Homily for Sunday, 20 August 2017

20th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Isaiah 56:1, 6-7; Psalm 67:2, 3, 5, 6, 8; Romans 11:13-15, 29-32; Matthew 15:21-28

How do we understand the relationship between memory and identity? When I speak of memory and identity, a few of us may recall a book by Pope John Paul II by this title, Memory and Identity, which was published just before John Paul II died in 2005. St. John Paul II had lived through some of history’s worst imbalances between memory and identity, such that both memory and identity were emptied of their proper meaning. St. John Paul II had lived through the rise of Nazi Germany, the height of communism in Eastern Europe, and other regimes that replaced the worship of God with the worship of the state and of ideology. These forms of what we might call “identity politics” or nationalism brought the worst wars and mass murder ever wrought on humanity; more Christian martyrs in the past century than in all the previous centuries of Christianity combined.

And yet “identity politics” persist today. This past week’s tragedy in Charlottesville, Virginia, is only the latest symptom of a more profound disease. This disease surfaces anytime we identify as “liberal” or “conservative” (or now perhaps by the new code words of extremism, the “alt-right” and “alt-left”) more than as Christian or more broadly human, created in God’s image and likeness. This disease shows itself when we identify as “orthodox,” as those who obey the teachings of their faith tradition as they understand them, over and against those who do not to our satisfaction; those so-called “heterodox.” This disease shows itself among those who attack the person and character of other people, too often under the guise of “pro-life,” “social justice,” or some other cause. This disease shows itself when, out of fear of those who do not identify as we do, we fail to welcome and integrate the migrant, the stranger, the refugee. This disease still leads to war, to broken relationships, and to disgusting displays of racism, among other symptoms. This disease falsifies identity and neglects the proper place of memory altogether.

Of course, the opposite is also true and often overlaps with “identity politics” disconnected from memory in its rightful sense. Memory can become so disconnected from identity that it becomes a sham and neglects altogether our identity, first and foremost, as daughters and sons of God. St. John Paul II, and many of us, have known in our lifetimes the effects of this disconnection of identity from memory, which then becomes a fraudulent mirage of itself. Genocides in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere, tribal warfare, conflicts in Latin America over ideology, aided and abetted by more powerful nations seeking their own ideological, resource, and military interests, and the continued scourge of terrorism (on which note we pray for the victims and people of Barcelona especially this week) stand out especially in my mind as instances of false memory that ends up, ironically, forgetting our fundamental, God-given identity.

And so where do we find hope in all this? How might we connect and balance memory and identity correctly in our lives and in our world today? The prophet Isaiah begins today with a critical message for us to hear. He says, “Maintain justice, and do what is right, for soon my salvation will come, and my deliverance be revealed.” In what way does God call us, through Isaiah, to “maintain justice and do what is right,” hoping for the final completion of God’s work of our “salvation” at the end of time?

Isaiah identifies maintaining justice and doing “what is right” especially with how we treat the “foreigners” among us, specifically “foreigners who join themselves to the Lord.” Could this not be an excuse, though, for us to deepen divisions, presuming we know who the “foreigners” are, and which foreigners have joined “themselves to the Lord” and which have not? I do not mean primarily to speak of our natural human tendency to think and communicate in categories, to identify and differentiate ourselves from one another in terms of nationality, race, religion, or any other category. To think and communicate in categories is not in itself wrong, but it can become dangerous when what makes another person foreign to us, “other” than us— nationality, race, religion, wealth, position or level of prestige in our Church, immigration status, differences in opinion, in political ideology, or disagreements in weighing of moral questions, and so forth— becomes greater than what unites us to one another and joins us all “to the Lord.”

Is the counter to this danger; the cure for this disease not then to seek out among people who differ from us what unites us “to the Lord”? Is this not God’s call to us to identify one another not first as “other”; not as friend or enemy; not as black or white; Christian or not; orthodox or heterodox; liberal or conservative; straight or gay; citizen or migrant or refugee; male or female, but as people beloved of God whom God wants to save— each and every one of us? This is, to me, how we might understand identity in its rightful sense. And only if we understand identity in this sense will we be able to balance it rightly with memory. And what is memory in this context? If identity is to define how we belong to and originate in God, as daughters and sons of God, then memory is to be mindful of God as our final goal; our one and only Saviour; the one and only object of our worship. This excludes raising any leader in our world, particularly anybody whose goals are to divide, to dehumanize, to stoke fear, and to believe his power to be beyond any check and balance, including God, to the level of saviour. We have but one Saviour, Jesus Christ, Son of God.

St. Paul knew this, and he experienced a famous conversion from living memory and identity out of balance; from presuming to know the will of God in murdering many of the earliest Christians in the same way too many today destroy and dehumanize anybody they view as “other.” St. Paul’s conversion was to be able to balance memory and identity rightly, and to acknowledge not himself but God in Christ as Saviour. The converted St. Paul never considered himself better, not least in God’s eyes, than the people he taught and served. St. Paul’s identity remained that of a proud and intense Jew, but after his conversion his identity was dependent on God; he would identify himself as God’s first. And so his memory was fixed on God who would call him to preach; to teach; to suffer and to die; God who would call St. Paul to heaven.

Who better than St. Paul to speak to the Gentiles, those who did not share his own Jewish identity, but did share his more important identity as beloved of God? This is at the core of St. Paul’s message to us through his Letter to the Romans. Our ministry is to emphasize and to re-emphasize constantly, by our words and our lived example, our common identity as beloved of God and our common memory that the final goal for every one of us is salvation in and by our one God. And not we, finally, but our one God, in this work of salvation, will erase any worldly division; any evil that is contrary to our salvation between now and the end of time.

Do we trust God enough to let God be our Saviour, or will fear outweigh our trust in God? Do we have the courage and faith of the woman of Matthew’s Gospel, who persists long enough that Jesus must acknowledge that she, too, a foreigner; a non-Jew, shares in the identity of beloved of God and remembers that her salvation, and the life of her daughter, is from God. “Woman, great is your faith”!

Great is our faith insofar as we identify first as beloved of God and remember that we are saved by God in Christ alone. Great is our faith insofar as we seek our identity and build memory not on worldly divisions but on our unity as people of God; as one people created in God’s image and likeness, seeking to bring the joy of this, our common memory and identity in our God, to all people and to all creation.