+ 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. +
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