Homily for Sunday, 13 February 2022– Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 17:5-8; Psalm 1:1-2, 3, 4, 6; 1 Corinthians 15:12, 16-20; Luke 6:17, 20-26

The message of our Gospel today is, I think (or maybe I hope) a familiar one to us: The beatitudes. Jesus pronounces certain groups of people “blessed”: The poor; those who “are hungry now”; those “who weep now”; those who are hated, excluded, reviled, defamed “on account of the Son of Man”; because of their belief in Jesus and imitation of how he lived.

But our Gospel message today might be just different enough from the beatitudes we are familiar with, so as to be, to say the least, a sharp challenge for us to hear and put into practice. We hear today Luke’s version of the beatitudes: Four blessings, toward the poor; the hungry; those who weep; those who are hated and excluded “on account of the Son of Man,” and four corresponding woes, toward those who are rich; those who are full; whose hunger has been satisfied; toward those who laugh; and toward those of whom “all speak well.”

The Gospels of Matthew and Luke each include versions of the beatitudes. Matthew’s beatitudes are often numbered as eight, without any corresponding woes, unlike Luke. Bible experts say that Matthew’s beatitudes may have been intended primarily to encourage an audience of Jews—Jesus’ own people—who had come to believe in Jesus as God; as the Messiah. If we are trying to encourage people, reminding them of the woes they will experience if they behave badly does not often work. God looks with special blessing upon the poor; those who mourn; those who are hated for the sake of their belief in Jesus as the Messiah and living as he has lived. And, Matthew says, if we are not poor, or mourning, or hated, all is not lost. The key is to attune ourselves to the experience and concerns of the less-advantaged, the poor, the mourning, those who are mistreated for their belief in and emulation of our Lord: To be as they are “in spirit” if we cannot be so in our actual experience. This is called solidarity with the poor, those who mourn, the mistreated and rejected.

I think we are much more familiar with Matthew’s version of the beatitudes than Luke’s version we hear today. Matthew’s beatitudes are far more frequently commented than Luke’s. We hear many more church hymns, at least in my experience, based on Matthew’s than Luke’s beatitudes. Besides, I cannot imagine the St. Louis Jesuits singing, “Cursed are your rich, for the kingdom shall not be theirs”… It simply does not have the same ring to it as, “Blessed be your poor”… Maybe we could compose a church hymn with Luke’s woes, in some dreadful minor key… On second thought, this is probably not a good idea. I would not want us all to get up and walk out of Mass!

Whatever the reason(s), Luke’s beatitudes and accompanying woes are much more direct and immediately challenging than Matthew’s. Matthew has Jesus proclaim the beatitudes at the beginning of his Sermon on the Mount. Again, I think we are maybe more familiar with this setting of the beatitudes, thanks to religious art and music. Matthew presents Jesus as the great teacher; the one to fulfill and uphold the authority of the Law of Moses and the prophets, but who exceeds even Moses and the prophets in authority. In Matthew, Jesus goes up a mountain with his disciples, but preaches his Sermon on the Mount toward the crowds below. We might imagine a kind of natural amphitheatre created by the hilly landscape of Galilee, where Jesus gave his Sermon on the Mount. I can attest to this: As a teacher, I want people to be able to hear me well. The hills surrounding where the crowds gathered to hear Jesus would have helped Jesus’ voice to carry more powerfully.

But Luke sets Jesus’ Sermon differently than Matthew. In Luke, it is not an extended discourse but a brief collection of sayings. Luke begins with the crowds, but has Jesus direct his preaching toward a smaller group of his disciples, already more committed to him and his message than the crowds would have been. Luke features not the Sermon on the Mount but the Sermon on the Plain: Jesus stands on his disciples’ level; on our level.

There is something to be said here for what it means to be a disciple of Jesus, for the disciples in Jesus’ time, in our Gospel, and for us. In Jesus’ time and place, a person who was wealthy enough could (usually for a handsome fee) study under a mentor or master teacher. The student, or disciple, of the teacher was expected to learn enough from the teacher’s instruction to be able to put it into practice. But the disciple was not usually expected to become the teacher; the teacher was one-of-a kind, irreplaceable.

Yet discipleship of Jesus worked a bit differently than discipleship of just any expert teacher in most or all of the ancient world. A person became (and becomes) a disciple of Jesus, not by that person’s choice of a master teacher or by paying a fee, but by Jesus’ choice. Jesus would take the initiative to call people to be his disciples. And Jesus’ disciples—we as Jesus’ disciples—are expected in some way to imitate the teacher, Jesus, so well as to be able to be his presence to our world forever, until he returns in glory.

So how are we to imitate the teacher, Jesus, so well that we almost become the teacher? Clearly, Jesus mission to his disciples, to us, to imitate his example and to become like him is urgent as Luke puts it in his Gospel. There are not only blessings in store for Jesus’ disciples if we should be successful in being like him, but there are woes or curses toward those who should fail. And the mission Jesus gives us to imitate him—to be the teacher’s presence in our world; a presence of justice, kindness, compassion—and the consequences of living this mission well or not are immediate: “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh… Woe to you who are filled now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.”

Now, please let me be clear that Jesus does not say that to be wealthy is a sin, or that, if we are not hungry or miserable then, woe to us, we must be doing something wrong. But Jesus is saying, I think, that if we have wealth that we could use to alleviate the suffering of others who struggle to make ends meet; if we have the resources to help ensure that nobody has need of basic necessities of life—food, water, shelter; if we have the gift of joy or laughter that could brighten the experience of somebody who is sad or despairing, then use these gifts for the benefit of the less well-off… now! The call is urgent; this is how we imitate Jesus Christ, the teacher. This is how we become like him, now, in our present world; our present experience; our present relationships.

But when our concern for worldly priorities becomes an obstacle to the mission of justice, kindness, and compassion to which Jesus calls us, then the woes apply. When our concern for ourselves and our own individual well-being inhibits us from striving for the common good, Jesus challenges us: “Woe to you who are rich… Woe to you who are full now… Woe to you who are laughing now… Woe to you when all speak well of you.”

Jesus’ message is without doubt challenging, especially in our culture that prioritizes (as it should, but perhaps even frequently does to excess, over the common good and social justice) values like wealth, individual comfort and freedom, everybody speaking well of us.

Luke’s beatitudes hearken to a longstanding biblical motif of blessings and curses (or blessings and woes). We hear this not only in Luke’s Gospel today but from the prophet Jeremiah, although Jeremiah lists the curses or woes first, and then the blessings. But Jeremiah’s core message is similar to Luke’s today: On the one hand, “cursed are those who trust in mere mortals”; in passing things like wealth, comfort, and individual freedom at the expense of common, social well-being, and ultimately at the expense of trusting God above all else. On the other hand, “blessed is the one who trusts in the LORD.”

Our Psalm today, the first of the biblical Psalms, carries on this message of Jeremiah and Luke: “Blessed is the [one] who does not follow the advice of the wicked… but whose delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law meditates day and night.”

My hope, sisters and brothers, is that this message of the word of God has not lost its edge; its ability to be somewhat discomforting and controversial in our time, as it was in the times of Jeremiah, of the Psalmist, of Luke the Gospel writer, of Jesus. How do we “delight” in the law of the LORD? How do we put it into practice, for the common good and salvation of everybody, now? How do we become like the teacher; the Christ?

I return to a word I used just a few minutes ago: Solidarity. When we enter into solidarity; into something of a relationship of care and of justice for the least of our sisters and brothers, so that all are blessed by the bounty of the Lord together, we will have imitated the teacher. We imitate a teacher, Jesus, who died and rose again to save us. His death was utter failure; utter woe to the world’s eyes, yet Jesus overcame this, so that we may follow Christ into the resurrection from the dead, as St. Paul says today, “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.”

Jesus gave us his Sermon on the Plain. He stood on our level, so that we could be raised one day to his in heaven. But he stood on the level ground with us, his disciples, so that we could begin to imitate him now; to be blessed now in our care, our compassion, our kindness especially for the least among us; so that we could be like the teacher who stands with us on the level ground.

Homily for Sunday, 12 September 2021– Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Readings of the day: Isaiah 50:5-9a; Psalm 116:1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 8-9; James 2:14-18; Mark 8:27-35

One of the great advantages of living in a religious community of priests, as I do with my brother Basilians Frs. Jim, Dave, and Glenn here in Edmonton, is the depth and diversity of conversation we get into among us. I pray this is also true in our families and households. But recently, just as classes were starting here at St. Joseph’s College and the University of Alberta, Fr. Jim (a philosopher) and I (a theologian) were having our usual deep conversation over breakfast. Fr. Jim asked me an interesting and important question: As a Christian, an academic theologian and instructor at our College, what sets Christianity apart? Why am I a Christian and not of any other noble faith in our world, or of no faith? And what gives me the passion to teach, preach, and study our faith as I do?

I found that, even for somebody who has had as much time to think about these questions as I have, to answer Fr. Jim’s question was difficult. After a long pause, and a short walk over to the coffee pot to fill my mug with the coffee that, for me, is essential to be able to answer such questions early in the day, I blurted out the best answer my insufficiently-caffeinated brain could come up with: The Incarnation. That God, in Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity who takes on our human nature, shares fully in all our experiences that make us human, including suffering and death, is to me what distinguishes Christianity from any other faith. The Incarnation, first and foremost, gives me the passion to preach, teach, and study our Christian, Catholic faith as I do.

As I reflect on my answer to Fr. Jim that morning, I do not want to put myself on the level of St. Peter in his answer to Jesus’ question in today’s Gospel: “Who do you say that I am”? But I think there are similarities between my answer and Peter’s answer to Jesus in our Gospel. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all include substantially this same event of Peter’s identification of Jesus as the Son of God, “the Christ.” The Gospels differ in some details, though. Only Matthew has Jesus emphasize to Peter how right his answer is, but that he could not possibly have answered so correctly had this not been revealed to him by God “the Father in heaven.” In Luke and Mark, Peter seems to identify Jesus much more fortuitously—“flying by the seat of his pants,” or maybe his tunic, so to speak. Of course, God’s grace in revealing to Peter Jesus’ identity as the Christ is implied by its context in Luke and Mark, if it is not as explicit as in Matthew.

But however Peter is able to answer Jesus’ answer about his identity correctly, amid all kinds of competing options—“John the Baptist… Elijah, and still others, one of the prophets”—with God’s grace (undeniably), before or after his morning coffee, Peter, thanks be to God, gets his answer right. For Peter as for me, the Incarnation is central to who Jesus is. In Jesus, the Son of God, already fully possessing the same eternal divine nature as the Father and the Spirit, has become fully human, fully one of us, and shares in every feature that makes us human, except sin. He takes on human flesh and blood, is born of a human mother, grows up a human child cared for by human parents, breathes, eats, sleeps, prays, serves, heals, teaches… dies a horrific, torturous death, rises from the dead, and ascends to heaven…

Wait, did we just go off script? Even if Jesus is human, he is also God. God cannot suffer and die, right? A significant part of me wants to leap to Peter’s defense when Jesus scolds him so harshly: “Get behind me, Satan! For you are thinking not as God does, but as humans do.”

Truly, though, I think part of me is so eager to defend poor Peter because I am so much like him. We are all so much like him. We would not be here, and we would not profess in our Creed all that we do about God who, in the Second Person of the Trinity, as Jesus, the Christ, became fully human if the Incarnation were not, as it was for Peter; as it is for me and for all of us, so essential to our faith. But, alas, like Peter, I tend; we all tend to think “not as God does, but as humans do.” This is not a criticism against us. If it were, I should be foremost in being criticized, because I have that much more responsibility, as a priest who studies and teaches theology, to understand and teach our faith accurately. We cannot help thinking “not as God does, but as humans do.” Our only experience is that of being human. We are not and cannot be God. We need God’s grace to reveal God’s self to us, Father, Son, and Spirit, so that we can think as God does and seek God in all things, all our thoughts, all our experiences, in our natural world and in heaven.

We are all so much like Peter. We are all here because we have all or will all, at some point, answer correctly; profess our faith correctly, as Peter did: “You are the Christ”…“I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.”

Yet we are all so much like Peter. We all constantly need God’s grace to accept and enact the most difficult thing we say we believe: That Jesus, the Christ, suffered, died (or is even able to suffer and die), rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven. We, like Peter, need God’s grace to put Satan behind us; Satan who would never allow us to make the profession of faith we do in a God who can and does take our human nature, including our suffering and death, only to transform it into resurrection and ascension to eternal life.

If the Incarnation is truly, as we profess that it is, essential to our Christian faith, then we must be very much like Peter. We must be very much like the “suffering servant” whose hymn we hear today through the prophet Isaiah. Today’s reading from Isaiah is the third of four “servant hymns” in Isaiah. It is the lament of somebody who is suffering horribly for relief from that suffering, but it is also a hymn of hope; of trust in God. This hymn anticipates God’s final vindication of the suffering servant, but also places that vindication in the present tense: “The LORD God helps me… I know that I shall not be put to shame; he who vindicates me is near.”

In our Church’s tradition, Isaiah’s servant hymns have long been connected to the passion and death of Jesus Christ. We hear the four servant hymns in order from the Book of Isaiah during Holy Week, just before Easter, each year. But who are Isaiah’s servants, really? (Isaiah was written centuries before Jesus’ time, so I think it is fair to say that Isaiah could not have been referring directly to a future coming of Jesus. Prophets do not foretell the future; they point out God’s action on our behalf in the present). Are the servants of Isaiah the prophet himself, suffering the reproach of Israel’s people, who were not open to his prophecy? Are they other prophets who spoke for God in Israel’s history? Do they stand for the entire people of Israel? Are they meant to remind us of ourselves as a people of God?

I ask this last question especially because, if we ourselves have not suffered, I think most if not all of us know somebody or know of somebody who has. How many of us have known somebody who has suffered greatly, yet has maintained faith and trust in God, that their suffering or even death will not have the final word? And, if we are not the person suffering in this way, yet continuing to believe and hope, how often do we tend to be drawn to those people; to the strength of God working through them?

This, I think, is at the heart of St. James’ bold claim that “faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” If our faith is true; if the Incarnation is the centre of our faith as we say it is, then our faith will necessarily lend itself to solidarity with others, especially those who suffer in any way. This is so because our solidarity with those who suffer is in imitation of Jesus Christ who, in an unprecedented way in history—in a way no other world religion claims its founder did—entered into full solidarity with us by becoming human like us. In this way, Jesus is Isaiah’s servant, projected into our human history, but so are we.

In this way the Incarnation becomes enacted in our own lives. Jesus continues to take flesh and blood, die, rise, and ascend to heaven in us, insofar as we enter into solidarity with the suffering servants of our time; as we pray and act preferentially for their well-being. This allows us then to sing together the servant’s hymn of lament, but also of hope and trust in God, that eternal life and not suffering or death will have the final word.

Homily for Friday, 2 April 2021– Friday of the Passion of the Lord (Good Friday)

Readings of the day: Isaiah 52:15-53:12; Psalm 31:6, 12-13, 15-16, 17, 25; Hebrews 4:14-16, 5:7-9; John 18:1-19:42

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

Let me, if we will, propose two key terms, freedom and solidarity, through which we might remember the events we do today, of the Passion and death of our Lord Jesus.

In his recent reflection for Good Friday in America Magazine, published by the Jesuits in the U.S., Fr. Terrance Klein, a priest of Dodge City, Kansas, asks what exactly God might have willed in allowing Jesus to go to his death, on a cross no less. Did, or could God, in fact, will his Son Jesus’ death in this horrific and humiliating way? This question may be both a common puzzle for us as Christian faithful and a major obstacle, Fr. Klein says, to non-believers: Who would want to believe in a God who would will, or at least allow, his Son to undergo a death like this?

Yet John’s Gospel today invites us to behold not so much God as a Father who would will or permit his Son to be given up to death, but the Son, Jesus, as freely in command of his self-sacrifice on the cross to its final moment, when “it is finished.” Our faith proclaims this freedom of Jesus; the freedom, Jesus says of himself at one point in John’s Gospel, to lay down his life and “to take it up again.”

And, if we go all the way back to the first moments of creation, we see that, of all the creatures God created, God willed from the very beginning to give us the same freedom God has. This is quite remarkable! This was and is also quite risky on God’s part: God gave us the freedom that nobody else but God has, to accept and to love whom God has made us to be or to reject and to hate this; to accept and love God; to accept and love one another as God loves us, or to reject and refuse to love God and one another.

When we have chosen to misuse the freedom God gave us to accept and love or to reject and refuse to love—this to some extent willing rejection and refusal to love, we might call sin—God has not rejected us in turn, although God was free to do so. No, God has responded to our sin by continually calling to us and being with us in history, through the Law and the prophets and, finally, by becoming like us in all but sin in the person of Jesus Christ. And we remember today how Jesus, Son of God, completed his free act of solidarity with us sinners: By redeeming us from all our sin, our rejection, our violence and hatred; by submitting to all this at the hands of sinners, on a cross, and transforming this into our ultimate good; the only possible means of our salvation.

“It is finished” now, this free act of God of solidarity with us, the only way we can be freed from sin and saved. We are witnesses, this and every Good Friday, to God’s re-creation of us, as remarkable as God’s first act of creating us with God’s own freedom. We are witnesses to this renewed freedom God has given us to love, to accept, to enter into solidarity with one another, especially anybody in any way disadvantaged, rejected, or abandoned in our world, as God freely entered into solidarity with us; as God freely took on our human experiences of joy and sorrow; good and evil; life, death, and resurrection, we pray, to eternal life.

Homily for Sunday, 21 March 2021– Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year B

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51:3-4, 12-13, 14-15; Hebrews 5:7-9; John 12:20-33

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

What would we think if I said, “The days are surely coming”; that some event or great news we have been looking forward to, maybe for a long time, was imminent? What if God were to say this to us, or somebody we think of as a prophet—like Jeremiah was to ancient Israel, but in our own time—or a person otherwise in a position of authority were to announce to us, “The days are surely coming”?

“The days are surely coming, says the LORD” through his prophet Jeremiah and to us anew today! I wonder, though, how the people who heard Jeremiah in their time announce this to them felt at first. Would they have been especially excited or joyful? Would they have wondered what this “new covenant” God was announcing through Jeremiah meant? Would they have felt guilty for their sins as a people since, as we hear from Jeremiah, the very reason God was proclaiming a “new covenant” with Israel was that Israel had broken the first covenant with God? Israel, God’s people, had been unfaithful to God, in a way similar to when there is infidelity between spouses in a marriage. But would the people of Israel, when they heard Jeremiah’s promise of “a new covenant” between them and God, been all the more resolved not to remain paralyzed by their guilt, but to repent?

Maybe many of them would have thought Jeremiah to be too dramatic and simply ignored him or become irritated by him (after all, Jeremiah is known among the Old Testament prophets to have been especially dramatic, fiery, even angry in his speech). Many may have been moved by Jeremiah’s tireless passion to listen to his announcement of this “new covenant” between them and God. More than likely, ancient Israel’s initial responses to Jeremiah’s announcement of “the days… surely coming” were a bit of “all of the above.”

“The days are surely coming”! How do we continue to hear and discern this message in our time? For about a year now, since the first COVID-19 control measures started, I have been praying Evening Prayer over Zoom every day with a group of relatives and friends from different places where I have ministered as a priest. Within the last few weeks, people in our prayer group have announced and been receiving doses of the vaccines against COVID-19. And, this past week, [one of our Basilian confrères in our house], whom many of us may know from his time at St. Joseph’s College, was so excited that he was finally able to book an appointment to receive a vaccine.

I was and am so happy for him! I could not help think of God’s first words to the people of Israel through Jeremiah in today’s reading: “The days are surely coming”! The days are surely coming when this pandemic will be in the past; a memory. The days are surely coming when we will be able to gather safely in our chapels at St. Joseph’s College for Mass. The days are surely coming when COVID-related restrictions on in-person attendance at Masses will be relaxed and then be no more; when we will be able to celebrate Eucharist and other sacraments freely, without anxiety about becoming sick, and as the health and nourishment of our souls, minds, and bodies requires.

These “days are surely coming”; this gives me great hope, and I cannot wait to welcome all of us, St. Joseph’s College’s worshipping community; faculty; students; staff colleagues, back to in-person worship; classes; prayer and work at our College as soon as we are able. “The days are surely coming” and, may I say, the days are already upon us (and not only because we have weathered a pandemic) when we have acquired an acute sense of Christ-like service to and prayer for anybody in need; anybody who is especially poor or disadvantaged, or simply anybody who longs (as we do) to gather together in one worship space to pray; hear God’s Word; sing; take, bless, break, and eat the bread that becomes Christ’s body, given for us and for our salvation, together. I am deeply grateful and joyful, sisters and brothers, whenever I look upon our community of faith here at St. Joseph’s College, whether (for now) in little insets in a Zoom window or (in not too long, we pray) in our College chapels, halls, offices, and classrooms.

“The days are surely coming” or, as Jesus says in John’s Gospel today, “The hour has come.” Now, when Jesus says in our Gospel, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified,” is this not a rather ominous reference to “the death he was to die”? Once again (Fr. Jim spoke a bit about this last Sunday), John’s Gospel today repeats Jesus’ connection between his being raised on the cross and the bronze serpent in Moses’ time being raised on a pole to heal the people of poisonous snakebites.

The crowd of Greeks who approach the Apostle Philip at the beginning of our Gospel today simply “wish to see Jesus.” I imagine this crowd is a lot like us: We, too, simply and nobly, “wish to see Jesus.” My prayer for us, sisters and brothers, is that our simple and noble “wish to see Jesus,” to worship and receive Jesus in the Eucharist, be granted very soon; that this “hour has come”; that at least those “days are surely coming” for us. Yet the crowds’ “wish to see Jesus” in John’s Gospel is met not with immediate consolation but with Jesus’ unsettling, even morbid at first hearing, reference to his approaching death on a cross.

And Jesus says that, for us to be in any way like him—like whom we are called to be through our baptism—means that we, too, will have a share in his passion and death. We, too, will be like the “grain of wheat [that] falls into the earth and dies.” If not, we will “remain just a single grain” but, to the extent we share in Jesus’ passion and death, we, like the grain of wheat that dies, will spring from the earth and “bear much fruit.”

My sisters and brothers in Christ, I feel impelled to think, with Christian hope, that we have been through a “grain of wheat” experience for a long while now. And, as the Lord knows, certainly better than me, many if not all of us have been through maybe several “grain of wheat” experiences in our lives: Maybe we have been ill, or a loved one or friend has experienced illness. Maybe we have loved ones who have died. Maybe we have served among the poor or those who lack basic necessities, or been in those situations ourselves. May any of us who have ever suffered know the Lord’s solidarity with you in your suffering. Today, we hear from the Letter to the Hebrews, the same reading we will hear again on Good Friday, of Jesus who “offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death.”

These same “prayers and supplications… loud cries and tears” Jesus now offers for all who suffer in any way; for all who, simply and nobly, “wish to see Jesus”; for all who long to be able to gather and worship in one space again soon, to take, bless, break, and eat the bread that becomes for us the Body of Christ, together in person again; for all of us who have experienced and continue to experience in mind, body, or spirit, what Jesus meant when he referred to the “grain of wheat” that must fall “into the earth” and die, in order to bear “much fruit” and “keep it for eternal life.”

With Jesus’ solidarity with us in times of suffering; privation; isolation, we are and will be the grains of wheat that spring from the earth and give it and one another life and joy. Already we sense the signs that those “days are surely coming.” In and through Christ’s passion and death, which we know by faith will end in the joy of resurrection, for us as once for Jesus, our “hour has come,” for our good and God’s glory forever.

Homily for Friday, 25 December 2020– Nativity of the Lord

Readings of the day (for Christmas Mass at Night): Isaiah 9:1-6; Psalm 96:1-2, 2-3, 11-12, 13; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14

This homily was given at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish, Sherwood Park, AB, Canada.

Merry Christmas, sisters and brothers! How many of us can remember an event or several events, dates and places of local, even personal significance to us, but also of more worldwide significance? These are the events when we might say, “We know where we were when”…

Some of us, if we go back some time ago, may remember where we were when various wars began or ended: For example, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, or more recent conflicts in the former Yugoslavia or Iraq or Afghanistan. Some of us, or people we know and love, may have fought in or lost loved ones in these wars.

Within the Church, some of us might remember where we were when a so-called “caretaker pope,” St. John XXIII, shocked both the Church and the world by calling the Second Vatican Council, not because the Church or the world were in a particular crisis, but to open the Church and the world to discern the voice of the Holy Spirit in light of world events, “the signs of the times.” Vatican II, with a number of bishops in attendance never before seen at a Council in our Church’s history, as well as many Catholic expert theologians and non-Catholic observers, discussed topics ranging from the nature and mission of the Church itself, to its liturgy and sacraments, to the meaning of religious freedom and other human rights, to themes of peace and justice, to the role of social communications.

Many of us may remember where we were at the end of the Cold War, as the Berlin Wall was dismantled and the Soviet Union collapsed. From the first landing on the moon to the long-awaited approval and distribution of vaccines against COVID-19 (and many more events in between): We know where we were when these local events with worldwide, even universal significance, happened.

It may seem that 2020 has not given us much to be cheerful about. The news has been dominated by COVID-19, a disease with virulence not experienced since the flu pandemic after World War I. My experience has been that even conversations with friends, family, and my brother Basilian priests are often dominated by the latest COVID news: How many new cases today? How many deaths? Is the government about to put in place new restrictions? Terms like “physical distancing” have become part of our vocabulary. Mental and spiritual health concerns amid the distancing and aloneness have compounded with the physical health crisis of the pandemic itself. Our churches and businesses, if not shuttered completely, are allowed a small fraction of their capacity of people.

With that, I want to make a point of acknowledging with gratitude everybody who is joining us from afar, via livestream, to worship, and especially to celebrate this Christmas, the Nativity of our Lord. I thank you. I thank everybody who is here in person. I thank volunteers, cleaners, parish staff, priests and other liturgical ministers, people who serve the disadvantaged and vulnerable—everybody who has made it possible for us to celebrate here at all. Again, a Merry Christmas to everybody!

Back in March, the evening before COVID-19 forced many countries, including France where I was living then, into lockdown, I remember where I was: Hearing confessions in a small parish in Paris. That evening, the church was full of people trying anxiously to receive the sacrament of reconciliation before Easter. The next day, and for two months after that, the churches were closed, and all of France went into lockdown.

In the midst of this pandemic, on May 25, George Floyd, a Black man, was killed on a street in Minneapolis. This and other similar incidents ignited protests and a nationwide, even worldwide reckoning with socially systemic racism and abuses of power. I remember where I was, in the days after George Floyd’s death, on the phone with an African American friend from my first years as a priest in Rochester, New York; my friend who was distraught at the violence, the racism, the slurs to which she personally had been subjected; my friend who gave me that graced opportunity simply to listen, to pray with and for her as she spoke.

The COVID-19 pandemic, the reckoning with and protests against systemic racism and brutality in law enforcement: These are recent events with local, but also very universal dimensions. We know where we have been, but these events have affected the whole world. This relationship between the local and the universal brings to my mind a prayer our Basilian communities in Colombia often pray (and prayed while I served in several stints in those communities), based on part of Chapter 12 of St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “Let us rejoice with those who rejoice; let us weep with those who are weeping”… How, then, do we accomplish what we pray for in that prayer?

How do we rejoice with those who rejoice, especially in this celebration of the Nativity of our Lord Jesus? How do we weep with those who weep; with those who are ill in mind, body, or spirit; with those who have been subject to racism, other forms of unjust discrimination or abuses of power; with those who have lost loved ones, or lost their livelihoods; who have lost the ability to worship in person and receive communion during this pandemic?

Perhaps our rejoicing with those who rejoice, and weeping with those who weep—in a word, solidarity—depends on our remembrance of where we are in the midst of world events and events that affect us personally. And, better yet, our solidarity with one another depends on our remembrance of who we are: A People of God, the Church, called together to celebrate this night and forevermore the birth of a child, Jesus Christ, Emmanuel (God-with-us; God in solidarity with us!) into a manger in Bethlehem; called together to celebrate this local event that has universal significance; that is essential to our salvation, not as disconnected individuals but together.

From the moment of Jesus’ birth, Luke’s Gospel says to us tonight, everybody who experienced this event was acutely aware of both its local and universal significance. Mary and Joseph, the shepherds and the angel who first spoke to the shepherds the “good news of great joy” of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem: Everybody knew where they were in those moments, but that this event held significance far beyond them.

Luke, the Gospel writer, the historian par excellence among the four Biblical Gospel writers down to the finest details, emphasizes the very local dimensions of Jesus’ birth. Caesar Augustus ruled the vast and powerful Roman Empire, which included Israel, land of Jesus’ birth, as the Roman province of Palestine. Quirinius, who is only mentioned this once in the entire New Testament, governed Syria, a rather insignificant part of the Roman Empire at the time. Mary and Joseph, a humble, we can imagine fairly ordinary Jewish couple, travel from “Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the City of David called Bethlehem,” Joseph’s hometown, to register in the Roman census. Mary, in a detail Luke gives us that is at least bizarre if not scandalous for the time, is engaged to Joseph but finds herself “with child.” She gives birth “to her firstborn son and [wraps] him in swaddling clothes, and [lays] him in a manger, because there [is] no place for them in the inn.”

Angels appear very specifically to “shepherds living in the fields.” These shepherds, and the place where the angels announce our Saviour’s birth to them, are what Pope Francis might call at “the peripheries”: Poor, dirty, smelling like their sheep, and probably feared or at least ignored by most people who lived in the cities and villages.

This, sisters and brothers, is how God chose to enter into solidarity as one like us, human, in all things but sin: To rejoice with us as we rejoice; to weep with us when we weep; to open to us the gates of salvation; to call us to remember where and who we are. The Nativity of our Lord was a very local event: Augustus ruled from Rome; Quirinius governed Roman Syria; a typical first-century Jewish couple, Mary and Joseph (typical except for Mary’s pregnancy) brought a baby into the world from its peripheries—into a manger!

The first announcement of this birth was equally “peripheral,” humble, local: From angels to shepherds. Yet, like so many of our world events but more decisively, this peripheral, humble, local event holds universal significance. Into a manger in Bethlehem, in first century Roman Palestine, is born for us; for the universe, for all times and places, “a Saviour, who is the Christ, the Lord.”

Homily for Tuesday, 24 November 2020‒ Memorial of Sts. Andrew Dung-Lac and Companions, Martyrs

Readings of the day: Revelation 14:14-19; Psalm 96:10, 11-12, 13; Luke 21:5-11

Tuesday of the 34th week in Ordinary Time

An old friend of mine used to watch televangelists who would interpret Bible passages like the one we hear today from Revelation as “proof” of all kinds of imminent calamities that would end with the spectacular and frightening destruction of the world as we know it. My friend and I would joke about these stereotypical televangelists: After all, does Jesus not say, including in the Gospel reading we have just heard: “Many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and ‘The time is near!’ Do not go after them”?!

Then again, does what Jesus asks of us in today’s Gospel not call us to do more than avoid following after fearmongers who, in Jesus name (or maybe in the name of the almighty dollar) like to bend Scripture to scare people about the imminent end of the world? Jesus says, quite pithily, “Do not be terrified.” If we were among the first people hearing Jesus say this, would we maybe have wanted to reply to Jesus, “What do you mean, ‘Do not be terrified’”? In Jesus’ time and in the time of the Gospels, as now and at any time in our world’s history, there have been calamities and disasters. People and nations have fought one another. There have been “famines and plagues,” including the COVID-19 pandemic that grips the world now.

But “do not go after” those who say, “I am he” and, “The time is near”! “Do not be terrified,” Jesus says. What is Jesus asking of us? “The time” of which Jesus speaks is not so much “near” or something destructive or to be feared. Is “the time” of which Jesus speaks not, better yet, “the time” of Jesus’ presence among us; a presence that has always been, even (and maybe especially) amid the worst disasters, disease, or violence this world has known? And, in this way, is Jesus not calling to us, wanting to be present to us here and now, as always? “The time” is not “near”; “the time” of Jesus’ presence to the world through us is here now.

Jesus wants us to make him present in our world and to one another. This reminds me of a prayer, based on Romans 12, that our Basilian communities in Colombia and Mexico often pray, roughly: “May we rejoice with those who are rejoicing. May we weep with those who are weeping”…

By this kind of solidarity with one another, in our joys and sorrows, or when our beautiful temples, in a way of speaking even our best intentions to give glory to God, are “thrown down,” we become something far more important and necessary to the world: We become Jesus’ own presence.

If we, every day, try to reach out to at least one person (even if by phone, audiovisually, or some other “physically distanced” means of communication), in solidarity with that person in rejoicing or weeping, sickness or health, hope or fear, and so on, we make “the time” of which Jesus speaks a time not of fear but of communion and hope; a time of presence; a time that is not so much “near” but actively and always here.

Homily for Thursday, 23 August 2018– Ferial

Thursday of the 20th Week in Ordinary Time


Optional Memorial of St. Rose of Lima

Readings of the day: Ezekiel 36:23-28; Psalm 51:12-13, 14-15, 18-19; Matthew 22:1-11

This homily was given at St. James Church, Vernon, BC, Canada.

What does St. Rose of Lima, whose feast we celebrate today, have to do with the relationship between the king and the guest in Jesus’ parable in today’s Gospel reading who arrives at the king’s wedding feast without his wedding robe?

Is Jesus’ parable we hear today not strange, in the sense that the king seems inconsistent in whether he metes out justice toward some who abuse his generosity, while he is abundantly merciful toward others we would expect him to punish more severely? In the case of the guest who arrives at the wedding feast not wearing his wedding garment, the king responds with particular harshness: “Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Why is the king in Jesus’ parable so harsh with this guest? This man does not make light of the king’s invitation to his wedding feast or, worse yet, mistreat and murder the king’s slaves as other invitees to the wedding feast do, so why is the man who might merely have forgotten the proper or have been too poor to dress in attire for the king’s wedding singled out to be excluded from the banquet hall?

Here, I would like to return to my reflection on St. Rose of Lima, a third order Dominican from Peru who lived from 1586 to 1617. St. Rose of Lima was the first saint from the Americas ever canonized. Although she was a layperson (she had taken a personal vow of virginity but never took formal vows in a religious order), St. Rose of Lima is almost always depicted in art and icons in a Dominican habit.

The religious order to which I belong, the Basilians, has no habit besides the usual clothing of priests, a clerical shirt and Roman collar when serving in ministry. Yet our clothing, even when we are not in ministry, is meant to reflect the values we strive to live as religious and priests: Poverty as simplicity of life; modesty; solidarity with the people with whom we minister. And yet these values, expressed in the formal vows we take in religious life, poverty, chastity, and obedience, are values to which every one of us, as baptized Christians, is invited to strive toward.

This was true of St. Rose of Lima, regardless of whether, as a layperson, she ever actually wore a Dominican religious habit. She wore the garment of the king’s wedding feast; the Lord’s feast of heaven, in her heart, and this was expressed in a life of outward solidarity with the poor and suffering in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Lima.

Jesus asks this of all of us: To clothe our hearts with the Lord’s wedding robe, a garment we are given at baptism. The garment is what we most value, even more than what we wear outwardly, which ideally is a sign of the values deepest within our hearts. If what we most value is love of God, love of one another and especially solidarity with those most in need, then I do not think we will need to worry about meeting the same end as the man without his wedding garment in today’s Gospel parable. The values deepest in our hearts will naturally express themselves outwardly; they will be our God-given garment of the feast of eternal life.