3rd Week of Ordinary Time

Readings: Jonah 3:1-5, 10; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20

“Time is running out…
The world in its present form is passing away…”
Paul tells us in our second reading today,
so we should set aside worldly concerns.
And in our Gospel Jesus arrives proclaiming, 
“This is the time of fulfillment.
The kingdom of God is at hand.
Repent and believe in the Gospel.”
Already the old world is crumbling
and the new world is being born.

But two thousand years later,
with the world seemingly still firmly in place,
what can such words mean for us?
Was Paul simply wrong about the timing of things
or was Jesus merely mistaken 
about the nearness of the Kingdom?
Can we safely ignore Paul’s advice 
about how to live in a world that is passing away?
Can we put off responding to Jesus’ call 
to repent and believe in the Gospel?

I don’t think so.

For Paul is surely correct: time is running out.
Indeed, that is all time ever does.
Time’s arrow ultimately moves in only one direction,
and the world as we know it 
is simply one long process of passing away.
Both for us as individuals and for the world as a whole
the end is, if not exactly in sight, 
at least predictable with some certainty.
You and I will one day die,
and the cosmos as we know it will one day end.
Everything that we seek to hold onto
decays and slips through our fingers.
Our loves and our labors,
our tears and our laughter,
all are passing.
We know this on some level,
which is why we expend 
so much energy trying to deny it.
We engage in fruitless attempts
to hold on to what is passing
and to exert control over 
what is in fact beyond our control.
And these attempts are often purchased
at the expense of others.
We are willing to deceive and destroy
in order to maintain the illusion
that we have mastery over our own destinies
and can change the direction of time’s arrow.

But we do not have to think that way.
Indeed, when Jesus says 
“repent and believe in the Gospel”
he issues a call to think differently
about our lives and our world.
To repent means literally “to think again,”
to change one’s mind,
to rethink and reevaluate 
and to see the world in a new way
so as to live in the world in a new way.
Time’s arrow need not point us toward death
and the ultimate dissolution of all that we love;
for those who believe in the good news Jesus brings,
it can point us toward the victory of life over death,
toward a new birth from above.
It can point us to a life that is more
than the endless clawing after control
of a world that is passing away.
This is the life to which Jesus calls
Simon and Andrew and James and John
in today’s Gospel,
when they abandon control of their own destinies
by placing their lives in the hands of Jesus.
This is the life to which Jesus calls us.

But what does all this look like concretely?
Let me offer an example.
Recently the Chinese embassy in the U.S.,
seeking to manage the bad public relations resulting
from the Chinese government’s repression of the Uygurs,
the Muslim minority in northwestern China,
tweeted out this message: 
“Study shows that in the process of eradicating extremism, 
the minds of Uygur women in Xinjiang were emancipated 
and gender equality and reproductive health were promoted, 
making them no longer baby-making machines. 
They are more confident and independent.”
What the embassy clothes in the appealing language
of emancipation, equality, and health
are in fact practices of forced sterilization and abortion
carried out as part of a program of genocide 
against a religious and ethnic minority. 

This is obviously something horrific.
But what is particularly striking
is the claim that Uygur women
are in this process gaining control over their lives,
a seductive claim that is used 
to try and sell this genocidal program,
not simply to us Americans,
who are heavily invested to our own autonomy,
but to the Uygur women themselves,
who are forced into re-education camps
where they are told that the abortion of their children
is in fact making them masters of their own destinies.
If this reeducation works,
the government will no longer have to resort
to the crude methods of forcing Uygur women 
to abort their pregnancies.
If it works, Uygur women will confidently choose 
to do so themselves,
in the name of emancipation, equality, and health.
In other words, they will have become just like us.

But what if this sort of control is an illusion?
What if we cannot kill our way 
to emancipation from fear,
the fear that we will not be able to hold onto
the future that steadily slips through our fingers?
What if the only hope 
in a world that is passing away
is to place our futures in the hands of Jesus?
Can we change our ways of thinking,
repent and think anew,
so that true emancipation is found
not in autonomy but in community,
not in self-assertion but in mutual service,
not in violence against the weak
but in welcoming the stranger?

I think one reason why the issue of abortion
remains so intractable in our own nation—
along with issues of poverty and immigration, 
the death penalty and racism—
is that all of us cling too tightly
to this world that is passing away
and to the illusion of control.
Indeed, we are willing to sustain that illusion
at the expense of others.
If we can just eliminate 
one more unwanted pregnancy,
one more hardened criminal,
one more undocumented alien…
well, then time’s arrow might change direction, 

the world might stop passing away
and be as we would like it to be.

We need to hear together the call of Jesus to repent.
For the words of Jesus remain true:
the kingdom of God is at hand.
It is just on the other side 
of a different way of thinking
which can lead to a different way of living.
May the God of grace
grant us a spirit of repentance
and have mercy on us all.

Baptism of the Lord

Readings: Isaiah 55:1-11; 1 John 5:1-9; Mark 1:7-11 

VIDEO

I had a very nice homily in mind for today:
something about ancient Israelite cosmology
and the symbolic role it plays in Mark’s story 
of Jesus’ baptism.
But, as so often in life and ministry,
events interrupt our plans,
and I feel compelled to say something
about the assault on the Capitol building
and about what light the Gospel of Jesus Christ
can shed in these dark days.

I feel compelled to say something,
but I speak with trepidation,
since I cannot really say anything 
about these things
without saying something 
about the role played by our President. 
I know that 50% of Catholics 
who voted in the last election
voted for Mr. Trump,
for a variety of reasons, of course,
and with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
Still, odds are that some of you 
might not like what I must say.
But say it I must, 
so I hope you will hear me out.

It is hard to deny that this past Wednesday
the words of President Trump were a spark, 
falling upon the fuel 
of weeks of unsubstantiated 
and repeatedly debunked claims 
of a stolen election,
a spark that ignited an insurrection that led
to an attempt by some to derail 
the peaceful transfer of power 
and ultimately to the deaths of five people.
The resignations of numerous people 
from Mr. Trump’s administration make it evident 
that even the most ardent supporters of his policies
have been forced to recognize his role
in inciting these shameful and deadly actions.
Even those who rejoice in his support
for the pro-life movement 
have been forced to see in his actions 
a blatant disregard
for the sanctity of life and for the common good.

I will admit that his words and actions have made me angry.
But they have also made me profoundly sad.
They have made me sad because I see in Mr. Trump
a dark truth about human beings in general. 
Donald Trump, despite some residual bluster, 
now stands defeated:
not by circumstances,
not by his political foes,
not by the media,
but ultimately by himself.
He has been defeated by an aversion to truth
that all of us, in our own ways, share.
I do not know if his false claim 
to have won the election by a landslide
is a cynical deception or a sincere delusion,
but whether deception or delusion
it is certainly evidence of something
that is true of all of us to some extent,
whatever our political persuasion:

in our desire for mastery over our lives,
and the lives of others,
we will believe and promote falsehoods;
we will deny and suppress the truth 
to bolster our egos,
even when doing so deadens our souls
and harms those around us.

As the poet T.S. Eliot put it,

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

You see this aversion to reality in Scripture, 
in the story of our first parents,
who chose to believe the serpent’s lies
that they could steal the wisdom of God
and so become the source and meaning 
of their own existence.
You see it today in the allure 
of elaborate conspiracy theories that we embrace 
because they support our worldview.
You see it in our resistance to new information
that might challenge our beliefs or lifestyles.
You see it in the tenacity with which we cling
to the conviction that our side, our party, our tribe
should be completely identified with the forces of light
and that those who disagree or oppose us
must be cast as the forces of darkness.

To recognize in Mr. Trump something that is,
to one degree or another,
true of all of us
is not to excuse his actions.
He had a choice,
just as we all have a choice.
We have a choice 
because into the darkness 
of deception and delusion
a light has shone,
and the darkness has not overcome it.
When Christ is baptized,
the heavens are torn open 
and the Spirit of truth descends upon him
and, through him, is unleashed upon our world.
Writing of Christ’s baptism,
St. Gregory of Naziansus said,
“Christ is bathed in light; let us also be bathed in light.”
Christ did not go down into the waters of the river Jordan
in order to be cleansed of sin,
but rather to purify the dark stream of human blindness
that flows from the sin of our first parents.
He plunges into the waters of deception and delusion
to transform them into waters of light and life.

In these enlightening waters we find
not just our salvation,
but an invitation, a call, a summons
to reflect in the world the light of truth
that has shone upon us.
St. Gregory writes, “God wants you
to become a living force for all humanity,
lights shining in the world. 
You are to be radiant lights 
as you stand beside Christ, 
the great light,
bathed in the glory of him 
who is the light of heaven.”
We must live as light in a world of lies.
We must first and foremost proclaim the great truth
of the world’s redemption through Christ, 
but we must also guard the more ordinary truths
from which our daily common life is woven.
We must resist the impulse to believe and promote
falsehoods that offer our egos 
temporary comfort in the illusion of mastery.
We must bear witness to the truth,
even when that truth discomfits us,
because without truth we are doomed.

We have seen this week one more example
of the destructive force of deception and delusion,
and we have heard in our Gospel a call
to be bathed in the Spirit of truth.
May Christ our way heal and bless our country,
may Christ our truth enlighten and empower his Church,
and may Christ our life have mercy on us all.

Tuesday after Epiphany--St. John Neumann

Readings: 1 John 4:7-10; Mark 6:34-44

“His heart was moved with pity for them.”
We have, I think, a deep ambivalence about pity.
Saying that you pity someone can be taken
as an underhanded way of asserting your superiority.
And how many of us have heard people say,
or said ourselves,
“I don’t want your pity.”
We feel that to receive pity is demeaning;
to feel ourselves pitied is to feel shame.
And yet, don’t we also want 
our suffering to be recognized?
Don’t we want others to grasp 
what it is we are going through?
Don’t we want what we are going through 
to move them in some way?
Is there a better way to put this than “pity”?
Perhaps we should call it “compassion”—
which literally means “to suffer with.”

But, whether we call it pity or compassion,
what is striking in today’s Gospel
is that this is what Jesus feels toward us.
He feels pity and compassion
because we are “like sheep without a shepherd.”
We wander in futility, 
motivated less by purpose than by fear.
He feels pity and compassion
because we are hungry—
not necessarily physically hungry,
though he pities that as well,
but spiritually hungry for the bread of life.
He feels pity and compassion
because that is who he is:
he is the divine pity who comes to guide us,
God’s compassion made flesh to feed us.
“In this way the love of God was revealed to us:
God sent his only-begotten Son into the world
so that we might have life through him.”

The saint we remember today, St. John Neumann,
like all the saints,
was made holy in giving himself over entirely
to this divine pity, this Godly compassion.
The saints know without shame
that they are saved by God’s pity,
and this knowledge allows them in turn
to live lives of divine compassion for others.
John Neumann, who spent a number of years in this area
ministering at St. Augustine’s in Elkridge
and St. Alphonsus here in Baltimore, 
poured out his life 
for the newly arrived immigrants to America,
who faced strong nativist prejudice
and anti-Catholic hostility.
Whether as a parish priest or as bishop of Philadelphia,
he sought nothing else but to lead lost sheep to Christ
and to feed them with the bread of everlasting life.
In his diary, he wrote the following prayer:
“My heart is pierced with sorrow 
when I hear of the loss of one of my sheep. 
Lord Jesus, have mercy. 
Permit not that any one of those 
whom you have entrusted to me should be lost. 
O my Jesus, I will pray, fast, suffer,
and, with the help of your grace, sacrifice life itself.”
When he died in 1860, at only forty-eight years of age,
God welcomed home one whose life 
was shaped by the pity of Christ,
who achieved great things
only because he knew himself to be
enfolded within the divine compassion
that has shown forth in Christ.

May we too embrace 

God’s pity and compassion,

and may God have mercy on us all.