Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time
Fr. Jim Deiters
On Friday and Saturday, our Jewish brothers and sisters gathered in Pittsburgh to pray for peace just one week after the American-born terrorist murdered their fellow synagogue members. One of the lead rabbis there called this weekend “Solidarity Shabbat” as he called for all Jews across the nation to go to their local synagogue and pray for God’s peace, so as to not let fear hinder people from worshipping our God. Just two weeks ago, Jews across our nation also held what they called “National Refugee Shabbat” to raise awareness of and pray for the 65 million people in the world who have fled persecution and violence in their homelands. There is a powerful lesson to learn from our Jewish brother’s and sister’s as they weave together prayers for utter dependence on God…and care for refugees and immigrants…as inseparable from one another.
In the Gospel today we have a rare situation in which Jesus and a scribe agree on something. If you remember from previous chapters of Mark’s Gospel, the scribes were the religious lawyers of the time and were usually trying to catch Jesus breaking one of the laws and thus they had a contentious relationship. This particular scribe changed the focus of the conversation from being about rules on washing hands and doing nothing physical on the Sabbath…to the deeper question about what really matters to God as the most important commandment.
Jesus knew his lawyer mind and love of details so he rightly names the love of God as the most important commandment, which we just heard in our first reading. This is the ‘shema’ prayer that Jews begin with every morning; before they leave home go into a world of so many false gods they pray “The Lord is God alone!” We just sang this same prayer in our Gloria, “You alone are God!” It is a prayer that reminds us that there isnothing more important in our life than God and their love of God. We say this but how does this play out in our daily lives? Does our daily calendar really reflect that God is the most important part of our life?
Jesus attaches to this another commandment to “love your neighbor” to show that you cannot separate a love of God from how you treat others. The scribe surprisingly agrees with Jesus! The two of them are able to cross their usual dividing line of differences to confess a common faith. Jesus and the scribe have stepped away from the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ categories and they find an island of reconciliation in a sea of hostility. It is such a powerful story for us today…as we head to the voting booth this week and are challenged to make theconnection between our love of God here at the Altar…and His Commandment of caring for God’s poor and marginalized, our “neighbor.”
Jesus and the scribe, along with our Jewish siblings praying for solidarity at synagogues this weekend, put things in perspective for us…as we sometimes mistakenly separate what we do here in prayer and what we stand for out in the world. For Jesus, it makes no sense to have great ritual, prayer and creeds about God…while ignoring issues of justice! In other words, we cannot consume the living Body of Christ in the Eucharist…and then turn our heads away from the living members of Christ’s Body who need our help. That would be called sacrilegious or sinful since it breaks Jesus’ Commandments.
This one reconciling conversation between Jesus and the scribe challenges us to think about what ‘commandments’ or ‘ideologies’ or ‘false gods,’ people or things, do we follow so passionately…that they become the defining force in our lives? How do we let a person or position become more important than a passionate love of the True God and a fervent care for all God’s children?
Every Eucharist is a time to seek God’s forgiveness for any time we have put some person or thing above God and his Commandment of love. Like all of the Jews praying for peace and solidarity this weekend, every Massis a prayer of solidarity – where we submit our passions and false ego to the one true God… and recommit our self to a care and love of all God’s children, especially those most in need.
In a few minutes we will hear these words in the Eucharistic Prayer: “Jesus always showed compassion for the poor…and became a neighbor to the oppressed and the afflicted.” And so we pray, “O Holy Spirit, expand our minds and hearts to think and act more like Jesus.”
LISTEN TO THIS HOMILY
Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Fr. Jim Deiters
Twenty-seven years ago, when I was a ‘baby priest’ just out of school and learning so much, a woman named Martha made a big impact and influence on my prayer and ministry. Martha was a really attractive cosmetologist in her late 30’s, but had a severe case of diabetes. Unable to deal with her illness, her husband divorced and left her with two children, ages 7 and 10. The diabetes eventually caused her to be completely blind while being a single parent unable to work. There were many days that Martha would rightfully feel depressed and hopeless; but there were other days when she was an incredible witness of faith to me. Our conversations about suffering were transformative for me as together we prayed and tried to find the Presence of God in the midst of her tragic circumstances.
Suffering is a terrible thing that God despises and would never inflict upon a person. But throughout history we humans, giving God the title ‘all-powerful,’ have blamed God for suffering since we think he should use his ‘power’ to intervene and stop all bad things and people. We mistakenly think God should interfere even though it would mean giving up our freewill every time we put ourselves in a dangerous situation, like driving a car. Since suffering is a part of our human condition and freewill, out of his incredible parent-love for us, God finds ways to use the suffering, pain, and tragedies of our life as opportunities to bring us closer to Godand to our true self. God finds a way to use every single pain or problem in our life as a road totransformation! Every single day, God is thinking about how he can take our troubled life to some better place…if we are willing to cooperate and trust him through the desert of not knowing or being unable to seewhere this is going.
Our Gospel story of Bartimaeus walks us through a beautiful way that Jesus uses the person’s disability to deepen his relationship with God and give the man a new self-identity. If you follow the simple pattern of the story, the man’s identity went from being a blind person sitting along the roadside probably homeless, to being a follower of Jesus. The first step of that faith process, as it is for all of us, starts with the person’s desire for Jesus. Bartimaeus’ desire is heard in his prayer, “Jesus have pity on me.” Secondly, Jesus always invites us to come closer. Bartimaeus wanted Jesus’ help so badly in his life that, when Jesus invited him to come closer, it says the man “sprang up” excitedly to go to Jesus. Healing always happens when we ‘get up’ from our ‘stuck place’ of blindness… and move closer to Jesus. The intimacy of the story goes further when Jesus asks that very personal question of faith, “What do you want me to do for you?”
If we just took the time to hear God talking to us so intimately, we would never again find an excuse to miss 15 minutes of quiet prayer each morning. But instead, we get stuck in thoughts about our problems and pain. And the devil wants us to over identify with our suffering as if that is all we are. But suffering does that – it can consume our thinking and take us down a path of self-pity or blaming God. All the while, Jesus is waiting for us to come to him so he can heal us, redeem us…and lead us to a place where we see that our life in Christ is bigger and better than whatever we are going through in the moment. Jesus helped Bartimaeus see that his life had more meaning and purpose than his disability; and his suffering actually led him to a deeper relationship with Christ…as the man becomes a follower of Jesus on the way to Jerusalem.
Ultimately we see this example in the life of Jesus as he embraced his Cross and entered INTO the dying experience…to show us that there is something beyond the present suffering. The Cross is God’s way of saying to all who suffer, “stick with me…don’t run from the problem; learn from it and trust that I will lead you to something beyond this.” We call this the Paschal Mystery – uniting our suffering and death with Jesus… AND rising with him! Moreover, when we connect our suffering to Christ on the Cross-, we learn that our burdens can be used as a path to becoming more fully human…which we call “life IN Christ.”
I witnessed this process in my friend Martha. She came to SEE that she was more than her insulin shots, her divorce, or blindness. She kept her sense of dignity by still having her hair and nails done; she mustered up enough faith to remind her children daily that God would carry them through this; and she sang “Amazing Grace” with me moments before her death at the age of 42. SHE was the one who found me at the roadside, blind in many ways, and brought me to Jesus in a whole new way.
Whatever ‘roadside’ you are sitting at – with a ‘disability’ of pain, grief, ego, false pride, anger, or doubt…, come to the Eucharist today and hear Jesus intimately ask you, “What do you want me to do for you?”
LISTEN TO THIS HOMILY
Twenty Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Fr. Jim Deiters
Often times the Sacred Scriptures speak directly to what is going in our life. I regularly hear people say to me after Mass, “Wow, that reading and your homily were written for me this week!” It speaks more about the timelessness of the scriptures…and how God’s Word always has a message of truth
and hope for our troubled lives. Today’s reading from the Book of Wisdom is one of those classic texts that speaks louder than ever for us as a Universal Church as we hear Solomon’s prayer to God asking for the ultimate gift of WISDOM.
We talk a lot about the Spirit’s gift of Wisdom in our school junior high classes as they prepare for the sacrament of Confirmation. I always appreciate how the students want to know the difference between wisdom and knowledge as they talk about their great need for wisdom in making significant choices regarding friends, what’s important, and their future.
On a global level, our Holy Father Pope Francis has talked about his own daily prayer for the gift of wisdom as he faces hundreds of difficult decisions that come at him from countries all over the world. I’m thinking of the Synod that is taking place in Rome during this month of October as the pope has brought together bishops, lay leaders, and young adults to help form a new plan for how we as a Church can better connect with and guide young people in their search for happiness and truth. One of the many challenges of the Synod is that young people attending are from different countries have such diverse needs, some of them hard for us to imagine. Some of the young adults at the Vatican meeting come from war-torn countries and are asking the Church to take a strong stance on the basic needs of food and housing for refugees; from other countries are young adults seeking the Church’s help for their countries lack of basic human rights for women and freedom of religion; and still others want the focus to be on the sexual abuse crisis and the Church’s credibility. More than ever we echo the prayer of Solomon as we “plead for the spirit of wisdom…” to truly guide us as a Church to a new place that is still grounded in God’s Word and the Eucharist.
How wonderful that in the middle of this Synod on young people’s faith, Pope Francis is canonizing7 new saints who are inspiring examples of listening to the Holy Spirit’s Wisdom for the risky waysthey felt called to live their faith. Saints always take bold steps, out of their comfort zone, to serve God. Only with the Wisdom of the Holy Spirit can we sort out all our priorities in light of what Jesus actually asks us to do with our life. We must continually discover for ourselves and help our young people learn how to listen to God and seek God’s Wisdom for our choices.
What is this “wisdom” that comes from God? Wisdom is a clarity of mind and heart that is rooted in an intimate friendship with God. Wisdom speaks to our heart about who we ARE and what is really important; Wisdom keeps us on the path of holiness…being true to God, our self, and others. Too often we only live on a superficial level of concentrating on the sensual needs of our body…and spend our life thinking about food, clothes, and other material things. On a higher level are the mind and intellect, but our ego wants us to get stuck up here in our head. But if we go into our heart and develop an intimacy with God, the Spirit places Wisdom in our HEART…to help us reprioritize our life based on what GOD wants of us! Getting stuck is what happened to the man in the gospel who thinks he wants to follow Jesus, but gets trapped on the material level of his life and can’t imagine living without all his ‘stuff.’ He got so much pleasure out of his things and his savings that he just couldn’t take up Jesus call to instead listen to his heart about the deeper happiness he was seeking.
Most of us get stuck at this level. We have in our head some idea of what being a follower of Christ means. But we often don’t go deeper and let Jesus’ Spirit of Wisdom take over our heart to be the true guide for all of our decisions. Now we can’t all be like our new saints: Pope Paul VI or Romero or Mary Catherine Kasper. God’s Wisdom speaks differently to each of us, depending on our vocation as married, religious, or single. Parents need a different set of ‘wisdom skills’ from God than I do as a pastor or a single woman needs in the workplace. But how we GET that Wisdom from the Holy Spirit comes similarly for all of us…through quiet prayer time leading to intimacy with God. When we let God’s Spirit take over our heart, then all of our desires for things and wealth and power and prestige…will start to fade…as our friendship with Jesus grows and helps us wisely know what is really important for our salvation.
Let us take a quiet moment before we call down the Holy Spirit upon our gifts at the Altar and upon our lives…and invite that same Spirit of Wisdom to now come and possess our heart.
LISTEN TO THIS HOMILY
Twenty Seventh Sunday in Ordinary
Fr. Jim Deiters
I have a confession to make: it wasn’t until my college years in Minnesota that I actually met for the first time a Protestant or a black person. Up to that time, I did not realize how sheltered my life had been in Southern Illinois. But I also learned how blessed I was to have grown up in a home with loving, married parents…as I started to meet classmates whose parents were divorced or had abused them. Although priestly ministry has since then exposed me to a great deal of sad suffering in people’s lives, I am still disturbed to guttural pain by each report of abuse of children or women that continue to be revealed against Church leaders, those in public office, other institutional leaders, and some parents.
In a recent article I read that was addressing the outcry of women, the writer asked, and “What can we learn from women who have been assaulted?” The female writer took a hopeful position by naming possibilities that might come out of all this, including her dream for everyone working together to create a cultural expectation and demand that every male will treat women with respect and dignity as their equal. How did we get to a level of humanity in which that remains only a dream? Or that we have to pray and plead for the safety of children in our homes, churches, and in a woman’s womb?
Even though our Judea-Christian heritage is rooted in these sacred scriptures that reveal God’s great love for every person and all of creation, we Christians still have a ways to go to be true leaders in our world of making sure that every woman and child is revered and respected. We see signs of ‘good news’ with such things as the recent Nobel Peace prize being given to two people who have exposed and are helping with the tragedy of sexual assault on young girls in Congo, Africa.
Our first reading and Gospel today, when read in the bigger context of their significance, both highlight the dignity of women and children as precious in God’s eyes. Since each of these readings were written at a time when women and children’s lives were of little significance, it is pretty radical that both the Genesis text and Jesus’ teaching are taking such a strong position about raising up the importance of women as created by God as a “suitable partner” for man and having equal say in a marriage or other relationship.
While Jesus’ response is based on a trick question to him about divorce, he uses it as an opportunity to expose the deeper injustice of how a man at that time could quickly divorce and “dismiss” a wife for various selfish reasons…while a woman had no voice at all for justice. While Jesus clarifies thepermanence of a marriage that was consecrated by God, he also raises up the dignity and voice of women by not so subtly revealing their equality in his simple yet profound quote, “God made them…male and female.” Jesus is taking his listeners back to our Genesis passage in which the author uses a beautiful story of woman and man being created from the same flesh and bones…to make Jesus’ point that God meant for man and women to live in an equal and respectful relationship – as ‘partners.’
In the bigger context of the Genesis story, “Adam” and “Eve” are names simply used to describeevery man and woman as being created by God as equal “flesh and bone.”
The theological point of the story is twofold: First, that God is the Creator of all and therefore everyone is similarly holy and loved by God (we hear this in the Eucharistic Prayer later on); secondly, when God lovingly says, “I will make a suitable partner for him,” it means that men and women are created to live incommunity, as social beings caring respectfully of one another, either in marriage or as reverent friends or workmates. From the beginning men and women were meant to be a complement and ‘help-mate’ for one another. Anything other than respect and care… of women for men and men for women is of grave moral disorder and terribly sinful.
But while Jesus has their attention on this issue, he also takes the opportunity to draw children into the same call for dignity that was also questionable at the time. This could aptly apply today to those who think that a baby in the womb has any less significance than a beautiful child smiling in her parent’s arms!
The bottom line for all of us today is the Sacred Scriptures call for us to review our own words and actions toward one another. Sometimes our very words or tone of voice can be derogatory and demeaning, either in marriage or other female-male relationships. And if our actions are anything but holy toward the other gender then these scriptures are calling for conversion.
Once again, the beauty of the Eucharist is how it brings each of us to a common ground…where Christ recreates us as equals in God’s eyes. Here in the Eucharist, the Body and Blood of Christ makes ALL of us “one flesh.”
LISTEN TO THIS HOMILY
Twenty Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Fr. Jim Deiters
I remember trying to preach on this Gospel about Jesus and a little child to our young school children last year. When I started talking about Jesus’ love of an innocent child, one of the fourth grade boys raised his hand and said, “Maybe children were different at the time of Jesus, but my 2-year-old sister is anything but innocent!” I don’t think I did a very good job that day of making my point about Jesus using the example of a child to get his adult disciples to stop worrying about their own self-promotion of being the greatest.
The main point that Jesus was TRYING to make that day with his disciples was that his teachings and example would eventually lead to his suffering and death by those who rejected him. Disciples, then and now, often become deaf to Jesus’ teachings, as we get caught up in our own self-grandiosity.
What I find most interesting is how the Church sets up a connection between this Gospel where Jesus talks about his death and resurrection…with our first reading from Wisdom that portrays a just person being condemned for his virtuous deeds. Since these two readings reveal that a person who loves others and works for justice will face condemnation by others, then we need to understand what this working for justice really is…since we claim it is a central part of our discipleship.
Now, a homily is not the time to do a thorough explanation of the Church’s teaching on justice, but I think it is worth at least reviewing some basic points since “justice” is one of the four cardinal virtues, along with temperance, fortitude, and prudence. Sadly, the devil has used the Church’s very teachings on justice to pit us Christians against one another in partisan views. We must admit that as followers of Jesus, we Christians march to the beat of a different drummer. Too many want to water down Jesus’ ideas of justice; perhaps out of fear of exactly what the book of Wisdom says happens to the just person being ridiculed and condemned…which we also see happen in the life of Jesus.
Defining justice is no small challenge, given its broad use over the centuries. Our Catholic teaching on social justice has its roots in the philosophy of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. But the Catholic Church began speaking boldly about justice issues in the late 1800’s as the Industrial Revolution led to an exploiting of women and children working in factories. Pope Leo XIII then speaks out about the value of the human person and human labor.
Then it was in 1931 that Pope Pius XI first coined the term ‘social justice’ to bring together the various components of justice like ‘economic justice’ between employer and employee… and distributive justice pertaining to how a society takes care of those who don’t have the basic human needs. Pius XI saw the necessity of a description of justice directed at community: hence, social justice. He wanted to emphasize the broader ramifications and ripple effect when people act unjustly.
Therefore, social justice is a virtue that emphasizes the responsibility of citizens to use their gifts and talents to improve the common good of their communities. In other words, we are called to be people for others. More specifically, the Church lists seven main areas of concern that we must be involved in: life and dignity of the human person, family life, community and participation in society, protect the rights of others, preferential option for the poor, the dignity of work and the rights of workers, solidarity with the underprivileged, and care for God’s Creation. Interestingly, most of these seven are what young adults are most concerned about and might be more involved in the church if they knew these were core to our faith.
Given that our reputation as Catholics is ‘on the line’ these days in terms of credibility, it seems we must cling to more than ever, our core teachings about living this Gospel of Jesus to make our Catholic faith appealing to those in the world looking for something to make sense of our broken world.
Why all this talk of justice today? First, it is a rare opportunity that the scriptures highlight this virtue. And secondly, as the great Jesuit missionary Fr. Pedro Arrupe said, “We cannot separate action for justice from the proclamation of the Word of God.” Therefore, in our primary goal of evangelizing others about God’s love for them in Jesus, we must integrate what we profess here in the Word and the Eucharist…with what we stand for out in the world. Let us pray for the Holy Spirit to help us assimilate this Body of Christ we receive into our words and actions when we leave here as people willing to be the “servant of all”….and give our life for the sake of Justice in God’s Kingdom.