Homily for Sunday, 21 November 2021– Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe

Readings of the day: Exodus 24:3-8; Psalm 116:12-13, 15-16, 17-18; Hebrews 9:11-15; Mark 14:12-16, 22-26

Near the beginning of Pope Benedict XVI’s first Encyclical letter, Deus Caritas Est (God is Love) are words that stand out to me both for their truth and their beauty. In Deus Caritas Est, not speaking of the Eucharist directly (considering we celebrate today the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ) but of the very essence of what it is to be a Christian, Pope Benedict says: “To be Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”

My sisters and brothers of the Church, Christ’s Body now on Earth: The very essence of our Christian faith, and the Eucharist within it, as Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium says, as “the fount and apex of the whole Christian life,” is first and foremost about “the encounter with an event, a person.” Our Christian faith; our celebration of Eucharist is about our personal encounter with Jesus Christ perpetuated in our history and life and faith experiences.

I will grant that this Solemnity we celebrate of the Body and Blood of Christ is multi-dimensional; so much so that it defies being reduced to a collection of ideas, concepts, or titles. We call this celebration the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, Corpus Christi. We speak of the Eucharist as “the fount and apex of the whole Christian life.” We speak of it as the Real Presence; the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. We speak of the Eucharistic celebration as a sacrament; a sign that is what it is, something we perceive with our human senses, but that points to a reality beyond itself, the real, true, bodily presence of Jesus Christ. In this way, French philosopher Paul Ricœur would speak of Eucharist and other sacraments as having a “surplus of meaning”; a meaning-beyond-meaning or meaning beyond our physical senses.

We speak of Eucharist as “the holy sacrifice of the Mass.” And our readings today certainly focus heavily on the dimension of sacrifice. Mark’s Gospel speaks of Jesus’ re-focusing of the Jewish commemoration of the Passover, when God spared the people of Israel from death and allowed their escape from slavery in Egypt, as long as they marked their doorposts with lambs’ blood as God commanded them. In the Book of Exodus today, we hear how Israel’s first Passover became a ritual memorial: An altar dedicated with lambs’ blood, animals sacrificed as burnt offerings to God. These sacrifices take on meaning-beyond-meaning or meaning beyond our physical senses: They point to a covenant; a promise by God that Israel would always be God’s people, and a response by the people of Israel to be “obedient” and faithful to God.

The Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples re-focuses; re-configures the Passover sacrifice in memory of the Exodus. Instead of repeating animal sacrifices each year in memory of the Passover, Jesus becomes the once-and-forever sacrifice for us. Jesus becomes the focus of our Passover; our only way to “pass over” to eternal life. No other sacrifice—not of animals, not of ourselves in heroic acts of faith—is capable of making eternal life possible for us. And although this sacrifice, like that of the Passover during Israel’s Exodus from Egypt, is repeated ritually through our celebration of Eucharist—the Mass—it is one and the same sacrifice, that of Jesus through his Passion and death, that is projected through our history as Church. The Letter to the Hebrews emphasizes this once-and-forever nature of Jesus’ sacrifice of self. No longer is “the blood of goats and calves,” offered to God an infinite number of times, necessary; Jesus offers his own Body and Blood to us, for our salvation, once, forever.

This all becomes very complicated; mysterious, even: How the sacrifice of Jesus for us from the Last Supper through his death on the cross is both once-and-forever, and ritually celebrated by our Church as our Eucharist; how Jesus offers us his Body and Blood and, at the same time, how we, the Church, are rightly called the “Body of Christ.” I invite us to pause for a moment on this dimension of sacrifice in our Eucharist. Clearly, sacrifice is central to our Eucharist: We commemorate Jesus’ sacrifice for us, his Passion and death, and at the same time Jesus makes his sacrifice not simply a past event, but one with real meaning for our present time.

But without present “encounter with… a person,” sacrifice remains only a finished past event. If our Eucharist is anything less or other than the high point of a continuous encounter with Jesus Christ that spans our whole lives, then it is only sacrifice, a one-and-done past event, with no present meaning. So how is our Eucharist the high point, “fount and apex” of our lifelong encounter with God in the person of Jesus Christ? Our Eucharist is not only the (usually) small wafer of bread and maybe sip of wine we may receive in communion at Mass, which we believe have become by that point in the Mass the Body and Blood of Christ. Our Eucharist is not only the “essential” words, spoken by the priest during the Eucharistic Prayer and which Jesus spoke at the Last Supper (and we hear today in Mark’s Gospel), when somehow ordinary bread and wine becomes Christ’s Body and Blood.

The effects of our Eucharist extend beyond this celebration; beyond the church buildings in which we celebrate it; beyond (for now) our computer screens onto which our Eucharistic celebration is live-streamed. The Cardinal Archbishop of Toronto, Thomas Collins, when he was Archbishop of Edmonton, would make a strong case that we live our identity as a Eucharistic people not only when we are together at Mass, but, for the most part, during the rest of the week when we are not at Mass. It is no accident, Cardinal Collins would say, that the last line of the Mass is a command to us to “go”: “Go in peace”; “Go… glorify God by your lives”! Cardinal Collins would humorously paraphrase the Latin of this line, “Ite, Missa est,” as “Get out of here; now you have work to do”!

My sisters and brothers, fellow Eucharistic people in Christ, our work, announced by “Ite, missa est” is, at its heart, to be the means by which everybody we encounter in our lives in some way encounters Christ, real and present. But how are we to be the means by which the world encounters Christ, real and present, by our every action; our every word? Surely we are weak sinners, and cannot be expected to configure ourselves perfectly to Christ at all times; to be the means at every moment by which everybody we meet encounters Christ through us, right?

We might think of plenty of instances in our history; in our Church when the encounter with Christians has been one with human sin, even to the point where sin has become embedded in social structures and attitudes. The imperialism and racism against this country’s Aboriginal peoples that drove its residential school system, with Church and state complicity, is an especially horrific example of this. So it is true; we are weak sinners. This is all the more reason for us to turn to our Lord Jesus in the Eucharist, that first and foremost point of encounter between God and us. Our graced encounter with Jesus Christ in this celebration can then strengthen us for our encounters with one another: For encounters that express sorrow and resolve to repent for when we have wronged other people as individuals, as a society, as a Church; encounters that increase our awareness, without defensiveness, of ways in which we benefit from socially-embedded patterns of sin; encounters that bring healing and reconciliation.

Most of the time, we will be (and have been) the means of encounter between Christ and everybody around us in the simplest of ways. We frequently do not and will not realize that we are bearing Christ’s real presence to our world through each simple smile or act of kindness. We know well that sometimes to be the means by which the world encounters Christ will be more difficult: Listen attentively, especially to people who differ from us, even if we may determine their views to be wrong; or to people who challenge biases we may not be aware we have; or to people who are suffering in any way. Prayerfully think of somebody we need to forgive (even if that person has never asked our forgiveness), and then begin the process, again prayerfully, of forgiving that person. Live purposefully with joy and thanksgiving toward God and anybody who has been good to us. After all, “Eucharist” (from sas eucharistō, “thank you” in Greek) is originally another word for “thanksgiving.”

St. Augustine of Hippo famously said of us as Eucharistic people, “You are what you receive.” So may we be, to the world, what we receive and celebrate: The Real Presence of Christ we now bear to our world for eternal life; the point of personal encounter between Christ and everybody we meet. Now, may I say, we have work to do…

Homily for Monday, 2 July 2018– Ferial

Monday of the 13th Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Amos 2:6-10, 13-16; Psalm 50:15bc-17, 18-19, 20-21, 22-23; Matthew 8, 18-22

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

How many of us are at least somewhat unsettled by the harshness of the prophet Amos in today’s first reading and of our Psalm? I do not particularly like to be reminded of my failings, even sometimes when I should be, much less criticized so intensely and at such length as Amos or the Psalmist criticize the people of Israel in the readings we hear today.

It does not seem to matter, at least to my ears, that Amos and our Psalm berate the people of Israel with a poetic style of writing. Can poetry not be just as harsh, and indeed more so, than other literary styles, since poetry is often designed to intensify a message in the way other ways of conveying a message cannot do, to make a point?

And what is the point Amos and our Psalm made to the people of Israel of their time, and to us today, with the intensity that only poetry can achieve? Amos and the Psalmist attack not only the sins of a few individuals, but the deep-seated, longstanding and, for many people of their time and society, subconscious evil of a whole nation; a whole society. For Amos and the other Old Testament prophets and often in the Psalms, the greatest social sin was not to care for the most vulnerable people of a society or a nation; the people summed up by the frequent Biblical motif of “the orphan, the widow, and the foreigner.”

Amos, like other Old Testament prophets, speaking in God’s voice, reminds his people that they were once as vulnerable and in need as the people they are ignoring or oppressing: “It was I who brought you up from the land of Egypt… to occupy the land of the Amorites.” And if the people of Israel did not treat the most vulnerable among themselves with greater justice, they would meet the same end as the Amorites whose land God had given them: Exile and destruction.

Social injustice, to be clear, though, is not a sin for its own sake. No, social injustice, especially toward the most in need and vulnerable, is so great a sin because it is a way of forgetting God. Social injustice puts us at risk of idolatry; of making gods of our wealth, security, might, and comfort in place of the one true God. I invite us to keep this in mind as we hear Amos and our Psalm today: “Remember this, you who never think of God.”

We are gathered here and now to worship God, so I do not think that our Psalm response is directed at us per se. We “think of God”; the evidence is here, among and around us. And yet I think today’s readings, in all their startling harshness, are a call to examine our individual but also social conscience: Who are the most vulnerable and in need in our society today? In what ways have I (or we) forgotten these “least” of our brothers and sisters, “the orphan, widow, and foreigner” of our time, if not oppressed them directly or indirectly through unjust social or political policies and support for those policies or laws? How well does our worship reflect our witness to God, how we “think of God,” by our acts of justice and mercy beyond the walls of this church?

Homily for Thursday, 10 August 2017‒ Feast of St. Lawrence

Thursday of the 18th Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: 2 Corinthians 9:6-10; Psalm 112:1-2, 5-6, 7-8, 9; John 12:24-26

Today we celebrate the feast of St. Lawrence, a deacon and martyr of the Roman Empire’s persecution of Christians under the emperor Valerian. Yet when we celebrate feasts of martyrs in our Church, people who have literally given their lives for Christ and have been killed out of hatred for our faith, I often ask how we might relate to these martyrs. Are our chances of being killed for our faith not slim to nil?

Of course, more Christians have been killed for our faith in the past century than in all the previous centuries of Christianity combined. But here in Canada, while we may encounter misunderstanding, incredulity, and even ridicule if we are truly living our faith, our lives are more or less safe. And so how might we relate to martyrs like St. Lawrence? What are common aspects of our lives with those of martyrs like St. Lawrence?

The readings we hear today might give us clues to answering these questions. Our Gospel reading from John is a classic call to martyrdom; Jesus’ glorification of anybody who would give up their lives for his sake, as he himself was about to when he spoke those words: “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains… a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

St. Lawrence died indeed, and a gruesome death at that. Let me suggest, though, that his death alone was not what made him a martyr. Before his death, St. Lawrence had practiced for many years a kind of living martyrdom. The most important ministry of deacons of the time in Rome was to ensure that the necessities of life of the poor were met. This St. Lawrence did with distinction. Legend has it that, when St. Lawrence was arrested and brought before the Roman prefect, he was ordered to bring with him the treasures of the Church to be confiscated. Lawrence presented to the prefect a large group of poor people of Rome, saying: “Here are the treasures of the Church”!

We say in our Psalm response today, “Happy the merciful who give to those in need.” And in our first reading, from 2 Corinthians, we hear that “God loves a cheerful giver.” St. Lawrence was certainly “the merciful” and “cheerful giver” to anybody in need. He gave his life to this ministry, long before he was killed for his and our faith. It is foremost in these works of mercy and in his regard for the poor as “the treasures of the Church” that St. Lawrence is an example to us. St. Lawrence’s free acceptance of a martyr’s death only flowed from the martyr’s example of the rest of his life.

God calls us, as he called St. Lawrence, “happy” insofar as we “give to those in need. God calls us still to give cheerfully; to ensure that the least well off among us are not in need of necessities of life and human dignity. God calls us to value the least among us as “treasures”; to challenge social structures that marginalize and dehumanize many while enriching a few. This is living martyrdom; a true counter-culture we are called to live as St. Lawrence did, dying to ourselves in the process, as humble grains of wheat fall “into the earth” to die and, only so, to “bear much fruit.”

Homily for Monday, 8 June 2015– Ferial

Monday of the 10th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: 2 Corinthians 1:1-7;  Psalm 34:2-3, 4-5, 6-7, 8-9; Matthew 5:1-12

Have you ever had the need to correct another person, or to speak out or write against a cultural tendency that is wrong or even sinful? If you have ever had to correct; criticize; confront another or a society’s ills, how often do we try to praise the person or society for right actions and tendencies before we offer our criticism?

I imagine St. Paul doing this at the beginning of his Second Letter to the Corinthians, which we hear today as our first reading. 2 Corinthians is often called St. Paul’s “angry letter” or is thought to be the “tearful letter” of which St. Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians. No early Christian community gave St. Paul as much trouble; tried his patience as much as the church of Corinth, in what is now Greece.

What made Corinth so troublesome to St. Paul? Corinth was ideally situated on the Mediterranean; a city with two ports. Because of this Corinth became very wealthy in a short time, at about the same time St. Paul brought the Christian faith there. Many Corinthians thought their city; their culture to be superior, even invincible. Who was this Jesus whom St. Paul preached to challenge their ways of living? Many in Corinth in Paul’s time were smug and involved in all kinds of immorality because their wealth could buy it or buy their way out of trouble.

But today we do not hear St. Paul criticize these Corinthians. Instead, he begins his Second Letter to the Corinthians with a lengthy encouragement of those trying to keep the faith in Jesus Christ that Paul has taught them. St. Paul especially encourages “those who are in any affliction.” He identifies; empathizes with their affliction and also having been encouraged in his moments of affliction; suffering.

What were the sources of “affliction” of the Corinthians whom St. Paul encourages in these first words of his letter to them? Were they external pressures: The threat of persecution under the Roman Empire or anybody opposed to the Christian faith, perhaps? The causes of suffering for faithful Corinthian Christians could also have been internal pressures to conform to the prevailing culture. They could have been pressures toward hoarding of wealth; toward excessive pleasures; toward disregard for the dignity of the human body more than toward faithfulness to Christ and his Gospel.

What are sources of “affliction” in our world; our country; our families today? Who is most in need of our “encouragement”? Could these people often be the same people in need of our firm challenge, even occasional criticism?

Drawing upon St. Paul, could our words of correction; criticism; our “angry” or “tearful letters” and words not more often be preceded by encouragement? To our children and grandchildren who no longer attend Mass: What is drawing them away from regular worship? Do they need criticism, or do they first need somebody from among us to hear them; to encourage them in ways they are living rightly? What are underlying afflictions of those who abuse their bodies with alcohol; drugs; sex? What about the poor among us?

St. Paul’s words to the Corinthians today invite us to be mindful of people who need our encouragement amid their afflictions that we may not even see.