Sacrifice engenders new life

Homily: 13^th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle A

Friends, the readings for Mass for these weeks that we are in have, as their general theme, teachings about the costs and rewards of discipleship.  Today, that teaching centers around a more particular theme, that of how a life of sacrifice engenders new life.  So, let’s take a look at our readings and see what I mean.

In today’s first reading we have this delightful little story, featuring the prophet Elisha.  It’s almost “cutsey”, isn’t it?  Elisha is a roving prophet and this woman of influence has pity on him so she invites him in for dinner and then this becomes a pattern every time Elisha comes to town.  This happened enough that the woman goes so far have a little room built onto her house for him so that he’d have a place to stay and not just a place to get a meal.  Among all of the stories of Elisha where he can seem to come off as harsh, this story is actually pretty sweet.

We see, of course, that there is more to the story: more that strips away the sentimentality of it and gives a depth of emotion to the scene.  The woman is noted as being a “woman of influence”, meaning that she (also meaning, “her husband”) had money.  It would have been easy for her to ignore Elisha as it is likely that he wouldn’t have run around in the “influential” circles in Shunem.  Yet, she didn’t.  Rather she took notice of him and showed him hospitality, simply because she recognized him as “a holy man of God.”  We see, then, that she was not only a “woman of influence”, but also a “woman of faith”.

Still further, we find out that she and her husband were childless; and, it seems, not for lack of trying.  Rather, it seems (because of Elisha’s servant’s response) like she and her husband had been married for some time, but had not yet conceived a child.  Could you imagine what it was like for them then to build a room for someone else on their house?  Most of us can imagine (and some of us have experienced) what it is like to have a deep longing to have children, yet be unable to conceive.  Try imagining, then, deciding to add a room to your house for a passing guest without thinking about the child for whom that room was always meant.  Now imagine just how hard it must have been for her to do that.  Yet she did; and, as it seems from the reading, she did it without so much as a word to Elisha: meaning that she did it simply because, as a holy man of God, he deserved that hospitality, and not because she had hoped to win favor from God.

Yet, she did win favor from God, didn’t she?  When Elisha first stayed in the room that she and her husband had prepared for him, he inquired as to what could be done for them.  When he heard the news that they were childless and that the husband was almost too old to be a father, he spoke the delightful prophecy that God would favor them and bless them with a child: a male heir for their family.  Imagine now the shock this woman must have felt hearing this prophecy.  Imagine the delight when, some weeks later, she discovered that she was indeed pregnant!  Yes, we see that there is a depth of emotion to this story; and in it, a beautiful lesson of how the sacrifices that this woman made—sacrifices made in faith to serve one of God’s servants—truly engendered new life for her and her husband.

In the second reading, Saint Paul gets more theologically specific about how sacrifice engenders new life.  He reminds us that it was Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross that brought us new life and that we must also sacrifice and die to ourselves so that this new life in Christ might take hold of us and engender new life in us and in those around us.  Saint Paul reminds us that this dying and rising to new life takes place spiritually and sacramentally in us through baptism.  This is to be for us a permanent reminder that, one day, it will take place for real: for we all must die someday, but if we believe in Christ and live as his disciples a resurrection to an eternal, glorified life awaits us.

Saint Paul reminds us that we must think ourselves as “dead to sin”.  This is because sin leads to death; and so, the more we deaden ourselves to sin (that is, the more that we make sacrifices of ourselves for others, instead of choosing to serve ourselves alone), the more the new life that we have in Christ can take hold of us: renewing our lives and engendering new life in the world around us.

In the Gospel reading, Jesus clearly makes demands of his disciples: telling them that, if they want to be his disciple, they cannot love father or mother, son or daughter, more than him.  Rather, he says, those who wish to be his disciple must take up the cross (yes, the horrific Roman execution device!) and follow after him.  Then he speaks paradoxically, saying: “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and who ever loses his life for my sake will find it.”  Let’s break this down a bit, shall we?

First, is Jesus saying that we cannot love our father/mother or son/daughter?  No, of course not.  For some reason, it’s easy for us to think (when we are thinking abstractly) that it has to be all one way or all the other: that is, that our love must be exclusively for one to the detriment of the other.  But in reality, we realize that, when we deeply love someone, it causes our love to grow, doesn’t it?  We realize that our love is not a “zero sum” game, but rather that, when given to the right person, it actually expands our love and makes it possible to love more!  Jesus knows this; and he knows that when his disciples love him first and above all that their love will expand exponentially, making it possible to love everyone else—including father/mother and son/daughter—with an even greater love than they first thought possible.

Author Fr. Francis Fernandez says it this way: “To love our neighbor in God is not to go about by a long and circuitous route in order to love him.  Love of God is a short-cut to our brothers.  Only in God can we really understand and love all men, immersed even as they are in their errors and we in ours, and in spite of those things that humanly speaking would tend to separate us from them or lead us to pass them by without a glance in their direction.”  This is beautiful!  Husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, everyone who can hear me: this means that, if you say “I love you” to someone, but haven’t striven to know and love God with all of your heart first, then you are cheapening your love for them!  Because you cannot really love them fully until you love them in and because of your love for God.  This is what Jesus means when he says, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.”

This paramount love for Jesus is what unravels the paradox.  For when I love Jesus enough to take up the horrific Roman execution device and follow him—meaning, when I decide to lose my life (that is, sacrifice my life) for him—then I will find new life and a true, pure love with which I can love others and engender new life in them, as well.

Let me back up again, a moment, because perhaps we have gone too “abstract” again in our thinking.  This “true, pure” love of which I spoke will not be passionate (though it may have passionate moments).  Rather, this true, pure love will look more like a radical hospitality: an openness to our core to recognize and receive each person we encounter with the same generosity of spirit with which Jesus recognizes and receives each of us.  This manifests itself in the little ways that Jesus enumerates: “Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet (like in the first reading)… whoever receives a righteous man because he is a righteous man... whoever gives only a cup of cold water to one of these little ones to drink because the little one is a disciple...”  These are not moments of passionate love, but rather small acts of radical hospitality.  Nonetheless, Jesus tells us that these small acts of radical hospitality—these small acts of sacrifice—will earn for those who offer them a generous reward.

Friends, full-disclosure, I’m about to turn this homily into a pitch for our Offertory Giving Renewal program, but I hope that you receive it with the sincerity that I prepared it.  It is not a slight of hand for me to say that one of the “small acts” that demonstrates our love for Christ above all is to commit ourselves to supporting our parish financially.  Rather, it is true.  So true, in fact, that it is one of the five “precepts of the Church”: that is, one of the five, fundamental ways that a Catholic Christian demonstrates that he/she is truly a follower of Christ (the other four being, “attend Mass every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation, confess your sins at least once a year, receive Holy Communion once a year during Easter, and observe the days of fasting and abstinence as prescribed by the Church”).  These are not the only ways, of course, but they are the fundamental ways: demonstrable behaviors that show that you are committed to Christ and his Church.  Returning these cards which you received in the mail this past week, indicating your sacrificial financial commitment to this parish and thus to the Christ’s Church, is an important spiritual act: one important act among many that demonstrates that you have chosen to take up your cross and follow after Jesus.

Many of you have returned these already, and I am grateful.  Most of you who haven’t will return them in the coming weeks and I am grateful, in advance, for your responses.  I know that this is a difficult time for all of us and I trust that each of you will respond in the way that you are able.  I simply ask that you will, like the Shunemite woman who looked to her love of God when she decided to provide for the prophet Elisha, look to your love of God when you discern the commitment that you are able to make to Saint Mary’s over the next year.  Your sacrifices will surely engender new life in this parish and will help to grow and expand love in your own hearts: love that manifests itself in a radical hospitality that this world so desperately needs.  The radical love engendered in the sacrifice of Jesus that we re-present to the Father here, on this altar.

Given at Saint Mary’s Cathedral: Lafayette, IN – June 27^th & 28^th, 2020

The Body is our food for the journey

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Homily: The Most Holy Body and Blood of Jesus – Cycle A

I can’t remember if I first heard this on a visit to Haiti or if it was on a visit I made to rural Guatemala, but it is a story that is nonetheless emblazoned in my mind.  It’s the story of what poor children do in that country when they have to go days without substantial food.  As I was told, children who become desperately hungry will begin to make mud cakes—literally putting water on dirt and forming it into a cake—and that they eat them.  Even though there is no great nourishment for them in them, they do it just so that they can put something in their stomachs to ease the hunger pangs.  Fortunately, I never saw a child doing that.  Fortunately, because I think that I would be traumatized by it.  Nonetheless, even the thought that children might do that saddens my heart.

I bring this up today because it is a truth about our human nature—that is, about our human instinct to survive: that threats to our lives will make us do things that we otherwise would never consider doing.  Food is so essential that our bodies are literally hard-wired to generate pain when we go long periods of time without food so that we never neglect our bodies’ need for food.  This pain, as we see in the story about impoverished children, can make us look even to the dirt of the ground as a way to alleviate it.

Today, on this great feast of the Body and Blood of Jesus—Corpus Christi—we heard from John’s gospel, chapter 6: more specifically, the end of chapter 6, which is the climax of this “Bread of Life” discourse.  In it we hear Jesus declare that his flesh is “living bread” and that his blood is “true drink” and that those who eat and drink of it will live for eternity.  This is an absolutely ludicrous statement and the “Jews” in the passage tell us why: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”, they ask.  Jesus doesn’t answer them directly, but we know the answer, don’t we?  At the Last Supper, Jesus takes bread and says, “This is my body... take and eat” and he takes a cup of wine and says, “This is my blood... take and drink”.  Connecting these two passages, Catholic Christians have always concluded that the bread and wine that we offer on the altar is transubstantiated into the Body and Blood of Jesus so that we might eat and drink them.  They are not completely “transformed”: meaning that their “forms”—that is, the appearance of bread and wine—don't change.  Rather, they are transubstantiated: meaning that their substance—that is, what they are in their essence—is changed.  No longer bread and wine, in their essence, they become the Body and Blood of Christ under the appearance of bread and wine.

Perhaps we’ve never asked this question, but it may be worthwhile to ask: Why did Jesus do this?  Why did he say that one must “eat his flesh and drink his blood” in order to have eternal life?  Well, because he knew our human condition.  He knew that hunger is a fundamental human experience and that, if he didn’t connect our fundamental desire to go on living indefinitely with the thing that is most closely connected with ongoing living—that is, with hunger and satisfying that hunger—we would look towards worldly ways alone of satisfying our hunger and would miss the one thing that could sustain us into the eternal life: life for which we instinctually know that we are made.  And because we are human and live in time—meaning that we’ll continually return to the experience of hunger throughout our time living in time—Jesus made this eating of his flesh and drinking of his blood something that we could do over and over again.

This is what we celebrate today: but only secondarily.  The first thing that we celebrate today is the fact that the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, God the Son, united himself to a human nature (body and spirit).  Even if Jesus hadn’t given us his flesh to eat and his blood to drink, it would still be necessary to honor the Most Holy Body and Blood of Jesus: simply because God lowered himself to be confined to our human nature and walk among us.  Secondarily, but no less importantly, we celebrate that Jesus has given us his human/divine flesh to eat and his human/divine blood to drink so that we might overcome the limitations of this world (in which all persons inevitably die) and live, like he lives, forever.  This great sacrifice for us (made effective by the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus) is so great that we continually offer it back to the Father as an act of Thanksgiving for so great a gift.

We were in a bad spot, though, these past few months.  This awesome food (and I mean that literally: this food that is awe-inspiring)… this awesome food was kept from us.  Better, we were kept from it.  The coronavirus pandemic meant that nearly all of us were deprived of this living bread and true drink for over two months.  This, as most of you noted, I’m sure, was a very serious thing.  If the Body and Blood of Jesus is our “food for the journey” towards eternal life, then to be deprived of it for months at a time puts us at great risk of starvation.  A number of you reached out to me and said over and over again that you are literally starving—that is, feeling hunger pangs—to return to the Eucharist.  We encouraged you over and over again to make “spiritual communions”: to invite Jesus into your heart spiritually until you could receive him in the fullest way that you can receive him in this world—that is, under the form of bread and wine—again.  “It’s not the same”, many of you said.  And you were right.  If it was “the same”, then what Jesus said in John chapter 6 was ludicrous and what he did at the Last Supper was pointless.  Our bodily reception of the Body and Blood of Jesus is essential.

So why did God allow us to experience this great hunger?  I mean, many of us could have died of starvation, right?  Yes, that’s true!  Or worse yet, many of us could have turned to the mud and made cakes to eat just to try and satisfy those pangs.  Many of us did just that: we turned away from God and towards the lower things of this world to try and placate our hunger, since God didn’t seem to want to give his “true food” back to us.  Worse, I say, because it’s possible to stay alive on mud cakes and because of that we begin to believe that we no longer need the “true food” of heaven.  So, then, given all of these risks, why did God allow us to experience this great hunger?  The first reading tells us.

In it, Moses is giving his “farewell” speech to the Israelites on the cusp of entering the Promised Land.  Moses reminds them that “[God] therefore let you be afflicted with hunger, and then fed you with manna, a food unknown to you and your fathers, in order to show you that not by bread alone does one live, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”  Just before this, Moses said that God afflicted them for 40 years in the desert “so as to test them... and to find out whether or not it was their intention to keep his commandments”.  The affliction was a test and a teaching: a test to see if they’d remain faithful to him; and a teaching to show them that he will sustain them by his word.

For these months of separation from our bodily reception of the Body and Blood of Jesus, we have been tested to see if we would remain faithful to him and, hopefully, we have learned that God’s Word is always with us to sustain us, even when the “bread from heaven” becomes unavailable to us.  Too often, I think, we overlook the Liturgy of the Word at Mass and see the Eucharist only as receiving Holy Communion.  That’s incredibly important, for sure; but it ought never be separated from the whole: that is the proclamation of the Word of God that also sustains us on our journey.  This is part of the reason why Bishop resisted distributing Communion outside of Mass: so as not to separate the Word, which sustains us, from the Body, which also sustains us.

Friends, it is truly good that we are back here together to celebrate this great feast that speaks to the lengths that God took to bring us, his greatest creation, back into communion with himself: going so far as to unite his divine nature with our human nature.  May the joy that we feel in this celebration—the joy of a restoration of our unity with him, spirit and body—sustain us and inspire us to lead others to this same fullness of unity; so that, as Jesus prayed at the Last Supper, we all may be one in the one body of Christ.

Given at Saint Mary’s Cathedral: Lafayette, IN – June 13^th & 14^th, 2020

Who God is, beyond our perceptions

Homily: Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity – Cycle A

          As a former engineer, my brain is wired for science.  What I mean by this is that it is wired in such a way that, when I see something that I don’t understand, I automatically begin to wonder about it and try to figure it out.  Quite frankly, most of us are wired for science in some way: usually in a very practical way.  Here’s what I mean.

          Say that you enter a room with which you are unfamiliar.  It’s a little bit warm in the room and you observe that there is a ceiling fan.  You know a thing or two about ceiling fans, but you’ve never turned on this particular fan, so you set yourself to figuring out how to turn it on.  You think, “Maybe the wall switch will turn it on”, and so you flip the wall switches.  If that doesn’t work you think, “Maybe I need to pull the chain on the fan to turn it on”, and so you reach up and pull the chain.  If that doesn’t work you think, “Maybe there’s a combination of the wall switches and the chain that need to be aligned to turn it on”, and so you begin to turn switches on and off, pulling the chain at each setting.  If that still doesn’t work, we think… what?  That it’s broken… of course!  You’ve observed, hypothesized, tested each hypothesis and observed some more, and when you’ve run out of hypotheses you draw a conclusion.  That, my friends, is science; and we do it almost every day.

          As much as I love science, because I love figuring out how to make things work, I do have one big problem with it.  You see, the problem with science is that it equates perception with reality.  In other words, science makes conclusions about reality based solely on what it can perceive.  In my example above, we concluded that the fan was broken because no switches or combination of switches would start it spinning.  We made a conclusion about reality based solely on what we observed.  The reality, however, could be that the fan functions perfectly well, but that the switch may be broken or maybe there wasn’t any electricity wasn’t flowing to the system.  In other words, there could be factors beyond our perception that could contribute to the reality.  Science does not always admit these factors and so sometimes draws incorrect conclusions about reality.

          For people of faith there is no other proof of the limitations of science than when we think about God.  Imagine for a moment that you didn’t know much about God (and let’s assume that you at least give credence to the fact that there is a God: that is, an all-powerful, all-knowing creator of the universe).  What would you do to figure out more about him?  Well, you’d observe, I suppose: you’d listen to what people said or wrote about him.  Then you might hypothesize about what he’d be like, followed by observing to see if you’re hypothesis was correct.

          Doing that you’d find out that people say that God is loving, kind, and merciful; that he has the power to control everything that happens in the universe; that nothing happens without his knowing about it and either making it happen or, at least, permitting it to happen.  Then you’d say, “Well, if that’s the case, then things should be pretty good around me.  People ought to be living in harmony with one another and there should be peace, because a God of love and kindness, who can control what happens in the world, would surely desire there to be love and kindness throughout the world.”  Having formed your hypothesis, you then observe the world and what would you see?  Love and kindness in many places, for sure; but also hatred, violence, and discord in as many, if not more places.  Having observed this, your conclusion might be: “God is not who people say he is, because what I perceive does not conform to that proposed reality.”

This is the error that many people in our society make today: they perceive a world broken and disharmonious and they conclude that, if God is who people say that he is, then he wouldn’t allow the world to be like this.  But since the world is this way, then God must not be who people say that he is.  Rather, he must be (at best) a mythical creature meant to make people feel better about living in this broken world or a weak God: a deity who can (perhaps) create, but cannot control the universe.  In either case, the conclusion leaves people with no reason to believe in him.

          The problem with this, of course, is that there are factors outside of one’s perception that contribute to the reality.  In other words, the reality of God is greater than our perception.  Thinking purely theoretically, we can somewhat easily conclude that there must be a God: an all-powerful being—the uncreated creator—who created all things.  Just imagine trying to figure out how any one of us got here (that is, to exist).  You’d begin walking down the sequence of causes and would quickly realize that, ultimately, “nothing” never begets “something”, but that in order for there to be “something”, there had to be something first—a something that didn’t rely on another something to bring it into existence.  This “something”—this creator which itself is uncreated—is what (Saint Thomas Aquinas tells us) we call “God”.  See, no bible quotes needed, just theoretical speculation and we can conclude that something akin to who we call “God” must exist in order for anything in the universe to exist.

In order to know that God is benevolent, however—that is, from a perfectly theoretical standpoint—we would have to do a lot more work.  To see that all creation works towards the propagation of life, instead of against it, and that this propagation is a good thing, could lead us to conclude that God is good: or, at least, has the good of creation in mind.  But to know God as we know him, as loving, kind, and merciful, or, as we celebrate him today, as a communion of persons, is something that we can know only if he, himself, has revealed it to us.

          Thankfully, this is something that he has revealed to us; and it is not something that he has revealed solely by some sort of divine declaration (even though he has done that).  Rather, he has revealed this to us also by his actions.  In the book of Exodus, we read that God declared himself before Moses to be “a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity” and God proved this as time and again he spared the Israelite people from destruction, even though they had repeatedly offended him.  So gracious and merciful is he—and so deeply in love of his creation—that, as we read in the Gospel, God eventually “gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.”  In doing so, he not only proved, once again, that what he said about himself is true, but he also revealed an incredible truth: that he is a communion of persons within himself.  And how do we know that Jesus truly is the Son of God and, thus, God himself?  Not just because he said so, but also because of the works that he did: healing the sick, driving out demons, raising the dead, and most prominently, of course, raising himself from the dead.

          Thus, the celebration that we come to today: the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity.  Today we are able to know and, thus, celebrate who God is in himself: not because we somehow perceive this with our senses; but rather because of the gift of Faith that has been placed in our hearts and because of the works that he has worked in the past (and continues to work today) that go beyond our ability to test scientifically.  In celebrating God as Trinity, we not only celebrate who he is, but also what that means for us.  We know that God is Love and so is a community of persons.  Because of this we know that, when God creates, he creates in love.  We know that, having created human beings to be persons, like himself, he created us solely so that we might share in his divine life, which is love.  Finally, we know that, when we turned away from him in sin, he did not shun us, but rather came close to us, becoming one of us in his Son who would make atonement for our sins and, thus, make it possible for us to share in the divine life once again: that is, to find the peace and harmony with him and one another for which our hearts constantly long.

          And so, my brothers and sisters, as we celebrate today who God is in himself, let us rejoice also in who we are in him: beloved sons and daughters destined to spend eternity with him.  This joy cannot be complete, though, if we try to hoard it for ourselves and neglect our neighbor; and in times like these when it is clear that disharmony and hatred is causing so many of our neighbors to suffer, we cannot stand idlily by.  Therefore, let us also commit ourselves to follow the admonition of Saint Paul to the Corinthians and “mend our ways, encourage one another, agree with one another, and live in peace” so that “the God of love and peace will be with us” and all those scientific skeptics might begin to see the truth that we proclaim: that the reality of God does match up to who he has revealed himself to be, that he cares about each and every one of us, and that he desires that each and every one of us dwell with him in eternal light, happiness, and peace.

          My brothers and sisters, out community desperately needs this witness!  Let us seek to be the image of God in which we were created and work to build in our place a communion of persons whose love brings harmony and peace to the world.

Given at Saint Mary’s Cathedral: Lafayette, IN – June 7^th, 2020