am I out of touch?

Homily

3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time C

23 January 2022

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

AMDG +mj

Am I out of touch?

Finally, after many years of resistance, I'm ready to cry uncle.  For quite a while, the signs of the times have pointed to a smaller Catholic Church, one in exile and in scandal.  I didn't want to believe it.  It's not what I signed up for!  When I said yes it was in response to the World Youth Days of John Paul II, when millions upon millions of young people came together to be affected by the Catholic faith and Her beautiful Eucharist.  When I started, I only saw success in our future.

It's hasn't quite worked that way.  God's ways are strange and different.  I don't have to tell any of you that.  How does it feel to be Catholic in these strange times?  I've been warned that the Catholic Church must be pruned.  Ouch!  I've been told she must get smaller to get better, before She can ever bear fruit again.  No way, I said!  The Church is like Allen Fieldhouse - 16,300 every game, no exceptions . . well, unless there's a pandemic of course.

But finally, I give up.  Not to resignation, mind you, but to the reality that I'm in a Church that has ended up in exile, one that has lost touch with its own story.  It happens even to me, though I am hear rehearsing spiritual ideas.  I can lose touch with my own story, and how God desperately want to touch it.

When's the last time I cried at church?  Weeping in church like the Israelites first reading from Ezra would be like the Jayhawks winning a road conference game for the first time in 8 years.  Oh wait, that just happened, and it was glorious!  Rock Chalk! We're a football school again.

Crying in Church would be like coming home as Jesus does to Nazareth, to a place and people you have desperately missed for a long time.

Or of course, it could just be that Ezra's homily was four hours long. That would make anyone cry.  At any rate, the tears become joy when the people of God get back in touch with their own story again, a story they had become numb to.  St. Paul describes such a Church, one that is sensitive to all the parts of the body, a Church that can feel its needs.

My vision in this new year is not for a Church that no longer fails, but one that can feel again.  I want to worship with you this year, so we can feel together how much God desires to touch us here as His body with His body.  I see a Church in touch with the Eucharist!

I no longer want to look at the empty seats here. I want to see you, so that I can share the difference affecting each other in this way makes in our story.

I'm tired of being out of touch.  I hope you are too.