Homily for Monday, 28 August 2017– Memorial of St. Augustine of Hippo

Monday of the 21st week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: 1 Thessalonians 2:9-13; Psalm 139:7-8, 9-10, 11-12ab; Matthew 23:27-32

This homily was given at St. James Church, Vernon, BC, Canada.

Are St. Paul’s first words of his letter to the Thessalonians not remarkable? In fact, does St. Paul not paint a picture of the Thessalonian Christian community that is seemingly a bit too good to be true? All is well early in St. Paul’s mission to bring the Christian faith to the Thessalonians. Not only does St. Paul’s message take root in the Thessalonians “in word,” but “in power and in the Holy Spirit.” In other words, by the time St. Paul writes his letters to them, the ancient Greek city of Thessalonica has become no more a “mission territory,” but its people have become responsible, authentic ministers to still other peoples of the Christian faith St. Paul had handed on to them.

The Thessalonians, St. Paul recognizes in his letter to them, are model Christians. In other regions, over perhaps great distances, the people praise the faith and the hospitality of the Thessalonians. In his biblical letters, St. Paul praises and encourages no other local Christian community as he praises and encourages the Thessalonians.

But what is most remarkable of St. Paul’s words of praise for the Thessalonians that we hear today? What is the greatest praise St. Paul gives the Thessalonians? St. Paul writes to the Thessalonians about how “the people of [other] regions” were reporting about how the Thessalonians “had turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God.”

This may not seem like St. Paul is saying much here, in the context of all the other great praise he gives the Thessalonians. But essentially communities like the Thessalonians are the dream of any pastor; any bishop; any leader in the Church. Many communities and people from the beginning of the Church, although Christian in name; faithful in name, have not succeeded as well as the Thessalonians of St. Paul’s time did in turning “to God from idols, to serve a living and true God.”

Other communities to whom St. Paul wrote had to be challenged to move from serving forms of dead “gods”; idols of wealth, self-sufficiency, and pride. The same was true of the scribes and Pharisees of our Gospel reading today from Matthew.

And today’s idols are legion: Military might, wealth for its own sake, polarizing and stifling ideologies, xenophobia and lack of hospitality toward those in need, pride, greed, obsession often with black-and-white certainty and “the way we have always done it,” to name a few.

How, then, do we break from these false and dead idols to “serve a living and true God”? St. Paul and St. Augustine, whom we celebrate today, in particular experienced famous conversions from forms of idolatry— for Paul a conviction that the new Christian faith of the time had to be destroyed, violently if necessary, and for Augustine a form of slavery to systems of thought that blinded him to God’s goodness in creation and our need for God’s grace to do good ourselves.

St. Paul would become the great evangelist to the Gentiles, the Greek and Roman, non-Jewish, peoples in the Roman Empire of the day. St. Augustine would become a towering intellectual, bishop, writer, and teacher. The Thessalonians, no less models for us than many great saints like Paul and Augustine, taught by the humble way they lived, which people of other regions noticed: They turned “from idols to serve a living and true God.”