Homily for Friday, 24 October 2014– Ferial

Friday of the 29th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Ephesians 4:1-6; Psalm 24:1-2, 3-4ab, 5-6; Luke 12:54-59

How does Jesus call us “to interpret the present time”? In the Gospel reading we hear today, Jesus criticizes “the crowds” of his time, those who follow Jesus from place to place, who hear his message, but do not wish to commit to the radical but ultimately saving demands of his message; his Gospel.

We hear Jesus admonish two particular groups of people: First, those who can predict rain when “a cloud” rises “in the west” and heat when the wind is “from the south” but cannot “interpret the present” signs of the kingdom of God, beginning with Jesus’ presence among them. Second, Jesus speaks against legalistic types who bring petty disputes before higher courts instead of settling them among themselves.

I have no personal slight against lawyers. I know of faithful and honest lawyers here in our parish. But I do have a soft spot in my heart for meteorologists. My father is a retired weather forecaster. Once, during my second stint teaching in Colombia, I was on pilgrimage, riding on the back of a Jeep in the mountains with other Basilian seminarians and people of the coffee and banana farming community we were visiting.  Farmers are interested in the weather, and so I was interested in the discussion they were having on the back of the Jeep. I was even able to predict correctly the storms that would hit or miss us that day. Was I channeling my father’s forecasting skill, or was this sheer luck? I suspect it was the latter.

Jesus’ point in our Gospel reading (perhaps meteorologists like my father and some lawyers may disagree) is that there is something more important than the weather or manipulating the law to resolve disputes in our favor. Most importantly, we are invited “to interpret the present time.” How do we do this?

One Vatican II document that speaks verbatim of discerning “the signs of the times” is the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes. This document laments much of the state of the world in 1965, from hunger, widening disparity between rich and poor, challenges of rapid improvements in technology and social communication (well before Facebook and Twitter!), spiritual indifference especially among youth, to the arms race and increasing destructiveness of war. And yet Gaudium et Spes was criticized by some as too optimistic!

The bishops who wrote Gaudium et Spes were optimistic or, better yet, discerned one point with profound accuracy: Despite the world’s problems, there is still a longing for God. Gaudium et Spes begins by acknowledging “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of [people] of this age” as the same “joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the followers of Christ.”

Is this not the most significant sign of “the present time”? Jesus invites us “to interpret the present time”; to discern “the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of [people] of this age”; to discern God’s presence in our midst and to build the Kingdom of God, a project brought to the present time through the life and Gospel message of Christ.

Homily for Friday, 26 September 2014– Ferial

Friday of the 25th week in Ordinary Time

Optional Memorial of Sts. Cosmas and Damian 

Readings of the day: Ecclesiastes 3:1-11; Psalm 144:1b, 2abc, 3-4; Luke 9:18-22

This homily was given at the Church of the Most Holy Trinity, Webster, NY.

Who is really in control of our lives; our world; creation? The easy answer to this question is that God is ultimately in control. Our first reading today from Ecclesiastes hints at this answer: “There is an appointed time for everything… [God] has made everything appropriate to its time… without [our] ever discovering… the work [that] God has done.”

But is it not foolish, indeed dangerous, for us to leave everything up to God’s control, when we are capable of shaping our relationships with one another, some events in our lives, in our communities, and even sometimes national and worldwide events?

There is “a time to be born and a time to die.” We have no control over birth and death. But do we not have some say in promoting peace or promoting or alleviating conflict in our interpersonal relationships; in our families; in our Church; even in our world? Are we not invited as Christians to love and not to hate; to care for one another and for God’s creation? And so why does Ecclesiastes allow for “a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace” when to love one another and, at least in part, to work toward peace is up to us? Is there ever “a time to hate”?

When I prepare with families for a funeral of a loved one, many choose this reading from Ecclesiastes as the first reading at the funeral. And yet often the short version of this reading, which leaves out “a time to hate,” is chosen. Clearly this phrase raises a fair objection. How can hatred be accepted as part of the way God has made us; made our world to be?

I think the answer to these kinds of questions is expressed toward the beginning and again toward end of our first reading today. Ecclesiastes says that, on the one hand, “there is an appointed time for everything.” On the other hand, God “has put the timeless into [our] hearts.” God has created time itself, and has also given us an awareness of “the timeless”; what we can control and influence and what we are invited to leave trustingly up to God are both God’s gift to us. Even more, the ability God has given to each and every one of us to discern the difference between what we influence and even have responsibility over and what is “timeless,” what is mystery, is God’s gift to us.

We have perhaps heard the so-called “Serenity Prayer” whose message is similar to that in our reading from Ecclesiastes: “God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Both the “Serenity Prayer” and our first reading today raise the question: Who is in control? Ultimately God is in control of our lives; our world; creation. God “has put the timeless into [our] hearts.” But God has also given us the gift of helping to shape his creation; to influence interpersonal, local, and more far-reaching relationships and events; a gift God has given to no other creature that we know.  This is our time to accept this role; this gift from God, with trust in God, balancing and discerning it along with the sense of mystery; of “the timeless,” a gift that God has also “put… into [our] hearts.”