Homily for Friday, 17 September 2021– Memorial of St. Hildegard of Bingen, Abbess, and St. Robert Bellarmine, Bishop, Doctors of the Church

Readings of the day: 1 Timothy 6:2c-12; Psalm 49:6-7, 8-10, 17-18, 19-20; Luke 8:1-3

Friday of the Twenty-fourth week in Ordinary Time

Today’s Gospel reading from Luke is a noticeably brief transitional passage between lengthier and more detailed episodes in Jesus’ Galilean ministry. It is preceded by the meal scene at the home of Simon the Pharisee, the woman who washes and anoints Jesus’ feet, and Jesus’ parable of the two debtors, which we heard in yesterday’s Gospel reading. Today’s passage is followed in Luke by the parable of the sower.

For its brevity, though, today’s Gospel reading says a lot to us about the diversity yet unity of the earliest Church, the first disciples of Jesus, across longstanding social and religious distinctions. Of course, Luke says, “the twelve were with Jesus”; the twelve Apostles are reminiscent of the twelve Old Testament tribes united as one nation of Israel. But then Luke, alone among the four Gospels, includes today’s detail about various women who followed Jesus: “Mary Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many [unnamed] others.”

What is a common trait among these diverse women and earliest disciples of Jesus? Luke says that they “provided for Jesus and the twelve out of their resources.” This is to say that, out of their diversity of resources—not only monetary but the particular gifts each brought to the community of disciples of Jesus—they worked to ensure the unity of these disciples in Christ. I think we can presume that the twelve; the women; all these earliest disciples of Jesus were diverse, if we only consider their personal backgrounds and material wealth, let alone other points of diversity. With her connections to the royal court of Herod, Joanna may have had some wealth. Mary Magdalene is often portrayed as wealthy. The Gospel says little about Susanna besides her name, and less still about several unnamed disciples of Jesus at the time.

We may know that, in terms of the Church’s liturgy, for weekday Masses in Ordinary Time the central theme of the first reading does not purposely fit together with that of the Gospel. Yet (please allow me to break this mostly unwritten rule of preaching here) I cannot help but see a point in common between the women in Luke’s Gospel who provide for Jesus and the twelve “out of their resources” and the caution to Timothy in our first reading today that “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.”

Money and other forms of material wealth are not in themselves evil, as long as they are used most justly, to ensure that nobody lacks at least the necessities of life. It is the individualistic “love of money”; the love of and selfish focus to excess on one’s individual rights when this negates the basic rights of others and the common good, that is evil. The author of 1 Timothy essentially urges Timothy and his Christian community (and us) to live their discipleship and dispense their gifts and wealth in the way the women in our Gospel do: With ultimate care for our unity in Christ, in imitation of him.

It is also appropriate today (I am not sure this happens on any other day of the year) that we celebrate the memory of two saintly Doctors of the Church, Sts. Hildegard of Bingen and Robert Bellarmine, on the same day. To be a Doctor of the Church is to be a saint recognized, as only thirty-six people in the Church’s history have, for outstanding teaching of our faith. But Hildegard, Benedictine abbess and mystic of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in the 1100s, and Robert, Jesuit entrusted with doctrinal interpretation and implementation of the Council of Trent in the 1500s and early 1600s, could not have been more different.

Perhaps our celebration of Sts. Hildegard of Bingen and Robert Bellarmine is yet another invitation to us to provide out of our diverse sets of resources and gifts for the common good and salvation of all.

Homily for Sunday, 25 August 2019

Readings of the day: Isaiah 66:18-21; Psalm 117:1, 2; Hebrews 12:5-7, 11-13; Luke 13:22-30

21st Sunday in Ordinary Time

This homily was given at St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, and St. James Church, Vernon, BC, Canada.

Do many of us ever reflect on the phenomenal diversity in our world of religious faith; of the number of faiths in our world, each with a particular approach to encountering the divine through acts of worship and devotion, and also through acts of individual charity and social justice? Of the more than 7.5 billion people on Earth now, 2.4 billion are Christian, and 1.1 billion are Catholic. Even among these 2.4 billion Christians and 1.1 billion Catholics in our world, do we not see great diversity of religious practice, some of which is divisive, even a counter-witness to Jesus’ prayer in the Gospel that we might “all be one,” but much of which is legitimate and enriches our Christian faith and the world?

Our reading today from Isaiah and our Psalm particularly view this diversity of faith in a positive way, especially for the time of these Old Testament writers. Isaiah writes originally to encourage the people of Israel who are nearing the end of a lengthy exile in Babylon, a foreign nation that worshipped gods foreign to Israel and Israel’s God. I suppose Isaiah could have urged the people of Israel to close in on themselves and to develop a set of religious practices and worship of the God of Israel closed off to the rest of the world. But instead Isaiah prophecies that peoples and nations who do not even know the God of Israel, “the coastlands far away that have not heard of [God’s] fame or seen [God’s] glory,” will be drawn to the God of Israel by the descendants of Israel’s exiles to Babylon.

Isaiah does not say how these foreign nations will be drawn to the glory of the God of Israel, only that they will. This presumes that the people of Israel will become messengers, prophets after their prophetic leaders like Isaiah, of the glory and fame, and so right worship of the one God, the God of Israel. But how they will communicate this message and have all the nations accept the glory and right worship of one God remains a mystery as the book of Isaiah ends at the prophecy we hear today.

Our Psalm, even more than Isaiah, emphasizes that the worship of the one God of Israel is and will be for all nations and all peoples. Psalm 117, the shortest Psalm in our Bible, proclaims with pithy energy, “Praise the LORD, all you nations! Extol him, all you peoples! For great is his steadfast love to us, and the faithfulness of the LORD endures forever.” Again, though, our Psalm is not specific as to how all peoples and all nations are to praise and extol the LORD, or how they are to experience this “steadfast love” and “faithfulness” of God that the Psalmist proclaims to be so universal. After all, can religious experience ever be exactly uniform everywhere and at all times, even among people of the same faith, let alone among people of different faiths?

If we see our world today, would it not seem that prophecies like those of Isaiah and our Psalm are far from realized? Some experts on these questions estimate that there are about 4 200 recognized religions in the world today. It would seem, then, that we are far from all peoples acknowledging and worshipping one and the same God, much less the God of Israel; the God of “steadfast love” and “faithfulness” extolled by our Psalm.

Even among people of the same religious faith, there is sometimes great diversity in religious experience. There are not only differences in denominational traditions, as we see in Christianity among Eastern and Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants, but differences within each of those traditions: Differences in particular private devotions and forms of prayer; generational and ethnic differences from one worshipping community, parish, or diocese to another; differences in religious experience created by the increasing mobility of people and globalization nowadays, and so on.

All this diversity and difference can be wonderful, even enriching to a faith community or to the world, but can it not also be a challenge to us? Does this diversity not naturally lead us to ask: When is diversity legitimate or not? What are essential truths (or is there any single Truth) that allow for little or no leeway? Is there one or are there several true religious faiths? And, if there is only one true faith or a limited range of true religious practice, what about the salvation of people who do not belong to the one true faith, who choose not to believe the claims to truth of a particular faith, or have never experienced religious faith? Are people of no faith, by choice or not, saved?

The easy answer to these questions is that all this is a mystery. Whether our God, as we Christians believe God to be the God of all peoples and nations, will save only people of our Christian faith, of many, or all faiths, is beyond our capacity to answer. But simply to evade the question like this may not be helpful to us. In contrast to Isaiah and the Psalmist, whose tone toward the diversity of religious and experience of the peoples and nations around Israel is more accepting, even welcoming (although Isaiah and our Psalm still limit true praise; true worship to one God), in Luke’s Gospel we hear a more exclusive message from Jesus: There is a “narrow door” through which we are to “strive to enter” in order to be saved. The person who asks Jesus, “Lord, will only a few be saved?” seems to have understood Jesus’ teaching correctly: Indeed only a few will be saved. But what does Jesus actually mean by this pessimistic-sounding teaching we hear in today’s Gospel: “Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able”?

We could go back to evading the question: If we cannot understand what Jesus was trying to teach, why bother continuing to discern what Jesus meant? Or we could try to place Jesus’ teaching about striving “to enter through the narrow door” in the context of the rest of our Gospel reading and of the other readings we hear today. At this point in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus and his disciples are well into their long journey from Galilee to Jerusalem. In Galilee, for the most part Jesus and his teaching and healing ministry had been well-received. In Jerusalem, he would enter the city through its narrow, crowded gates. Within days of being received into the city as a king, he would be expelled from the city and crucified outside its gates. A quick note about Jerusalem: I have been to Jerusalem, so I have experienced literally the narrowness of its gates; its doors. Probably, then, in today’s Gospel, Jesus is referring to his impending entrance into the literal city of Jerusalem of his time. More figuratively, to follow Jesus; to be a disciple of Jesus would have meant to follow him through the “narrow door” of the earthly Jerusalem, to the end of a journey that was to lead to death, for Jesus and for many of his earliest disciples. To enter the earthly Jerusalem through its “narrow door,” though, to accept humiliation and even death was and is the only way to resurrection; the only way to salvation; to eternal life.

So I do not think that, by inviting his disciples to “enter through the narrow door,” Jesus is or was excluding anybody who is not of a specific religious faith—who is not Christian, or who was not of Jesus’ own Jewish faith in his time—from the possibility of salvation. In fact, the rest of today’s Gospel reading gives us some needed context on Jesus’ meaning by, “Strive to enter through the narrow door.” Salvation will be denied to those who insist on being “first” at the expense of others they exclude out-of-hand: People who think differently from us; who are of a different religious faith than us; people who look different from us. In this way, people who insist that they can gain salvation on their own, on account of their own wealth or the right ideas or right religious faith and so forth, will be “last” while those dismissed as “last… will be first.”

“The narrow door” is impossible to enter for anybody who tries to enter alone. Salvation cannot be a solo effort. Rather, “the narrow door” will be easier to pass through for any and all who help others to pass through it. Salvation is and must be a communal, whole-Church, whole-world effort. Entrance through “the narrow door” of eternal life is for anybody who not only preaches truth or uses truth in a way that excludes other people who have not experienced the truths we preach, but who lives and gives her or his life in witness to this truth. If we believe in one true God, a God of “steadfast love… faithfulness”; justice and kindness, then these are the values we are to live out to inspire the peoples, nations, and faiths of the world in all their diversity. And we pray that God may ultimately reconcile all this, in a way that is mysterious to us now, into an eternal existence with God that will be open to all nations and all peoples.

Homily for Sunday, 9 June 2019‒ Pentecost

Mass during the Day

Readings of the day: Acts 2:1-11; Psalm 104:1, 24, 29-30, 31, 34; 1 Corinthians 12:3b-7, 12-13; Pentecost Sequence; John 14:15-16, 23b-26

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

A proverb I heard not long ago says this: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” How might this proverb speak to our culture, including how we understand and live as Church? What might this kind of proverb have to do with Pentecost, which we celebrate today?

If I were to ask us when each of us thinks the Church began, historically or otherwise, how many of us would answer, “At Pentecost”? But then what is (or was) Pentecost? What is Church and why?

Might the readings we have heard today give us a clue toward the answers to these “brainstorm”-type questions? Fifty days after Jesus had risen from the dead (which is the meaning of the word “Pentecost,” fifty days), the Acts of the Apostles says to us that Jesus’ apostles, if not a larger group of Jesus’ disciples, those who had followed Jesus during his public ministry, passion, death, and resurrection, “were all in one place together.” It was at this point, when Jesus’ disciples “were all in one place together,” when the Holy Spirit descended upon them “like a strong driving wind” and in “tongues of fire.”

The rest of this account of Pentecost we hear from Acts also speaks of togetherness among the disciples of Jesus and an even larger group of “Jews from every nation under heaven” gathered in Jerusalem at the time. But this togetherness was not and could not be a too-simple and artificial uniformity. The group that witnessed to this first Pentecost, the birth of our Church, was too large and too diverse to be so uniform. All these different people from all over the world would witness together, but each “in their own tongues” to “the mighty acts of God”; to the power of God’s Holy Spirit; to the birth of a Church.

Does this not sound a lot like the Church today; like our reality here in Rochester and at St. Kateri? “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” I do not believe that proverbs like this are meant to be a criticism of those who “go alone” in our Church or civil society, or in our St. Kateri Parish for that matter, as if acting together is always better than acting alone; as if going far is always better than going fast.

The rightful diversity within the Church will forever welcome the faithful who view change in the Church—in decisions made at various levels of Church leadership, the people who lead, or sometimes even the teachings that guide and result from those in leadership—as more often good, and the faster the better. And the same rightful diversity within the Church will necessarily welcome those with usually the opposite view, who are wary of change or who stress caution or consensus before allowing change; who prefer going far to going fast; going together to going alone.

Instead of serving as an indictment of people with either view, I think our experience of Pentecost, in a similar way to that first Pentecost of which the Acts of the Apostles speaks to us today, has two effects on the Church and on us as the Church’s faithful. First, our experience of receiving the Holy Spirit, our experience of Pentecost, puts in right order these two complementary movements in the Church of going alone and therefore faster, and of going together and therefore farther. Second, our experience of Pentecost purifies our intentions behind preferring either to go alone and therefore fast, or together and therefore far, or a bit of each preference depending on our particular circumstances of life.

Our experience of Pentecost, like the very first experience Jesus’ disciples had of Pentecost, rightly orders the desire or movement in our same Church toward going together and therefore far, versus the desire or movement toward going alone and therefore fast. We hear of this right ordering in our readings today. The Holy Spirit first draws all this diversity of peoples together, so that they will be able to go far once they are sent out by the same Spirit, not in spite of but precisely because of their diversity. But the diversity of these earliest disciples of Jesus is a diversity whose unity is safeguarded by the grace of the Holy Spirit, and the same is true of the Church today. The same Holy Spirit who once drew together the diverse peoples of the earliest Church draws us into this “one place together” so that we may honor and celebrate together our diversity held in unity by the Holy Spirit. We may not be “Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the districts of Libya near Cyrene, as well as travelers from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs.” But we are from East Irondequoit, West Irondequoit, elsewhere in greater Rochester, New York State, or beyond; rich, poor, and middle class; ideologically left, right, and center; people who prefer more pre-Vatican II liturgy or post-Vatican II liturgy, and so on, all called to this “one place together.” We might only want to be wary of letting in certain Canadians who study in France; they may be a little suspect…

Only once we have been drawn together by the Holy Spirit into the unity of “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church” in this one celebration will we be able to set out, each in the particular ways in which we are called, to proclaim the Gospel, “glorifying [the one] God by our lives.” Only by learning by celebrating here and now our “going together,” our being “in one place together,” will we then be effective, if not sometimes surprisingly fast, if and when the Holy Spirit calls us to “go alone,” each putting our individual or unique gifts to the service of the same Gospel, remaining faithful to our unity as Church.

In John’s Gospel today, Jesus reinforces this point: To learn by celebrating our “going together” is necessary if and when the Holy Spirit, who keeps us together as one Church, calls us within this Church to “go alone”; to exercise our more particular or unique gifts at the service of the Gospel. In the same discourse as when Jesus promises his disciples the Holy Spirit, “another advocate to be with [us] always,” Jesus says to his disciples, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments… Whoever loves me will keep my word.” My sisters and brothers, love; keeping the commandments of Jesus, first among which is to love one another as Jesus has loved us; keeping Jesus’ word: These are not individual actions that we accomplish without any grounding in community; as one Church that gathers together to hear and celebrate God’s word in our Eucharist, together. To keep Jesus’ commandments, to love, presupposes our gathering “in one place together.” In fact, God himself is a communion, a “togetherness” of three distinct persons (more on this next Sunday, when we will celebrate more specifically the Most Holy Trinity).

Yet togetherness, unity, communion does not stifle diversity, individuality, uniqueness of spiritual and other gifts. In fact, our unity reinforces and honors our diversity, individuality, uniqueness of gifts. Our Pentecost experience of the Holy Spirit not only puts in right order the complementary movements in the Church of going together and therefore farther so that we may be able to, if necessary, go alone and therefore maybe faster, but also our Pentecost experience of the Holy Spirit purifies these two seemingly opposite movements, so that indeed they are complementary and will never stifle each other. As 1 Corinthians says to us today, we remain “one body though [with] many parts. We receive “different spiritual gifts” by “the same Spirit.” We perform “different forms of service” by the grace of our “one Lord” and God.

By “going together,” we gain the strength and unity we need for when we are called to “go alone.” As Church, we breathe with two lungs. Our unity and then our diversity are inspired by the same Spirit. Insofar we gather “in one place together” to celebrate this, we will both “go far” and “go fast,” because our Pentecost experience empowers us to do both.