Homilies 2005

This weekend, we continue our annual consideration of stewardship. Today, we get down to the real brass tacks. We turn our focus to funding all our many endeavors.

The majority of us are quite comfortable financially. We rarely crave for the essentials. We aren’t deprived of much, except in terms of how much or how many, or how big or how fast. There is nothing wrong with this, and we need not feel guilty about it.

Our big decision is not whether to have a television… or two or three. Our budgetary crisis is whether to splurge for that giant screen, or the new service that lets you stop action to raid the refrigerator. It’s obvious to us that every member of the household – including the dog and the cat – must absolutely have a cell phone. Our challenge is whether it can take pictures, play tunes or download my email while I’m tying up traffic in the left lane of Hull Street or swerving toward the median strip on 288.

Half of the bridesmaids in today’s gospel story believed they had what they needed. They were wrong. They had all the necessary paraphernalia – lamps, wicks and flints. They didn’t have nearly enough oil to keep the lamps burning.

It wasn’t because they were too poor to buy more oil. If that were so, the other bridesmaids were pretty heartless in their refusal to help. No, they just weren’t thinking. They weren’t being wise. The money for more lamp oil went, most likely, to buy more important things.

How important is it to you that the lamps in your life are burning bright and steady? I mean, of course, the lamps that are fueled by realities that material possessions and personal indulgences can’t and won’t provide?

It’s easy to lull yourself into thinking the parish doesn’t need much by way of your financial support, especially when it seems like we’re already able to do so much. It’s easier still when everyone can receive equally from the parish whether they give a lot, or a little or nothing at all.

The unwise bridesmaids figured they could get by on what the others would provide. But the others couldn’t give them the satisfaction of providing it for themselves.

Financial stewardship is really a matter of talking the time to stop and think. It’s about making wise choices that establish your priorities, rather than letting the frenzy of life decide them for you.

Before you fill out your commitment card, or end up not handing one in at all, stop and think.

Is the support I’m giving based on a realistic assessment of what it really costs to run the parish?
Is that support a true expression of how important the parish can, and really should be in my life?

As Catholics, the investment we make in funding our parish is a huge part of the oil that fuels our faith.

That lamp oil, when you bring enough along, can keep the flame of your faith burning, not just dimly or only for awhile, but strongly and always; not just when times are easy, but also when times get rough; not just to light the way for you, but to make the path bright and clear enough for everyone who walks there too.

This weekend we begin our annual focus on stewardship. Our stewardship efforts, of course, take place more than once a year. They happen all throughout the year. Like every effort of ours at Saint Gabriel’s, each stewardship effort, whenever it occurs, holds up to us the gospel mandate to practice what we preach.

As those who are serious about our attachment to Jesus, our constant aim is to strive for faith experiences that not only make sense, but that actually make a difference, down deep and in ways that can last and endure. This becomes keenly important to us in these days, enmeshed as we are in a culture that venerates appearances, thrives on sensations, melts at any fear and foolishly chases after every flimsy promise of success, security or material advancement.

This means in order to practice what we preach, we have to expose as phony and intentionally refuse any version of faith that turns us in on ourselves, numbs our sense of duty toward others and isolates us from the community. That is precisely why we never accept the notion that faith is a private, a so-called personal affair between me and God – because such faith has nothing at all to do with God.

To borrow a phrase from the current political vocabulary in our country, that kind of faith is “a dog that won’t hunt” here at Saint Gabriel’s or in any other truly Catholic parish. It is the false religion for which God, through the prophet, as we hear in our first reading today, condemns the priests of Israel for foisting on their people. It is, as we hear from Jesus in today’s gospel, the same notion of faith by which the scribes and Pharisees defiled the chair of Moses.

What was so horrible about those religious leaders? They claimed to possess a private pipeline to God, a personal hotline with the Almighty. What’s so bad about that? Their very claim, by which they honored themselves, denied the place of honor and esteem that God’s inclusive love extends to every person.

This is why we never look at the invitations of stewardship as one more hassle, one more bothersome claim on our time, our energy and our resources.

Rather, we embrace stewardship as an opportunity to reach down into ourselves to discover a gift placed in each of us by God. It is a gift that God has never denied to any person. It is, in fact, the gift that makes all of us like God. It is the gift of generosity.

Our stewardship team will invite you to share your gifts. Before we are willing to share gifts, we must first recognize our gifts and appreciate their value.

Stewardship helps us discover the gift of generosity – the gift that draws us out of ourselves; the gift that opens us to enjoy the gift of giving; the gift that always receives much more than it ever gives.

We talk about being “self-conscious”. Someone once suggested the term should change to “other-conscious”. We are easily distracted by other people’s opinion or estimation of us. Parents fret over the influence of peer pressure on their teenagers. Truth be told, we adults are very susceptible, maybe more than our teenagers, to the expectations of our peers.

Acting our age, becoming comfortable with looking at the world as adults, is a major part of what it means to mature spiritually. Look back over our summer liturgies, to our little course in being disciples. Jesus has been introducing us to adulthood. He slowly moves us from a childish (not childlike) faith to faith that is realistic, healthy and mature.

This is why we our insisting nowadays that faith in not about the head but the heart. Faith is not a collection of facts, but personal conversion, a real relationship with a real person, Jesus Christ.

We’ve finally resolved to do faith the way Jesus directs us, by putting emphasis on our formation as adults, in a way that is truthful and sincere. We are coming to see that we cannot pass on the strength of faith – abstract faith, maybe, but not the strength of our faith – to our children and youth if our own faith is undeveloped and immature.

Our summer course in discipleship starts to wind down today, coming to its end with what seems like a misplaced question. After these months of instruction, you would think Jesus would ask us to reflect on ourselves, on who we’ve become in the process. The fitting question would seem to be, “Who are you now?”

Instead, Jesus asks a more penetrating question. It reminds us that discipleship has little to do with who we think we are, or who we yearn to be, and everything to do with who Jesus is for us.

The mature Christian puts aside all delusions of self-importance. She realizes that human achievement and control are deceptions. He understands why Jesus chooses the least likely disciple to be the head apostle. As mature disciples, we take great consolation in knowing that the denier, the weakling, the dim-witted one, the fumbler is the one Jesus appoints to be the rock, the key-holder and the one in charge.

We have a poignant call to spiritual maturity in events that have unfolded recently on the Gaza strip. It stands apart from opinions about the conflict itself. Even in the face of severe provocations, the Israeli soldiers and police did not resort to taking up arms against settlers and protestors in Gaza.

Whatever the motivation, and whether or not they or their leaders will take a lesson from it, here emerges a persuasive message for our turbulent times. It silences the childish blabber that has forever insisted that violent and deadly conflict is the only sure way to resolve human conflict. From this resolute refusal to sacrifice human lives in exchange for security and peace, the light of truth flashes. It exposes the vulgar irresponsibility that calculates the expenditure of human life on the scales of strategic practicality and that reduces the destruction of human life to a political liability.

Why is it that Jesus doesn’t hesitate to make of Peter, who was anything but “a rock”, the foundation for what he wants to build? It is because Jesus is not erecting a fortress of power, majesty and might to be borne on the shoulders of others. He is fashioning a church, constructed from the wood of a cross, a handful of nails and a crown of thorns. It is assembled from his own bruised body and held together by the pouring out of his own blood.

It is from a position of weakness and vulnerability that Jesus shows us true authority and real strength. From the cross, Jesus confirms and wants us to realize that it makes no difference what others make of us, or what our ambitions tempt us into thinking we can make of ourselves. From the cross, Jesus knows and wants to teach our heart that the only thing that matters to any of us is what God wants and is able to make of us all.

We open the font of baptism to newborns and the very young. We claim them for the Lord, pledging to stand by them as they grow in the Lord.

We open, as well, our arms to teenagers returning from their work week in Petersburg . We welcome them home, eager for the stories they bring from their efforts among the poor.

The responsibilities we undertake as the Lord’s disciples are many and demanding. It is no wonder we can feel inadequate to the task.

We fret over not having what it takes. Like the first disciples, we immediately conclude that there’s more we need, more to do, more to accomplish before we’ll ever be ready for discipleship.

This week, our staff and I spent a day in inner-city Petersburg . We went to visit with 17 of our teenagers who spent the entire week there. Assisted by adult and young adult supervisors, they formed work crews with teenagers from other churches. Their task was to make repairs and improvements to twenty homes belonging to the poor.

The youth get to interact with the residents of the houses they are fixing. One of the first residents we met on our visit was intent on telling us how grateful she was for what the kids were doing. She struggled for just the right words to describe what their service meant to her. Finally she said, and repeated over and again, “They brought in hope, that’s what I’m saying, they brought in hope”.

We spoke with the daughter of another resident, an elderly man confined to a well chair. She told us how he had been depressed and hadn’t left his house for years. “I just couldn’t get him to budge,” she said. “But when these young ones came in here, he just came right back to life. Yesterday he had me push his wheelchair down the road to visit a friend he hasn’t seen in forty years.”

The disciples said to Jesus, “Lord, all we have here are five fish and a couple of loaves of bread… you’ve got to let us go get more”. We are not the first to think we don’t have what we need to do what Jesus wants of us.

A handful of teenagers went down to a poverty stricken area of Petersburg . What a dumb thing to do.

Didn’t they consider all that terrible heat? Didn’t they realize that kids can’t make much of a difference anyway – not with just a bunch of nails, some fancy tools and a few buckets of paint?

With the little they had, what did they presume to achieve in the face of such vast misery and enormous hardship?

And Jesus said to the disciples, “Bring what you have here to me”. That’s when the miracles start to happen; when we trust in the Lord. That’s when a handful of teenagers, with little in hand, can bring in hope for a young woman and can bring an old man back to life.

Whoever we are, however we live and whatever we have… all of us feel that things could be better. There is for each of us that one thing or set of things, which we still lack, and just have to have. If we could only get our hands on it, it would make everything perfect.

For Jesus, the “one crucial and indispensable thing” is for us to value the kingdom of God .

But, what is God’s kingdom? Do we know what it is, to be able to seek it, like the merchant and his pearls? If we found it, like the fellow in the field, would we even recognize it?

God’s kingdom is a life where what God wants is what happens. We carry out God’s desires naturally and freely, not by force or obligation, but out of spontaneous love and with generous devotion.

This weekend, a dozen or so of our teenagers leave for Work Camp. They will spend the week among the poor down in Petersburg , Virginia . They will be working on the homes of the poor, fixing, replacing, painting and doing what’s needed to help improve truly terrible living conditions. They will interact with the poor and get to know them and how they live day in and day out.

When I spoke with them, each of the youth had their own version of a common motive for going to Work Camp. They want to come away with a deeper appreciation for what they have, for their own blessings. They want to let the poor know that they matter, are not forgotten and are not alone.

With such goals, there will be those among this handful of teenagers who will touch God’s kingdom during their week in Petersburg . Like Solomon, the wise, they are not after more for themselves, just the wisdom to know the value of what they already have. Their sights are not set on themselves, but on assuring others of their dignity, value and worth.

As our teenagers scrape, brush, hammer and saw their way through a week of Work Camp, they will uncover treasures in the most unlikely places. They will receive from the poor, who will appear to have little to give, more than any of us with all our richness could ever provide them.

Our parish treasure lies in those among us with wise hearts, like these young people and the teenagers who go to Work Camp each year. Our pearls of great price exist in those who love and dedicate themselves to the work and prosperity of the parish, and to the health and wellbeing of our faith life.

Our richness rests in the vitality and excitement that is all around us in this place we call Saint Gabriel Parish. It can be discovered in numerous programs, efforts, services and events – and in the spirit that is behind and part of each.

It is a treasure that we can, all of us, learn to appreciate more and take for granted less. It is a way of life that is freely, spontaneously and generously shared with all of us, which others among us should and can attempt to imitate more willing and more often.

Our first reaction is to jump in and fix things, to take charge and make things right. In our passion to succeed, we muster power to push obstacles aside and assert whatever force it takes to make things go the way we think they should.

Enormous trees grow from the tiniest of seeds, but only when hands are gentle and resolute enough to sustain such tender beginnings.

A little yeast transforms a whole mound of flour into bread, as long as the kneading is not too rough or too prolonged.

A wise grower tells his impulsive workers to back off with their hard-line plans to ensure a bountiful harvest.

To be useful disciples, we must know and truly believe that aggression, power and might never really change a thing. No matter how committed we are to what is good; we cannot force or impose goodness on anyone.

It takes on strength from our gentleness. It gains endurance from our patience. It ripens and matures, slowly but surely, from the yeast of our persistent love.

Today it is my pleasure to introduce Sister Maria Teresa Goffi, a dear friend and a true co-worker in the mission of discipleship. She is going to ask your help in the tasks of cultivating, transforming and harvesting that are the life’s work of the Comboni Missionary Sisters.

You may know them by their former name, the Sisters of Verona. I know that your support for these women will be generous. They bring about enormous good, often with the tiniest resources – and always with gentle hands, patient hearts and persistent love.

Maria Teresa and all the Comboni Sisters whom I’ve known throughout the years always embrace me as un amico della famiglia, “a friend of the family”. I can return the honor today in a special way by inviting you to welcome her as un’amica nella nostra casa, “a friend in our home”.

The Word of God is not for the most part a talking word. It is first and foremost a doing word.

The first words that God speaks, at creation, become what they express. God says “light”, and there is light. God utters the word “earth”, and the earth is there. God speaks of the moon and the stars and the sky, and there they are.

We speak of discipleship as our vocation. This is, of course, easier said than done. Carpenters and furniture makers deal in wood. Farmers deal in produce or livestock. Accountants and money managers deal in numbers. Designers deal in shapes and forms. Computer technicians deal in software and hardware. All of these trades and careers have their interested clients and their avid consumers.

As disciples, we deal in the Word of God. The numbers of those who seek us out are few and far between. Our potential clients, if you will, are often anything but eager to obtain what we offer. More likely, they are indifferent to our offerings. Frequently they react with opposition and even animosity.

As Isaiah the prophet has said, words that come from God’s mouth are not expected to come back void. God’s word is not spoken idly. It is not there, like so much else that people seek today, to appease or to pacify.

God’s word is loaded to the hilt with intention – it seeks, as it did at creation, to make happen what it conveys. It is not meant drift in one ear and out the other, to gratify and entertain us as it passes through. It comes to take hold of us. It seeks to involve us in its purpose. It intends to make us part of “achieving the end for which (God) sent it”.

As disciples, we cannot proclaim to others a word that we have not first put into action in our own lives. Nor can we think that our work is done when others remain only an audience to God’s word.

As disciples of the Lord, we can never be satisfied with communities of bystanders who hear but make no effort to listen, who see but do nothing to understand. Worse still, it is never our privilege to claim that God’s word is meant only for a few, that our destiny is to be a handful of active and passionate believers in a sea of disinterest and apathy.

To do the work of disciples, we must be honest with ourselves and willing to be just as honest with each other. No one knows the joy and thrill of doing God’s word, who sits by idly waiting to be served by it without first serving it.

As disciples, we must never say of our sisters and brothers: “maybe they aren’t involved, but at least they are here” or “at least they come around some of the time rather that not at all”. This is not courtesy or openness, it is neglect. God’s word is waiting to me achieved in them no less than in anyone else.

The ability to fulfill God’s word in our own life, to act on it and to live it out is the gift of faith that is given to all, equally. Where it slumbers, no one has made the effort to awaken it. Where it sits unproductive, no one has worked to persuade and cajole it to bear fruit. Where it is shriveling and decaying, no one has bothered to attend to it, to give it water and light.

The gift of faith is not my gift or your gift. It is our gift. If it is not growing rich in all of us, it is not fully appreciated by any of us.

The field where the seeds of faith are sown is not just my section of the field or your section alone. It is the field of life where all of us are meant to flourish. If there are hard places or dry spots, our work as disciples is to till them, to irrigate them and to make them places where faith will take root and grow.

The first semester of our summer course on discipleship, if you will, came to a close with last weekend’s liturgy. The timing to move to the next phase coincides perfectly with our “Fourth of July” break.

Over the next few weekends, there will be a brief transition. During it, we will reflect on the experience of preaching God’s word to people who are not interested or who might even be hostile.

Jesus begins the transition this weekend. Fittingly enough it comes alongside the secular festivities of Independence Day. It is an invitation from Jesus to true freedom and liberation.

Jesus wants us to put aside a set of endeavors that have us weary and exhausted. He wants us to put down a set of burdens that have been weighing heavily on us. Before we breathe a sigh of relief, we better listen carefully. It could be that Jesus is trying to liberate us from things quite different than what we would imagine.

Jesus spends his entire ministry struggling against concepts of God that are harmful to us. They come to us from those whom Jesus calls, in today’s gospel passage and elsewhere, “the learned and the wise” who, for all their knowledge of religion, know nothing of the generosity of God.

Instead, they construct a false religion. It becomes the enemy of faith. It teaches us that we must win God’s love; it instructs us in ways to earn God’s favor; it convinces us to rely on our own power and might to get God to save us.

False religion never invites us trust in God’s love. It has us struggling constantly to gain God’s salvation, rather than participating in it and welcoming others to join us in it.

Jesus rails against religious leaders of his day for “heaping burdens on the people”, burdens which they “never lift a finger to help them put down”. These are the burdens that Jesus wants us now to put down for ourselves. Jesus sees the weariness of our spirits. He sees how we’ve exhausted ourselves with the labor of earning God’s love and favor.

We cannot take up the work of discipleship while we are entrapped and immersed in useless efforts to win our salvation.

Jesus invites us to leave those labors behind us. He welcomes us to join him under another yoke, the yoke of God’s free gift of salvation. It is the yoke that will guide us away from the fruitlessness of our own endeavors. It is the harness that will lead us to see and give thanks for all God’s efforts on our behalf.

Only with that yoke on our shoulders can we see and reveal what wisdom and learning alone cannot know: the precious worth that all of us enjoy in the generous heart of God.

Our summer course on how to follow Jesus, on how to be his disciples, continues with a lesson on being biblical prophets.

Have you ever been in a situation where no one else sees what you are seeing? I don’t mean you’re hallucinating. Instead, some awful thing is taking place, and no one seems to notice but you. You’re not seeing pink elephants, but everyone is ignoring a huge elephant sitting in the middle of the room.

You keep pointing to what’s wrong, but no one will pay attention. Or they try to sugarcoat it, or water it down. Or they try to convince you that what you know is wrong is really right. Or, worse, you’re suddenly the villain. The cause of the wrongdoing or harm that you’ve addressed is all of a sudden the victim of your ruthless and uncalled-for criticism.

If you’ve had such an experience, and hung in there, you know what it means to be a biblical prophet.

You’re a biblical prophet when you challenge a group of friends at school about the way they treat another kid; or when you show them – or even some adults – that you can have real fun without alcohol or drugs.

When you help a fellow Catholic identify the faith conflict beneath his or her biting comments about the Church or the parish – you are practicing biblical prophesy.

You are being a biblical prophet when you speak out about moral crusaders who selectively ignore or shrewdly play down one or another moral crisis because addressing it would not be popular or convenient, or solving it would require radical change or demand personal sacrifice.

God raises us up as prophets by showing us what God sees. Prophets are not secret keepers. We are eye-openers who, like God, will not rest until others see what is really going on – especially as it affects the poor, the neglected and the forgotten among God’s people. And we should never worry about whose feather’s we ruffle in the process.

Jesus calls us as his disciples to be biblical prophets. Others, of course, might have different names for us.

Nonetheless, as we heard at our last Feast, we are the ones who at our baptism received, with Christ, the anointing of priests, prophets and kings.

As anointed prophets, Jesus charges us to hang in there when others avoid and deny what’s going on. What others admit only in muffled whispers, Jesus wants us to shout about from the housetops. What some would like to keep in the dark, Jesus wants us to pull out into the light.

Maybe before now we have hesitated and held our tongues. Shyness, or even fear, might have gotten the best of us.

But from now on, let anyone who has benefited from our silence be afraid. Let those who have been deprived of the blessing of our voice know that our fears have ended.

You know that you are called to be prophets. Jesus, who calls you, will never deny you. So, do not be afraid.

We know what it means to be God’s prophets. The care of God, who opens our eyes, will never abandon us. So let’s not be afraid.

We continue this weekend what we could call our “summer course on discipleship”.

To review from last weekend, we are at the beginning of one of two liturgical periods called Ordinary Time. This one takes us from the festivities of the Easter season all the way to our preparations for Christmas in Advent – from summer right to the end of the fall in November. The second period will move us from the Christmas season into Lent.

During the summer, we’ll be hearing, as we do today, and did last week, passages from Matthew’s gospel. Along with the other scripture passages for our liturgies, the selections from Matthew are all about being a discipleship.

I’m calling this our summer course on discipleship to drive home a point. The call to be disciples is a call that Jesus addresses to us, to me and to each one of you.

A disciple is a student. We are students of the Lord Jesus. We listen to learn. When true learning takes place, things change for the student. Once we’ve agreed to be disciples, our lives will never be the same. We will never be the same.

“If you do what you hear me say, and keep my covenant, you will be a treasure to me”. With these words, God gives us a new way to look at ourselves.

As we listen and learn God’s commands, we recognize the true purpose behind them. God is helping us discover who we truly are. God does not turn us into a treasure. God introduces us to the treasure God created us to be.

In today’s gospel passage, Jesus sends us out to do the very things that he has been doing. What’s more, Jesus empowers us with his own authority.

Discipleship is not a mindless, empty venture. Jesus does not lead us around by our noses. He doesn’t play us like puppets on a string. The works of Jesus become our works in union with him. His authority becomes ours, in imitation of him. Discipleship is partnership.

Here again we discover ourselves anew. Our work is not just any work. We are not just run-of-the-mill laborers. We are partners with Jesus himself. Our efforts will bear the fruit of a new and better way of life for all people.

As disciples our life has a purpose that reaches beyond material things. Our work expresses our dignity as those chosen and called by Jesus himself. As disciples, what we say and what we do offers new meaning to others. Our task is to repair and transform the broken and tarnished image that others have of themselves.

As we take up the work of discipleship, we return to our true purpose as one of God’s people. We rediscover ourselves as created in God’s image. Our service to others affirms their rightful heritage as God’s own, and opens their eyes to God’s presence in their lives.

When we engage in the Lord’s work, we can proclaim with him that the Kingdom of God is truly at hand.

Matthew is the selected gospel for this period of Ordinary Time. Ordinary Time is the time between our great liturgical seasons. It is an opportunity to review what it means to live out the mysteries we celebrate at Christmas and Easter.

This time around, the focus is on discipleship. The passages we hear from Matthew’s gospel will give us a job description for being a disciple. It will be an orientation to our job responsibilities, to what Jesus expects of all of us who call him Lord.

As we will experience at this month’s Feast, the font of baptism is the first place where we encounter our vocation as disciples. That vocation is a call to be like Jesus, to make his reasons for living the purpose for our own living.

Understandably, as soon as we hear that comparison to Jesus, many of us back off from discipleship. The job seems far out of our range, way beyond our abilities, much more than any of us would be worthy to undertake.

Oddly enough, one of the first persons that Jesus recruits as a disciple seems no more fit for the job than any of us. He is a “social misfit”, one of those “outcasts” that no one would take seriously as a disciple. He is, more bluntly, a sinner.

Please do not misunderstand. We must not conclude from the call of Matthew that a facility at sinning is among the job qualifications for discipleship. We should, though, quickly figure out that, as far as Jesus is concerned, those who are “holier than thou” need not apply.

Jesus is looking for people with personal experience in the field of mercy. Jesus knows that the self-righteous have their own brand of mercy. It’s the kind the Pharisees excel in doling out – with harsh judgments, biting criticisms and no qualms about slamming the door on those who don’t make the grade. It’s not the brand of mercy that Jesus seeks.

Jesus wants disciples skilled in compassion. He is looking for individuals who can provide the kind of mercy that restores dignity and rekindles hope. Jesus calls to be disciples those who have failed miserably and know what it is to get a second chance. He seeks those who have been down-and-out and know what it’s like to receive a helping hand.

And so, when Jesus posts the position for discipleship, none of us need hesitate to apply.

We can be thankful to be part of a community where there are so many disciples – whether they use the title or not – who encourage us with their example.

In the upcoming Messenger, our parish newsletter, for example, you’ll see a story from one of our parishioners.

She jumped in, along with six other parishioners, to answer a last minute call to feed the homeless. More to the point, as she recounts, she had just messed up with another set of parish responsibilities. She could have let failure dishearten her. Instead, it became an incentive to get back up and return to being a disciple.

On Friday evening, I was with more than a dozen of our teenagers. They will be spending a week of summer vacation fixing homes for the elderly and poor. None of them is very excited about hard work and in the crushing heat of July. Yet, in their own words, they are all look forward to “an eye-opening experience” of being with the poorest of the poor.

We have close to 100 adults and teenagers getting ready to provide Vacation Bible School for our little ones. Right now, until more of you sign up your kids, there are more helpers than there are students.

At the same time, you might know a parishioner who isn’t exactly enthused about church involvement. Or maybe it’s someone who doesn’t get to church at all, or only rarely. They are, for all appearances, dead to faith.

Go home, and look over the rest of the passage from today’s gospel. It’s in the 9 th chapter of Matthew’s gospel.

You’ll read about a father who comes to Jesus for help because his daughter has died.

Jesus goes to the child, and announces that she isn’t dead, but merely asleep. Jesus takes the child’s hand, and she comes up and out of her deathbed.

As a disciple, the ministry of Jesus is your ministry. That means that your job duties include waking the dead!

In our times, “the dead” can be fellow Catholics who have fallen into a deep sleep when it comes to living their faith.

Our task as disciples is to go to those who are asleep and to stir them – with our excitement, with our desire to share our joy with them, with our willingness to take their hand and welcome them back among us.

Nowadays we translate that as: The Feast of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ. Lots of words for a once simple phrase: Corpus Christi .

Some people are going around saying that most Catholics don’t believe in the Body and Blood of Christ anymore.

If you read the Letters to the Editor in our diocesan paper, you’ll know what I mean. The writers say they know it's so because they’ve read a survey that says it’s so.

What a strange twist, resorting to surveys to gauge what people believe. Worse still, it’s a flimsy way to justify such a sweeping indictment of people’s faith.

The scriptures use different tools to test what people believe. They are more trustworthy. More to the point, they don’t rely on words to test beliefs. They look instead to actions.

Living like we believe, acting like the Body and Blood of Christ is real to us – that is the very point of the scriptures which the Church puts before us in the liturgy for Corpus Christi .

All of us here enjoy many blessings, and we need not deny that we do. The gift of the Body and Blood of Christ helps us distinguish, however, between two kinds of blessings: those that give life, and those that make a mess of our life.

Some blessings, so-called, make us feel superior and self-important, so that we hold others in contempt. Blessings like those turn us inward, isolate us and ruin our relationships with others.

A true blessing, however, fills us with gratitude and thanksgiving. That’s why we use the Greek term Eucharist for the Body and Blood of Christ. It means to give thanks, to act grateful.

True blessings compel us to share what we’ve received. They make as eager to bring others into the blessing, to repeat the generosity. They cause us to reach out; they bring us together and unify us. That’s why the Body and Blood of Christ is a holy communion.

It’s doesn’t matter what we have or what we lack. What matters is how we receive and accept what we have and the way we handle having what others might not have. We ourselves control whether what we have is a blessing or a curse.

Last Sunday evening I met with some of the youth for our monthly “chats with Fr. Pat”. Before I arrived, a speaker told them about the experience of being homeless. Following the talk, two groups – Middle School and High School – totaling about 40 teenagers put together 250 bag lunches for Richmond ’s Friends of the Homeless. The kids wrote messages to the homeless on the bags, and put notes inside the bags.

There is an irony to today’s feast. Christians have argued and even fought over whether or not the consecrated bread and wine really turns into Jesus. Jesus turns the issue around. He wants us to realize that he becomes bread and wine, that he is food and drink for us. Jesus serves himself to us. He is the bread we eat. He is the wine we drink.

What our teenagers put in those bags might not sound like much – a sandwich, some pretzels and a few Oreo cookies. What they put into making those bag lunches goes far beyond what we could measure.

One of teenagers told me, “I want the homeless to know they aren’t alone out there on the streets”.

Our youth minister told me that the homeless were thrilled and excited. They thanked God that there are still such good young people around.

Another teenager asked if bag lunches could become a regular project for our youth. I said, “Consider it done”. And he said, “Thanks. It helps me appreciate what I have. And it’s a chance to let the homeless know that they’re important.”

I don’t know how those 40 kids would do with a survey about Jesus being present in the Eucharist. I’m certain of one thing, though: When these kids are adults, we won’t see letters in diocesan newspapers from any of them claiming to be better Catholics than everyone else.

The Eucharist is not about academics, and certainly not about putting other people down. The Body and Blood of Christ is the living God who comes down to be among the people and who lives to be food and drink for his people. His presence is known to us in the breaking of bread and the pouring of wine.

We make that presence known to others by a grateful repeating of the blessing. Our Eucharist is to make of ourselves a blessing to others, to feed them with the gifts we have received from the hands of Jesus, to offer them a cup full and overflowing with the love of Christ.

Last weekend, on Pentecost Sunday, we looked back to recall and celebrate our beginnings as a Church. We gave thanks for our heritage, conceived as it was in the very mission of Jesus. We took stock of the nature of our own mission as a church, born as it was from the mission of Jesus, upon which all our efforts and strivings are modeled and to which every action and undertaking of ours must be accountable.

We saw Jesus, in the upper room, setting us off on our mission as the church with words and actions of forgiveness, healing, reconciliation and peace.

We reach back to our origins once again today as we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Trinity.

Merely to speak, in the same breath, of our origins and of God goes immediately to the wonder of the reality we celebrate today. The doctrine of the Trinity, for all the academic discussions that have surrounded it, keeps alive for us one simple and central truth. It is the truth that ours is a personal God.

When we profess belief in a Trinity God, we speak volumes more than those who claim that it all begins and ends with insisting that we were created by God. As the old ballad used to go, “If that’s all there is, my friend, then let’s keep dancing.”

We, on the other hand, know our Creator as the God whose very life is all wrapped up in our existence. God creates us, sure enough. More marvelously, God creates for us!

Ours is the God who comes to live life with and for us, whose spirit wraps us up in the life of one another and in a sacred and holy communion of life with the Living God. Ours is a fellowship God. The Trinity God - fully immersed in our lives, from the beginning and to this very day and forevermore.

Today is Pentecost, the feast of our beginnings as a church. For the children, we say it’s the Church’s birthday, so they can understand.

Today we mark the first in a series of countless days, stretching over 2000 years of human existence, which compose the history of our Church. The events of Pentecost launched a myriad of lifetimes, lived beneath the branches of the Tree of Life and lived out in imitation of the Crucified and Risen Christ.

It is fascinating, even astounding to hear the accounts of how this reality of being church came about. This is true especially when you consider how things could have gotten started, as opposed to the way they actually began.

We hear again that familiar text where Jesus finds the disciples huddled behind closed doors, looking and acting like a bunch of scared rabbits. Imagine the scene when Jesus drops in on this frightened and indecisive group. Jesus must have been the last person they wanted to have bursting in on their nail-biting assembly.

This was not the first time this motley cluster had failed to live up to the Lord’s expectations. Standing there now, with their tails tucked up under their knocking knees, I have no doubt they were bracing for a stern dressing down from Jesus.

“Shalom” (we translate it to mean “Peace be with you”). It was a greeting used only among friends. It’s not something you’d say when you’re about to lay someone out in lavender.

Just when they think Jesus is about to clobber them – he offers his “Shalom”. He is assuring them that all is well. “Don’t sweat it,” he’s telling them – “I’m not going to bite off your heads”.

That’s when the Spirit of what it means to be Jesus’ church finally grabbed hold of them. “Shalom” – “I’m starting you off on your mission by looking beyond your weakness and failures”.

Our mission as a church is born out of the womb of patience, compassion and the willingness to give others a second chance.

In that context, Jesus answers a question that was tossed around that upper room a thousand times before he arrived: “What do we do now?”

Jesus answers by pointing his disciples towards sinners. Not to scold or chew them out (anymore than they had gotten the dressing-down they so well deserved). They are, instead, to forgive and reconcile sinners.

This is the same text where Thomas is gone when Jesus makes his first visit. Thomas hasn’t stayed locked inside like the rest.

When the others make the claim that Jesus is alive, Thomas wants to touch Jesus’ wounds. When Jesus returns, he lets Thomas do just that – touch his wounded hands and feet; put a finger into the wound in his side.

Thomas had been out with the crowds; out among people wounded in many ways. Jesus was also out with the crowds. But Thomas couldn’t see Jesus there, not until he touched the wounds of Jesus.

In the exchange with Thomas, Jesus sets the Church off in the right direction. Our mission starts with touching wounds.

Our church is born in the wounds of Christ who wants to be known in all who are wounded.

Ours is the Spirit of Pentecost. It’s the Spirit of those who have suffered the shame of falling down and who have thrilled in the delight of being lifted up.

As a Pentecost people, we live always under the branches of the Tree of Life, going forward, that is, with the hope of the cross always at our back.

Our Pentecost hope is that whenever we shut out Christ, he will come to find us. It is the hope that, found by Christ, we don’t have to pretend to be what we aren’t and don’t need to make believe we’re doing something we haven’t yet done. It is the hope of those who are forgiven, prompting and strengthening us to forgive. It is the hope that comes from being reconciled, impelling us not to exclude or cast aside, but to gather in and unite.

As a Pentecost people, ours is the song of faith authored by Thomas, the first disciple to go out among the crowds. It is an anthem sung by us whenever we touch the wounded, and sung with us by those who feel our touch upon their wounds:

At the Feast this past week, I heard something about the word “mystery” that was completely new to me. Its Greek root means “infinitely knowable”.

A mystery is not something we will never understand. Instead, mysteries are realities that we never stop understanding!

So often in the Gospels, it takes people a long while to understand what Jesus is saying or doing. At first, the meaning escapes them, or they misinterpret. It’s only later that the real significance emerges. Or, before they can fully understand, they have to recall something else that Jesus said or did before. Many times, they have to reach way back into Jewish scriptures before they really grasp what’s going on.

That’s why we don’t fool with Bible fundamentalists. You can’t hack the scriptures up into isolated stories or phrases. If you do, you are bound to get the wrong impression about everything that is written there.

Jesus is the Master of Mystery. That doesn’t mean he keeps things hidden from us or unexplained.

Rather, Jesus shows us that truth is something to be discovered and explored. He shows us how God’s wisdom is gradually, and constantly, unfolding for us. He teaches us to seek and uncover the wonder of God’s love in the everyday experiences and events of life.

In one of the Gospels, the followers of Jesus are going through a period of real discouragement and frustration. Jesus is becoming harder and harder to understand. His challenges are more and more difficult to accept. In the middle of all that, Jesus is working a cure on a blind man. And the cure doesn’t work – at least not completely at first. It takes several tries, with lots of blurred vision before the fellow is able to see things clearly.

Seeing the way the cure unfolded helped the disciples realize that faith is not flash-in-the-pan. So, the story of the curing can’t stand alone. Its meaning could get twisted around if it did. Instead, one story, about a man who cannot see, becomes a wealth of hope and encouragement for the disciples and for us.

While Jesus persists in getting that blind man to see, he urges us to stay the course with our own faith. As we’ve heard repeated so often in the Easter season scriptures, Jesus assures us that he will stand by us and stick with us, that he will not rest until we get what God wants for us. Jesus wants us to trust that he will never leave us alone.

Too many Christians toss the Ascension aside as a mystery that we could never understand.

Look back to before the Ascension. It’s no mystery in the way we usually use that word. Although, it starts off that way. For weeks now, we’ve heard Jesus predict his departure from this earth. He’s going back to the Father. And, somehow, that’s supposed to make us happy. “You ought to rejoice,” he says, “that I am returning to Father.”

Why should we rejoice? Here’s another promise made and broken. One more disappointment. He we are again, abandoned and alone.

“I have come”, Jesus told us, “so that my joy can be yours, and your joy can be complete”. What joy is that?

His joy was not in sitting back, but in standing up. His joy was not in wringing his hands, but in jumping in with both feet. His joy was not in being served, but in serving.

How can doing for others make me happy? How can giving up the little I have get me more than I could ever want? How can serving others make me feel on top of the world?

I guess it’s a mystery… the kind we’ll never understand. Unless, of course, we get up and do it. Then it becomes a mystery that we will never stop understanding – and one that will bring us joy – completely and forever!

Over these three festival days, we’ve taken a new look at life, piercing beyond what simply meets the eye.

On Thursday, we looked at the Eucharist as more than wine and bread alone. Unlike those who come only to eat, drink and run – we saw the Eucharist as a time to watch and pray as the spirit of Jesus transforms us into food and drink to satisfy and nourish others.

On Friday, we took hold of the cross, an instrument of death, to see what life, if any, could possibly remain there. As we watched and prayed, Jesus fashioned from the dried limbs of our faults and failures a flowering tree whose branches can bring joy and hope to a waiting world.

We continue to keep watch tonight. As darkness falls, we face the night with all that Jesus has provided us.

Yet in the cold and damp air, we begin to worry and fret: Can the fire we’ve lit against the night’s chill really burn forever? Will the great sagas of greatness and might that we have just retold sustain us for what lies ahead?

As we stand safe and warm in the glow of our Paschal Light, should we really ignore the thickening darkness outside our doors?

Yes, Jesus has made us over into food and drink for others. Yet, how many hungers can just the few of us satisfy? Can we possibly quench every thirst that the crowds will bring to us?

Yes, Jesus has strengthened our limbs, and we feel the sap of his life running through us. Yet, can this one tree, beautiful as it is in full bloom, withstand the hot and dry days that lie ahead, or the storms that will surely come? And tender as we are, the life so new within us, can we survive the biting winds and freezing cold of winter?

As we watch and pray, we feel the earth shifting beneath our feet.
It trembles. It quakes.

We hear the sounds of strong, aggressive men. Now they are whimpering and sniveling. Their armor clatters as they shake with fear. They abandon their weapons. They flee like so many frightened children.

The quaking earth is the world as we have let it evolve. It is the breeding ground for everything that brought Jesus to the cross. It is a world gone wild with power and self-interest.

As we watch and pray in vigil tonight, evil is being shaken at its very foundation. We see its dazzling golden façade crack and crumble.

We watch the fleeing bullies and we recognize exactly who they are. They are the purveyors of hatred and bigotry. They are the ringleaders of violence and war. They are the champions of everything that cheapens life and degrades the human person.

These terrified giants are the phony politicians, the charlatan religious leaders, the holier-than-thou fanatics, the fat cats whose day of reckoning has finally arrived. They are the mighty whom God is finally evicting from their thrones.

The resurrection is not something we can look at in this way or that. It is not something we see in any way it all. No one saw God raising Jesus from the dead.

Resurrection is something that happens to us. It changes us. It helps us see things for what they truly are. It shifts the earth and everything else we thought was firmly in place beneath our feet.

The resurrection is not the end of those things that threaten and menace us. It is the end of our bowing to their power. It is the end of our catering and cowering to them.

The resurrection does not promise us an eternal spring, or trees that bloom forever or a sun that never sets.

It is the promise that the winter’s snows will always melt.
It is the sure hope that the sun will never sink below the horizon without rising glorious again in the morning.

Resurrection is the fearlessness that comes from knowing that the gardener of the Tree of Life is God. God who raised Jesus from the dead. God whose dauntless care for us will always shake death from our roots. God who will always send death scurrying away from us.

Resurrection is the heart and soul of our faith - faith that frees us to believe and to be sure that even what looks like dead wood is indeed a living tree, a Tree of Life that will never fail to sprout its buds and blossom in all its glory – again and again, always and forever.

	Saint Gabriel Parish Homily Archives
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	Homilies 2005
	• Stewardship 2 - Nov 6 32nd Sunday Ordinary Time • Stewardship 1 - Oct 30 31st Sunday Ordinary Time • 21st Sunday Ordinary Time - Aug 21 • 18th Sunday Ordinary Time - Jul 31 • 17th Sunday Ordinary Time - Jul 24 • 16th Sunday Ordinary Time - Jul 17 • 15th Sunday Ordinary Time - Jul 10 • 14th Sunday Ordinary Time - Jul 3 • 12th Sunday Ordinary Time - Jun 19 • 11th Sunday Ordinary Time - Jun 12 • 10th Sunday Ordinary Time - Jun 5 • Corpus Christi Sunday - May 29 • Trinity Sunday - May 22 • Pentecost Sunday - May 15 • Ascension Sunday - May 8 • Easter Vigil - Mar 26 • Good Friday - Mar 25 • Holy Thursday - Mar 24