Homily: 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle A
Friends,
our readings remind us today that God has given us everything that we need to
live a pleasant and fruitful life as well as a reminder of the stewardship that
is a part of having received these gifts from God. In both the first reading and the Gospel, a
vineyard owner is described who does everything right. He picked a field with good soil, he tilled
the ground and cleared it of stones, planted vines that have been known to
produce the choicest grapes, and installed a winepress so that, when the grapes
are picked at the perfect moment, not one moment is lost before extracting its
juice to begin the winemaking process so as to preserve its perfect
flavor. He even guarded it to protect it
from animals. Yes, he did everything
that a good owner would do if he wanted to all but guarantee a choice crop of
grapes.
Yet,
in both cases, we hear that the vineyard owner didn’t reap a bountiful
harvest. In Isaiah, we see the vineyard
itself produced bad fruit, worth nothing but the be thrown out. And in the Gospel, Jesus tells us of how the
owner’s hired workers try to keep the owner from claiming his harvest, plotting
to keep it for themselves, instead. In both
cases, the parables were meant to wake up the people who heard them to the
reality that they have not responded well to the gifts with which God had
enriched them nor to the stewardship with which they had been entrusted by God. We hear these today as a reminder that we,
too, need to wake up to these realities.
Above
and beyond these things, however, these words were a reminder both for those
who originally heard them and for us today that we can’t let ourselves fall into
the trap of thinking that God is our servant, instead of our Lord. The ancient Israelites of Isaiah’s time
started to take their prosperity for granted and started treating God like
their servant—someone on whom they called to help them do things their
way—instead of their Lord—someone to whom they directed their love and service. The chief priests and elders of the Jewish
people during Jesus’ time here on earth were entrusted with the stewardship to
teach God’s people how to be in right relationship with God, but what they did
was turn religion into a pseudo-slavery, which kept God’s people beholden to
them (under the pretext of being beholden to God), instead of being actually
beholden to God. Thus, in both cases,
the result was that God would take away from them the good that he had given to
them to give to others who would produce fruit from the gifts and stewardship
that they had been given.
At the
core of this failure, it seems, was their failure to remain grateful for what
they had been given. Instead, they took
it for granted that what they had been given was somehow owed to them. Thus, they failed to produce the fruit that God
desired—a kingdom of justice and harmony in right relationship with God—producing
rather wild grapes of selfishness and greed.
And
this is not just a failure of a particular people at a particular time,
right? No, it’s a failure that every
human has been in danger of falling into since the first sin. It is clear that, when people remain truly
grateful for all that they have (most of which they didn’t deserve), they
remain content and in harmony with one another.
However, when gratitude is lost and people begin to feel entitled,
people turn to selfishness and greed, with disharmony and rancor as the result. When this happens, we lose sight of the
“other” as our brother/sister and we begin to treat them poorly. In a real way, we lose our sense of the
dignity of the “other” and, as a result, we begin to mistreat them. Perhaps you can take just a second now to
consider the state of our society and to ask, “Is how we treat one another a
sign that we are a grateful people, or a people given over to selfishness and
greed?” I think that, as a people, we
have fallen into the latter category.
Friends,
if we wish to remain in the care of the vineyard owner or with our stewardship
in God’s vineyard, then we must return to a radical gratitude for what God has
given us and away from our greed. The
signs that we are ungrateful are abundant in the way we treat each other, are
they not? Last Tuesday’s debate of the
candidates for president was a disgrace of humanity (not just the office of
President, but of humanity). Are
we much better, though? Do we not
similarly disrespect the dignity of other persons when we gossip, backbite, and
behave passive-aggressively towards one another? I think that we do.
Friends,
Pope Francis has taken slack over the years for not speaking out enough about
the “life” issues, most prominently abortion.
Nevertheless, our Holy Father makes profoundly pro-life statements every
time that he condemns gossip and backbiting and urges us to abandon these
cancerous behaviors. These, of course,
are nowhere near equivalent to the sin of abortion, but they are a part of the
undercurrent that keeps the culture of death afloat, and he knows it. Friends, the culture of life will begin to be
restored only as soon as we begin to respect and honor the dignity of our own
lives. Meaning first, that we remain in
awe of the gift of each our lives and decide to respect them. Then, recognizing the same dignity in others,
we will begin to have a profound respect for them, as well. Finally, and after significant time, we’ll
begin to enshrine in our laws this respect, and thus protect that dignity in
everyone.
This
year we celebrate the 25th year of St. John Paul II’s encyclical, The
Gospel of Life. In that letter he
called on us to dismantle the culture of death in order to build a culture of
life once again. He lived through the
horrors of Nazi Germany. He saw that
those horrors began not with laws enshrining a right to mass-murder by gas
chamber. He saw, rather, that they began
when people’s disrespect for the inherent dignity of another began to be
enshrined in the culture. The “culture
of death”, therefore, is not the culture that permits mass-murder, for that is
only its effect. Rather, the “culture of
death” is the culture that tolerates one group of people treating another group
disrespectfully—one in which gossip, scandal, and defamation are tolerated—for
these “smaller” horrors are the foundation stones that make the greater horrors
(like the holocaust and abortion) possible.
As we strive eagerly to elect government leaders who will work to write
and enact laws that respect all human life, let us not forget that we must also
work within our own lives to root out any attitude or tendency to treat those around
us disrespectfully.
This,
of course, begins with gratitude: gratitude for the gift of life that God has
given us and gratitude for the stewardship that he has given us to use this
life for good, which is the building of his kingdom. What better place to renew our commitment to
gratitude than here, in the Eucharist: our sacrifice of thanksgiving to God? As we make our gift of praise and
thanksgiving today, let us be especially mindful of God’s gift of our lives and
the stewardship that comes with it.
Then, let us put aside our selfish differences and decide that we are
going to be a family that loves one other: a family, who works to bring the
culture of life back into our community and, through our community, and in the
name of Jesus, into the world.
Given at Saint Patrick’s Church: Kokomo, IN – October 4th,
2020
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