhaps even shocked.

          So perhaps you’d rather experience God’s generosity. Then learn to be, before God, a beggar. Then you will be bowled over with the Lord’s generosity. Ask the Lord who bestows his gifts not according to our deserving but according to his boundless generosity to give you that hunger which longs to be fed; that emptiness which yearns to be filled. Stand beneath his cross and say, in the words of the old evangelical hymn:

          Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to your cross I cling.

Monday, August 21, 2017

"WITH GOD ALL THING ARE POSSIBLE."


Homily for August 22nd, 2017: Matt. 19:23-30.

          Today’s gospel reading is a follow-up to yesterday’s, about the young man who “went way sad, for he had many possessions.” Jesus’ disciples are astonished, today’s gospel tells us, to hear the Master say that riches are a bar to entrance into God’s kingdom. Their religion taught them that material blessings were a sign of God’s favor. No wonder that the disciples ask: “Then who can be saved?” The figure used by Jesus of a camel passing through the eye of a needle is, the Scripture scholars tell us, a typical oriental exaggeration – something impossible even to conceive, let alone happen.

Jesus did not tell the young man with many possessions to sell everything because riches are evil. Rightly used, wealth is good. Riches become a danger for us, however, when we hang on to them too tightly B and whenever they give us a false sense of security.

Jesus summons us, as he summoned the rich young man in yesterday=s gospel, to trust in God and in him alone. For unaided human powers the demands Jesus makes on us are impossible. They are impossible, that is, for everyone except God. AFor God all things are possible,@ Jesus tells us.

When life seems too much for you; when you are weighed down by anxiety, illness, injustice, the claims of others, or the nagging sense of your own inadequacy; when God=s demands on you seem too great B whenever, in short, you come up against the impossible; then you are up against God. He is the God of the impossible. In every impossible situation, in every trial that is too hard for you to bear, his divine Son and your best friend is saying to you, with tender love: 

AFor you it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.@

 

 

Sunday, August 20, 2017

"THE YOUNG MAN WENT AWAY SAD."


Homily for August 21st, 2017: Matt. 19:16-22.

          “What must I do to gain eternal life?” the young man asks Jesus. Keep God’s commandments, Jesus responds. I’ve kept them all, the young man responds. Has he -- really? That is more than doubtful. That would make the young man sinless. And according to traditional Catholic belief, the only completely sinless human being in all history is the Lord’s immaculate mother, Mary. Even the greatest saints have sins and fall short of God’s standards in some way. Indeed the saints are the first to acknowledge their sinfulness.

          So the young man in today’s gospel is actually mistaken about his spiritual condition. But his goodwill is clear. He sincerely wants to do what is right and what the Lord wants for him. With his unique ability to read the human heart, Jesus sees in this young man an attachment to possessions which is holding him back from offering himself completely to God. That is why Jesus tells the man to sell all that he has, and give to the poor. Relinquishing earthly treasure will secure him treasure in heaven, Jesus says. And it will free the young man to follow Jesus without hesitation or reserve. The young man's reaction shows that there are still limits to his desire to serve God completely. He "went away sad, for he had many possessions."       

          The Lord gives this call to some in every generation. Others he calls not to total renunciation, but to something equally important, and no less difficult: detachment. That means enjoying the good things the Lord gives us, thanking him for them; but not clinging to them tightly or fearing their loss.

          Show me someone who has discovered the secret of deep and true happiness, and I’ll show you someone who lives with open hands, and a heart open to others in need. Ask the Lord to help you live like that, and you’ll be happy too. The Lord is inviting you to begin – today!