13th Sunday in Ordinary Time B

Homily
13th Sunday of Ordinary Time B
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas
1 July 2012
Daily Readings
Audio

Whenever we get a good scriptural commentary on death like we have in today's first reading from the Book of Wisdom, I always try to take advantage of it and make a point of emphasis.  We know as Christians we are not supposed to be afraid of death.  For the love of Jesus Christ is stronger than death, and the Lord's Resurrection is a central tenet of our faith, and a sure sign that He is waiting for us His beloved on the other side of death.  For us death is a passover, in many ways no more worrisome than our falling asleep each night before passing into a new day tomorrow.  While it is a sign of stewardship of the goodness of this life that we now experience that we do not want to die, and we want to put it off as long as possible, the greatest fear for a Christian must be not death,  but living forever as we are now, without ever passing over into the fullness of life that corresponds to our deepest desires.  Death for us is a just punishment for sin, as the book of Wisdom rightly says, for since love is the source of life, those who do not always love should not always live.  Death is a welcome deadline for each person who wants to love with all their heart, mind and strength, and thus to truly live.  In Christ, death is not just a welcome deadline, it is a true passover.  Woe to us then if we do not as Christians look forward to, and daily prepare for, our own death.

Christ demonstrates the love that is the source of all life, including the eternal life borne from His Resurrection, in his willingness to touch a young girl who was thought to be dead.  Not only this, but He allows himself to be touched by a woman who was hemorrhaging, and thus known to be unclean.  In the Mosaic law, most clearly defined in the book of Leviticus, there were strict provisions for the maintenance of the Jewish community, including prohibitions against eating or touching things or persons that were unclean.  The law was meant to preserve life and community, and lest we think such laws to be primitive, it is important for us to admit that we still today belong to many groups that have rituals and rules for who is in and who is out.  Sometimes the strongest of groups have the strictest of rules and rituals.  Think of the consequences for a KU basketball or football player who misses a practice or is late for a game?  Think of how quickly we ostracize someone who says something or does something or wears something that we deem inappropriate.  The Leviticus rules of the Israelite community may sound primitive to us, but we make as many rules today or more in the forming of our groups.  The Catholic Church herself has endured for many centuries now, a group to which all people and nations are invited, but a group with strict rules for things like communion, delineating who is ready and who is not ready to receive communion.  Group identity and belonging is one of the strongest forces in human behavior and sociology.

When Jesus goes against these rules, then, as a faithful Jew who came as he said not to abolish the law but to fulfill it, he is doing something big.  He is starting a new group, a group that knows not only how to avoid evil but how to conquer it by love and relationship.  Two of the strictest rules in the Levitical law were rules against touching human blood, for example, from a woman who is hemorrhaging, and against touching dead persons, unless you were the family member preparing the body for burial.  The hemorrhaging woman, then, had every reason to think that Jesus, a faithful Jew, would be hopping mad at her for making him unclean by touching him.  Yet Jesus says the opposite, telling the woman that her faith has saved her, and that she may go in peace.  Likewise for the daughter of Jairus, Jesus shows himself to be the closer to this girl than any family member, by touching her body that was thought to be dead.  Traditionally, the waking of this girl is not  a Resurrection miracle on the scale of the raising of Lazarus, for we take the Lord at his word when he says the girl was only sleeping.  Nevertheless, though, Jesus' touching of the girl, and healing her through love and relationship, and through his power as the author of life, shows clearly that the old laws delineating the family of Israel are being fulfilled and transcended by Jesus.

So too the Church is our deepest family, for it is the family to which we belong through the healing and powerful touch of our Lord.  We can think of the group or family that is the Catholic Church in many ways, by looking at her boundaries and measuring the length and breadth of her tradition, by studying the laws of inclusion and exclusion that define her.  Yet most simply and profoundly, we can think of the Church profitably as those who have been healed and made alive by the uniquely powerful and loving touch of Jesus Christ.  The Church includes those who have been touched by Christ, particularly through the physical touch of the holy sacraments, and most profoundly by a touch more intimate than the touch experienced by the women of today's Gospel, the touch of the Eucharist, the loving reception under the roofs of our bodies of the Body and Blood of our Lord.  The Eucharist then defines who is in and out of the Church, who is part of the new group and family that is destined to last forever, even beyond the boundaries of death, because the Eucharist is truly the perfect healing and loving touch of Jesus Christ.  Amen.

2012 11th Sunday B

Homily
11th Sunday in Ordinary Time B
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas
17 June 2012
Daily Readings
Audio

Happy Father's Day this weekend to all our dads out there.  As most of you know, I am in the business of recruiting, not to natural fatherhood, but to spiritual fatherhood - to the priesthood.  When I first got the job for the Archdiocese from Archbishop Naumann 5 years ago, I was excited, and in many ways I still am.  But I have to be honest, although we have made lots of progress, and have been blessed with incredible men preparing to become priests, and although we are hoping to ordain 15 men or more in the next 3 years, the job has been much harder than I thought it would be.  Either I thought the priesthood was more attractive to guys than it really is, or I thought there would be more men willing to make the sacrifice to say something beautiful with their lives, and to do something so important as being a priest.  Though we've been blessed, it's been hard.

The Archbishop has asked us to rally on June 29th in Topeka for religious freedom. The fortnight for freedom organized by the Church is in response to a pending federal mandate that would force religious employers, including Catholic schools,hospitals, universities and charities, to violate their consciences and provide contraception and abortion-inducing drugs to all employees.  Although in response to opposition the federal administration has compromised and put the onus for this mandate not on the Church but on insurance companies, this is not an acceptable compromise given that many Catholic entities are self-insured and at any rate, will still be paying for most of an insurance policy that covers things contrary to Catholic moral teaching.  I hope you have heard about this in the news, and have heard about the rally already.  The Archbishop will speak about it next weekend.  Unless a strong exemption from this mandate is obtained, the Catholic church is prepared to defy this unjust mandate, and pay the consequences for doing so, or in the worst case scenario, close her schools, universities, hospitals and charities.

Some have labeled the Church's opposition to providing contraception and abortion-inducing drugs to all employees as a war on women, and have tried to find support for the mandate by using this rhetoric.  But on this Father's Day weekend I want to put forth that there can be no war on women when a society is raising up just and holy men.  What I want to say this weekend is that underlying a perceived need and right to contraception and abortion inducing drugs is a deeper crisis in fatherhood.  Just as I have had a hard time as vocation director finding men to address the crisis of spiritual fatherhood in the priesthood, so also in the current situation where there is the consistent breakdown of marriage and the family aided by a contraceptive mentality, the crisis of natural fatherhood is all the more urgent.  Trust me, if I find a man who has the virtue and maturity to make others holy by the way he loves them and teaches them - if I find a man who would make a great priest - there are ten women or more who think he would make a better husband.  I can't overemphasize how great the need for husbands and fathers in our society really is.  Nowhere is this more apparent than at the university, where women outnumber men by a significant majority, and men seem to have a more difficult time all the time maturing into men who can make a sacrificial gift of themselves.  So again I repeat, there can be no war on women in a culture where men are laying down their lives for them as Christ laid down his life for his bride the Church. But finding men willing to do this is hard indeed.

This summer Archbishop Naumann is taking me and our seminarians to Montreal, to the shrine of St. Joseph constructed principally through the work of a simple and humble new saint of our Church, St. Andre Bessette.  Talk about a man who started out as a mustard seed!  St. Andre was thought to lack the talent to be much of a priest, or even a religious for that matter.  He was assigned for many years in his religious congregation to the most insignificant of jobs - to be the porter, the doorman.  Yet he did this job with such zeal and love, and prayed for the people entrusted to him with such sincerity, that people soon came to realize that the Lord was answering the prayers of little Andre with great efficacy.  Thousands began coming to him to ask him to pray for them, and eventually the Lord entrusted this smallest of men with the task of building a great oratory to St. Joseph, to whom Andre had entrusted the prayers of so many.  The Lord was pleased to do his work in honor of the great St. Joseph through the smallest of men, and this summer all our seminarians will visit the relics of this new saint who taught us how devotion to St. Joseph is a sure path to justice and chastity for every man.


As our seminarians begin preparing for this pilgrimage, as part of their formation to be future spiritual fathers, I invite all dads, and all of us, to take a moment today to consecrate the men in our lives to St. Joseph.  I fear that devotion to St. Joseph and consecration to him is dying out in our Catholic piety.  In my own simple piety, when I find that as a sinner I often do not love like Jesus I go to Mary, who simply allows the Lord's will to be done unto her.  And when I lack the humility, readiness and joy of Mary to let it be done unto me,  I go to Joseph, who though not possessing a Sacred Heart like Jesus nor the Immaculate Heart of Mary still is known for being just - for doing the right thing even when it became difficult or confusing.  We honor him as well, as a go-between for those men who want to be chaste both inside and outside of marriage as he was, for those men preparing to be both spiritual fathers and natural fathers, as he was.  In preserving the virginity and unique motherhood of the Mary both inside and outside of marriage, and in protecting the child Jesus, he is a sure exemplar for every man especially in a culture that has a hard time raising up worthy fathers.  He is in every way close to those who seek his powerful intercession.  As the beautiful Catholic piety says, every man should go to Joseph.  Especially for those who wish to be fathers in a culture that is losing the meaning of fatherhood, let us pray for them on this Father's Day weekend, that they will not be afraid to go to Joseph.  Amen.

2012 Holy Trinity B

Homily
Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity
3 June 2012
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas
Daily Readings

Audio

Today's meditation for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity can be taken in two different directions.  The first direction is the necessary reminder that God is God and we are not God.  In celebrating the Most Holy Trinity, we can be reminded that even though God has perfectly revealed himself through the gift of his only Son and the sending of the Spirit, he does not become any less mysterious.  In his eternal perfections God is still more unlike us than he is like us.  This way of taking the Solemnity reminds us that we will never figure God out, and if we think we are understanding him, we are understanding something else, not God.  Although we might through diligent meditation and study make some progress in grasping the resonability of God being one nature shared by three persons, and how this can be so given that the Son is essentially the opposite, two natures shared by one person, we must admit at the end of the day that since God is God and we are not, we will never understand him by deduction, but only approach understanding through faith.

Yet another direction to take the celebration of the Trinity is to celebrate how simple God is.  God is the ground of all reality not because he is complex, but because he is simple.  To say that God is trinity is to say simply that God is love.  It is to say nothing more, but nothing less either.  To say that God is trinity is to say something simple.  It is to say that before we contemplate God as that which nothing greater can be thought, before we think of him as being creator of the world but completely free and independent, and not a part of the world, before we think of him as an eternal and indissoluble unity of three persons in one nature, or as the only thing whose essence is the same as his existence, we say simply that God is love.  That is the most important thing we ever say about God.  It is the first thing we must say.  And to say this is to say something simple.  Before we say that God is the greatest thing we say that God is the greatest person.  Deeper to the mystery of God than being the greatest thing, is the mystery of his being the greatest relationship.

Our celebration of the Trinity then is not resigned to a confession of how distant and mysterious God is to us as a thing unlike us; no, it is a simple celebration of personhood.  Our own understanding of what a person is, is grounded in the personhood of the Trinity.  In the Godhead a person is defined as one known and loved by another person, so much so that a communion of persons is created sharing one nature.  So too the proper definition of us who are human persons created in the image and likeness of the Trinity, is that we become persons when we are known and loved by other persons.  Jesus tells us to baptize in the persons of the Trinity because this grounds us in the trinitarian foundation of personhood.  Those adopted by God in baptism receive an even more profound personhood, for they are loved and known by God in ways that human persons cannot love and know each other.  The Christian faith, and its understanding of personhood grounded in the Trinity, perhaps provides the last great hope for understanding the inviolable dignity of every human person, against a torrent of ever more arbitrary and less personal definitions of what a human being is. 

While first confessing that God in his essence is unlike us and so mysterious that we will make little or no progress in understanding him by deduction, still the solemnity of the Trinity is a celebration of intimacy with God.  We cannot own God or put him in our pocket by studying theology, but we enjoy a greater intimacy by being called children of the Trinity through baptism, and by being placed through adoption and the sharing of the Holy Spirit at the very heart of the mystery of who God is.  In the sacred liturgy we are sharing, we are placed not at odds with the Trinity, but at the very heart of the Trinity.  We cry out to God together not as slaves, but as Romans says, as children crying 'Abba, Father!"  We pray to the Father with the Son in the Holy Spirit at every liturgy.  And in the same Spirit, we ourselves not only pray but we are privileged to listen from a front-row seat to the conversation being had between the Father and the Son, a conversation and a sharing of love that is itself the Holy Spirit.  Above all, then, the liturgy of the Most Holy Trinity is a reminder not of our distance from God, but a simple realization that really couldn't get any closer.  Amen.