I had to bust my tail today, though. Three Masses in two different languages and a marriage preparation meeting (in Spanish) thrown in for good measure. What a great day!
Here's today's homily. To all my engineering buddies, remember "K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid!)"? If you read this, you'll definitely think about it :)
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Homily:
15th Sunday of Ordinary Time – Cycle C
A few weeks ago, around the time of the anniversary of my
ordination, I was thinking about how what it was like when I was discerning
what God was calling me to do, but didn’t yet know that he was calling me to be
a priest. I remember it being a very
difficult time. Every day I felt like I
was giving all of my energy striving to hear God speaking to me so that I could
know what it was that he was calling me to do.
I remember at one point feeling very frustrated, because I knew that it
couldn’t be as difficult as I seemed to be making it. I even joked with my friends that it was as
if God was right there in my face, screaming what it is he wants me to do and I
was just staring right past him as if he wasn’t even there and saying “God,
where are you?” It wasn’t until a priest
stopped me in my tracks and said very plainly: “Dominic, you know what God
wants you to do, now just do it!” that I finally woke up to see what had been
right in front of me.
You know, I don’t think that this is a very uncommon
experience. In our lives we oftentimes
get distracted or we get so mired in something that our minds and our hearts
get cloudy and it becomes difficult to get clear about what it is, exactly,
that we are supposed to be doing and why it is that we are doing it. In other words, we lose sight of how we got
to where we are at and where it was we were going. This can be in our family life, our career,
or in our spiritual life. What happens
is we get anxious about feeling lost and, instead of looking for the answers
that are right there in front of us, we start striving to look beyond our
situations and beyond ourselves to find a way out. As it turns out, the answer was usually right
in front of us; but because of our anxiety “we couldn’t see the forest for all
the trees”, so to speak.
Moses understood this pretty well. He had spent forty years in the desert with
the Israelite people and multiple times they became frustrated at the long
journey, which clouded their vision about where they were going, and they
started demanding some new way to live: something beyond themselves and God’s
promises that would help alleviate their anxiety. And so, now that they were about to enter
into the land that God had promised them, Moses reminds them that they don’t
need to go beyond themselves when, after they’ve settled in the land, they
begin to feel lost or so mired in their daily lives that they don’t remember
what they were there for and who had brought them there. Rather, he says, “heed the voice of the Lord
and keep his commandments”: the same ones that you learned about in the desert
and that you are so familiar with that they are literally “on your lips and in
your hearts.” In other words, he was
saying, “You already know what God wants you to do, so just do it.”
Unfortunately, our human urge to complicate things is
pretty strong and so we see that by the time of Jesus the Israelites had set up
a whole complicated system of laws and regulations that were intended to ensure
that they always “kept the commands of the Lord”; so much so that they weren’t
accessible to everybody, but rather needed scholars who could interpret it for
people. One of these scholars came to
Jesus today to test him, to see if he was truly a teacher of the Law or if he
was some quack trying introduce some new law or teach something contrary to it. Jesus, however, didn’t fall for it and he
turned the test back on the scholar.
“What do you have to do? You tell
me. You’re a scholar of the law; what
does it say?” Amazingly, this scholar
doesn’t begin to rattle off every one of the more than six hundred regulations
that were included in the Mosaic Law, but rather he states the obvious: love
God and love your neighbor.
Contrary to what the scholar was expecting, Jesus takes the
wind out of his sails and says, “Well, you got it! Do this and you will live.” Hoping that there still might be a chance to
get Jesus into a debate, the scholar then asks him, “but who, then, is my
neighbor.” This, of course, was a much
better question and Jesus gives him a better answer: there’s no complicated
list of rules and regulations for deciding who your neighbor is; neither
politics, nor race, nor land of origin has anything to do with it. Your neighbor is whoever, at any given
moment, happens to be right in front of you.
Yet, we still fall into this same trap, don’t we? We allow ourselves to get so bogged down
trying to do things better that we forget why we were doing it in the first
place and we end up frustrated, thinking it’s too complicated and so we give up
(or at least we’d rather give up). I
mean, how often does a simple household project turn into something five times
more complicated once we get into it? How
often, then, does that project go unfinished because we didn’t feel like we had
the expertise to complete it?
Perhaps we don’t think of it this way, but the same thing
happens in our spiritual lives. We
think, “Oh, I’m struggling to be holy, well then maybe I need to start praying
more rosaries or novenas or chaplets” and we bog ourselves down with trying to
do so much that we forgot what we were trying to do it for: to grow closer to
God! Or perhaps the opposite
happens. We think, “Well, I tried
praying the rosary once and it didn’t work.
Holiness is too complicated, so I’m just going to give up. I’ll show up for mass on Sundays, but that’s
it.” Holiness isn’t complicated; we make
it complicated when we get anxious because we find ourselves stuck in a rut.
Holiness, my brothers and sisters, is not about the
multiplication of prayers and devotions (not that there is anything wrong with
them). Holiness is about living the
commandments of the Lord that are right here in front of us: love God and love
your neighbor. What are some ways we
love God? We pray daily, we actively
participate in the Mass, we read the Bible, and, when we realize that we’ve
offended him in some way, we come to Confession to clear the air between us. And what about loving our neighbor, how do we
do that? We get involved in peoples’
lives, helping them out when and where we can and we allow our plans to get
interrupted by the needs of our brothers and sisters around us, regardless of who
they are or where they came from.
My brothers and sisters, as you can see, this is not
complicated: but it isn’t easy, either, is it?
God did not make getting to heaven complicated, but by sinning, we made
it difficult. Therefore, we need grace
if we even want to have a chance to get there; and we get that through
baptism. Then, we have to keep ourselves
in grace: which we do when we love God and love our neighbor. And if we ever find that we’re in need of
more help to stay in grace, don’t worry because God hasn’t left us hanging. This is why he gave us the other sacraments,
especially the Eucharist. And that’s it! We get into grace and then we strive to keep
ourselves in it (including getting back into it when we’ve fallen out of it)
for the rest of our lives and, boom, we inherit eternal life. No complex spiritual programs or scrupulous
conformance to minute letters of the law: just unflinching devotion to God, in
prayer, praise, and thanksgiving, and unhesitating generosity, in the ways that
we are able, to the needs we encounter daily is all we need to do to become
saints. It’s that simple. You got it?
You get it? Good!
Given at All Saints Parish:
Logansport, IN – July 13th & 14th, 2013
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