American Pie, the Letter, and the Spirit

Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Don McLean produced a hit 8 minutes and 42 seconds long called “American Pie.”  And while most red-blooded Americans know the song, and maybe have even sung it at a karaoke bar, I imagine that as generations get further and further from its release in 1971, fewer and fewer people know that the song, which is mostly upbeat, speaks about the loss of innocence in America, beginning with the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper in 1959.  
    As we heard the Gospel today, we heard about the Pharisee who stood as far removed from the Law of Moses as many young people do today from “American Pie.”  The Pharisee knew the words.  He knew the right answer that the two greatest laws to uphold included the love of God with all of one’s self and the love of neighbor as oneself.  But he didn’t know the deeper meaning.  

    And so Christ has to give him a parable to talk about love of neighbor and how love of neighbor is demonstrated.  The Samaritan, the one outside the law, actually demonstrated love of neighbor, rather that the priest or the Levite.  Those who should have known the law the best, and certainly its deeper meaning, practiced the law the least, and become the bad guys in the parable.  The one who had no direct access to the law, because his people had abandoned the law when they intermarried with the local pagans, lived the law of loving one’s neighbor as oneself, even sacrificing his own money to care for the robbery and assault and battery victim, though the neighbor in this case was a stranger.
    There can be a challenge for us as Catholics, and Catholics probably better educated that in any century before.  If you want to know what the Church teaches on any issue, simply Google it.  I understand there’s even a Catholic AI that can help synthesize the Church Fathers, Doctors of the Church, and Magisterial documents to answer questions.  But are we like the Pharisee, who knows the right answer, but lack the gift of understanding to know how to put that knowledge into practice?  
    Many will refer to the practice and the deeper reality of what God has revealed as the spirit.  We hear that dichotomy today from the epistle between the spirit and the letter.  The spirit gives life, while the letter kills.  Sometimes this dichotomy is used to advance things which are patently contrary to the letter by placing it under the spirit of the law.  Some will say, for example, that while St. Paul clearly teaches that those who obstinately practice homosexual actions cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven (and notice that the actions separate us from God, not necessarily the disordered affection), that because our Lord taught us to love people, we cannot say that homosexual activity is wrong, because St. Paul was referring to the letter of the law, while the desire to let people love whomever they want to love (to use their phrase, not our understanding of true love) is part of the spirit of the law.
    But, that’s like saying that we can’t say adultery is wrong simply because Christ loves the person who commits that sin against the sixth commandment, and would never want to condemn that person.  Christ doesn’t want to condemn that person, but that person does have to choose the good that God has revealed, which is part and parcel of how God made us.  
    The spirit of the law does not mean anything goes.  But it does mean we have to look more deeply than the surface.  There’s a difference between looking beyond and looking more deeply.  To look beyond means that we ignore what we have received.  To look more deeply means to investigate how what we have received can be more fully understood.  It is the difference between changing a teaching (looking beyond) and legitimate development of doctrine (looking more deeply).  
    I think one good example of this is the more nuanced teaching of the Church on suicide.  The Church has taught, and in some cases will always teach, that taking one’s own life means committing a grave sin.  God clearly states in the Scriptures that He is the author of life, and the only one who can legitimately end an innocent life (though sometimes people have to end lives in the interest of defense of self, family, friends, or country without sin).  However, we have come to understand the complexity of a human mind that thinks that the best way to ease the psychological pain that he or she undergoes is to take his or her own life.  In some cases, and really the full knowledge of what is going on only God knows, a person is not free to make a choice because of chemical imbalances in the brain.  And, as we know, if a person cannot freely choose an action, no matter how grave it is, it cannot be a mortal sin.  So when a person commits suicide, unless we know it was made with a clear mind, we have some doubt as to how culpable that person was for an objectively evil action.  
    This is also what makes assisted suicide, also known as euthanasia, so horrible.  If people of any age feel that their lives have no value (and often times society tells them they have no purpose if they can’t be fully active or somehow benefit society), they are vulnerable to depression and rejection, and a doctor or nurse who comes to them to help them kill themselves takes advantage of that depression in an action which does not admit, generally, of repentance because of its finality; once completed you don’t get a do-over.  On the one hand, the Church reminds us that if we undergo euthanasia or assisted suicide and we know what we’re doing, we don’t know how that person could go to heaven, and that person would be denied anointing of the sick beforehand, and a Catholic funeral afterwards.  However, only God knows fully the mind, and so we also need to not presume omniscience and have some understanding for a person who may have dealt with mental illness in some form while trying to make the decision, especially if it was more encouraged by those who swore an oath to do no harm.
    The face value of the law and the commandments is not always the final word.  We don’t go beyond what God has revealed for our moral life, as if there are no moral absolutes or as if God’s teaching always changes with cultural adaptations.  However, we do need to go deeper to better understand the full implications of what God has revealed of how we are to love our neighbor and how we are to love God: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

The Stink of Death

Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time–Third Scrutiny

    In my first four years as a priest, I worked very closely with our parish school in East Lansing.  I enjoyed interacting with the kids in the classroom, teaching them from time to time, playing on the playground with them, and rewarding them for paying attention during Mass with smarties, and hopefully they came to connect to Christ more closely through me.
    When the warmer temperatures started coming in May, the fifth grade class in particular became a little gamey, as some kids started to get more body odor, but hadn’t quite realized that they needed to start wearing deodorant yet.  God bless their teachers for having to firmly, yet gently, tell the kids that they needed to bathe or shower every day and needed to wear deodorant.  The effects were noticeable when put into practice.
    In the Gospel today for the third scrutiny, we hear about a stench.  The stench is from a man who had been dead in a tomb for four days, a smell even worse than 5th grade b.o.  While I’ve been around dead bodies in my work with the Michigan State Police, I haven’t had to go into a house that had a dead body discovered after a long time.  So I don’t have a personal experience with that particular odor.  But I know it’s not pleasant.
    When we think about what God wants to do with you, Skyler and Raegan, as your prepare for your baptism next week, some might think about it like throwing deodorant on.  Nothing changes, but you don’t smell it because you mask it with other scents.  In fact, Martin Luther, who separated himself and led to a great division from the Catholic Church, referred to humans and the process of justification as snow-covered dung.  We’re the dung; grace is the snow.  We’re still bad, but God covers us up so that you can only see the pure white of snow.

    But that’s not what God does with Lazarus, and that’s now what God says He will do through the prophet Ezekiel, and that’s not what St. Paul says that God has done for us thanks to the Resurrection of Christ.  Jesus does not spray perfume on Lazarus but leave him dead.  He gives Lazarus new life, calls him out of the tomb, and removes the stench of death from him.  God provides a new reality for Lazarus, not a slight upgrade on his current condition (which was dead).
    And that’s what God will do for you.  The call to follow Christ, especially as an adult, means a call to a new form of life, not just a modified way of your current life.  You stink (not physically)!!  You stink because you are dead in your sins!!  But Christ does not want you to be dead.  Christ wants you to be alive in Him through the working of the Holy Spirit, who, after you are baptized, will dwell within you as God dwelt in the Temple.  You cannot make yourself alive.  And no matter how much perfume you put on a dead body, it still remains dead and will stink.  But God will take away the stink and make you alive in Him so that your can flourish.  
    In this, God fulfills the word He spoke through the Prophet Ezekiel: “I will open our graves and have you rise from them…I will put my spirit within you that you may live…thus you shall know that I am the Lord.  I have promised, and I will do it, says the Lord.”  God will give you new life through Baptism, Confirmation, and the Eucharist so that you can live primarily for Him, even as you live your human life.  
    Yet, our temptation, and this is true for me and all those who are baptized here in the church, is to return to the tomb.  Even though God has freed us from the death that comes from sin, we foolishly seek to return to the tomb and return to the stench.  Sometimes we are like dogs who just had a bath, only to go outside and roll around in our own dung.  We forget just what a great gift we have received from God in our new life, and go back to stinking and death because it’s what we have known.  We’re so overwhelmed with death that we can be like Mary, who sits at home still mourning her brother’s passing, while Martha goes out to Jesus and makes her profession of faith that He is the Resurrection and the Life.  
    But only when we put our faith in Jesus can we see new life given to us.  Only when we realize that we cannot save ourselves can God raise us to new life so that we don’t stink.  In this scrutiny, we ask God one final time before your baptism to put away from you any works of death that will not allow you to receive His new life.  We one more time have these minor exorcisms where the Holy Spirit drives from you anything that does not help you prepare for the new life of Holy Baptism.  
    And in praying for you, we, the church assembled here, also remember that God does not call us to live in the tomb.  God does not want us to stink.  He wants to have us bathe so that we are truly clean, not snow covered dung, and rely on the graces that come from baptism, or receive the cleansing of the second baptism, the Sacrament of Penance (often called confession).
    God is about to do a great work in you, Skyler and Raegan.  He won’t just put deodorant or perfume on you.  He won’t even hit you with an Axe bomb like a middle schooler.  He will wash you clean, not only to smell with the odor of sanctity, but truly to give you new life, to transform you by the power of His grace.  May this last scrutiny help you prepare fully for the new life God will grant you next week, as He calls you out of the tomb, unbinds the bands of sin from your bodies, and makes you both a temple of the Holy Spirit.

You're So Vain

Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
    When it comes to ironic songs, certainly one of the top ten is “You’re So Vain,” by Carly Simon.  She spends an entire song talking about a particular person, only to repeat in the refrain time and time again, “You’re so vain / You probably think this song is about you.”  While Carly has revealed to a select few whom the song was written about, there is still widespread speculation about the person who’s so vain.
    When it comes to the virtue of humility, if you think the readings are about you and how to grow in humility, they probably are.  In the end, we all need to grow in the virtue of humility.  Pride is the one sin that we probably will all need to work on until we die, though maybe we have others as well.  
    And, ironically, the virtue of humility helps us to realize that life is not, in the end, about us.  Pride seeks to replace God with our own ego, our own self.  St. Thomas Aquinas teaches us that the original sin consisted of pride: “man’s first sin consisted in coveting some spiritual good above his measure: and this pertains to pride.”  We know the story about the serpent testing Eve, and convincing her that if she ate of the fruit, she would be like God, which enticed her to disobey God’s command not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Adam followed suit, probably with Eve telling Adam exactly what the serpent told him.  
    Pride can be so insidious because we do have legitimate personal needs upon which we should focus.  It’s legitimate to focus on our need for food and drink; clothing; housing; friendship.  Yet we can twist all those things so that our desire for them becomes inordinate as we convince ourselves that, because of how important we are, we only eat and drink the best.  Or because of our status we cannot shop for clothing at regular stores, but have to only wear Banana Republic or Burberry.  Or if we don’t have a big enough house, the neighbors won’t recognize how well we’re doing.  Or that everyone should like me because, well, what’s not to like?  
    Humility consists, the Angelic Doctor says, in tempering and restraining the mind from focusing on high things immoderately against right reason.  It does not seek after honors or things beyond the greatness to which God calls us as His children.  It allows God to be God, rather than trying to take His place and control all things according to our desires.  

St. Benedict 

    St. Benedict, the great Patriarch of Western Monasticism and founded of the Benedictine Order, lists twelve degrees of humility.  Don’t worry, there’s not a test on memorizing them, but they will be available at my blog, which has all my homilies, and which you can access at the parish website.
    The twelve degrees are, in descending order: “that a man fear God and bear all his commandments in mind”; “by not following one’s own will”; regulating one’s will according to the judgement of a superior; not begin deterred from good actions because of difficulties and hardships; acknowledging one’s own shortcomings; “deeming oneself incapable of great things”; putting others before oneself; “that in one’s work one should not depart from the ordinary way”; not being in a hurry to speak; not overly laughing or being too cheerful; not being “immoderate in speech”; and “restraining haughty [or arrogant] looks.  Again, it might be good to go back to this homily, or simply do a Google search for St. Benedict and the Twelve Degrees of Humility to help us in examining our conscience.  Honestly, as I read through that list, I could probably check off mostly all of them as ways that I need to grow in humility.
    The great thing is that humility allows God to exalt us in a more perfect way.  If we really desire to be great, then we need to serve greatly and humble ourselves, because, as our Lord tells us, “every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”  And to be clear, Jesus is not telling us to act humble so that God can exalt us, but truly to be humble.

Bl. Solanus Casey

    We see this in the lives of the saints.  First and foremost, in the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who sought after no special privileges, but became the Mother of God.  Or St. André Bessette, who was a simple porter, or doorman, at a religious house in Quebec, but became knows as the Miracle Man of Montreal.  Or our own Bl. Solanus Casey, who was only ordained a priest simplex, meaning he could not preach or hear confessions, but whose fame because widespread across the US for the miracles worked through his intercession, even while alive.  None of these sought after fame or miraculous powers, but simply sought to be the person God wanted them to be, and because of that focus on God and doing His will, God elevated them.
    I can tell you that if you don’t think you need to grow in humility, then this homily is about you.  And if you know you need to grow in humility, then you at least recognize the insidious nature of pride.  Through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. André Bessette, and Bl. Solanus Casey, may be put God first in our lives and work for His exaltation, rather than our own.  In all things, may God be glorified!