The weeds among the wheat

Homily: 16^th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle A

          Friends, we have been considering over these past weeks certain parables given by Jesus which he used to give his disciples a vision of what the kingdom of heaven would be like.  These he gives so that all of us—even the most simple among us—might have an idea of how this mysterious kingdom that Jesus often proclaimed would look.  Even the fact that Jesus uses the word “kingdom” to describe it is a metaphor in itself, which separates it from other forms of political organization and government.  In other words, it would be much different if Jesus said “the republic of heaven is like…” or “the empire of heaven is like…”  In describing heaven as a kingdom, he sets it apart and defines its basic structure.

          Perhaps, then, people were confused when Jesus proclaimed to them “the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”  At first, they might have thought, “Great!  We’ve been waiting for Yahweh to send us the Messiah, the great King, who would establish God’s lasting kingdom and subdue all of our enemies.”  Looking around, however, they quickly found that none of those things were happening and so, perhaps, began to become perplexed.  Thus, Jesus began to teach them in parables what the kingdom—which, he proposed, was at hand—looks like.  One of these—the parable of the wheat and the weeds—was meant to dispel any confusion about why all of God’s enemies—that is, those who do evil in the world—had not yet been subdued.

          In the parable, Yahweh is shown as the wise farm owner who, not knowing that his enemy had sown weeds among his wheat, allows the weeds to grow alongside the wheat until the time of the harvest, so as not to uproot any of the wheat along with it.  He knows that his wheat—that is, the children of his kingdom—are strong and can withstand the presence of weeds among them and still produce fruit.  Thus, he leaves the weeds among the wheat knowing that, ultimately, the plans of the enemy will be squashed as the wheat is gathered into his barn (that is, into heaven) and the weeds will be thrown into the fire to be burnt (that is, in to the depths of hell).  For the children of Israel who were looking for a kingdom of heaven in which all of their enemies would be subdued and purged from their midst, this parable provided an explanation that demonstrated the wisdom of leaving evil doers and sinners among them.

Still, there’s a problem with the parable, right?  In last week’s parable, Jesus taught that the wheat sowed among weeds was choked and so produced no fruit.  This week, however, he shows the wheat growing up with the weeds, but, instead of being choked, they produce fruit anyway.  So, how do we reconcile what seems to be a contradiction?  Well, by remembering that these are metaphors and that metaphors are always limited: they are meant to highlight certain aspects of things.  In doing so, however, they often give an incomplete picture.

In the parable of the sower who sows indiscriminately, Jesus was teaching his disciples not to allow themselves to get intertwined with those who do evil, for the evil doers will choke out the divine life within them so that they produce no fruit.  In the parable of the weeds sowed among the wheat, however, he was teaching his disciples that it is possible to coexist with those who do evil and still produce fruit.  In the first, Jesus is warning his disciples not to give themselves over to the ways of those who do evil, because even their good intentions to be righteous will fail because of the constant influence of evil around them.  In the second, Jesus is saying that the mere presence of those who do evil is not enough to keep the righteous ones from producing fruit, because they have not given themselves over to evil ways.  Both are true, in spite of what seems to be a contradiction, and so contribute to create the rich image of the kingdom of heaven which Jesus is trying to construct.

Still, there is one other troubling thing in this parable.  In it, Jesus indicates that there are “children of the kingdom” and “children of the evil one”.  In doing so, he seems to say that there are some who are destined for heaven and some who are destined for hell.  We believe, however, that God creates all men good and destines them for heaven; and so why does Jesus say that there are “children of the evil one”?

Contrary to what was commonly believed at the time, Jesus was teaching that the kingdom of heaven would be open to all, not restricted to one ethnic race, predestined by election beforehand by God.  This is why he proposed the parable of the mustard seed.  In it he showed that the small seed of the kingdom would blossom into a large bush in which all the birds of the air (an image for the many nations and ethnicities of the world) would come and make their nest.  Being a member of either kingdom, therefore, is a matter of choice, not predestination.  Thus, the “children of the kingdom” are those who have turned to the way of righteousness—in other words, those who have chosen to become children of the kingdom—and the “children of the evil one” are those who have refused the way of righteousness, thus choosing to become children of the evil one.

Now, because each of these has chosen their way (instead of having been predestined to a certain way), each of these can still choose the opposite way: the children of the kingdom to become children of the evil one and the children of the evil one to become children of the kingdom.  Thus, Jesus proposes the parable of the yeast, saying that the kingdom is like a little yeast that is mixed in with dough.  Having been mixed in, it causes the whole batch of dough to rise.  With this parable, Jesus is indicating that the children of the kingdom, mixed in with the children of the evil one, can lead them to convert and choose the way of righteousness and so cause the greater growth and expansion of the kingdom throughout the world.

My brothers and sisters, these parables are reasons for us to have great hope while living this world.  It is obvious that God, through his divine grace dispensed to us in the Church, has raised up children of the kingdom throughout the world.  It is also obvious that the evil one, who is the devil, has stolen from the children God has raised up men and women who have given themselves over to evil, thus becoming children of the evil one.  All of us, I suspect, would be glad to see this evil banished from our midst.  As we can see, however, it is not God’s plan to act in an outwardly powerful way to accomplish this.  Rather, he leaves the children of the evil one among us; and this for two reasons: 1) because uprooting those who do evil could cause some of the weaker ones among the righteous to be uprooted, too; and 2) because he longs to see the children of the evil one converted to become children of the kingdom.

Therefore, we, who consider ourselves to be children of the kingdom, have some work to do.  We are called to be yeast in the midst of the world: glorifying God in our prayer and in our work so that those who have given themselves over to be children of the evil one would be converted and the kingdom of heaven would grow and expand throughout the world.  This is the task given to us as disciples and there is no more worthy work than this in the world.  In this Eucharist, therefore, let us give thanks for the grace to be children of the kingdom of heaven; and, strengthened by it, let us take courage and embrace this work so that our king, Jesus Christ, may truly reign among us.

Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – July 22^nd & 23^rd, 2017

Fatherhood and the Eucharist

Homily: the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ – Cycle A

          Father’s Day, like Mother’s Day, is a great day because it is a day of remembering: remembering so as to honor.  If we stop for just a moment and think about it, we’ll see that this truly is a beautifully human thing: that we pause to recognize that there is something honorable in parenting (and, specifically, this weekend, in fatherhood).  That this year’s celebration of fathers coincides with our celebration of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ provides us with an excellent opportunity to reflect on fatherhood and the Eucharist.

          When we look at the Sacred Scriptures and the life of Jesus we detect many aspects of what it means to be a father.  A father has a real love for his children no matter how they may respond to him.  A father’s deepest desire is for his children to know and experience his love.  He desires the well-being of his children and teaches them how to love others by his example.  A father must at times correct, admonish and warn his children for protection’s sake.  A father always speaks the truth with love, even when it is difficult.  Christian fathers, in particular, must know how to teach their children to receive God’s love in prayer and to taste and see God at work in everyday life. Ultimately, when examined closely, we acknowledge that the fullness of fatherly love is the complete surrender that a man makes of himself for his children.

          We recognize these qualities in the life of Jesus in his preaching, in his teaching, in his healing and deliverance ministry, and especially in his loving relationship with his closest disciples, the apostles.  He speaks of his love for his apostles when he says "As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you, abide in my love."  He calls them friends.  He corrects them when he overhears them arguing over who is the greatest.  In order to remain faithful to the Father’s ways, Jesus strongly rebukes Peter with the words, "Get behind me Satan."  He prays for Peter personally as well as for the well-being of all the apostles and those who will believe in him in the future.  Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, calling God “Father”, and teaches them by his example to go off in quiet prayer.  Jesus promises the Advocate who will instruct the apostles in all matters and keep them in the truth.

          Since Christ is the “image of the invisible God”, we can see in him and by his example, the fullness of the Father’s love for us.  Truly, the giving of his Son is the fullest surrender of himself that God the Father could make for us.  The fact that this surrender continues to happen each and every day—each and every hour—on countless altars throughout the world, is evidence of the Father's unfathomable love for us.  Thus, in celebrating the real and enduring presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, what we are celebrating is the real and enduring Love of the Father poured out for us.

          Fatherhood, therefore, is fully realized when a father surrenders himself fully and continually for his children.  In other words, just as the outpouring of God the Father’s love for us is real and enduring, so the outpouring of a father’s love for his children must be both real and enduring.  While I could name for you a number of saints who demonstrated this fatherly virtue heroically, I’d like to introduce you to a great example who has not yet been nominated for sainthood, instead.  He is Karol Josef Wojtila, senior: Saint John Paul II’s father.

          The elder Karol was a retired soldier from the Polish army and a tailor.  He was widowed when young Karol, his son, was the age of nine.  He had already lost one daughter in infancy and later would suffer the loss of his eldest son, Edmund.  He was an upright man and a man of deep piety.  As an example, Saint John Paul II would recall that, after the death of his mother, his father took him into his parish church and led him to the image of Mary, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and said to him: “She is your mother now.”

          While other men may have gotten lost in their grief and become distant from their family, Karol senior remained engaged in the lives of his sons.  He made his young son’s clothes himself, he did the cooking and cleaning, and he encouraged his sons in their friendships, their studies and their sports.  Above all, and especially for Karol junior, Karol senior formed his son’s early faith.  The Pope, himself, describes this best.  He wrote: “My father [was] a deeply religious man.  Day after day I was able to observe the austere way in which he lived.  By profession he was a soldier and, after my mother's death, his life became one of constant prayer.  Sometimes I would wake up during the night and find my father on his knees, just as I would always see him kneeling in the parish church.”  This real and enduring outpouring of love for his children had a deep and enduring impact on a man whose real and enduring outpouring of love would have a deep and enduring impact on the world.

          My brothers and sisters, the example of Karol Wojtyla senior shows us that being a father is about generating life.  This generation of life doesn’t end, however, after the conception of a child.  Rather, it must continue throughout the child’s life.  In other words, every father must make a real and enduring outpouring of his life so that his children may grow into life.  Logic tells us, of course, that one cannot give something that one does not have and so the question arises: “How can a father be continually filled with life so that he can continually pour out his life for his children?”  The answer is in our Gospel reading today.  There Jesus says: “Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.”  The answer, in other words, is the Eucharist.  Therefore, fathers, it behooves you to approach this altar frequently—even daily, if possible—because by receiving the Most Holy Body and Blood of Jesus in the Eucharist you receive Life, himself, and thus are filled with life so that you can pour yourself out for your children.

          And so, my friends, as we celebrate this wonderful gift that has been given to us—the real and enduring presence of Jesus: Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity in the Eucharist—and as we recognize and honor the fathers among us, let us give thanks to God the Father in heaven for this amazing gift of his love and let us pray for the fathers among us that, strengthened by this Holy Sacrament, they might continually generate life in their children, like Karol Wojtyla senior did, and thus produce an abundant harvest of life for the world.  Saint Joseph, patron of fathers, pray for us!

Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – June 18^th, 2017

There can be only one...

          Jesus came to gather God's scattered children into one flock under him, the one (Good) Shepherd.  If there is any division among us, we must work to erase it so that there would be only one flock.

----------------------------------------

Homily: 4^th Sunday of Easter – Cycle B

          The other day, I got to thinking about this woman I know named Laura.  I met Laura nearly five years ago when we both signed up for a summer internship for future pastors and pastoral counselors at one of the hospitals in Carmel.  This was a non-denominational program, so there were Catholics, Protestants, and even those who didn’t claim to belong to any particular faith tradition.  Laura fit into that latter category.  She grew up Catholic but had long since drifted away from practicing her faith in the Catholic Church.  I must confess that at first I judged her unjustly.  Because she was a woman, divorced, in her early forties, and had left the practice of the Catholic Church I judged her to be someone who left the Church for ideological reasons—I assumed that she wanted women to be priests—which was why she was now pursuing this pastoral career from outside of the Catholic Church.

          As I got to know Laura through working together in the hospital, I grew to respect her deeply.  She had been through a lot of painful situations in her life and I could see that she was trying to make sense of it all while remaining true to who she was and to being a disciple of Jesus.  Nonetheless, I still held on to my prejudice that she had an agenda against the Catholic Church (in spite of the fact that she hadn’t said one negative word against it).  One day, however, she said something that blew me away.  I don’t remember what the conversation was about, but we must have been saying something about the Church or about different faith traditions, because at one point Laura said “That’s why I love the Catholic Church, because it’s so egalitarian.  They take anybody!”  “Wait,” I thought, “you’ve abandoned the Catholic Church to do your own thing but you love it anyway?”  It was confounding to me, but it completely obliterated my prejudices of her and it made me think harder about how I look at people, especially people who don’t “fit” into my idea of a “good disciple”.

          Today, in our Gospel reading, we hear Jesus call himself the “Good Shepherd”.  In fact, in each year of the three year cycle of readings the Gospel for the 4^th Sunday of Easter is taken from the “Good Shepherd” discourse in John’s Gospel.  Therefore, we’ve come to call the 4^th Sunday of Easter “Good Shepherd Sunday”.  This year, we are blessed to hear the part of this discourse in which Jesus calls himself the “Good Shepherd” and then continues to describe how a good shepherd behaves.  The good shepherd “lays down his life for his sheep”, Jesus says, and he knows his sheep and his sheep know him.  We know that Jesus is the Good Shepherd, because we know that he laid down his life for us his sheep.  In every church we keep a reminder of that somewhere and so all we have to do is look to the crucifix to be reminded that Jesus is the Good Shepherd who laid down his life for us his sheep.  And he knows us and we know him.  Every Sunday (and for some of you even more frequently) we come to Mass and we hear the Word of God proclaimed and broken open for us.  This word reveals Jesus to us so that we can know him and know him deeply.  And, of course, since Jesus is the Son of God “through whom all things were made” he knows us and he loves us: not as some sheep that his Father hired him to shepherd, but as his own sheep for whom he would lay down his life.  And this is all very familiar to us.

          Then Jesus says something interesting.  He says “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold.  These also I must lead, and they will hear my voice, and there will be one flock, one shepherd.”  You know, if you take a look around you, you’ll notice that we’re a pretty homogenous group of people.  Certainly there is great diversity in our backgrounds, but if someone who didn’t know any of us stood outside and watched as everyone left after Mass, I’d bet that he or she would conclude that, for the most part, we were all pretty much the same.  And if we look around in our community, we can see that there is a large part of it that does not belong to this Church: people of different races and ethnicities, people of different socio-economic status, and people of different religious tradition.  And so when you heard the words of Jesus today—“I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold… These also I must lead”—I hope that some of these people came to your mind.  I want you to ask yourselves this question: “Are there any of these people who are not part of this Church whom I would not want to be part of this Church?”  In other words, is there anyone who isn’t here whom you would be “repulsed” to see come here?  My hope is that the answer for all of us is “no”, but I suspect that at least for a few of—perhaps more than we would like to admit—the answer is “yes”: that there are people in our community whom we think don’t “fit” and so we would rather that they find another place to worship.

          In the first reading, we heard Peter proclaim in his speech to the Sanhedrin that there is only one name by which we are to be saved (that is, the name of Jesus).  Notice he didn’t say by which “the chosen ones” would be saved, but rather by which we—meaning all—are to be saved.  Coupled with Jesus’ words that there would be “one flock [and] one shepherd”, we see that we have no claim to exclusivity in the Catholic Church.  In other words, no one has any right to claim “this is my church and I hope that only people like me attend here.”  In fact, none of us even have the right to claim that any church is “their church”.  In fact, there is only one person in the entire universe who can rightfully say “this is my church”, and that’s Jesus.  The rest of us can only claim to belong to it.

          And so, my brothers and sisters, we see that my friend Laura was right.  The Catholic Church, that is, the universal Church, is the Church for everyone, because it is Jesus’ Church.  In fact, it has to be for everyone; because if it devolves into being “my church” then it loses its very reason for existence: to be the one flock of the one shepherd, Jesus Christ.  If we struggle with the idea of having… oh let’s call them “less favorable people” here, then I invite you to remember one thing, which we heard in our second reading from the letter of Saint John: “Beloved, we are God’s children now.”  My brothers and sisters, there is no greater dignity than this: to be children of God.  Therefore, any distinction between us and those around us—either here in the pews or out in the community—are distinctions in this world only.  In God’s eyes, we are either his children or those who one day will be his children through baptism.  Our task is to erase every other division and work solely so that there would be one flock for our one shepherd, Jesus Christ.

          As we continue to revel in our Easter joy, let us show God how grateful we are to be called His children by renewing our efforts daily to build up His Church into the one flock whom Jesus the Good Shepherd laid down his life for; and for whom he will one day return to shepherd into the eternal joy of heaven.

Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – April 25^th & 26^th, 2015