Homily for Sunday, 11 July 2021– Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Readings of the day: Amos 7:12-15; Psalm 85:9-10, 11-12, 13-14; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:7-13

We might find it curious that, in the Bible, nobody God calls to be a prophet wants to be a prophet. Why is this? There are several reasons why the Biblical prophets do not tend to want to be prophets. Some of them are all too aware of their own inadequacy, moral or otherwise, for the task. I think of Isaiah, who pleads with God, to no avail, to choose a better prophet than him, “a man of unclean lips living among a people of unclean lips,” or Elijah, who hides from God in a cave to avoid being sent out as a prophet: “Take my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.”

Other prophets in the Bible have other reasons for being reluctant to accept God’s call to prophesy. Prophets during the time of Israel’s kings in the Old Testament tended not to have good reputations, or they were not widely accepted by the people who were meant to receive their messages. Many kings of the time hired “professional” prophets, who usually told the kings what they wanted to hear. Some prophets of Israel’s royal court were not simply flatterers to the king in this way, but these court prophets who challenged the king (much less got away with it with their lives or reputations intact) were few.

Enter Amos, whose call to be a prophet we hear about today. Amos is no professional prophet of any royal court. He is a humble “herdsman, a dresser of sycamore trees.” In fact, Amos is not even from the Kingdom of Israel, but from Judah. Now, this becomes a bit confusing: After the death of King Solomon, son of King David, Israel split into two kingdoms, Israel in the north and Judah, centered around Jerusalem, in the south. Judah often claimed to have held onto belief in only the one God, whereas Israel and its kings believed in or worshipped many gods. This led to Israel and Judah resenting each other, so we can understand a bit better why “Amaziah, the priest of Bethel,” orders Amos to return to Judah and “never again prophesy at Bethel.”

The setting of Bethel for Amos’ call as a prophet is appropriate; it is also a bit ironic. Bethel literally means “house of El” or “house of God” (El is a Hebrew name for God). It was near the border between Israel and Judah. Bethel is where the Book of Genesis says Jacob’s vision of angels ascending and descending on a ladder between heaven and earth took place. Yet because Bethel is situated where it is—not as far away as Jerusalem, for people who lived in the northern Kingdom of Israel—Jeroboam, the first king of Israel as a kingdom separate from Judah, built golden calves, one at Bethel, so that the people of Israel did not have to travel all the way to the temple of Jerusalem to worship. Does this story of a golden calf sound familiar? The presence of a golden calf in Bethel led the people of Israel to worship it, an idol, instead of the one God of Israel, just as the golden calf in Exodus had led the people of Israel into idolatry back then. Bethel, the “house of God,” had become a house of idol worship; a house of a false god.

God sends Amos to Bethel to preach against this worship of false gods, and all the unfaithfulness and injustices that went along with it. And, we can imagine, Amos and his message were not well-received by the king of Israel, the officials of his court, or most of the people of Israel. It would be as if a foreign leader or influential person were to travel to another country today and criticize the leaders and people of that country on their own soil. This is usually not received well, even if the criticism is justified.

“Amaziah, the priest of Bethel,” essentially tells Amos to go home to Judah and spare Israel and its king the criticism Amos directs against them. This would be well and good if Amos were one of those professional royal court prophets kings of that time were used to. But Amos’ prophetic mission is not his own; it is from God. Amos never wanted to be a prophet, but God had called him from tending his flock and sycamore trees to prophesy in Israel.

In Mark’s Gospel today, we meet more people—Jesus’ twelve apostles—who never wanted to be prophets and probably could not have dreamed of the mission with which Jesus would entrust them. Yet Jesus does just that: He entrusts his apostles with a prophetic mission; a difficult mission at that. They are to travel light, so to speak, with only a staff. (This would be a good skill for me to practice, as a priest of a religious order who has traveled and served in many places.) Jesus’ apostles are to be totally reliant on God and the hospitality of the people they meet. Should the people in any place “refuse to hear” the Twelve, they are to leave, shaking the dust off their feet “as a testimony against them.”

Jesus’ instructions to the Twelve highlight the difficulty of their journey and the message they are to preach. It is a message of repentance, after all. And maybe Jesus’ instruction to his apostles to shake the dust from their feet should some people not receive their message well especially calls to mind the difficulty of the apostles’ journey and message. Nowadays, like many good Biblical sayings, though, “shake the dust from your feet” has become a convenient, catchy phrase: Do not let a disagreement, or somebody’s ill reception of a message we want to communicate, bother us; simply move on. But, whenever I hear this Gospel, with this instruction of Jesus to his apostles, I try to understand it as a challenge to listen more attentively, especially as a priest and especially to people who disagree or are not receptive, for whatever reason, to my idea or message. I think a key prophetic skill for today might be to develop this reflex to listen; not to misunderstand “shake the dust from your feet” as an excuse not to listen to those with whom we differ (or even find disagreeable).

Another key characteristic of a prophet, if we look at Jesus’ Apostles, or Amos in the Old Testament, is that a true prophet recognizes that prophecy is a gift and a commissioning from God. Amos was not a professional prophet of a royal court, somebody who wanted to be a prophet. In fact, God called him to prophesy on foreign soil to a king and people who were not receptive to his message. The same was true of Jesus’ Apostles, in many ways. To what extent is the same true of us?

This may sound far-fetched to many people (maybe less so within this group), but God calls each of us, in virtue of our baptism, to be prophetic. In baptism, each and every one of us is anointed, as Christ himself was, “Priest, Prophet, and King.” This does not necessarily mean that we will accomplish great feats of faith, or be great and powerful communicators or educators of our faith, although some of us will be or are already.

Ultimately, a prophet by definition is one who speaks for God. Our speaking (or acting, or listening) in the place of God, impelled by the call of God, may lead us to communicate a message that is unpopular, in a place or time where we will be dismissed as strange or even ridiculed. This was Amos’ reality, as he preached faithfulness to one God to the unreceptive ears of Israel’s king and his court. Our prophetic baptismal calling may be more like that of Jesus’ first apostles, whom Jesus sent forth to preach repentance (similarly to how Amos was sent forth but, in the apostles’ case, they worked more as a team or in small groups than the more solitary prophets of the Old Testament, like Amos, did), but also to console and to heal the sick. More often, we will live out our prophetic mission in unassuming ways, making God known and heard through small everyday acts of kindness and mercy.

There are perhaps countless ways to live our prophetic calling from God, but each of us holds in common a baptismal calling to act, speak, listen—to do all we do—in a way that makes God most present in our world. And, as the letter to the Ephesians reminds us, we did not choose this prophetic calling from God, but God has chosen us for a purpose. God has chosen us “in Christ,” not only in baptism but “before the foundation of the world.” This is remarkable language from Ephesians!

In whatever particular way we live our prophetic calling from God, we can be assured, Ephesians says, that we have been blessed “in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens.” We are called, yet also equipped with every blessing, to be God’s prophets in our time: To be God’s ears that listen, God’s mouth that speaks, God’s hands that work; that heal; that console, God’s feet that carry us to each encounter with God’s people, while we trust fully in God’s strength and blessings to see our prophetic journey through.

Homily for Sunday, 15 July 2018

Sunday of the 15th Week in Ordinary Time


Readings of the day: Amos 7:12-15; Psalm 85:9-10, 11-12, 13-14; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:7-13

This homily was given at St. Basil's Church, Toronto, ON, Canada. 

Is anybody here a Mark Twain fan? One of my favourite sayings attributed to Mark Twain is a caution against being too wordy: “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” But, in his work, “Refuge of the Derelicts,” in Fables of Man, Mark Twain writes, with special depth if less humour: “There are no accidents. All things have a deep and calculated purpose. Sometimes the methods employed by Providence seem strange and incongruous, but we have only to be patient and wait for the result: Then we recognize that no others would have answered the purpose, and we are rebuked and humbled.”

There are no accidents. Is the same not true of Mark Twain, as for the prophet Amos, as for St. Paul, as for Jesus’ disciples, as for us today? Can we not imagine Amos, in our reading from him today, as puzzled at first by the accusation against him by “Amaziah, priest of Bethel,” of essentially being a career prophet, having chosen purposely to be a thorn in the side of the king and people of Israel? Amos’ answer to Amaziah’s charge of careerism is that he is in fact “no prophet, nor a prophet’s son.” Amos, he says of himself, is a prophet, certainly not because he wanted to be a prophet, but essentially by accident.

And yet there are no accidents. However, there is what we call divine providence. And what is divine providence; God’s providence? Amos speaks of divine providence, not mere accident, when he says to Amaziah, “the Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.”

It was no accident; I did not want to be a prophet (because who in their right mind would want to be a prophet, especially in Amos’ time?), Amos says, but the LORD made me do it… and I accepted and trusted the LORD’s call to be a prophet. I accepted and trusted that the LORD had and has a plan and a purpose for me; for each and all of us as individuals and as a community of faith, human species, and world, that will be the best for me in the end. I accepted; we accept and trust in divine providence, even if this means sacrificing something good in our lives for a greater, longer-lasting good, and ultimately for our salvation.

Because of this self-sacrificial dimension, divine providence and our trust in it, in God, differs from a kind of self-help, magic, or superstition: “Become rich or healthy immediately by following these ten easy tips. Send this to ten of your friends within 24 hours for good luck; if you do not send this message, you will experience bad luck for seven years.” Although I am being a bit facetious here, divine providence and our trust in God’s plan and purpose have nothing to do with these kinds of self-help, magic, or superstition. As for Amos, St. Paul, for Jesus, and for many of Jesus’ disciples through the ages, trust in divine providence may lead us to sacrifice even our lives for a greater good; the greatest good, eternal life.

Amos was not a career prophet, despite Amaziah’s accusation against him. He discerned a vocation, a calling, to be a prophet, which his own will alone, without the help of God’s grace, would not have accepted. The same was true of St. Paul and of Jesus from the moment he became fully human, one like us in all things but sin. And the same is, has been, and/or will be often true of us.

In the letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul speaks the language not of career but of vocation by God’s providence. St. Paul says that God “chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love.” And then he adds, “In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will.”

This language of vocation, of God’s calling; of God’s choice; of plan and purpose; of inheritance is not the same as the language of career. Jesus, like St. Paul after him and Amos before him, staked his life and teaching on his disciples’; on our understanding and practice to some extent of this difference in languages: Career versus vocation by God’s providence; career versus inheritance, plan and purpose of God.

Jesus sends “the twelve” Apostles “out two by two” and asks of them what is impossible without God’s grace: “He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics.” In other words, the Apostles were to entrust themselves entirely and self-sacrificially to God’s providence, plan and purpose for their lives, which would ultimately be eternal life.

All this is not to say that, while a vocation is great, a career is necessarily bad. Many or most of us are in or would like to be in stable careers. And yet a vocation, unlike the best careers, does not allow us to retire, let alone early. A vocation holds no promise of a decent salary, pension, or other benefits… So much for workers’ rights the Church asks us to defend, right? A vocation, unlike a career, is something we would not accept on our own without God’s grace. And when we do accept a vocation, a calling by God’s providence and grace, our acceptance of vocation happens “when we recognize that no others would have answered the purpose,” as Mark Twain once said, “and we are rebuked and humbled.”

And yet each of us, at some point, have accepted not a career but a vocation from God: Those of us, for instance, who have been baptized or are preparing or preparing a loved one for baptism; those of us who are married; those of us raising children; those of us who, perhaps very sadly on a personal level, cannot raise children or work through the bureaucracy of the adoption process; those of us who are in religious life or priesthood. “No others” but you or me “would have answered the purpose” to which we are called by God as individuals and as a community of faith.

A vocation is not a career (although they may overlap), and is no accident. A vocation always involves self-sacrifice. I have been and continue to be personally reminded many times of this. A year ago, and again this summer, I visited the parish, St. Kateri in Rochester, just around Lake Ontario from here, where I had served as a deacon and first sixteen months as a priest (I was ordained a priest just over four years ago). In St. Kateri Parish is a young family, good friends of mine, whose first of two children has recovered from four bouts with leukemia in the last seven years and is now eleven years old. A year ago, I had a conversation with the guidance counsellor of the school attached to the parish, St. Kateri School. The guidance counsellor at St. Kateri School is also a personal friend, mother, wife, and cancer survivor. During this conversation, I spoke about how I had become friends with the first family with the daughter who has battled leukemia. After one of this girl’s relapses with cancer, I had anointed her on a Monday and given her first communion in the same hospital bed the following Friday. And I have had other encounters in ministry before and since then with this girl and her family, and we remain close friends. In this conversation, I said at one point to the guidance counsellor that I felt that my journey with this family; my friendship through ministry with them had been somewhat “by accident.”

At this point, my guidance counsellor friend stopped me. She said to me, “There are no accidents. You have become like an uncle to those children and a friend to this family.” Those words, a year and more later, continue to move this itinerant uncle-priest profoundly. I was (ever-so-gently) “rebuked and humbled” by these words of my guidance counsellor friend.

“There are no accidents. All things have a deep and calculated purpose” under God’s sometimes seemingly “strange and incongruous” providence. Perhaps “no others would have answered the call”; would have been in the right place at the right time to minister with and be ministered to by a then-very sick child and her family and friends. But I was there. And I thank God from my depths for this fact; for God’s purposeful providence; for vocation.