Participating in the mission of the Local and Universal Church

          This past weekend was our Missionary Appeal weekend and Monsignor Jerome Feudjio from the diocese of Saint Thomas in the Virgin Islands made the mission appeal.  He was unable to stay for our 5:30 p.m. Sunday Mass, so I preached this brief homily trying to capture his thoughts.

Homily: 25^th Sunday of Ordinary Time – Cycle B

          When I was a kid back in Joliet, I remember hearing recordings of Bishop Joseph Imesh during mass.  When he had a message that he wanted to get to everyone he would sometimes make a recording and send it out to the parishes to play during the Sunday masses.  Now, I am just old enough to remember Saint Mary Nativity church before its latest renovation and I remember that one of the upgrades that they made in that renovation was to add a sound system with the capacity to play recorded materials like cassette tapes.  (Kids, if you don’t know what a cassette tape is, ask your parents about it after mass.)

          To be honest, I really had no clue who the Bishop was and why he got to have a recording of himself played in the middle of mass, but I do remember thinking that he must have been pretty important for Fr. Stalzer to give up some of his preaching time so we could hear it.  What it did help me realize, however, is that, as Catholics, we are all connected.

          I had heard in the past that one of the complaints about older Catholics is that they couldn’t see beyond the walls of their parish church: that they were too “parochial” and not “universal” enough.  Recent studies have shown that younger Catholics have trended the other direction, giving little attention to their local parish and identifying, rather, with the universal Church and the Pope.  (If you’ve ever heard of a little thing called “World Youth Day” then you know what I’m talking about.)  What gets lost in either case is the fact that we are a part of a diocese, which is under the pastoral care of a bishop, who is a successor to the Apostles, and that our mission as a parish is wholly bound up in the mission of our diocese, which is the mission of our bishop to bring the Good News of Jesus Christ to north-central Indiana; and, through that mission, to support the bigger mission of the universal Church.

          A way that we show our support for that mission is through our stewardship both at a parish level—sharing our time, talent, and treasure to support the many ministries in our local community—at the diocesan level (which we do by participating in the Fruitful Harvest campaign), and by our support of the missions—work being done in places where the Gospel still hasn’t been heard by everyone—by clergy and laity who, therefore, have little resources with which to work.

          Monsignor Jerome, the Rector of the Cathedral in the Diocese of Saint Thomas and the Vicar General of the Diocese was here this weekend to speak to us about the ongoing needs of their still relatively young diocese on the Virgin Islands.  Monsignor had to leave early this afternoon to fly to Washington D.C. to meet his bishop, Bishop Bevard, as they are scheduled to meet with the Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Christophe Pierre tomorrow.  He was disappointed that he could not address you all directly here at this Mass, but I promised him that I would do my best to share his thoughts with you here this evening as he seeks your continued support.

          Monsignor limited his thoughts to two points.  First: to say thanks.  You’ll recall that, last September, two category 5 hurricanes swept through the Carribean, directly hitting a number of U.S. territories, including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.  Monsignor spoke of the great damage that was done (not least of which, the roof of his rectory was destroyed…), but also of how the people of the dioceses in the United States (and our diocese, in particular) responded to provide funds to help supply them with food (as resources and supplies were thin) and the capacity to begin to rebuild.  For this he, on behalf of Bishop Bevard and all the people of the Virgin Islands, is extremely grateful.

          Second: he asks for further help.  While some supply lines have stabilized, Monsignor says that they are still in need of relief help.  The reason?  Instead of running their soup kitchens 5 days a week, as they were before the hurricanes, they are now running them 7 days a week so that some folks can have just even one meal a day.  Along with that, there are still many folks who, when they come for their meal, speak about other needs and, Monsignor relates, they cannot not help them.  Finally, one year removed, their Bishop, Bishop Bevard, is just now beginning to permit parishes to spend money on recovering buildings.  Up until now, Bishop Bevard has focused on supplying the needs of the people in their diocese.  Therefore, in spite of his great thankfulness, Monsignor Jerome needs to ask for our continued financial support so that the work of rebuilding may continue and the Church on the Virgin Islands may continue to grow.

          In our second reading today, the Apostle James tells us of how order is disrupted by selfishness and jealousy.  And in our Gospel reading, we hear Jesus’ famous instruction to his disciples: that those who wish to be acknowledged as greatest among them must be the servants of everyone.  One only needs to look around at society to see that we are becoming increasingly disordered, and at the television election ads to see that jealousy and selfish ambition are alive and well.  By responding to the needs both of those close to us, here in Lafayette and Tippecanoe County, and of those far away, like the people still recovering on the Virgin Islands, we overcome selfishness and jealousy and make ourselves the servants of all: like little children in the eyes of God who have found his favor and, thus, will receive the full riches of his kingdom.

          Therefore, my brothers and sisters, please be generous in supporting the needs of Bishop Bevard, Monsignor Jerome, and the people of the diocese of Saint Thomas in the Virgin Islands.  Your gift will not only be an act of service to those in need, but will also be an act of thanksgiving for the many blessings that you have received from God; and will prepare you to receive the fullness of blessedness: life eternal with God in heaven.

Given at Saint Mary’s Cathedral: Lafayette, IN – September 23, 2018

Your chance to meet the King

Homily: 34^th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle A

Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe

          Saint Theresa of Calcutta, as most of us know, spent over 50 years serving the dying poor in the slums of Calcutta, India.  She had felt a special “call within her call” to religious life, as she would call it, to attend to those who were dying and poor that she (and the sisters that she eventually gathered around her) would find on the streets of Calcutta.  For the most part, the people for whom she and her sisters cared had no chance of recovery and survival.  That wasn’t Mother Theresa’s purpose, though.  Her call was to acknowledge their human dignity and to make them feel loved and cared for in their dying days.

          Over the years that she completed this service, many asked Mother Theresa, “How do you do it?”  In other words, “How is it possible for you to spend all of your days ministering to people who are physically filthy (because they haven’t bathed in a long time), while breathing intense body odor, dressing open sores and wounds, cleaning fecal matter and throw up, while living in a place with relatively poor sanitation and even poorer ventilation?”  Mother’s answer was always five simple words (which she would count off using the fingers of her hand): “You. Did. It. To. Me.”

          For Mother Theresa, it was her love of Jesus, and Jesus’ promise that he made to his disciples in the judgment parable that we heard in our Gospel reading today, that impelled her on.  For her, Jesus’ judgment warning wasn’t so much of a threat (that is, “look at how you will be punished if fail to do this!”), but rather an amazing opportunity promised to her.  When she read, “whatever you did for one of the least brothers of mine, you did for me”, she saw her chance to meet Jesus, for whom she had fostered and intense love, in the flesh of the poor ones whom she met in the streets of the slums of Calcutta.  In other words, in this phrase, Mother Theresa found the way to order her life rightly so as to demonstrate her love for Jesus in the most intense way.

          Friends, it is true that this passage of Matthew’s Gospel is a depiction of the final judgment.  If we view it only as a fearful thing, however—that is, as something over which we have no control—then we fail to see the beautiful instruction that Jesus gives to us within it.  You see, in telling us how we are going to be judged, Jesus is giving us a clue as to how we are to order our lives rightly.  In effect, Jesus is saying: “If you love me and you wish to serve me, here’s how you do it.”  And what is that way?  To do works of mercy to all those around you.  In doing this, that is, in instructing us in this way, Jesus is demonstrating that he is shepherding his people, just as he promised to do through the prophet Ezekiel centuries before.

          In our first reading, we heard this prophesy from the prophet Ezekiel in which God says that he, himself, will come to tend his sheep.  He is saying this because the shepherds whom he had appointed for his people—that is, the rulers who had followed in the line of King David, the original “shepherd king”—had failed to shepherd his people rightly, which led God to remove his protection from them, which then led to their being conquered by the Babylonians and forced into exile from their land.  This prophesy, then, is a promise that God himself will come and shepherd his people once again and lead them back into their land.  More importantly, however, he promises to lead them into rightly ordered lives, by which they will enjoy God’s friendship for all eternity.

          Today, therefore, as we celebrate this feast of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, we see that what we celebrate is Jesus Christ, the great Shepherd King—not just of one people at one place in time, but of the whole universe—whom God sent to save us from our exile in sin and to shepherd us into rightly ordered living so that we might enter into God’s friendship for eternity.  As King—especially as a King who has shown us such great benevolence by taking on our human nature so that he might suffer all of the effects of our sinfulness (including, and especially, death!) in order to save us from sin and death—he expects that we will serve him and offer to him works that demonstrate our gratefulness for this grace that we have been given.  Even more so, however, our King expects that our works would not be done out of duty alone, but also out of our love for him who has already demonstrated his love so generously for us.  This latter expectation is what Mother Theresa clung to so strongly in her life and in her work: She loved Jesus so much that she delighted in demonstrating her love for him by performing these extraordinary acts of mercy for those “least brothers” of his.

          My brothers and sisters, Jesus is our great Shepherd King and he longs to shepherd us into his kingdom of eternal life and peace.  And so, how do we allow him to shepherd us?  Well, it would be easy for me to say “by doing the works of mercy”.  Perhaps, however, I can offer an even more practical method: what if we simply tried to be less selfish every day?  You know, if we all tried to be a little less selfish every day (and, therefore, more giving to others), then, before we know it, we’d look a lot more like Mother Theresa.  All it takes is a choice—and it is a choice that we’ll have to make every day—but when we do, we begin to let Jesus shepherd us.  And when Jesus shepherds us, then our lives begin to become rightly re-ordered.  And when our lives begin to be rightly re-ordered, then our world will begin to be rightly re-ordered.  And when our world becomes rightly re-ordered, then what else is that but the kingdom of God among us.  And what more could we want than to have the kingdom of God among us?  Once we experience that, then we have nothing else to wait for than the coming of our Shepherd King, Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, so that death, the final enemy will be destroyed and we will be given back to God to live in the eternal joy of heaven.

          You probably didn’t think that being a little less selfish today could bring about heaven did you?  But it’s true!  Choose heaven today, therefore, by choosing to be less-selfish and you will be choosing eternal life: the shepherding of our King, Jesus Christ—the very same King who we meet here at this altar.

Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – November 25^th & 26^th, 2017

The cure for selfishness? How about NFP?

          My first real "hitting" attempt at preaching on a moral issue.  I think that I did pretty well in clearly making my point while also emphasizing the Good News.  I wish I could have said more, because I know that I pretty much caricature-ized everyone who uses contraception, but I felt like God was moving me to speak about this rather frankly.  Hopefully you all will take the week to learn more about NFP and its benefits for promoting strong families and faithful discipleship of our Lord, Jesus!

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

          I remember back when I was a kid that during the summer, and after I was old enough to be trusted to cross Theodore Street, which was a busy street close to the house in which I grew up, my mother would send me over to my grandmother’s house to help her with little projects around her house.  Grandma Lucy always had vegetables growing in her gardens and so one of my regular jobs at her house was to weed the gardens.  I was always glad to help out my grandma, but this was one of the more unpleasant jobs for me as a 13 year old.  As many of you know, I’m sure, it is a very tedious job and for a teenage boy it can be very difficult to maintain the concentration necessary to do that job well.

          One of the difficulties that I encountered in the job was making sure that I only pulled out the weeds and not the sprouts of grandma’s vegetable plants.  I often learned the distinction the hard way: when grandma would come out to check on me and find one of her tomato plants uprooted.  Now, I love my grandma Lucy, but she was pretty rough around the edges, so when I screwed up like that, I heard about it from her.  She never gave up on me, though, because she always let me back into her garden to go after those weeds.

          Sometimes, in the years that followed, when I would hear today’s Gospel reading, I would think back to those summer hours spent weeding grandma Lucy’s garden and I would think to myself: “Man, I wish grandma would have paid more attention at Mass; because it sure would have saved me a lot of headaches and heartaches if she would have just let those weeds grow!”  My guess, however, is that she did pay attention and that she knew that Jesus’ parable means slightly different things depending on which level you apply it.

          Taken as it is, Jesus’ parable about the wheat and the weeds applies to a pretty grand scale: the kingdom of heaven.  Applied at that level, the parable speaks very generically and the people he speaks of are “caricatures”, that is, identified by a major characteristic: in this case, whether they are good or wicked.  Now, parables are, essentially, metaphors; and a metaphor does two things: it both highlights certain things and hides others.  For example: to say that “time is money” highlights that time is something valuable and that it can be spent.  What it hides, however, is that time cannot be saved: it just keeps ticking on no matter what we do.  Thus, in the parable of the wheat and the weeds, Jesus highlights that on the earth there will always be wickedness mixed in with the good; but that’s ok, because at the final harvest the good will be separated out from the wicked.  What it hides, however, is that people can change, while wheat can never be anything more than wheat and weeds never anything more than weeds.  Thus, the wicked (that is, the weeds) are not doomed to always be wicked, nor are the good (that is, the wheat) predestined to remain good; for they, too, can fall into wickedness.  And so the scale that Jesus is working in is important for our interpretation.

          Speaking at the level of the kingdom of heaven, the interpretation means exactly what we’ve said: that always there will be the wicked mixed in with the good and that the good will be preserved from the fire at the final harvest.  Brought down to the individual, however, the interpretation will have to change a bit.  At this level, Jesus would certainly speak of rooting out the weeds as soon as they appear, because, as we heard last week, the good seed that falls among thorns is quickly choked and produces no fruit.  In other words, there is no room for both wheat and weeds in the individual heart of a person.

          We can also apply an interpretation of this parable to the level of small groups, such as a family.  There we’ll find a mixture of the grand, kingdom-of-heaven scale interpretation with the small, individual scale interpretation.  Here we see that wickedness can, indeed, be sown among the good seeds of the members of a family.  Yet, as on the individual level, it is important to root out wickedness at the first sign of its growth, for wickedness sown in the midst of the family can destroy the entire family altogether.

          One of the most destructive weeds that can be sown in the midst of a family is selfishness.  In a family—more so even than on the level of a neighborhood or a town—the individual members are dependent on one another.  When selfishness takes root in a family it begins to separate members one from another as each seeks to satisfy his or her own wants and desires often at the expense of the others, thus stripping the family of the good fruit it could produce.  Dare I say that one of the most sinister seeds of selfishness in a family is the use of artificial means of contraception?  Sinister, because it appears to be something benign, that is, completely harmless, while it quietly destroys the rich harvest a family might produce.

          Contraception is the seed of selfishness in a family because it cuts God out of the parents’ relationship.  In effect, it says “God, you can’t be trusted to direct this part of our lives, so we are going to decide for ourselves when we’ll have children.”  For many, what it also says is “We want to have sex without consequences, that is, without responsibility”, which is nothing more than saying “Sex is about satisfying my desires; it has nothing to do with my family (that is, unless I want it to).”  That sounds pretty selfish, doesn’t it?  When that kind of selfishness grows up in a family, it’s like poison that ruins the whole harvest.

          “But Father, we can’t afford to have an unlimited amount of children.”  Yes, I know.  And God knows that, too.  That’s why he designed our bodies—particularly the female body—with a discernible fertility cycle that can be cooperated with to space out pregnancies: in other words, a natural way to prevent a pregnancy when it’s not feasible to support another child that nonetheless acknowledges God’s control over life instead of selfishly taking control for one’s self.  The various methods for discerning and utilizing this cycle are called “Natural Family Planning” (or NFP, for short) and they are like a natural herbicide that destroys selfishness at its roots and fertilizes the individual members of the family so that together they produce a rich harvest.

          NFP forces couples to be attentive to one another so as to “listen” to the female body’s natural signals indicating when it is fertile for conceiving a child.  Thus, in order to space pregnancies, couples have to periodically abstain from sex during these fertile periods, causing them to restrain their passions (and, thus, their selfishness) and to find other ways to express their intimate love for each other, which teaches them greater self-giving and often causes them to grow more intimate with one another.  Now, is there anybody here that doesn’t want more intimacy—that is, deep, meaningful connections with others, especially their spouses—in their lives?

          This week the Church is sponsoring “NFP Awareness Week” and so I invite all couples, young and not-so-young, married and engaged to be married, and anyone who thinks they might be married in the future, to explore the benefits of NFP for their family.  (You can start by reading the “extra page” of our bulletin this week.  Additional resources can be found on the US Bishop’s website: www.usccb.org.)  Talk to your friends about it.  Find someone who is using NFP and ask them what it has done for them personally and for their family.  Pray about it and ask God for the courage to trust him and his plan for you and your family.  Most of all, try it.  Test its claims for benefits and let it test you.  Perhaps you’ll find some weeds within you that you didn’t realize were there.  NFP may help you to root them out.

          My brothers and sisters, spilling seed lifelessly is like sowing weeds of selfishness among the wheat of your family.  With NFP, however, one lays down a strong defense against those weeds; for he or she acknowledges that God is in control; and that that is a good thing!  With NFP trust in God and trust in his power to overcome evil, even as it grows up around us, grows and we flourish.  Thus, at the final harvest, we will be gathered together among the wheat and welcomed into the barn that is eternal happiness—that is, the satisfaction of all of our desires—in heaven.  Strengthened by this Eucharist, let us take courage to choose this life of happiness today.

Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – July 20^th, 2014