Homily for Sunday, 8 September 2019

Readings of the day: Wisdom 9:13-18b; Psalm 90:3-4, 5-6, 12-13, 14, 17; Philemon 9-10, 12-17; Luke 14:25-33

23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

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

Full disclosure: Yesterday was my brother Eric’s and (officially) new sister-in-law Chelsea’s wedding at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in Sherwood Park, a great celebration of love, family, friendship and, dare I say, Christian discipleship. What exactly, then, does Jesus mean when he says, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate their father and mother, spouse and children, brothers and sisters… and even their life itself cannot be my disciple”? How many of us here now, maybe with your family or friends, are here because you in fact really hate your father or mother, husband, wife, or children, brothers or sisters, or even your own life? And petty squabbles and, kids, sibling rivalries do not count. Jesus says we really need to hate each other to be his disciples, right?

Well, not quite. At least I hope that, having just celebrated my brother Eric’s and sister-in-law Chelsea’s wedding, I am now not supposed to hate them and the rest of my family if I want to be Jesus’ disciple! I think we may understand what Jesus says in today’s Gospel a little better with a brief lesson in Greek, because Jesus’ original meaning when he asks us to hate “father and mother, spouse and children, brothers and sisters… and even [our] life” in order to be his disciple gets lost in translation to English. When Jesus asks us to hate “father and mother, spouse and children, brothers and sisters… and even [our] life” in order to be his disciple, the word we hear as “hate” is from the Greek misei. In English, words like “miser” or “miserly,” for somebody who is not very generous with his or her money, derive from this Greek word.

So, does this mean that Jesus’ ultimate disciple would be somebody like Ebenezer Scrooge? Well, again, not quite. Misei in Greek means, more precisely, “to treat as nothing”; “as of minimal to no importance.” This may still be troublesome for those of us who love our families and like to spend a lot of time with them, as I do. One great blessing I have when I have taught here at St. Joseph’s College is to live, for a few months of the year, in the same city as most of my immediate family and many of my closest friends. I would have difficulty being Jesus’ disciple if this meant treating my family as if they were not important. This is simply not my reality; my experience.

But to be Jesus’ disciple, I think Jesus is saying to us today, is a question of priorities. Even if (as I hope we all do) we love our mothers and fathers, our wives, our husbands, our children, and know the beauty and dignity of our own lives, Jesus is asking us to put God first. Jesus is inviting us to put our relationship with God above all the other great relationships we may have with people closest to us and however much we may love our own lives. Compared with our relationship with God, Jesus invites us to consider even the greatest of our relationships with other people and with ourselves (and certainly our own ego) as of minimal to no importance. This is especially because all our relationships with other people—our families and close friends—and our ability to recognize and love the dignity of our own lives all find their source in God.

If we understand Jesus’ saying that, to be his disciple, we must “hate… father and mother, spouse and children, brothers and sisters… and even [our] life” in this way, this may also help us to place what Jesus says to us in the context of our other readings today, from Wisdom, the Psalms, and Philemon.

The Book of Wisdom, not surprisingly, invites us to prioritize and seek after wisdom. Now, the Book of Wisdom is a strange book of the Bible. It, like several books that make up the so-called “wisdom literature” of the Old Testament—Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Sirach, some of the Psalms, and Wisdom—barely mention God and at times include statements that are theologically problematic if they are not interpreted carefully. We hear even today, for example, that “a perishable body weighs down the soul, and this earthly tent burdens the thoughtful mind.” Texts like this would be used by people on the fringes of the early Church called Gnostics (from another Greek word, gnosis, that means “knowledge”), who taught that the human body is like a prison dwelling from which the soul had to free itself to go to heaven. This teaching, and the Gnostics’ view that there is knowledge, gnosis, that is essential for our salvation that is outside the Bible or the teaching of the Church handed on from Jesus’ Apostles, were eventually condemned by the Church as heresy. But the Biblical wisdom literature is also peculiar in that it mentions God sparingly and, at face value, tends to prioritize human faculties like wisdom over anything divine.

At least today’s reading from Wisdom acknowledges a divine source (who remains unnamed, but still) of wisdom. The Book of Wisdom asks, “Who has learned your counsel, unless you have given wisdom and sent your holy spirit from on high”? So, if Wisdom prioritizes or glorifies wisdom above all, we could say that it does so because to prioritize or glorify wisdom is to point us to the source of all wisdom, the ultimate source of “all that is good,” whom we call God.

Like the Book of Wisdom and Luke’s Gospel, St. Paul’s letter to Philemon also calls us to discern priorities. Philemon is the shortest and one of the latest of St. Paul’s letters that are included in our Bible. St. Paul writes from prison to a wealthy Christian of the time, Philemon, who was possibly a bishop or other leader of the Church and who owned slaves, but whose slave Onesimus had run away from him. In the meantime, Onesimus had become a Christian (possibly baptized by Paul) and was being accompanied and taught by St. Paul in the Christian faith. If the Old Testament Book of Wisdom prioritizes the human faculty of wisdom, Philemon gives pride of place to virtues like forgiveness and reconciliation. Like wisdom, forgiveness and reconciliation point us to our utmost priority, God. Who here has forgiven or reconciled with another person, or been forgiven, not least in the sacrament of reconciliation, and so knows of what I speak?

Philemon, whom St. Paul addresses with this brief yet moving letter, was in no way obligated to receive Onesimus back as his slave, much less as “a beloved brother” in Christ as St. Paul asks of him. St. Paul knows this; he knows Philemon’s legal rights toward Onesimus, yet he asks Philemon to receive Onesimus back anyway, using affectionate terms for Onesimus like “my child” and describing his relationship with Onesimus like that of a father to a son.

St. Paul’s letter to Philemon, Jesus in Luke’s Gospel, our Psalm today, and the Book of Wisdom all point us to our ultimate priority, who is God. But each reading we hear today points us to God in a different way. In the letter to Philemon, the way to God is through practice of the virtues of forgiveness and reconciliation, especially when we are not required to forgive somebody; to receive that person back as “a beloved brother” or sister. Forgiveness and reconciliation without conditions is how God acts toward us when we stray from God and hurt one another by our sin. Unlike Onesimus, though, we do not begin as slaves; we begin as beloved people, created in God’s own image and likeness.

Our Psalm, like the Book of Wisdom, prioritize wisdom among ways of seeking God first. To know the shortness of our earthly days is, in a way paradoxically, to know the “favour” and “steadfast love” of the LORD for us; to know God as the source of our life, both our finite life on earth and our eternal life with God in heaven for which this life is our preparation.

In this earthly life, family and close friends can help us to prepare for eternal life by acting as examples of God’s love toward us, and our acting as examples of God’s love toward them. It will be unlikely for us, but it does happen still in our world today that people, Christians, are asked to choose in a moment between love for family, friends, and this life, and God. It is for these moments especially that Jesus says, “Whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

Whether in the rare event we will be called to give our life for the Lord, or whether we seek wisdom, or love of family and friends, or forgiveness and reconciliation—all of which are good things—may we allow our seeking after these things to point us toward God. All earthly realities are secondary: Wisdom, human love and relationships, even giving our lives for our faith. God is and must be first. God is the source of “all that is good”; all that God gives us in this life for our salvation.

Homily for Sunday, 30 June 2019

Readings of the day: 1 Kings 19:16b, 19-21; Psalm 16:1-2, 5, 7-8, 9-10, 11; Galatians 5:1, 13-18; Luke 9:51-62

13th Sunday in Ordinary Time

What is the most difficult choice you have ever had to make? Has there ever been an important choice you have had to make that you hesitated to make, or one that you made immediately; that you were “resolutely determined” to make, maybe despite or because of its difficulty?

Today the word of God invites us to make a choice, to set out on a journey. The choice, the journey, to which our readings invite us today is a difficult one. The destination of our chosen journey is the cross, yet still we are invited to set out “resolutely determined” on this journey.

We have, as Church, just celebrated the great liturgical seasons of Lent and then Easter. Our Eastertime celebrations have extended into the feasts of Pentecost, the Most Holy Trinity, and the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ. Could we be faulted if we felt somewhat of a liturgical let-down since now, as of this weekend, we ease back into the more familiar rhythm of Ordinary Time, after the great liturgical high points of our Church over the last several weeks?

After the penitential intensity of Lent, the great joy of Easter, the Church’s day of birth in the Holy Spirit that is Pentecost, the celebrations of our experience of sublime divine mysteries through the Solemnities of the Most Holy Trinity and Most Holy Body and Blood, now we are invited to set out, with only a few basic necessities and with resolute determination, on a journey.

Thankfully, we are not alone on our journey. We have each other. We are led on this journey by our Lord, “resolutely determined to journey to Jerusalem,” where he, although faultless, is to die as a common criminal, crucified for us between two thieves. Our Lord even sends “messengers ahead of him” to prepare towns whose people we are to encounter in advance of meeting them. Still, that we are accompanied by one another and led by the Lord does not make this journey much easier for us. The destination of our journey is still the cross, and even the intermediate steps of this journey promise to be difficult.

Why, then, should we even bother setting out on this journey, let alone be “resolutely determined” to do so? Would it not be easier for us to continue happily as “we have always done it”? Would it not be easier for us to envision a static world; a static Church in which styles of and the kinds people in leadership change slowly if at all, whether at the parish level, the diocesan level, or the universal Church level? Would it not be easier for us to accept a Church in which doctrine or liturgical practice and their interpretation did not develop with time, but remained certain, clear, and unambiguous forever? Would it not be easier for us to accept, as Christian disciples, to live in a world in which we would never be misunderstood or even ridiculed for our beliefs and for trying to live them? Would it not be easier to be able “to call down fire from heaven,” as James and John wished to do to the Samaritans who would not accept them because their destination was Jerusalem, on those who differ from us or who ridicule and misunderstand us? Would it not be easier to accept a Church in which Christians never would, as St. Paul says to the Galatians; to us today, “go on biting and devouring one another,” renouncing their freedom for Christ won by Christ’s self-sacrifice on the cross to sell themselves back into a form of slavery? (I speak here especially of a pervasive and abusive form of seeking after power and status in the Church at the expense of the faithful whom the power of those who have it is supposed to serve).

It would be nice if our world, our Church, our journey were so simple and promised clear success at its end. But this is not the reality of our Church, our world, or the journey on which Jesus invites us to set out. The journey on which Jesus invites us to set out “resolutely determined” features a few aspects that are clear and certain: This journey will end in the cross. It will end in failure, at least insofar as the world sees. It will end in shame. It will end in death. Even its intermediate steps, its passage through Samaritan towns so to speak, will be difficult. Does anybody here still want to join our Lord Jesus on this journey, let alone with resolute determination?

Thankfully, we already have some experience of this very journey to which Jesus calls us: We who have been baptized have taken at least the first steps (or our parents and godparents have taken them for us) on this journey. We have been baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ. Yes, we know that the cross toward which Jesus and we are “resolutely determined” to journey is not the end of our story. Eternal life is; resurrection is. But to reach our resurrection to eternal life, our journey must pass through the cross: Failure; shame; death; Jerusalem; solidarity with the Son of God crucified between two thieves.

Today we as Church invite, during this celebration, RJB to be the latest disciple to be baptized into this journey toward Jerusalem, through death to resurrection, on which Jesus leads us. Almost four years ago, on August 1, 2015, on a sweltering day across this St. Kateri Parish from here at St. Margaret Mary Church (which, without air conditioning on hot summer days, may be an apt description of an earthly form of purgatory), R’s parents, B and P, with me as the Church’s witness, were married.

B and P, and all our married or to-be-married couples, you, too, are living a particular experience of the journey to which Jesus invites us, this journey to Jerusalem, through the cross to resurrection. You made a promise before this Church of faithfulness and truth to each other “in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health,” to “love and honor [each other] all the days of” your life. I imagine that this promise you made, on some days more than others, is lived out more like that of the passage of Jesus and his disciples through Samaritan towns: You know the difficulty in resisting the temptation “to call down fire from heaven” on each other!  

B and P, you accepted “children”—this child, your son RJ—“lovingly from God, [to] bring them up according to the law of Christ and his Church.” You accepted; you were and are “resolutely determined” to set out on this journey, led by Jesus Christ, to Jerusalem, through death to resurrection.

Our Church now blesses all your “yeses”; all your promises; all your steps of choosing to accept to join our Lord Jesus Christ on this journey to Jerusalem, through this earthly life and its sacraments through death to resurrection, “resolutely determined.” Our Lord Jesus continues to invite you, B and P, and all of us, to make difficult choices, from the moment of our baptism. They are choices that, we pray, will bring you great joy not only in eternal life but in this earthly life. But they are and will be difficult choices nonetheless.

Our Lord Jesus invites us, through our baptism into one Church, to prioritize Christ and his mission toward Jerusalem above all else: “The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head”; “Let the dead bury their dead. But you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God”; “No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what is left behind is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Our Lord Jesus invites us to join him in proclaiming the kingdom of God, a difficult mission in our world, to “glorify God by our lives.” Our Lord Jesus invites us to choose, “resolutely determined,” to follow him to Jerusalem, through death to resurrection to eternal life.

Homily for Thursday, 13 June 2019– Memorial of St. Anthony of Padua, Priest and Doctor of the Church

Readings of the day: 2 Corinthians 3:15-4:1, 3-6; Psalm 85:9ab, 10, 11-12, 13-14; Matthew 5:20-26

Thursday of the 10th week in Ordinary Time

“Dear St. Anthony, please come ‘round. Something is lost and cannot be found.” How many of us have prayed this prayer or a prayer like this to St. Anthony when we have lost something?

St. Anthony of Padua is known as the patron saint for finding lost items. This association between St. Anthony and lost items is based on a legend of a Franciscan novice under St. Anthony’s guidance who left his religious order in anger, taking with him St. Anthony’s breviary, or book of daily prayers. According to the legend, an angry St. Anthony appeared in a dream to the novice the night after the novice had suddenly left the Franciscans with St. Anthony’s breviary. St. Anthony’s appearance in his dream convinced the novice to return to the Franciscans and to return the breviary to St. Anthony while accepting to do penance for having stolen the breviary and for his outburst of anger.

Maybe the novice’s vision of an angry St. Anthony in his dream was so effective in persuading the novice to return St. Anthony’s breviary and return to the Franciscans because it was so out of character for St. Anthony to lose his temper. St. Anthony is one of the most versatile saints of the Church, and a patron of many causes besides lost items, but he was not known as an angry saint. However, St. Anthony is associated with instances in which he interceded to quell anger or to repair the damage of angry outbursts. In one instance, a knight in Tuscany had beaten his wife, but then turned to St. Anthony in sorrow for his own sin. St. Anthony healed the knight’s wife. Another version of this legend has a young woman whose hair had been torn out by her husband turn to St. Anthony. Miraculously, while St. Anthony prayed for the woman as well as for repentance for her husband and reconciliation in their marriage, the woman’s hair grew back in St. Anthony’s presence.

St. Anthony of Padua is a saint of repentance and reconciliation. In Matthew’s Gospel today, Jesus intensifies the Old Testament commandment not to kill to include outbursts of anger that are meant to destroy or demean others: “You have heard that it was said to your ancestors… ‘You shall not kill,’ and whoever kills will be liable to judgment. But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment.”

On the one hand, anger in itself is not a sin but an emotion with which God has created us all. Even God; even Jesus becomes angry occasionally, as the Bible shows us. On the other hand, God calls us to master our more intense emotions like anger so we do not use these emotions to destroy other people or ourselves. Jesus’ commandment could be extended, appropriately in our time, to avoidance of gossip, passive aggression, and other subtler but as-destructive forms of lack of control of our anger.

Maybe most important, though, is what Jesus says further on in today’s Gospel. If we are aware that another person “has anything against us,” Jesus says, “go first and be reconciled with your brother.” In other words, we might recognize that we are all sinners and that, sooner or later, we will need another’s forgiveness or need to forgive another person. Jesus asks us to anticipate this need for forgiveness, to be reconciled to one another, in a sense, preemptively. On this memorial of St. Anthony of Padua, may St. Anthony intercede for us, so that we might master anger; that we might know our own and one another’s need for reconciliation, and anticipate one another in this need, going “first” to “be reconciled with” our brothers and sisters.