Homily for Friday, 28 July 2017– Ferial

Friday of the 16th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19:8, 9, 10, 11; Matthew 13:18-23

What commandments do we find the easiest to keep? And what commandments do we find the most difficult to keep?

Today we hear in Exodus of God calling Moses up Mount Sinai to give him the Ten Commandments. We know that the people of Israel whom Moses was leading through the desert were able to hear God as he gave the Commandments to Moses, so God hid nothing from the people as to the Law he expected them to observe. Do we ever wonder, though, if the people of Israel were standing at Mount Sinai, hearing God give the Ten Commandments to Moses, and thinking if not saying things like these among themselves: “That commandment not to kill should be easy enough, but that commandment not to covet— what does “covet” mean again?— may be more difficult. We know that one of the first of the Ten Commandments the people of Israel would break, when they made the golden calf, was the commandment not to make idols; images of other gods. What were the most and least difficult commandments to keep for the people of ancient Israel?

We might ask the same question of our time and culture.  Almost ten years ago now I was a postulant, just beginning formation with the religious order I belong to now, the Congregation of St. Basil or Basilians. I am originally from here in Edmonton, and the first place to which I was appointed by the Basilians was Cali, Colombia, to teach high school French and English. An article at the time written in a religious newspaper or magazine reflected on the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience that we in religious orders both of men and women take. Let me say, on this note, that poverty, chastity, and obedience are not only vows that set men and women of religious orders apart from the rest of us. These are standards by which we are all called to live by our Baptism and any specific vocation that flows from Baptism: Religious life, priesthood, single life, married life, and so on. Poverty, chastity, and obedience are called “evangelical counsels”; they are essential standards for all of us to live by. They are somewhat like commandments.

The article, as I remember, said that in more wealthy parts of the world, poverty is the most difficult of the evangelical counsels to live by, and obedience is the least difficult. In less wealthy regions, as in my experience in Colombia, poverty is the easiest of the counsels to live by. I do not mean this, and neither did the article, simply because regions like these have less material wealth, although might less wealth allow us to live with greater gratitude and take less for granted? And, at the same time, there tends to be a greater focus in wealthier regions on social and moral order, and so obedience.

Each of us; each culture and region of the world has its commandments; its social and moral standards that are more or less difficult than others to keep. Let me suggest that, hearing the Ten Commandments from Exodus, our prayer today might be one of thanksgiving to God for the commandments we find easier to keep, and for help with those we find more difficult. In this way, in the words of our Psalm, we might more and more hold God’s commands in reverence, as “words of everlasting life.”

Homily for Thursday, 27 July 2017– Ferial

Thursday of the 16th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Exodus 19:1-2, 9-11, 16-20b; Responsorial Canticle: Daniel 3:52, 53, 54, 55, 56; Matthew 13:10-17

Did any of us hear in our readings today the contrast between how God makes God’s self known in Exodus versus in Matthew’s Gospel?

How God makes God’s self known to us; reveals himself to us: We call this divine revelation. In Exodus today we hear the immediate lead-in to the Ten Commandments, which we will hear tomorrow. God is most concerned that the people being led by Moses in the desert will hear him when he speaks with Moses; when he gives Moses the Ten Commandments. God says to Moses, “I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, in order that the people may hear when I speak with you and so trust you ever after.” The people need to be able to trust Moses and so to trust God. This is the primary way in which God reveals himself in the part of Exodus we hear today.

In Matthew’s Gospel, do we not get the sense of a more distant and even irritable God through Jesus’ explanation of why he speaks “to the people in parables”? Jesus offers us a strange and even somewhat troubling explanation for why he teaches in parables: “[So] that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.” Does Jesus speak in this way because he really does not want the people hearing him to “perceive… listen,” and understand what he is saying? This seems to me to be unlikely. Perhaps Jesus speaks this way because the people have had a chance to “perceive… listen” and understand him, to believe that he is the Messiah, and they have missed their chance.

But how long do we have before we have missed our chance to “perceive… listen… understand” believe what has been divinely revealed to us, that Jesus is the Messiah, and to back up our belief in Jesus as the Messiah by the way we live? As one bishop I know is fond of saying tongue-in-cheek, we have “between now and five minutes after death” to believe in Jesus as the Messiah and to act by what we believe. In other words, this process that we might call conversion takes a lifetime. But how long do we have?

Nobody fully knows the answer to this question. The Ten Commandments, the introduction to which we hear today in Exodus, were one event of God’s self-revelation to the people of Israel during a forty-year journey through the desert to their homeland. The journey of conversion, of grappling with divine revelation, would take the people of Israel more than one generation. Yet they did enter their homeland, although Moses did not.

We cannot know how much time we have left to believe in what God has revealed to us; what is essential to our faith; in Jesus Christ as the Messiah, and to live by it. Perhaps, then, Jesus is inviting us; pleading with us not to wait. Conversion is not a process we might begin in the future, but a process to live out in the present. And only if conversion for us is a present more than a future reality will we also experience the promise of Jesus to his disciples in today’s Gospel in the present: “Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.”

Homily for Friday, 16 June 2017– Ferial

Friday of the 10th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: 2 Corinthians 4:7-15; Psalm 116:10-11, 15-16, 17-18; Matthew 5:27-32

Who among us is intense about our faith or knows somebody who is? I would describe most if not all of us here as intense in living our faith, simply because we are here now on a Friday morning at St. Kateri Parish at St. Cecilia Church to celebrate the Eucharist. How many people, even among the most devout Catholics, devote part of a Friday morning; part of almost every day for many of us, to our celebration of the Eucharist? We are in the minority, my sisters and brothers in Christ!

Please let me be clear: Many of our sister and brother Catholics, for reasons too many to count, are unable to be at Mass every day. They work, they raise families, they are aging, sick, or homebound… And many of these people live our faith just as intensely and devoutly as we who are here do. Add to this those among us who engage in ministries in the Church, or who work passionately for social justice causes including, fundamentally, the defense of the dignity of all human life and all creation.

I would say we are quite an intense group of people. And today our Word of God speaks to us and celebrates two of the most intense people who have ever walked this earth, St. Paul and Jesus. St. Paul encounters the intense pride of the wealthy Christian community of Corinth of the earliest Church. Yet Corinth’s intensity meets its match in St. Paul, who compares his ministry to death, uniting it in particular to the death of Christ.

A saint is one who knows how to die. A saint has received from God and applied in her or his life the grace of how to die to her or his own pride insofar as it inhibits this person’s ability to serve God in serving the needs of God’s people. A saint knows to die to any form of injustice, of lack of love or charity in action or speech. A saint knows when to die to one form of ministry or service to move to a new one. A saint knows the grace of death to partisan ideological narrowness; to gossip; to needless divisiveness. A saint knows how to die, in order to rise again; to ascend and transcend with Christ. A saint dies as she or he lives: Intensely.

This grace of dying in order to rise is true of St. Paul, so much so that many in his Corinthian audience likely found his message challenging, if not outright frightening, even morbid. And the same is true of Jesus himself. Jesus, and St. Paul after him, lived, died, and rose intensely. Today we hear Jesus’ second of six of what have been called “intensification” sayings in Matthew’s Gospel: “You have heard” this commandment, “but I say” live it more intensely; more demandingly.

It is not enough to obey this sixth of the Ten Commandments, not to “commit adultery.” If we so much as look at another person as no more than property to be used; to be taken from another (which is how Jesus views adultery, specifically the taking of another’s spouse for one’s pleasure), we will bear God’s judgment due to this sin. But the more we live self-control out of love, which is more demanding and intense than the commandment requires, as a kind of death to self, the closer we will be to rising to intense and eternal life.

Homily for Tuesday, 28 July 2015– Ferial

Tuesday of the 17th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Exodus 33:7-11, 34:5-b-9, 28;  Psalm 103:6-7, 8-9, 10-11, 12-13; Matthew 13:36-43

We hear today from the book of Exodus of a particularly frustrating time for Moses as he leads the people of Israel home out of slavery in Egypt. Does it not seem that, at every turn, the people of Israel complain about something on their journey: The desert heat; not enough food; not enough water… “Moses, he looked at me funny”?! 

The people of Israel are badly behaved in other ways. They fail to trust on many occasions in God, through Moses, to lead them back to their homeland. But this is also a time at which Moses especially seeks the help of the LORD to lead Israel. A tent, “called the meeting tent,” is set up in the middle of the desert to be a place where the people could “consult the LORD.” The people of Israel had access to God like never before through this “meeting tent.”

Moses enters the “meeting tent” and, “for forty days and forty nights,” he is alone with the LORD. And what does Moses ask of the LORD? We hear that Moses asks for God’s mercy and forgiveness toward the “stiff-necked people” he is leading. Moses first acknowledges God’s name, “LORD.” And then Moses acknowledges the greatness of God’s mercy: “The LORD, the LORD, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity.”

God’s mercy does not mean that the people of Israel will escape without consequences for their unfaithfulness toward God. And yet if, in the highly symbolic language of Exodus, God will punish the people “to the third and fourth generation for their fathers’ wickedness,” God promises to continue his kindness “for a thousand generations” toward those who remain faithful. God’s mercy; God’s forgiveness, even before we ask for it, always greatly (we could say infinitely) outweighs God’s wrath; God’s punishment.

And here in the book of Exodus God’s greatest act of mercy yet is to have Moses write on another set of tablets the Ten Commandments. Do we remember perhaps how, earlier in Exodus, Moses descends the mountain after receiving the original Ten Commandments on tablets and, when he sees the people making a golden calf idol, he destroys these tablets. Here, through Moses, God offers the people a new beginning. God offers them mercy and forgiveness, even if it is difficult for us to understand God offering a set of commandments as an act of mercy. This is the people’s opportunity by God’s mercy to renew their vows; their promise to remain faithful to God and just toward one another.

In a similar way we are continually given a chance at renewal, especially through the sacraments of reconciliation and Eucharist, because God is merciful toward us. God’s infinite mercy and forgiveness toward us are shown by Moses’ re-presentation of the Ten Commandments to the people and again through Jesus’ parable of the weeds among the wheat in Matthew’s Gospel.

God invites us not to pull up the weeds too early and so to risk destroying the wheat. God gives us a renewed chance at faithfulness, captured in the image of Moses writing the Ten Commandments a second time. Our God is infinitely merciful toward us and invites us to the same mercy and forgiveness toward one another and ourselves.

Homily for Sunday, 8 March 2015

3rd Sunday in Lent

Readings of the day: Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19:8, 9, 10, 11; 1 Corinthians 1:22-25; John 2:13-25

Here is maybe a difficult question: In whom do we trust? To any of us who have a U.S. bill or coin on hand, I ask us to take it out and look at it. What do our bills and coins say on them about who we trust? They all say, “In God we trust.” This makes our task of knowing in whom we trust easier, right? If our money says, “In God we trust,” it must be true.

If only our answer the question, “In whom do we trust?” were that easy! And even if we are able to answer this question with “God,” are we not then invited to answer some even more difficult questions: In what kind of God do we trust? How do we understand and experience God, so that we are able to trust in God? The trouble, for me at least, is that our readings only help us with these questions if we are attentive to one common way, in our readings today and in all of Scripture, in which God makes God’s self known to us. And what is this common way in Scripture; in our readings today in which God makes God’s self known to us? What is the one consistent trait of God in which we are invited to trust? Stay tuned…

But if we are not so attentive to the one consistent way in which God reveals God’s self to us does God not seem woefully inconsistent to us, especially in the readings we have just heard?

Perhaps when we first hear the Ten Commandments that God gives to Moses on Mount Sinai in our first reading, from Exodus, might our first impression of God be that he is somewhat mean? God promises “mercy down to the thousandth generation” to those who obey his Commandments, but this is only after promising “punishment… down to the third and fourth generations” on those who disobey God’s Commandments. If God were really a God of mercy and kindness, why would God threaten to curse those who disobeyed him at all? It would seem that we cannot trust God to be merciful and kind all the time, depending on how we hear these Ten Commandments.

Our first reading also raises the problem of the anonymous God. The “Big Guy in the Sky” shouts down commands at us from a pillar of fire, just like the one in the Cecil B. DeMille movie, “The Ten Commandments.” God does not seem very friendly. He does not even introduce himself to us by name. God just begins by telling us to do a few things and not to do many other things: “I Am… I Am… I Am the LORD, thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” God is so anonymous; so distant that whoever played God’s voice in “The Ten Commandments” was not included in the credits at the end of the film.

I must admit that God sounded awesome back in 1956. To some of us, Charlton Heston as Moses looked almost as awesome as God back then! And those divine sound effects and fire were well ahead of their time. But, in the Biblical version of the Ten Commandments if not in the movie version, God still may seem distant; anonymous. God shouts forth the Ten Commandments, engraving them with his fingers on stone tablets (I wish my fingers were that strong). God blesses all who obey his Commandments, but curses all who disobey them, all from a distance, as the “I Am” hidden behind a pillar of fire.

I would have difficulty trusting in this kind of God. Would you? I would have difficulty with a God who shouts at us, let alone when people shout at one another. When I was a child, one of my favorite comic strips in the newspaper was called “One Big Happy.” This comic strip centers on six-year-old Ruthie and her eight-year-old brother, Joe. One day, as Ruthie and Joe are arguing, Ruthie says, “Stop shouting at me, Joey! Shouting is against the Ten Commandments”! Joe asks, “Which one”? Ruthie responds, “All of them! They all begin with ‘Thou shout not…”!

And yet if God shouts out the Ten Commandments, God’s shouting, in the person of Jesus, is even worse in our Gospel reading today. God is no longer anonymous and distant as in giving Moses the Ten Commandments. In Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple in John’s Gospel, God is just plain angry: “Take these out of here,” Jesus shouts at the people selling doves near the Temple as he overturns the money changers’ tables, “and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.” I cannot say this for sure, because John’s Gospel does not say so, but I wonder how important a role Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple played in his death. At the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry in John, during his first visit to Jerusalem, Jesus becomes violently angry in the Jewish faith’s holiest place, the Temple. Would the cleansing of the Temple, followed by Jesus’ claims in John’s Gospel especially to be God, “I Am,” so offended the people that they would demand that Pontius Pilate have him crucified? Did the people of Israel; the religious leaders in particular, become so unable to trust a God who could be so angry with them that they decided to kill him?

The Cross of Jesus Christ presents us with yet another challenge in knowing and trusting in God. This challenge is at the heart of our second reading, from St. Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians. St. Paul says that “Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified.” We also hear, “For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.” Is this not a strange argument to trust in God? Who would trust in a God who is foolish; who is weak; who would submit himself to die a shameful death on a cross? Would St. Paul have been very successful at first in convincing the Corinthians, seekers of “signs” and of “wisdom”; Jews and Greeks alike in his audience, to trust in this kind of God? Somehow I doubt it. But eventually our Christian faith gained enough believers; enough people to trust in God even in stubborn Corinth, and around the world.

Why is this? Again, what is the one consistent trait of God in which we are invited to trust? What is the trait of God in which two thousand years of Christians and our sisters and brothers in the faith of Abraham, the Jews and Muslims, have come to trust? This trait is not that God will only bother us when God wants to shout laws at us, is angry at us, or when we want something from God. This trait is not that God is, in a strange way, so foolish and weak that he is actually wise and strong. These arguments to trust in God are not very persuasive, I do not think.

So why would we trust in God? I think we trust in God the more we understand and experience God as the God who wants a relationship with us; who invites us to strengthen our relationships with one another. God does not give us the Ten Commandments just to be mean to us while retreating into the distance behind a pillar of fire. No, God gives us the Ten Commandments to govern and strengthen right relationships with God and with one another.

Jesus did not clear the money changers and their goods out of the Temple just because he felt especially angry that day. No, Jesus invites us to put aside barriers to right relationship with God and with one another: Wealth when it does not serve people in need but selfishly feeds a “marketplace” mentality, even among people of faith.

And St. Paul speaks to us of a God who so desires relationship with us that, in Christ, he willed to die for us; to save us. And so we, too, “proclaim Christ crucified.” Not only on our coins, but in our hearts and on our lips, we as Christians can and do proclaim, “In God we trust.”