Homily for the Funeral Mass of Cody Ringsmuth

+ J. M. J. +

Homily for the Funeral Mass of Cody Ringsmuth (obituary)

It may sound strange, but for me as a priest and as a man it is a privilege to be with you, Cody’s family and friends. We gather here this morning in the aftermath of a terrible choice, a true tragedy, his decision to take his own life. There is almost nothing that is more painful, in my own family we lost my Uncle Paul to suicide as well, so I know a little bit from the inside the terrible pain you are experiencing today.

I was speaking yesterday with a very wise and experienced retired priest friend of mine, and he gave me some very good advice as I was preparing to preach to you today. In a moment like this, our hearts cry out for answers, “Why?” We cannot help but ask this question, and if we are wise, we turn to the Lord for answers… but the Lord doesn’t give us an answer in the face of death and suffering. He doesn’t explain it all so that it all makes sense. This is not to say that He abandons us, far from it, but He doesn’t give us exactly what we think we want.

God gives us something different, stranger, better. We turn to the Word of God in the face of life, and in the face of death, and we find no answer there, but rather the Lord’s response. In our first reading, we hear from the Book of Revelation and John describes a new heaven and a new earth. He describes heaven, eternal life, and it is beautiful to behold.. God will dwell with us, and we will be his people. He will wipe every tear from our eyes, there will be no more dearth. Our thirst for peace and for God will be satisfied with springs of life-giving water. This is God’s promise to us, the gift that He longs to give us, if we will but accept… eternity with Him, in all of His beauty and splendor. We cannot live or understand this life fully or well except in the light of this truth… this mortal world is not the whole story, our weak and fallibly body mind and soul is not the whole story! Death, however final it may seem, is not the whole story.

Perhaps very many of us here believe this truth, at least on some level. Perhaps some of us want to believe this truth, that there is more to life than this world. That does not, however, remove the struggle and battle of this life. In our second reading from Paul’s Letter to the Romans, St. Paul describes this battle, “All creation is groaning in labor pains even until now; and not only that, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.” In Jesus Christ we have become the adopted sons and daughters of God by our baptism. If you haven’t received that gift, God desires you to receive it. By baptism we are grafted into Christ, into His death, and into His resurrection. It is this truth that gives us hope in the face of death, in the face of sorrow, in the face of despair.

We must not minimize the destruction wrought by Cody’s death, for that will bring us no peace. We know too viscerally today that wound… rather we turn to a God who is bigger than all of our sins, more beautiful than our worst ugliness. We trust not in ourselves, for we are weak. We trust not in our good deeds, for in the face of death they are small. Rather, we trust in God, our Loving Father.

In our Gospel today we encounter not God’s answer to suffering and death, but His response. On the Cross Jesus took upon Himself, Jesus who is Himself God, He took upon Himself our sorrow, our wounds, even very mysteriously our despair. Did Cody despair in making the choices that he did? Jesus has already been there… on His own lips were the words that perhaps dwell in our hearts right now, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, if there was ever a God for atheists, or for those of us who are tempted to doubt or despair in the midst of tragedy, it is Jesus Christ, who Himself uttered those words, “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?”

In Jesus Christ, God gave us no answer, no formula, no theory… God came Himself, He taught, He healed… He suffered, He sweat blood, He cried out. Cody has died, and soon will be buried, and Jesus was there before him, in death, and in the tomb. Jesus has borne every burden for us already, He has walked through the dark valley. Our God is no far off deity, but God for us, God with us, Emmanuel.

At this Mass, at this Eucharist, we entrust Cody into God’s perfect mercy, infinite beyond imagining. We offer the most perfect sacrifice, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and Jesus’ self-offering on Calvary becomes present to us at this altar, and once again Jesus comes to us hidden under the appearance of bread and wine. We do not understand, but God is with us now. We entrust Cody into His hands, we give thanks for the blessings in Cody’s life, and we pray too for ourselves. We are weak, we may well be close to despair… but God is near, He is with us, He has walked through these shadows ahead of us. May we follow Him to the Cross, to the Tomb… and to the Resurrection, to Eternal Life.

May God’s mercy shine upon Cody, who was baptized into His death and resurrection. May God’s mercy shine upon Cody who ate the Body of Christ, the Bread of Life. May God’s mercy shine upon us who grieve his death.

+ A. M. D. G. +

Where do you hear the Shepherd's voice?

 + J. M. J. +   

 
Homily Outline for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year C

On this Good Shepherd Sunday, we hear very succinctly, “My sheep hear my voice; I know them and they follow me.”  It is very hard for us to embrace this truth: we are not the principal shepherds of our lives, ourselves, or our families!  Jesus is our shepherd, Jesus who is God, and we are not.  This boils down to a very simple truth: God is God and I am not!  It bears repeating. We so easily place ourselves at the center of all reality and meaning, thus displacing God, and very quickly we can find ourselves worshipping at our own altars, instead of at God’s altar.

Jesus our Good Shepherd leads us to green pastures, to fresh water; He protects us from wolves and thieves; He seeks out the lost sheep and brings them home.  This is reassuring in theory, but it’s only meaningful if we actually allow Jesus to direct and shape our lives.

Where do we hear Jesus’ voice?  If He is to guide, protect, teach, and rescue us, we must hear His voice.  We hear His voice in our hearts and in the Church.  We are created for God, this longing for God is inherent and constitutive of what it means to be fully human. As St. Augustine said, “You have made us for Yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.”  God’s voice speaks to us in the depths of our conscience and in our pure desires.  However, that interior voice must be tested and purified by God’s self-revelation through the Church.  Left to our own devices, we are supremely capable of justifying nearly anything we want, supremely capable of distorting, ignoring, or even silencing the voice of our conscience for a time.  We are broken and weak from original sin and our own sins, and so left to our own devices we are terribly vulnerable.  Jesus entrusted His teaching and authority to His Apostles.  In time, the New Testament was recognized and assembled by the Church.   No Church, no Bible.  If we want to know God’s teaching and His law, we must turn to the His Revelation, both in its written form, and in the living voice of the Church which necessarily interprets a text.  No text can interpret itself.  Scripture and Tradition together correct and guide our consciences, so that we can truly be one flock, hearing Jesus’ voice and following Him.

To hear this Word, and even more, to act on this Word, will necessarily involve us in difficulty!  In our 2^nd reading we are given a beautiful vision of heaven where every tear has been wiped away, but notice, these multitudes who stand before the throne and before the Lamb are also the ones who have survived a time of great distress, and they have been washed white in the blood of the Lamb.  In our 1^st reading Paul and Barnabas are preaching Jesus Christ, but they are rejected by many, persecuted, and they end up getting kicked out of the whole region.  If we are faithful to Jesus Christ, we too will face opposition, rejection, and even persecution at times.  We do not seek trouble, but we must know that to follow Christ means not only glory and eternal life, but also the Passion and the Cross.  We have experienced the resistance in our own hearts to doing the right thing.  We have been hurt by others when we tried to do what was right.  We have looked around at times and noticed that the great tide of majority opinion and practice often seems to be flowing away from or against the Church.  Jesus told us this would be so, and from the Early Church to the present, so it has been.

As an under-shepherd, delegated by the Church to serve you on behalf of Christ, I participate in a very small way in Jesus’ sacred role as shepherd, and so I am charged with helping you to hear the Shepherd’s voice and to follow Him, even as I struggle to do this myself.  With you I am a member of the flock, for you I am a shepherd.

As I look around the world in which we live, I see so much that is broken, so many attractive lies that lead us away from the Flock and away from the Shepherd, Jesus Christ.  One place this is particularly evident is in the breakdown of our families, the basic unit of the flock.  We are all impacted by this in one way or another.  Our society and culture becomes more and more extreme in worshipping the God of Self at any cost, and vocations that require the gift of self have suffered terribly… both priesthood and marriage.  The Church continues to teach the truth, as She always has, the truth entrusted to Her by Jesus Christ, and yet it seems that our society, and indeed, most of us baptized Catholics, turn a deaf ear.  More and more people seem to understand that something has gone terribly wrong, and as I talk to you in many different contexts, I hear your concern and anxiety.  The death toll mounts from war, and violence, and abortion.  Our children are more and more brutalized by a world full of pornography and bloodshed sold as entertainment.  Fewer young adults each year enter into stable marriages, and fewer children have access to both their mother and father.  We all see this, we are all impacted by it, on some level we all cry out, “What is happening to our world, to our society, to our communities, to our families!”

God has not abandoned us in these storms and continues to teach us the truth through His Church, if we have ears to hear. We are not sheep scattered without a shepherd, unless we refuse to hear His loving voice.  Jesus is calling us together away from bitter pastures and tainted water, away from wolves and precipices, but we must respond, we must hear His voice and follow Him. We must know Him and be known.

The most basic building block of society is the family, and our families are falling apart all around us.  OUR families! ..not families in some far-off inner-city war zone… OUR families.  Our parents, our children, our spouses, our grandchildren… we are falling apart.

Almost 44 years ago, Pope Paul VI issued an encyclical letter titled Humanae Vitae, which means “Of Human Life,” and he addressed the raging storms of controversy that surrounded the use of artificial birth control in the Church.  New technologies had arisen, and many voices confidently asserted that they would bring a new era of human flourishing.  Many voices within the Church clamored for the pope to give the thumbs up to the creation of a brave new world where no one would be burdened by a pregnancy that they didn’t intend.  And, yet, being the Vicar of Christ, a shepherd in service of the Good Shepherd, Pope Paul VI taught the truth, a truth that was very hard for the Church to hear, a truth that lead many to revile and scorn him.  We have sown the wind, and after forty years, we are reaping the whirlwind that Pope Paul VI clearly prophesied.  Let me close by reading you two short paragraphs from that letter, paragraphs that strike to the heart of the very broken world in which we live.  Hear the voice of the Shepherd speaking to you through His Church:

Consequences of Artificial Methods

17. Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.

Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.                                          (Humanae Vitae # 17) (Full text here: Humanae Vitae)

My brothers and sisters in Christ, sadly, Pope Paul VI was exactly right in every regard… there has been a general lowering of moral standards, both women and men are treated more and more as instruments, even by their spouses, and the government here and in many other countries has indeed taken undue control of human life into its own hands and away from families and parents.

I do not even begin to imagine that what I have said today has explained in any full way the Church’s teaching, nor do I imagine that I have provided an adequate or convincing defense of that teaching.  However… Jesus is our Shepherd, He speaks to us through the Church, and Pope Paul saw what the experts and pundits did not.  If you would like to learn more and grapple with these important issues, pick up a copy of Humanae Vitae at the entrances and read it prayerfully.  Also, we have a rack of very fine pamphlets examining various aspects of a Culture of Life, please check them out!  If we will listen, we will hear the Shepherds voice, and He will lead us through the storms of this world to eternal life.

+ A. M. D. G. +

Do you love Jesus?

+ J. M. J. +

Homily Outline for the 3rd Sunday of Easter, Year C

We, like the Apostles, have heard the announcement that Jesus is Risen from the Dead! From the Easter Vigil until now, this good news has been the chief concern of every liturgical prayer of the Church, and so we say over and over again, “Alleluia,” that is, “Praise God!” Not only have each of us heard this announcement these weeks, but of course, many times in the past, for as long as we have been Catholic. And, yet, simply to have heard this news is not enough and we see this beautifully in our Gospel today. Simon Peter and the others have gone back to Galilee to fish. I’ve often intended to make a sign and a t-shirt that state, instead of the very common John 3:16, rather John 21:3, a very beautiful verse which we’ve just heard, “Simon Peter said to them, ‘I am going fishing.’ They said to him, ‘We also will come with you.’”!!!

As they fish, we don’t really know what’s going through their heads… they have heard of Jesus’ rising, and yet here they are. Maybe they just needed some ready money, and they know how to fish. Maybe they don’t know quite how to respond to the news of the resurrection. Maybe, for Simon Peter in particular, maybe their own weakness in the face of the Passion still burdens their hearts… they know they DID NOT stand by Jesus in His trial and death. How can they in good conscience stand by Him now?

And yet, after a night of fishing with no success, there is the Risen Son, Jesus, standing on the shore, greeting them in that beautiful moment of the rising Sun, although they do not recognize Him. Just as before, He tells them to cast out their net one more time, and when it comes back full to the bursting, John realizes who it is, and Peter impetuously abandons the groaning net and jumps into the sea and swims to shore…

In these days you and I have been immersed in our daily duties… our work, our bills, our families, our friends. We’ve been earning money and spending it, we’ve been studying or training for sports, we’ve been loved by friends and family and tried to love them back. We’ve been immersed in struggles large and small, trying to rise to the occasion. All of this can completely occupy our minds. Right at this very moment, very many of you may be partially or completely occupied by thoughts far away from my homily or even being in Church… Can we stop, can we pause… look at me! Stop, pause, just for a moment, give me your undivided attention, clear your heart of busy distraction, however important… Hear John’s surprised words in that dawn light, “It is the Lord.” Hear the splash as Peter suddenly drops his rope and jumps into the water. Jesus came to them in the midst of their busy lives, their duties, their struggles… and He comes to you and to me now, in this living word, and very shortly on that Altar, Jesus Himself.

Jesus speaks to Simon Peter… and these words are for you and for me: “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” It’s not immediately certain, even grammatically, what the “these” refers to… is it the other apostles? Is it Peter’s daily tasks and work? Is it Peter’s struggles and habits? DO YOU LOVE JESUS MORE? Close your eyes and pause with me and let this question ring in your heart. DO YOU LOVE JESUS MORE? (Pause)

Three times those words rung out in Peter’s ears, and three times he told the truth, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” Again “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” Again “Lord, you know everything, you know that I love you.” Those words might very well be on our lips and in our hearts… we do love Jesus. I don’t doubt that in some way and in some fashion EVERY SINGLE ONE of us here loves Jesus…and yet still the Lord asks us this question as we stand before Him, as we prepare to receive Him into our minds and hearts, in our hands and on our lips… Jesus says to us, “Do you love me?”

If we don’t look into the Lord’s eyes, if we will not allow that question to ring out in our hearts, this Easter season could trundle along and pass us by, another handful of weeks where the priest happens to be wearing white, a pair of months where Easter Lilies are in the sanctuary… But it we will look, if we will hear this question… what might happen? Could we say yes, and hear the Lord’s reply, “Feed my sheep.” Could we recognize that to authentically acknowledge Jesus risen NECESSARILY involves us in hearing Jesus’ final words, “Follow me.” “Follow me.”

In the aftermath of that encounter, as we heard in our first reading, Peter and the apostles were beaten and imprisoned and mocked and hauled before magistrates, but they steadfastly made one reply, “We must obey God rather than men.” The witness of their lives set the world on fire, and despite over 200 years of intense and savage persecution, the Church grew and grew. The voices of men, women, and children from every walk of life cried out with one voice, as we heard in the second reading, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches, wisdom and strength, honor and glory and blessing.” Worthy is the Lamb once slain, now risen in glory to receive not only our presence at Mass, not only our nominal or superficial identity as Catholics, but indeed our whole hearts, our whole minds, all our strength. Worthy is the Lamb to be given every burden and struggle and sin and wound. Worthy is the Lamb to have us place at His disposal, in His hands our lives and breath and time and talent and treasure and family, all that we are and all that we have, every single thing a gift from our Creator and Redeemer. Worthy is the Lamb for us to love Him more, He who is more, greater than sin, greater that failure, greater than death itself, the Lamb upon the throne.

Today, once again, my brothers and sisters in Christ, Jesus speaks to us intimately, to our hearts, “Do you love me more?” Today may we do more than simply nod and move along… may we do more than simply go back to the hubbub and immerse ourselves in daily things that are not bad, but merely less than Christ. May we say with Peter, “Lord, you know that I love you.” May we hear Jesus call us to serve in the infinitely varied ways that He calls us each day… May we receive Jesus now and by the infinite grace of this Eucharistic gift, may we be empowered to Follow Him.

+ A. M. D. G. +