Sunday, September 25, 2011

Humbly think of others as more imporant than yourselves

Homily
26th Sunday in Ordinary Time C
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas
25 September 2011

Humbly think of others as more important than yourselves.

God sucks.  I know this is an unusual way to start a homily, by stating that God sucks.  But these are not my words.  They are the words of a distraught grandfather in the St. Louis airport this Friday.  God sucks, he said to me.  He wasn't attacking me verbally.  He was letting me know that something terrible had happened in his life.  His 38 day old grandson had died suddenly, and the family was at a loss to explain what happened.  They didn't yet have a medical explanation.  Grandpa was heading to Philadelphia to bury a grandson he had never met.  Grandpa was a former Catholic.  He told me that now he is more Buddhist than anything, and that his son had nothing to do with God.  Grandpa came up to me because he was a former Catholic, and perhaps the only one who would say anything at the burial.  There wouldn't be a minister there.  He told me that he was sure that I couldn't help him, that I couldn't justify why God let this happen anymore than he could, that he had concluded that God sucks.  But he approached me anyway.

I'm not tooting my own horn here, but within a minute, I was able to help him.  I did give him a few things to say at the burial, and he thanked me.  I've buried a few children, visited many more in children's hospitals, spent more than a few hours wondering as we all do, why God's ways seem unfair.  The Israelites in tonight's first reading lay this argument against God, why is life so unfair?  God answers their question with a question; He doesn't respond like a bully, enforcing rules because He says so.  No, he asks whether it would be any more fair for the guilty to be allowed to live forever?  God's question shows us what hell really is; not the unfairness of this world, but the situation where men lived forever while never becoming their best selves.  Think about this for a second - would you want to live forever in a world, yes, even this world, without ever becoming the person you always promised yourself you would be?  Would you want to live forever in this world always growing older and never growing younger?  God in his question shows us what hell is really like.

So the unfairness of this world is something we must accept; it is the fragility of life; yes, even accepting the death of children sometimes, that points us away from desiring a living hell, existing only in this world in a sinful state, always growing older and never younger, and makes us long for those spiritual ways in which we capture the newness and fullness of life.  It is natural for us to question God when the good die young while the wicked prosper, for our anger at God is perhaps the only way in the short term we can tell him how good life is, and how grieved we are by its loss.  If we didn't get upset about the fragility of life, it would be because our hearts have grown cold, and that we have grown incapable of love.  We are angry when the good die young because life is beautiful; life is worth living, and there is meaning in sharing life with those we love.  So even when the unfairness of life hits us the hardest, we know that God who created this world, even if we do not fully understand his ways, is good.  Life is worth living because God is good.

St. Paul shows us in the letter to the Philippians how to cut right through the unfairness of the world; yes, even how to get over the guilt of our good fortune while others around us are so unfortunate.  Humbly think of others as more important than yourselves.  Mother Teresa put it this way:  compassion is believing that another person's life is as real as your own.  Now most of us are familiar with evolutionary arguments that show that there are survival advantages to loving others, to helping others, to sharing life with others.  Those who love and are loved live longer.  But what Paul and Mother Teresa are talking about is something that goes beyond biology; they refer to something that only makes sense if man has a transcendent spiritual freedom.  They encourage us not to love to the point of personal biological advantage, but to love to the point of biological death.  They speak of self-forgetfulness.  They speak not of loving in order to live; they speak of living in order to love.  For a true Christian, love is more important than life.  As St. Paul would tell the Corinthians, if I have life, but have not love, then I am not a person.  I am nothing.

That is why a true Christian, when he has a chance to end his life in order to grow perfect in love, does so.  Christians are to become experts at finding a way to end your life; either spiritually, through a perfect self-forgetfulness, or vocationally, through the priesthood, religious life or marriage, or physically, through the blood of martyrdom.  No one sees biological self-advantage in the cross; the cross is not loving so enhance one's life; it is self-abandonment for the good of the other.  The cross is the path to true and new and everlasting life, a life that is no longer measured in hours but by the depth of love.  Jesus ended his life when a path of perfect love presented itself; he who could not know suffering and death took the form of a slave, and chose the most hideous means of torture so that we would never doubt that love is more important than life.

It's not that a Christian can't wish that life would be more fair.  It's not that we can't get upset when we don't understand, or that God's ways make perfect sense to us.  But we need not say that God sucks, for the fairness of life is not the ultimate question for a Christian; we are baptized into the death of Christ so that our ultimate question is not whether life is fair, but whether life presents me a personal opportunity to grow perfect in love, which is my heart's deepest desire.  To that ultimate question, the answer is always yes.  And insofar as we live this question, the unfairness of this world can never trap us, and there are never a shortage of opportunities to move toward that eternal life for which I am made.

To this great end, let us heed the words of St. Paul.  Humbly think of others as more important than yourselves.  Amen. 

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