Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
A
couple of weeks ago I went out to lunch with a guy named Joe. Joe graduated from Lansing Catholic
this past May, and was getting ready to move down to Ave Maria College in
Florida, where he will play football, and he wanted to catch-up a little before
he left. While Joe and I were
eating lunch, the waitress, a 45-50 year old women came over and said, “I just
have to say, one of you smells really good.” There we were, left with the option of a woman liking the
smell of either a young priest (dressed in clerics, mind you), or an
18-year-old.
A
few days later, playing volleyball with some friends on a Thursday evening, my
teammate tells me as he’s about to serve, “Father, you smell really good! What type of cologne do you wear?”
We
each have our own smells. Some are
highlighted (or hidden) by deodorants and/or cologne or perfume. But our “scent,” if you will, helps to
communicate who we are. St. Paul,
in our second reading, tells us to “be imitators of God…as Christ loved us and
handed himself over…as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant
aroma.” So if we are to be like
Jesus, we must smell like Jesus, not in the sense of our musk, but in the way
we live.
When
a person is baptized and later confirmed, Sacred Chrism is put on his or her
head. The Chrism is a mixture of
olive oil and a special perfume.
Parents of baptized babies notice the smell of the Chrism. Those who are confirmed certainly
notice the smell, especially since most of those who are confirmed around here
are in adolescence and are very
concerned with how they smell. But
Sacred Chrism smells for a reason.
It reminds us that we are to have a special smell, the aroma of Christ,
the odor of holiness.
How
do we smell differently? How do we
have the odor of holiness? There
are a lot of ways, but based upon our first reading and our Gospel, I want to
suggest one very practical way: the way we treat Sundays.
Sunday
is a Christian’s day, because it is the day that Jesus rose from the dead. That’s why we set it aside every week
for worship. It is the new
Sabbath, fulfilling the rest that God commanded we take in the Ten Commandments. It is a day to be given over to the
worship of God, charitable works, family and friends, and relaxation. And it used to set us Catholics apart,
just as Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, set Jews apart. But we have fallen away from the sacredness of the Lord’s
Day.
Why do
we need the Lord’s Day? Frankly,
we need the rest. I’m sure I could
ask any one of you how the past week went, and you would have myriad events
that took place that, whether simply required or even recreational, drained
your batteries. We need rest, just
like Elijah, working for God, needed rest. In fact, he was running away from King Ahab and Queen
Jezebel, who were going to kill him, because he had demonstrated the power of
the true God, and put to death the false-prophets of Baal. But, Sunday is not just about sleeping
all day. Even Elijah is told to
take bread, because He will need it for the journey to the mountain of God.
Sunday
is also about worship, and for us as Catholics, that worship means the
Mass. We are not fulfilling the
Sabbath Commandment if we just sleep all day and vaguely think about God. We need to come to Mass because it is
only in the Mass that the Bread of Angels, the Eucharist, is given to us. We come to Mass because it is there, in
a special way, that we are taught by God through His Word, read to us to strengthen
us to live out our baptismal call to holiness. Jesus promises us that, if we are not conscious of grave sin,
which makes us unworthy to receive His Body and Blood, than we will live
forever, because the bread that He gives is his “flesh for the life of the
world.” The Eucharist is precisely
what we need to have strength to do those million things that naturally arise
in life between Monday and Saturday, from work, from family, from sports, etc.
Now,
there are lots of people, even Catholics, who do not go to Mass on Sunday, who
do not receive the Eucharist, and we may think that they’re doing just
fine. But “just fine” is only a
shadow of the “great” that God wants for them, if they would only come to Mass
to worship and receive, in a state of grace, the Eucharist. Without the Body and Blood of Christ
that we receive at Mass, we are only a shadow of who we can truly be in Christ.
For the
rest of the day, as a way of having the aroma of Christ, let’s say no to almost
everything else. That will be
hard, without a doubt. And some of
us have to work, especially in emergency response jobs or the service industry
like in restaurants or gas stations.
But, many of us can say no to anything which is not truly relaxing and
God-focused. Many of us can say no
to sports practices and menial work which can be done on other days. If we pledge to each other that we will
say no to lesser things, which allows us to say yes to God, family &
friends, assisting the poor, and relaxation for one day per week, then our
families will be able to worship God and find strength in the Eucharist, and
will be able to enjoy each other’s company and strengthen their familial bonds,
and we’ll have the strength and energy we need to do the work that lies ahead
of us from Monday through Saturday: at work, at school, on the field, in the
gym, and around the house. And in
this one way, we will have the aroma of Christ, the odor of holiness, so that
we will smell good, not for a waitress or a friend, but for God.
