Homily: 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle A
This week the Church transitioned back
into Ordinary Time. Perhaps for most of
you the switch was rather unremarkable.
Generally these transitions are pretty smooth for me, too, but because
of my vocation, I can never just “roll through” them with little notice. In the breviary, which is the book of prayers
from which all priests must pray every day, there’s always a little note at the
end of a season. For example, this past
Monday was the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, which officially ended the
Christmas season in the Church. At the
end of Evening Prayer there’s a simple note that says: “After the feast of the
Baptism of the Lord, Ordinary Time begins.”
Even though I know that this is coming, I almost always pause when I
read that and think to myself: “[sigh] Suddenly, everything just feels so…
ordinary.”
This can be how we feel, right? How many of you were lamenting to put away
Christmas and get back to the “rest of your life”? We know that we can’t live our lives in
constant celebration, and that we have to get back to work and school, and so
we go back to “ordinary” things and we leave Christmas, and all the excitement
of celebrating Christ’s birth, packed away in boxes until next year. Can you see that there’s a problem with this,
especially when we apply it to our lives of faith?
“Ordinary Time” never means “just go
back to doing what you were doing before”.
Rather, Ordinary Time is the time to take all of the blessings that you
received during the celebratory season (like those new things that you received
at Christmas) and apply them to your everyday life so as to help renew your
everyday life and thus grow as a Christian disciple. Ordinary Time is the time in which we engage
the hard work of growing in holiness. It
is not “throwaway” time in between the great seasons of Advent/Christmas and
Lent/Easter, rather it’s valuable time given to us so that we might produce
fruit in the world for God’s kingdom.
And so, let me remind all of you of something:
holiness is a great privilege to which we have been called. This is what Saint Paul says to us in the
second reading: that we are “called to be holy”. He says these words as if it is an exclusive
gift that not everyone is chosen to receive.
In reality holiness is unobtainable by ourselves; and so to be chosen to
receive it is a great privilege. Yet,
how often do we see it as a burden!
“Well, I guess I ought to be holy today… ugh!” To be holy is difficult and if we weren’t
called to be holy we wouldn’t be able to obtain it ourselves, but we are called
and so we can obtain it. The problem, it
seems, is that we’ve lost touch with the understanding of the amazing gift that
holiness is; and so we’ve lost the ambition to become holy, even though we’ve
been called to it.
If we have, indeed, lost touch with the
understanding of what a gift holiness is, then how do we turn back to see
it? We have to embrace what is
essential, once again. We have to
embrace those essential works of the spiritual life: Mass, prayer, confession,
mortification, reading, devotion to Mary and the saints, etc. In order to for this to be fruitful, however,
we first need to re-center our hearts and our lives on what is essential: that
is, on Christ, himself. John the
Baptist, in today’s Gospel reading has to point out Jesus to his followers—men
and women who were flocking to him to receive his baptism of repentance. They were so caught up in the work of
repenting, that they were missing the reason for their repentance—Christ,
himself, walking among them. Today, if I
can be so bold, in order to inspire us as we enter into Ordinary Time, I’d like
to do the same for all of you.
We, as Catholic Christians, have as our
purpose to be a Christ-centered people.
This purpose is realized when both our faith is active and when our love
for Christ in the Eucharist is fervent. The
Eucharist, of course, in which Jesus is truly present to us, Body, Blood, Soul,
and Divinity, is where we have the opportunity to unite most perfectly in the Heart
of Jesus. Love of the Eucharist,
therefore, is the most perfect way to become and remain a Christ-centered
people.
Now, if we say that our purpose is to
be a Christ-centered people, and that Christ is truly present to us, in the
fullness of his Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity, in the Eucharist, and in the
Blessed Sacrament that we reserve in the tabernacle and in our adoration chapel,
then we have to ask ourselves a question: is that demonstrably obvious to
anyone who knows us?
When I first started to attend this
parish twenty years ago, the adoration chapel was just being constructed. Father Richard (and Monsignor Duncan before
him) knew that having parishioners praying before Jesus in the Blessed
Sacrament every day, throughout the day, would be the fuel that would motivate and
power everything else that we would do as a parish. Let me tell you, they were right.
In my own experience, committing myself
to making the celebration of the Eucharist the most important thing in my life and
making it a priority to spend a minimum of one hour a week in adoration of Christ
in the Blessed Sacrament—that is, striving to become completely Christ-centered
in my life—completely changed my life for the better. Well before I discovered my vocation to the
priesthood, becoming Christ-centered in my life in this way changed my attitude
towards life and the things of this world. I found grace to deal with the ups and downs
of this world and my relationships with my family, friends, and co-workers all
improved as a result. Now, nearly twenty
years later, I can say that the same is still true: being Christ-centered in
this way remains the most important thing in my life, and so I encourage each
of you to examine your lives—individually and as families—to explore how you
can be more Christ-centered in 2023. ///
My dear brothers and sisters, Ordinary
Time in the Church is never ordinary.
Nevertheless, this year, as we enter into this Ordinary Time, we have a
special opportunity to embrace this time for what it is: a time to heed the
call to be holy by re-centering ourselves on Christ through our love of the
Eucharist. I pray that the power of
Christ that we receive in this Eucharist will inspire you to engage more deeply
in this bold work of allowing our Lord to strengthen this parish as a place
that proclaims from every side the proclamation of John the Baptist, “Behold
the Lamb of God!”—so that we, along with all those around us, might encounter
him anew and say once again (or, perhaps, for the first time) those words that
bring us salvation: “Now I have seen and testified that He is the Son of God.”
Given
in Spanish at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Parish: Carmel, IN
January
15th, 2023
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