God loves us into loveliness – Matt 22:34-40, 1 Thes 1:5c-10, Exod 22:20-26

30th Sunday of Ordinary Time; Holy Cross - St. Stanislaus.

My father was a wandering Aramean.  Well, he wasn’t; my father was from Cumbria and the only wandering I remember him doing was purposeful moderate hiking.  But, if we were celebrating Passover, it wouldn’t matter if your father was from LaPorte or La Paz; we would each make that claim, that “my father was a wandering Aramean,” and we’d make it because Deuteronomy tells us to.  As the Jewish people recall each year the saving wonders God worked for His people in freeing them from slavery in Egypt, they don’t let that event stay soberly and tamely in the past, they claim for themselves, “my father was a wandering Aramean.”  In much the same way, today in this Church we’re invited to hear the Word of God say to us, personally “you were aliens in Egypt.  Remember.”  That’s not a word that we can let sit in the past, not a word we can hear directed solely to that one generation millennia ago, wandering in the desert, freed from slavery, approaching the promised land, receiving the Law as they went; that’s a word for us.  That’s the Word of the Lord for us.  That’s a word that takes on life in this assembly.  That’s a word in which we encounter Christ.  We were aliens in Egypt.  We were slaves.  Remember.

God makes us gift – Matt 22:15-21, 1 Thes 1:3-5

29th Sunday of Ordinary Time; Holy Cross parish.

When I was a child, I collected coins.  Growing up in England in the pre-Euro zone days, it was pretty easy to travel around Europe collecting different coins from different countries and, when my dad would travel for business, he’d bring back coins from more far-flung places.  I was fascinated at first by the different sizes, shapes and colors, by the different ways value was shown, and finally by the different values projected by the coins in a deeper sense: how did each nation make a statement about who they were by how they decorated their coins?  Now, I soon came to realize that coin-designers did not tend to be especially imbued with the virtue of national humility, but none that I can remember made as bold a claim as that coin the Pharisees produced from their own purse at Jesus’ request.

Preaching Pause

After having not had a Sunday off preaching for quite a while, I now have two in a row.  Last weekend, we used the video for the Annual Bishop's Appeal in place of the homily and next weekend we have a visitor from Holy Cross's Vocations Office doing a "Vocations Appeal."  Just wanted to let people know I haven't disappeared, and regular service will resume in two weeks' time!

God extends mercy to guide us to the kingdom – Matt 21:28-32

Twenty-sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time; South Bend TV Mass, and Holy Cross parish.

“Tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you.”  What would be your reaction to that?  Imagine you’re a chief priest, you’re standing in the Temple, your home base, the place you feel most grounded in the presence of the God who called you into his service, into leadership in his service, and this odd, homeless, wandering preaching who had just shown up in Jerusalem to great acclaim from the people has the nerve to say to you: “Tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you.”  I’m sure we can imagine various responses, and, knowing how the story ends, we know that their reaction culminated in plotting to have this wandering preacher killed.  But, I’d submit there’s one proper response: gratitude.  Gratitude followed by conversion of heart.

God invites all to join the work and receive the reward – Matt 20:1-16

Twenty-fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time; Holy Cross parish.

We don’t know why those men were standing around the market place at the eleventh hour, about five o’clock in the afternoon.  The vineyard owner doesn’t know either, so he asks them, and they give almost a non-response, “because no-one has hired us.”  I call it almost a non-response, because it’s patently obvious: if anyone had hired them, they’d be at work in someone’s field or someone’s barn and not standing around a market place!  Maybe a more probing question might have been, “and why has no-one hired you?”  But the master doesn’t ask this, and so we can’t get to know.  We don’t know if they were seen as too old to be able to labor, or too young to know what they were doing, or too odd to be able to get on with the other workers, or if they looked sickly, or threatening, or if they slept in and showed up to the market place late, or if they were just unlucky.  All we know is that the master called, and they followed.

God gives all to let the light in – Jn 3:13-17, Phi 3:6-11

Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross; Holy Cross - St. Stan's.

Imagine a boy born in captivity, born in a cellar, trapped.  Imagine this boy has never seen sunlight.  He has only seen his murky world clinically and coldly illumined by artificial, ill-colored electric bulbs.  His mother has told him of sunlight, has told him of how wonderful it feels upon the skin, of how the clouds flow past it leaving their shapes behind, of how it fills a space with warmth and beauty, of how it’s like the lights he’s seen, but so much more, so much better, that with it, he’d be able to see colors as they really are, that he’d be able to distinguish blue from black (which yellow electric light can never allow) and see the beauty.  Slowly, she comes to realize that the blacked out window in the basement is low enough that she could break it.  It’s too small for either of them to be able to get out, but she could break it.  Who knows what her captors would do to her in response to this outrage against their control?  But she has to risk it.  Whatever it would cost, she’d dare to risk it, to let her boy see the sun, to show him that there is an outside, there is a force invisible to him more ancient and more powerful than the walls that confine them, a force able to truly illumine them, that need not be overcome and shut out by walls, a force that could pierce through that window that she would give all if needed to open, and let in the light that would delight, that would warm, that might just excite her son enough to turn to it, and seek the freedom it promised.

God appoints us as watchmen to bring us forgiveness – Ezek 33:7-9, Matt 18:15-20, Rom 13:8-10

Twenty-third Sunday of Ordinary Time; Holy Cross church.

Ezekiel was an exile, a displaced person.  He was an Israelite living in Babylon, because the Babylonians had come to Jerusalem, destroyed it, destroyed God’s house, the Temple, in its midst and forced them on the long march East to Babylon.  The people were bereft of the only ways they’d known God: the Temple, the kingship, the Land.  But, God did not desert them.  The people would discover that in their exile, God was in their midst too.  Just as, centuries later, the Church, bereft of Christ’s humane presence, would discover that wherever two or three gathered in his name, he was there.  But, I’m getting ahead of myself.  God did not desert his people.  God continued to send prophets, to call them back to covenant living, even when living in a strange land.