Homily for Tuesday, 26 May 2015– Memorial of St. Philip Neri

Tuesday of the 8th Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Acts 22:30, 23:6-11; Psalm 60:1-2a, 5, 7-8, 9-10, 11; John 17:20-26

After hearing our Gospel reading today, do any of us feel a bit sorry for Jesus’ disciples? Peter, discouraged, says to Jesus: “We have given up everything and followed you.”

What precedes Peter’s discouragement? Our Gospel reading today, I think, requires some context for us to understand Peter’s reaction and then Jesus’ reply to Peter: “Amen, I say to you, there is no one who has given up” everything for me and for “the Gospel who will not receive a hundred times more.”

Jesus has encountered a rich young man in Mark’s Gospel just before the reading we hear today. How well do we remember this conversation between the rich young man and Jesus? The rich young man asks Jesus how he might enter eternal life. After all, he has “observed all” God’s commandments “from [his] youth.” Still, Jesus sends him away sad, saying, “You are lacking in one thing. Go, sell what you have and give to the poor… Then come, follow me.”

Jesus does not turn the rich young man away primarily because of his excess wealth. But he lacks something more critical to his salvation than literally giving away his material possessions. What does the rich young man lack? What do Peter and the other disciples also lack? The rich young man, like Peter and the other disciples in today’s Gospel and like us, follow God’s law as faithfully as we can. We are here at Mass earlier than most people are awake, many of us daily. And then so many of us here at St. Kateri go forth from worship here to serve our communities our families by wonderful works of mercy; kindness; generosity of all kinds. I am almost sure that this is all God can ask of us!

Our first reading, from the Book of Sirach, praises people who “keep the law”; the commandments of God. To those who obey God’s commandments, Sirach says, “the LORD will give back… sevenfold.” And our Psalm assures us: “To the upright I will show the saving power of God.” And so to obey God’s law; God’s commandments is excellent and a significant starting point toward eternal life.

But there is more to entering eternal life than following a set of commandments. But what? How many of us know somebody who is almost obsessive about following rules perfectly? This kind of obsession can destroy a person spiritually and perhaps physically and mentally.

God invites us to obey his commandments. And yet, more importantly, God asks us to live God’s law with joy and perhaps a sense of humor. St. Philip Neri, whose feast we celebrate today, is known as a patron saint of humor, which he often directed at himself. A man once asked St. Philip Neri if, as a penance, he should wear a hair shirt. St. Philip allowed him to wear the hair shirt, if only outside his other clothing!

St. Philip Neri shows in episodes like this how to be obedient to God’s law with joy and humor. His example is an echo of the central point of our readings today: Live God’s law; the Gospel of Jesus Christ, not with obsessive perfectionism but with joy, and this will bring us to eternal life.

Homily for Monday, 26 May 2014‒ Memorial of St. Philip Neri

This homily was given at the convent of the Holy Child Sisters, Oxford, United Kingdom

Monday of the Sixth Week of Easter

Readings of the day: Acts 16:11-17; Psalm 149:1b-2, 3-4, 5-6a, 9b; John 15:26-16:4a

What words or concepts do we associate with poverty? Does poverty mean to be materially poor or even destitute? Does poverty mean to give up wealth in order to live by the Word of God? Do we perhaps relate poverty with one of the religious vows we have taken and a principle by which all Christians are called to live?

How many of us would think of Lydia, the “dealer in purple cloth” we encounter in today’s first reading, as poor? I suspect that not many people would think of Lydia as poor. After all, she was a wealthy merchant whom Acts says had a home large enough for the Christian community of Philippi to gather in for worship. Lydia was one of the first leaders of the early Christian “house churches.”

For this reason I see Lydia as an example to us of poverty. How so? Lydia was not poor materially (the Book of Acts notes otherwise), but she was poor in the sense that she generously opened her home to St. Paul and to the Christians of Philippi. Even before this, and before Lydia and her household were baptized, Acts says that “the Lord opened her heart to pay attention” to St. Paul and his message, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour.

“The Lord opened her heart”; Lydia allowed her heart to be opened by the Lord. This is an example to us of courage and humility; of poverty of heart and spirit; of openness to the Lord that extends beyond mere material poverty. It is possible to be materially wealthy and yet to be poor in the way Lydia was.

Speaking of poverty, I deeply appreciate that for the last several days I have been visiting Oxford, the home city and university of Blessed John Henry Newman. The English cardinal was an Oratorian and an admirer of St. Philip Neri, the founder of the Oratorians whose feast day we celebrate today. John Henry Newman admired Philip Neri especially because of his poverty.

Newman writes this of St. Philip Neri toward the end of The Idea of a University: “He would be but an ordinary individual priest as others: and his weapons should be but unaffected humility and unpretending love… He came to the Eternal City and he sat himself down there… He sat in his small room, and… the rich and the wellborn, as well as the simple and the illiterate, crowded into it… And who was he, I say, all the while, but [a] humble priest, a stranger in Rome... great simply in the attraction with which a Divine Power had gifted him?”

St. Philip Neri in Rome, Cardinal John Henry Newman here in Oxford, and Lydia in Philippi in the Acts of the Apostles are all examples to us of poverty. May we, too, live their way of poverty; of humbly allowing God to open our hearts “to pay attention” to the Lord and to the Lord’s Gospel.