Homily for Sunday, 13 August 2017

19th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: 1 Kings 19:9a, 11-13a; Psalm 85:9, 10, 11-12, 13-14; Romans 9:1-5; Matthew 14:22-33

How deeply do our own experiences; our society and culture; our families, friends, and acquaintances; people we regard as leaders, in society and in our Church, influence our basic image of who God is? Of how many different images of God; popular understandings of God are we able to think?

Maybe thanks to the influence of Pope Francis, although God has been understood in these terms long before him, we may be developing an increasing awareness in our Church and broader world of God as merciful; a God who calls us to be merciful and kind to one another. My observation, though, is that this increased emphasis on a merciful God calling for a more merciful Church and world has not pleased everybody. How do we balance mercy with moral accountability? How do we respond to people who persist stubbornly in defiance of moral norms of Church or of societies; who persist in sin? Might an authoritarian God resonate better with some who are worried about too permissive an image of God, so that moral decay and, eventually, the whittling away of any sense of right and wrong, continue unchecked?

What other images of God, besides the merciful God, the permissive God, and the authoritarian God, vie for space in our minds and in our experience? Much like the authoritarian God is the angry, punishing God. There is the God of military might, or the God who blesses wealth (for some, this God of the so-called “prosperity Gospel” also curses people who are poor, sick, with disabilities, or otherwise disadvantaged). The God who sets the universe in motion and then leaves it, and us, to our own devices, is also alive and well in our world: The impersonal, distant, “blind watchmaker” God or, as I have heard this god called among my brother Basilians, “Yoyo” God, as in “You’re on your own”!

These are only a few predominant images of God, of the top of my head, that we might experience. None of these images of God are perfect, although some are better than others. Some have more of a basis in Scripture than others. Today we hear about the prophet Elijah in 1 Kings. Elijah hides in a cave on Mount Horeb. Why would Elijah want to hide himself in a cave on Mount Horeb? The reading we hear today from 1 Kings is right after Elijah has killed all the prophets of Ba’al, a false god in Israel worshipped by the queen, Jezebel. In a rage, Jezebel calls for Elijah to be killed and so, fearing for his life, Elijah flees to the cave on Horeb.

Who could fault Elijah, his life in danger for obeying God against the prophets of Ba’al, for believing himself to be a failure, “no better than [his] ancestors” in eliminating from Israel any worship of foreign gods? More importantly, who could fault Elijah for understanding God first and foremost as a God of might; an angry and violent God? After all, this kind of God had been Elijah’s experience: The God who, through Elijah, had responded to the idolatry of Jezebel and the people of Israel, and Jezebel’s murder of the prophets of the LORD, by having the prophets of Ba’al slain by the sword? This same God now seemed content to leave Elijah on his own on Horeb to die.

At this point, though, when Elijah is most stuck on his images of God as mighty and perhaps angry and violent, and then as distant and allowing Elijah to sink into despair, God calls Elijah out of the cave. The LORD says to Elijah that he “is about to pass by.” Will Elijah recognize the presence of the LORD when he passes by Mount Horeb? The first vision Elijah experiences that might be God is of a strong wind, “splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces.” And, we hear, “after the wind” is “an earthquake” and then “a fire.” Do any of us wonder what Elijah may have been thinking as he was witnessing these visions? Might he have been thinking how closely the wind, the earthquake, and the fire resonated with his prior experience of God: Mighty, angry, violent, and even destructive; a God to be feared more than loved?

To Elijah’s credit, he is able to discern that none of these visions; none of these images— the wind, the earthquake, and the fire— are adequate images of God. Elijah’s and our God is “not in the wind… not in the earthquake,” and “not in the fire.” No, Elijah’s and our best and fullest experience of God is in “the sound of sheer silence.” It is as though, through the silence, God says to Elijah, “Do not be afraid. Do not fear the wrath and destruction of Jezebel. Do not fear me, as though I am an angry and violent God. I have chosen you as my prophet. Rise and wait for me at the entrance to the cave. I will be with you, in calm silence.”

Is this God who called Elijah from the cave on Horeb; is our God not the same God who has been with us from the first moments of creation? St. Paul pleads with his own people in his Letter to the Romans to recognize that the God who once appeared to Elijah in “the sound of sheer silence” is the same God who has been with us all along. This God, our God, gave to the people of Israel first “the adoption, the glory, the covenants… the Law, the worship, and the promises… the patriarchs” and finally “the Christ.” Our God is not to be feared but to be worshipped in love. Our God is “not in the wind… not in the earthquake,” and “not in the fire,” but in “the sound of sheer silence”; in the peace and unity we build in our Church, our communities, our households, and among nations. God is with us in his kindly sustenance of creation; in forgiveness of our sin and of our false images of God that we too often still promote to our world: The gods of fear, of anger, of escalating threats, of violence, of military “fire and fury”; or the impersonal “yoyo” god— “You’re on your own”!

Do we not, though, still in our day have difficulty with all these incomplete and inadequate images of God? Does our world not still, too often, fear God instead of loving God and, in loving God, learn to love one another and uphold one another’s basic dignity as creatures of God? Do too many people today (including ourselves perhaps; including me sometimes) not still doubt the loving kindness of our God by which we are ultimately saved?

To us as to Jesus’ disciples on the boat in Matthew’s Gospel who “cry out in fear” amid the storm; to us as to Peter who, thinking he is able to walk on water by himself before he becomes frightened by the wind and begins to sink; to us as St. Paul to the people who first heard him; to us as to Elijah hidden in despair on Mount Horeb, God extends a hand of kindness, encouragement, and peace, and calls out: “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” Firmly yet gently, God challenges our incomplete and inadequate images and understandings of who God is; our fear that prevents us from loving God and one another as we are called to do: “You of little faith, why did you doubt”?

Our God is in the calming of the storm at sea; in the calming of our fears; in the calming of the chaos and conflict of our world; in the calming of our false or at least incomplete images of God as either behind the chaos or distant from it. Our God “not in the wind… not in the earthquake,” and “not in the fire,” but in the silence; in the calm. May we not doubt. May we not fear, but may we worship and celebrate in love of God and of one another.

Homily for Thursday, 10 August 2017‒ Feast of St. Lawrence

Thursday of the 18th Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: 2 Corinthians 9:6-10; Psalm 112:1-2, 5-6, 7-8, 9; John 12:24-26

Today we celebrate the feast of St. Lawrence, a deacon and martyr of the Roman Empire’s persecution of Christians under the emperor Valerian. Yet when we celebrate feasts of martyrs in our Church, people who have literally given their lives for Christ and have been killed out of hatred for our faith, I often ask how we might relate to these martyrs. Are our chances of being killed for our faith not slim to nil?

Of course, more Christians have been killed for our faith in the past century than in all the previous centuries of Christianity combined. But here in Canada, while we may encounter misunderstanding, incredulity, and even ridicule if we are truly living our faith, our lives are more or less safe. And so how might we relate to martyrs like St. Lawrence? What are common aspects of our lives with those of martyrs like St. Lawrence?

The readings we hear today might give us clues to answering these questions. Our Gospel reading from John is a classic call to martyrdom; Jesus’ glorification of anybody who would give up their lives for his sake, as he himself was about to when he spoke those words: “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains… a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

St. Lawrence died indeed, and a gruesome death at that. Let me suggest, though, that his death alone was not what made him a martyr. Before his death, St. Lawrence had practiced for many years a kind of living martyrdom. The most important ministry of deacons of the time in Rome was to ensure that the necessities of life of the poor were met. This St. Lawrence did with distinction. Legend has it that, when St. Lawrence was arrested and brought before the Roman prefect, he was ordered to bring with him the treasures of the Church to be confiscated. Lawrence presented to the prefect a large group of poor people of Rome, saying: “Here are the treasures of the Church”!

We say in our Psalm response today, “Happy the merciful who give to those in need.” And in our first reading, from 2 Corinthians, we hear that “God loves a cheerful giver.” St. Lawrence was certainly “the merciful” and “cheerful giver” to anybody in need. He gave his life to this ministry, long before he was killed for his and our faith. It is foremost in these works of mercy and in his regard for the poor as “the treasures of the Church” that St. Lawrence is an example to us. St. Lawrence’s free acceptance of a martyr’s death only flowed from the martyr’s example of the rest of his life.

God calls us, as he called St. Lawrence, “happy” insofar as we “give to those in need. God calls us still to give cheerfully; to ensure that the least well off among us are not in need of necessities of life and human dignity. God calls us to value the least among us as “treasures”; to challenge social structures that marginalize and dehumanize many while enriching a few. This is living martyrdom; a true counter-culture we are called to live as St. Lawrence did, dying to ourselves in the process, as humble grains of wheat fall “into the earth” to die and, only so, to “bear much fruit.”

Homily for Wednesday, 9 August 2017– Ferial

Wednesday of the 18th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Numbers 13:1-2, 25, 14:1, 26a-29a, 34-35; Psalm 106:6-7ab, 13-14, 21-22, 23; Matthew 15:21-28

Is it possible, on the one hand, for the quality of our relationship with God, whether our fundamental relationship toward God is one of trust or one of fear, to affect our relationships with God’s creation; with one another? On the other hand, is the opposite also possible, when the quality of our relationships with creation; with one another are reflected in the quality of our relationship with God?

Our readings today, from Numbers and the Gospel of Matthew, suggest a connection between our relationships with the created world, with one another, and with God. In the Book of Numbers, we hear of the final preparation stages for the people of Israel to return home to the land God has promised them. Through Moses, God sends spies into “the land of Canaan” to scout the land the people of Israel are to settle. After forty days of scouting Canaan, the spies return and report on their spy mission to “Moses and Aaron and all the congregation of the Israelites in the land of Paran.” Their report is mixed: Canaan is prosperous, flowing with “milk and honey.” And yet the scouts doubt the ability of the people of Israel to conquer both the land and the people of Canaan. The people of Canaan “are stronger than we,” the scouts report, “to ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.” The land of Canaan itself “is a land that devours its inhabitants.”

Indirectly, the scouts’ lack of confidence that the people of Israel could settle successfully in Canaan shows their lack of trust in God, who had promised this land to them. Their default relationship with God is one of fear. And so God’s promise, the inheritance of the land of Canaan, will be for the next generation. Because of the scouts’ lack of trust in God, shown by their unfavourable report about the land of Canaan and its people, their generation is left to perish in the desert.

Contrast the fear and lack of trust of the Israelites under Moses, of the scouts to Canaan in Numbers, with the boldness of the Canaanite woman (a pagan, not even a Jew!) who asks Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel to heal her daughter. The Canaanite woman would have had every reason to fear or doubt Jesus’ ability to heal her daughter of the demon. Jesus’ disciples try to send her away because she continues to pester them. Even Jesus does not seem too keen on helping the woman. Jesus’ first priority, he says to the woman, is to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Jesus even seems, to our ears, harsh with the Canaanite woman (what this meant in Jesus’ time, if different from its meaning today, is difficult to say), likening her and her non-Israelite people to “dogs.”

Nevertheless, the Canaanite woman is not deterred. She even plays along with Jesus’ seemingly derogatory reference to her people. The Canaanite woman shows bold trust in Jesus’ ability to heal her daughter, trust that is clearly from God and that she reflects back to God in a kind of gift exchange. Jesus must acknowledge her deep trust in him and so in God, which is greater than that of most of his own people: “Great is your faith”!

Great is the faith of those people who show their trust in God by acknowledging and trusting God’s handiwork in creation and in our relationships with one another.