----------------------------------------------
Homily:
16th Sunday of Ordinary Time – Cycle C
This past Tuesday, I attended the Peru
For most of the evening, all three rings of the circus had
performers in them and many times, they weren’t all doing the same things. I started to get overwhelmed as I was trying
to shift my attention from the one act that was right in front of me to the
other acts in the other two rings so that I didn’t miss anything (and, having a
bit of a “parent streak” in me now, I wanted to be sure that I was giving
applause to everyone so that none of them would feel unappreciated). After three hours of doing all that I was
exhausted! As I reflected on the
evening, what I realized was that I was experiencing something that I think a
lot of people in our day and age suffer from, which is what I call “the fear of
missing out”.
This “fear of missing out” is a peculiarly modern condition
that many of us suffer from in which we feel the need to fill our days with
doing or experiencing every possible thing that we can because we are afraid
that if we didn’t we’d be “missing out” on something. All you have to do is watch a few commercials
on TV and you will quickly find that advertisers are intently focused on
engaging this fear in each and every one of us.
“Don’t miss out! Sale
In our Gospel reading today, we are presented with a case
study of these to modes of living in the persons of Martha and Mary. Obviously, Martha is the one who becomes too
focused on “doing” while Mary is the one who remains focused on “being”. Now, it would be pretty easy for me to stand
here and say that “Jesus commended Mary for ‘choosing the better part’, so
start being more like Mary than Martha”, but I think that would belittle the
point. Notice that in the first reading
Abraham and Sarah went wild with work to serve the three strangers that came
upon them and that for all of their “doing” they were blessed with the announcement
that within a year, Sarah (who was thought to be barren at that point) will
give birth to a son. Hospitality was an
important value for the peoples of the Ancient Near East, and thus we see both
Abraham and Martha responding as was expected of them when unexpected guests
came to their homes.
And so, why, then, did Jesus commend Mary, who wasn’t doing
anything, over Martha, who was working so hard to be hospitable? I believe it is because he recognized that
Martha was so focused on “doing” all of the right things that she forgot to notice
who she was doing it for. It’s not that
Jesus wouldn’t have delighted in whatever food and refreshments that Martha
would have provided, but he came to see them and to “feed” on their company,
rather than just to have a good meal.
Martha, it seems, was reacting to a fear of not doing something—that is,
of leaving something left out—and so was chastised a little by Jesus, while
Mary focused on what was more important—that is, enjoying the company of their
guest and allowing the guest to enjoy their company—and so was commended for
it.
And this, of course, continues to be a temptation for us
all. I mean, how often during holidays
or other special occasions do we get so caught up in the preparations and
executions of our celebrations that we fail to enjoy what it was that we were
doing it all for in the first place: to delight in the company of family and
friends? Or how about with our
stewardship? How often do we get so caught
up in the “doing” of our service that we forget to connect with those whom we
are serving? The best part about the
“Loaves and Fishes” lunches is not the number of people who have a good, hot
meal that day, but rather the number of people who walked in as strangers and
left feeling like they had been seen and cared for. This is the balance that this case study
shows us: our work, even our hospitality, is not an end in itself; it is always
a means to the end of growing in communion with one another.
You know, every week, through his Church, God prepares a
banquet for us and a lot of people do a lot of work to make the banquet
special. If all of our work is only an
attempt to “do something pretty (or entertaining… or whatever)” then we’ve
missed the point of why God prepares it for us.
God prepares the banquet for us because he delights in our company and
he wants us to delight in his. Thus,
the focus of the Liturgy is on “being” together—that is, Mary sitting at the
feet of Jesus—more than it is on “doing” something for the Lord—that is, Martha
obsessing over serving.
My brothers and sisters, Jesus invites us to be with him
today. And so if you are feeling
burdened with trying to do it all or trying take it all in, then just stop a
while and enjoy this time that we have with him each and every week: this time
at the feet of Jesus; because when you do that then you’ll see what’s truly
important and you’ll never regret what you’ve “missed out” on because you’ll
have already done the one thing that is truly valuable: you will have seen
Jesus and you will have been seen and felt cared for by him.
You know, our lives, often times, can feel like a
three-ring circus (and perhaps even more so when we are trying to live our
baptismal call to give loving service to God and our neighbor). Jesus reminds us today, however, that he
never desires us to be so preoccupied with our serving—that is, with
“doing”—that we miss out on the opportunity to be with him: both here at Mass
and in the encounters we have with him in our daily lives. Let us, then, pray for the grace to abandon
our fears for what we might “miss out” on in this world, so that we don’t fail
to enjoy the one thing that truly matters: the love and fellowship of Jesus.
Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport , IN
No comments:
Post a Comment