Homily: 12th Sunday of Ordinary Time – Cycle B
Friends, our Scriptures today challenge us to examine our faith—that
is, our trust in God and in his promises—particularly in the midst of life’s storms. This is because these storms have a way of
challenging us to confront what we really believe about God and whether we are
willing to trust in his promises.
This coming week, I have the privilege of serving as the chaplain
for Camp Crux middle-school camp for girls.
The purpose of the camp is to provide our Catholic young people with a lived
experience of faith, in the context of outdoor adventure, that will lead them
to transition from having a faith that is merely received (that is, a faith
that simply repeats what is taught) to having a faith that is owned (that is, a
faith that is personally acknowledged and accepted as one’s own choice). It does this by providing a dynamic
environment that mixes a traditional camp experience (cabin living, outdoor adventures
and games, comradery with peers, etc.) with prayer, teaching, and reflection. Each year the camp adopts a theme based on one
of the three “transcendentals”—Beauty, Truth, and Goodness—to lead our young
people to a deeper experience of God. This
year, the theme returns to Beauty, a theme that I anticipate will resonate quite
well with the girls.
The hoped-for result from this camp experience is that the
teens will bring this new-found energy for owning and living their faith back
into their home communities and begin to act in order to be a force for
building up God’s kingdom here on earth.
Thus, the camp programming emphasizes what we heard from Saint Paul’s
letter to the Corinthians in today’s second reading: that “the love of Christ
impels us” to go forward and to work for the building up of God’s kingdom through
being joyful and confident witnesses of the faith. I can personally testify that this is what
happens with many our teens (and the adults who help direct the camp, as well)
after this week of camp.
One of the other things that the camp acknowledges is that
there will be challenges to living out this faith once they return home. There are many storms that teens face today:
bullying, separation and divorce of parents, betrayals by friends, and the
pressures that social media place on them to be noticed and liked by their
peers. For many teens, this leaves them
fearful both that God may have abandoned them in their need or, worse yet, that
God is not powerful enough to save them from these storms. In reality, each of us must face stormy times
in our lives and each of us has to wrestle with the fears that come with
them. Thankfully, our Scripture readings
speak to this today.
First in the book of Job, we hear that God speaks to Job
“out of the storm”. Right away, we learn
that it is not from outside of the storm that we encounter God, but rather that
we encounter him right there in the midst of it. In other words, God is there with us in the
storm and if we seek him within it, instead of from without, he will speak to
us there. We also hear how God reminds
Job of his power over the storm as he reminds him that he made the seas and the
storm clouds and set for them the limits that they must not pass. Job had feared both that God had abandoned
him in this stormy time in his life and that God, perhaps, did not have the
power to overcome them. God, however,
came to him both to assure him of his presence and with great authority to remind
him of his power over every storm.
Then, in Mark’s Gospel, we hear the story of how Jesus and
his disciples were crossing the Sea of Galilee after a full day of teaching
when a fierce storm rose up against them; and we hear that the disciples feared
for their lives while Jesus slept. Finally,
they gave in and cried out to Jesus: “do you not care that we are perishing?” Their fear was not that Jesus didn’t have the
power to save them, but rather that Jesus was choosing not to save them by
remaining asleep. In other words, their
fear was that Jesus had abandoned them in their need. Both of these passages from Scripture, then,
invite us to acknowledge in our own lives how we fail to recognize God’s
presence in the midst of the storms in our lives as well as how we fail to have
faith in his power to overcome them.
The call that we receive today, therefore, is the call that
Saint Paul gave to the Corinthians in his letter from which we read: that is,
the call to look at all things in a new way.
Paul boldly proclaims that, “once we have come to the conviction that
one has died for all”, we must also acknowledge that in Christ “all have died”;
and since Christ now lives so do we, also, now live in him. Therefore, “the love of Christ impels us”,
Paul says, to see all things in a new way: because worldly death is no longer
death and thus there is nothing left to fear: because what greater fear could
there be than the fear of an irreversible death? Therefore, this new way of seeing leads to a
new way of living: for now we must live knowing that Christ is with us in every
storm; and thus we must take courage to acknowledge that he has not abandoned
us to die, but rather that he is with us and that he has the power to calm
every storm. Armed with this knowledge
and courage, we can go forward boldly to serve those feeling abandoned in their
own storms so as to be Christ’s powerful presence to them. This is the message that Camp Crux hopes to
instill into the heart of every teen that participates in it, and it is the
message that we are receiving in this Mass today.
My brothers and sisters, this level of faith doesn’t bloom
overnight. Rather, achieving this level
of faith is a process of growing and flourishing over time. Nourished by the Sacraments and strengthened
by our joyful and confident living of our faith, our faith grows and the
kingdom of God is amplified here on earth.
Therefore, may the love of Christ encountered here at this altar impel
us to this growth in faith: the faith that can make God’s kingdom truly present
here.
Given at Our Lady of Grace
Parish: Noblesville, IN – June 22nd, 2024
No comments:
Post a Comment