Friends, please pray with me tomorrow for a greater respect for life: especially that our nation will become a place where every life, from conception to natural death, is protected and respected.
-------------------------------------------
Homily: 3rd Sunday
in Ordinary Time – Cycle A
If there is
anything that last year’s election and this past Friday’s presidential inauguration
has demonstrated for us, it is that our country remains woefully divided. This is sad, because ultimately we should be
celebrating our democracy and looking forward to the future; but instead we are
bickering like overly-emotional twelve year olds trying to make mom or dad pick
a side and declare a winner.
And while I
wish that I could say that this is a secular problem that doesn’t affect the
Church, simple observation will show that it is a human problem; and since the
Church is as much a human institution as it is a divine one, our human capacity
to bicker like twelve year olds finds its own place among us. The history of the Church, in fact, is a history of one crisis after another. This is because, as I’ve already mentioned,
of our fallen human nature, but also because, from the time of Christ's
Ascension into heaven until the day of his Second Coming, the Church has been
and will continue to be engaged in a spiritual war, in which Satan attacks our
fallen humanity and constantly seeks to divide us.
This very
fact is on display even in the first
generation of Christians. If you
read through Saint Paul's letters, you’ll find that many of them were, in fact,
exercises in crisis management,
written in response to crises of
faith, morals, or church discipline. The
passage we heard today from Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians is a good example of this.
Paul had founded the Christian community in
Corinth during his second missionary journey.
As he usually did, he spent months
gathering and instructing believers after which he appointed local leaders—the
first priests and bishops—to continue his work, while he moved on to another place
to repeat the same work. Now, however,
he has received news that the community he established in Corinth is becoming divided. Strife has broken out among different cliques of believers, who had declared
allegiances to different early Church leaders, thus breaking up the family of Christians. And so Saint Paul wrote to them to remind them that it's not the person
who preaches that matters, but rather the person who is preached: that is, Jesus
Christ, and that all Christians are called to be united in Christ, the one Lord, not divided into camps of “I’m
with her” or “I’m with him”. He strongly
exhorts them to "be united in the same
mind and in the same purpose",
because Christ is of one mind and of one purpose.
This same
problem has come up many times in the history of the Church. For example, in the thirteenth century, when
the Franciscans and the Dominicans were founded, many Catholics began to be
divided: praising one group while criticizing the other. This, of course, was a division that neither
Francis nor Dominic intended and which, like Saint Paul, they worked diligently
to eliminate.
Today, of
course, we face the same temptation. In
recent years, God has raised up a variety of new movements, religious orders,
apostolates, and lay associations. He
has done this in order to open up new channels of grace, arming and supporting
the Church in a new period of history. Unfortunately,
this flowering of new spiritualties has also caused rivalries and divisions. “Unfortunately”, because we all know that a
garden is often most beautiful and most flourishing when there are a wide
variety of blossoms within it. And so
why would any of us in the garden criticize the roses because they don’t look
like daffodils, or criticize the daffodils because they don’t smell like lilies? My brothers and sisters, as Saint Paul urges
us, we must put to rest all un-Christian rivalries, we must silence all of our
destructive criticism, and we must be of one mind and of one purpose if we hope
to fulfill God’s one purpose for us: that is, that all peoples would be united
to him in the Catholic Church.
So why haven’t
we done this yet? Because, as I’ve
mentioned earlier, we are fallen human beings and we are full of selfish
tendencies. Thanks be to God, therefore,
that Christ is always at work in us to counteract our fallen nature. Through prayer and the sacraments, his grace
penetrates our minds and hearts, transforming us into mature, wise, and
fruitful Christians. But God's grace doesn't
do all the work for us; rather, he gives it freely and then leaves it up to us
to put it to good use. And while there
are many practical things that we can do to activate God's grace and become
agents of unity, instead of division, today I’ll highlight just two (this is
your homework).
First, we must
develop self-discipline in what we say.
Words, as we all know, can be powerful weapons for both good and evil. In today's culture, lack of respect for words
has become rampant (just spend five minutes on social media and you’ll see). Sadly, it has become normal and acceptable to
use words like knives, cutting people up. A Christian, however, should use words like
keys: opening hearts and minds, encouraging others, building communion, speaking
well of one's neighbors, or not speaking at all. If we hope to be agents of unity, instead of
division, my brothers and sisters, then this is a skill that we all must
practice constantly.
Second, we must
develop self-control in the area of our emotions. How many times have we regretted words spoken
in anger, emails or texts written in frustration, and decisions made in the
midst of passion? When waves of strong
emotions break over us like a storm, they can cause us to lose our
self-discipline in what we say and quickly lead us to use words
destructively. Therefore, even if our
emotions seem righteous, we should practice the discipline of walking away from
any important decisions, conversations, or correspondence until our emotions
have subsided and we can think clearly again.
Then we will be ready to use our words constructively and thus
contribute to building up the Church and our community, instead of tearing it
down.
Of course
all this disunity and division will not disappear overnight; but it will
disappear if we begin to work diligently towards building up unity by being “united
in the same mind and in the same purpose”, which is Christ. And so, today, as Christ renews his commitment
to us in this Mass, let's ask him for the grace that we will need to heal the
divisions that plague us, and let us promise to do our part to always be "united
in mind and purpose" with him and with his Church.
Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – January 22nd,
2017
No comments:
Post a Comment