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, 17 July 2016

16th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Genesis 18:1-10a; Psalm 15:2-3, 3-4, 5; Colossians 1:24-28; Luke 10:38-42

This homily was given at the Monastery of the Carmel of St. Joseph near Spruce Grove, AB, Canada.

What is hospitality? What would be the best image we could form in our minds of the perfect host?

Our readings today present us with several images of hospitality; with several hosts. We hear in Genesis of the visit by “three men” to Abraham and Sarah at “the oaks of Mamre.” Abraham shows himself to be a gracious and even quite humorous host. He says to the three men, “Let me bring a little bread.” I imagine Abraham with a slight smirk on his face as he enters the tent to ask Sarah and his servant not to make only “a little bread” but a magnificent feast of “cakes… curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared.” Maybe Abraham thought, “These three visitors are in for a big surprise. They do not know the feast I have in store for them”!

At the end of this feast at Mamre, one of the servants says to Abraham, “I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son.” Might Abraham have thought at this point, “Wait a minute!? I have heard this promise of a son before. What a joke! Sarah and I are way too old to have a child”!

We know that Abraham had not always been the best host. God had made this promise of a child before to Abraham and Sarah, and they had dared to laugh at God and his far-fetched promise. Now, as he hosts his three guests “by the oaks of Mamre,” we see that Abraham is beginning to master the art of hospitality with a bit of humour. And just as the three men are about to leave, they deliver God’s announcement to Abraham that, from this point, in her womb Sarah has become the host to God’s last laugh at the expense of Abraham and Sarah: She is now pregnant with Isaac, whose name means “he who laughs.” One does not simply laugh at God and get away without consequences!

This would be far from the last or most direct time in which God would enter our world; in which God would teach us something about hospitality; in which God would go so far as to become human like us, to share in our life, our death, our sorrows yet also our joys, our tears and, I am sure, even our laughter. God has revealed himself to us in this utmost way in the person of Jesus Christ. Now we as Church are hosts to Jesus Christ; to God in our world. How do we go about hosting God in our world; revealing God to our world today?

The episode of Abraham with his three guests at Mamre is perhaps most famously depicted in the Russian Andrei Roublev’s fifteenth century icon called “The Trinity” or “The Hospitality of Abraham.” I do not dare to explain the sublime symbolism of this icon, which I do not understand well: Which angelic figure represents which person of the Trinity; why in some cases the angels’ wings overlap and in other cases do not; the significance of the chalice form of the space among the three figures and the wine-filled chalice on the table around which they are gathered; what the meaning is of the angels’ clothing, of the house in the upper right and of the tree at top centre… I would just as soon laugh at God as try to decipher Roublev’s “Trinity.”

I will only say this about the Most Holy Trinity: In the Trinity we have the ultimate revelation of hospitality; of the love among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit such that there is mysteriously distinction yet no division among the three persons of our one God. In the Trinity there is even more perfect hospitality; more perfect love than the hospitality and love shown by Abraham to his three guests at Mamre.

Yet I think there are simpler images of hospitality and of love, with humour, than Roublev’s “Trinity” or than Abraham’s feast with his guests at Mamre. I think of two images in my mind of great hospitality, one from my experience of being on pilgrimage to the Holy Land and the other from the history of my religious order, the Congregation of St. Basil or Basilians.

Three summers ago I was on a Basilian Peace and Justice Pilgrimage to the Holy Land. We were in the Palestinian territories of Bethlehem, Hebron, East Jerusalem, Jericho, Qumran, and the Dead Sea, south toward the Bedouin lands of the Negev desert, and elsewhere. It was the beginning of the Muslim month of fasting by day, Ramadan. In several of the homes in which we stopped, we were offered tea and sometimes small sweets. The hosts, if they were devout Muslims, would not partake of the food and drink they offered us. At the same time as we on pilgrimage felt for them, we were moved by some of the most profound hospitality we had ever experienced.

From our Basilian history I recall the story of our ten founding priests, who ran a clandestine minor seminary on a hill near Annonay, in the foothills of the French Alps, in the wake of the French Revolution. From time to time the Revolutionary troops would stop by our minor seminary to inspect us, to ensure we were not doing anything religious. One advantage of the hilltop placement of the minor seminary was that our founding confrères could see the troops approaching from a long distance. Our priests had enough time to prepare for their arrival by setting out the best French bread and wine their meagre resources could buy. The troops would go about their “inspection,” wining and dining with these priests-in-disguise until, suffice it to say, they went home more than full and satisfied, leaving our first Basilians and the minor seminary they served to survive another day.

The hospitality of our one God in three persons was alive and well in the meeting of Abraham with his guests at Mamre; alive and well in the Holy Land; alive and well among our early Basilians in Annonay. And our God of hospitality is alive, well, and present here now. Mysteriously, here in Carmelite community in this monastery, united with your Carmelite sisters and brothers throughout the world and all religious and the entire Church, particularly in this Eucharistic celebration, we are both the guests and the hosts in this house of God.

Yet in trying to take in this mystery we may try to do too much, so that we become less-than-ideally present to God; to God’s hospitality; to God’s love among us. And so Jesus offers us a gentle caution through our Gospel account of the encounter among Jesus, Mary, and Martha. I think we do well not to try to smooth over Jesus’ admonition of Martha who, Luke’s Gospel says, “was distracted by her many tasks.” At the same time, Mary is fully attentive to Jesus, sitting at his feet and listening “to what he was saying,” taking the posture of a disciple of the time. Jesus says to Martha, “Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

Would we not expect Jesus to give Martha more credit for welcoming “him into her home”; for serving him and Mary at table; maybe for caring for their other household, material needs? And yet Jesus sides with Mary over Martha! Why?

Somehow Mary, in sitting “at the Lord’s feet” and listening to him, was more hospitable to Jesus than was Martha, who was left “to do all the work by” herself. How can this be? Hospitality can take many forms. Sometimes hospitality means to “do… the work”; to serve at table; to expend energy serving our sisters and brothers. This is the “Martha” form of hospitality shown rightly by Abraham at Mamre; by our Palestinian Muslim hosts during our Holy Land pilgrimage; by the first Basilians to the Revolutionary troops in Annonay; often by us in religious life. But then sometimes the “Mary” form of hospitality is most appropriate: Simply listen, quietly but actively; be present; learn from our Lord and from one another.

The right form of hospitality for the moment will be a constant process of discernment. Yet this discernment; this hospitality is an essential part of our calling as Christians; as a people gathered here in celebration; as a people of God who is love; who is hospitality in person, always present to us.

Homily for Wednesday, 28 May 2014‒ Wednesday of the Sixth Week of Easter

This homily was given at the convent of the Holy Child Sisters, Oxford, United Kingdom

Readings of the day: Acts 17:15, 22-18:1; Psalm 148:1-2, 11-12, 13, 14; John 16:12-15

St. Paul speaks in our first reading today from the Areopagus to the people of Athens who, according to Paul, were worshiping “an unknown God.” Have any of us ever known someone to worship “an unknown God”? Among worshipers of “an unknown God” I include those who may not know they are worshiping any god at all.

Have any of us ever heard someone say, for instance, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual”? In my experience, people who say this usually mean that they do not identify with any organized religious tradition; almost as often they do not want to. Their lack of desire to be associated with an organized religion may be based on an objection they have to a particular religious tradition or to organized religion in general, or they may perceive that religion limits their freedom to think and to believe as they wish. But I wonder if there are “spiritual but not religious” people who describe themselves this way because they do not know at enough depth what a particular religious tradition practices and teaches.

It is difficult to judge whether the Athenians to whom Paul speaks at the Areopagus worshiped “an unknown God” in the sense that the “unknown God” of their altar inscription was actually unknown; whether they wanted no association with any organized religion (unlikely, since the pagan Greek understanding of the divine was somewhat sophisticated); or whether some had rejected Christianity in favour of their own religion.

Paul’s audience in Athens may have included all these types of people. We hear from the Acts of the Apostles that, upon listening to Paul, some Athenians genuinely accepted the Christian faith. Others “scoffed” at Paul and immediately rejected the faith he was preaching. I doubt that many among Paul’s hearers, if any, truly rejected any and all religion whatsoever. This stance of “spiritual but not religious” is, I think, a more modern and even contemporary phenomenon, but I will leave this question to philosophers…

Nevertheless, in our time we still know people who are “spiritual but not religious.” We know people who have built spiritual places of worship “to an unknown God.” We know people who have, for a variety of reasons, perhaps anger or simple indifference, rejected religion altogether; rejected Christianity; rejected the Catholic Church. I find it fascinating that the University of Oxford is home to both Blessed John Henry Newman who, by his own writings, grew from worship of “an unknown God” toward embracing Christianity, and to Richard Dawkins, the biologist and vehement atheist of our own time. This university is also home to (I suspect) a majority of people who stand between the likes of Newman and Dawkins in their approach to religious faith.

May our mission as Church be to act with special kindness and to pray for those who reject religious faith. May we respect and uphold the freedom of religion of people of other faiths; and may we encourage and also pray for those genuinely searching for a religious home; those who build their altars “to an unknown God.”