We spend a lot of time, too much time really, looking at other people and what is going on with them. We can be so worried that others will end up with something better than what we have, that we may very well miss the great blessings that are set out for us. None of those migrant workers were cheated, indeed the landowner was fair to all of them. But he went beyond fair; he also recognized the plight of the poor. In case you missed it, that is the Gospel, brothers and sisters in Christ. He decided to give more than he had to to those who might have otherwise gone without anything. He recognized his duty to the poor, and we would all do well to follow his example, because that’s what Christ expects of us. We are also expected to be thankful people. If we have worked all day by the sweat of our brow to earn what we have, then we should be grateful for the grace of honest work. If we received a gift we could never earn, then we should be grateful for the grace freely given. But we must never sully it by looking at what others have received, lest we miss noticing the graces we have received and miss the opportunity to be thankful.
Category: Preaching, Homiletics & Scripture
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Tuesday of the Twentieth Week of Ordinary Time
Today’s Gospel reading follows immediately after yesterday’s in which the rich young man went away sad, not knowing how he could attain eternal life, because he had many possessions. Today, Jesus explains to his disciples what was going on. “Amen, I say to you, it will be hard for one who is rich to enter the Kingdom of heaven.” And it’s not going to be hard because God is setting up the obstacle; it will be hard because we have placed an obstacle between ourselves and God. Jesus isn’t bashing rich people. And it’s not just rich people who will have trouble going to the kingdom. It’s going to be hard for anyone who has an obstacle between themselves and Jesus. So whether that obstacle is riches, or our work, or our lifestyle, or whatever, we need to let go of all that. It’s going to be hard for us to get into heaven with obstacles in our way, “but for God all things are possible.” If we let go of our obstacles, if we make a real sacrifice for the kingdom, then the kingdom is ours.
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Monday of the Twentieth Week of Ordinary Time
So the question today is, what is it that holds us back? The rich young man seemed to have it all together: he acknowledged Jesus as the good teacher, so he must have been familiar with what Jesus said and did. He kept all the commandments, so he certainly had a religious upbringing and was zealous to follow the law. But, with all that, he still knew that something was lacking. “What do I still lack?” he asks. When Jesus reveals that the next step in following the Gospel involves letting go of his worldly possessions, he finds that to be somewhere he can’t go. He had many possessions, and he wasn’t yet ready to give them up.
So back to my first question. What holds us back? Is it many possessions? Maybe, but maybe not. It could be our work, or power, or what the neighbors might think. It could be that we don’t want to get out of our comfortable boats and follow Christ according to the way he is calling us. Whatever it is, it involves letting go – giving up what is not God and clinging to him alone. It’s not that Jesus didn’t want the rich young man to have money. He wanted him to have eternal life. And whenever we cling to what is not God, we are in effect giving up eternal life.
There’s the old joke about the man who fell off a cliff, and on the way down he snagged a precarious branch to hold on to. But there was no way he could get to safety, so he called out for help: “Is anyone up there? I need help!” Suddenly he heard a voice in response to his pleas: “Let go.” He thought about that for a minute and said, “Is there anyone else up there?”
We have to be ready to let go of whatever holds us back from accepting the life that God wants for us. What he has is so much better than whatever it is we’re holding on to. So the question is, will we give up what is holding us back, or will we give up eternal life?
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Twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time [B]
Today we have set before us two tables. One is the incredibly rich banquet of wisdom, and the other is, I don’t know, the fast food of foolishness, I guess. The question is, at which table have we been eating?
We see in today’s first reading the personification of wisdom. Wisdom is seen as a female character who has made preparations for a luxurious meal. Meat has been prepared, and that was a luxury in biblical times. Wine has been mixed, probably with spices to improve its flavor and make it a bit more potent. But the invitation has gone out not to the rich and powerful, but the simple and those who lack understanding. These are the ones who are called to the banquet of wisdom to partake of this incredible meal. They will feast on the rich meat of understanding and be carried away by the potency of the wine of enlightenment. But coming to that table requires turning away from foolishness, and it is only by doing so and eating at this table that one can live.
The second reading, too, speaks of this choice, but with a tone of warning: be sure to live not as foolish persons but as wise – watch carefully, St. Paul warns, how you live. He acknowledges that the days in which the Ephesians were living were evil ones, something to which, I think, every generation can relate – no generation ever fails to experience evil in some way at some time. And so, to combat evil, they – and we – are warned to aspire to right conduct. Try to understand the will of God, which is the project of all our lives. Don’t live in drunkenness, whether caused by wine or just by immersing oneself into the foolishness of the world around you. Instead, we are called to be people of prayer, following God’s will, singing God’s praise, “giving thanks always and for everything.” The word thanks here is, in Greek, eucharisteo, of course, meaning we are to live as Eucharistic people, aware of God’s blessings, and thankful for the grace we have received.
All of this serves as a fitting prelude to the choice Jesus’ audience is facing in today’s Gospel. They have been mesmerized by the feeding of the multitudes that we heard about a few weeks ago. And they have been hanging in there as Jesus has unpacked the meaning of that event in the time that has followed. But now, they have to come to terms with all of it. Many are repulsed, understandably, I think, at the notion of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of another person. And so now they have to decide if this is something they can live with. Next week, in the Gospel, we will see how that shakes out. But ironically, as we now know, this is something they cannot live without.
As we come to worship today, we have been dining at one of the other of the tables ourselves. Have we been dining at the table of foolishness? Have we tried living by mere human wisdom; put our security and trust in material things; relied on temporary and superficial appearances and even put off feeding our spirits to another time? Have we surfed the web to find wisdom, and gotten bogged down in the nonsense that lurks there? Have we glued ourselves to television and hung on the words of Oprah and Dr. Phil, or been lost in the banal world of reality TV? Those of us who are well educated may have thought book learning would give us answers to life’s imponderables. Perhaps the results have left us still hungry; like trying to fill our stomachs eating lettuce soup. We may feel some initial satisfaction, but it soon passes and all we can think of is where we can find food. We have been dining at the wrong table.
And so wisdom calls out to us simple ones to pull up a chair to the right banquet. Feasting on the richness of wisdom leads us inevitably to the banquet of the Lord. Will we be repulsed at the idea of eating the flesh and blood of our Lord, or will we set aside the so-called wisdom of the world and embrace the real wisdom of God, which is so far beyond our understanding? Jesus says to us today that we can become part of God, indeed that is the whole point. We were created to become part of God’s life, to be caught up in him, and to be part of him. But the problem is, our dining on the fast food of foolishness, the so-called “wisdom” of this world, has left us sinful and sorrowful, with an emptiness that cannot be filled up in that way.
And so God did the only thing he could do. If we could not be part of him because of our foolishness, he decided to become part of us. He sent his son Jesus into our world to walk among us, to live our life, to walk on the earth as we do. Jesus ultimately gave himself for us, offering his body and blood for our salvation, giving us this great nourishment so that he could become part of us in a similar way to the way all food becomes part of us. As we dine at the table of the Lord, our God who wanted us to become part of him becomes part of us, and so we are caught up again into his life as we were always supposed to have been.
Jesus fed several thousand people with five loaves and two fish a few weeks ago. But that was nothing. It was a mere drop in the bucket compared to what he wants to do now. Now he wants to give himself so that we can be one with him:
For my flesh is true food,
and my blood is true drink.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood
remains in me and I in him.People who content themselves in eating the food of this world – even if it’s manna from heaven – will still die. But those – and only those – who eat the bread that is Jesus will live forever. That’s what Jesus tells us today. Because it is only by Jesus becoming part of us that we can become part of God, which is the fulfillment of our destiny as creatures of our God. This is a hard teaching, and we may struggle with it in the same way the crowds struggled with it when Jesus said it. But this is Truth; this is the wisdom of God; this is the way we get filled up so that we never hunger again.
And so which table will we choose now? Please God let us follow the Psalmist’s advice: Taste and see the goodness of the Lord!
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The Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
The tradition of the Assumption of Mary dates back to the very earliest days of the Church, all the way back to the days of the apostles. It was known that Mary had “fallen asleep” and that there is a “Tomb of Mary” close to Mount Zion, where the early Christian community had lived. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 tells us that, after Mary’s death, the apostles opened the tomb, finding it empty, and concluded that she had been taken bodily into heaven. The tradition was spoken about by the various fathers of the Church, and in the eighth century, St. John Damascene wrote, “Although the body was duly buried, it did not remain in the state of death, neither was it dissolved by decay . . . . You were transferred to your heavenly home, O Lady, Queen and Mother of God in truth.” The current celebration of Mary’s Assumption has taken place since 1950, when Pope Pius XII proclaimed the dogma of the Assumption of Mary in his encyclical, Munificentissimus Deus, saying: “The Immaculate Mother of God, the ever-virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heaven.”[1]And so we have gathered here this morning to celebrate the life of Mary, Mother of God, the first of the disciples of Jesus her son. And there is plenty to celebrate in her life. We who would be Jesus’ disciples too, can learn much from the way she lived her discipleship. We can see in her life, I think, at least three qualities of discipleship. The first is joy. She is one who not only allowed something incredibly unbelievable to be done in her, but allowed it with great joy. That she did this with joy tells us something very important about who she was. Teilhard de Chardin wrote, “Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God.” Those who live with joy, true joy, do so because God is at work in them and God is at work through them. Mary knew this from the moment the angel came to her.
The second quality we see in Mary’s prayer is humility. She knew this wasn’t about her; this was about what God was doing in her and through her. It wasn’t she that did great things, no, “the Almighty has done great things for me,” she tells us, “and holy is his Name!” The third quality is faith: Mary’s simple faith allowed her to say “yes” to God’s will and made possible the salvation of the world. Because of that faith, she had a bond with our Savior beyond anything we could ever hope for. Indeed without Mary’s fiat, her great leap of faith, the salvation of humanity may have gone quite poorly.
What is important for us to see in this feast, though, is that it proclaims with all the joy the Church can muster that what happened to Mary can and will happen for us who believe. We too have the promise of eternal life in heaven, where death and sin and pain will no longer have power over us. Because Christ caught his Blessed Mother back up into his life in heaven, we know that we too can be caught up with his life in heaven. On that great day, death, the last enemy, will be completely destroyed, as St. Paul tells us today.
Mary’s life wasn’t always easy, but Mary’s life was redeemed. That is good news for us who have difficult lives or fine it hard to live our faith. Because there are those among us too who have unplanned pregnancies. There are those among us whose children go in directions that put them in danger. There are those among us who have to watch a child die. But because Mary suffered these sorrows too, and yet was exalted, we can hope for the day when that which she was given and which we have been promised will surely be ours.
Mary’s life was a prophecy for us. Like Mary, we are called to a specific vocation to do God’s work in the world. We too are called to make sacrifices so that God’s work can be accomplished in us and through us. We too can be joyful because God is at work in us. We too are called to humility that let’s God’s love for others shine through our lives. We too are called to lives of faith that translate into action on behalf of others, a faith that leads God’s people to salvation. And we too, one day, will share in the glory that Mary has already received in the kingdom of God.
Pray for us, O holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.
[1] http://www.ewtn.com/library/ANSWERS/AOFMARY.HTM -
St. Maximilian Mary Kolbe, priest and martyr
Maximilian Kolbe became a Franciscan novice at the age of 16. Earlier in life he had a vision of the Blessed Virgin offering him two crowns, a white one of purity, and a red one of martyrdom. Maximilian said, “I choose both.” The Blessed Virgin smiled and departed from him. Maximilian devoted his life to purity through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin. He founded the Mission of the Immaculata to combat religious indifference, which he saw as the greatest problem in society. By the time the Nazis overran Poland, the mission numbered as many as a million people.
Maximilian was twice arrested by the Nazis and the second time taken to Auschwitz. One day a fellow prisoner escaped, and the commandant decided to put ten men to death, whom he chose by arbitrarily pointing men out as he walked among their ranks. Just after the tenth man was chosen, Maximilian stepped out of the ranks and asked to take the place of one man, who had a wife and children. The commandant asked “what about you?” to which Maximilian replied, “I am a priest.” Because the regime at the time was striving to eliminate all the leaders of the people, Maximilian’s request was granted, and he died in the starvation chamber some three months later.
Our Psalmist today urges us, “His mercy endures forever.” St. Maximilian Kolbe is one who kept the works of the Lord in front of him day and night, and sought to bring God’s mercy to people even in the midst of a harsh and oppressive regime. He was devoted to Mary and through her, to the love of God. That love translated into action, literally giving his life for others. His martyrdom joins his life to that of Christ with an inseparable bond.
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Wednesday of the Ninteenth Week of Ordinary Time
Living the Christian life never means that we just calmly except anything another person does. But we do need to follow a certain procedure in dealing with those sins against us. It’s not right, for example, when we are wronged, or when we perceive we are wronged, to immediately email everyone we know and slander them. Nor is it okay for us disciples to talk about a brother or sister in the Lord behind their back. When someone wrongs us, we owe it to them to give them the opportunity to make amends. We bring the matter to their attention in charity, and open up a pathway to forgiveness. If they choose not to take it, we can escalate the issue as our Lord describes in today’s Gospel, but we never have the right to ruin a person’s good name without cause. Christ has given the keys to forgiveness to the Church as a gift. But that means that we who are the Church have a responsibility to forgive, just as we have been forgiven.
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Saint Lawrence, Deacon & Martyr
St. Lawrence was a deacon of the early Church, who was charged with the care of the goods of the Church. Legend has it that he was called in by the Prefect of Rome, who had just killed Pope Sixtus, whose feast day we celebrated last week. The Prefect told Lawrence that he wanted the treasures of the Church, since Christ didn’t bring any money into the world with him, and hence must not be important. So Lawrence told him to give him a few days to inventory the goods of the Church. Three days later, Lawrence assembled a large group of the widows, orphans, blind, lame and leprous. He presented them to the Prefect saying, “Behold, these are the treasures of the Church.” The Prefect was so angry, he ordered him to be killed, but, in his words “by inches,” meaning a slow and tortuous death. Lawrence was bound to a gridiron and was roasted over coals. At one point in the torture, Lawrence is said to have called out cheerfully, “I am done on this side, I think; you can turn me over now.”
Whether or not that was the real story, the point is that Lawrence’s martyrdom illustrates a beautiful acceptance of Jesus’ call in the Gospel today: “Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life.” We who would be followers of Christ are called to know what the real treasures of life are, and to be willing to sacrifice to protect them.
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Friday of the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time
Today’s Liturgy of the Word asks us to ponder the question, “what do we have to do to remain in covenant with God?” And the question, I think, is an important one. We would want to respond to God’s gracious act of covenanting with us first. We see in today’s readings that he chose us first, and calls us out of love for us. Moses recites the mighty acts of God in which he remembered the promises made to the people’s ancestors and kept them, even though the people certainly didn’t deserve it. Even though they often sought to break the covenant, God kept it anyway, loving the people even when they were unlovable.
But what should our response be? For Moses and the people Israel, the response was to keep the law. The law itself was a wonderful document, given to the people out of love, to help them walk the straight and narrow, and to remain in relationship with God and others. Moses contends that no other nation had gods that were loving and wise enough to provide something like that for their people.
Jesus, of course, takes it several steps further. “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” Following the law was the first step, but it was pretty basic. Even if the people obeyed it – which they often did not – it was still a matter of will mostly, and not heart. Jesus calls us to make the same sacrifice he did: lay down our lives for one another out of love.
“For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” And isn’t that the truth, really? When we get so caught up in ourselves and our own pettiness, how quickly life slips away and we wonder what it all meant. But when we lose our lives following Christ and loving God and neighbor with reckless abandon, well, then we have really found something.
God loved us first and best, and always seeks covenant with us. The law is still a good guide, but the cross is the best measure of the heart. How willing are we this day to lose our lives relentlessly spending the love we have received from our God with others?
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Wednesday of the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time
We have an interesting dichotomy in today’s Liturgy of the Word. First, we have the people Israel, who, as you know if you’ve been following the story these last couple of weeks, have been saved miraculously from abject slavery in Egypt, led through the desert and through the Red Sea to safety, fed with bread from heaven, and hydrated with water from the rock. They have continually been in God’s presence and have been led by a column of cloud by day and fire by night. But they have time and again rejected God and refused to have faith that he would deliver on his promises. Today, at the precipice of the Promised Land, they reject him yet again. And then we have the Canaanite woman in today’s Gospel, who has absolutely no claim on God’s mercy. The Canaanites are the pagan people thrown out of the Promised Land to make room for God’s chosen people. That she would even believe in God is a miracle, and yet her faith today is relentless. Today’s readings embody the question of faith for all of us. Will we give up on grace when we are faced with tough times, or will we choose to believe, against all odds, that God will hear our prayers and say, “Let it be done for you as you wish”?
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