Will you step into the white-hot blowtorch of Christ's love?

+ J. M. J. +

Homily Outline for the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

In the last couple weeks, I have spoken to you about the lives of four beautiful saints from very different walks of life, three of them from the 20th century: St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan friar; Bl. Franz Jägerstätter, a Austrian husband and father; St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, a German Carmelite nun; and St. Clare of Assisi, an Italian religious sister from 800 years ago. These four, along with many other holy men, women, and children down through the ages offer us a witness, a goal, and an example of seeking the Lord. In our second reading from the Letter to the Hebrews, we hear this reality spoken of very beautifully, for we are not alone:

Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us and persevere in running the race that lies before us while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith.

So great a cloud of witnesses… so many lives lived in the midst of difficulty and struggle and even apparent failure, but lived in radical obedience and conformity to Christ! So many lives, near and far, that make concrete and practical the call of the Gospel to us. In our own families, in our neighborhoods, in our parishes, we also encounter these witnesses. We see people around us choosing the Lord, His Church, His Truth, without counting the cost.

The readings this Sunday really challenge us, really throw down the gauntlet before us… do we choose Christ, or do we choose comfort, convenience, the crowd, political correctness? In our first reading, the Prophet Jeremiah wears out his welcome with the Jewish king because he has unabashedly spoken God’s truth. He is speaking the truth that people do not want to hear, a truth that calls them to conversion. They take him and thrown him down a well, and he is stuck there in the mud. At first this might seem a little comical, but it is not. He is unable to move, and he is facing a slow and painful death from starvation and dehydration. The king reconsiders this cowardly and violent act, and has Jeremiah removed… but if you were to read ahead, you would find that King Zedekiah persisted in ignoring Jeremiah until the whole city of Jerusalem was captured by the Babylonian armies.

In our daily lives, that voice of God speaks to us through the Church, through God’s Living Word, through our daily prayer, and in our consciences. The Church very intentionally lifts up for us the lives of the saints throughout the year to invite and challenge us. We use images of the saints in our stained glass windows, in statues, in holy cards to spark us to zeal. In our own diocese we promote the cause of Venerable Frederic Baraga precisely because we feel that his beautiful life should be more widely known!

One possible reaction to God’s call is to walk away… and we see this very commonly in our society. Many of our own family members and friends have walked away from God and God’s Church. One possible motivation, among many, is the avoidance of a call to conversion. If we know God is calling us to change, to grow, to serve, one way to avoid that call is to tune God out. If there is something in our lives that is not as it should be, it can seem easier to avoid the challenge than to enter the battle with our own weakness.

But here we are at church… you and me, with all of our faults and failings! Here we are in this hospital for sinners, this clinic for the spiritually weak and broken! It’s a sort of walk in clinic…all are welcome! No one asks to see your insurance card before you come in the door! No one asks to make sure you can afford the co-pay! Here we are, to some extent aware of our need for God’s help. Inasmuch as we have chose to be here, we are choosing God’s help. But for us, sitting in the pews, and for me at this altar, I think the great trap is lukewarmness… the great trap is spiritual tepidity. We show up, perhaps we avoid the most overt sins. This is good, we praise God. But it is also possible for us to settle in comfortably far short of the holiness God calls us to, with all of the sacrifice that involves, but also far short of the beauty and joy. In this light hear Christ in the Gospel speaking to our hearts:

I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing! There is a baptism with which I must be baptized, and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished! Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.

Jesus doesn’t want division… He doesn’t seek division… but He knows the human heart perfectly, and He recognizes that many who hear His voice will not immediately follow Him wholeheartedly. Among His own disciples and apostles this was true, and it is still true. If we allow the Lord to set our hearts on fire with zeal and love, it may well mean a parting of ways with the common opinion, the broad common path. It may mean a division between us and our increasingly depraved popular culture. It may mean a parting of ways with neighbors, friends, or even family members who do not want to follow the Lord wholeheartedly.

 In no way do we seek division… but we acknowledge that a choice to follow Christ will have a price, consequences, and the Lord wants us to follow Him anyways. Listen to how the Letter to the Hebrews describes Jesus’ path:

For the sake of the joy that lay before him he endured the cross, despising its shame, and has taken his seat at the right of the throne of God. Consider how he endured such opposition from sinners, in order that you may not grow weary and lose heart. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood

On this path that Jesus has walked, we are invited to follow… enduring the Cross, despising its shame, bearing opposition, struggling on in the midst of weariness.

This may sound overly dramatic… but think of the places in our daily lives where our consciences nudges us: our favorite vice or sin; the gossip or profanity that we accept from day to day; the person who hurt us who we have resisted forgiving; the awkward person in need of help who we have shied away from; the time for prayer we desire but haven’t actually offered God. No blood here, perhaps, no newspaper accounts of our struggle, but this is the front line, and the Lord calls us to battle, and to victory. He has come like a blowtorch of love, a white-hot flame of love, and He longs for our daily lives, words, and actions to be ablaze with His love and truth. As we receive Him now, may He set our hearts and lives on fire!

+ A. M. D. G. +

Seeking Heaven with St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross and St. Clare of Assisi

+ J. M. J. +

Homily Outline for the 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Our theme last Sunday, God’s call to store up treasure in heaven, continues this week. We are invited to trust God, to put our faith in God, and to prepare ourselves for when He comes. This call runs counter to our desire to trust ourselves or our possessions, to put our faith in this world, and to prepare ourselves only for worldly concerns. This world, this life, is so immediate, so much in front of us at every moment, and so it is a constant challenge, a constant choice, to set our sights on heaven rather than on earth.

In our first reading, the Book of Wisdom calls to mind the Exodus, how God had saved the People of Israel. God prepared them and they followed God’s commandments, they trusted His promise. Again and again the People of Israel struggled and even failed to trust God, and again and again God called them back to trust and faithfulness. God has been faithful to you. It is possible that as you look at your life you can name and identify times and places where this was visible and evident. If so, call them to mind! Like the People of Israel, if we will remember God’s faithfulness to us, we may be inspired to be faithful to Him! As the psalmist sings:

Our soul waits for the LORD, who is our help and our shield. May your kindness, O LORD, be upon us who have put our hope in you.

We believe, we receive the Gift of Faith, in light of what God has done, but it always also involves a leap, a trusting beyond what we can see and measure. Our Second Reading from the Letter to the Hebrews gives us a famous definition of faith: “Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen.” Abraham is the example who is placed before those early Jewish Christians… Abraham who got up and left his homeland at God’s call; Abraham who trusted God’s promise of offspring even as he and Sarah were too old; Abraham was ready to sacrifice even his son Isaac at God’s command. With all the patriarchs, all the faithful men and women of Israel, Abraham died in faith, not living to see the fulfillment of all that was promised them. They “saw it and greeted it from afar….” because they were seeking and desiring “a better homeland, a heavenly one.”

Jesus takes up this theme in the Gospel and makes a radical call to his followers:

Do not be afraid any longer, little flock, for your Father is pleased to give you the kingdom. Sell your belongings and give alms. Provide money bags for yourselves that do not wear out, an inexhaustible treasure in heaven that no thief can reach nor moth destroy. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.

What would it look like to follow this call from Christ? What does this kind of faith and trust look like? As I told you of two men who have been lifted up as saints last Sunday, today I would like to tell you about two women!

On Friday we celebrated the feastday of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, more commonly known as St. Edith Stein. Like St. Maximilian Kolbe and Bl. Franz Jägerstätter, St. Teresa Benedicta also died at the hands of the Nazis during World War II, and with St. Maximilian Kolbe she was burned in the terrible crematorium at Auschwitz. Her life, though, was very different from theirs. She was born in 1891 in Breslau, she was raised in a nominally Jewish family. In her teens and twenties she abandoned Jewish belief, and passed through atheism. She was a brilliant philosopher and worked closely with Edmund Husserl. She came to know some serious philosophers who were also devout Catholics, and one evening while staying with a Catholic friend, she happened upon the spiritual autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila. She stayed up all night reading it, and when she finished at dawn she exclaimed, “This is true.” Not long afterwards she was baptized. She was 31 years old, and twelve years later she abandoned a very promising academic career to enter the Carmelite order as a cloistered nun, taking the name St. Teresa Benedict of the Cross. Despite being sent to the Netherlands by her order so as to avoid the Nazi persecution of Jews, she was caught up in the Nazi net after the invasion of the Netherlands, and in 1942 she was killed in the Auschwitz gas chambers.

St. Edith Stein struggled with faith, rejected faith, sought truth in philosophy… but when the light of faith broke into the gloom in which she lived, she had the courage to respond and embrace it. She was even willing to risk difficulty with her Jewish family as she became Catholic, and the frustration of her academic colleagues when she entered the convent. She knew that death was approaching as the Nazi threat grew. We know from her letters that she approached that hour with courage, trusting that God was with her even as she suffered at the hands of sinful and savage men. She was truly like the servant Jesus mentions, who was prepared when the master arrived.

On Sunday (today), we have a second beautiful life, a life also lived in radical obedience and trust in God. August 11th is the feast of St. Clare of Assisi. Clare was raised in a wealthy family, and her parents had their hearts set on making a good match for her that would also advance the family fortunes. Clare, however, had been following the life and conversion of St. Francis, and eventually she ran off to join him. It was not possible for her to live the life of a beggar in the streets, so she entered the protection of a nearby Benedictine Abbey, and the nuns there sheltered her from the violent protests of her family. Eventually she was able to found the Poor Clares, who lived a life of poverty in community in solidarity with the life of the Franciscans. Clare had to face her family, the expectations of society, and even had to fight within the Church for the unique charism of poverty that God had entrusted to her. God came at an unexpected hour, with an unexpected gift, but, beautifully, Clare was ready to respond.

Jesus tells us to “Gird your loins and light your lamps and be like servants who await their master’s return… ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks.” It is possible that God will call you in some very unexpected way, as He called St. Teresa Benedicta and St. Clare, but it’s very likely He is calling you right now to reconciliation and love right where you are… to extend forgiveness to a family member or friend, or to ask for forgiveness… to love someone you do not like… to give and serve in some small and even hidden way that will nonetheless make all the difference. God IS calling… may we answer, ready, willing, wherever He calls. Right now He knocks at the door of our hearts and lives, He comes once again to this altar. He entrust much to us, because He gives us Himself. With St. Clare, with St. Teresa, let us say yes, and embrace our heavenly homeland.

+ A. M. D. G. +

St. Maximilian Kolbe & Bl. Franz Jägerstätter stored up treasure in heaven!

+ J. M. J. +

Homily Outline for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C


At first glance, our readings this Sunday are rather forbidding: “All things are vanity!” says Qoheleth; We are like grass, “which at dawn springs up anew, but by evening wilts and fades,” says the psalm; “You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?” says God to the rich man in the Gospel parable; “Put to death, then, the parts of you that are earthly,” says St. Paul to us in the 2nd reading. This is heavy sledding, and it seems to present a forbidding and negative perspective on this world.

Let me tell you about two men who acted on this powerful call from Christ to store up treasure in heaven. On September 1st, 1939, the Nazi army massively invaded Poland and devastated the Polish army and the Polish nation. Very quickly the Gestapo began to round up any potential leaders of resistance. Fr. Maximilian Kolbe, a Conventual Franciscan, was running the largest religious house in the world, an active publishing apostolate, and even a radio station. Very quickly he and some of his friars were picked up and put in prison. After some months of mistreatment and intimidation they were released. They went right back to publishing and evangelizing, so in February of 1941 they imprisoned him again, this time he was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. In late July that summer, a prisoner escaped from his barracks, and in retaliation the Nazis selected 10 prisoners at random to be starved to death. All the prisoners were standing at attention, and the men were singled out. One of them, Polish Sergeant Francis Gajowniczek, cried out in agony over his wife and children who would be left behind. Fr. Kolbe stepped out of line, and act that by itself would normally have resulted in immediate execution, and offered himself in Francis’ place, saying, “I am a Catholic priest. I would like to take his place, because he has a wife and children.” The camp commandant was silent, and then accepted the exchange. The ten men were put in a standing cell and starved to death. For two weeks, as they died, Fr. Kolbe encouraged them to pray and to sing hymns. On August 14, 1941, the vigil of the feast of the Assumption, Maximilian was one of four prisoners still alive. His impatient captors executed him

Fr. Kolbe

by means of a lethal injection of carbolic acid and burned his body in the crematorium. 60 years later, on August 14th 2001, I was there in Auschwitz for a special Mass to mark that anniversary, a day which is now the feast of St. Maximilian Kolbe. Most of the beautiful work that St. Maximilian did in this world was destroyed… his friary was disbanded, his publications silenced, and he himself was killed. But his life is not a source of discouragement and depression,rather it is a beacon of great hope. Surely Auschwitz was one of the darkest places in all of human history, where over a million people were snuffed out and burned up. Yet, even there, a man of faith did not become part of the evil, rather he chose to freely offer himself for a stranger. Even as he was being starved to death, he prayed for his captors and forgave them. The man he

Francis G. & his wife

saved was reunited with his family and lived until 1995. He was present at both the beatification and the canonization of St. Maximilian, he testified during his entire life to his gratitude at the gift of life given to him. St. Maximilian Kolbe’s life not only bore a rich harvest in eternity, but even here in this world.

As a recent college graduate visiting Auschwitz, I was enormously grateful to see it in light of Kolbe’s life. With just the facts as they are normally stated, I think I would have left Auschwitz depressed and saddened at man’s inhumanity to man. In light of St. Maximilian Kolbe, I left there inspired and challenged to follow the Lord, confident that in Christ all circumstances could be overcome, even if that meant mortal death.

On the other side of the border, in Austria, we have another example of this kind of courage, of this seeking treasure above all in heaven. Franz Jägerstätter was raised in a small farming village, and after a wild life in his 20’s, he came home, settled down, married, and began the difficult task of raising his family as a peasant farmer. When the Nazi’s took over Austria, he voted against this, and was public in his resistance. Eventually he was drafted into the Nazi army, and he refused to serve. Not long after he was taken into custody, he was executed. In 2004 he was beatified.

And so the challenge comes to us… do we allow ourselves to be absorbed only in the good things of this world? They are good, just as God created them to be, but they are not God, and they are not our eternal destiny. We will return to dust, we will stand before the Lord’s throne, we will at that moment see clearly that many of the things that we have striven after here were not of the first importance. God offers you and me grace today, through these words of scripture, through the lives of these saints. Here the words of Blessed Franz Jägerstätter:

 “Just as the man who thinks only of this world does everything possible to make life here easier and better, so must we, too, who believe in the eternal kingdom, risk everything in order to receive a great reward there. Just as those who believe in National Socialism tell themselves that their struggle is for survival, so must we, too, convince ourselves that our struggle is for the eternal kingdom.”

 By God's grace, we do not face imprisonment or execution for following Christ, but it is nonetheless a constant temptation for us to be drawn and absorbed entirely by the things of this world.  Do we raise our eyes to the heavenly kingdom?  Do we struggle to put first things first?  Many voices will happily encourage us to acquire, to consume, to have... but this will not bring lasting peace. The moral current of our society flows farther and farther from God... do we allow ourselves simply to be carried along?  Perhaps it is even more difficult to keep track of heavenly treasure when we face the gradual and subtle temptations of our time.

Here the words of St. Paul,
“Brothers and Sisters, if you were raised with Christ, seek what is above, where Christ is seatred at the right hand of God. Think of what is above, not of what is on earth.”
May we use the things of this world well, honorably, and with love. May we set our sights and our hearts on eternal life, especially as we prepare to receive our Lord and Saviour now!

 

+ A. M. D. G. +