"THEY TOOK OFFENSE AT HIM."

Homily for July 5th, 2015; the 14^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B. Ezek. 2:2-5; 2 Cor. 12:7-10; Mark 6:1-6.

AIM: To challenge the hearers to respond to Jesus Christ as we encounter him in his Church.

                                           

On Independence Day, yesterday, we celebrated more than two centuries of national history. We Americans have a reputation in the world for optimism. Our nation=s history has made us optimists. The earliest settlers all came from Europe. They needed huge amounts of optimism to build a new nation in the wilderness, and to push its frontier westward until it spanned the continent. Despite all the blood, sweat, tears and treasure which this nation-building involved, until the Vietnam war it seemed that just about every major problem confronting us was soluble. From small beginnings, and protected by two oceans, we became the richest and most powerful nation on earth. If you=re rich and powerful, you cannot expect to be universally loved. Confronted today with hatred and terrorism, our troops and other public officials the daily target of sniper and guerilla attacks in the Middle East and elsewhere, we wonder anxiously how long the American success story can continue. 

Today=s readings are not about success and power, however, but about rejection and weakness. In the first reading God warns Ezekiel that he is sending him to a rebellious people, who will reject the prophet=s message. The second reading records Paul=s prayer for deliverance from what he called Aa thorn in the flesh.@   

Some biblical scholars think this was a psychic or physical ailment. Others think it may have been the same opposition from within his own community which faced Ezekiel. Whatever it was, Paul says that God answered his prayer not by taking away the thorn, but by giving him strength to bear it. Through this experience of personal weakness, Paul writes, he learned to rely not on himself, but only on God. AFor when I am weak,@ he writes, Athen I am strong.@

The gospel tells us of Jesus= rejection by his own community. AThey took offense at him,@ the gospel says. Jesus offended people in three ways. For some he was too ordinary: AIs he not the carpenter?@ they ask. What makes him so special?   Others were offended because Jesus was not ordinary. AWhere did this man get all this? What kind of wisdom has been given him? What mighty deeds are wrought by his hands!@ Others still were offended because Jesus seemed so weak. This was the judgment of the bystanders at Calvary, who jeered: ASo you were going to destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days! Save yourself now by coming down from that cross.@ (Mk 15:29f). Such taunts were the final judgment of Jesus= contemporaries on this man who seemed to make himself equal with God, yet who, when the chips were down, was unable to save himself from a criminal=s death.  

By any normal worldly standards Jesus= life was anything but a success story.  Most of those who knew him remained quite unimpressed. Many took offense at him. That was true then. It is no different today. True, Jesus no longer comes to people in his human body. Today he comes through his mystical body, the Church.  People encounter and judge Jesus Christ today through those who have become members of his body in baptism C in other words, through us. We have been made eyes, ears, hands, feet, and voice for Jesus Christ. He has no other. 

Many people today say that they accept Jesus Christ, but want nothing to do with the Church. For some the Church is too ordinary. The Church is full of hypocrites, they say, people who are no better than anyone else. Others are offended because the Church is not ordinary. They find us remote, hopelessly out of date. The Church, they complain, preaches irrelevant dogmas to people who need practical help coping with life=s daily problems. They are offended because the Church C and that means us C lacks compassion for people who cannot live up to the Church=s unrealistically high moral standards. Still others are offended because the Church seems so weak. Why doesn=t the Church do something, they ask, about the terrible problems of society: urban poverty and blight in the richest country on earth, crime and terrorism, injustice, greed, and the rape of the environment?

People today, in short, are offended by the Church for reasons very similar to those that caused Jesus= contemporaries to be offended at him. Many seek a Apure@ Church: one that is not ordinary, not remote, not weak. Some C including many Catholics who are no longer with us C think they have found this pure Church in a community of Aborn again Christians@ who exclude the lax and the lukewarm.  Others find the pure Church they are seeking on television. The worshipers you=ll see there on Sunday morning are all squeaky clean. The preacher always has a polished and uplifting message. The singing is always fervent and on key. How many Catholic parishes can compete with that?

The Catholic Church doesn=t even try to compete. Like its Lord, the Catholic Church is, most of the time, very ordinary and quite unimpressive. It is the Church of saints, yes. Yet it is also the Church of sinners C and never more obviously so than right now, when the media still bombard us with lurid stories of priestly failings and sins. The Catholic Church is and will always remain the Church of sinners for one simple reason. It stubbornly insists on making room for people who slip and fall and compromise; who are weak in faith C whose faith, in not a few cases, is difficult to distinguish from superstition. Who are these people? We are! We need to ask ourselves this question: if the Church were as pure as I would like it to be, would there be room in this immaculately pure Church for an ordinary weak sinner like me?

The Catholic Church, in short, is human, as Jesus was human. It is ordinary, as he was ordinary. It can be remote, as Jesus was sometimes remote. And it is often weak, as Jesus was weak. Hidden behind this ordinariness and remoteness and weakness, however, is all the power of God; all the compassion of his Son Jesus; and all the strength of his Holy Spirit, who came in flaming tongues on the first Pentecost to kindle a fire that is still burning; and to sweep people off their feet with a rushing might wind that is still blowing.

Most of Jesus= contemporaries took offense at him. As another translation of our gospel has it, AThey found him too much for them.@ What about you?

FREEDOM IS NOT FREE

Homily for July 4^th, 2015.      

             The 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia 239 years ago today pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. Have you ever wondered what happened to them? 

Five signers were captured by the British as traitors, and tortured before they died. Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned. Two lost their sons serving in the Revolutionary Army; another had two sons captured. Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the Revolutionary War.

What kind of men were they? Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists. Eleven were merchants, nine were farmers and large plantation owners: men of means, well educated, but they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that if they were captured, the penalty would be death. Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, saw his ships swept from the seas by the British Navy. He sold his home and properties to pay his debts, and died in rags. Thomas McKeam was so hounded by the British that he was forced to move his family almost constantly. He served in the Continental Congress without pay, and his family was kept in hiding. His possessions were taken from him, and poverty was his reward. Vandals or soldiers looted the properties of 8 others [Dillery, Hall, Clymer, Walton, Gwinnett, Heyward, Ruttledge, and Middleton].

At the battle of Yorktown, Thomas Nelson, Jr. noted that the British General Cornwallis had taken over the Nelson home for his headquarters. He quietly urged General George Washington to open fire. The home was destroyed, and Nelson died bankrupt. Francis Lewis had his home and properties destroyed. The enemy jailed his wife, and she died within a few months. John Hart was driven from his wife's bedside as she was dying. Their 13 children fled for their lives. His fields and his gristmill were laid to waste. For more than a year he lived in forests and caves, returning home to find his wife dead and his children vanished.

As we give thanks to God for the courage and generosity of these founders of our beloved country, we need to remember: Freedom is never free!

"THOMAS WAS NOT WITH THEM."

Homily for July 3^rd, 2015: John 20:24-29.

          On the evening of Jesus’ resurrection, Thomas was not with the other apostles. He did not see Jesus until he rejoined them a week later. Then he uttered what many scripture scholars believe may have been the last words spoken by any of Jesus’ disciples in the original version of John’s gospel: “My Lord and my God!”

Thomas’s experience has an important lesson for us. Faith is not a private me-and-God affair. Jesus taught us this in the one prayer he gave us. It begins not “My Father,” but “Our Father.” We pray as members of a community. We need each other. Why? Here’s one answer.

Dwight L. Moody, founder of the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, tells about visiting an old friend. As they chatted in the evening by the friend’s fireplace, the host said to Moody. “I don’t see why I can’t be just as good a Christian outside the Church as within it.” Without replying, Moody used tongs to pick up a blazing coal with tongs, allowing it to burn by itself.  In silence the two men watched it smolder and go out.         

          Dwight Moody believed that the support which believers give one another was an affair of this world only. We Catholics believe more. When we say in the Creed, “I believe in the communion of saints,” we are acknowledging that the community which we entered through baptism extends beyond this world. It includes the saints and our beloved dead. A passage in the letter to the Hebrews expresses this belief. It comes at the beginning of chapter 12. The preceding chapter recounts the great heroes of faith in the Old Testament. The writer portrays them as spectators in an arena, cheering on and encouraging us, who are still competing in the race which they ran before us. Then come these words. I discovered them as a young teenager. They thrilled me then. They thrill me still: 

          “Seeing then that we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which clings so close, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the beginning and end of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising its shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.”

THE GOD OF THE IMPOSSIBLE

Homily for July 2^nd, 2015: Genesis 22:1b-19.

          The story in today’s first reading of the patriarch Abraham preparing to kill his son Isaac is, to us, horrifying. In the ancient world, however, human sacrifice was no more shocking than today’s wars, large and small. Important for us is what this story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son Isaac tells us of the Lord God. It shows us God doing his characteristic work: bringing life out of death. Let me explain.

          We hear the first note of this theme in God’s promise to Abraham that he and his wife Sarah, whose hope of issue has long since died, will receive in their old age a son through whose descendants “Abraham shall become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall bless themselves by him” (Gen. 18:18). That promise was so preposterous that Sarah laughed – and her husband as well (Gen. 17:17 and 18:18). From the deadness of Sarah’s womb, however, God brings forth new life. When her son is born, he receives the Hebrew name Isaac, which in that language means “laughter.” His very birth was a divine joke. The laughter of Isaac’s parents is long past, however, when his father, in response to what he is convinced is a divine command, prepares to kill the son upon whose survival the fulfillment of God’s promise depends. Ten seconds from death at his father’s hand the boy is saved by the message of an angel.

          If we had time I could go through the stories of Abraham’s descendants and show you how, in every generation, God repeatedly does the impossible, by bringing life out of death. This culminates in the event of the Passover, when Moses and God’s whole people, doomed to certain death between the impassible waters of the sea ahead of them, and Pharaoh’s whole army advancing upon them from behind, is saved through divine intervention.

Why does the Bible devote so much space to recording these “mighty acts” of God? Because they show us who God is: not just who he was, but (because God never changes) who he is today, and will be for all time. He remains always “the same yesterday today and forever” (Heb. 13:8). Even in a nuclear age the Lord’s arm (to use biblical language) is not shortened.

          Is it consistent with biblical faith to assume that we shall always remain the kind of people we have been and are – never changing in any fundamental way, never growing? The final book of the Bible tells us that God “makes all things new” (Rev. 21:5). Believing those words is, admittedly, not always easy. When we doubt, we are in good company. Abraham and Sarah not only doubted but laughed – and were brought up short with the question: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” Centuries later, one of their descendants, questioning how she could be the mother of God’s Son while remaining a virgin, received a remarkably similar response: “Nothing is impossible to God” (Lk 1:37; Jerusalem Bible). This is the God whom we encounter here in the Eucharist: in his holy word, in the sacrament of his body and blood; the God who brings life out of death, who, time after time, does the impossible. 

 

"GO HOME TO YOUR FAMILY."

Homily for July 1^st, 2015: Matthew 8:28-34.

          “They begged Jesus to leave their district,” we heard at the end of the gospel reading. But of course. The loss of the herd of pigs was a disaster for the local economy. The story is one of the strangest in the New Testament. Jesus heals a man of insanity. He has been living like an animal in a cave. According to the ideas of that day, he is possessed by evil spirits. Jesus drives out the spirits, who enter some pigs feeding nearby. The animals rush headlong over a cliff into the lake, and are drowned.

          We must leave these bizarre details to the Scripture scholars. Important for us is what happens to the man after his healing. For that we must turn to Mark’s gospel. He tells us that the man begs Jesus to take him with him. The man is crushed when Jesus refuses this request and tells him: “Go home to your family and announce to them all that the Lord in his pity has done for you.” 

          “To my family?" we can imagine the man thinking. They were the people who had driven him out of his mind in the first place. At home everyone would point him out, whisper about him, laugh at him. What would happen to his new-found sanity and peace of mind then?

          With a cold, dead weight on his heart the man watches Jesus and his friends get into the boat. They row out a little way from shore and set the sails. Gradually the boat gets smaller and smaller, until it is only a speck on the horizon. And the man thinks: “Out there is the man who has changed my life: the kindest, the most wonderful man I have ever met.” It must have been a long time before the man finds the courage to turn round and climb the cliff gain, obeying Jesus’ command: “Go home . . . ”

          In a few minutes the Lord will give you that same command. Perhaps you’d prefer to stay. How good it is to be with Jesus. It is quiet and peaceful in church at this early morning hour. How difficult it is to return to the rough and tumble of daily life, to the demands that await you as soon as you do return. But return you must. We live not on the mountain tops of great spiritual experiences. Most of life’s journey is spent in the valleys; and for each of us there are times when those valleys are dark. When you must walk in darkness, remember the beautiful words of the most loved of all the 150 psalms, Psalm 23: “Even though I walk in the dark, I fear no evil; for you are at my side, with your rod and your staff that give me courage.”

"WHY ARE YOU TERRIFIED?"

Homily for June 30^th, 2015: Matthew 8:23-27.

Jesus is sound asleep in a boat, in the middle of a storm B the only place in the gospels, incidentally, where we find Jesus sleeping. It was the sleep of exhaustion after a busy day of healing and teaching. But it was also the tranquil rest of the only man in that boat who had no reason for fear amid the elemental forces of nature.

Though the disciples were experienced seamen, these seasoned fishermen turn in panic to their sleeping master, who unlike them was no sailor, with the anguished cry: ALord, save us! We are perishing?@ “Why are you terrified, O you of little faith,” Jesus responds calmly. Then, Matthew tells us, he “rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm.”

It was more than the stillness of nature. There was an eerie calm in the boat as well, as Jesus= disciples look at each other in amazement, each formulating the same question: AWho then is this whom even wind and sea obey?@ Their Scriptures told them that only God could do what they had just seen Jesus do.

From the earliest times Christians have compared the Church to a ship. Like the ark, which rescued Noah and his family from the great flood, the Church preserves us from the flood of danger and evil in the world. Time and again, however, our ship is buffeted by storms. Whenever storms assault the Church, it is easy to think that the Lord is absent B or at least indifferent. Like those first friends of Jesus in the storm on the lake, we cry out in fear. At the proper time B which is God’s time, not ours B the Lord banishes the danger, and with it our cause for fear. In Mark’s version of this story Jesus puts another question to his terrified friends: ADo you not yet have faith?@ Jesus is asking us that same question right now: ADo you not yet have faith?@ What better response could we give than the cry of a friend of Jesus in Mark’s gospel: ALord, I believe. Help my unbelief.@  (Mark 9:24) 

"YOU ARE PETER."

Homily for June 29^th, 2015.

AYou are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church.@ In Jesus= language, Aramaic, the words for Peter and Rock were the same. In calling his friend, Simon, APeter,@ Jesus was giving him a new name: ARock.@

In reality, Peter was anything but rocklike. When, on the night before he died, Jesus told Peter that within hours Peter would deny him three times, Peter protested: AEven though I have to die with you, I will never disown you.@ (Mt. 26:34f) We all know the sequel: Jesus was right, Peter wrong.

Jesus gave the position of leadership of his Church to the friend whose love was imperfect; whose impetuosity and weakness made the name Jesus gave him C Rock C ironic: as ironic as calling a 350-pound heavyweight ASlim.@  Before he was fit to become the Church=s leader, however, Peter had experience his weakness. He had to become aware that without a power greater than his own, he could do nothing.

With Peter the Church honors the Apostle Paul. His call was as surprising as the choice of Peter to be the Church=s leader. Who could have imagined that the Church=s arch-persecutor, Saul, would become its first and greatest missionary, Paul? If Peter was impulsive, impetuous, and often weak, Paul was hypersensitive, touchy, subject to wide swings of mood: at times elated, at others tempted to self-pity. No one who knew Paul would ever have accused him of Ahaving it all together@ C to use modern jargon.

Is there anything like that in your life? When you look within, do you see any of Paul=s touchiness, or Peter=s impetuosity and weakness? Take heart! You have a friend in heaven C two friends, in fact: Peter and Paul. The same Lord who gave the vacillating Simon the name of ARock@; who summoned the Church=s arch-enemy, Saul, to be her great missionary, Paul, is calling you. In baptism he made you, for all time, his dearly loved daughter, his beloved son. He called you to be not only his disciple, but an apostle: his messenger to others. You say you=re not fit for that? You=re right. Neither am I! God often calls those who, by ordinary human standards, are unfit. But he always fits those whom he calls.  

God has a plan for your life, as surprising and wonderful as his plans for Peter and Paul. Knowing this, and aware of how God was accomplishing his plan in Paul=s own life, Paul could write: AI am sure of this much: that he who has begun the good work in you will carry it through to completion, right up to the day of Christ Jesus@ (Phil. 1:6).

Those words are part of the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ. And the best news of all is simply this. The only thing that can frustrate the accomplishment of God's plan C for you, for me, for any one of us C is our own deliberate and final No.