The Heart of the Matter

Homily for Sunday, October 30, 2011

Today our Scriptures have us reflect on what leadership is, and what leadership is not.  Especially, we are invited to see what makes for failed leadership.  If there has ever been a time in history when there has been a crisis of failed leadership all across society, now is that time.  

Wall Street greed has inspired a growing reaction against the leaders of business who have profited so extravagantly while ordinary people’s savings have disappeared.

Leadership in academia has overseen the dumbing down of America while costs have soared and scores have plummeted.

The political leaders have failed to break through the fog of bitter rivalry so as to work together for the common good.  Leaders simply can’t be trusted to solve the enormous problems facing our society.

Leaders in business cannot trust this crisis in governance with the result being that businesses cannot move forward to create new jobs.

The roadblock of political bickering will not allow creative leaders to emerge to solve our immigration fiasco.  Leadership in opinion-making has failed miserably in helping create a society of virtue and self-control and has sold us all out to extreme individualism which cannot hold a society together.

And we have all lived through the lurid scandal in church leadership which has broken our hearts and tested our faith.  How well is it said in the Prophet Malachi: “And now, O priests, this commandment is for you: You have turned aside from the way, and have caused many to falter ... ; you have made void the covenant ... , says the LORD of hosts.  I, therefore, have made you contemptible and base before all the people, since you do not keep my ways.”

What an indictment!  And what a long list of failures in leadership.  And it goes on further in the Gospel, in Jesus’ list of failures of the leaders of his time.  

How about yourself as a leader?  How are you doing?  Are you a leader in business, in academia, in some service industry, among your peers and relatives and friends?  All of us are persons of power, especially the power of influence.  Our opinion on anything really does matter.  Have you ever considered how many stands we take in life, not because we believe in them, but because we don’t want to be rejected by people we value?  

So, let’s all admit that each of us is a leader in one way or another.  And let us heed what Jesus is telling us as leaders.  He’s telling us three things: to practice what we preach; to lighten the burdens of others; and to become free by abandoning the need for recognition and acclaim.

First: practice what we preach.  If we really believe in the love of God and in His gift of mercy, then let’s allow that love and mercy to saturate all of our interactions, opinions, political choices and relationships.  If we leave love and mercy as a private matter, then we are no better than the hypocrites in the Gospel.

Second: Lighten the burdens of others.  If we remain a selfish, self-indulgent, consumerist culture that does not care about the world we will be leaving to future generations, then we are laying heavy burdens upon them and not lifting a finger to lift them.  We need to learn anew the maxim, live simply so that others may simply live.

Lastly, abandon the need for recognition.  This need for the applause of others, the admiration of others, the esteem of others, is the most fatal attack on our inner freedom.  When we are overly concerned about what others may think of us, we are not inwardly free.  Do you remember: two Sundays ago, in the Gospel, a two-faced man came to Jesus trying to trip him up, asking about the tax to Caesar, and began by flattering him: "Teacher, we know that you are a truthful man and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. And you are not concerned with anyone's opinion, for you do not regard a person's status.”  As much as this was a trap of flattery, this man was also describing Jesus as who He truly is.  And he is describing what we should aim for: to be truthful, to embrace the way of God in accordance with the truth, and to no longer be concerned with anyone’s opinion. 

These are the keys to good leadership: practice what we preach; lighten the burdens of others; and be inwardly free from needing recognition.  

So, my brothers and sisters, let ask Jesus to help us restore good leadership in our church and in our homes and in our society.

 

Homily for Sunday, October 23, 2011

[A meditation on Deus Caritas Est, Encyclical of Benedict XVI,12/25/2005]

What a wonderful Gospel to select for a Nuptial Mass!  And what a wonderful Gospel we just happen to have in our lectionary for this weekend.  I think of the song by the Beatles, “All you need is love,” a song written in the 1960s when love became a most frequently used word for all kinds of superficial ways of loving.  As society began moving away from solidly set philosophical moorings, love morphed into meaning a sentiment, a sentiment without the ramifications of true love.  

The feeling of love is a sentiment that comes and goes.  There is, of course, the truly marvelous spark of first love, but it is not the fullness of love.  True love needs to go through a process of purification and maturation.  True love, mature love, needs to learn how to die to self in order that another may thrive.  True love necessarily includes our loving God as well as loving the ones we call “our loved ones.” And when love really becomes godly, becomes mature, it also awakens within us a feeling of joy, born of the experience of knowing oneself as being loved - above all loved by God, but also by the many manifestations of God’s love for us, particularly in the loves of our lives, and most especially in the love of one’s spouse and family.  

This mature love, however, also moves us on a path towards an all embracing love.  Here we find that our “yes” to God’s love transforms us into uniting our will, our intellect and our sentiments with the living God, who has by now become very real to us.  It’s as if the extraordinary experience of human love, when perfected and purified of its selfish nature, opens us up to the unspeakable, beyond-imagining love of God.  When this happens one finds oneself wanting the same things God wants, and rejecting the same things God rejects. 

All of this gets tested, proven and purified in marital love, which must again and again learn the lesson of how to want the same thing the beloved wants, and how to reject the same thing the beloved rejects.

In our relationship with God, our maturing into wanting what God wants, and rejecting what God rejects, is what makes us holy.  A husband and wife, who have learned to unite their wills with each other, find that the result is a deep down satisfaction about life, harmony within the home, and sheer joy in each other.

So also each of us, who learns to unite our will with the will of God, can find in this love affair with God a communion of thought and sentiment with the greatest Lover of our souls, and thus we will find that our will and God’s will increasingly coincide.  And the hallmark of this union in love with God is twofold: a deep abiding sense of peace, and a love that cares for all God’s children, especially the poor.

Someone who has learned the art of true love will discover that God’s will is no longer alien to me, God’s commandments are no longer imposed upon me.  Rather, by now, I have come to the realization that God is in fact more deeply present to me than I am to myself.  This results in an increasing abandonment of self to God; and increasingly God becomes my joy.

The school for learning the art of true love is the family, based upon the growing love between husband and wife.  If their love is sure, if their love is undergoing the ongoing purification of self, ridding the soul of selfishness, then the children grow up as no strangers to true love, as increasingly capable of learning the art of love.

Imagine if all of us here today were to commit ourselves to beg God for this kind of mature love, imagine how this few people could impact the world in which we live.  Imagine if all of us could see with the eyes of Christ.  Imagine if we could give to others the look of love that every human being craves, ever since we first looked into our mother’s eyes as newborn babes, and saw in those motherly eyes the look of pure love!

If on the other hand, I have no contact with God in my life, then I cannot see in the other anything more than “the other,” and I become incapable of seeing in another person the image of God.  I will have closed myself off to God’s love and will become increasingly selfish, or live life in a lifeless way.  The love of God and the love of neighbor are really inseparable, and form, as we heard in the Gospel, a single commandment. In the art of true love, love grows through loving. Love is “divine” because it comes from God and unites us to God; through this unifying process it makes us a “we” which transcends our divisions and makes us one, until in the end God is “all in all.”

 

Homily for sunday, October 16, 2011

What do you make of the fact that our spot in the world, called the West, has become increasingly de-Christianized?  I think of my grandparents and my own parents who clung to the faith because it had meaning for them, it gave meaning to all the aspects of their lives; and they and their contemporaries held on to the faith at all costs because they valued it so much.  

Now, however, today’s generations in the West have abandoned Western Civilization so dramatically that the classics of Western Civ, and its religious foundations, are largely unknown to their contemporaries.  Today’s descendants of these earlier faith-filled people are leaving the faith in droves.  It has no value for them, nor any relevance.  Who today would have the biblical insight that Harry Truman had in 1948? 

In 1948 the brand new United Nations established that two peoples would live on that little strip of land known as the Holy Land: Israel and Palestine.  When in that year Israel declared itself to be a state, the question was: who would recognize it as a state, as a nation?  It’s one thing to declare yourselves to be a nation, but it takes recognition by other nations for a country to be recognized as one.  It seemed that no nation wanted to make such a move. 

President Truman made the brave, unsupported decision to recognize the state of Israel, against the opinion of all of his advisers.  Some time afterwards, he was introduced at the Jewish Theological Seminary as “the man who helped create the state of Israel.” Truman erupted with: “What do you mean “helped create”?  I am Cyrus!  I am Cyrus!”

Thus we can understand today’s reading from Isaiah in which God makes clear that, though the King of Persia did not know that the One, true God, the God of Israel was the very same God who worked through Cyrus to bring the captives back from Exile and to re-establish them in the state of Israel.

Where is the ability today to interpret the events of our world within a biblical framework?  Where is the faith today, faith which can give meaning to what presses upon us?  What are the reasons for this worldwide loss of faith?  

Why is our time settling for a malady of superficiality, of wanting only the sound-bite, of wanting to forget the divine, and the holy?  It’s like a slow slide into madness.  

In today’s Gospel when Jesus is facing those who try to trick him by making a dichotomy between God and the reality of living within the Roman Empire, Jesus grounds them in both realities.  As members of the Empire, use the coin with the emperor’s image to pay the tax.  But since man is the image of God, pay to God what is His due, by giving your all to God.

What this means for us today is that we have to recapture the truths of our faith and take every opportunity to drill them into our children and our children’s children until the whole culture is brought to its senses: that there are core truths that we will never abandon.   There is the core truth of the cross, that self-indulgence is not the way of Christ, that no newly conceived person need die for me to live the way I want to.  There is the core truth that we are all called to holiness, not to licentiousness and greed and a soft existence that cares little for the plight of the world’s poor.  And there is the core truth that all men and women are under the judgment of God, that we all must give an account to God for what we have done in our bodies and receive our recompense, for good or for ill.  

A future generation will be able to look back and see what the reason was for such a massive loss of faith at this particular time in history.  That future generation will also be able to see what kind of age the world entered because of such a loss of faith.

Someone will by then have the eyes of faith to see the Cyrus-yet-to-come who will bring the exiles of faith back to a homeland where virtues are exalted, where self-sacrifice again holds first place of honor, and where God is worshiped in spirit and in truth.

Homily for Sunday, October 9, 2011

Do you give much thought to your Christian dignity?  By that I mean, does it occur to you on a regular basis that you are baptized and therefore a beloved son or daughter of God?  Do you ever reflect on your status as a prince or a princess in God’s eyes, a member of a royal people, whose dignity can never be removed, except if we disown our membership in the household of God.

As royal people, royal in God’s eyes, we have been invited to the wedding feast of the Son of God.  What is this wedding feast?

In the prophet Isaiah, who wrote about the coming Messiah hundreds of years before Christ, we hear about the messianic feast as “a feast of rich food and choice wines, juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines.”  This is the abundant banquet feast of the wedding of the King’s Son.  This messianic, promised wedding feast was also the backdrop for the wedding feast of Cana when Mary prompted her Son to work a miracle, so lavish that the celebrating could go on for days and days.  Another sign of the wedding feast of the Lamb.

So, this wedding feast is the feast of celebrating the union between God and His people.  This union is so wonderfully fulfilled in Jesus Christ who is totally one with God, and is in fact God, and totally one with human beings, and is in fact completely human.  The marriage has taken place in Christ Jesus. And all of us are called to the wedding banquet.  High born and low born are invited.  People who are living in humble circumstances, and people who are living with abundance.

Indeed the Eucharist is the foretaste and promise of that messianic wedding feast that we call heaven, eternal life, life on high with Christ Jesus. So, we can say with St. Paul, "I can do all things in him who strengthens me."

There is a problem, however.  Many people forget their invitation.  Many people get caught up in this-worldly matters and forget their dignity as sons and daughters of the great King who invites us to the wedding feast of His Son.  Notice in this gospel how badly these people treat the messengers who reissue the invitation.  They ignore the King, they get preoccupied with other matters and forget the King and his Son’s wedding.  And for some, it even happens that in some of these people a real opposition grows and so that they hate being a part of the royal people.  They seem to forget who they are as sons and daughters of the Most High God.  They seem to find other things more preferable to the close relationship the Great King wishes to have with them.  They forget that the promise of the Great King is that He, “the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from every face.”  Instead of welcoming the invitation, these ungrateful people “laid hold of his servants, mistreated them, and killed them.” This mistreatment of the King’s servants enrages the King who then “sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city."

Even though the King was justified in His anger, doesn’t His violent reaction seem to be not typical of a loving and forgiving God?

Even more puzzling is what comes next: The King has a seemingly unjust reaction to this fellow who comes to the banquet not wearing his wedding garment.  What sense can we make of Jesus portraying His Father as destroying the city of those who refused His invitation, and throwing out into the darkness someone who was not dressed correctly?  Don’t these two reactions counter our image of God as a loving God, patient and always forgiving.  

How can we understand God as loving and kind when we have these two unsettling images.  Perhaps a story might help:

When I was a young priest, I was a chaplain of Central Catholic High School in Denver.  It was a multi-ethnic Catholic high school.  There was no one particular race in predominance.  There were black, white, Hispanic and Asian students.  It was beautiful and it worked.

My custom was to take a given class of students into the school's very beautiful, small chapel and do a prayer service with them.  On one particular day the students taught each other about the fear of the Lord far better than I ever could.  Right next to me, in the front row, were three back girls.  Behind them were three white girls.  During the course of the service, the 3 white girls started acting up, misbehaving, disturbing the environment of prayer we had all come to.

The three black girls spontaneously turned around to the white girls and one of them in full voice said, “You don’t mess with God!”  You could have heard a pin drop.  And everyone knew real prayer that day.

So, whenever you hear such things as the Great King destroying a city, or the fellow tossed out because of his not wearing the wedding garment, the point is this: You don’t mess with God!  Do not betray your status as a beloved son or daughter of God.  And do not take casually the invitation He sincerely and lovingly gives you.