Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Since I’ve been a priest for ten years, people ask me if I just recycle my old homilies. Generally, the answer is no, as each time I preach I am in a different place, and so is the parish to which I’m preaching. And yet, as I heard this Gospel passage, and saw the theme developing, especially from the first reading and Gospel, my mind kept going back to a Kenny Chesney song that I knew I had used before in a Sunday homily.
So I went to my blog where I keep all my homilies to see how I had used it, and if I had used it here at St. Pius X. And lo and behold, I have used the song…twice…once in 2012 when I was at St. Thomas Aquinas parish in East Lansing, and once in 2014 when I was administrator of St. Joseph parish in Adrian. So, now I guess it’s your turn to hear the words of this Kenney Chesney song that my previous two parishes had heard.
The song is from the album “Lucky Old Sun,” and was written by Jim Collins and Marty Dodson. It became Kenny’s fifteenth number one hit. The song is entitled, “Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven.” Country music has long been known for its lyrics, and was described by Harlan Howard as “three chords and the truth.” The lyrics I’ll highlight today are from the refrain and a little from a verse. Kenny sings:
Everybody wants to go to heaven,
Have a mansion high above the clouds.
Everybody want to go to heaven,
But nobody want to go now.
[…]
Said preacher maybe you didn’t see me
Throw an extra twenty in the plate.
There’s one for everything I did last night
And one to get me through today.
Here’s a ten to help you remember
Next time you got the good Lord’s ear,
Say I’m coming but there ain’t no hurry
I’m having fun down here.
The lyrics are even better with the melody.
There is truth in those lyrics, as in there are people who would say those words echo their sentiments. There’s this general desire of people to go heaven, that mountain of the Lord about which the Prophet Isaiah spoke in our first reading. But, if pressed, there are things that they would prefer to do while on earth, items to check off their bucket list, however saintly or devilish, that they want to do first. Everyone wants to say with Psalm 23, “and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord / for years to come,” even if they don’t always want to follow the lead of the Good Shepherd and go to the pastures He points out.
So there’s this cognitive disconnect. When we hear the parable that Jesus tells, the one we hear today about the wedding feast to which the king invited guests, we think they’re crazy to say “thank, but not thanks,” especially for something as simple as farming or doing business. But, if pressed, we often RSVP in the negative, but for worse or flimsier reasons than for farming or business.
The excuses become even more mundane if we look at the Mass as the foretaste of heaven. Each week I say: “Behold the Lamb of God. Behold him who takes away the sins of the world. Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb.” This is as close to heaven on earth as we can come. And yet, even without COVID, we have all sorts of excuses why we can’t make it.
But truly, each day we are RSVPing to the King’s invitation for the wedding feast for His Son, Jesus. Each day we make choices that say, “Yes, I’m coming,” or “Nobody want to go now.” And what the Gospel reminds us is that a simple desire to go may not be enough. Jesus, in the parable, tells of a guest who came, but one was not in a wedding garment (and in the parable it’s a man, which isn’t surprising, since men often wouldn’t know how to dress for a particular occasion). The king says to him, “‘My friend, how is it that you came in here without a wedding garment?’” The man has no answer. So he is bound and cast outside into the darkness.
When we were baptized, we were given a wedding garment, a white cloth which represented the cleanness of our soul. The priest said, “you have become a new creation and have clothed yourself in Christ. May this white garment be a sign to you of your Christian dignity. With your family and friends to help you by word and example, bring it unstained into eternal life.” When we make a choice against God, when we deem something other than God a higher and more important good, we stain that garment. God, in His mercy, can cleanse it for us in the Sacrament of Penance, but we still have to hold on to it (symbolically speaking) and not throw it away by our choices.
It is so easy to fix our hearts and minds and attention on what is earthly, on the physical things that scream for our attention. It is so easy to go day-to-day with an earthly mentality, that we don’t want to go to heaven, yet. But that is why St. Paul reminds us to set our minds on what is above. That is why, as we will hear in a few minutes, we are invited to lift up our hearts, so that we are, once more, reminded that getting to heaven is our top concern so that, at our time, we are ready for the wedding feast of the Lamb.
