Homily:
32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle B
In the film,
“Good Morning Vietnam”, Robin Williams plays the role of Adrian Cronauer, a
rogue radio broadcaster for the military radio network who had just been sent
to Vietnam during the armed conflict there.
The film is one that mixes comedy and drama. One of the more humorous (although
irreverent) parts of the film occurs when Adrian “substitute teaches” an
English class for some local people. In
it he is trying to teach them how to use English curse words. He suggests a situation to one man that ought
to get up his ire—that a waitress just spilled hot soup over his nicest
suit—and asks the man how he would respond.
The man, however, responds politely.
Adrian tries harder and suggests that this waitress is now beginning to
push him and insult not only him, but also his family. Still, the man responds politely, saying that
he will “remain reticent”. Finally,
Adrian works up into a fury, claiming that the waitress has now brought spoons
and knives from the kitchen is doing horrible things to him, like stabbing him
and gouging out his eyes, and he asks the man in the class, “What are you going
to say!?” The man leans in and responds,
“Well, I’m waiting to die.”
This exchange
highlights certain differences in cultural biases between Americans and Vietnamese,
so much so that for Adrian, this man’s response to being attacked made
absolutely no sense to him. Adrian did
not have this man’s frame of reference (one that values respect for another
even when that respect isn’t being shown to you) and so could not make sense of
this man’s unwillingness to defend himself from this abuse.
In the Gospel
reading, we encounter another similar kind of exchange. We all know this story, of course, because
we’ve heard it a hundred times and a hundred times we’ve heard the “moral” of
the story: “The widow gave everything, so we, too, should give
everything.” We’ve heard it so often
that we are no longer sensitive to the fact that what she did was, in truth,
unreasonable. I mean, how many people
suffering in poverty do you know who go around giving up all that they have
left to some religious institution.
These days, if we heard of someone asking people to give up all of their
life savings for some vague promise of benevolence from God, we’d call that
person either a scam artist or a cult leader.
And the people that follow their lead we call gullible and naïve. Yet here is this poor widow, dropping her
last two cents into the temple treasury.
She’s nuts, right? And what’s
even more nuts is that Jesus commends her for it!
Perhaps,
however, since this story is included in the Gospel and since I think that it’s
a safe bet that most of us here believe that the Bible is God’s words to us and
that Jesus wasn’t a madman… perhaps we can give them the benefit of the doubt
and try to understand what makes this poor widow’s act—and Jesus’ commendation
of her act—reasonable.
First, let’s
look at the widow’s situation. She’s a
widow, thus she no longer has the financial support of a household and so she
most assuredly is poor. The Gospel
doesn’t say that she’s old, but I think that it is safe to assume that she is
advanced in years. Thus, with no income
and being advanced in years (and no retirement plan or Social Security to pull
from), she was probably reaching the end of whatever financial means that she
had at her disposal. I can imagine this
woman taking a hard look at her situation and saying to herself, “When this is
gone, I’m going to die.” /// She had a choice to make: would she cling to those
last two coins, trying to make as much use out of them as she could and thus
extending her life to the maximum possible limit, or would she turn it over to
God, abandoning her whole life to his promise, made so often in the Psalms, to
care for the poor and the widow. Simply
stated, if God didn’t exist, her act would be an act of lunacy, almost
suicidal. She dropped those coins into
the treasury, though, didn’t she? And
why? Because of her faith. And so it seems that faith has the power to
correct our reason.
My brothers and
sisters, the reality of our lives is that we are all like that poor widow. In spite of whatever worldly riches we might
enjoy in this world, we are nonetheless poor in the eyes of God. None of us can know when we are going to die
and so death, too, remains always before us.
Therefore, the question that faces us is the same question that faced
the poor widow: will we use what we have for ourselves in an attempt to extend
our lives for as long as possible, or will we turn it over to God, abandoning
ourselves to him because of his promise to care for us?
Many years ago,
before I was a seminarian, I was searching for authenticity in my life. I had just rediscovered the Faith and was
striving to learn how to live it. I came
across this quote from Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard and was moved by it. I cut it out and taped it to the inside of my
bible so I wouldn’t forget it. Cardinal
Suhard said that “Every Christian, especially the Christian priest, must be a
witness. To be a witness consists in
being a living mystery. It means to live
in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God didn’t exist.” Little did I know at that time that I would
be a Christian priest. Nonetheless, his
words put before me today the same question as they did when I first encountered
it: Would the way that I live my life still make sense if God didn’t exist?
My brothers and
sisters, the world is trying to convince us that God doesn’t exist and thus
that to follow Christ is completely unreasonable. Like Adrian Cronauer’s cultural blindness in
that English class in Vietnam, however, the world cannot see the thing that
makes our lives reasonable: our faith.
My brothers and sisters, it is because God lives that the widow’s
offering is not only reasonable, but commendable, and it is God’s existence
that makes our faith, and thus our acts of abandonment to him, also reasonable.
Over the past
couple of weeks, you’ve had the chance to discern how God is calling you to
serve both our parish and our community.
Today, I am asking you to exercise your stewardship by making a
commitment of your time and talent to serve in our parish and community. Hopefully you brought your Time and Talent
pledge forms with you and have them completed.
If not, there are some extra forms in the pews. Please mark if you’re “I - Interested” in
knowing more about a ministry, “C – to Continue” in a ministry, or “R – to Remove”
from a ministry (and if a ministry isn’t listed, feel free to write it in). Also, please be sure to fill out your
personal information on the back of the form.
Finally, please note that these are not life-long commitments, but simply
a sign that you’re ready to step deeper into the ways that God is calling you
to serve.
I’ll give you a
few moments to fill them out before the ushers come forward to collect
them. Like our financial stewardship,
stewardship of our time and talent is a way that we demonstrate our faith to
the world. Therefore, my brothers and
sisters, be bold and thus give witness to the great mystery of God’s presence
among us.
Given
at Saint Mary’s Cathedral: Lafayette, IN
November
10th & 11th, 2018
