(BASE Sunday)
LIBRARY OF HOMILIES
FROM
FATHER CHRIS
FEBRUARY 2000
February 6th - 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time (English)February 13th - 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time (English)
Until the last half of the 20th century life was hard for most
people. Sickness was common. Labor meant hard work in factories
or mines. Farmers did most of their work by the sweat of their brow.
Children died in childbirth, and sometimes their mothers as well.
Most people didn’t like life as it was, but there was very little that
could be done about it. Even the very rich could not change the circumstances
of sickness and death.
However, the time in which we live and the nation in which
we live has made great strides in eliminating many of the diseases that
afflicted the world. Recently we heard of the birth of the 6th billionth
person. Some scientists complained that there were too many people
on this earth. Yet, it has only been because of science and technology
that we can feed that many people. It’s only because of the research
done that we have virtually eliminated smallpox, leprosy, and polio.
Many other diseases like the flu don’t kill as many people as they once
did either. Wars and famines still occur, but we can do things about
them and usually do.
The downside of progress is that we get even more frustrated
when things don’t go as we expect. Who of us likes to be down with
a cold or flu? Advertisements on television try to get us to buy
products that will allow us to keep going without any discomfort.
If we run into some glitch in our technology we get angry and upset.
A power outage of a couple hours is devastating. If the phone is
out and we can’t hook into the Internet, it’s a tragedy!
I think that we can easily get like Job. He had many
good things in his life. He had prosperity, a loving family, good
health, and an important place in society. Then, one by one these
things are taken from him. He doesn’t understand why. He cries
out to God for an answer. His friends tell him that it must be due
to sin. Job doesn’t buy that explanation. As he will learn
from God, it’s not because of any sin that he faced those tragedies, but
that it was part of the very fabric of life.
But if suffering, sickness, and death are part of the fabric
of life, we naturally wonder why. Isn’t God good? Isn’t God
powerful? Why isn’t life better? These are questions that Job
asked and only heard from God that he was not able to grasp the mystery
of life and death.
It seems to me that we hear of what we must do in the face
of tragedy. The Gospel seems to indicate that God doesn’t desire
sickness. When those who were afflicted with any disease came to
Jesus, he healed them. A central part of Jesus’ ministry was healing.
He spoke of God’s love and forgiveness and then he freed them from sin
and suffering to prove it. This is God’s plan.
How shall we respond? Jesus responded to God’s will
through prayer. He would go off by himself to a deserted place to
pray. It was in the quiet of prayer that he found solace and strength.
It is that same prayer life that would allow Jesus to encounter sin in
all its forms, most particularly on the cross.
Secondly, we learn that in the face of struggle commit to
service. Peter’s mother-in-law is healed from her ailment and immediately
gets up to serve. My guess is that she was always a servant and this
was her way of showing thankfulness to the Lord for her healing.
St. Paul tells us that he found great freedom in serving. When he
committed himself to the Gospel he could do great things. He could
endure trial, persecution, sickness, and imprisonment. He found hope
in suffering for it tied him more fully to Christ and the cross.
Finally we learn that ultimate peace and comfort will never
be found on earth. We can use our technology to make life a little
easier. We can help alleviate the affects of poverty and war.
We can make drugs that ease pain and cure sickness. But we will always
fall short of complete happiness. When the apostles found Christ
in prayer they told him that the people were looking for him. What
was his response? He said, “We must travel on to other places.”
Not everyone would find cures. Not everyone would be able to touch
Jesus to experience a miraculous cure. But all could believe.
All could find hope in Christ and experience the peace of eternal life.
So when we find life is getting us down, we can complain and
question. Maybe a better solution would be to turn to the Lord in
prayer, receive help and consolation, and then rise to serve Christ in
the people around us. By doing so we will find gain peace and everlasting
life at the end of our days. Amen.
6th Sunday in Ordinary Time
(BASE Sunday)
“I don’t want you to help me. I can do it myself!”
Have you ever heard these words by a 2-year-old or a ten-year-old, a teenager,
or someone who was eighty? I bet you have. Most of us have
grown up with the belief that what makes life important is that we become
independent. We should stand on our own two feet and not have to
rely on others. At least that’s the standard belief in our society.
Being self-reliant is good and worthwhile. We want children
to take responsibility for their actions. We would like to treat
senior citizens with respect and dignity instead of telling them what they
should do or what will be good for them. Yet, the mystery of life
is that what makes it meaningful is not that we do it alone, but in harmony
with other people. It is only when we learn to work with others that
we find there is satisfaction and goodness in life.
The leper in the gospel is considered helpless by the standards
of his day. He was supposed to ring a bell, stay far away from the
community, and was considered dead to his family. He didn’t have
any rights or privileges. Yet, this leper approaches Jesus and makes
a declaration of faith. He says to the Lord, “I know that if you
will it, I can be healed.” He was not willing to concede that he
was helpless. He knew that if he had faith and trusted in the Lord
he would be healed.
Today we once again renew our covenant with each other.
We say publicly, I can’t do it alone. We agree that we can’t feed
the hungry all by ourselves. We recognize that to educate the young,
counsel those in distress, or provide for the spiritual upbuilding of the
Body of Christ, we must work in harmony with many other Catholics throughout
the Diocese of Orlando. Most of us don’t think much about what the
Diocese does for us or even how we participate within the Diocese except
on BASE Sunday.
The most important lesson we learn is that we form a portion
of the Body of Christ in Central Florida. We are called by God to
do His work right here and now. We are to be responsible for the
unborn, for the proper care and education of children, for the strength
of families, and for the concerns of the elderly. This is true no
matter what age we are or our marital status.
I know that it gives me great pride belonging to a Church
that is over 1 billion people strong. It gives me pride knowing that
my Catholic Church has funded our grassroots organization in Volusia County.
I am proud of the work that Catholic Relief Services does in areas after
natural disasters, famines, and war. We are present in the world
to bring peace and comfort. Likewise I am proud of the fact that
we can and do good work in our diocese.
We are not perfect, of course. Maybe there are many
more things that we could do or that could be done better. That will
always be the case. The Lord will simply ask us when our days are
done, “Did you do what you could do to make a difference?”
I have a friend who is my age. About 15 years ago she
lived in Massachusetts. She had a best friend. This friend
developed cancer. At the time she had a husband and two small children.
What my friend told me is that she knew that what was needed was someone
who could help her with the medications, take care of the kids, and still
be a friend. This she could do.
Before her friend died it was necessary that she move into
the house, almost like what Hospice does. She knew that after her
friend’s death it would mean follow-up with the children and husband.
She did that for over five years. To this day she never complains
that she gave a year of her life to help her friend in her dying.
She realizes that this was what had to be done. She is thankful that
she was able to do it.
Today’s Gospel is about best friends. It doesn’t seem
like that at first. It seems like it is a story of a miraculous healing.
It is certainly that. It’s about Jesus declaring that he has power
from God to forgive sins. It’s a story about how the crowds were
spellbound by Jesus’ teaching and healing. But all of those things
occurred because of the love and support of four friends.
Recall that the paralyzed man had four friends who brought
him to Jesus. They saw the huge crowd and realized that they would
never be able to get their friend to Jesus. They could have given
up and simply said, “We’ll try some other time when Jesus isn’t so busy.”
They didn’t do that.
They brought the man up on the roof of the house and began
opening up a place in the roof. I understand that the houses at the
time were similar to the pueblos in the Southwestern U.S. They were
made of mud and straw. To open a place in the roof would mean digging
a hole that would have to be patched up later. It didn’t seem like
too much of a sacrifice to do this. The men did what they had to
do.
Jesus looks at the faith of the four friends and says to the
man that his sins are forgiven. Have you ever wondered how many people
are praying for you? Have you ever wondered if some of the good things
that have happened in your life are a result of other people’s sacrifices
and prayers? I know that I do. It’s impossible to know at any
one time how many people that is, but I would guess that for most of us
we have at least one person who remembers us in prayer every day.
The man in the Gospel had four friends that we know about.
When the man is forgiven of his sins the rest of the crowd
are aghast, but for the wrong reason. They are so concerned about
Jesus claiming to forgive sins. What they don’t think about is that
the man’s problem isn’t so much that he is paralyzed, but that he has sins
in his heart that have weighed him down. Jesus wants him to know
that he doesn’t have to fear that. Have you ever been sick or injured
and wondered if you were right before God? What if God were to call
you home today, would you be ready? Most of us might be inclined
to say no. We want another opportunity to repent of past sins and
be more faithful. Jesus was reassuring the paralyzed man that if
he died that day he wouldn’t have to fear. God had freed him from
sin and eternal death.
Finally Jesus heals the man of his paralysis. To you
and I that was the man’s problem. We would have thought that should
have been Jesus’ primary concern. Like most of the Gospel stories
we don’t know what happened the next day or the week after that.
Did this healing change the man? Was he now able to assist his friends
who risked so much for him? Did he take his healing for granted and
soon forget that a great deed had been worked in his life? We will
never know. Yet, I would imagine that initially everything was wonderful.
He would have retold the story to dozens of people. Everyone would
want to know all the details. Then as the days and weeks went on
the man who had been paralyzed would no longer be able to get handouts
of food or clothes from compassionate people. He would now have to
work. He would now have to be concerned with the needs of others
and not only himself. That is when the hard work would really begin.
You and I have been forgiven our sins countless times.
Some of us can point to miracles that we have experienced or someone that
we know has experienced. Has this led us to be more faithful and
more loving? Are we completely changed? Maybe we need best
friends to keep us on track and to remind us of the many wonderful things
God has done for us. Maybe we need friends to help us not take things
for granted, but be grateful. Thank God for friends like that.
Amen.
About a year ago the Air Force Chief of Chaplains directed
each base to have a plan in place in the event that the chapel staff was
not present on a weekend. He challenged each base to ask the question
that if a deployment took the priest and Protestant chaplains along with
the enlisted support staff away how would the base’s spiritual programs
operate. In order to ensure that this was working each base would
be called up and told that on the following weekend they would implement
the plan. The chaplains and staff were told to stay away that weekend.
That way they could test if the system was working.
At Patrick AFB, where I do my reserve duty, the Catholic side
had been developing that scenario for years. They had a contract
with the retired Holy Cross priests in the Cocoa Beach area for coverage
at the Masses and confessions. They had already been having lay people
set up, clean up, arrange for the coffee and doughnuts, and take care of
getting the collection to the bank. The Protestant side was working
on such a system for their services too. It was more difficult for
them, because it was unfamiliar ground. The people who attended those
Protestant services had a hard time imagining that there might come a time
when there wouldn’t be a chaplain to lead worship.
Unfortunately, over the last twenty years in the Catholic
Church, we have gotten more used to the idea that there are fewer priests.
In some places around the country parishes and missions do not have a resident
priest. The people have learned that if they want to keep their parish
open they will have to look to a new model of church. It won’t be
sufficient to say that there will always be a priest to run things.
Right now we are in that transition phase. We don’t
know if the situation we find ourselves in is temporary and will reverse
itself in time or if this is a whole new working of the Holy Spirit.
We are trying to decide if we should try to do things as before with reduced
manpower or imagine entirely new ways of doing things.
The people who lived in the time of Jesus had to ask the same
questions. They wanted to know where did Jesus fit. They wondered
if he was a rabbi. They knew what rabbis did. They assumed
that Jesus would fit into that category. When he didn’t they wondered
if he was a Pharisee. Pharisees were lay people who tried to have
a close relationship to God by following the Jewish Law completely.
Maybe Jesus was a Pharisee. He didn’t seem to fit that bill.
They wondered if he was a member of the Essene community like John the
Baptist. They knew that those people fasted, lived very austere lives,
and often lived in the desert or in caves. Jesus didn’t seem to do
that. Who was he? Where did he fit? The people didn’t
know.
Jesus, as he often did, uses images. He tells them that
if there is a wedding all the guests come to celebrate. Under Jewish
Law, while a wedding feast was going on and the groom remained with the
guests, they were not required to fast or abide by other regulations.
Jesus said that his disciples are at a wedding feast. They were living
in a time of celebration. Jesus then uses the example of an old cloak
and old wineskins. In both cases the older material has gotten brittle
and has fully stretched. If you put new cloth over stretched cloth,
when the new cloth begins to stretch it will tear the old cloth even further.
When wine is placed in skins it continues to ferment. If you put
new wine into old skins they will not be able to handle the fermentation
and burst. In all cases it is necessary to do something different
from the ordinary, from the usual.
Jesus’ life and ministry were ushering in an entirely new
way of relating to God. Jesus represented for the people not a spokesman
for God, but God visiting His people. This new way represented seeing
God as one who would share in everything that humanity endured. God
would not be absent from us in times of joy or sorrow. We would have
a God who understands our fears and our deepest longings. This is
what Jesus shared. Likewise, we are given a new way to live.
We are called to see the image of God in everyone, not just in those that
we like. There is a new way to see the poor, the lowly, children,
and gentiles. No one is apart from God’s concern.
In many ways what we are being called to do as a church is
the same thing. What does it mean to be church today? How do
we bring forth this message to a tired world? Most importantly who
will do this? These are the questions that must be asked. It
is clear to me that this is the work of everyone. Each member of
the Church is called to be priest, prophet and king by baptism. This
is new wine. Our wineskins aren’t used to this wine. Can we
try on new wineskins to embrace this new vision given us by God?