Homily for Monday, 2 July 2018– Ferial

Monday of the 13th Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Amos 2:6-10, 13-16; Psalm 50:15bc-17, 18-19, 20-21, 22-23; Matthew 8, 18-22

This homily was given at St. Kateri Tekakwitha Parish, St. Margaret Mary Church, Rochester, NY, USA.

How many of us are at least somewhat unsettled by the harshness of the prophet Amos in today’s first reading and of our Psalm? I do not particularly like to be reminded of my failings, even sometimes when I should be, much less criticized so intensely and at such length as Amos or the Psalmist criticize the people of Israel in the readings we hear today.

It does not seem to matter, at least to my ears, that Amos and our Psalm berate the people of Israel with a poetic style of writing. Can poetry not be just as harsh, and indeed more so, than other literary styles, since poetry is often designed to intensify a message in the way other ways of conveying a message cannot do, to make a point?

And what is the point Amos and our Psalm made to the people of Israel of their time, and to us today, with the intensity that only poetry can achieve? Amos and the Psalmist attack not only the sins of a few individuals, but the deep-seated, longstanding and, for many people of their time and society, subconscious evil of a whole nation; a whole society. For Amos and the other Old Testament prophets and often in the Psalms, the greatest social sin was not to care for the most vulnerable people of a society or a nation; the people summed up by the frequent Biblical motif of “the orphan, the widow, and the foreigner.”

Amos, like other Old Testament prophets, speaking in God’s voice, reminds his people that they were once as vulnerable and in need as the people they are ignoring or oppressing: “It was I who brought you up from the land of Egypt… to occupy the land of the Amorites.” And if the people of Israel did not treat the most vulnerable among themselves with greater justice, they would meet the same end as the Amorites whose land God had given them: Exile and destruction.

Social injustice, to be clear, though, is not a sin for its own sake. No, social injustice, especially toward the most in need and vulnerable, is so great a sin because it is a way of forgetting God. Social injustice puts us at risk of idolatry; of making gods of our wealth, security, might, and comfort in place of the one true God. I invite us to keep this in mind as we hear Amos and our Psalm today: “Remember this, you who never think of God.”

We are gathered here and now to worship God, so I do not think that our Psalm response is directed at us per se. We “think of God”; the evidence is here, among and around us. And yet I think today’s readings, in all their startling harshness, are a call to examine our individual but also social conscience: Who are the most vulnerable and in need in our society today? In what ways have I (or we) forgotten these “least” of our brothers and sisters, “the orphan, widow, and foreigner” of our time, if not oppressed them directly or indirectly through unjust social or political policies and support for those policies or laws? How well does our worship reflect our witness to God, how we “think of God,” by our acts of justice and mercy beyond the walls of this church?

Homily for Monday, 14 August 2017‒ Memorial of St. Maximilian Kolbe

Thursday of the 19th Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Deuteronomy 10:12-22; Psalm 147:12-13, 14-15, 19-20; John 15:10-16

Who is a stranger, as a saying goes, but a friend we have yet to meet? Today the Book of Deuteronomy sets down the Lord’s basic requirements for faithful living: “Fear the Lord your God… walk in all his ways… love him… serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and… keep the commandments of the Lord your God.”

To love and to fear (as in to show reverence toward) God is, once again in Deuteronomy, connected with love for one another. And who are the people God asks through Moses whom we are to love and to attend to their needs and basic dignity especially? We cannot claim to be worshipping God rightly if we do not especially uphold the dignity of the most vulnerable among us. God, we hear, “executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and… loves the strangers.” So God, through Moses, commands the people, “You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” This “preferential option” of God, if we might call it that, toward the orphan, the widow, and the stranger is one of the most common motifs of the social justice teaching of the Old Testament.

Throughout not only Deuteronomy but the whole Old Testament, the measure of our love for God is how we love and care for the orphan, the widow, and the stranger. In John’s Gospel, from which we hear today, though, the standard of love of God and of one another is not so much (at least on the surface) our care for the orphan, the widow, and the stranger— the people among us most in need of our care— but friendship. Jesus says to his disciples: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends… I do not call you servants any longer… but I have called you friends.”

And so what are the connections between care for those most in need of our love and our care, captured in the motif of the orphan, the widow, and the stranger in the Old Testament, right worship of God, and being “friends” of Jesus and of one another, ready to lay down our lives for our “friends”?

We see these connections in the life of St. Maximilian Kolbe, the Franciscan priest, missionary, and martyr of Auschwitz whose feast we celebrate today. In July 1941, three prisoners tried to escape Auschwitz, so that the camp commander randomly selected ten men to be starved to death. Maximilian Kolbe volunteered to take the place of one of the men, Franciszek Gajowoniczek, who was married and had children. Maximilian Kolbe’s words to the commander were remembered, if not ever written down precisely: “I am a Catholic priest from Poland; I would like to take his place, because he has a wife and children.”

Maximilian Kolbe took the place of Gajowoniczek, who had been a stranger to him, a numbered prisoner of Auschwitz as Kolbe was. Though Kolbe’s martyrdom, Gajowoniczek became to Kolbe no longer a beloved stranger but a friend. And it was Kolbe’s regard for the dignity of a stranger, as God commands of us, that made him the ultimate friend, of God and of all of us, for “no one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”