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 Thursday, 20 June 2019

Readings of the day: 2 Corinthians 11:1-11; Psalm 111:1b-2, 3-4, 7-8; Matthew 6:7-15

Thursday of the 11th week in Ordinary Time

“Please put up with me”: Am I underestimating the probability of success in beginning an important message or trying to convince somebody with such a plea? Well, we know from the fairly spread of the Christian faith in the time of St. Paul, especially in large cities of the then-Roman Empire like Corinth that developed thriving Christian communities even under intermittent persecution from Rome and some Jewish leaders, that St. Paul was quite successful and convincing in spreading our faith.

I think it is important for us to remember that these Corinthians of St. Paul’s time were especially difficult people to bring to the Christian faith. Corinth was a rich city and proud of it, thanks to its possession of not one but two ports on the Mediterranean Sea, which allowed for increased trade by sea and therefore wealth to enter the city. Change, especially conversion from one faith, Greco-Roman paganism, to another, Christianity, is a tough sell when all is going so well for a city the way it was for first-century Corinth.

Scripture scholars often refer to St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians as his “tearful letter.” St. Paul pleaded with the Corinthians in bringing them to the Christian faith to the point of tears, out of a deep love for them, like no other people or city to which he wrote and ministered. To the Corinthians especially, St. Paul’s message, his preaching of a poor, humble Christ who freely accepted death on a cross to save us was, we could say, a religious culture shock.

In wealthy cities like Corinth, one paid handsomely to study under an elite teacher. This clashed, as we hear from 2 Corinthians today, with St. Paul’s preaching of “the Gospel” to the Corinthians “free of charge.” No self-respecting teacher or preacher in an ancient Greek city like Corinth would have taught or preached “free of charge” as St. Paul did, not only to a few wealthy students but to the whole city and to the world. Yet St. Paul’s strategy, along with pleading with the Corinthians to “put up with” him, worked splendidly anyway, no doubt by the grace of the Holy Spirit.

If we reflect on St. Paul’s loving pleading with the Corinthians to the point of tears, “Please put up with me,” what are the messages we find most difficult to accept today in our lives? Have we ever had difficulty accepting change even when change is necessary or right?

Maybe we have difficulty hearing somebody and accepting her or his message when this person differs from us politically or in understanding of the Church and its mission, for example, or when another person does not share our Christian faith or moral understanding at all. Maybe as difficult for many of us (if I have heard accurately from some of us here at St. Kateri Parish) is the impending change in leadership in this parish after anywhere from nine to forty-three years of Basilian leadership here.

I pray that we at St. Kateri will not only “put up with” but come to love St. Kateri’s new pastor when he begins here next week. I pray that everybody who leads, who prays, and who loves in this parish will continue to lead, pray, and grow in love with a new pastor and vicars, as the Corinthians went from putting up with St. Paul in his time to leading, praying, and genuinely loving him and one another for the growth and unity of the Church.

Homily for Sunday, 16 June 2019– The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

Readings of the day: Proverbs 8:22-31; Psalm 8:4-5, 6-7, 8-9; Romans 5:1-5, John 16:12-15

Our brother Basilian priest of happy memory, Fr. Peter Etlinger, had little use for when people would compare our present time or experience with almost-mythical “good old days.” “Don’t tell me about the good old days,” Fr. Etlinger would grumble, “I was there; they weren’t so good”!

But does the Word of God we hear today not call us to remember the “good old days”? I do not mean to remember the “good old days” in the sense of imagining for ourselves a mythical golden age that never in fact existed, as if to diminish any good in our present world and present experience. No, the Book of Proverbs begins today by pointing us back to the very first moments of God’s creation of the universe, through a figure Proverbs names “the wisdom of God.”

Even before there were “good old days,” or any kind of days or nights to count; “before the earth” was formed; before heights and depths, “fountains or springs of water,” mountains, hills, or fields, the wisdom of God was there. And God’s creation of the world, of our universe, which “the wisdom of God” witnessed, was so very good. The Book of Proverbs is far from the first text of our Bible to marvel at the goodness of God’s creation. If we remember, in the very first lines of the Book of Genesis, after each “day” of God’s creation, God looks upon his creation and sees that it is good.

Yet in Genesis and even more so in Proverbs, the one being singled out as especially good, in whom God and “the wisdom of God” take particular delight, is us: “I found delight in the human race.” Why is this? What about all the chaos, the divisions, the violence, and the sin in our world; the suffering we human beings inflict on one another and on our world? What is there in “the human race” for God to delight in?

Even if there were no sin, no human-caused suffering in our world, our Psalm asks, “What [are we] that [God] should be mindful of” us; “the son of man that God should care for him”? And yet God has made us “little less than the angels”; little less than God himself. Why would God have made us so? Why does God delight in the human race so much?

This may be a completely inadequate answer on my part to such a deep question as why God should delight so much in “the human race,” but please let me do my best to answer this question here anyway. God delights in us so much because we are unique among creatures on earth in our ability to form relationships not only with one another but with our Creator, God. How many of us have looked up at the “heavens, the work of [God’s] fingers, the moon and the stars,” or looked out at nature and the life that fills it and thought, “Wow! It had to have taken an awesome creator—we call this creative being God—to make all this so beautifully and perfectly”?

How many of us have listened to the sounds that echo through this place and this Eucharistic celebration, both the expected sounds of the Mass itself, like its ritual and music, and more spontaneous sounds, like the cooing of small children? How many of us have thanked God for a success in life like a new job, a happy retirement, or graduation, or have prayed to God for any of these things? How many of us have thanked God for a good friend, or our wife or husband who, sacramentally, is the foremost person in our lives, for those of us who are married, who shows us the face of God and leads us to eternal life with God? How many of us have ever sought or received healing from God, for ourselves or for another person? How many of us, especially on this Father’s Day, have prayed and thanked God for our fathers or, for those among us whose fathers have gone to be with our Father in heaven, how many of us have prayed for our fathers to intercede for us and watch over us from on high?

In these and many more ways, we form relationships not only with one another but with our God, in a way that only we human beings can. And we also believe, fundamentally about ourselves as human beings, that we are created in God’s image and likeness. If this is so, then the God in whose image and likeness we are created, who enables us to marvel at God’s handiwork in his creation as “the wisdom of God” in Proverbs does; who enables us to ask for what we need from God and to thank God in prayer; to form relationships with one another and with God, must be a relational God.

But how can God be a relationship within God’s self—we speak of God as a relationship of three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—if we also believe that God is fundamentally one? This is at the heart of the mystery we celebrate on this Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity: God fundamentally one and fundamentally a relationship of three, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This and any other true mystery cannot be explained logically, theo-logically, or with any increase in our “head knowledge.” The mystery of the Trinity, how God is one and also three, and any other true mystery, may only be comprehended through faith-filled experience.

This is what Jesus says to his disciples in John’s Gospel, from which we hear today. To try to comprehend mystery through our reason alone would overwhelm and even frustrate and sadden us: “You cannot bear it now,” Jesus says. We, like Jesus’ first disciples, have experienced relationship with God the Son, especially because God the Son took on our human nature, which maybe makes the Son easier for us to relate to than God the Father or the Holy Spirit. We have experienced relationship with God the Father from the first moments of creation, to the giving of the Law and the Prophets to Israel, to God’s sending of his only Son as one like us in all but sin. And now, through the Son, God sends us God’s Holy Spirit, our promised guide “to all truth.”

But we cannot absorb “all truth” all at once, without becoming overwhelmed, frustrated, and sad. In order to grow in relationship with and in our experience of the Holy Spirit; in order to grow in our comprehension of “all truth,” not taking it to the head but taking it to heart, requires time. It requires patience. It requires prayer. It requires us to be disposed to awe at the beauty of God’s creation that surrounds us.

The process of which St. Paul speaks to the Romans, that of the Holy Spirit, sent to us from the Father through the Son and “poured into our hearts”; the process from endurance to “proven character” to hope that “does not disappoint,” even in times of affliction, is a process of love. It is a process of growth in relationship. Those of us who have ever been in love, think about this: Did you go from attraction to somebody to the deepest intimacy, perhaps marriage, in an instant? Probably not.

The same is true of our faith-filled experience of the one God as Trinity; as a relationship of three, as of love: It takes time, patience, prayer, and a disposition to awe to allow it to grow and deepen. This does not happen in an instant, but over a longer process. And then, as happens in the best of relationships—imagine again a long, happy marriage or a great friendship—our experience of relationship in all its complexity draws us closer to oneness with the person with whom we enjoy the relationship. This is true of our relationship with God as it is with our relationships with one another: We experience God in an awesome multiplicity of ways. We enter into relationship with the God we experience and name as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and, as we grow and deepen in this relationship of love with God, we are drawn closer to oneness with God.

We are drawn closer to the appreciation of God’s oneness. But, as in our human relationships, we never lose our unique individual personalities in our relationship with God, and the distinction in the ways we experience God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is never lost. Our relationship with God, three-in-one, grows and deepens into a future in which, more and more, we comprehend and take to heart “all truth,” while still remembering fondly the “good old days” when God first made us, when we first knew delight in God and when God first “found delight in the human race.”

Homily for Sunday, 26 August 2018

21st Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Joshua 24:1-2a, 15-17, 18b; Psalm 34:2-3, 16-17, 18-19, 20-21; Ephesians 4:32- 5:1-2, 21-32; John 6:60-69

This homily was given at Our Lady of Sorrows Parish, Vancouver, BC, Canada. 

Baseball great Yogi Berra once famously said, “If you see a fork in the road, take it.” Of course, he also once quipped, “I never said half the things I said,” so sometimes what Yogi Berra actually said is up for debate.

Our readings today present us with “fork in the road” situations; we are required to make choices: In Joshua, whether to “serve the LORD” or the gods of foreign nations and faiths; in Ephesians, whether to act in our relationships among one another with the love with which Christ loves us; in John’s Gospel, whether or not to continue to follow Jesus when his teachings and those of the Church he has founded become “difficult.” When have we been faced with situations in our lives when we have had to make choices, practically, morally, or otherwise? Does this not happen to us constantly?

Are we not all here because we have chosen to be here? Our reasons for being here at this Mass at Our Lady of Sorrows vary: Maybe we are here out of a simple joy and love for the Mass. Maybe we are here with friends or family. Maybe we are here because the time of this Mass allows us to sleep in just a bit longer before we drag ourselves to Mass (that is not necessarily a bad thing), or because “Mom, Dad, or somebody made me get up for Mass,” or some other sense of obligation, or maybe some other more or less noble motive. The point is that we have all made a choice to be here. And, from the choice to be here to worship as a Catholic community of faith to simpler everyday choices like what to eat or wear, we are constantly making choices.

But relatively few of our choices are of the magnitude of the “fork in the road” moments faced by the people of Israel in Joshua’s time, the early Christians addressed by the letter to the Ephesians, or Jesus’ disciples in John’s Gospel grappling with what Jesus meant by making eating his flesh and drinking his blood essential for their eternal life. Each of these groups of people featured in our readings today also faces great pressure in making the choices they need to make. Would it be fair for us to wonder whether these people may have been tempted to evade making choices at all, or tempted strongly to make the wrong choice?

We hear first today from the end of the Book of Joshua. By this point in the Book of Joshua, the people of Israel who had been led by Moses and his successor, Joshua, back to their land have conquered this land for themselves from the Canaanites with relative ease. They might have thought, and probably many of them did think reasonably that it would be just as easy to maintain the land they had conquered as it had been to take possession of it. Sure, there are nations more powerful than Israel surrounding Israel and who worship other gods than the LORD. It would be tempting for Israel, in this situation, to bow to these surrounding nations and their gods to avoid being invaded and overtaken by these more powerful nations. Still, Joshua, in his last address to the people of Israel before his death, gives Israel a choice: “If you are unwilling to serve the LORD, choose this day whom you will serve.”

When Israel could have chosen the easy way of alliances with pagan nations and worship of their gods, they choose freely under Joshua’s leadership to be different from these other nations. The people of Israel choose freely to take a risk of angering these other nations by trusting solely in the one LORD they know to be the true God, and not to trust in alliances with worldly power to save them.

A similar choice to the one put before the Israelites under Joshua is put before Jesus’ disciples in John’s Gospel. We have arrived at a decisive point in our relationship with Jesus as his disciples. Jesus has repeatedly claimed that he is God, the one LORD the people of Israel have worshipped since the time of Moses and the gift of manna in the desert. Jesus claims to be the true food from heaven to which the manna only pointed. Jesus claims that the only way to eternal life is to eat his flesh and drink his blood. By this point, the people hearing Jesus are outraged. Most of them turn away from Jesus and return to the way they were living before encountering Jesus. His own disciples ask a very legitimate question, one perhaps many of us have asked about particular aspects or teachings of our faith: “This teaching is difficult. Who can accept it”? How can this man claim to be God, and how can he claim that the only way to eternal life is to eat his flesh and drink his blood?

Jesus’ disciples are at a fork-in-the-road moment, and they have only one choice: To take the fork. And our salvation depends on making the right choice.

“Do you also wish to go away”? Jesus asks his twelve closest disciples, his Apostles, as many if not most of his followers to that point turn “back and no longer [go] about with him.” Jesus knows that, even among these twelve, one will betray him outright, maybe not at this decisive point that is difficult for Jesus’ disciples to commit to following him, but at another fork-in-the-road moment not long thereafter. Might we imagine that even Simon Peter, the leader and usual spokesperson for the Twelve, may not have been so sure if he and the other Apostles in fact wanted to “go away” from Jesus at this point. Peter answers Jesus with a cautious, introspective kind of question at first: “Lord, to whom can we go”? Did Peter pause before continuing to answer Jesus, as if to say, “I need a second to think about this”?

We cannot know fully what was on the mind of Peter and the other disciples, only that this could not have been an easy question for him to answer on their behalf. I imagine Peter, looking up at the thinned-out crowd after many had turned away from Jesus, complaining and disputing among themselves. And yet Peter makes a decisive choice; the right choice. He answers Jesus, “You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe that you are the Holy One of God.” Peter answers “yes” to continuing to follow Jesus, not because he is the perfect disciple, but because he freely chooses to allow Jesus to strengthen him and the others who continue to follow Jesus. Peter freely chooses to continue to walk with Jesus, at least until the next fork in the road.

My sisters and brothers, this is all Jesus; all God asks of us (or at least all Yogi Berra asks of us): “If you see a fork in the road, take it.” There will be points in our lives, if there have not been already, when we must choose and there is no intermediate option between “yes” and “no”; between serving the LORD and serving other gods, ourselves, or worldly goods and pleasures as gods; between continuing to follow Jesus, who has the “the words of eternal life,” as difficult as his way and words can be to follow, and not.

There will be points in our lives, as the letter to the Ephesians reminds us with the imagery of a faithful marriage, when to love another person, let alone God, will be a difficult choice. Our readings call us beyond the attraction-infatuation stage we might experience at first in a relationship with somebody, and even with God. Love becomes a choice. Being Church, a community of faith in worship and actions of kindness and mercy, eventually becomes not mere infatuation but a choice. It becomes a difficult choice in love when any members of the Church, especially in leadership, idolize and abuse power and prestige. They walk among the crowds who turn from Jesus; who make the easy but wrong choice; who refuse to walk with Jesus beyond the fork in the road.

Will we, then, continue with Jesus beyond the fork in the road, at least until the next decisive moment? Will we choose to be Church? Will we choose to serve the LORD faithfully? Will we choose to love as Christ loves us and “gave himself up for” us? Will we choose to let the words of Simon Peter be ours: “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

Homily for Monday, 4 September 2017– Ferial

Monday of the 18th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; Psalm 96:1, 3, 4-5, 11-12, 13; Luke 4:16-30

This homily was given at St. Clare Church, Edmonton, AB, Canada.

What is it possible for us to know about heaven? How much of eternal life, of being saved, is dependent on our own effort or works versus God’s free gift of grace?

On this Labour Day, our celebration of work and everybody who works, our readings point more toward eternal life as God’s free gift than as having anything to do with our effort. In his first letter to the Thessalonians, St. Paul writes words of tremendous hope. “Jesus died and rose again,” St. Paul says, and for this and no other reason, we have the possibility of eternal life. “Through Jesus,” who has died and has risen from the dead through no merit of ours, “God will bring with him those who have died.” All St. Paul asks of us is to “encourage one another with these words.” It is no wonder, then, that today’s reading from 1 Thessalonians is often one of the selections at funerals in our Church, a time when we want to be encouraged; to know that our God is merciful and wills most of all that we might have eternal life.

Luke’s Gospel, too, emphasizes God’s gratuitous gift. Neither the possibility of eternal life nor God’s presence with and care for us in this life is limited by our effort or factors like our ethnicity or religious tradition. God is the creator of the universe and so is the universal giver of the possibility of eternal life. When Jesus speaks this truth through the images of outsiders like the “widow at Zerephath in Sidon” receiving the prophet Elijah in a time of famine or “Naaman the Syrian” being cleansed before any of the “lepers of Israel,” the people in the synagogue of Nazareth become furious with him. How is it that these outsiders receive God’s preferential treatment? Does it matter that we believe in the right God in order to be healed; in order to be saved? Do our efforts matter for our salvation?

If we listen attentively to our Gospel reading today, we hear that our efforts and our right worship do matter for our salvation, but perhaps not in the way we might most naturally think. Today’s Gospel reading is Jesus’ basic “mission statement: “To bring good news to the poor… to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

But this is not only Jesus’ mission; it is ours also. How, then, are we bringing good news to those in need? How are we, in St. Paul’s words, encouraging one another by our words and our deeds? How are we working to free the oppressed and the marginalized and to welcome and integrate the outsiders? How are we doing all this without worrying about whom God will save and whom he will not?

Heaven is God’s gift of grace, but we are still called to cooperate in this life in making God’s gift of grace known universally. French philosopher Gabriel Marcel once said, “To love another is to say to that person, ‘You shall not die.’” To love is to will and work for eternal life for everybody and all creation, and to trust God’s grace to make this will; this dream of ours a reality. We are called to dream this dream and work to realize it; to love one another. If we do simply this, the rest of the work of our salvation is God’s.