Homily for Sunday, 22 February 2015

1st Sunday in Lent

Readings of the day: Genesis 9:8-15; Psalm 25:4-5, 6-7, 8-9; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:12-15

What are some of the things we do during Lent? Maybe Lent is a time for us to focus more deeply on prayer. Maybe during Lent we might commit more intently to ministry to and with the poor; the sick; the elderly; the homeless; the homebound; others in need. Maybe the Lenten discipline of abstaining especially from meat on Fridays may help us to grow spiritually. Then again, meat-free Lenten Fridays are a light penance for me. I look forward in particular to our parish’s Fish Fry every Friday during Lent. I like fish, but even more I enjoy meeting and being with all of us, the people of St. Kateri Parish. And I enjoy supporting our parish’s Boy Scouts by whose generosity we have our Fish Fry every Friday during Lent.

Maybe during Lent we might give up something other than just meat on Fridays, like sweets, coffee, or social media… One year, before I became a Basilian, my roommates suggested that I give up puns for Lent. This was a heavy penance for me; my roommates probably lamented that it was only for forty days!

All these Lenten activities are excellent, especially if they help to deepen our relationships with one another and with God: Works of mercy and justice; increased commitment to prayer; abstaining from meat on Fridays during Lent, and possibly giving up something else we enjoy but that is not essential to us. But, even if we do all these activities during Lent, what if we were to focus simply on remembering more profoundly God’s loving kindness; God’s saving, sustaining presence in our everyday lives?

The people of ancient Israel; the people of the Bible had a special word for God’s loving, kind action toward us and our responsibility, in light of God’s loving kindness toward us, to act with loving kindness toward one another. This word is “covenant.” 

Several times we hear this word, “covenant,” in our first reading today from the Book of Genesis. God calls “Noah and… his sons” out of the ark after the Great Flood, and then immediately makes a covenant with them and “every living creature” that has survived the flood. “I will establish my covenant with you,” God says to all who were on the ark. The rainbow will be “the sign… for all ages to come of the covenant between” God and Noah “and every living creature” for all time. Nothing, especially no flood, will ever destroy this new covenant God has made with all creation. “I will recall the covenant I have made,” God promises.

But what is a covenant? Is it some kind of contract? Perhaps we might understand a covenant as a contract. Many of the Biblical covenants between God and the people are written like contracts: God makes a promise to bless and to save the people; the people are responsible for keeping God’s commandments; for remaining faithful to their end of the bargain with God in return. If the people fail to remain faithful to God, they may incur a curse or destruction, like a forty-day flood!

But a covenant is more than just a contract. Imagine us signing on a line for the following: Divine parts and labor: Salvation of humankind and all creation. Cost: Infinity dollars, plus applicable taxes and unwavering faithfulness to God’s commandments; ark building materials sold separately; available while supplies last.

Fortunately for us, a covenant is more than this. But what is a covenant, among ourselves or between us and God, if not merely a contract? We might look to the sacraments as signs of what covenant means, especially for us as Christians. Sacraments are signs to us, much like the rainbow was to Noah, of God’s loving and kind presence to us; God’s saving and sustaining care for all of creation.

Do any of us remember when, a few years ago, concern about legal re-definition of marriage and the rate of marriage breakdown in this country led our sisters and brothers in some Protestant traditions to enter into so-called “covenant marriages”? Their concern was that our society understands marriage too much as a limited, breakable legal contract and not enough as an unbreakable covenant bond; a sign of something even more than wife and husband give to one another in a marriage. We might call this “something more” God’s presence; sustenance; strength; grace; loving kindness. “Covenant marriages” (I think rightly) struck at our social reduction of marriage to a mere contract. My concern is that they fell into this same trap of reducing marriage to a mere contract and so have not really solved this ongoing social problem.

Is not marriage a covenant relationship, not only a one-time contract offer on the wedding day but lived throughout a married couple’s life together? The same might be said of all our Church’s sacraments: They are visible signs of our relationship with God and with one another. Our sacraments are visible signs of God’s present, loving, and saving kindness toward us and all creation. Here we celebrate together one of these visible signs of God’s presence and loving kindness; of covenant relationship, our Eucharist.

In the same way, our second reading from the First Letter of Peter speaks to us of baptism in terms of covenant. “A few persons… were saved by water”; by the flood in Noah’s time. Now we are all offered salvation in Jesus Christ by baptism into Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection. Baptism is not just a one-time contract with God. It is our entrance into covenant relationship with God and with one another, the Church. It is our entrance into the life of “the Kingdom of God” that our Gospel reading today says is “at hand,” here and now. We enter into this relationship with God and with one another in baptism and in every sacrament; a relationship through which God’s loving kindness is made present through our community of faith.

Baptism, like any sacrament, is not a mere contract. It is more than a contract. Indeed, I think a covenant relationship is more difficult for us to maintain, let alone to understand, than an ordinary contract. All is well if we honor the terms of a contract. And if we do not honor the terms of a contract, we may pay a penalty. In Biblical terms, we might (although I believe instances of this are rare) be cursed or destroyed. 

Try as we might, we cannot break the covenant we have now with God; the covenant God has made with all of creation. But what can we do to honor this covenant relationship with God and with one another? What does God invite us to do to honor this covenant?

God invites us simply to remember our covenant relationship with him and with one another; to remember that God is always faithful to this relationship: “I will recall the covenant I have made,” God promises. God invites us to remember and to be confident in God’s mercy for the times we fail to live up to the same covenant.

This remembrance of covenant is the high point of our Mass. We hear the words of Jesus in our Eucharistic Prayer: “Do this in remembrance of me.” And then our Eucharistic Prayer continues in remembrance of “the saving Passion of [God’s] Son, his wondrous Resurrection and Ascension into heaven” and our looking “forward to his second coming.”

We remember covenant, not a mere contract. We remember; we celebrate; we live this covenant with God and as one community of faith. We remember especially through our sacraments: Visible signs of covenant; visible signs of God’s loving kindness; of God’s sustaining, caring, saving presence to us and to all of creation.

Homily for Tuesday, 17 February 2015– Ferial

Optional Memorial of the Seven Founders of the Order of Servites

Tuesday of the 6th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Genesis 6:5-8, 7:1-5, 10; Psalm 29:1a-2, 3ac-4, 3b, 9c-10; Mark 8:14-21

What do our readings today say about God? What do they say to us about ourselves; about human nature?

At first glance, does God not seem in our readings to be harsh and destructive? In our reading from Genesis, God is about to send a catastrophic flood upon the earth. This flood will be the exact reversal of creation, by which God created order and life from chaos. Now, chaos will once again reign.

But is it God’s chaos that will reign, or ours? Human beings seem hopelessly depraved in our first reading today. God orders the flood “when he [sees] how great” is our “wickedness on earth.”

Jesus’ own disciples are not much better in our Gospel reading. Not only have they “forgotten to bring bread.” This is the least of their worries. No, the disciples have been infected by “the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.” Their “hearts” have been “hardened” by legalism that lacks compassion; by leadership that lacks courage; by failure to see and act by the signs of the reign of God reaching its fulfillment before their very senses. Are these not still challenges in the lives of faith of many Christians today? We are challenged to act with compassion and not out of legalism or partisanship. Our Gospel challenges us to have courage to stand up both to relativism and its just-as-harmful opposite in our culture, absolutism that does not allow for uncertainty; that over-categorizes; that limits both God and us.

Jesus ends our Gospel reading today with a pointed challenge to his disciples: “Do you still not understand”? But is Jesus, or is God who orders the flood in Genesis, actually acting harshly? Perhaps we are being invited to understand today’s readings differently than we are used to understanding them.

Today’s scene from Mark’s Gospel is not an end but a beginning for Jesus’ disciples. They will continue to grow in knowledge of God’s reign and of their place in it as they continue to journey with Jesus.

Likewise, the flood in Genesis is a new beginning, not an end. “Noah found favor with the LORD,” not that a cruel God was to bring a destructive flood on the earth, is the central message of our first reading. Noah does not stand alone as the righteous character in the flood story; the one God chooses to save. Noah stands for everything good still in creation. Indeed, our sin; our abuse of free will has corrupted creation, initially designed by God as “very good.” But there is still something worth saving; worth redeeming in creation; in us. And so “Noah found favor with the LORD.” In this way we find favor with the Lord also.

Perhaps then God does not appear as harsh as at first glance in our readings. We human beings are not bad or depraved, but redeemable. We are living our redemption now in Christ, through which God challenges us; strips away what is sinful in us as though by a flood of compassion and mercy. We are living a new beginning, not an end, because, like “Noah,” we have “found favor with the LORD.”

Homily for Tuesday, 10 February 2015– Memorial of St. Scholastica

Tuesday of the 5th Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Genesis 1:20-2:4a; Psalm 8:4-5, 6-7, 8-9; Mark 7:1-13

If we were to write a book or make a movie about our first reading today, could we not call it something like, “God Saw How Good it Was: Part 2”? Yesterday we heard Part 1, the first four days of creation in Genesis 1, and today we hear the last three days of the Genesis 1 creation account.

“God saw how good it was,” Genesis repeats after each day of creation, the central and timeless truth of Genesis 1. But what does God create on the sixth day? God creates human beings “in his image… male and female.” God gives us great responsibility over the rest of God’s creation: “Be fertile and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it,” that is, act with God’s goodness and loving care for creation, not abusively but in grateful service toward creation. “Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that move on the earth.”

And then, on the sixth day the repetitive words of Genesis change slightly. We hear that, when God had finished creating the universe; all its living beings; us, “God looked at everything he had made, and he found it very good.”

This leads me to ask a possibly controversial question of us this morning: Is it not perhaps arrogant of us to assume that we are the only beings in the universe who make God’s creation not only “good” but “very good”; the only beings in the universe capable of some kind of relationship and understanding of an infinitely loving and creative God?

I ask this question mainly because I just finished reading a wonderful book by a Jesuit brother and priest, Guy Consolmagno and Paul Mueller, astronomers at the Vatican Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. Their book, inspired by a question first raised at a General Audience by Pope Francis, is called, Would you Baptize an Extra-Terrestrial?

This assumes there are extra-terrestrials out there who would want to be baptized; that there are extra-terrestrials out there at all. I mean, there is no scientific proof that extra-terrestrial intelligent life exists, let alone with awareness of a loving creator God. There is no Biblical mention of extra-terrestrials either, unless, as my professor of Old Testament in the seminary used to joke, “They’re in the divinely-inspired footnotes”!

But still I ask, “What if”? As Guy Consolmagno, Paul Mueller, and Pope Francis have asked, what if we were to encounter aliens who exit a UFO, have pointy ears, bug eyes, and green skin like the ones in children’s drawings, or who look like ET from the movie; who, like us, have some awareness of relationship with a loving creator-God; who maybe speak in backward sentences like Yoda from Star Wars? Challenge our faith, would ET?

Challenge our faith… perhaps. But I hope we would be able to consider such a being, like any being or thing God has created, as even more evidence of timeless truths that go back to the Book of Genesis; to the beginning of our universe: God’s love is limitless. God’s love is creative. God looks upon all creation, known or yet unknown to us, and indeed it is “very good.”

Homily for Monday, 9 February 2015– Ferial

Monday of the 5th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Genesis 1:1-19; Psalm 104:1-2a, 5-6, 10. 12, 24, 35c; Mark 6:53-56

What was the beginning of our universe, or the beginning of our earth, like? Was there ever a time before suffering; before death; before sin?

Our first reading today from Genesis responds to questions like these, but not in the same way science or philosophy would respond to these kinds of questions.

Let us go back to the beginning; I mean literally to the beginning of Genesis. “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth,” the Book of Genesis starts, “the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind,” God’s own creative Spirit, “swept over the waters.”

The creation stories in Genesis move from image to image to speak of the beauty and goodness of God’s creation. “God saw how good [it] was,” Genesis 1 repeats no fewer than six times, four in today’s first reading. Genesis’ goal is not to confirm scientific theories like the Big Bang or evolution. These theories may be right, or may be shown one day by science to be outdated.

Genesis points us to another, universal, transcendent truth: That what God created (the universe; the earth; animals and plants; the sea and the sky; us) is, intentionally on God’s part, good. And this good that God created can be observed by the humblest of human beings because we are made in God’s image and likeness. English philosopher Sir Francis Bacon once spoke of our ability to observe God’s goodness both in “the Book of God’s Word,” the Bible, and in “the Book of God’s works” (creation). We are capable of knowing and sensing God’s goodness through God’s creation and giving thanks for it. It does not take a scientist to give thanks to God although, as a microbiology lab technician before I became a Basilian, I often saw God’s awesome goodness in the microscopic creatures I studied.

“God saw how good it was.” We can see this in relationships with one another: Within our households, with friends, within our parish; across oceans and borders between countries and languages. We can see this when we selflessly help other people in need. We can see God’s goodness when we look up at the stars on a clear night. What marvelous expanse; what enormous goodness! We can see this in our beautiful town of Irondequoit and State of New York; the nature and activities that I occasionally get a chance to explore. We can see God’s goodness in the falling snow… Wait: The six inches of snow forecast yet to fall here today and tomorrow may be evidence of the effects of Original Sin (I kid. We will hear more about Original Sin and its effects in the daily readings later this week, though). Please be safe.

“God saw how good it was.” This is the truth of which Genesis 1 speaks to us: A truth that is universal; transcendent; timeless. “God saw how good it was,” and now and forever we can sense how good it is and give thanks to our God for his Word both of Scripture and of creation.