The Heart of the Matter

Homily for Sunday, September 25, 2011

Autumn is a good time to think ahead to the autumn of our lives.  When we are young, we don’t think too much about the end of life; we have too much to live for.  But even for the young, it is very worthwhile to know about the autumn of life.  

In autumn the days become shorter, the nights become longer, the leaves become their most beautiful just before they fall to the ground.

So also for a human being.  In the autumn we become more aware of the shortness of life, and if we have aged in wisdom and grace, we become our most beautiful before we die.  

That aging in wisdom and grace is our task all along the way through the years of our lives.  Our final beauty is determined by our life  of faith. Or, another way to say that is: our eternal salvation is determined by our freewill response to the Lord’s grace as He portions it out to each according to His purpose.  Today’s Scriptures give us some powerful medicine to reflect upon the end of our days.

Our Gospel selection about the two sons is very instructive and thought provoking.  We see one son who gives lip service to his father yet never carries out the will of the father.  The other son seems to be rather rebellious, flatly denying any willingness to do the father’s will.  However, as the day wears on, he changes his mind and does the exact thing his father had asked him to do earlier on the day.

This second son can be a symbol of the rebellious child of God who turns his or her back on God the Father and goes off to do his own thing, even to the point of having nothing at all to do the will of God.  Perhaps even, sin is added to sin, so that this one loses his way, so much so, that he gets to a point where he changes his mind, opens up to the grace of God and turns his life around.

The beauty of Jesus’ telling the story of this son is that there is always hope for someone who has been baptized, that God’s grace will turn him around.

On the other hand, there is the other son, the one who gives lip service, thereby avoiding an explicit fight with his father, but he never does the will of his father.

This first son can be a symbol of the baptized person whose actions are totally inconsistent with the teachings of Christ.   The right words may come forth from his lips, but his heart is far from doing the will of God.  This kind of person, and there are many of them, causes the kind of problem that Mahatma Ghandi experienced.  When asked why he never became a Christian, he said:

"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. The materialism of affluent Christian countries appears to contradict the claims of Jesus Christ that says it’s not possible to worship both Mammon and God at the same time."

So, we must be more forthright about the role of evil, the role of blatant or subtle wickedness. Seeing evil clearly may lead us to undergo a conversion of heart and make God, and God's will, our top priority.  Hear this from Pope Benedict in his encounter this week with Lutherans near the spot where the Protestant Reformation was born:

 “Most

people

today,

even

Christians,

set

out

from

the

presupposition that God is not fundamentally interested in our sins and virtues. He knows that we are all mere flesh. And insofar as people believe in an afterlife and a divine judgment at all, nearly everyone presumes for all practical purposes that God is bound to be magnanimous and that ultimately he mercifully overlooks our small failings. The question [of how we stand with God] no longer troubles us. But are they really so small, our failings?

“Is not the world laid waste through the corruption of the great, but also of the small, who think only of their own advantage? Is it not laid waste through the power of drugs, which thrives on the one hand on greed and avarice, and on the other hand on the craving for pleasure of those who become addicted? Is the world not threatened by the growing readiness to use violence, frequently masking itself with claims to religious motivation? Could hunger and poverty so devastate parts of the world if love for God and godly love of neighbor . . . were more alive in us? I could go on. No, evil is no small matter. Were we truly to place God at the centre of our lives, [evil] could not be so powerful.” 

So, whether we are young or old, we really do need to ask the question:  where do I stand before God? 

 

Homily for Sunday, September 11, 2011

“Anger and wrath and hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight.”

 Have you ever considered how much energy we spend on anger?  Have you ever thought, what a waste of time and energy is it to abide in anger?  Abiding in anger clouds our view of reality and pushes us to miss the beauty of life and to see even more of the dark side of life.  Anger leaves us irritable and more likely to become angrier still when a mild irritation comes along.  Anger steals our peace; and when our decisions are made in a spirit of anger, the decisions are rarely good ones.

Abiding in anger makes us unpleasant to be around.  It makes us irritable and likely to say mean things. When someone abides in anger, the tranquility of the home is spoiled; and if someone in the family is hugging anger and wrath tightly, then how pleasant is it for the other members of the family to come home?

Now, there are different types of anger.  There is the perfectly normal, and healthy, anger of reacting to some event or comment that is hurtful either to ourselves or to another.  This is what we call righteous wrath.  But righteous wrath does not steal our inner peace.  No, righteous wrath spurs us into action to correct the injustice that has been done, or even to rescue someone who has fallen into the trap of some injustice.  This kind of righteous wrath is not the most common form of anger.  Indeed, it is always accompanied by inner peace and confidence and a drive to fix what can be fixed, or to point out an injustice so that “the elephant in the room” is recognized and somehow dealt with.

This is different from the anger and wrath that are hateful things.  The hateful things about anger and wrath are described by the following hallmarks:

When anger steals our inner peace and leaves us on edge and bleeds into the fabric of our lives, this is a hateful thing.

When anger leaves us in a state of being easily irritated and likely to lash out, this is a hateful thing.

When anger seems to control our inner life and makes us unpleasant to be around, this is a hateful thing.

When anger comes out of perfectionism that wants everything and everyone to conform to our high standard, this is a hateful thing.

When anger leaves no room for forgiveness and reconciliation, this too is a hateful thing.

Jesus today makes it very clear to us today that He, the Lord, is very patient with us and very willing to be merciful and forgiving of us, especially when we call upon him for his mercy.  But the Lord also makes it very clear that we must exercise the very same kind of patience and mercy in our relationships with others.

Why is it that we always seem to hurt the people we love the most?  Whether is is by words or actions, why do we disrupt the tranquility of the home, which should be our place of safety and security?  Why? Because we have not yet come to recognize that we are far more in danger of the Lord’s wrath than we realize.  If we really understood the Lord’s mercy, we would clearly see how much in need of it we are.  If we could see our failings and sins as the Lord sees them, we would fall on our knees and plead for his mercy.  It would surely be given to us!

But in our pride we tend to think that I, the great “I”, am the only one entitled to be a sinner.  Everyone else must be perfect, but I can go on judging others as somehow less than they should be, so I abide in anger.

Abiding in anger is a massive failure in humility.  I, I alone, can stay as I am, but everyone else must change to be as I want them to be.

Do you remember the great line in Scripture where Jesus says, “How can you remove the speck in your brother’s eye, when you have a wooden plank in your own eye?”

So, my brothers and sisters, when we catch ourselves being angry, and especially when the angers persists, then let’s do a soul check to see if our pride is getting in the way.  If the cause of our anger is is such that we have a state of righteous wrath, then let’s do whatever we can to address the injustice that needs attention.  Then, as the serenity prayer says, we change what we can change and accept what we cannot change, and we ask the Lord for the wisdom to know the difference.

Addressing injustices, however, are rare circumstances.  Mostly, we are like the proud debtor in the Gospel who thinks that he alone should be given mercy.  Remember the words of the Our Father: forgive us our trespasses AS we forgive those who trespass against us, and only as much as we forgive those who sin against us.

 

Homily for Sunday, September 4, 2011

Whenever I hear of tremendous conflicts that people are having with someone else I think of this selection from Matthew 18 as appropriate guidance: talk to the person directly but keep it between the two of you, maybe the problem can be solved by just an honest conversation.  If that doesn’t work, take one or two people with you to bring some objectivity into solving the problem.  If that doesn’t work, take it to the church, a larger group of believers, to seek their help.  If that doesn’t work, then treat that person as an outsider.  Stop fretting about it and move on with your life.  Very sound wisdom. 

But!  But as I read this Gospel in the context of the rest of Chapter 18 of Matthew and see what Scripture the Church has given us from the Old Testament to match this Gospel, I see something far more important than a method to solve our squabbles.

What is going on in Matthew 18?  The movement is this: Jesus warns his disciples to be like children, be humble and don’t inflate your self-importance.  

Then, speaking of children, Jesus warns his disciples to steer very clear of causing scandal to a child “for it would be better to have a great millstone fastened around your neck and be thrown into the sea” rather than you would ever cause a little one to sin. 

Then comes the parable of the lost sheep and how the good shepherd would leave the 99 to go in search of one lost sheep.

Then comes today’s gospel account of Jesus’ guidance on how to go about reconciling in the church, along with the power of binding and loosing, a power given to the church that even heaven itself will heed.

So, can you see that this is about something far more important than our squabbles.  It’s about how we go about being church.  It’s about being humble and never giving cause to one of these little ones to sin so as to lose the redemption won at such a great cost as our Savior’s blood.  It’s about how important it is that we seek out and lead back anyone who goes astray.  And, in today’s gospel, it’s about the importance of giving fraternal correction.  

And what exactly is fraternal correction?  One of the greatest teachers of the faith lived in the late 300’s AD.  St. John Chrysostom, the Patriarch of Constantinople, was one of the most effective preachers in the whole history of the church.  He describes this fraternal correction in this way:  “You will be doing everything for the glory of God if, when you leave this place, you make yourselves responsible for saving a brother or sister, not just by accusing and rebuking him or her, but also by advising and encouraging, and by pointing out the harm done by worldly amusements, and the profit and help that come from our instruction.”  

Ah, so the context of fraternal correction has to be in loving our neighbor as ourself, for we don’t want to lose our own salvation, do we?

But alas, we are in danger of watching our society and our loved ones slide into hell without a word of admonition from us.  Perhaps we do not believe anymore that people can lose their salvation!  Or perhaps we do not love enough so as to risk rejection from speaking the truth to someone who has turned his or her back on Christ. 

St. John Chrysostom talks about our willingness to care enough about others to help bring them back to the Lord.  He says,  “You will also be preparing for yourself a double reward, since as well as greatly furthering your own salvation, you will be endeavoring to heal a fellow member of Christ’s body. It is the Church’s pride, it is the Savior’s command, not to be concerned only about our own welfare, but about our neighbor’s also. 

“Think to what high honor you raise yourself when you regard someone else’s salvation as a matter of extreme importance. As far as is humanly possible you imitate God himself, for listen to what he says through the prophet: “Whoever leads another from wrong to right will be as my own mouth.”

So, today’s reading from Ezekiel makes even more sense:  We, the church, all of us, are to be watchmen, sentinels, who have a vantage point on what is happening to our world and how much danger we are all in. Hear what the Lord says to the watchmen:  “If I tell the wicked, ‘O wicked one, you shall surely die,’ and you do not speak out to dissuade the wicked from his way, the wicked shall die for his guilt, but I will hold you responsible for his death. But if you warn the wicked, trying to turn him from his way, and he refuses to turn from his way, he shall die for his guilt, but you shall save yourself.

Is your love for your loved ones strong enough to take this risk?