who's for dinner?

Homily

16th Sunday in Ordinary Time C2

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

17 July 2022

AMDG

Who is for dinner?

That sounds cannibalistic, but it's not.  If anything is clear about today's Scriptures, it's that every meal is less about the food, and more about the people.  Ultimately, meals are about feeding on God and each other.  The right question is our pivotal one.  Who is for dinner?

Tell me about your dinner table?  Is it one of the most important places in the world?  It's meant to be.

Your dinner table is meant to participate in the one right before us now.  At this Mass, this table is your table.  It's also your tomb.  The Mass is the place where you put your life on the line, that as St. Pauls says, your sufferings might be taken up and fill out the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for the redemption of the world.  This altar is your table, and your tomb.  

Your dinner table at home is a participation in this. Don't take my word for it.  Look at how Abraham and Sarah hosted God at their table, and were blessed in turn with the conception of Isaac their son.  Then go straight to Mary, Martha and Lazarus' table.  From there go to the table of the Last Supper.  Then don't tell me that your dinner table doesn't matter.

You won't hear this on the news, but the future of the world runs through your dinner table.  It doesn't run through your phone, nor through the ballot box.  To be sure, a historical vote as consequential as any in Kansas history, a matter of life and death, has already started.  Voting has a critical place in affecting the common good.

Still, the ballot box is less important than your dinner table, and it's not even close.  Conversation, relationship and communion, the ultimate sources of love and of life, are meant to run through your dinner table.

The reason the world is so messed up, the reason we have to vote on the right to rip children out of their most intimate relationships, is because we don't have dinner like we used to, like we are meant to.  I stink at dinner.  Maybe you do too.  Dinner is not just a bodily function, a checking of the box, something else to worry about.  If it's just that, than to hell with it, as Jesus tells Martha.  

Unless I feed on God and my family and my neighbor at dinner, I have no chance for the communion, conversation and relationship that gives life.  I neglect giving attention and intention to dinner at my own peril.

If not dinner, than what's your thing where you experience that depth and intimacy of conversation and communion?  

What's been revealed to us is that we can't live without it.

Let's face the pivotal question.  Who is for dinner?