Homily for Sunday, 19 June 2022– The Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi)

Readings of the day: Genesis 14:18-20; Psalm 110:1, 2, 3, 4; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; Luke 9:11b-17

The Body and Blood of Christ, the Eucharist, the Mass: This reality we celebrate now has many names and many dimensions. And the readings we hear proclaimed from the word of God today, and the prayers of today’s Mass, each highlight particular dimensions of this celebration more than others.

The beauty, variety, and complexity of Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, Corpus Christi, reminds me of the many different celebrations of this day I have experienced. Maybe some of us have participated in outdoor processions through the streets with the Blessed Sacrament. I have experienced this less here than in Colombia, where Corpus Christi processions are often quite elaborate.

Of course, Corpus Christi reminds me of first communions at which I have presided as a priest—the first one being the first communion of my godparents’ grandson, during my very first Mass as a priest. But I am especially remembering lately my many conversations at table with a brother Basilian priest I lived with in Rochester, New York, when I was just ordained, whom I especially loved and who was especially beloved of the whole Basilian community and people with whom he ministered. Fr. Joseph Trovato went to be with our Lord a couple of years ago. Quite often, though, when conversations with Fr. Joe would turn toward the Mass, the Eucharist, he would say, with his characteristic gentle voice, that the dimension of the Eucharist he found most difficult to live was that of sacrifice.

I was always somewhat surprised to hear Fr. Joe say this. When I think of priesthood (and not only the ordained priesthood but our common priesthood as baptized Christians), I think of one of my favourite prayers, St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Suscipe: “Take, Lord (Suscipe, Domine), all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will; all that I have and possess. You have given all to me. To you, O Lord, I return it. All is yours; dispose of it wholly according to your will. Give me your love and your grace, for this is enough for me.”

Another thing that would surprise me about Fr. Joe, when I would bring up Ignatius’ Suscipe, is how he would look me directly in the eye and, with all the sternness he could muster (which was not much), say to me, “I do not like that prayer.” When I would ask him why, he would say, “Because I find it such a difficult prayer to live out.” I think that, if Fr. Joe found Ignatius’ Suscipe difficult to live out, the rest of us are in big trouble! Instead of the Suscipe, Fr. Joe’s favourite prayer or saying was from St. Francis de Sales: “There is nothing so strong as gentleness, and nothing so gentle as real strength.”

There have been few people, let alone few priests, who have lived the sacrifice demanded of Ignatius’ Suscipe—the total surrender to God of liberty, memory, understanding, our “entire will” to our Lord who has “given all to” us—as well as Fr. Joe Trovato. He certainly lived the radical (and, dare I say, more than humble, but self-sacrificial) gentleness to which St. Francis de Sales’ saying invites us.

The self-sacrificial gentleness of Ignatius’ Suscipe, of St. Francis de Sales, or of Fr. Joe Trovato is a Eucharistic self-sacrificial gentleness. It is a gentleness and a self-sacrifice to which the Lord in his grace invites us. There are many moments in our Mass, every time we celebrate it, when we remember Jesus’ sacrifice of his entire being, his having “given all to” us, for our salvation.

Maybe the most important moment during our Eucharistic celebration when we remember Jesus’ self-sacrifice for us is when we pray the same words Jesus did at the Last Supper, on the night before he gave himself up to death for us: “Take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my body, which will be given up for you… Take this, all of you, and drink from it, for this is the chalice of my blood.”

The earliest disciples of Jesus remembered Jesus’ sacrifice, his giving of his body and blood for us, at the Last Supper and on the cross, in Jesus’ own words. “This is my Body that is for you… This cup is the new covenant in my Blood. Do this… in remembrance of me.” St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, which we hear today, is an early witness to this way in which Jesus’ first disciples remembered his sacrifice for us and its meaning for our salvation.

The Eucharistic dimension of sacrifice is closely connected to its dimension of memorial: Of memory not of artifacts in museums, but memory that projects Jesus’ giving of self to us into our history, so that it becomes always and everywhere present. And it becomes a self-sacrifice we can and are called to imitate: “Do this in memory of me… You have given all to me. To you, O Lord, I return it.”

But how, through remembrance of Jesus, our greatest act of self-sacrifice, or otherwise, could we ever return such a sublime gift as Jesus has given to us: His Body and Blood; his life, on the cross? At Mass, in our Eucharistic prayers, we use a lot of language of sacrifice and of returning to God some element of God’s sacrifice of himself in Jesus for us. During our table conversations, Fr. Joe often liked to point out this language of sacrifice in our Eucharistic prayers that, like Ignatius’ Suscipe (so he would say) he had difficulty living out, much less understanding. Sometimes our Eucharistic language of sacrifice can be bold. We pray, for instance: “May this sacrifice of our reconciliation… advance the peace and salvation of all the world.” We still await with Christian hope, sisters and brothers, the fulfillment of this “peace and salvation” for which we pray every time we celebrate our Eucharist.

Sometimes our language of sacrifice in our Eucharistic prayers can be difficult to understand: “Look, we pray, upon the oblation of your Church.” What is an oblation? It is another word for sacrifice; for offering back to God what God has given us in this very celebration: The sacramental yet very real presence of the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. And so, we pray, “We offer you in thanksgiving this holy and living sacrifice… May [Christ] make of us an eternal offering to you, so that we may obtain an inheritance with your elect.”

But can we ever offer God back what he has offered us; what God continues to offer us through our Eucharist: His very self, for our salvation? Can we ever match the sacrifice of self that Jesus offered for us on the cross? Without God’s grace, the short answer to these questions would be no. I have no doubt that Fr. Joe Trovato was on to something when he would say he had difficulty living out the meaning of the Lord’s sacrifice for us; the meaning of St. Ignatius’ Suscipe: “You have given all to me. To you, O Lord, I return it.”

I will go a step beyond Fr. Joe here: Without God’s grace, to remember and to live in imitation of Jesus’ sacrifice for us is impossible. Yet, should we ever despair of God’s grace, we need only to remember the abundance of that grace of which Jesus’ greatest miracles were a sign. We hear from Luke’s Gospel today how Jesus multiplied the “five loaves and two fish,” so that there was enough to feed “about five thousand men,” and women and children in addition to them, with food still left over.

In this way, God will multiply even our smallest efforts at imitating God’s self-gift to us in our lives. God will multiply even our smallest efforts at kindness; at the kind of hospitality and blessing Melchizedek, the priest-king, shows Abram, and Abram returns to Melchizedek, in our reading from Genesis today.

God’s abundant grace will multiply our “I find this difficult to live out” into more than enough to nourish the world. In God’s grace, all the dimensions of this great celebration of the Body and Blood of Christ come together: Sacrifice, memorial, hospitality. God’s grace enables us to celebrate here now, and then to bring God’s real, nourishing presence to our world by all we say and do. God’s grace “is enough for us,” so that all we have received, we now return; we now give to a world hungering and thirsting for peace and salvation.

Homily for Sunday, 22 July 2018

Sunday of the 16th Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 23:1-6; Psalm 23:1-3, 3-4, 5, 6; Ephesians 2:13-18; Mark 6:30-34

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

Have we ever noticed how many Biblical passages are based on images of shepherding? These shepherding images may be easier to identify with in a culture like that of Israel, the Holy Land of Biblical times or of the present day, for that matter, than in a culture like ours, especially in a major city like Edmonton. When was the last time anybody here saw a shepherd or sheep? It has been a long time since I have seen a shepherd or sheep. And yet our Church dedicates one Sunday a year to a kind of celebration of shepherding, Good Shepherd Sunday, which coincides with the Fourth Sunday of Easter. Today, both our first reading, from the prophet Jeremiah, and our Psalm focus heavily on images of shepherding.

If we were to hear no more than our reading from Jeremiah today, and since the Church already celebrates a Good Shepherd Sunday, we might want to call today “Bad Shepherd Sunday.”

When I was in seminary, I took a practicum class on how to preside at Mass and other liturgical occasions like baptisms, weddings, and funerals. The textbook for the class, written in a humorous tone, especially considering the subject matter, by a Jesuit, Fr. Dennis Smolarski, was called How Not to Say Mass. The part of the Book of Jeremiah we hear today might as well have been called, “How Not to Shepherd,” although it would seem that Jeremiah was not in as humorous a mood in writing and preaching to the people of Israel of his time as Fr. Smolarski was in writing How Not to Say Mass.

Speaking through Jeremiah, God denounces the bad shepherds; the bad leaders of Israel of the time: “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture”! But what made these shepherds so bad, and why, in our time, do we need a “Bad Shepherd Sunday”? How is Jeremiah’s denunciation of the leaders of Israel of his time relevant to us today?

Even if many of us may not identify as well as people of Biblical times with the shepherding metaphors found throughout the Bible, do we not still have some idea of what qualities a good leader would have, whether that leader is in government, a religious leader, an educator, a leader in the workplace, in society, in local community, or another kind of leader? Maybe we look to our leaders to unite our country; our society; our communities around common causes or a shared sense of what is just and right, socially if not also morally. A good leader leads by kindness, forthrightness, and gentleness, without losing anything of the strength of his or her leadership. In the words of St. Francis de Sales, “there is nothing so strong as gentleness and nothing so gentle as real strength.”

Do we not also have a sense of what characterizes a bad leader: One who divides a country; a society; a community; our world, and then plays on those divisions and the vulnerabilities of the people for personal or political gain? A bad leader can become so self-absorbed that this person no longer understands him or herself as a servant of a greater good, much less of our salvation but, at an extreme, as a kind of god distant and unyielding to the needs of the people he or she is leading.

Today we hear Jeremiah responding prophetically to precisely this kind of self-absorbed, self-righteous, self-deifying but ultimately false and bad leadership by the “shepherds who destroy and scatter,” whether in his time or in ours. Bad shepherding; self-absorbed leadership, Jeremiah and the other Biblical prophets say time and again, is a form of idolatry, of replacing the one true God with oneself or somebody or something else created as a god. For Jeremiah and the other Old Testament prophets, idolatry was the worst sin that could be committed. This is most critical to understanding the Old Testament prophets: They would never chastise the people or their leaders so harshly as we hear Jeremiah do today unless they were committing some form of idolatry, of making themselves equivalent to gods.

In contrast, a good and righteous leader; a godly leader; God himself always puts leadership at the service of unity; at the service of legitimate diversity and free will so that those the leader serves may grow as leaders themselves. For a good leader, leadership is never about them; it is not about me. Any leadership, especially in our Christian way of life, is about another and ultimately about God and leading one another in love toward God; toward salvation.

This is the kind of leader and leadership; the kind of shepherd and shepherding God, through Jeremiah, promises the people: “The days are surely coming… when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.”

As Christians, we believe that the shepherd, the righteous servant-leader of our salvation whom Jeremiah once promised has already lived among us as Jesus, the Christ. And we believe that Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd, will return at the end of time to complete God’s work of our salvation. And yet there has never been a time when the LORD our God, the ultimate good shepherd, has not been with us in history. For God, shepherding has always been for our good. God’s shepherding us has always been, as our Psalm says, for the restoration of our soul. And so we may pray with confidence, even and perhaps especially in times of hardship, “in the presence of [our] enemies”: “The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want.” Still, our God has chosen not to shepherd us alone and impersonally (although God could have done so), but to give us “shepherds after [his] own heart,” in another of Jeremiah’s great shepherding metaphors, to live among us and to lead us to God, to salvation. Can we not almost hear God saying about his way of shepherding, “It is not about me, but about my beloved people; my beloved created universe.” God has chosen to make each and every one of us, by virtue of our baptism, responsible for one another’s salvation. We are all the sheep of God’s flock, but also in a way all one another’s shepherds.

And so how are we to shepherd, to lead one another toward God; toward our salvation? History has constantly given us examples of good, godly servant-leader shepherds; of saints; of the strong yet gentle Christ-like figures most if not all of us have experienced. And yet history has also provided us many examples of how not to lead; of people for whom leadership is about them and less if at all about God. I am heartbroken whenever I hear of people in positions of power, especially in the Church (often, but not always, ordained people) who have become self-absorbed more than God-absorbed. Emotional, sexual, physical, or other abuse of vulnerable people; legal rigidity to the point where the law, whether of Church or state, becomes like a god and becomes abusive: These are the symptoms of idolatry, left in the wake of bad shepherds. “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture,” says the LORD! And please allow me to beg forgiveness for the times when I, as an ordained leader of our Church, have put myself in the place of God; when I have failed to serve God’s people and our salvation; when I have sinned; when I have been a bad shepherd.

I, we all, our Church, and our world need from time to time the jarring reminder that Jeremiah and other prophets give us. We need this Bad Shepherd Sunday as much as we need a Good Shepherd Sunday in our Church. We need reminders like our readings give us today in order to lead one another more effectively to the salvation God promises us; in order to seek, reach out to, and welcome the people most vulnerable and most in need of God’s presence; those in need of rest; those in need of firm yet still gentle and kind guidance; those whom Mark’s Gospel describes for us today as “like sheep without a shepherd.” We need reminders like those we hear today to live up to the calling, the responsibility for one another’s salvation that we have received in baptism, to be shepherds; servants; leaders after the saints, and after God’s own heart.

Homily for Sunday, 23 July 2017

16th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Wisdom 12:13, 16-19; Psalm 86:5-6, 9-10, 15-16; Romans 8:26-27; Matthew 13:24-30

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

How would we describe God in no more than a few words or a short sentence? Is it possible to describe God in so brief a way? A good place to start, if we were to undertake the maybe barely possible task of describing God in a few words or a short sentence, might be our readings we have just heard. How do our readings today describe God?

I wonder if, within our culture here in Canada and even across cultures and around the world, there might be two major ways people tend to describe and understand God (or any divine being under whatever religion or belief system): God as good and kind, and God as great and powerful. Under the category of God as good, we speak of God’s kindness, mercy, or gentleness. When we think of God as great, we might speak of God as mighty, powerful; as the God who is capable of creating or destroying even the whole universe; the God who is able to conquer an enemy or punish evildoers.

We find both these images, ways of describing God in our Scriptures: God as good and kind and God as great and powerful. And we find these two ways of describing God in our readings today. In seminary, one of the most fascinating courses I took was on the Psalms. When I speak of the image or description of God as great and as good, I am remembering this way in which the priest who taught the course presented the Psalms. And in our responsorial Psalm today, we hear God presented both as “good and forgiving… merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (and so God as good) and as one before whom “all the nations [God has] made shall come and bow down” (and so God as great and powerful).

Our first reading today, drawn from the Book of Wisdom, like today’s Psalm plays on balance between God’s goodness and God’s greatness or power. Wisdom describes a God “whose care is for all people.” God is also clearly described in Wisdom as powerful: “Sovereign in strength,” rebuking “insolence,” showing his “strength when people doubt the completeness of [God’s] power,” and with “power to act whenever” God chooses. Yet God judges justly and “with mildness” and governs “with great forbearance.” God teaches through the gentle exercise of divine power “that the righteous” are those who are “kind.” God fills his “children with good hope” and offers “repentance for sins.” These are all hallmarks of God’s goodness and “loving kindness,” while not denying God’s greatness and power.

In Jesus’ parables of the weeds among the wheat, the mustard seed, and the yeast, the same balance is shown between images of God as good and those of God as great and powerful. God, as “the householder” in the parable of the weeds among the wheat, will, on a day and hour God chooses and only God knows, gather the weeds, separate them from the wheat, bundle them, and burn them. There are consequences for our sin, the weeds that “an enemy,” that is, the devil; Satan has sown in our hearts. And are we not all sinners? Between now and the last day, we will be held accountable for the good we have done as well as for our sin; the wheat as well as the weeds we have sown in the garden that is God’s earth; God’s creation and our relationships with one another and with this creation. God will eventually judge good and evil; “the living and the dead,” as we pray in our Creed.

The key word in all this is “eventually.” God is by no means short on power to judge and to punish sin. God’s final defeat of evil, sin, and Satan is promised us. Yet, even as a judge, God acts with great patience. For a time, God allows our weeds to grow up within the wheat crop. This is the same God who is gentle and patient enough to allow the tiny mustard seed, our tiny and often fragile faith, to grow into a magnificent plant that provides shelter and rest to “the birds of the air”; to all God’s creatures; to us. This is the same God who waits for the small amount of yeast to leaven the great batch of dough, again perhaps an image of our faith.

God’s great power is always balanced by God’s goodness; mercy; kindness; gentleness; patience. Jesus’ parable of the weeds among the wheat in particular reminds me of a line from The Gulag Archipelago by the Russian author Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, commenting on the forced labour camps of the former Soviet Union. “If only it were all so simple,” Solzhenitsyn says. “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart”?

If we were to look within our own hearts; if we were to look into the heart of our Church; of our world, we would see a beautiful garden, created, planted, and nurtured by God, no less. But, before long, we would notice that our garden— ourselves both as individuals and together as Church and as a world— is in desperate need of weeding. “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every” one of us. Our God could very well, with great power, uproot the weeds; destroy the evil and sin sown by Satan that has taken root in our hearts; in the heart of our Church and our world. But our God does not do this. To uproot the weeds too soon would destroy us; would destroy what God wants to save in us, in our Church, and in our world.

God delays weeding the garden, so to speak, not because he is weak or wants to procrastinate. God is not like me; I am not much of a gardener, and I especially dislike pulling weeds! No, God who is great and powerful enough to weed the garden, chooses in his goodness to allow the wheat crop, the good that is within our hearts; our Church; our world, to grow and mature. God chooses in his goodness to give the mustard seed time to grow into a magnificent tree that is shelter for everybody and all creatures. God chooses to allow the small amount of yeast to leaven the great batch of dough, because God is as good as he is great, and then some.

St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, from which we hear today, also speaks to this same overriding goodness and patience of God in light of our weakness and even our sin. God, in his goodness, has sent his Spirit to live within us. “The Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know to pray as we ought,” St. Paul says. “That very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” How beautiful this image is of God’s goodness; mercy; kindness; gentleness; patience!

Yet I think God is inviting us through God’s Word we hear today first to hold God’s greatness and goodness together; not to separate them and, second, to act toward one another as God acts toward us, with power and strength that is conditioned by goodness and loving kindness. St. Francis de Sales once said, “There is nothing so strong as gentleness, and nothing so gentle as real strength.”

Imagine our relationships; our marriages; our families; our households; our communities; our workplaces; our Church if we were to live as God lives in us, with goodness; mercy; kindness; gentleness; patience in no way disconnected but conditioning our exercise of “real strength.” Imagine our Church and our world, the more we welcome the sinner (all of us, ultimately) and journey with one another toward God, free of the fear of losing a morally or otherwise pure or certain Church that is a myth anyway. Imagine what a means of God’s grace we could grow into then, if we act as God acts toward us: With gentleness and with real strength that are so interconnected that, for God, they are one movement.

God is gentle and God is strong. God is good and God is great and powerful because God is greatest in his goodness. God is strongest in his gentleness; mercy; kindness; patience. More and more, may the same be true of us.