Homily for Sunday, July 11, 2010

Back at the end of May I went to Mississippi to go on an 8 day directed retreat.  A retreat like this is a silent retreat.  No lectures, no reading of books, no TV, no radio, no catching up on the news or sports, no conversations, except one hour a day when the retreatant meets one-on-one with the retreat director.  This is 8 days of sheer waiting and listening for God. During the daily one-on-one time, the director listens to what is going on in the life of the retreatant and then gives selected passages of Scripture to pray over.  Then, each day thereafter, the director helps the retreatant discern what is from God and what is not.

            I had yearned for this time away with God because I wanted to sort out things with God on what had happened throughout the Spring.  For the sake of visitors, it was a very difficult time because I had to make a decision that was considered by many to be the exact opposite of what I should have done.  It was a decision that was considered to be unloving, intolerant and discriminatory.

            So, I began the retreat by saying to the Lord: Go ahead, Lord, and tell me what I did wrong.  Challenge me, correct me, show me what I did that was contrary to Your will for me and for my parish.

            I figured that since so many people had reacted so violently, that surely the Lord would show me a better way to have addressed the problem. I was very open to learning from the Lord a new way of seeing things.  In fact, I expected to be corrected.  I said to the Lord, “All I want is to be a loving, gentle and kind pastor; and what happened seemed to be unloving, unkind, and hardly gentle.”

            Instead, the Lord confirmed what I did and told me that I must lay out more clearly for my flock that the road to eternal life is a straight path and the gate into eternal life is a narrow gate.  Too many are choosing the wide path that leads to spiritual destruction, oblivious to the dangers all of us are facing as the world become more secularized, more divorced from God.  

            Now for an application to the Good Samaritan story.  The Fathers of the early Church understood this Gospel not only as a description of the Gospel-call to be loving towards everyone, but it was also seen to be a description of what happens in life. Jerusalem symbolized Paradise; and the journey to Jericho symbolized the descent into sin.  The being half-dead, the nakedness and the wounds are a description of what sin does to us.  The Good Samaritan symbolizes Jesus who rescues us from our stricken condition and brings us to the inn, which symbolized the Church.  

            My brothers and sisters, secularization is presenting itself now in more and more cultures and is imposing a world and a humanity without reference to God.  God and religion are being driven away from the public square; and this increasing secularization is invading every aspect of daily life.  More and more people are developing a mentality in which God is simply not a part of their lives.  It’s a wide scale descent of humanity from Jerusalem to Jericho, from Paradise to sin.

            We are called to be compassionate not only towards all people who are suffering physically; we are also called to be compassionate toward people who are making that descent into sin.  We need to walk with sinners as Jesus did, eat with them, embrace them, but also help them know right from wrong.  The way we can lead them to the forgiveness of a loving God, is to feel the pain and chaos of our own sin and their sin, and increasingly we are to be more and more like Jesus and not enter into sin ourselves.  We need to walk amidst the temptations, distractions, and comforts offered by the world without either selling out our Christian message, or unhealthily withdrawing into some shell of not wanting to say what needs to be said.  And we need to do this all without denigrating other people.

            This is a tall order.  We risk sounding like know-it-alls.  We risk posturing as someone who is holier than thou.  There can be no hint of that kind of arrogance.  But we cannot walk by like the priest and the Levite and do nothing.  Doing nothing is not the loving thing to do!