31st Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Deuteronomy 6:2-6; Hebrews 7:23-28; Matthew 12:28b-34

When in our Gospel reading a scribe comes to Jesus

and asks him which of the commandments is the greatest

Jesus’s answer is in one sense not surprising:

he replies by quoting from the book of Deuteronomy

a passage that is to the Jewish people

perhaps the most familiar passage in all of Scripture:

Hear, O Israel!
The Lord our God is Lord alone!
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
with all your soul,
with all your mind,
and with all your strength.

But Jesus does not stop there.

This first and greatest commandment

seems to immediately imply a second commandment,

this one taken from the book of Leviticus:

You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

What is notable about Jesus’s answer to the scribe’s question

is not so much the two passages of Scripture that he cites

but rather the way in which he joins them together:

love of God and love of neighbor go hand in hand.

Indeed, we might say that love of God and love of neighbor

are but a single love.

The great 17^th-century saint, Francis de Sales,

said that love is like the ladder that Jacob saw in his dream,

stretching between heaven and earth,

upon which the angels ascended and descended:

love is a ladder,

“raising us even to spiritual union with God,

and bringing us back to loving companionship

with our neighbors” (Treatise on Perfection Bk. 10 ch. 11).

On this weekend, when we celebrate our relationship

with our Sister Parish of St. John the Baptist 

in Sepalau, Guatemala,

it is good to remind ourselves of this single love

upon which we are raised up to God

and journey back to our neighbor.

We have had a relationship with the people of Sepalau,

a remote mountain village of about 800 people, 

for twenty years;

we have helped finance a school building, a church,

and most recently a community chicken coop.

We have sent delegations from our parish down 

every couple of years 

and, as many of you remember, 

a delegation from Sepalau

came to visit us here in Baltimore in 2008.

Maintaining this relationship has required much effort,

not only because of the physical distance of some 3000 miles,

but also because of the distance 

of language and culture and experience.

Those of us who have not been there 

cannot really imagine

the daily lives of the people of Sepalau:

the great beauty of the land and culture of Guatemala,

but also the every-day struggles of this particular village.

For example, I am sorry to say that the chicken coop project

has gotten off to a rocky start

due in part to the logistical difficulties 

of setting up a community bank account

but also due to disagreements within the village itself,

community dynamics that are themselves 

difficult for us to understand:

why can't they do things the way that we do them?

The people of Sepalau are good people, 

but they are not perfect people.

And maybe it is in this that they are most like us.

We too seek to be good – 

to love God and love our neighbor –

but we too are imperfect in that love.

While we as a parish want to show our love 

to the people of Sepalau,

the distances of time and culture 

make maintaining this relationship a challenge

and all too easy to put out of our minds

or to leave to someone else.

Perhaps this is the way 

in which love of God and love of neighbor

most resemble each other:

if it is difficult to love the neighbor whom we can see

how much more difficult is it 

to love the God whom we cannot see?

If our love of neighbor is imperfect,

how much more do we fail 

in our attempts to love God 

with all our heart,

all our soul, 

all our strength?

So while love is the ladder 

upon which we rise up to God

and which brings us back to our neighbor,

it all proves to be a pretty complicated and difficult affair.

Our faltering human love 

can seem like a pretty shaky ladder.

But thanks be to God 

that the twofold commandment

to love God and neighbor

is enfolded within the promise of God’s love for us.

In the love we show to our neighbors –

whether distant neighbors in Sepalau,

or near neighbors in Baltimore,

or the nearest neighbors of all: our friends and family –

we are simply handing on 

the love that God has shown to us:

in the end it is God’s love that is the ladder

that brings us close to God’s kingdom;

it is God’s love along which we journey 

to our neighbors near and far,

and it is God’s love that unites us together with them

to the God who is love. 

27th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Genesis 2:18-24; Hebrews 2:9-11; Mark 10:2-16

Some of you might recall the Catholic custom of “First Fridays.”

These were days especially devoted to the Sacred Heart of Jesus

when Catholics would go to special Masses 

or perform other devotions.

This was sometimes associated with promises

of particular spiritual benefits

for those who received communion at First Friday Masses

for nine consecutive months,

most specifically the gift of dying in a state of grace

with the Heart of Jesus as their refuge in their final moments.

Now this might seems just a bit too calculating: 

in exchange for about half an hour a month 

over nine consecutive months

I can get my ticket into heaven stamped.

Seems like a pretty good deal.

It might be easy for some of us to be scornful

of such a simplistic spirituality

and be glad that the Church has grown beyond such things.

But the Church has not abandoned the custom of First Fridays;

in fact, I went to a First Friday Mass just this past week

at Loyola University, where I work.

I think it is actually a good thing 

that the Church has continued this practice,

because our Catholic tradition 

of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus

is rooted in a profound theological insight

into the nature of God’s love for us.

Because God has become a human being in Jesus Christ,

God not only loves us with perfect divine love,

the dispassionate love of God’s benevolence to all creatures,

but God also loves us with the love of Jesus’s human heart,

a heart that, like our hearts, knows pain and distress,

a heart that is pierced and broken when love is rejected,

a heart that, precisely in being pierced and broken,

has become a source of grace, a place of refuge,

for all the brokenhearted of the world.

This theology is rooted in what we read today

in the Letter to the Hebrews:

Jesus is the one who by the grace of God 

tastes death for everyone,

who has been made perfect through suffering.

A human heart made perfect through suffering –

made perfect in the knowledge 

of what each and every one of us suffers,

an intimate knowledge of the failures and betrayals 

of human love,

as well as love’s glories and triumphs.

And, the writer of Hebrews says,

he is not ashamed to call us brothers and sisters.

This is good to bear in mind 

as we reflect on our Gospel reading,

in which we hear Jesus’s stringent 

and challenging teaching

regarding marriage and divorce.

His words offer no escape clauses,

and I am not going to try to invent one for you.

Even if we put the teaching in historical context

and understand that in Jesus’s culture

the way in which men could cavalierly abandon their wives

was a genuine social justice concern,

Jesus’ teaching still does not seem to recognize

the pain that often accompanies the collapse of a marriage:

the shattered hopes and broken hearts and rejected loves.

Of course, Jesus’s point here is to underscore for his hearers

the challenge of being his disciple

and the promise that the original integrity of creation

will be restored through him.

But we should also remember that this challenge and this promise

are made by one whose own heart is broken on the cross

by the rejection of his love.

However we deal with the challenge 

of Jesus’s teaching on marriage,

we must remember that he too is one 

whose human heart is wounded,

and that from his wounded heart 

he offers salvation and hope.

On Friday, as Mass was ending, 

I reflected on the people who were there.

Many of them were elderly,

and they undoubtedly had long experience

of the joys and sorrows of human life:

promises kept and promises broke,

hopes fulfilled and hopes destroyed,

marriages that survived and marriages that didn’t.

What drew them there to that church on that day?

Was it simply the promise of the benefits gained

by attendance at nine consecutive First Fridays?

Or was it, rather, the chance to worship the God

who knows from within the joys and sorrows of the human heart

and whose love can sustain us through those sorrows and into joy?

Whenever I officiate at a wedding in this church,

before the service I light a candle 

at our altar of the Sacred Heart,

and I pray that the couple would know 

the love of Jesus in their marriage:

the love of a heart that is broken, yet forgives,

a heart that knows our failings but is always open to us,

a heart that is a place of refuge and of healing.

I pray that all of us would come to know 

the love that flows from that heart

and would share it in turn with all those whom we meet.

23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Isaiah 35:4-7a; James 2: 1-5; Mark 7:31-37

Through my son Denis, the percussionist,

I have recently been introduced to the work

of the Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie.

She is a remarkable musician in a number of ways:

sustaining a career as a solo classical percussionist,

receiving over fifteen honorary doctorates,

winning a Grammy,

and being one of the featured performers

at the opening ceremonies of this past summer’s Olympics.

She also happens to be deaf.

Because she would much rather be known as a musician

than as a “deaf musician,”

she generally does not talk much about her deafness.

But when pressed she will say that while she is deaf,

in the sense that her ears do not work properly,

this does not mean that she cannot hear.

Hearing is simply being able to interpret vibrations,

to experience them as meaningful.

And while most of us do this most of the time 

with our ears,

we can also do it with other parts of the body,

as when we feel the rumble of a passing truck 

in our torsos

or see the reverberation of a guitar string or a drum head 

with our eyes.

If one does not have use of his or her ears,

then one must find other ways to connect 

to the vibrations that we call music,

which is what Evelyn Glennie has learned how to do.

Hearing, Glennie says, is in some ways 

just a specialized form of the sense of touch,

and what she has learned to do is to interpret pitch and tone

with the whole of her body,

building up in her brain what she calls a “sound picture”

by opening up her whole self and letting the music inhabit her

so that she can in turn let music flow out of her

through the medium of her instrument.

Evelyn Glennie shows us the power of human beings

to adapt to seeming limitations and to overcome obstacles

in pursuit of the things they love.

But she also shows us that hearing

is about far more than what we do with our ears.

In some ways, “hearing” is about our whole self

opening up to the reality around it.

This can help shed light on today’s Gospel reading.

This story involves much more than simply the healing

of one whose ears do not work properly.

The man’s deafness here is a symbol of spiritual deafness –

of the way in which we close ourselves off

to the vibrations produced by what God is doing in the world.

In the context of Mark’s Gospel,

the deafness of the man whom Jesus heals

is a symbol of the inability of the people of Jesus’s day,

of even his own disciples,

to recognize the presence of God’s messiah in their midst.

Their expectations of what God’s anointed would be like –

a powerful warrior and ruler like King David –

made them incapable of hearing God’s voice 

in Jesus, God’s Word.

In our second reading, from the letter of James,

we encounter another sort of spiritual deafness:

an inability to recognize 

in the poor person with shabby clothes

one whom God has chosen to be rich in faith

and heir of the kingdom that God promised 

to those who love him.

The people in Mark’s Gospel,

the Christians to whom James writes,

and even we ourselves,

depend perhaps too much 

on our normal way of perceiving things

and so are deaf 

to the presence and activity of God around us.

The example of Evelyn Glennie

learning to hear music with more than her ears

indicates to us that in order for us to overcome

our own spiritual deafness to the Word of God in all its forms

we need to open ourselves up to new ways of knowing,

new ways of sensing the presence of God.

When Jesus heals the deaf man, 

he touches his mouth and ears

and says, “Ephphatha – be opened!”

Today he says to us as well, “Be opened!”

We need to be opened by Christ,

so that we can hear with our whole self,

hear the voice of God that sounds all around us:

in the sometimes comforting 

and sometimes discomfiting words of Scripture,

in the cries of those who beg for food,

in the voices of those who cry out for justice,

in the words even of those who might disagree with us.

If Jesus touches our ears and opens our senses

our deafness can be overcome;

the music of God’s Word can inhabit us and transform us.

And as with the man in today’s Gospel,

the touch of Jesus opens not only our ears, 

but also our mouths,

so that the music of God’s Word that fills us

can also flow forth from us

to bring hope and comfort and challenge and good news

to all whom we encounter.

Ephphata – be opened!

19th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: 1 Kings 19:4-8; Ephesians 4:30-5:2; John 6:41-51

“Get up and eat, 

else the journey will be too long for you!”

These are the words that God, 

sounding suspiciously like someone’s mother, 

speaks in our first reading,

when Elijah has grown discouraged 

on the journey he is making to Mt. Horeb, 

where he will encounter God.

He is being pursued by his nemesis King Ahab 

and it looks like his prophetic mission is a failure,

so he sits himself down beneath a broom tree 

and prays to die:

“This is enough, O Lord!”

But God will have none of it:

he sends an angel with bread and water 

and tells him,

after he lies down for a second time,

“Get up and eat, 

else the journey will be too long for you!”

God has plans for Elijah;

God has a journey for him to undertake,

and the miraculous food and drink that God offers him

is intended to sustain him on that journey.

Maybe you have never prayed to die,

or maybe you have,

but I suspect that almost everyone here

has at some point or other sat down and said,

“This is enough, O Lord!”

I am tired of having my efforts go unappreciated.

I am tired of work that is frustrating.

I am tired of trying to love people who do not love me back.

I am tired of taking one step forward and two steps back.

I am tired of this journey you have put me on

and I think I will just stop, sit down, and let life run its course.

We may not pray for death like Elijah did,

but we do sometimes feel like giving up on life – 

giving up on a life that is more than simply getting by,

more than simply marking time, 

giving up on our life having some larger meaning, 

some eternal meaning, 

some meaning in the eyes of God.

We give up on the idea of our life 

being a journey to Mt. Horeb

where we will meet God.

But God will have none of this.

I cannot, of course, speak for you,

but I know that when I say, 

“This is enough, O Lord!”

God never seems to reply,

“Yes, you’re right.

The journey is too long.

I’ve asked too much.”

Instead God says, 

“Get up and eat, 

else the journey will be too long for you!”

God seems to say this most often 

in the form of my wife or children or friends

not letting me mope around feeling sorry for myself.

God reminds me through their voices 

that there really is no choice,

if my life is to have ultimate meaning,

but to get up, as weary as I might feel,

and continue the journey

even though its final goal, 

union with the living God,

is something that lies infinitely beyond 

even my power to imagine.

“Get up and eat.”

What food can sustain us on such a journey?

What food can give us the strength to go forward

into the mystery of the living God?

Jesus says it quite plainly in todays Gospel:

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven;

whoever eats this bread will live forever;

and the bread that I will give
is my flesh for the life of the world."

One of the terms that early Christians
used for the Eucharist was viaticum,

which means “food for the journey,”

a term we still use for the final Eucharist given to the dying.

But in a sense every Eucharist is viaticum;

as a medieval hymn puts it,

     O food of travellers, angels’ bread,
     Manna with which the blest are fed,
     Draw near, and with your sweetness fill
     The hungry hearts that seek you still.

Every time we receive the Eucharist, it is food for our journey.

But it seems so small:
how could a bit of bread and sip of wine

fill the hunger of our hearts?

How could a small Sunday slice of time 

give us the food that would sustain us
on a journey to eternity?

This is the mystery:

the bread and wine that we bring to God’s table

is graciously accepted by God

and then graciously given back to us,

no longer bread and wine

but Christ’s flesh for the life of the world.

This is the mystery:
here at this altar,

week in and week out,

we come, weary travelers,
to whom God says, 

“Get up and eat,
else the journey will be too long for you!”

And strengthened
by the living bread of Jesus Christ

we continue on the journey,

glorifying the Lord by our lives.

14th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Ezekiel 2:2-5; 2 Corinthians 12:7-10; Mark 6:1-6

I don’t typically look to summer blockbusters or superheroes
for the starting point of a homily,
but in light of today’s readings
I could not help but think
of the new “reboot” of Spider-man
that debuted this past week.
The villain in the movie,
the one-armed mad scientist Dr. Curt Conners,
is driven to harness the regenerative power of reptiles –
you know, the way that lizards can regrow their tails –
not only so that he can regrow his own missing arm,
but so that he might create, as he puts it,
“a world without weakness.”

Well, as usually happens to mad scientists,
Dr. Connors’s ambitions involve him
in some serious technological overreach and
(spoiler alert!)
he ends up turning himself
into a giant reptilian monster
and terrorizing New York City
until Spider-man comes along
to save the day.

As I said, I don’t usually look for wisdom from movies,
particularly not from ones
in which the main character dresses in Spandex,
but in this case I think that,
in addition to some awesome 3-D special effects,
we have a genuine insight:
our desire to create a world without weakness,
no matter how well intentioned it may seem,
will in the end destroy our humanity,
because in this life
weakness is part of our human condition.

It was the rhetoric of ridding the world of weakness
that accompanied Hitler’s murderous campaign
to cleanse the world of so-called inferior races.
It is perhaps a desire for a world without weakness
that accounts for the fact that at least 70% of pregnancies
in which the fetus is diagnosed with Down Syndrome
are terminated.
It is the quest for what we might call
“a Church without weakness”
that leads some to desire a smaller, “purer” Church,
presumably one that is rid of all those
who might struggle with the teachings of the Church
on various matters of faith and morals.
And it is the desire for a self without weakness
that leads us either to deny our own frailty,
or to loath the frailty within ourselves
that we cannot deny.

Our second reading,
from Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians,
is one of the New Testament’s profound reflections
on the grace of living in a world of weakness.
Paul says that God gave him
a “thorn in the flesh,
an angel [or ‘messenger’] of Satan” –
in order to remind him of his weakness.
This might refer to a physical disability
or perhaps to some sort of moral temptation
to which Paul was prone,
but, whatever the nature of this “thorn,”
when Paul prays three times to have it removed
God says in reply, “My grace is sufficient for you,
for power is made perfect in weakness.”

Power is made perfect in weakness.
St. Thomas Aquinas comments
that this is “a remarkable way of speaking,”
sort of like saying
“fire increases in water” (Super 2 Cor. cap. 12 lec. 3).
But this remarkable way of speaking
should be, for we who are Christians,
our native language,
because it allows us to speak eloquently of God’s grace.
If we boast of our weakness –
if we acknowledge our fragility –
then, Paul tells us,
the power of Christ will dwell in us.
The power of Christ is not a power
that makes a world without weakness
but rather a power that makes its dwelling
within our world of weakness,
a power that inhabits weakness,
in order to offer a way through weakness
into God’s embrace.
The cross shows us
the perfection of power in weakness in all its mystery,
for it is our faith as Christians
that through the cross of Jesus
God has poured out the power of grace,
a grace abundant to save an entire world of weakness.
And when we know our own weakness we are set free
to embrace the very power of God.

When we accept our own weakness
we are also set free to accept the weakness of others,
to give up our dream of the perfect spouse or child,
our dream of the perfect Church,
our dream of a world without weakness.
To know your own weakness is to have God’s Spirit
open your heart to others
in compassion and mercy.

What is your weakness?
What is the thorn in your flesh?
In a sense, it doesn’t matter.
What matters
is that we all live in a world of weakness.
What matters
is that God invites us today to know our weakness
so that we may know fully
the power of God’s grace at work in us.
We should not seek a world without weakness,
for when we are weak –
when we know our own helplessness
and our need for mercy –
it is then we are strong in mercy
through the power of God.