Groundhog Day Delayed

Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Even though Groundhog Day was last Sunday, you may feel like we’re in the movie with Bill Murray as we come to today.  After all, it’s another Super Bowl Sunday with the Kansas City Chiefs playing, and the Lions not.  But, we also celebrated this exact Mass, that of the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, on 11 November 2024, just 3 months ago, because we celebrated the Resumed Fifth Sunday after Epiphany to fill in the last weeks of the Sundays after Pentecost.  The Sundays after Epiphany and before Septuagesima this year are more plentiful than they were last year.
    Luckily, the Word of God is living and effective, and is a treasure that cannot be fully mined or a spring that can fully be drained.  If we think we have exhausted the meaning of Sacred Scripture, the deficiency is in us, not the Word of God.
    It is so easy to look at the list that St. Paul gives us as something we just have to do, virtues we have to check off a list.  We strive to show mercy, humility, modesty, and patience.  We aim to bear with one another and forgive each other, and especially to demonstrate charity towards all.  Maybe sometimes some of those are more difficult than others.  But we get so wrapped up in what we should do, that we end up in a kind of Pelagianism where we earn our salvation.  Maybe consciously or subconsciously we think to ourselves: ‘If I am merciful, then God has to let me in to heaven.  If I just muster up the right amount of patience, then I don’t have to worry about eternal salvation.’  We end up trying to save ourselves, which is impossible for us, since it was also impossible for Abraham, Moses, and David, whose holiness probably exceeded our own.
    How easy it is to put the cart in front of the horse!  We want to earn God’s love and God’s favor.  We figure that if we just do enough good things, or avoid enough bad things, then God will be happy with us and we can rest easy.  But notice that St. Paul encourages us to certain behavior because we are already the elect of God.  St. Paul gives us moral laws, behaviors to follow, because we are already the beloved of God.  We don’t do certain things so that God will love us.  God loves us, so we do certain things and live a certain way.  
    St. Paul takes for granted, as do the epistles that we hear each week, that we already know that we belong to God the Father as His beloved sons and daughters in the Son of God.  That is the great gift of our salvation!  We had nothing that could close the gap that original sin had created.  We had no goodness in us that even approached deserving to be saved.  St. Paul writes in his epistle the Romans, chapter five: “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us….Indeed, if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, how much more, once reconciled, will we be saved by his life.”  
    So God’s saving love comes first, and then what we do is our response to that love.  If we think about it like dating, it also makes sense.  If the other person doesn’t love us, no matter how many good things we may do for that person, it doesn’t create that love.  However, if that person loves us, then we want to be better, we want to show our appreciation for that love.  And we show that appreciation by doing the things that help that love to grow.  We can’t earn the other person’s love, but once we have that love, if we truly love the other person, we change ourselves freely and to the best of our ability to show gratitude for that love.
    Or, to use a similar example that our Lord uses in the Gospel, God’s love has already been sown into the fields of our heart.  Weeds do sometimes pop up, but we pull them up at the proper time in response to the desire that our field be clear so that the fruit of Christ’s love can grow as fully as possible, and not lose out to the weeds.  It’s not as if we can clear the weeds from our entire field, and then God will sow His love in us.  
    I often preach a fairly rigorous message about living upright lives.  I myself try to do whatever I can to live as Christ and His Church have taught, and I like the rules and the clear delineations of what the expectations are.  But it’s good for me, and for you, to remember that we don’t earn God’s love.  Nothing we could ever do could make God love us.  God has already loved us, so much that He allowed His Son to die for our salvation.  What we do is the response to God’s love, not the catalyst of His love.  
    You, brothers and sisters, are already chosen by God for salvation.  You, brothers and sisters, are beloved by God because, after Holy Baptism, He sees and loves in you what He sees and loves in His Son, Jesus Christ.  Do not seek to be worthy of God’s love; it will never be enough.  Open yourselves to His love, and return that love by putting on the mind of Christ, and living the life that He lived: mercifully, humbly, modestly, patiently, and charitably.  In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  

Job and Detroit Lions Fans

 Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

    I am convinced that at some point in the future, the Lions will make it to the Super Bowl.  It will be the fourth quarter, and the Lions will be losing by 1 point.  They’ll be on the opponent’s 20 yard line, ready to kick the game-winning field goal, with 1 second left on the clock.  The kicker will kick the ball, and it will go straight, ready to pass through the uprights, and just as it’s about to pass through, and the refs are about to raise their hands, Jesus Christ will return in glory, and the Lions will forever be the team that never won a Super Bowl.
    As Lions fans we are used to disappointment.  There are other bad teams, but only the Lions seem to find new and exciting ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  So perhaps we can sympathize with Job from our first reading and say “I have been assigned months of misery, and troubled nights have been allotted to me.”  In case you’re unfamiliar with Job, it’s a beautiful book of the Bible.  It may be more of a parable than a literal story, but it tells the story of a man who is faithful to God, but then undergoes great trials.  His first trial is that his oxen and donkeys were grazing, and were stolen by Sabeans, who killed all the herdsmen, save one.  Lightening struck all his sheep and shepherds and killed all but one shepherd.  Chaldeans came and stole all of Job’s camels, and killed all their caretakers, save one.  His seven sons and three daughters were all killed when their house collapsed during a party, and only one servant survived.  To this Job says: “‘The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’”  Quite the ordeal!
 

   But then, Job is struck by severe boils “from the soles of his feet to the crown of the head.”  Life is so bad that his wife, obviously a loving and caring woman, tells Job, “‘Curse God and die.’”  The Book of Job makes clear that Job has done nothing wrong, and yet he suffers greatly.  This story of Job is an attempt to understand why bad things happen to good people.  I encourage you to read the rest of the book (we only hear a part of chapter 7 today) to see how it ends.
    Suffering is a part of life, not just for Lions’ fans.  There are moral evils that we have to suffer with (crimes, betrayals, loneliness from others’ rejection of us); there are also natural evils that make us suffer (natural disasters, illnesses, pandemics).  People of all faiths and none struggle with this question, sometimes called Theodicy, of why bad things happen to good people, and why there is evil in the world.  In case you’re wondering, there is no easy answer.
    Jesus, as He so often does, turns the question on its head.  What does He do?  He heals; He grants wholeness; He saves.  Our Gospel today relates healings that Jesus did, exorcisms, and preaching.  Jesus shows us that He enters into our evils, some of our own making, some that we have no control over, and He brings healing.  The very word for savior in Latin, Salvator, is connected to another word, salus, meaning health.  The Salvator is the one who brings salus.  
    But Jesus, our Savior, doesn’t do so extrinsically, outside of all our sufferings.  He doesn’t watch from afar and offer us health while social distancing.  He enters into our pain, our suffering, our illness, and brings us delight, wholeness, and health.  And that’s part of the beautiful message of the Gospel: Jesus defeats sin and death through His Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension; but we still see it happening, until Jesus returns and ushers in the fullness of His Kingdom.  Until then, Jesus suffers with and in us; He does not abandon us.  And while suffering is not good, it always helps to know that we are not alone, that our suffering has not separated us from the One who loves us above all, as suffering often does make us feel segregated.
    I think this is so clear from our pandemic.  I’m not here to argue against science and taking necessary precautions to protect one’s health.  But one of the greatest evils in this pandemic, whether physically necessary or not, is that we are being disconnected from each other.  Whether we have symptoms, are asymptomatic, or are virus-free, COVID has sought to divide us from each other.  The age-old wounds of sin and division, that were always just below the surface, have come to the top and are festering.  And because we lack a physical unity with each other, that spiritual and emotional unity has also been stretched, or even torn.  
    In the midst of that division, Jesus continues to heal and make whole.  There are stories of heroic Catholics–priests, deacons, and lay faithful–who have refused to let people die alone, even if they had COVID.  The Church has continued to feed the poor, shelter the homeless, educate adults and children, because that is Jesus’ work, and that work does not stop just because there’s a pandemic.  My mind is drawn, by way of an earlier example, to St. Damian of Molokai, whose Belgian blood I share, who gave up his own life to bring Jesus and His healing, especially spiritual healing, to the leper colony in the Hawaiian islands.  
    But even today, through the Sacrament of Penance (confession) and the Eucharist, Jesus continues to heal, and continues to walk with us through our suffering.  He has defeated it, and suffering will end when Christ is all in all.  But until then, Jesus does not leave us orphans; He does not leave us to suffer alone, but suffers with and in us, so that we can bear our burden with Him.
    In the times when you feel most alone, most abandoned, most bereft of human interaction, turn to Jesus in prayer.  Come to the church and spend time in front of the Blessed Sacrament.  Look to the crucifix, and lay all your trials on that cross.  If you do, life, victory, and wholeness will be yours in Christ Jesus our Lord. 

"We're on a Mission from God"

 Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

            Well, we all know that there’s a big game today.  To be honest, I’m not really a Giants or a Patriots fan.  I’ll cheer on the Giants tonight, mostly because I am a Payton Manning fan, and his younger brother, Eli, is playing for the Giants.  If I had my wish, the Detroit Lions would be playing this evening in the Super Bowl.  But, I suppose that if the Lions had played in the Super Bowl, and had won, then I would be coming back here, because we know that would be a sign that the end of the world was imminent.  

            But whether you’re a Giants fan or a Patriots fan, we all know that for each and every one of those athletes, their mind is on one thing and one thing alone: winning that game.  That is, as it were, their mission, and they’re probably hoping that they’re not on a Mission Impossible.

            What is our mission as Catholics?  As St. Thomas Aquinas parish and St. John Church and Student Center, we have a mission statement: “We are a Roman Catholic parish in a university community, joining students of all ages, joining people from all walks of life and from all corners of the world through Jesus Christ, our Lord.  As a Eucharistic people, we nurture spiritual growth through worship, evangelization, stewardship, education, service, justice, outreach and hospitality.”  This mission statement was crafted by members of our Parish Pastoral Council, which is a visionary board with the task of helping Fr. Mark with their advice of how the parish can fulfill that mission statement.

            But imagine being asked, “What is your mission?” on the street and trying to remember all of that.  It’s a great mission statement, but it would be hard to remember all of the wording.  Jesus, in today’s Gospel passage, give us His mission: “‘Let us go on to the nearby villages that I may preach there also.  For this purpose I have come.’”  Jesus’ mission is to preach.  And what is He preaching?  The Gospel, the Good News, of God’s love and Truth, made manifest in Jesus’ very Person. 

            This was also the mission of St. Paul.  We hear his words to the people of Corinth today in his first epistle: “If I preach the gospel, this is no reason for me to boast, for an obligation has been imposed on me, and woe to me if I do not preach it!”  Yes, it is a mission for Paul, but he also calls it an obligation.

            St. Paul has this obligation because he was called to be an apostle, one sent out by Jesus to preach Jesus, and Him crucified, as Paul says elsewhere, for the salvation of souls.  But what about us, who are not the bishops, the successors of the apostles?  What is our mission?  Well, if one part of the definition of the Church is the Mystical Body of Christ, and we are members of that Mystical Body through baptism, then our mission is the same as Jesus’: to preach.  But we do not preach ourselves because we cannot save anyone.  Only Jesus saves.  So we preach Jesus: His Word, His Teaching, His saving Gospel.

            This was affirmed by Vatican II on the Apostolate of the Laity: “The Church was founded for the purpose of spreading the kingdom of Christ throughout the earth for the glory of God the Father, to enable all men to share in His saving redemption, and that through them the whole world might enter into a relationship with Christ.”  This is what the Church calls the apostolate, when each and every member, each in his or her own way according to the individual state in life, is acting towards that purpose.  “In the Church,” the document continues, “there is a diversity of ministry but a oneness of mission…[The Laity] exercise the apostolate in fact by their activity directed to the evangelization and sanctification of men and to the penetrating of the temporal order through the spirit of the Gospel.”  In other words, while our parish mission statement is certainly helpful, we can really pare it down to the final words of Jesus in the Gospel according to Matthew: “‘Go and make disciples of all nations.’”

            So how do we do that?  We know the what, now what’s the how?  To be honest, there are as many ways to spread the Gospel as there are people here.  We can do it through the way we act and talk at work, the way we relax, the media we promote, etc.  Each day God gives us new opportunities to share with people how important our relationship with Jesus is so that they want the joy and the love that we have found in Christ and His Church.  We are obliged, as was St. Paul, to make Christ known through our actions and through our words.  We can’t just choose one.  If all we do is act uprightly, that’s a good start, but we need to speak about Jesus to those who do not know Him at all, or those who do not know Him fully.  If all we do is speak about Jesus but do not let that influence our actions, then we need to show people by our deeds that the words we speak are not hollow, but change the way we live.

            One opportunity to preach the Gospel has been handed to us recently by the Federal Government.  The United States Department of Health and Human Services has declared that health benefit plans must include coverage for sterilization, contraception, and abortion-inducing drugs, without an exception for those religions that teach that such coverage is contrary to its faith.  The Catholic Church in the United States will never comply with this mandate.  This nation is built upon the three-legged stool of the First Amendment.  Our precious freedoms of religion, speech, and assembly underlie everything this nation is, and everything this nation has ever accomplished.  Religious liberty gives the freedom to preach the Truth.  And the truth is that pregnancy is not a disease.  Nor is the natural fertility of a woman a disease.  Through the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Michigan Catholic Conference, the Diocese of Lansing is exploring a number of options, including litigation and Congressional reform.  As these efforts move forward, we Catholics should make clear to our elected officials the crucial importance of religious liberty, and we should pray daily for those who have the responsibility of making these decisions.

            By the laity taking an active role in politics, advising their representatives, regardless of political party, that we will not allow the Federal Government to infringe upon the conscience rights of citizens, we preach the Gospel.  By insisting that Christian people not be compelled to participate in immoral activity, we participate in the mission of Christ to stand up for the Truth. This is not a partisan issue.  This is our obligation, our mission, as members of the Body of Christ, to preach the Gospel, always and everywhere, even when it is difficult.