Homily for the 14th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center
4pm Vigil, 9am Sunday
4/5 July 2009
Year for Priests
St. John Vianney, pray for us!
JMJ +m AMDG

The higher they rise, the harder they fall. This is why most of us are afraid of being prophets. We do not want to be hypocrites. We don't want to tell people what to do, beset as we are by our own weaknesses. Being a prophet is too dangerous, even if there is something deep within us that we desperately want to say with our lives. We keep it in because being a prophet is too dangerous. It will get us killed. Being a prophet rocks the boat. It costs us friends. It goes against tolerance of the differences of others. It opens us up to criticism. It puts our past under scrutiny and our present in the spotlight. Prophecy makes people want to bring us down. Leadership is dangerous for no one cares about those who are merely following, but everyone takes a shot at those on top. Being a prophet means risking people saying about us, 'Who in the world does he think he is?'

Without prophets however, the people will perish. Our Church lacks enough prophets, and as a result, many Catholics do not go to Mass regularly, our collective conscience grows weaker instead of sharper, and excellence and virtue among us easily gives way to complacency and mediocrity. We accept the moral choices of the society around us, rather than keeping our eyes fixed through faith on the things that are truly good, the things that will last forever.

Our nation has leaders, but lacks enough prophets. We are still good at celebrating that we are free from tyranny, that we are free to elect our government and to do what we darn well please. And thank God we celebrate this, and use this weekend to never take this liberty for granted. Yet do we have enough prophets among us to remind us that freedom from tyranny is quickly wasted unless it becomes a freedom used toward pursuing excellence and virtue, stable dispositions of the soul that produce persons of character who delight in what is deeply good and true and beautiful. Do we have prophets that point us all toward a happiness that is less based on personal preferences and more directed toward a universal common good that we all share? Do we have enough prophets like these? I think not.

And even if we do have enough prophets like these among us, are we not too much like the residents of Nazareth, who cut Jesus down to size as quickly as they could? Do we not discard the prophets who do emerge in our lives, so that we may remain comforable, forcing God to love us where we are rather than daring to become more like Him? Have we so long ago given up on the idea that God has placed a message on our hearts, a message that compels us to live differently? Have we stopped discerning how we can live precisely in such a way that the world is distinctly different by what we say and do? Have we stopped believing that many people will only become whole, and become the people they deeply want to be, only if we give the prophetic witness that we were put on earth to give? Have we lost the drama of living, of being sent on a mission that has been given to us and to no one else, and instead focused on merely surviving? Have we lost the amazement that comes from knowing that God is right beside us, working miracles in us and through us, and redeeming the world bit by bit, through the choices we make. Have we stopped believing that the world really does have a chance to be redeemed and made new by the love of God, manifested in the world by what we say and do? If we have stopped believing in ourselves in this way, it is no wonder that we can find ourselves losing faith in God, and failing to see the marvelous deeds He accomplishes through His holy prophets, right in our midst. +m