Homily: 15th Sunday of Ordinary Time – Cycle C
A few weeks ago, I celebrated the tenth anniversary of my
ordination. As I reflected on these years
of priesthood, I remembered what it was like when I was still 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 was that he wanted
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 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.
It seems to me that this is a common experience for us. In our lives, we frequently get distracted or
we become so mired in something that our minds and our hearts get cloudy and it
becomes difficult to find clarity 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 and to where it is that we are going. This can be in our family life, our career,
or in our spiritual life. What happens
is that we get anxious about feeling lost and, instead of looking for the
answers that are right there in front of us, we start looking beyond our
situations and beyond ourselves to find a way out. As it turns out, the answer usually is right
in front of us; but because of our anxiety simply can’t see it.
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. Now that they were about to enter into the
land that God had promised them, Moses reminds them that they don’t need to look
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 for what reason
they came into that land and who had brought them there. Rather, he instructs them, “Heed the voice of
the Lord and keep his commandments”: the same ones that you learned about in
the desert and with which you are so familiar that they are literally “on your
lips and in your hearts.” It’s as if he
was saying, “You already know what God wants you to do, so just do it.”
Unfortunately, our human urge to complicate things is strong
and so we see that by the time of Jesus the Israelites had set up a 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 them. One of these scholars came to Jesus to test
him, to see if he was truly a teacher of the Law or if he was some quack trying
to introduce some new law or to teach something contrary to it. Jesus, however, didn’t fall for the trap and
he turned the test back on the scholar.
“What do you have to do? You’re a
scholar of the law, you tell me. What
does it say?” Surprisingly, this scholar
doesn’t begin to recount 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 affirms
his answer and says, “You are correct!
Do this and you will live.”
Hoping that there still might be a chance to draw 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). For example,
how often does a simple household project turn into something much 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 forget for what reason we are trying to do it: to grow
closer to God! Or perhaps the opposite
happens. We think, “Well, I tried
praying the rosary 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 multiplying
prayers and devotions). 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 that 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 be reconciled
to him. 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 be interrupted by the
needs of our brothers and sisters around us, regardless of who they are or from
where they came.
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 want to have a chance to get there: which we get through Baptism and is strengthened
in Confirmation. Then, we have to keep
ourselves in grace: which we do when we love God and love our neighbor. Our help to do this is in the other sacraments,
especially the sacraments of Holy Eucharist and Confession. And that’s it! We get into grace and then we strive to keep
ourselves in 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.
May the faith that God has placed in our hearts strengthen
our trust in God’s grace and, thus, our courage to live these commandments in our
daily lives and to manifest his kingdom among us.
Given in Spanish at St. Joseph
Parish: Delphi, IN and Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Parish: Carmel, IN – July 10th,
2022
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