Homily for Thursday, 1 August 2019– Memorial of St. Alphonsus Liguori

Readings of the day: Exodus 40:16-21, 34-38; Psalm 84:3, 4, 5-6a, 8a, 11; Matthew 13:47-53

Thursday of the 17th Week in Ordinary Time

This homily was given at the Kateri House Women's Residence Chapel, St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.

What kinds of homes do we live in, and with what kinds of keepsakes or treasures do we fill our homes?

Is it fair for me to presume that, since we are near the middle of a major city, most of us live in houses, apartments, or other, say, permanent dwellings? Having said this, I think of and invite us to pray for everybody, especially in the midst of our city of Edmonton but around the world, who are homeless or who otherwise do not have a permanent home; a permanent and safe place to keep even a few treasures.

As a member of a religious order under a vow of poverty, my experience is nowhere near the experience of poverty, of uncertainty as to where to find safe shelter, food, and other necessities that homeless people experience. Yet, as a Basilian, I have had the experience of moving from one place and one form of ministry to another often enough that this tends to minimize the amount of material goods I and my Basilian brothers might accumulate. We have in our Basilian houses decorations that show both that these are religious houses and that they are places of warm hospitality, not only toward fellow Basilians but anybody who may visit our homes.

Today, the Book of Exodus features Moses, who builds the tabernacle that is to house the Ark of the Covenant, and all this within a structure called the Tent of Meeting. The impermanence of this structure, even though it was to be the dwelling of God himself among the people of Israel, is remarkable to me. The Ark of the Covenant and its tabernacle within the Tent of Meeting was designed to be disassembled and reassembled as the people of Israel under Moses’ leadership journeyed from Egypt to their more permanent homeland of Israel. It would be many more centuries before the home of the God of Israel on Earth would become a more permanent structure, the Temple of Jerusalem, and even this first temple and its successor would not last forever.

Our Gospel reading today, from Matthew, focuses on our most permanent dwelling of all: The Kingdom of Heaven. It is to be the dwelling of “the righteous,” those people who have acted according to God’s love for us toward one another, especially people most in need. The Kingdom of Heaven will not be a place for people with the greatest number of earthly treasures, but for people who have made in their hearts a permanent dwelling for our God, our ultimate treasure, “beauty ever ancient yet ever new,” as St. Augustine of Hippo once prayed.

Through the likes of Moses and Jesus, God proposes for us today a dwelling that is much more permanent than anything we have ever known. God proposes to make God’s dwelling, heaven, forever our home. All God asks of us is to make of our hearts God’s home on earth—a tabernacle of sorts, meant to move about, to change, to be disassembled and reassembled as our earthly pilgrimage progresses—but still God’s home on earth. As St. Alphonsus Liguori, whom we celebrate today, once said, “The human heart is, so to speak, the paradise of God.” Jesus, too, asks us to make of our hearts “the paradise of God,” the storehouse of “what is new and what is old,” while God prepares our permanent home in heaven.

Homily for Wednesday, 9 August 2017– Ferial

Wednesday of the 18th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Numbers 13:1-2, 25, 14:1, 26a-29a, 34-35; Psalm 106:6-7ab, 13-14, 21-22, 23; Matthew 15:21-28

Is it possible, on the one hand, for the quality of our relationship with God, whether our fundamental relationship toward God is one of trust or one of fear, to affect our relationships with God’s creation; with one another? On the other hand, is the opposite also possible, when the quality of our relationships with creation; with one another are reflected in the quality of our relationship with God?

Our readings today, from Numbers and the Gospel of Matthew, suggest a connection between our relationships with the created world, with one another, and with God. In the Book of Numbers, we hear of the final preparation stages for the people of Israel to return home to the land God has promised them. Through Moses, God sends spies into “the land of Canaan” to scout the land the people of Israel are to settle. After forty days of scouting Canaan, the spies return and report on their spy mission to “Moses and Aaron and all the congregation of the Israelites in the land of Paran.” Their report is mixed: Canaan is prosperous, flowing with “milk and honey.” And yet the scouts doubt the ability of the people of Israel to conquer both the land and the people of Canaan. The people of Canaan “are stronger than we,” the scouts report, “to ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.” The land of Canaan itself “is a land that devours its inhabitants.”

Indirectly, the scouts’ lack of confidence that the people of Israel could settle successfully in Canaan shows their lack of trust in God, who had promised this land to them. Their default relationship with God is one of fear. And so God’s promise, the inheritance of the land of Canaan, will be for the next generation. Because of the scouts’ lack of trust in God, shown by their unfavourable report about the land of Canaan and its people, their generation is left to perish in the desert.

Contrast the fear and lack of trust of the Israelites under Moses, of the scouts to Canaan in Numbers, with the boldness of the Canaanite woman (a pagan, not even a Jew!) who asks Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel to heal her daughter. The Canaanite woman would have had every reason to fear or doubt Jesus’ ability to heal her daughter of the demon. Jesus’ disciples try to send her away because she continues to pester them. Even Jesus does not seem too keen on helping the woman. Jesus’ first priority, he says to the woman, is to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Jesus even seems, to our ears, harsh with the Canaanite woman (what this meant in Jesus’ time, if different from its meaning today, is difficult to say), likening her and her non-Israelite people to “dogs.”

Nevertheless, the Canaanite woman is not deterred. She even plays along with Jesus’ seemingly derogatory reference to her people. The Canaanite woman shows bold trust in Jesus’ ability to heal her daughter, trust that is clearly from God and that she reflects back to God in a kind of gift exchange. Jesus must acknowledge her deep trust in him and so in God, which is greater than that of most of his own people: “Great is your faith”!

Great is the faith of those people who show their trust in God by acknowledging and trusting God’s handiwork in creation and in our relationships with one another.   

Homily for Tuesday, 8 August 2017– Memorial of St. Dominic

Monday of the 21st week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Numbers 12:1-13; Psalm 51:3-4, 5-6ab, 6cd-7, 12-13; Matthew 14:22-36

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

How often have we read or prayed with a passage from the Bible, or heard the Word of God at Mass, when a verse or part of a verse catches our attention? Perhaps a few words feel out of place within the rest of the passage or reading.

Might the description in the Book of Numbers today of Moses as “very humble, more so than anyone else on the face of the earth,” be one of those moments that catch our attention because this description breaks from the flow of the rest of the reading? Maybe because I am teaching here in Edmonton at St. Joseph’s College this summer, and I have been grading papers, I am becoming particularly sensitive to (among a few kinds of grammatical and other foibles) the overuse of superlatives.

For example, one of the most annoying tendencies ever (now, I am saying this for humorous effect) is when it might have been convincing enough to me to describe Moses as humble, but the writer describes Moses glowingly as humbler “than anyone else on the face of the earth.” My reaction to superlatives like this is often a skeptical, “Really”? Well, in this case, we hear a superlative from the divinely inspired Word of God, so I will take the writer of Numbers’ word for it.

But is this description of Moses, where we hear it in our first reading today, still not jarring; seemingly out of place within the context of our reading? Led by Aaron and Miriam, the people complain “against Moses because of the Cushite woman he had married.” (This, again, is countercultural to most if not all of us. In Moses’ time, interethnic marriages were potentially scandalous; here today they are not). God defends Moses, afflicting Miriam with a skin disease because of her sin of having opposed Moses’ leadership unjustly. Aaron then pleads with Moses, and Moses with God, for forgiveness and for healing for Miriam.

Perhaps the stark contrast between Moses’ great humility and Aaron’s and Miriam’s lack thereof eventually enables Aaron and Miriam to recognize and ask forgiveness for their sin. Perhaps, in the reading we hear today from Matthew’s Gospel, the Pharisees and the scribes might have benefitted from a similar stark reminder of the differences between Jesus’ leadership and their own. For the Pharisees and scribes, “the tradition of the elders” had become an end in itself and a point of excessive, even sinful pride. The religious tradition, Jesus taught, was to serve the good of the people, not the other way around.

But Matthew does not break from the flow of his Gospel to emphasize for us that Jesus was so much humbler or a better leader than the Pharisees or the scribes, although he was. No, Matthew does not help us with superlatives! And today, while we acknowledge some people with superlative praise, how many people do we know who go about doing good works; who are holy, and yet humble and unassuming? I think of the likes of Mother Teresa, within the lifetime of most of us here.

St. Dominic, whose feast we celebrate today, taught his followers within the Order of Preachers he founded to preach the Gospel of humility by example. Early Dominicans were simply called “The Holy Preaching” for this reason. Their example is for each of us to strive for: To be “The Holy Preaching” ourselves; to preach Christ by example, with no need for superlatives.

Homily for Friday, 4 August 2017– Memorial of St. John Vianney

Friday of the 17th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Leviticus 23:1, 4-11, 15-16, 27, 34b-37; Psalm 81:3-4, 5-6, 10-11ab; Matthew 13:54-58

What is authority, and how do we gain authority?

As the journey home to the land promised them continues for the people of Israel under Moses, we make the transition from Exodus to Leviticus today in the daily readings at Mass. But the authority Moses has in leading the people of Israel continues. It is an authority based on trust and reciprocal love between the people and Moses.

The kind of love and trust that builds between Moses and the people of Israel was the love and trust that the saint we celebrate today, John Vianney, enjoyed with the people he served in the tiny French village of Ars. John Vianney was known for his long hours hearing confessions. He was a devoted pastor, or “Curé” of Ars, in the tumultuous years after the French Revolution. Not long after John Vianney’s arrival in Ars, the humble parish priest began to draw travelers from long distances who would seek his spiritual guidance. St. John Vianney’s authority, like that of Moses, was based on love and building trust between himself and the people he served.

Jesus is not so fortunate insofar as building trust with the people he taught. Matthew’s Gospel says today that Jesus had arrived “in his hometown” and had begun “to teach the people in their synagogue.” Instead of recognizing Jesus’ authority; that he is the Son of God, the people of Nazareth question his authority: “Where did this man get this wisdom and these deeds of power? Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary” and “his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas”?

By this point in Jesus’ public ministry, it would seem by Jesus’ remark that “prophets are not without honour except in their own country and in their own house” that he had enjoyed popularity and even genuine love from the people he had encountered before his return home. It is difficult to say why Jesus would have been received so poorly in his hometown after having had prior success; having established himself as a teaching authority in Israel. Perhaps the people of Nazareth were jealous of Jesus’ authority. Perhaps they were simply too familiar with Jesus and not willing to accept that a son of their hometown could be God. Perhaps that any human being could be God was too much of a stretch for the people’s Jewish faith already.

Whatever the reason Jesus was not accepted in Nazareth, I have found that my experience has been closer to that of John Vianney than to that of Our Lord. It has not been my experience to be derided; to have my authority questioned especially here in the city where I grew up. And so I find it somewhat difficult to relate to the events of today’s Gospel.

And yet, to return to the questions of what authority is and how we gain it, let me ask for your prayers on this feast of St. John Vianney, patron of priests, that any authority I exercise or any priest exercises through the ordained priesthood may, first, be a reflection of Jesus’ authority; God’s authority that sustains the world and our Church with loving kindness. And second, may any authority I or any priest; any minister of our Church exercises serve the authority we are all given through Baptism before any other sacrament, to be the presence of Christ we receive and celebrate here to our world.