Homily for Sunday, 2 July 2023– Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Readings of the day: 2 Kings 4:8-11, 14-16a; Psalm 89:2-3, 16-17, 18-19; Romans 6:3-4,, 8-11; Matthew 10:37-42

A week ago, I was preaching a retreat for our Basilian novice Bishoy Dawood, who is at the end of his novitiate year here in Edmonton and will profess first vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience within my order next weekend. I invite us please to pray for Bishoy; some of us might remember him from when he served weekday Mass with me here at OLPH once or twice during his novitiate year. (And implicit in my opening lines here is a call for anybody who may be discerning a call to religious life, maybe as a Basilian—in which case, please come and see me—or to the diocesan diaconate or priesthood). On retreat, I preached conferences on our vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and on our order’s motto, “Teach me goodness, discipline, and knowledge.”

I feel, every time I have spoken publicly on the religious vows, especially that of poverty, that I should have an official license made somewhere: Class one hypocrite. Because, visibly-speaking (I can speak for myself as a religious priest), I am not suffering. We live in an affluent country [and, here in Sherwood Park, an affluent community, on average]. We have food on the table and a roof over our heads. Now, there are poor and disadvantaged persons among us, I will guess even in this parish. I and my brother Basilians live at St. Alphonsus Parish on 118 Avenue in Edmonton, a neighbourhood that visibly reminds me of Jesus’ words to Judas Iscariot in our Gospels, every time I look or go outside: “You will always have the poor, but you will not always have me.” I learned recently that there are 80 000 Aboriginal people in the City of Edmonton, many living with trauma inflicted upon them over generations. There are many poor concentrated in our area of the city, people with addictions, recent migrants and refugees, and so on.

Whenever I speak on our vow of poverty, I do the common “preacher thing” of outlining the traditional Bible passages associated with poverty. Last weekend, I spoke about Jesus’ first Beatitude in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” I spoke about the Gospel story of Jesus’ encounter with the rich man who wants to be Jesus’ disciple, has followed all the commandments since his youth, yet goes away sad because, the Gospels say, he is unable to part with his “possessions.”

On Jesus’ encounter with the rich man, let me emphasize that his material wealth is not the problem, the obstacle to discipleship. The possessions he is unable (or unwilling) to let go have nothing to do with money or material goods. The problem for the rich man is that everything becomes an object to him, something to be counted and costed, something of which he is unable to let go: His wealth, yes, but also the number of commandments to which he is faithful (and how faithful, and for how long he has been faithful), and discipleship of Jesus itself.

Contrast the rich man of the Gospels with the woman of Shunem in today’s reading from 2 Kings. Our reading begins by describing the Shunammite woman as “wealthy.” For the Shunammite woman as in Jesus’ encounter with the rich man, wealth is not and will not be the obstacle (or a help) toward right relationship with God and other people, toward acting in a right and godly way.

The woman in 2 Kings notices that the prophet Elisha, Elijah’s successor, is “passing through Shunem” as he frequently did. And Elisha apparently had a favourite café pit stop in Shunem each time he was in town. This reminds me of my pre-priesthood, pre-Basilian life when I was a lab technician and occasionally did house calls as far away as Rocky Mountain House. My favourite pit stop for lunch on house call days on that route was just outside of Bentley, Alberta, a coffee and sandwich shop called “Bean There.” Or, if any of us are ever traveling toward B.C. on the Trans-Canada Highway, your last chance for gas at Alberta prices and a decent lunch (if you are hungry) before the B.C. border is at the Husky at the top of the hill in the morbidly named village of Dead Man’s Flats. So, there are a couple of road trip pit stop recommendations from me.

The Shunammite woman recognizes Elisha as a frequent visitor to her town, so she calls her husband to help her to prepare her home to receive Elisha “whenever he comes to” them. Elisha is grateful for the Shunammite couple’s hospitality. So he calls “his servant Gehazi,” we hear, who says to Elisha that the only desire this otherwise well-to-do woman has is to bear a child. Here we have the frequent biblical motif of an elderly woman or couple longing for a child. (Please allow me to insert a prayer here for anybody among us or anybody we know experiencing infertility. This can be agonizing). Elisha ends this visit with the Shunammite couple by prophesying that, “in due time, [they] shall embrace a son.” And, if we continue in 2 Kings, Elisha’s prophecy comes true. And, still later in 2 Kings, the son dies, sadly, but Elisha raises him back to life.

The Shunammite woman and her husband are the picture of poverty. They live poverty in the way I, under a public religious vow of poverty, would like to live it, better than I do. Wait, did I just say that the Shunammite couple in 2 Kings today are the picture of poverty? I did. Why?

The Shunammite couple of whom we hear today in 2 Kings is such a great example of poverty not despite or, somehow ironically, because of their wealth. They are a great example of poverty because they are so unreservedly hospitable toward Elisha as he passes through their town. The Shunammite couple does not count the cost to themselves of building a whole new “small roof chamber with walls” onto their house and furnishing it with “a bed, a table, a chair, [and] a lamp,” all for when Elisha visits their town.

Now, maybe they do not count the cost of the home improvements because they are just that rich. Yet, if we think for a moment about some of the details 2 Kings gives us about this couple, we realize they are Shunammites. Shunem was a simple agricultural village in the Jezreel Valley near the Sea of Galilee, in the northeast of Israel. It was susceptible to drought. So, even though the Shunammite woman in today’s reading is said to be wealthy, her and her husband’s wealth is precarious.

The son they long for dies, only to be raised by Elisha, all within the same chapter 4 of 2 Kings from which our first reading is drawn today. And then, a little later in 2 Kings, Elisha advises the Shunammite family to flee to Philistia for seven years. They live there, in a foreign (non-Israelite, Gentile) land, to wait out a famine. All their wealth is lost—their home, with its rooftop addition built for Elisha, and their land— before Elisha ends the famine and restores to the Shunammite family what they had lost.

Wealth in and of itself is not the measure of how poor the Shunammite woman, her husband, and her son are. The measure of their poverty, which is always exemplary and does not vary with the cycles of gain and loss through the many vignettes of their story in 2 Kings, is that their wealth (or periodic loss of it) is never an object to be counted. They are generous and hospitable toward Elisha. And God rewards this pious family from a little agricultural Galilean village with restoration of their longed-for son to life, their home, their land, and with great friendship with the itinerant prophet Elisha when Elisha was probably looking for a simple coffee shop in town.

Jesus’ message in Matthew’s Gospel today is difficult for us to hear. I hope Jesus does not literally mean that I am not supposed to love my father and mother nearly as much as I love Jesus. [I should be careful here, since my mom and dad are among us at Mass this morning]! I think, in line with Elisha’s encounter with the Shunammite family in 2 Kings, Jesus is inviting us to be somehow like the Shunammite woman and her husband are toward Elisha: Welcome the prophet to town, into our homes, no matter how much or little material wealth we have. Be grateful and generous for the opportunity to be hospitable. Do not count the cost of hospitality and of discipleship, even if it is to the point of giving our lives: “Take up [your] cross and follow me.”

In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul says that baptism is our initiation into the poverty to which Jesus invites us. We have all “been buried with [Christ] by baptism into his death, so that, just as Christ was raised by the glory of the Father”—and just as God, through Elisha, raised the Shunammite couple’s son and saved them from famine and loss of everything—“we too might walk in the newness of life.” We, too, might know the restoration of our eternal wealth, eternal life in Jesus Christ.

This is an invitation to poverty, sisters and brothers: Not necessarily to give up our material wealth, unless this has become no more than a precious, countable commodity, more important than God and each other in our lives. We never know when or how we will encounter God in another person, in the situations of our lives—in a small agricultural village in Galilee, in our care for somebody in need or in a situation of pain or loss, in a small coffee and sandwich shop in Bentley or Dead Man’s Flats, Alberta—until we have lived the poverty, the gratitude and hospitality without cost and commodification, to which our Lord invites us today.

Homily for Sunday, 15 January 2023– Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Readings of the day: Isaiah 49:3, 5-6; Psalm 40:2, 4, 7-8, 8-9, 10; 1 Corinthians 1:1-3; John 1:29-34

This time of year is a time of change. We change to a new calendar year. I am not sure if I speak for many of us, but it takes me a few days (or weeks?) at the beginning of a new year before I am able to write this year’s and not last year’s date on papers I am signing, without having to think about it.

How many of us have ever made New Year’s resolutions, or made these this year? We commit to changing old behaviours and habits for our own health, or we resolve to be kinder to ourselves or others somehow.

Not long ago, we were in the midst of the Christmas season, the celebration of Jesus’ birth. It is a time of joy, not only for religious reasons, but for many of us (I hope) a time to be with loved ones, family, and friends. If there is a time that reminds us that we, human beings, are both sacred and social creatures, Christmas is it. And Jesus willed to share in our sacred and social human nature in all things but sin. In this we rejoice. And we had four weeks of Advent before Christmas, as a preparation of our hearts and minds to celebrate Jesus’ birth and our hope in his return at the end of time.

Now we are back in Ordinary Time. It is quite the change from Advent and Christmas. Some of my closest friends and family members know how excited I get (and poke fun at my expense for this) about being able to wear green vestments at Mass for the first time since November. Liturgists (or maybe it is just me) get excited about such things. But really, we find ourselves past one of the high points of the Church year, back in Ordinary Time.

We could say (and we would be right) that Ordinary Time does not have to be ordinary in the sense of boring or nothing special. Ordinary Time, these thirty-four-plus weeks of the Church’s liturgical year, is a season of counting time. Toward what do we count time in the Church? In Ordinary Time, we count or keep time with hope toward Jesus’ return in glory on the Last Day. The “ordinary” in Ordinary Time does not mean boring, nothing special, but it means to count, keep track, or number something. Still, this is quite a sudden change from Advent and Christmas back into Ordinary Time.

John’s Gospel today speaks of more or less sudden change of another kind. John the Baptist, who has been baptizing people in the Jordan River, sees Jesus approaching him and exclaims, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”! Something is about to change in this encounter between Jesus and John, which ends with John baptizing Jesus. Something is about to change for the entire people of Israel of John’s and Jesus’ time. Something is about to change for the whole world. Something is about to change for us.

John’s Gospel is clear that Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan by John the Baptist changes John the Baptist most immediately of anybody. John may have been part of a movement of Jewish people in Israel who withdrew from the noise and distractions of the big cities and towns, mainstream Judaism either of the Pharisees with their strict adherence to the Jewish Law or the temple priests, to pray and encounter God. The baptisms John had been performing carried the main meaning of repentance, washing clean of sin as much as any physical or ritual impurity. Baptisms like John was performing were quite common, even in more mainstream Judaism, in Jesus’ time.

But then Jesus meets John the Baptist at the River Jordan. John says in our Gospel that he had been baptizing with a certain hope for the Messiah, the coming of the Saviour of Israel and the world. John was doing something similar to what we are doing, sisters and brothers: Counting toward or counting on (anticipating) with hope the coming of the Saviour, only we are counting with hope toward the second coming (we Christians believe) of Jesus Christ at the end of time. John the Baptist was counting on the first coming of the Messiah: “I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he [the Messiah] might be revealed to Israel.”

And John is able to identify Jesus quickly when he arrives on scene: “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”! John is changed radically by this encounter with Jesus. No longer will he need to baptize with water in anticipation—as a counting toward in hope— of the coming of the Saviour of the world. The Saviour is there, standing before John: “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

The meaning of baptism, as much as the role of the Baptist, also changes radically in this encounter between John and Jesus. No longer is baptism, or the role of John the Baptist, primarily about repentance or washing clean of sin or other impurity. This is still, to the present day, one of many meanings of this very complex ritual. Baptism continues to include a dimension of cleansing from sin, both original sin that we inherit through the generations from the first people who lived on earth and the sin we commit. Baptism continues to include a dimension of receiving and being sealed by the gift of the Holy Spirit. Those of us who have attended a baptism of an infant may remember that, after the baptism itself, the infant is anointed with chrism, a very strong, pleasant-smelling oil. This is the same oil we receive at confirmation, a sacrament of renewing and intensifying the gift of the Holy Spirit with which we are first sealed in baptism.

But the first and foremost meaning of baptism, ever since John baptized Jesus in the Jordan, is that we become more like Jesus who, by becoming human and by being baptized by John, became like us in all things but sin. By our baptism we are made members of a priestly, prophetic, and royal people, the Church, in imitation of the high priest, the prophet of prophets, the King of Kings, Jesus Christ. In baptism, sisters and brothers, we have a share in Jesus’ life and ministry: A life in service and love toward one another that draws us to God, that draws us toward eternal life. In baptism we especially have a share in the death of Christ so that, by Jesus’ resurrection (in which we also share through baptism), death is transformed. Death is made no longer final. Eternal life in heaven is our final state.

By being baptized in the Jordan by John the Baptist, Jesus changes for us the meaning of baptism. In baptism, who we are radically and suddenly changes. We become sharers, full participants, in the eternal life Jesus offers us by his becoming human, his baptism, his life, death, and resurrection. Each of us becomes like Christ, the perfect human being, as Christ became like us. Each of us becomes, in a way, “another Christ.”

We (very purposefully on the part of the Church) hear John’s Gospel account of Jesus’ baptism as we begin Ordinary Time. All this happens: We become more like God “who humbled himself to share in our humanity” in the person of Jesus Christ, from the moment of our baptism. Hopefully (let us pray for this) our becoming more like God, more like Christ, by the grace of God will help us to be kinder, more just, and more loving toward one another. All this happens as we continue to count forward in hope toward the return of our Saviour on the Last Day. All this happens as we continue to count forward in hope, the true meaning of “Ordinary” Time, toward eternal life.

Homily for Sunday, 5 June 2022– Pentecost

Readings of the day: Acts 2:1-11; Psalm 104:1, 24, 29-30, 31, 34; 1 Corinthians 12:3b-7, 12-13; John 20:19-23

John’s Gospel is peculiar in many ways, not least of which is John’s account of Pentecost, Jesus breathing the Holy Spirit on his disciples, which we hear today.

Remember that, one week ago, for our celebration of Jesus’ ascension to heaven, we heard Luke’s version of these events. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus asks his disciples to remain in Jerusalem until he ascends to heaven, and then he sends the Holy Spirit upon them: “Stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”

In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ appearances after his resurrection and his gift of the Holy Spirit to his disciples happen all at once. We hear today how, on the very day Jesus rises from the dead, he stands among his disciples in a house where they had gathered, behind locked doors “for fear of the” Jewish leaders who had handed Jesus over to the Romans to die. Jesus appears in his disciples’ space, despite the locked doors, and greets them, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And Jesus sends his disciples, as John makes a point of saying, with the gift of the Holy Spirit that he had promised them during his ministry and at the Last Supper: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

So, which is it? Did Pentecost—Jesus’ sending of the Holy Spirit upon his disciples; the birth of the Church—happen after or before Jesus’ ascension? Or did Pentecost happen more than once?

The renowned Sulpician Bible scholar Fr. Raymond Brown caused no small controversy at the time when he wrote that Christians should consider that Pentecost has happened not only once; not twice, before and after Jesus’ ascension to heaven, but many times. And the Holy Spirit still descends upon and inspires our Church to action, to mission today. We have all experienced Pentecost-like moments, sisters and brothers, many times in our own lives. I am not only speaking of our celebration of Pentecost once a year, fifty days after Easter, but much more often than that. And, most of the time, we are not even aware when we are experiencing an encounter with the Holy Spirit; a Pentecost-like moment.

The first Pentecost-like moment in each of our lives as Christians is at baptism. Now, at baptism if, as most of us are, we have been baptized as infants, we will not have been aware that we have just encountered the Holy Spirit. But our parents and godparents will have been aware of this Pentecost-like moment. They will have spoken for us at our baptism, when they respond, “It is,” to the question of the priest or deacon just before the baptism: “Is it your will that [this child] should be baptized in the faith of the Church, which we have all professed with you”? At the anointing with chrism after baptism, the Rite of Baptism clearly speaks of the effects of this sacrament: “The God of power and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has freed you from sin, given you a new birth by water and the Holy Spirit, and welcomed you into his holy people.” The moment of our baptism is our first encounter with the Holy Spirit as members of “God’s holy people,” the Church. It is our first Pentecost-like moment.

In baptism we (or our parents and godparents for us) make our first profession of faith, one St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians says today is only possible by the grace of the Holy Spirit: “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.” And St. Paul connects the moment of our baptism back to those first Pentecost moments Jesus’ apostles experienced, in the locked room when Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit upon them; in Acts when tongues “as of fire” descended upon them. St. Paul says, “For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body… and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”

In confirmation we are again anointed with the chrism oil we received at baptism: “Be sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit.” If, for most of us, our parents and godparents witnessed for us and assented to the work of the Holy Spirit in us from the moment of our baptism, in confirmation we have the chance to assent; to agree to, witness and consciously receive the Holy Spirit for ourselves. For us, as St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians, the singular “gift of the Holy Spirit” becomes a remarkable diversity of gifts that spur us on to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ by all we say and do. In confirmation, this vast array of gifts of the Holy Spirit is summed up in a formula of seven: “The spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of right judgment and courage, the spirit of knowledge and reverence… the spirit of wonder and awe in [God’s] presence.”

We may sum up the gifts of the Holy Spirit in this kind of list of seven but, as St. Paul knew and we know, the Holy Spirit’s gifts to us are unlimited by any of our human categories or language. Still, all these gifts of the Holy Spirit, without number, is meant to serve one purpose in us; in the Church. St. Paul says, “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” And our ultimate good, sisters and brothers—the good God desires for all of us together—is eternal life.

Each of our Church’s sacramental rituals include a moment when we call upon the Holy Spirit and his gifts without number to direct us toward this “common good” and ultimately toward eternal life with God. I will not analyze each time in our sacramental rites when we call upon the Holy Spirit. This would take me far too much time, and I would be keeping us from (eventually) leaving here to proclaim the Gospel to the world with the gifts the Spirit has given us. And I do not wish to do this.

But I want to draw our attention simply to the Mass, since we are in the midst of it now. Most of us, if we are paying attention, know the first major moment at which we call upon the Holy Spirit during the Eucharistic Prayer at Mass: The priest extends his hands over the bread and wine and prays that the Holy Spirit transform this bread and wine into “the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Yet I often wonder if even the most faithful, attentive Catholics at Mass realize that there is a second moment during the Eucharistic Prayer when we call upon the Holy Spirit. There is no change in the position of the priest’s hands, or much of anything, to indicate when this happens, except that the priest prays that the Holy Spirit might descend not upon the bread and wine a second time, but upon us. We pray that the Holy Spirit might transform us to “become one body, one spirit in Christ.”

“Just as the body is one and has many members,” St. Paul says, “all the members of the body, though many, are one body.” We pray, every time we celebrate our Eucharist, that the Holy Spirit might transform us to make this unity in multiplicity of gifts and members of the Church a reality.

I find it astounding, every time I hear our reading today from Acts, that “every nation under heaven,” people speaking and hearing the Gospel in their own languages, were “all drawn together in one place.” All witnessed together, in unity yet phenomenal diversity, that first Pentecost when the Holy Spirit descended like wind and in tongues of fire on Jesus’ first apostles.

They—Jesus’ first apostles; the vast multitude of people, each speaking and hearing the Gospel in their own language—are a lot like us: Gathered together in one place before God; gathered to receive gifts of the Holy Spirit without number but all oriented toward “the common good” and toward our eternal life with God. That, if anything, is amazing. Only the Holy Spirit of God can do this. Only the Holy Spirit can gather us together “in one place” to hear the Gospel; gather us together to be transformed, more and more, into “one body, one spirit in Christ”; gather us together where we may receive the strength and inspiration to proclaim the Good News and communicate the Spirit of God to our world.

This is our Pentecost: Not only a one or two-time communication of the Spirit to Jesus’ first apostles, but a Pentecost moment projected into our history and our memory as a people of God. We celebrate here and now an ongoing Pentecost; our encounter now and forever with the Holy Spirit that draws us all “together in one place”; that orients us toward the common good and that will bring us to eternal life.

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, 24 January 2021– Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Readings of the day: Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Psalm 25:4-5, 6-7, 8-9; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20

This homily was given at St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.

When was the first time God called us? If we have ever been aware of God calling us, when was this?

When we speak of somebody calling us, specifically God calling us, especially in this religious sense we may speak of such a calling as a vocation. This word is from the Latin verb vocare, which means “to call.”

Our readings today are all about call, or vocation, events. I imagine most if not all of us are familiar with the Old Testament story of Jonah. What does Jonah do when God calls him to go to the “exceedingly large city” of Nineveh to urge the people living there to repent “from their evil ways”? Well, Jonah flat-out refuses to go where God calls him. And, before the part of the Book of Jonah from which we hear today, Jonah is thrown overboard from the ship on which he is trying to flee God, and spends three days in the belly of a fish for his efforts!

We also hear a more obvious call or vocation event in Mark’s Gospel today: Jesus calls the fishermen “Simon and his brother Andrew” and then “James son of Zebedee and his brother John.” Both pairs of brother fishermen respond to Jesus’ call to be “fishers of people” in completely the opposite way to how Jonah had responded to God’s call for him to set the Ninevites right. Simon and Andrew, James and John “immediately” drop their nets; leave the lives and family they knew behind and radically choose to follow Jesus’ call.

And, even if our reading today from St. Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians is less obviously about vocation events than today’s Gospel, it still centres on God’s call to us. St. Paul anticipates the imminent full realization of the reign of God on earth (as we should still anticipate today, since we do not know when this fulfillment of God’s reign will take place; we can only hope joyfully for it). St. Paul invites the Corinthians (and us) to examine and adjust our priorities; to live as if Jesus could return as he promised at a moment’s notice. God’s call or vocation through St. Paul to us is simply to be ready in joy for this event.

Yet how many of us think of a vocation as something related to the ordained priesthood or maybe joining a religious order of brothers, sisters, or nuns? How many of us have a broader understanding of vocation as any calling, specifically any calling from God? I invite us to think of vocation in this broader sense of any divine calling. This broader understanding of vocation, I think, will help us to answer the very first question I asked a few moments ago: When was the first time God called us? Whether or not most of us were aware of our first vocation—and I suspect most of us were unaware of when God first called us to anything, because probably most of us were infants at the time—we received our first vocation, in the religious sense of this term, at our baptism.

Right after the baptism itself, the pouring of water, we are anointed with a sweet-smelling oil called chrism. During the anointing with chrism at baptism, the priest or deacon prays over the newly-baptized: “God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has freed you from sin, given you new birth by water and the Holy Spirit, and welcomed you into his holy people. He now anoints you with the chrism of salvation. As Christ was anointed Priest, Prophet, and King, so may you live always as a member of his body, sharing everlasting life.”

This prayer speaks profoundly of our first Christian calling; our first Christian vocation. It is the same calling that Jesus Christ received from God the Father. The name “Christ” is not a surname, but means “anointed.” The Christ, Jesus who is anointed God’s own Son, receives a threefold vocation; a calling as “Priest, Prophet, and King.” We, in imitation of Jesus, the Christ, are called a priestly people, in a broader sense than the ordained priesthood, which is its own specific vocation. We are priestly from the moment of baptism in the sense that we are given a vocation “to glorify God by our lives”: To live holy lives, which involves worship of God and prayer, but certainly is not limited to worship (such as the Mass) and other forms of prayer. To be called priestly is to be called to orient everything we do and are toward God and toward our ultimate vocation, which is eternal life, never as disconnected individuals but always together, in and through Jesus Christ.

We, like Jesus, the Christ, are called a prophetic people. We are the voice of God on earth, not only by how we speak that attracts other people to God, but by how the way we live is coherent with the words we speak. Do we love one another, especially people we find difficult to love; disagreeable, in line with what we speak and hear from the Lord himself in our Scriptures: “Love one another as I have loved you.” No exceptions! To live up to our prophetic calling of our baptism is difficult but essential.

We, like Jesus, the Christ, are called a royal people. Our royal calling is not what many people may associate with royalty: Sitting on a throne, maybe distant from the people of a kingdom, with servants to wait on us. Or maybe, especially in Canada, where our official head of state is the Queen of England, we may associate with royalty what we see and hear of the British royal family or other world monarchies. But still this notion of royalty is distant from our everyday reality. Jesus and our Church mean precisely the opposite of this aloof sense of royalty when we speak of our royal calling.

To be called royal means for us to be called in some way to give ourselves in service to our sisters and brothers, somehow in memory of Jesus who gave his very life in service to us, for our salvation. Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium, whose focus is to answer the question, “What (or who) is the Church”?, beautifully defines Christ’s and our royal vocation as one by which we lead, again by the example of our lives—specifically acts of self-denial; self-restraint, even from what may in some ways be good, in favour of a greater good and in imitation of Christ—to the King who gave himself for us so that servants might be made kings like him. This is the heart of our royal calling, sisters and brothers in Christ: “To lead [one another] to that King for whom to serve is to reign,” as Lumen Gentium says; to give of oneself for the good and salvation of one another “is to reign.”

In all this, then, what does “vocation” mean, specifically to be called by God somewhere or to some activity in our lives? I think one problem (a good problem to have) is that “vocation” is such a broad term. We may define it along the lines of the priest, prophet, king motif, which connects nicely with baptism as our primary Christian vocation. We hear many professionals of all kinds speak, I think very rightly, of their professions not as jobs but as vocations. For me, as a priest of a religious order, it is easy to speak of having responded to a vocation, because our world, especially within the Church, is more likely to understand religious life and sacramental orders as vocations. But what about marriage, single life, the vocation to be a deacon, or lesser-known states in life like consecrated virginity, or liturgical service as lectors and acolytes (all of which are recognized with liturgical rites of our Church as true vocations)?

Do we understand how defining “vocation” can become very complicated, very quickly? And then how do we respond to a vocation if we discern that God is calling to us? Have we ever refused God’s call, as Jonah did, before he accepted to go to Nineveh? Were we immediately eager to accept God’s vocation to us, as Jesus’ first apostles seemed to be according to our Gospel? Or have we been somewhere in between refusal and immediate acceptance of God’s calling when we have discerned it? Was our response something like that of the Biblical Samuel, who wisely waited to be sure it was God and not his beloved priest Eli calling him? (We heard last week about God’s call to Samuel, and John’s Gospel version of Jesus’ call of his first apostles. Have we not been blessed with the richness of vocation events in our readings over these last few Sundays)? Maybe there is no “right way” to respond to a divine vocation, except, if I may say, to strive to orient our whole lives and conduct toward God, and toward eternal life in heaven, which is the ultimate vocation for each and every one of us.

Homily for Sunday, 18 August 2019

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 38:4-6, 8-10; Psalm 40:2, 3, 4, 18; Hebrews 12:1-4; Luke 12:49-53

20th Sunday in Ordinary Time

This homily was given at St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.

About one hundred years after Jesus’ earthly life, in the ancient city of Sinope, now part of Turkey, there lived a man named Marcion, whose teachings became important in shaping early Christianity. Why would I start with the story of Marcion, from so many centuries ago? Well, Marcion perceived some key differences between what became the Old and New Testaments of our Bible. In the Old Testament, Marcion saw that God was often angry and quick to punish people for wrongdoing. Marcion, though, saw the God of the New Testament, shown through the life of Jesus, to use my word here and not Marcion’s word, to be nicer than the Old Testament God.

In the course of ministry, I have heard people claim only once or twice that the God of the Old Testament is angry and punishing while the God of the New Testament is kinder and more forgiving. So maybe Marcionism is not really popular these days. After all, if we read enough of our Bible (something Marcion did not have the benefit of doing in his time, because the books to be included in the Bible as we know it were not set yet in Marcion’s time), we see instances when, in the Old Testament, God is quite kind and forgiving and, in the New Testament, when God—even Jesus—becomes angry and promises punishment of wrongdoers.

One of those instances when Jesus becomes angry is in the Gospel reading we have just heard. Jesus himself asks and then answers the question: “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division”! This does not sound like a very nice Jesus; like the Jesus maybe many of us would associate with peace, forgiveness, love, does it? What does Jesus mean when he says that he has come to bring not “peace to the earth… but rather division”?

Let me suggest that we are right if we get the impression that Jesus is not very nice in today’s Gospel reading. In our Gospels, Jesus is often not very nice… Now, why would I say that? I insist: Jesus is not nice. In the Gospels, including in our Gospel reading today, Jesus is redemptive. Jesus is often tender and forgiving, even of some fairly serious evil and sin. Jesus is loving. Jesus always, even when he is angry or on a prophetic mission, looks out for our utmost well-being. Jesus shows us the way to salvation; he is our way to salvation. So Jesus is kind, in the sense of the kind of love he shows, that goes so far as to lay down his life so that we may have eternal life. But Jesus is not nice.

How do we use the word “nice”? Do we not usually mean somebody who is kind, loving, forgiving, a lot like Jesus usually is in the Gospels? This is nice, but this definition of “nice” is actually quite recent. Not too long ago—about two hundred years ago, which is a short time when we speak of how language changes—“nice” primarily meant “ignorant” or “stupid,” from its Latin origin, meaning “not knowing.” Only since then has “nice” fairly rapidly taken on the more usual sense of something or somebody pleasant, agreeable, or kind.

Then again, we still use “nice” in its older deprecating or insulting sense today. Have any of us ever shown lack of interest, or heard somebody show lack of interest in what another person was saying in a mocking tone, “That’s nice.” I suppose that what we mean by “nice” today is all about our tone and body language in using this word. When we are pleased by something or somebody, we say, “Aww, that’s really nice, thank you,” or simply, “Niiiice”! But we can mean nice in a dismissive way, as in, “I am not interested in this foolishness. Go away”… “That’s nice.”

So I suppose we could consider Jesus to be “nice” in this newer sense of somebody pleasing or kind, but is even this not a stretch when we hear Jesus in Luke’s Gospel today? Not “peace to the earth… but rather division” does not exactly sound nice in the sense of kindness or pleasantness. Rather, Jesus sounds a lot like the prophets of the Old Testament before him: People who spoke truth to power; people who spoke for God; who confronted God’s people and their leaders with truths they often did not want to hear; people who risked their own lives in doing so, and who were not exactly “nice” about it much of the time. Among those prophets was Jeremiah, who was so persistent in not being especially “nice” as an advisor to King Zedekiah that Zedekiah’s officials had Jeremiah thrown into a cistern and left him to die.

In a similar way, Jesus, “a prophet and more than a prophet,” was persistent in claiming to be God’s own Son; in warning his hearers that their eternal life depended on repentance from their sin; in speaking truth to powerful elites that they did not necessarily want to hear. Jesus was often enough not “nice” about insisting on seeking the utmost good, the salvation, of all people, such that those elites had Jesus crucified and left him to die. Does this not sound familiar?

The prophet Jeremiah was not, in one sense, nice. Jesus was not nice. There is a reason why both Jeremiah and Jesus were killed at the hands of the elites of their day. When Jesus proclaims that he had come not “to bring peace to the earth… but rather division,” he is not saying that he had intended to go out of his way to create divisions among his hearers; his disciples. This would not only not have been nice, but this would have been unkind, and against Jesus’ own rule governing his every action and word. Instead, Jesus always seeks our best interest; our salvation. Yet Jesus knew that, in seeking our best interest, our salvation, his words and actions would expose our division; our sin; everything that already exists to inhibit our way to salvation. Only in exposing our already-existent divisions, sin, unkindness, injustice, and everything that inhibits our salvation that God so dearly desires for us will those divisions, sin, unkindness, and injustices ever be healed and forgiven. And, as many if not all of us know by our own experience, divisions, unkindness, and sin are not distant realities from us. They exist within our own relationships. They exist and destroy the intimacy and trust even within our households and families, as Jesus reminds us today.

Jesus’ reminder of this state of our world into which he came, which has not changed much from Jesus’ time to ours, is hardly nice. It reveals a hard truth many people in Jesus’ time were unwilling to accept, and that many people in our time, I dare say, are no more willing to accept than they were in Jesus’ or Jeremiah’s time. True prophets, who accurately bring to light the state of the world; the state of our human relationships; the state of our relationship with God always speak and act for others’ best interest. Prophecy cannot be ego-driven. But this does not mean prophecy must be nice. Prophecy, if it is true, may go so far as to put at risk the prophet’s reputation, if not his or her very life, if it is true prophecy.

What, then, does this mean for us today? From the moment of our baptism we are called “priest, prophet, and king” in our Rite of Baptism itself. Our baptism calls us to take part in the prophetic mission (as well as priestly and royal missions, in the self-sacrificial sense) of Jesus. Our baptism calls us to seek and work toward one another’s salvation, not only our own. Nowhere, though, in our Rite of Baptism are we called to be “nice.”

This does not mean that we are to seek out opportunities to divide, to destroy relationships, to make enemies, or to scandalize one another unnecessarily. This would itself be sinful. Prophecy is never “all about me.” Instead, true prophecy is all about participating in God’s salvation of the world through prophets through the ages, like Jeremiah, and ultimately through Jesus Christ. Our baptismal prophetic mission is a participation in God’s salvation of the world. It will entail discernment of the sometimes fine line between revealing hard truths about the sin of the world, especially to people in positions of power, and contributing to the sin ourselves; between acting and speaking from our own ego and acting toward the best interests of one another; between being merely “nice” and being kind and just (the virtue we call Christian charity) even when we are angry (even justly so) at another person or at the sin of the world.

Without God, it may be possible to be at least superficially “nice,” but only by putting God first is it possible for us to be the prophets our baptism calls us to be, for one another’s salvation and the salvation of the world.