I'm sure folks weren't expecting it, but what they got this week was a pretty good funeral homily. I guess since I haven't had one in a while, my spirit was itchin' to preach about hope in the resurrection (and the readings this weekend paved the way for it) :-)
Next Saturday, I leave on the Youth Service trip to Virginia Beach, VA (Catholic HEART Work Camp). Thus, I won't have a homily to post. Perhaps I'll have a chance to post some news from the trip though. Please pray for us!
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Homily:
10th Sunday of Ordinary Time – Cycle C
Friday, I received an e-mail from my mom telling me that
they had to put their cat Jeffery down.
Jeffery was an old cat. We
acquired him close to twenty years ago, when I was still in high school. In recent months he had become very feeble
and was having difficulty moving around.
Finally, this week his rear legs began to give out on him and that’s
when my parents decided to put him down.
When I talked to my mom later in the day, she related to me how she had
informed my six and a half year old niece, Rachel, and her almost four year old
brother Luke that they were going to put Jeffery to sleep. Now Rachel and Luke had already had an
experience similar to this. Just last
year, my sister had to put down their dog Trigger, whom both Rachel and Luke
had known their whole lives. Thus, when
my mom told them what was going to happen to Jeffery, she said that he would go
to be in “animal heaven” with Trigger.
She then gave them both a chance to say “goodbye” to Jeffery to which they
replied, “Bye bye, Jeffery. Say hello to
Trigger!”
With my adult understanding of death, I was surprised (and,
I must say, delighted) by the simplicity of my niece and nephew’s response to
their encounter with the death of someone they knew. Jeffery was going to sleep and we wouldn’t
see him again, but there was no reason to be sad because he was going to
“heaven” to be with Trigger and the other animals that had “gone to
sleep”. Theirs is a simple “He’ll be in a
better place” kind of hope. This is because,
as kids, they just don’t have the capacity yet to consciously register what
death means for them and so the death of someone loosely connected to them
doesn’t cause them any great distress.
As they grow older, however, they will, of course, develop the capacity
to see how it is possible that what happens to others could also happen to them;
and thus an encounter with death will become a much more complex experience for
them.
Our readings today give us a couple of examples of this. Both the widow of Zarephath and the widow of
Nain are facing death on multiple levels.
As tragic as the deaths of their sons are for them, their tragedies are
amplified by the fact that they’ve also lost their house and home. Back in ancient Israel, after the death of
her husband, a woman becomes the responsibility of her son and if no son is
alive to provide for her, she is left poor and without means to provide for
herself. Thus the normal distress that
comes with facing the death of a loved one is complicated for them by the very
real possibility that each of them would be left without food and shelter and
soon face their own death from starvation, illness or, perhaps, mistreatment by
others. As the Scriptures have shown us,
however, God would not abandon them.
To the widow of Zarephath God sent Elijah. At first the widow thought that Elijah, the
man of God, had come to bring a curse (because to her it was no mere coincidence
that his arrival coincided with her son’s illness and death). Elijah had great concern for this widow who
had shown him such great hospitality, however, and so he prayed that God would
restore this woman’s son—and, thus, her livelihood—back to her; which he did.
To the widow of Nain the Son of God himself came. In this case the man of God—Jesus—waits for
no complaints or cries for help. Instead,
the Gospel tells us that he “was moved by pity for her” and thus offers the
woman encouragement before he himself raises the dead man to life, which, in
effect, gives her back her own life.
In both cases, God restored hope to the widows by showing
that he had not abandoned them and that he had the power to reverse even death. For us Christians, this hope has been
definitively established through the death and resurrection of Jesus. Nevertheless, death and sadness still
exist. Thus, at times we still have
trouble finding hope. Recently, I had my
own experience of this with the death of my dear friend Fr. Scott Carroll.
Perhaps many of you have heard or read about Fr.
Scott. He was the man from Ohio who was
very sick from cancer and who was ordained to the priesthood two days before he
died. Fr. Scott and I started seminary together,
but his diocese required him to spend a year working in a parish and so he fell
a year behind me in studies. We remained
close, however, and I was greatly looking forward to his ordination on the
twenty-second of this month. When it was
found that the cancer that was first detected and treated in 2011 had returned,
the prognosis wasn’t very good. Nevertheless,
Fr. Scott entered treatments at the beginning of this year, hoping to make it
to June 22nd. The cancer,
however, was moving faster than the treatment could handle. For weeks his bishop encouraged Fr. Scott to
allow him to ordain him early. On May
the 8th Fr. Scott agreed to be ordained and was made a priest at his
home, surrounded by his family. When I
saw the picture of Fr. Scott with his bishop after he had just been ordained,
he looked weak and thin and it was obvious from the picture that he hadn’t gotten
out of his hospital bed for the ordination.
I was immediately struck with sadness to see my friend in this
state. That, coupled with his bishop’s
move to ordain him early, and I knew that he was not going to live much
longer. I made plans to travel to Ohio
to see him on the 10th, but received a call that morning saying that
he had died overnight. Of course, I was
deeply saddened by this and this sadness persisted through the weekend and came
to a peak at the viewing, when I knew I must say goodbye.
The funeral, of course, was beautiful. During it I gradually felt my sadness opening
up to hope: the hope promised us in the Resurrection. Although my sadness did not disappear, it was
now being infused with hope: and not a shallow, “he’s in a better place” kind
of hope, but rather a deep hope, founded on true faith in the promise of
eternal peace that awaits those who remain faithful to him. My friends, this is the true Christian hope
that Jesus gives us: not one that tells us not to be sad, but rather one that
infuses that sadness—that true sense of loss—with the faith to trust in God’s
promised presence, even when all seems lost.
Therefore, my brothers and sisters, I think that the lesson
for us today is to remember that we are all widows in one way or another; for
we will all suffer (or, perhaps, have suffered) great losses in our lives that
leave us feeling like we’ve just lost everything. But we don’t have to deny our sadness in
order to experience hope. In fact, it is
when we most deeply experience sadness that God is most “moved with pity” for
us, and thus disposed to act in our lives in a way that infuses our sadness
with hope: the ultimate hope that he will one day restore life to all those
who’ve remained faithful. Let us, then,
abandon ourselves to hope: for God has promised us (and Jesus has shown us)
that he will never abandon us to death.
Now, since today is also the first weekend of the
seminarian appeal and the weekend that we celebrate three new priests ordained
for our diocese (and I celebrate my first anniversary as a priest, and Fr. Mike
celebrates his 20th anniversary as a priest, along with many other
ordination anniversaries), I’d like to make one last comment about the
priesthood. Fr. Scott was ordained a
priest about 40 hours before he died.
Many might stop to ask why his bishop ordained him. As I reflected on that, I came to realize
that what he did was show us that the priesthood is more that what we priests do,
it’s about who God has called us to be.
In our second reading today, Saint Paul speaks about how God had “set
him apart from his mother’s womb” to call him by a special grace to be a witness. In a very real way, every priest had been set
apart by God from his mother’s womb for this special grace to be a
witness—solely by their very presence on earth—of God’s promise to never
abandon us to death. Some of us priests
do this by meeting the widow in her sorrow and infusing it with hope. Others, like Fr. Scott, do so solely by
witnessing that hope through remaining faithful to following God’s call, even
to the point of death. Let us, then, give
thanks to God for our new priests and let us pray for them; for they are God’s
promise to us that he will not abandon us.
And let us also respond generously to the seminarian appeal and thus
show God our faith in his never-failing promise.
Given at All Saints Parish:
Logansport, IN – June 8th & 9th, 2013
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