Homily for Saturday, 1 November 2014– Solemnity of All Saints

Readings of the day: Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14; Psalm 24:1bc-2, 3-4ab, 5-6; 1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12a

Who are saints? Has anyone here ever thought that there may be many more saints‒ people who have entered heaven‒ than our Church has officially named, or canonized?

Here are some figures on saints: From the year 1000 to 1978, when John Paul II became pope, “fewer than 450” saints were canonized. St. John Paul II, ordained a priest on the Solemnity of All Saints 68 years ago today, alone canonized over 480 saints and beatified 1 300 more people in his 28 years as pope. There are more than double the canonized and beatified people (those declared “blessed,” with one more attributed miracle needed to be canonized a saint) now than before John Paul II became pope. And those are just the named saints. They are more than the number of days in the year on which we Catholics celebrate saints.

Fortunately we have this Solemnity of All Saints on which we celebrate literally all saints, those named and unnamed. This, I think, is our Church’s way of saying that there are many more saints than those we formally recognize and canonize.

This is not some strange idea. Our readings for today resonate with this sense that there are many saints, officially recognized or not. Some saints (for the first few centuries of Christian history these were all the saints recognized) are martyrs; those who have given their lives for our faith. Our first reading, from Revelation, speaks of these saints, courageous witnesses to Christ whose “robes” have been “washed in the blood of the Lamb.” Our second reading includes all people who have lived with the purity of “children of God,” and in our Gospel reading Jesus calls many people “blessed”: “The poor in spirit… those who mourn… the meek… those who hunger and thirst for righteousness… the merciful… the clean of heart… the peacemakers” and those “who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness.”

Our Responsorial Psalm is especially inspiring to me because it speaks of all who long for God. We have all prayed here, “Lord, this is the people that longs to see your face.” Is this not the first step toward being a saint: To long for the face of God; to desire to be with God for eternity? Do we not all have this desire in some way?

Please allow me to say with confidence that I do not think we would be here if we did not desire to be with God. We all desire to be with God, now and forever. Am I right? We are all called to be saints; called to be among the holy people of God.

There are many saints-to-be here now who live this universal call to be saints, to be children of God who “long to see God’s face,” better than I could ever preach it in words. Our Church and our world have many anonymous saints; I believe more than the saints whose names we know. This, more than just the saints canonized by our Church, is our cause for celebration. This is why we are here on this day to remember All Saints.

Homily for Tuesday, 28 October 2014– Feast of Sts. Simon and Jude

Tuesday of the 30th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Ephesians 2:19-22; Psalm 19:2-3, 4-5; Luke 6:12-16

What do we know about Jesus’ Apostles? The Gospels give us many details about some of the Twelve, for example Peter, James, and John, who were with him at most significant events in Jesus’ life. We know of Thomas as the one who doubted Jesus’ resurrection, but then believed. From the beautiful scene in John’s Gospel of Nathaniel (named Bartholomew in the other Gospels), whom Philip calls from under the fig tree to “come and see” Jesus, we know of these two apostles. We know of Matthew the tax collector-turned-apostle. Especially if you are of Scottish ancestry, you may have a devotion to St. Andrew. And of course, for all the wrong reasons it seems, we know of Judas Iscariot, “who became a traitor.”

But what do we know of Simon and Jude, whose feast we celebrate today? It would seem that we know very little about these two apostles.  

In Luke’s Gospel from which we hear today, Simon is called “the Zealot.” Was Simon a member of the Zealots, who are thought by some scholars of our time to have been a political movement during and after Jesus’ time intent on asserting Israel’s independence from Roman rule by force? Or is this a nickname given him in the Gospel simply because Simon was a passionate Apostle of Jesus Christ (although this could describe all twelve Apostles)? We cannot be sure.

We know even less about Jude, or “Judas the son of James,” than about Simon. Did his thought give rise to the New Testament letter that is named after him? Popular devotion makes Jude the patron saint of hopeless causes. Perhaps we could pray to St. Jude to help us with the hopeless cause of knowing who he was…

Despite our inability to know who the Apostles were beyond the little that Scripture gives us, our first reading today gives us some idea not only of the significance of the Apostles, but of who we are as Church. The Letter to the Ephesians says that we, the Church, are “built” together “upon the foundation of the Apostles… with Christ Jesus himself as the capstone.” We are “fellow citizens with the holy ones and members of the household of God.”

These two verses from Ephesians say a lot about the Apostolic beginnings of our Church; that the Church, headed by Christ, is “built upon the foundation of the Apostles.” The bishops, with the pope as both head and brother bishop, are an image of this first group of Twelve Apostles. They are successors of the Apostles, and so we pray in our Creed that we are “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.” And we, like the Apostles, are “fellow citizens with the holy ones.”

What dignity God has given us! A few of us may be well known; “big names” in our communities; our workplaces; our parish… But are not most of us more like Simon and Jude? We are, for the most part, lesser known beyond a close circle of loved ones, but together we are “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.” We are “fellow citizens with the holy ones,” those well-known and those not so well-known.

Homily for Monday, 27 October 2014– Ferial

Monday of the 30th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Ephesians 4:32-5:8; Psalm 1:1-2, 3, 4, 6 (R: based on Ephesians 5:1); Luke 13:10-17

My sisters and brothers in Christ, in what way do we “live as children of the light” as St. Paul invites us to live in his letter to the Ephesians? How do we “behave like God as his very dear children,” putting into practice what our Psalm response urges us to do?

I think that, at the core of our message in Ephesians and in our Responsorial Psalm is St. Paul’s phrase in our first reading: “But instead, thanksgiving.”

The Letter to the Ephesians lists many ways in which Christian disciples were not to act. “Obscenity or silly or suggestive talk… is out of place,” as are immorality, impure actions or speech, and greed. These are the deeds of “darkness” against which we are to turn in order to be “children of light”; to behave like the “very dear children” of God.

Do not most if not all of us have a strong sense of right and wrong? This is to be encouraged, and yet I ask who has given us the moral ideals by which we live? These ideals are a gift from God. But then who among us has ever entered a confessional and confessed a long list of recurrent sins or bad habits? Again, this is laudable, and please be assured that God, through the Church, forgives these and all sins for which we seek forgiveness.

But then how many of us pause to give thanks for God’s gift, not only of forgiveness and absolution in the sacrament of reconciliation, but for the moral ideals that God has put into our hearts in the first place; for the desire to confess when we have fallen short of these ideals; for God’s mercy and grace; for having made us his own “very dear children”?

It would give me great joy if we were all able to answer “yes,” all or at least most of the time to this question. At least most of the time, I; we give thanks to God for moral ideals given to us through Scripture; through the Church; through the people we love. “But instead, thanksgiving,” St. Paul says to us. Thanksgiving is of highest value in being “children of light”; God’s “very dear children.”

Thanksgiving is what “the leader of the synagogue” in our Gospel reading today and other religious leaders in Jesus’ time were lacking. The Sabbath had become a law to follow instead of God’s gift for which to give thanks. The synagogue leader is “indignant”: How dare Jesus cure the woman on the Sabbath? But the woman Jesus cures understands the core message: “But instead, thanksgiving.” With thanksgiving, our Gospel reading says, the woman “at once stood up straight and glorified God.”

We are invited to be like this woman. We are invited to thanksgiving; to give thanks to God for the gifts he has given us, whether healing, forgiveness, the moral ideals that lead us to God, or the very fact that we are here to worship as a community of faith. “But instead, thanksgiving”… By our thanksgiving we live as God’s “very dear children”; as “children of light.”

Homily for Friday, 24 October 2014– Ferial

Friday of the 29th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Ephesians 4:1-6; Psalm 24:1-2, 3-4ab, 5-6; Luke 12:54-59

How does Jesus call us “to interpret the present time”? In the Gospel reading we hear today, Jesus criticizes “the crowds” of his time, those who follow Jesus from place to place, who hear his message, but do not wish to commit to the radical but ultimately saving demands of his message; his Gospel.

We hear Jesus admonish two particular groups of people: First, those who can predict rain when “a cloud” rises “in the west” and heat when the wind is “from the south” but cannot “interpret the present” signs of the kingdom of God, beginning with Jesus’ presence among them. Second, Jesus speaks against legalistic types who bring petty disputes before higher courts instead of settling them among themselves.

I have no personal slight against lawyers. I know of faithful and honest lawyers here in our parish. But I do have a soft spot in my heart for meteorologists. My father is a retired weather forecaster. Once, during my second stint teaching in Colombia, I was on pilgrimage, riding on the back of a Jeep in the mountains with other Basilian seminarians and people of the coffee and banana farming community we were visiting.  Farmers are interested in the weather, and so I was interested in the discussion they were having on the back of the Jeep. I was even able to predict correctly the storms that would hit or miss us that day. Was I channeling my father’s forecasting skill, or was this sheer luck? I suspect it was the latter.

Jesus’ point in our Gospel reading (perhaps meteorologists like my father and some lawyers may disagree) is that there is something more important than the weather or manipulating the law to resolve disputes in our favor. Most importantly, we are invited “to interpret the present time.” How do we do this?

One Vatican II document that speaks verbatim of discerning “the signs of the times” is the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes. This document laments much of the state of the world in 1965, from hunger, widening disparity between rich and poor, challenges of rapid improvements in technology and social communication (well before Facebook and Twitter!), spiritual indifference especially among youth, to the arms race and increasing destructiveness of war. And yet Gaudium et Spes was criticized by some as too optimistic!

The bishops who wrote Gaudium et Spes were optimistic or, better yet, discerned one point with profound accuracy: Despite the world’s problems, there is still a longing for God. Gaudium et Spes begins by acknowledging “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of [people] of this age” as the same “joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the followers of Christ.”

Is this not the most significant sign of “the present time”? Jesus invites us “to interpret the present time”; to discern “the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of [people] of this age”; to discern God’s presence in our midst and to build the Kingdom of God, a project brought to the present time through the life and Gospel message of Christ.