INTRODUCTION - (Ezekiel 33, 7-9) (Romans 13, 8-10)
(Matthew 18, 15-20) Our first reading takes us back six hundred years
before Christ as God explains to his prophet Ezekiel his responsibility as
a prophet. He must warn God’s people of their sinful ways or he will be
held accountable. It is a prelude to the gospel where Jesus instructs his
followers how to help each other stay on the right track. St. Paul’s
teaching on love in our second reading reminds us that if we should try to
correct one another it should be done out of love.
HOMILY - I happened to meet a lady this week carrying a little
baby. I found out the baby’s name was Joseph. I thought: an appropriate
name for a handsome little fellow! The encounter got me wondering what I
was like when I was an infant and wouldn’t it be interesting to go back in
time and experience what it was like to have to be fed and changed, to
have to be carried around and cared for and to have to cry and scream when
you needed something. When we came into this world, we were totally
dependent on other people for our every need. As we grow to become more
independent, we sometimes forget how in so many ways we will always remain
dependent on others. Labor day is a good reminder that our existence is
really a co-existence. How would we ever survive without farmers and
electricians and car mechanics and trash collectors and bankers and
doctors and the thousands of occupations and services we depend on in our
complex society. The scenes from New Orleans and the gulf area we saw on
TV this week remind us how dependent we are on others. While many people
come to the aid of those suffering from the devastation, we are saddened
to hear of people whose only value in life is their own self-interest and
who readily take advantage of those who are vulnerable. Tragedies bring
out the best and the worst in people. For Christians, St. Paul reminds us
that love is the basic law. Love unites us and calls us to care for one
another. His words also are good advice for those who let their credit
cards get out of control: “owe nothing to anyone, except to love one
another,” Paul tells us.
One area where we often forget that we always remain dependent on others
is in our spiritual lives. So many these days decide they don’t need to go
to church. They can pray on their own, they rationalize. I wonder how
often they really do.
Our gospel today presupposes the need for a community of faith and that
there be unity and harmony in the community. We can see that Jesus was
giving guidelines to be followed in order to restore unity and harmony
among the members of the community when there was serious disunity and
sin. There is a three step process to follow: 1) Encourage the wrong doer
and, tell that person they are doing wrong and not everyone else. Perhaps
they can be brought back to the community. This was the job the prophet
Ezekiel had to do for all the people of his day. It’s not an easy thing to
do. I’ve been slammed down at times for trying to tell someone they’re not
living like they should. 2) If that doesn’t work, Jesus gives us another
procedure to try in order to build a bridge between a wrong doer and God’s
people. He tells us gather two or three others to go with you to talk to
the person. That is very similar to what we refer to today as
intervention. I’ve done this with alcoholics who deny they have a problem.
Family and loved ones come together and bombard them with their concern
and their love and try to get the person to see they have a problem and
they need to go into treatment. It can be very effective, but sometimes
that doesn’t work either. 3) As a final step Jesus said get the entire
community on your side.
At the end of his instruction about preserving unity and harmony in the
community, Jesus teaches us about our need to pray with one another.
Certainly we should pray on our own, but there is a unique power in
praying with others. It’s like logs in a fireplace. One log has a hard
time burning all by itself. But two or three together make a nice fire.
Praying with others is something husbands and wives and children should do
more of. It’s something we do every time we celebrate the Eucharist, the
special prayer Jesus gave us at the Last Supper and which he told us to
celebrate in his memory. The Church makes it a serious obligation to come
to Mass each week lest we get lazy or too busy with too many things that
we forget that he has asked us to gather in his name and in his memory.
In another place in his epistles St. Paul tells us “we are the body of
Christ.” A body must be united for it to operate properly because all the
parts depend on one another. We all depend on one another, not only for
our material and emotional needs, but also for our spiritual needs. And
that dependence doesn’t end at age 16 or 17 or 35 or 85. It continues on
as long as we share in Christ’s life. For we are one body with him. I want
to thank you all for coming today. Amen.
24th Sunday in Ordinary Time
September 11, 2005
(Sirach 27, 30 – 28,7) (Mt. 18, 21-35) I welcome the classes of ‘43, ‘44,
‘45, and ‘46. I am grateful my friend and cousin, Fr. Don McCarthy, who
was in the class of ’43, could join us this evening to concelebrate the
Mass. Today is Stewardship Sunday throughout the Archdiocese, and you
probably wouldn’t feel at home here if I didn’t talk about money. Well, I
do want to say something later on, but I’m not really ready to give a
full-fledged Steward talk this weekend. We still have some things to talk
about at Parish Pastoral Council before I can address that topic, so
you’re all lucky this year, because you won’t hear a big sermon on money
here and you’ll probably miss it at your own parish. In place of that, I
do have a little story to make you feel at home. One of our parishioners
told me this story the other day. She does not want to be identified. She
told me one Sunday Msgr. Schwartz was giving a very long sermon. She was
three years old at the time and with the usual innocence of childhood she
asked her mother in a fairly audible voice: “Is he going to talk all day?”
The people around her didn’t dare laugh, but a lot of them were smiling.
She said he finished up his sermon rather quickly after that. I’ll try not
to do the same to everyone today. As George Burns said: “The secret of a
good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending; and have the
two as close together as possible.”
The theme of our readings is on forgiveness. Reading the paper each day
shows us what unforgiveness does to nations, as they keep trying to get
revenge on one another for some real or imagined act of cruelty. Some of
the battles between different peoples have roots that go back hundreds of
years. Many still live by the ancient principle of “an eye for an eye and
a tooth for a tooth.” That rule was meant to keep a person from exacting
more revenge than what was appropriate. In other words, if someone knocked
out one of your teeth, you could only knock out one of theirs and no more!
I couldn’t find the exact quote, but I think it was Martin Luther King who
said, if we all insisted on an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,
soon everyone in the world would be blind and toothless. In the Sermon on
the Mount (Mt. 6, 38), Jesus told us that’s no longer the rule we should
live by. Today’s parable illustrates his position of forgiveness. We can’t
hold on to hating and desire for revenge. We have to let go.
A couple of comments might help us get a feel for Jesus’ parable. Our
translation is very weak and does not give the full impact of what was
going on. It spoke of “a huge amount” that a servant owed his king and
then of “a much smaller amount” that was owed. The original version (in
the Greek) says the man owed his king ten thousand talents. In today’s
money that would be about 2 or 3 billion dollars. In that society it was
customary for people who couldn’t pay off their debts to be sold into
slavery. The king’s generosity was beyond belief. The man whose debt was
cancelled was owed (again looking at the original Greek) a hundred denarii.
Translated into today’s dollars, that’s about $5000. It boggles our mind
to think that anyone could be as selfish as the man in today’s gospel. He
was given so much and, in spite of the unbelievable example of generosity
shown by his king, he hadn’t learned how to be generous toward others.
Refusing to forgive is a form of anger, anger we will not let go of (or as
the first reading describes it so poetically, anger that a person hugs
tight). The man in the parable who refused to forgive his fellow servant
may have been motivated by selfishness or pettiness or greed or by the
refusal to let anyone take advantage of him. I think in most cases,
however, when someone refuses to let go of their anger it is because of
pride. We tell ourselves, when we are hurt by someone, we should not have
been treated like that. No doubt we were treated badly, but we do more
harm to ourselves than to anyone else when we keep that anger alive in us.
It will only eat us up emotionally and maybe even physically. As a
counselor I have seen what unforgiveness does to the individual who cannot
let go of pain or hurt someone has caused them. Jesus’ admonition to
forgive is good not only spiritually but psychologically too.
One of the people we often have difficulty forgiving is ourselves. We do
something we are embarrassed about or ashamed of and we continue to beat
ourselves up. I did it to myself for years and, as a result, I always felt
a lot of depression. It took me a long time to realize my problem was
pride (more accurately it was neurotic pride). Our pride tells us we
should be better than we really are and when we fail, our pride comes down
on us with a vengeance. Certainly we should keep working to improve
ourselves and to learn from our mistakes (this is healthy pride), but we
also need to accept the fact that we are not perfect. And beating
ourselves up will not help us improve ourselves, it will only depress us.
Often times people have complained to me in counseling or in confession “I
don’t feel as if God has forgiven me for what I did.” I tell them, it’s
because they haven’t forgiven themselves.
Obviously today’s parable is about forgiveness, but there is another
important element to it and that is that we must not forget how generous
God has been to us. We celebrate God’s goodness now as we continue on with
our Mass thanking him for his mercy and love which is worth more than many
billions of dollars. It’s worth is infinite, because God’s love is
infinite. Amen.
25th Sunday in Ordinary Time
September 18, 2005
INTRODUCTION (Isaiah 25, 6-9; Mt. 20, 1-16) The prophet in today’s
first reading is speaking to God's people in exile. They were depressed.
They had lost everything. They were sure they had lost even God's love
because of their sinfulness. The prophet assures them it is never too late
to return to the Lord. Even though they were not worthy of it, and they
knew it, God will extend his mercy toward them if they will reform their
lives. When God forgives us it’s not because we are worthy, it is because
of his own kindness and generosity. Jesus’ parable makes us uncomfortable
because sometimes God’s generosity seems out of control, so far beyond
what we consider fair (especially when he is extra generous toward someone
besides us). Truly God’s thoughts are not our thoughts nor are his ways
our ways. His thoughts and his ways are often beyond our understanding. HOMILY - A lady told the story about her grandmother who owned a
country store in a little rural town in Arkansas. (A 3rd Helping of
Chicken Soup for the Soul – pg 233) The lady telling the story often would
help her grandmother in the store. Whenever a customer would come in
grandmother, would always ask the person how they were doing. Certain
customers always went on and on complaining about something: it’s too hot,
or the ground was too hard to plow or whatever. Whenever this happened,
grandmother would look at her grandchild and give her a little nod. Then
after the complainer was out of the store, she would call her grandchild
over and say, “did you hear that? Did you hear what old Tom or Doris was
complaining about?” Then she would teach her grandchild a lesson: “There
are people who went to sleep all over the world last night, poor and rich
and white and black, but they will never wake again. They expected to rise
but did not. Their covers became their winding sheets. And those folks
would give anything, anything at all for just five minutes of this weather
or 10 minutes of plowing that field where the ground is hard. So be
careful when you complain, granddaughter. What you’re supposed to do when
you don’t like a thing is change it. If you can’t change it, change the
way you think about it.”
Jesus’ society was different than our own. The usual wage for a day
laborer was a denarius, which was enough to feed one’s family for a day.
What the generous owner of the vineyard was doing was to make sure that
none of the people who worked for him that day would have to beg, borrow
or steal in order to feed their families the next day. It’s too bad the
ones who worked all day were not happy that the ones who came late would
have food for the next day. The owner was fair with all, but more generous
with some. And so the ones who got their fair salary, but not the extra
bonus complained. Let me say: there are advantages to complaining. It
helps us get things off our chest, it helps us sort out our thoughts, it
sometimes helps to get things done. Counselors and psychologists and
doctors would not be able to help people if people didn’t complain.
Politicians would be without work, if people didn’t complain. Friends and
spouses wouldn’t be able to give support and sympathy to each other if
they didn’t let the other person know how they hurt. But we have to be
careful not to make complaining a way of life. We have to be careful not
to do it out of envy like the people in today’s gospel. And if we’re going
to complain, we should also stop to count our blessings.
Jesus’ parable is really about salvation, of course. Remember Jesus
received a lot of criticism for associating with sinners. The religious
leaders thought the ordinary person had little or no chance to be saved.
They thought only the religious leaders were deserving. Jesus’ parable was
telling everyone God's mercy is available at any time to the person who
responds to his invitation to be saved. It’s never too late. It’s not
smart to decide to wait until the last minute, however, because the
opportunity to turn to God at the last minute might not be there for any
of us. As St. Paul says (IICor,6,2) “Now is the acceptable time! Now is
the day of salvation!”
But our parable can apply to more things than salvation. How many times
have we said, “God isn’t fair?” Fortunately God isn’t fair if fair means
we get what we deserve. God is more than fair. God is overwhelmingly
generous to all of us. So often we think God is being more generous to
someone else and we are more deserving. Even if we were more deserving,
and only God knows that, we will only make ourselves miserable by drawing
comparisons. We will always find someone who appears to be better off than
we are. Rather than comparing ourselves with others, it’s best to focus on
God's goodness to us and to trust that God is more than fair toward any of
us. We all have our problems, but we all have much to be thankful for. And
the “Eucharist,” a word which means “thanksgiving,” is the most perfect
way to do that.
26th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Sept. 25, 2005
INTRODUCTION – (Ezekiel 18, 25-28) (Matthew 21, 28-32) In 587 B.C.
when the Babylonians conquered the Jews, destroyed their cities and Temple
and farms and took them off to Babylon as their slaves, the conquered Jews
concluded they were being punished for the sins of their ancestors. They
complained God was unfair. In today’s first reading from Ezekiel, God
addresses the Jews during their exile. God tells them they brought this
disaster on themselves by their own sins. But the situation was not
hopeless. They could always turn back to God if they wanted. This reading
prepares us for the gospel where we hear a similar message. If we have
damaged our relationship with God, we can always turn back.
HOMILY – I hate to be late for meetings or appointments, almost as
much as I hate to be early. So I usually try to time myself so I get where
I need to be just on time! Sometimes unexpected complications arise, road
repairs, an accident or whatever and on those occasions, as I offer my
apologies for being late, I always give my excuse. And that is typical of
most people I know. At a meeting I was at recently, one of the
participants came about 25 minutes late and gave us a multiple choice
excuse: “car wouldn’t start, traffic was slow, there was an accident, take
your pick!” I know people who are habitually late who never try to offer
an explanation. Their attitude seems to say: “The important one has
arrived now, we can start.” A couple of weeks ago I was at a meeting with
the Archbishop, who is usually very prompt, and he came about five or ten
minutes late. As he entered he said, “if I had left on time, I would have
arrived on time.” I was impressed. How many times do you hear someone say
that? His was an honest admission of responsibility.
I’m not here to talk about being late, but about taking responsibility.
Despite what our parents tried to teach us about honesty, experience
taught us that if we did something wrong and can convincingly put the
blame on someone else, we can avoid getting into trouble. When we grow up
we know admission of guilt can cause us serious problems or even a big
lawsuit. I understand Harry Truman had a sign on his desk “the buck stops
here.” How few there are who are ready to say the same thing.
Now I’m talking about honest admission of responsibility. Sometimes people
blame themselves for something when they’re not responsible. I know
sometimes children do this. For example, when a father and mother break
up, often the children feel they were somehow the cause of the break up. I
always counsel parents to assure their children that the problem is
between daddy and mommy and not their son or daughter’s fault. We can’t
escape the fact that our lives are influenced by other people. For
example, if we had good and honest parents, we benefited from their care
and example. On the other hand, if we grew up in an alcoholic home, for
example, we certainly experience the effects of that. Much of the work of
counseling and psychology is to uncover and resolve the bad influences we
experienced in life and learn to go on from there. We don’t have to stay
stuck in the negative things that have happened to us. I was stuck for a
long time, always blaming my parents for problems I was facing until I
decided to forgive them and start doing something on my own about the
things that were bothering me.
In our first reading, this is what God is telling the Jewish people in
exile. They wanted to blame their ancestors. Certainly their ancestors
contributed to their situation, but God also told that generation what
they needed to do to avoid disaster and they did just the opposite. God is
telling them they have to learn to take honest responsibility for what
they are going through. And if they do so and stop blaming their ancestry
and stop blaming God for being unfair, things will start turning around
for them.
Jesus gives us a similar message in today’s gospel. The religious leaders
of Jesus’ day put on a good show of being holy people. No doubt some of
them were. But Jesus was not impressed with many of them. He wanted people
who would be honest with themselves. He wanted people who, if they were
sinners, would admit it and get themselves right with God. Talk is not
going to impress God. Excuses are not going to impress God. Empty promises
are not going to impress God. It’s the good that we do that’s going to
please God and bring us the eternal happiness we were made for. For
example, we can blame the hierarchy or the boring sermons or the songs we
don’t like or the price of gas or our busy schedules or whatever else we
can think of as to why we’re not practicing our faith. We can make lots of
promises to ourselves about what we’re going to do tomorrow, but it’s what
we actually do that’s going to matter. Jesus is telling us if we’re not
doing right, it’s never too late to change our minds
