Welcome to CatholicPreacher! I use this page as a type of archive of my thoughts for my Sunday homily.

Sunday, June 30, 2013

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost


Is Your Faith a Wall or a Door?

"The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love"(Gal.5:6).

     Every Christian will likely recount when he or she the made the conscious decision to follow Christ.  Some of the stories are quite dramatic, the classic sinner to saint repentance; these are narratives of great clarity and inspiration.  However, not many of us have had such conversions.  Most conversions could be likened to an extended dating between couples, when at some point total commitment becomes imperative.  For us Catholics, that is usually Confirmation.
     The calling of Elisha in 1Kings and Jesus' call in Luke provide a couple of notable differences as outlined by theologian Reginald Fuller. Elisha's call was not the complete abandonment of his life, but rather an added responsibility to serve God as prophet.  Jesus' call was absolute and urgent.  One had to immediately respond to the desire to follow Christ and completely ("No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God"-Lk.9:62).  Another important difference noted by Fuller was that Elisha was not called to follow Elijah, but to succeed him as prophet.  Jesus' disciples were not called to replace him, or even to succeed him, as much as continue to be led by him through the presence of the Spirit. Despite the tendency to set up structures of hierarchy and obedience in the institutional Church, every Christian from Pope to the most despised criminal who hears God's voice is accountable to Christ. We all minister as servants, but possess the baptized nature of priest, prophet and king for the mission.
     As we continue in our reading of St.Paul's letter to the Galatians, he negotiates the concept of the nature of our freedom in Christ in responding to our call.  Paul uses the highly-charged terms flesh and spirit.  In this context, Paul uses the term flesh to mean our human natures---instinctual and rational (lower and higher, respectively), not the carnal appetite alone as so many misread. Spirit is capitalized and refers to the Holy Spirit.  Paul associates this "flesh nature" as that which seeks to justify oneself before God in following rules and thus meriting justification; rather, Paul speaks of being led by the Spirit.  The Spirit is liberation from law, from the futility of realizing righteousness through observance of rules of spiritual discipline (Law) alone.  As Christ came "not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it, so Paul preaches freedom from finding righteousness in the Law in declaring that "The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love". The Spirit releases us not from practicing the Law, but from the necessity of finding salvation through observance of the Law. 
     Our calling is to a relationship with a living God through Christ.  We don't have to abandon the Law, but it must serve, first and foremost, the chief commandment: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might.  Jesus adds the ethical necessity of expressing this love "and your neighbor as yourself".  Paul's "only thing that counts" is our inherent freedom from placing observance before relationship; relationship always comes first, and that is why faith and discernment and connection to a community of professed believers is essential.  In seeking God, we seek Him as a community of believers.
     Faith, misunderstood as short-sighted obedience to rules rather than relationship, is a wall to our spiritual life and prevents us from accessing God's love and grace.  As Paul writes in Romans about the futility of this struggle: "For what I want to do I do not, but what I hate I do".  He is speaking of the futility of overcoming our "flesh" without the Spirit---reaching God by rules rather than by responding to a direct overture of God through Christ.  For it is in this relationship in the Spirit that Paul proclaims "...if you are led by the Spirit you are no longer under the Law".  To be "under" the Law means that to be "walled in" by the Law, prevented by the Law--The Wall.  The Spirit is the door Christ opened in his sacrifice, and we are asked to step through it.  Liberation can be a scary thing, though, because it is not possible to always know the nature of this transformation, where it will lead once we are committed. But that is the nature of faith. Consider the words of St. Paul: All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything (1Cor. 13:17).

Saturday, June 22, 2013

Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Hill of Crosses in Lithuania

"Bear one another's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ"  Gal. 6:2

     The Old Testament reading in Zechariah has been understood by Christians in two distinct ways as exemplified in John 19:37 as the one "pierced" alluding to Jesus, while Revelation 1:17 uses this image of being pierced as referring to the suffering of the ungodly in Christ's Second Coming and subsequent judgement (Parousia).  These two seemingly divergent allusions work together in our understanding of our salvation journey as a pilgrim church, a people on the way.
     Today's gospel event in Luke comes on the heels of Jesus feeding the five thousand and leads to Jesus' questioning the disciples as to who people think he must be. After a litany of prophets, Peter's confession that Jesus was "the Christ of God" suggests Jesus' identity as a servant Messiah (he just got done feeding people!) rather than the ruler Messiah, and reveals Jesus as anointed of God rather than anointed by a prophet of God. The direct and close association is unmistakable and eventually becomes the inchoate understanding of Jesus as God in the Trinity.  Jesus' admonition not to reveal this understanding springs from the need to complete his mission by the ultimate expression of his servant-mission of healing: to give his life in perfect obedience to a love-stricken God.  This love is brought to perfection in Christ's sacrificial love; Christ's mission could only be finally understood, and the Messiah revealed, after the crucifixion and subsequent resurrection.
     As Zechariah is bringing the hope of Messiah, Jesus fulfills this great hope from engendering faith that God's love transforms crucifixion to resurrection.  Jesus living and walking among humanity was God's great presence among his creation, or a parousia, which is Greek for "presence". Jesus was God's presence among his people.  The Parousia (capital P) references Christ's second coming in Christianity, but also connects with a key word in Luke's gospel: daily.  Luke and Matthew write from the identical source material (Mark and an unknown document, Q); however, unlike Matthew's account, Luke has Jesus telling his disciples that anyone who wishes to follow him must "take up his cross daily."  It is in this word that we make the connection to the Parousia allusion from Zechariah recorded in Revelation, but instead of Christ return at the end of time, the daily parousia is our mission.
     In this sense, we make present Christ as we "take up our cross".  We know there is no shortage of crosses.  Very often we look to some immediate burden we didn't ask for as our cross, but I would like to suggest we look beyond the crosses we bear not by choice and the single cross we are asked to bear.  After all, Christ didn't say we must take up our crosses, but rather our cross. The cross of Christ is the cross of our neighbor.
    Paul, in Galatians, references "bearing the burden" of others as that which fulfills the law of Christ.  What is the law of Christ?  Jesus' commandment to love one another. When we bear the burden of our neighbor, the loving presence of Christ is made present.  Parousia is made real now, not some distant time in the future, and what brings people to worship God no longer is fear of being slung into hell, but the experience of the awe-filled experience of God's love. Christ's ultimate judgment in the Parousia may not fall on those who refuse to believe or live lives of dissipation but rest most heavily on those who know Christ but refuse to love.
  

Sunday, June 16, 2013

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost


The Heart of Grace: Love

Christian grace is the undeserved favor of God towards us; we don’t deserve God’s love because of what we have achieved, the good we have done.  God loves us because he desires communion with us.  In other words, God’s love exists independent of our actions, or even of our awareness of Him.  As we respond to this love over time, this becomes our story of salvation.  Christ’s death and resurrection was God’s greatest act of love, “for no one has greater love than this: to lay down his life for a friend”(John 15:13).  We are the friends of God when we show our love for one another; this is God’s “command” expressed in Jesus’ great command, but more importantly, revealed in his actions. It's not so much "What would Jesus do", but rather "What did Jesus do?"
In today’s reading from 1 Samuel, Nathan, the prophet who succeeded Samuel, helped David face his great sin of abusing his power by taking his loyal friend’s wife as his secret lover while his friend was away at war fighting for Israel.  How does one tell a king he is a great sinner effectively?  He does it with a story.  Likewise, Jesus in today’s gospel tells a story of the Pharisee, Simon.  In both instances, a painful truth had to be communicated, and because both King David and Simon had a sense of God’s love, Nathan and Jesus used parable rather than condemnation to reveal the need for repentance.
Jack Kavanaugh, a Jesuit scholar aptly observes that “Our resistance to repentance parallels our resistance to love. If we experience ourselves unable to trust fully that God could love us unconditionally, the indirect method of parables sometimes is the most efficient strategy to help us accept the mystery of our redemption.”
Paul, likewise, recounted his salvation in sharing a story, not providing a scholarly treatise on grace. He recounts God’s love revealed to him while he was persecuting the Church,  

"how I persecuted the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it, and progressed in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries among my race, since I was, even more, a zealot for my ancestral traditions. But when God, who from my mother’s womb had set me apart and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me,  so that I might proclaim him to the Gentiles…."

We witness to the truth of God’s love by striving to love one another as God loves us.  This is our liberation from the Law.  It isn’t that we can just disregard the commandments of God as revealed in earlier times (we can’t simply commit adultery by claiming not to be bound by the Law), but rather we fulfill the Law in loving one another as we have been loved by God.
Our confronting the sinners in this world begins not with condemnation, but with the story of our graced lives.  We share our table with sinners because we all have sinned and fallen short of meriting God’s favor. We gather to worship not because we are saints, but because we are sinners striving for sainthood.

Saturday, June 8, 2013

Third Sunday after Pentecost




Do This in Remembrance of Me

Today’s readings from the Old Testament and the gospels seem to focus on the miracle of resurrecting the dead; Elijah in 1Kings and Jesus in the Gospel of Luke are both miracle workers.  To be sure, these readings do deal with resurrection, but the resurrection of the two dead sons is only temporary.  In time, these young men will again succumb to death as does every human.  What, then, is the author of Luke and 1 Kings trying to get us to understand?
Each story is really begins around a mother’s experience of abandonment by her son’s death.  In 1 Kings, the mother who has hosted Elijah the prophet is filled with anguish believing that the prophet’s visit has brought God’s retribution upon her for some undisclosed sin by killing her only son.  Likewise, in Luke, the widow’s son has passed away and the woman is now alone.  The widow-mother in 1 Kings laments to Elijah

“Why have you done this to me, O man of God?
Have you come to me to call attention to my guilt
and to kill my son?” 

The phrase “to call attention” is more literally translated “to bring my sin to remembrance”(RSV). The Greek phrase for remembrance is key; the word is anamesis and suggests more than bringing up a past thought.  The word carries with it the connotation of bringing a past reality to the present---resurrecting an old wound of an undisclosed sin.  Elijah immediately passes the buck and blames God, but he also pleads “O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again”.  The boy is resurrected and the story ends with the widow joyfully announcing:  “Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.” This realization is the crux of the story, and the concept of "word" is crucial.  The Hebrew notion of "word", dabar suggests the “word-action” of God.  The same essential meaning of the Greek logos of John’s gospel that created the world.  God’s word brings life, not death.
In the literal rendering of this story the truth could be easily eclipsed by focusing on the extraordinary event of the raising of the dead. The truly eternal life, though, is the revitalization of the widow’s faith that God’s love is real and present in her world, now, through the prophet's "mouthing" the "word".  In Luke, Jesus’ deep seated compassion for the widow brought her son back to life, but also gave the woman the eternal gift of hope and trust in God’s goodness.  The proclamation that “God has come to help his people” is the crowds response, not unlike the widow’s in 1 Kings. Both stories turn on the faithful response of God's chosen ones (Elijah and Jesus).  Would that each person you meet recall the encounter with such joy!
Each Sunday we participate in an “anamesis” in the memorial of the Mass when we proclaim: “Christ has died.  Christ has risen.  Christ will come again””.  These phrases engender hope in the faithful.  For as St. Paul reminds us “If we have died with Christ, then we shall live with Christ”.  They can be an occasion for us to participate in the Thanksgiving that is called Eucharist, as we recall the crucifixions Christ has raised us from, so we can secure the hope of Christ's coming into the lives of so many who wait patiently for hope.
We too share in some part of the vulnerability of the widows when we can’t see God’s will in the mess of our lives, in its pain and seemingly arbitrariness of destruction.  This “widow’s soul” of feeling vulnerable and abandoned is like a great beacon for God and the faithful.  In our grief, God’s great compassion is at work around us like God’s call to Elijah, and Jesus’ profound feeling of compassion.  It is precisely when we feel abandoned that we need to draw near to our community, the Church, and the Mass.  Christ’s healing sacrificial power made present at every Mass begins this great healing and salvation. Never underestimate the power of the faithful’s gratitude in being able to work God’s great healing power in our lives.