Homily for Thursday, 9 September 2021– Ferial

 Readings of the day: Colossians 3:12-17; Psalm 150:1b-2, 3-4, 5-6; Luke 6:27-38

Thursday of the 23rd week in Ordinary Time

Optional Memorial of St. Peter Claver, Priest

What clothing do we keep in our Christian wardrobe, so to speak? I have to admit, and I wonder if I speak for many of us: I am a little more concerned these days about what I wear now that we have returned to our work and study places in public after many months of working from home and online due to the COVID pandemic.

Speaking of our worship, I have served as a priest in enough places among the poor to know to be very careful about how to approach the subject of appropriate clothing for Mass; for our worship spaces. I am sure we have heard the term “Sunday best” to describe proper, dignified Church attire. In places I have served, because of poverty or other reasons, people have arrived at churches in shabby clothing. These people are always a reminder to me not to do or say anything, especially as a minister of the Church, that would marginalize them further. Neither I nor any of us know what is in a person’s heart, based on their clothing no less.

Today, the letter to the Colossians also invites us to put on a kind of clothing that is more important than our physical clothing. Colossians reminds us of the appropriate clothing of the heart: “As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion and kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.” And again: “Above all, clothe yourselves with love.”

Love is not measured in percentages of cotton, wool, polyester, nylon, or other materials we might wear. And, in Luke’s Gospel today, Jesus raises the command to love to a new and radical level: “I say to you that listen, ‘Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.’”

Here, Jesus is not asking us (figuratively) to wear our best clothing, the clothing of love including for our enemies, only on Sundays, or when we are at Mass, or when we feel like it. No, we are to put on this best clothing all the time, even when this clothing might be less comfortable than the clothing of bitterness, rudeness, or impatience that we (yours truly included) may be tempted to put on occasionally when people behave in less-than-loving ways toward us.

I pray sincerely that none of us have or will have enemies; people who challenge us profoundly to love them as God loves them (and us). I pray that none of us will ever be an enemy to anybody else; that, as Colossians says, “the peace of Christ [will] rule in [our] hearts,” and especially at the heart of our presence, our ministry, our study, and our worship here at St. Joseph’s College. But we know as Christians that, to the extent we live our faith in the public square, even humbly and quietly, we may not have enemies, but we will have people who misunderstand us or outright reject at least what they perceive to be important tenets of our faith that they cannot accept.

Our encounters with these people, our encounters with the poor or otherwise marginalized will be opportunities to put on our best clothing, that of love: The invisible clothing that few may perceive immediately that we are wearing, but the clothing that makes us who we are as disciples of Jesus Christ in our world.

Homily for Sunday, 4 August 2019

Readings of the day: Ecclesiastes 1:2, 2:21-23; Psalm 90:3-4, 5-6, 12-13, 14, 17; Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11; Luke 12:13-21

18th Sunday in Ordinary Time

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

Who went to Mass today to hear a discouraging message? I will venture to say that few if anybody here today is here to hear a discouraging message.

Yet do we not hear just this, a real “downer,” from the Book of Ecclesiastes today: “Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher… All is vanity.” All your toil “with wisdom and knowledge and skill”; your work, even if you work extended or irregular hours for some perceived good to yourself or to other people, our society, our country, or our world: All this means nothing. All the benefits of our hard work will be left behind “to be enjoyed by another.”

“All is vanity,” sorry. The Jesuit priest and columnist for the newspaper The Catholic Register out of Toronto, Fr. Scott Lewis, who taught me in a course at Toronto’s Regis College, says (I think rightly) in his Register column, “God’s Word on Sunday,” for this week that “the author of Ecclesiastes will never win a prize for being the most joyful or hopeful individual in the Bible.” In fact, Fr. Lewis says, the Jewish Rabbis a few centuries after the writing of Ecclesiastes who decided on which books to include in the Bible were leery of including Ecclesiastes in the Bible as we know it today for a number of reasons: Ecclesiastes is too discouraging. Its message could have been written for anybody already cynically dissatisfied with life enough to have been waiting for an authoritative message to support their cynicism. Ecclesiastes’ message is not particularly religious. The Book of Ecclesiastes barely mentions God.

For good or for ill, though, the Book of Ecclesiastes and its “vanity of vanities” message are in our Bible. But if we fast-forward to the chaotic 1960s, thanks to The Byrds’ 1965 single, “Turn, Turn, Turn,” it would seem that the message of the cynical teacher of Ecclesiastes has gained new receptivity. “To everything… there is a season… and a time to every purpose under heaven”: Today, over fifty years since “Turn, Turn, Turn” was released, its lyrics are engrained in the memory of many people. Is this maybe because, in the 1960s (I think this is true of any time period), people were reflecting on both the joys and the chaos of the time, individual and social successes and problems, by asking the foremost question, “What does it all mean”?

If we fast-forward again to our own just-as-chaotic time, are we not still asking similar questions? What does our life on earth mean? Of what benefit is wealth, or work, or anything? After all, the people who die with the most wealth, or having worked the hardest or the longest, still die. “Vanity of vanities,” it would seem still today, “All things are vanity.” Yet, at least by my observation, Ecclesiastes—not usually the reading we hear today, but the “to everything there is a season” reading, from Ecclesiastes 3—is a staple at Catholic funerals, when people are, I would think, searching for some message of hope or meaning in our own lives and in the life of our deceased loved ones.

These questions are age-old: What is the meaning of our life on Earth? Of what benefit is wealth, or work, or our acts of justice and kindness toward others? Why bother, anyway, if “all is vanity”? Our Psalm today, the letter to the Colossians, and the Gospel of Luke all speak to these enduring questions we have about the meaning of our earthly life and of our activity during it, although maybe not with the same cynical edge as the Teacher in Ecclesiastes.

Our Psalm speaks to the finiteness of our life on earth; our life that is “like grass that… in the morning… flourishes and is renewed [and] in the evening… fades and withers.” Still, for the Psalmist, our earthly life and work within it have great meaning and dignity. We ask God, through our Psalm, to bless our lives, however short, and our work: “Prosper for us the work of our hands.”

The letter to the Colossians invites us to prioritize “the things that are above… not… things that are on earth.” The context of Colossians is both a form of laxity in the practice of Christian faith that had developed within a few decades of the earthly life of Jesus, and a response to that laxity. The more time passed after Jesus’ ascension into heaven, we might understand, Jesus’ disciples got increasingly impatient for Jesus’ promised return to Earth at the end of time. The longer Christian disciples waited for Jesus’ return, the more they became lax or ignorant about accumulating material goods that, while not bad in themselves, risked distracting them from placing their foremost hope in God and in eternal life. The letter to the Colossians’ response to this laxity is radical, even for its time. Colossians asks its hearers to think of themselves as already dead: “For you have died, and your life is hidden in Christ with God.”

In case we think that this call in Colossians to think of ourselves as already dead is morbid or simply bizarre, I invite us to think of our own baptism. Our Church’s Rite of Baptism is full of references to death: Death to our finite earthly life so that we may rise to eternal life with Christ.

But do we not experience in our world today the same tension that would have inspired the letter writer to the Colossians to invite us to think of ourselves as dead to this finite world in order to place our priority and our hope on God and eternal life? On the one hand, do we not hear from some people even today an Ecclesiastes-like despair, without the context of the world and spirituality of the author of Ecclesiastes, who lament the “vanity”; the lack of any meaning in this earthly life? On the other hand, maybe more often today, we hear the “evil twin” of this despair of any meaning in our earthly life; we hear a “prosperity gospel” mentality that encourages greed and material accumulation, even under sometimes Christian pretexts. This “prosperity gospel” holds that either the material poverty of the poor is a curse from God and wealth a blessing, or social justice and an equitable distribution of earthly goods do not matter anyway, because God will make all our inequity and injustice right at the end of time, no matter how justly or unjustly we act now.

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus offers us, I think, a counterweight either to a mentality that despairs of any meaning to our life on earth or to the “prosperity gospel” view, which, similarly to its evil twin, holds this earthly life to be of no meaning but, in doing so, encourages greed and social injustice, all too frequently under a religious mask. In our Gospel reading today, Jesus encounters a man who asks him to order his brother to divide his inheritance with him. In refusing to do as the man requests, Jesus turns to “the crowd” and warns them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”

Jesus does not say that the possessions themselves are bad, or even that the man he encounters at the beginning of today’s Gospel reading is unjust in demanding his share of his inheritance. For us to understand Jesus as teaching that material possessions are in themselves bad, or that this man’s demand for his inheritance is in itself unjust, would miss the point of Jesus’ teaching. Such an understanding would be inconsistent both with the balance of Biblical teaching and with our Church’s historical teaching on the meaning of our earthly life and on justice concerning earthly possessions or wealth.

Neither Jesus, in our reading today from Luke or elsewhere in the Gospels, nor the author of Ecclesiastes—especially if we read Ecclesiastes beyond his cynical-sounding “vanity of vanities” lament we hear today—nor the letter to the Colossians, nor the Psalmist consider all wealth, all human work, or earthly life to be in themselves meaningless. Instead, Jesus and the authors of Ecclesiastes, Colossians, and our Psalm ground all meaning of earthly, material wealth, of labour, and of life itself, in God.

Human wealth, labour, and even our work toward individual charity and social justice have great meaning and dignity, but only if they are grounded in God first. If these are anything but God first—might first, nation first, wealth first, or me first—they become empty, meaningless “vanity of vanities.” Only by placing God first in all we possess, do, and are may we have eternal life, the life of ultimate meaning. And only with God first does our prayer, that of our Psalm, have any meaning for us here and now: “Prosper for us the work of our hands.”

Homily for Sunday, 28 July 2019

Readings of the day: Genesis 18:20-32; Psalm 138:1-2, 2-3, 6-7, 7-8; Colossians 2:12-14; Luke 11:1-13

17th Sunday in Ordinary Time

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

“How is your prayer life? How do you most like to pray”?

These are questions I frequently ask people of faith in the course of my ministry as a priest. These are questions I frequently ask myself. When I ask these questions, often I observe that people to whom I ask these questions wonder what precisely I am asking: Do I mean to ask the time of day at which people prefer to pray, or whether people tend to prefer “formula” prayers like the Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be, the rosary, prayers at mealtime, or devotional prayers to particular saints, or simply free verse? Do I mean to leave my intent of these kinds of questions open to interpretation? (Usually I do, in fact, like to leave these questions a bit open-ended).

Is prayer not somewhat of a delicate subject for many of us? Many experts on prayer (if there are such people) suggest that there is no single right or wrong way to pray. Those of us familiar with the Baltimore Catechism of the 1940s may remember its definition of prayer as “a lifting of the mind and heart to God.” More recent prayer “experts” like the late Jesuit Fr. Thomas Green, whose book Opening to God and its sequel Weeds among the Wheat I highly recommend for anybody interested in deepening your prayer experience, reflect on difficulties with definitions of prayer like that of the Baltimore Catechism. The definition of prayer in the Baltimore Catechism, “a lifting of the mind and heart to God,” is well and good, but can lead us, Fr. Green says, to place undue emphasis on our own efforts at prayer over God’s effort to reveal God’s self to us in our prayer. And so prayer is difficult if impossible to define, except maybe as an act of attentive listening to God without trying to limit God; an act of Opening to God that is easier said than done.

In this context of attentive listening to God, Opening to God, I would like to connect this difficulty, if impossibility, in defining prayer to what we hear today from Luke’s Gospel. Luke begins by placing Jesus and his disciples at prayer “in a certain place”; a nondescript, undefined place. In this place, which the usually-detailed Luke does not even name, Jesus’ disciples ask him: “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.”

But how did John teach his disciples to pray? The trouble for us is that, at least in the Bible, there is no account of how John the Baptist taught his disciples to pray. We know from elsewhere in the Gospels that John had disciples, people following him, and that John’s and Jesus’ disciples were not mutually exclusive groups; some of John’s disciples were probably also Jesus’ disciples, and Jesus’ disciples also John’s disciples. We know from the Gospels that John preached a message of justice and repentance in anticipation of the Messiah, Jesus, but the Gospels never explicitly speak of John the Baptist teaching his disciples to pray.

“Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples”: When Jesus’ disciples ask him this, Jesus gives them, and ultimately us, the Lord’s Prayer or the Our Father. Now, neither Jesus nor the Gospel writers seem to be too fussy about the exact formula of this prayer, the Our Father. Who here noticed that the wording of the Our Father we have heard in today’s Gospel reading is not exactly the formulation of this prayer we are used to praying, whether privately or together, say, at Mass? The form of the Our Father we are more used to is from Matthew’s, not Luke’s, Gospel. We might presume that these differences between forms of the Our Father in Matthew and Luke are due to one form being older than the other (Luke’s version of the Our Father is shorter, so it is probably older than Matthew’s). We might presume that these differences are due to differences in the needs of the early Christian communities Matthew and Luke were trying to reach with their messages: Luke, for instance, focuses more on the social needs and challenges of his community, whereas Matthew focuses more on the spiritual good and cohesion of his community.

This is all fine, but how does this meet our needs; the spiritual and social needs of our community of faith here? If Jesus were standing among us here, and we were to ask him to “teach us to pray,” what prayer would he teach us? Would Jesus prayer be a particular formula, to be prayed at particular times of day, or for a specific amount of time every day, or would Jesus ask us simply to pray from our hearts; to lift our hearts and minds to God as the Baltimore Catechism says, however we see fit, at least when we pray in private?

I think we hear a clue to the answer to these questions from the rest of our Gospel reading as well as our first reading, from Genesis, and our Psalm today. As soon as Jesus teaches his disciples the Our Father, he goes on to tell a strange parable in today’s Gospel. The friend in Jesus’ parable, who is asked for “three loaves of bread” at midnight—Luke does not say why anybody would ask a friend for “three loaves of bread” at midnight—Jesus says will eventually give the person who asks for the bread what he asks for, not so much “because he is his friend” but “because of his persistence.” And if any of our human friends might be convinced by our persistence to give us what we need, even when meeting our needs is inconvenient for our friend, Jesus asks us to imagine “how much more… the heavenly Father [will] give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him”!

I interpret from this that there is never really an inconvenient time to pray to God for what we need. Jesus does not give us a correct formula with which to pray, but only asks us to pray persistently: “Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.”

If we go back to the Book of Genesis, to our first reading today, we find a model of persistence in Abraham. In fact, please allow me to introduce to us, as a model for our prayer, Abraham the Pest! Abraham the Pest probably knew as well as anybody the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah, so it could not have been much of a surprise to Abraham when the LORD revealed to him his plan to destroy these cities. Yet Abraham knew, as the LORD had to have known, that there were at least a few righteous people among the wicked of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham’s own nephew, Lot, and Lot’s family were among these righteous. So Abraham the Pest begins to bargain with God: “Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city… Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five”? “Suppose forty [righteous] are found there”… Thirty… Twenty… Ten… Okay, just my nephew and his family, please, unless Lot’s wife looks back at the burning city, then I will accept that you turn her into a pillar of salt”  (but that is another story).

How might God have responded to Abraham’s persistent bargaining to save anybody righteous among the wicked inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah? I try to imagine God’s tone of voice with Abraham as The Pest bargains with God: “Alright, Abraham, I suppose I have given you my blessing to be the pest you are. Note to self: Create limits on persistence of future humans when they pray. No, wait, it is too late; I have already created the ‘pest gene’ in all Abraham’s descendants, who are to number as the stars. What was I thinking? Alright, Abe, you win, you big pest! I will save the righteous people of Sodom and Gomorrah, even if there are only a few of them”!

Our Psalm today gives us a guide for when our persistence in prayer, our being a pest like Abraham to God, pays off: Give thanks to God for when God answers our prayer. “I give you thanks, O Lord… On the day I called, you answered me,” we pray with the Psalmist. Give thanks to God when God does not give us exactly what we asked for, but gives us something even better, or when God helps us to endure suffering, because in Christ God took the suffering and evil of our world on himself on the cross to redeem it, so says the Letter to the Colossians to us today.

What does all this say about how we should pray? I think, first of all, we are invited to pray with the likes of Abraham the Pest, our Father in Persistent Faith; of Thomas Green the Contemplative; of John the Baptist; of Jesus our Saviour. Pray for our needs and for the needs of one another, especially the least well off. Listen attentively without imposing limits on God. And, when our prayer, the “lifting of [our] mind and heart to God,” is answered, give thanks that “on the day” we call, God answers us.