"IN THE YEAR THAT KING UZZIAH DIED."

Homily for July 14^th, 2018: Isaiah 6:1-8.

AIn the year King Uzziah died. I saw the Lord,@ the prophet Isaiah tells us in our first reading. Uzziah had been king for some four decades. His death, and the accession of a new monarch, were a breakup of landslide proportions. Golden opportunities await, at such times, young men with good connections. Isaiah was young. He had the right connections.

So in the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah had every reason to be excited about the dazzling prospect of a new career opening up before him. And precisely at that time of unique opportunity, he found the way blocked. A more exalted king than any who ever sat upon an earthly throne summoned this brilliant, well-connected young man to higher service. Isaiah never forgot it.

Dramatic experiences like that are rare. What is not rare, indeed what is very common, is the shattering of plans or expectations, the sudden blocking up of progress along our chosen path, which Isaiah experienced. Perhaps there is someone here today who is facing the collapse of hopes, plans, or dreams. Your life seems to be coming apart at the seams. You don’t know which way to turn. If that, or any of that, is your story, then listen. The Lord has good news for you.

Times of crisis are always times of opportunity, times of growth. Sometimes the only way God can get at us is by breaking us B or allowing us to be broken. To set us on the right way, God must sometimes block up the way we are on B even it is in itself a good way. What looks to you like the end of all your hopes, the destruction of every plan and aspiration you ever entertained, may be the Lord=s summons to a closer, if more difficult, walk with him. God never closes a door in our lives without opening another. The Lord has shown me that in my life B again and again.

As we travel life=s way, we who in baptism have become sisters and brothers of Jesus Christ should be sharpening our spiritual vision. For it is only with the eyes of faith that we can perceive the unseen, spiritual world all round us: beneath, behind, above this world of sense and time. Faith assures us that the Lord is watching over us always, in good times and in bad: the same God who appeared to Isaiah in the year that King Uzziah died. Glimpsing this mighty God, our loving heavenly Father, with the eyes of faith, we too join B as in a moment we shall B in the angels= song first heard by Isaiah:  AHoly, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts!  All the earth is filled with his glory!@  

 

"YOU WILL BE HATED BY ALL."

Homily for July 13^th, 2018: Matthew 10:16-23.

          A priest fifteen or perhaps more years ordained, told me recently that he was concerned about the overly rosy image of priesthood being offered to today’s seminarians. The recruitment material sent out by Vocation Directors is full of success stories. The photos on the websites of today’s seminaries show young men laughing, smiling, and joking. None of this is false. Thousands of priests testify to the joy of serving God and his holy people as priests. I’m happy to be one of them. The late Chicago priest-sociologist and novelist Fr. Andrew Greely said: “Priests who like being priests are among the happiest men in the world.” And he cited sociological surveys to back up that statement.

          The result of all this happy talk, my priest-friend told me, was that young priests who have a bad day, a bad week, or who encounter rejection or failure, start thinking that perhaps they have chosen the wrong vocation and should abandon priesthood. Jesus never promised his disciples that they would have only joy, success, and happiness. Our gospel reading today is about the price of discipleship. “You will be hated by all because of my name,” Jesus says. Only after these words warning about the cost of discipleship does he proclaim the good news: “But whoever endures to the end will be saved.”    

Friends, the days of socially respected Catholicism are over. Powerful forces and currents in our society press us to be ashamed of the Gospel — ashamed of our faith’s teachings on the sanctity of human life in all stages and conditions, ashamed of our faith’s teachings on marriage as the lifelong union of one man and one woman. Our courts, the entertainment industry, and the powerful shapers of opinion in today’s media, insist that the Church’s teachings are out of date, retrograde, insensitive, uncompassionate, illiberal, bigoted. They insist day in and day out that we who defend Church teaching are hateful people. They threaten us with consequences if we refuse to call what is good evil, and what is evil good. They command us to conform our thinking to their orthodoxy, or else say nothing at all.

Speaking a few years ago to a group of priests about the increasing secularization of our society, the late Cardinal George of Chicago said, in what he later admitted was an “overly dramatic fashion”: “I expect to die in bed; my successor will die in prison; and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.” Mostly omitted by those who quote these words, is the good news which the cardinal spoke in conclusion: “His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the Church has done so often in human history.”

TRAVEL LIGHT

Homily for July 12^th, 2018: Matthew 10:7-15.

“Do not take gold or silver or copper for your belts; no sack for the journey, or a second tunic,  or sandals, or walking stick,” Jesus tells the Twelve as he sends them out to proclaim the Kingdom of God and to heal the sick. He wants those whom he commissions as his messengers to travel light. They are to depend not on material resources, but on the Lord alone.

          Jesus’ words are especially relevant today. All over the world, the forces hostile to the Church are rising. In our own country the government is trying to impose on Catholic organizations, such as Catholic hospitals and universities, requirements which we cannot, in conscience, accept. We are being asked, for instance, to pay for sterilization and abortion. In Ireland, unlike the United States a historically Catholic country, there is even an attempt to pass a law which would compel priests, in certain instances, to violate the seal of the confessional. TV entertainers air gross jokes about Catholic priests which they would not dare make about Muslim imams or Jewish rabbis. And the media show little interest in reporting studies which show that Christians are the Number One target of religious persecution in the world today.

          We rightly lament this tide of anti-Christian and anti-Catholic sentiment. But it has a positive side as well. Whenever in its two thousand year history, the Church has been favored by worldly powers, whether financially or in other ways, it has grown spiritually flabby and weak. The Church is always at her best in times of persecution. When persecution is raging it is difficult, mostly impossible, to see this. Things become clear only when we look back. So let’s look back.

In recent centuries the most violent attack on the Church came in the French Revolution, which started in 1789 and lasted more than a decade. Thousand of priests were murdered under the guillotine. Most of the French bishops fled the country. Those who remained had to accept restrictions on their ministry which they justified on the plea that there was to other way to continue offering the sacraments to God’s people. 

As the Church moved into the nineteenth century, however, there was an explosion of religious vocations in France, and the foundation of an unprecedented number of new religious orders, for both men and women.

          When we grow discouraged at the hostile forces confronting us, we need to remember: God can bring good out of evil – and he does, time after time!

SOCIAL JUSTICE

July 15th 2018: 15^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, year B.

Amos 7:12-15; Mark 6:7-13

AIM:  To show the nature and need of prophecy, and of repentance. 

Should the Church get involved in politics? Many people say, ANo way. Religion and politics don=t mix.@ Others disagree. A religion, they say, that is unwilling to leave the four walls of the church and go out into the public square is irrelevant to real life. Whenever fundamental moral issues are at stake, these people maintain, the Church must get involved. Otherwise the Church risks being untrue to its Lord and his message.

But which political issues actually do involve moral issues important enough to justify the Church=s involvement? Is capital punishment such an issue? What about the decision of our government to invade Iraq? The Pope opposed both. So did the American bishops. Ironically, many of those who welcomed Church protests against capital punishment and the Iraq war insist that Church leaders keep silence about the imposition of capital punishment on society=s weakest and most defenseless members: babies in their mothers= wombs. They defend war against the unborn as a sacred right enshrined, they say, in our country=s Constitution C even though no one discovered it there until 1973.  

Our first reading today introduces a religious figure who was severely condemned for involvement in politics. Like his countryman, Jesus, centuries later, Amos was a layman with no professional training for religious office. AI was no prophet nor have I belonged to the company of prophets,@ Amos told the priest in charge of the sanctuary at Bethel. God called Amos while he was still a shepherd and farmer, and commanded him: AGo, prophesy to my people Israel.@

God gave Amos no crystal ball to predict the future. That is not the prophet=s task. Instead Amos, like all true prophets, was summoned to speak Aa word of the Lord@ to the people of his day: to warn, to admonish, to rebuke, and to encourage. As a simple countryman, living close to nature, Amos was scandalized by his glimpses of city life during his visits to market. He records what he saw there: wealthy, callous plutocrats, overfed and over-housed, spending their time thinking up new ways to amuse and enrich themselves. Meanwhile poor peasants like Amos, burdened with debt, could be sold into slavery for the price of a pair of sandals.. 

Amos saw this glaring social injustice compounded at the religious sanctuaries. There he found prosperous worshipers rejoicing in their good fortune, which they interpreted as proof of God=s favor. To this rotten and decaying society the official prophets and priests had nothing to say but what a later prophet, Isaiah, would call Asmooth words and seductive visions@ (Is. 30:10) C rather like certain religious speakers at prayer breakfasts of political and business leaders today.

Without mincing his words, Amos pronounced his society ripe for God=s judgment. Here is a sample of his message: AHear this, you who trample upon the needy ... >When will the new moon be over,= you ask, >that we may sell our grain? ...We will fix our scales for cheating! We will buy the poor man for a pair of sandals; even the refuse of the wheat we will sell!= The Lord has sworn ... Never will I forget a thing they have done! ... I will turn your feasts into mourning and all your songs into lamentation.@ (Amos 8:4-10) Those are strong words. No wonder that the priest, Amaziah, roundly condemned Amos for this unwelcome message, and for daring to speak at all in a place of religious pilgrimage without permission. With the contempt of the religious functionary for the upstart outsider Amaziah tells Amos: AOff with you, visionary ... Never again prophesy in Bethel; for it is the king=s sanctuary and a royal temple.@

In the gospel we heard Jesus telling his disciples they would face similar rejection, and how to behave when they did: AWhatever place does not welcome you or listen to you, leave there and shake the dust off your feet in testimony against them.@ Rejection was sure to come because of the message Jesus gave them. AThey went off,@ the gospel says, Aand preached repentance.@ Repentance is never a popular message. In the Bible the word means more than regret for past actions which we see, by hindsight, were wrong. Repentance means a fundamental change of direction. It means turning around from self to God. Repentance means putting God at the center of life rather than somewhere out on the fringe.

If Amos were to come back today, what are some of the things he would denounce in our society and tell us we needed to repent of? Here is a short list.

One which was often mentioned by our recent Holy Fathers, Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict, and by Pope Francis today, is consumerism. This is the false idea that we can buy happiness by amassing more and more possessions. A whole industry exists to promote this idea: advertising. Advertising which tells us where we can get things we need, at prices we can afford, is useful. But advertising designed to kindle desire for things we never knew we needed until we saw the ad is questionable at least. 

Something else which cries out for repentance is hedonism: the mindless philosophy that says, AIf it feels good, do it.@ Hedonism wrecks lives, relationships, and marriages, every day. And it is hedonism which lies at the heart of the recent Supreme Court decision, that marriage can mean whatever we choose it to mean.

We need to repent also of the hard-hearted selfishness which ignores the needs of the poor and oppressed in our midst; or which thinks that our obligation to them can be discharged by gifts to charity from our surplus goods, with no examination of unjust conditions in society that cause poverty and oppression. 

We need to repent too of an over-spiritualized religion which is concerned only with saying prayers and getting into heaven; and which ignores the challenge which Jesus gave us in his model prayer: AYour will be done on earth as it is in heaven.@ Those words challenge us to build colonies of heaven here on earth C by living not just for ourselves, but for God and for others. 

That is a short though incomplete list of the demons mentioned at the end of our gospel reading against which Jesus sends us today. Demons so powerful, and so pervasive, can be driven out by one thing alone: repentance. And the repentance to which Jesus summons us is not somewhere else, tomorrow. It is here, and it is now. And repentance begins not with someone else. If it is begin at all, repentance must begin with ourselves.

ST. BENEDICT

Homily for July 11^th, 2018: St. Benedict.

St. Benedict, whom the Church celebrates today, was born in Norcia, some 70 miles north of Rome, probably around 480. His Catholic parents gave him a religious upbringing, sending him to Rome for studies as a teenager. Benedict reacted negatively to the worldliness of Rome. Convinced that for his soul’s health he should become a monk, he left Rome and journeyed east into the mountains of central Italy, where he took up residence in a cave, as a hermit. In time some of the pious nobility in Rome began to visit Benedict and to offer him their sons to rear them for almighty God. This enabled Benedict to form 12 monastic communities all under Benedict’s general oversight.

          By age 50 Benedict, confident that his monks could remain faithful to their calling without him, journeyed south to Monte Cassino, between Rome and Naples, where he founded the monastic community which still exists today, and wrote what he himself calls his “little Rule for beginners.”  He died there in 547 or shortly thereafter, probably in his late sixties.

          “We are going to establish a school for the service of the Lord,” Benedict writes in the Rule’s prologue. “In founding it we hope to introduce nothing harsh or burdensome.” Benedict makes it clear that his Rule is addressed to all – to the average person without any special gifts – and not just to spiritual athletes.  “As we advance in the religious life and in faith,” Benedict writes in his Rule, “our hearts expand and we run the way of God’s commandments with unspeakable sweetness of love” – words which clearly reflect Benedict’s own experience. 

          All over the world today men, and women as well, are still living according to Benedict’s Rule, more than thirty of them here in St. Louis. One follower, a Trappist monk at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, helped me to cross the threshold of the Catholic Church at Easter 1960. He died there in 2006 at the age of 97.  It was a lifetime of faithful observance of Benedict’s “little rule for beginners” which enabled him to write the beautiful words with which I close:

            “To fall in love with God is the greatest of all romances. To seek him, the greatest human adventure. To find him, the highest human achievement.”   

"PRAY THE LORD TO SEND LABORERS."

Homily for July 10^th, 2018: Matthew 9:32-38.

          The brief gospel reading we have just heard is a kind of bridge between the reports Matthew has been giving us about Jesus’ deeds of compassion on the one hand, and his call to others to share in this compassionate care of God’s people. The summary is contained in a single sentence: “Jesus went around to all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom, and curing every disease and illness.” The sentence following describes Jesus’ reaction to the needs of those who flocked around him, to hear his words and receive healing. “His heart was moved with pity,” our translation says. In the original Greek the word for heart refers to the inner organs in general. Matthew is saying that Jesus was all ‘churned up in his gut’ at the needs he saw all round him. They were “troubled and abandoned,” Matthew tells us, “like sheep without a shepherd.”

          “The harvest is abundant,” Jesus says then, “but the laborers are few; so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest.” Those are the last words in chapter nine of Matthew’s gospel. Chapter ten, which we shall hear tomorrow, starts with Jesus’ call of twelve men from his disciples, to be apostles.

          We need to take Jesus’ call for laborers seriously. We should be praying often, even daily, that many of our young people will hear and heed the call to serve him as priests, deacons, and religious Sisters and Brothers. But we need to do more. If you know someone who you believe would serve well in one of those roles, speak to him or her about it. If that is too difficult, then tell a priest about that person, so he can do the recruiting himself. In today’s world pursuing a religious vocation is so counter-cultural that candidates need all the encouragement and support we can give them. Moreover, many young people are just waiting to be asked. And if we don’t ask them, who will?

JESUS' RESPONSE TO FAITH

Homily for July 9^th, 2018: Matthew 9:18-26.

          Today’s gospel recounts two miracles: one a miraculous healing, the other a resurrection from the dead. All the healings reported in the gospels are Jesus’ response to faith. Mark’s gospel tells us that when Jesus visited Nazareth, where he had grown up, “he could work no miracle,” because the people who had known him for years lacked faith. (Mk 5:6).   

          In today’s gospel the first person to manifest faith is a synagogue elder whose daughter has just died. He believes Jesus can bring her back to life. Greater faith than that one cannot imagine. The second person who approaches Jesus with faith is a woman who has suffered hemorrhages for twelve years. Jews had a special aversion to blood. Still today the Jewish dietary laws say that to be kosher, and hence fit for human consumption, meat must have all the blood drained from it before it before it comes to the table. This helps us understand that the situation of the woman with hemorrhages is desperate. She makes her request for healing not in words, but by grabbing hold of the tassel on one of the four corners of the prayer shawl worn by Jewish men. She is  confident in the power of Jesus that even this contact with his garment can bring her his healing.

          Both petitioners receive what they seek in faith. Sensing that power has gone out from him, Jesus turns around and confronts the woman. “Courage, daughter!” he tells her. “Your faith has saved you.”  “And from that hour,” Matthew tells us, “the woman was cured.”

          When Jesus arrives at the house of the synagogue elder, he finds a crowd already mourning the death of the man’s daughter. Hired flute players are playing a funeral dirge. “Go away,” Jesus tells them. “The girl is not dead but sleeping.” Not for the first time in the gospels, the people ridicule him, confident that he has lost touch with reality. When the crowd has dispersed, Jesus enters the house, takes the girl by the hand, and raises her to life.

          What better response could we make to the story of these two miracles than to repeat the anguished words of the father in Mark’s gospel seeking healing for his deaf mute son who seems to have what we would call epilepsy. Asked by Jesus whether he believes healing is possible, the man replies – and we repeat: “Lord, I do believe! Help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24).