Homily for Tuesday, 18 June 2019

Readings of the day: 2 Corinthians 8:1-9; Psalm 146:2, 5-6ab, 6c-7, 8-9a; Matthew 5:43-48

Tuesday of the 11th week in Ordinary Time

Is anybody here able to think of somebody you would consider an enemy?

In one sense, I have difficulty thinking of anybody I would consider to be a true enemy. But what do we mean today when we speak of an enemy, compared to what Jesus meant by our “enemies” in his time, as we hear today in Matthew’s Gospel when Jesus asks us to “love [our] enemies and pray for those who persecute” us?

Today, as in Jesus’ time, we might think of an enemy as any foe, any adversary, anybody who demeans, disrespects or, as Jesus says, persecutes us. Some of us in our not-too-distant Church history, or maybe even still today, might speak of Satan as the (arch-)enemy. These definitions of an enemy have persisted for centuries and still exist now in English and many languages. Yet many ancient languages spoken in Jesus’ time and before then distinguished our more common definition of an enemy as a persecutor from another form of enemy as essentially a stranger.

If we include within our possible range of meaning of “enemy” somebody who is a stranger to us, does Jesus’ command in our Gospel today, “love your enemies,” not become somewhat more challenging to us? Is it not challenging enough to love somebody who constantly demeans or persecutes us, without having to love also anybody who is a stranger to us? I cannot think of many, if any, people who demean or persecute me to the point that I would consider them enemies. But I am able to think of people, some at one time close to me, with whom I could make a better effort to communicate; others who think and behave differently from the way I would think or behave about whom I could avoid gossiping or whose differences I could make a more deliberate effort to understand and even honor. I could make a better effort than I do to listen attentively, and not only to reply but to understand and honor, to people I differ from in various ways.

How many of us could “love [our] enemies” more than we do in the sense of loving and honoring people who are or who have become strangers to us, even when this estrangement is more-or-less unintentional? Who are the strangers in our lives from whom Jesus is inviting us to become a little less estranged; to love more than we do?

Some people are easier to recognize as strangers than others, for example the neighbor who has just moved into the neighborhood. The farther another person’s experience is from our own, the easier it can be to define this person or situation as strange to or estranged from us. Perhaps the integration or lack thereof of migrants and refugees into our countries shows this especially strikingly. For undocumented migrants, refugees, or trafficked persons, there is yet another layer of estrangement, of “not like us.”

Yet estrangement exists within families and between people whose relationships were once close, let alone with people whose situations and experiences are far from us. How often do we make enemies, in this sense of estrangement, with people with whom we would otherwise be close, as in by blood or by friendship? The internet and its “social” media, and other forms of modern communication too often further accelerate this estrangement.

“Love your enemies,” Jesus invites us today. Work to bridge estrangement. Jesus’ challenge to us today through this commandment is great indeed.

Homily for Thursday, 13 June 2019– Memorial of St. Anthony of Padua, Priest and Doctor of the Church

Readings of the day: 2 Corinthians 3:15-4:1, 3-6; Psalm 85:9ab, 10, 11-12, 13-14; Matthew 5:20-26

Thursday of the 10th week in Ordinary Time

“Dear St. Anthony, please come ‘round. Something is lost and cannot be found.” How many of us have prayed this prayer or a prayer like this to St. Anthony when we have lost something?

St. Anthony of Padua is known as the patron saint for finding lost items. This association between St. Anthony and lost items is based on a legend of a Franciscan novice under St. Anthony’s guidance who left his religious order in anger, taking with him St. Anthony’s breviary, or book of daily prayers. According to the legend, an angry St. Anthony appeared in a dream to the novice the night after the novice had suddenly left the Franciscans with St. Anthony’s breviary. St. Anthony’s appearance in his dream convinced the novice to return to the Franciscans and to return the breviary to St. Anthony while accepting to do penance for having stolen the breviary and for his outburst of anger.

Maybe the novice’s vision of an angry St. Anthony in his dream was so effective in persuading the novice to return St. Anthony’s breviary and return to the Franciscans because it was so out of character for St. Anthony to lose his temper. St. Anthony is one of the most versatile saints of the Church, and a patron of many causes besides lost items, but he was not known as an angry saint. However, St. Anthony is associated with instances in which he interceded to quell anger or to repair the damage of angry outbursts. In one instance, a knight in Tuscany had beaten his wife, but then turned to St. Anthony in sorrow for his own sin. St. Anthony healed the knight’s wife. Another version of this legend has a young woman whose hair had been torn out by her husband turn to St. Anthony. Miraculously, while St. Anthony prayed for the woman as well as for repentance for her husband and reconciliation in their marriage, the woman’s hair grew back in St. Anthony’s presence.

St. Anthony of Padua is a saint of repentance and reconciliation. In Matthew’s Gospel today, Jesus intensifies the Old Testament commandment not to kill to include outbursts of anger that are meant to destroy or demean others: “You have heard that it was said to your ancestors… ‘You shall not kill,’ and whoever kills will be liable to judgment. But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment.”

On the one hand, anger in itself is not a sin but an emotion with which God has created us all. Even God; even Jesus becomes angry occasionally, as the Bible shows us. On the other hand, God calls us to master our more intense emotions like anger so we do not use these emotions to destroy other people or ourselves. Jesus’ commandment could be extended, appropriately in our time, to avoidance of gossip, passive aggression, and other subtler but as-destructive forms of lack of control of our anger.

Maybe most important, though, is what Jesus says further on in today’s Gospel. If we are aware that another person “has anything against us,” Jesus says, “go first and be reconciled with your brother.” In other words, we might recognize that we are all sinners and that, sooner or later, we will need another’s forgiveness or need to forgive another person. Jesus asks us to anticipate this need for forgiveness, to be reconciled to one another, in a sense, preemptively. On this memorial of St. Anthony of Padua, may St. Anthony intercede for us, so that we might master anger; that we might know our own and one another’s need for reconciliation, and anticipate one another in this need, going “first” to “be reconciled with” our brothers and sisters.

Homily for Friday, 16 June 2017– Ferial

Friday of the 10th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: 2 Corinthians 4:7-15; Psalm 116:10-11, 15-16, 17-18; Matthew 5:27-32

Who among us is intense about our faith or knows somebody who is? I would describe most if not all of us here as intense in living our faith, simply because we are here now on a Friday morning at St. Kateri Parish at St. Cecilia Church to celebrate the Eucharist. How many people, even among the most devout Catholics, devote part of a Friday morning; part of almost every day for many of us, to our celebration of the Eucharist? We are in the minority, my sisters and brothers in Christ!

Please let me be clear: Many of our sister and brother Catholics, for reasons too many to count, are unable to be at Mass every day. They work, they raise families, they are aging, sick, or homebound… And many of these people live our faith just as intensely and devoutly as we who are here do. Add to this those among us who engage in ministries in the Church, or who work passionately for social justice causes including, fundamentally, the defense of the dignity of all human life and all creation.

I would say we are quite an intense group of people. And today our Word of God speaks to us and celebrates two of the most intense people who have ever walked this earth, St. Paul and Jesus. St. Paul encounters the intense pride of the wealthy Christian community of Corinth of the earliest Church. Yet Corinth’s intensity meets its match in St. Paul, who compares his ministry to death, uniting it in particular to the death of Christ.

A saint is one who knows how to die. A saint has received from God and applied in her or his life the grace of how to die to her or his own pride insofar as it inhibits this person’s ability to serve God in serving the needs of God’s people. A saint knows to die to any form of injustice, of lack of love or charity in action or speech. A saint knows when to die to one form of ministry or service to move to a new one. A saint knows the grace of death to partisan ideological narrowness; to gossip; to needless divisiveness. A saint knows how to die, in order to rise again; to ascend and transcend with Christ. A saint dies as she or he lives: Intensely.

This grace of dying in order to rise is true of St. Paul, so much so that many in his Corinthian audience likely found his message challenging, if not outright frightening, even morbid. And the same is true of Jesus himself. Jesus, and St. Paul after him, lived, died, and rose intensely. Today we hear Jesus’ second of six of what have been called “intensification” sayings in Matthew’s Gospel: “You have heard” this commandment, “but I say” live it more intensely; more demandingly.

It is not enough to obey this sixth of the Ten Commandments, not to “commit adultery.” If we so much as look at another person as no more than property to be used; to be taken from another (which is how Jesus views adultery, specifically the taking of another’s spouse for one’s pleasure), we will bear God’s judgment due to this sin. But the more we live self-control out of love, which is more demanding and intense than the commandment requires, as a kind of death to self, the closer we will be to rising to intense and eternal life.