You Gotta Have Faith

Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  What came first: the chicken or the egg?  As a young student this question was posed, but I never really thought it too complicated.  If the egg came first, who would sit on it to incubate it so that the chick could hatch?  But, philosophers much wiser than me have debated this general question for centuries.
    In our Gospel, another question gets posed that could, if we’re not careful, trip us up.  That question is: what comes first: faith or miracles?  Perhaps we don’t consider this much of a question, as all the miracles seem to follow from faith.  And yet, our Lord says today that unless the people see signs and wonders (another way of saying miracles), they will not believe.  So what comes first: faith or miracles?
    Throughout the Scriptures, it seems mostly evident that faith comes first.  Christ does not do many miracles in Capernaum because of their lack of faith.  And miracles without faith are more like magic tricks, and God doesn’t do magic tricks.  So faith comes first.  And yet, the miracles themselves also beget faith.  Our Lord raises the son of the widow of Nain, without any sense that she believed in Him.  The woman with a hemorrhage has some small faith so that she touches our Lord’s clothes, but then, after she receives healing, our Lord turns and tells her that her faith has saved her, not only healed her.  So many people, after encountering the Savior, are certainly moved to a deeper faith after they receive a miracle.  So there we see a back and forth when it comes to the relationship with faith and miracles.  Faith leads to miracles, which lead to more faith, which leads to more miracles.  It’s like the chicken and the egg: chickens lead to eggs, which lead to more chickens, which lead to more eggs.
    So how is our faith?  Do we have confidence in what God has revealed?  Do we trust that God can still work miracles in our life and in the lives of others?  Do we have to see signs and wonders before we believe?
    The eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews begins with faith.  The sacred author writes, “Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen.”  Hope assures us that what we have not yet received we will, and faith is the object of that hope, the thing unseen which we believe we will receive.  The author lists examples of faith-filled men: Abel; Enoch; Noah; Abraham.  In the Canon the Church refers to Abraham as “Patriárchae nostri Abrahae,” or “Abraham, our father in faith.”  And the Epistle to the Hebrews reminds the hearers and readers that Abraham, while still called Abram, left the familiarity of his home to go to a land he had never seen, with all his family and possessions, called by a God he didn’t know all too well.  Doubt could have taken hold of him, questioning if his mind was playing tricks on him, how he would survive and care for his flocks outside of what we now call the Fertile Crescent, and whether the people living there would welcome him or attack him.  But he didn’t allow those questions to stop him.  He left modern-day Iraq, or Chaldea, behind.

    So, too, Abraham demonstrated great faith when it came to Isaac, his beloved son and the son of the promise God had made.  Hebrews 11:17 reads, “By faith Abraham, when put to the test, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was ready to offer his only son, of whom it was said, ‘Through Isaac descendants shall bear your name.’”  While child sacrifice was all too common in the near East, especially to the pagan god Moloch, Abraham had two seemingly contradictory things from which he had to choose: was Isaac the son of the promise that Abraham’s descendants would be more numerous than the stars?  Or was God asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on the top of Mount Moriah?  Walking up Mount Moriah, one can only imagine the pain and questioning in Abraham’s heart, but he followed God’s command anyway, trusting that “God was able to raise even from the dead,” and, of course, God stopped Abraham’s hand before Isaac could be killed.  
    Faith is risky business, because we sometimes don’t see the results of our faith on this side of eternity, and sometimes what God asks us to do seems to defy logic.  It’s like Indiana Jones in “The Last Crusade,” who has to step out into what looks like a great chasm, taking an almost literal “leap of faith.”  Or it’s like Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring, recalling the words of his uncle, Bilbo Baggins, saying, “‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door.  You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might go.’”  Faith led St. Frances Xavier Cabrini to leave behind Italy and help form the faith in the US by founding schools and teaching.  The same could be said for St. John Neumann and Bl. Francis Xavier Seelos, who came from Europe to help the Church in the new United States of America, or Bishop Benedict Flaget, a Sulpician priest who became one of the first bishops of the US, but who came to the US from France originally to spread the Gospel in the then-frontier lands of Indiana and Kentucky.

Bishop Benedict Flaget

      

So how is your faith?  Are you willing to leap out and trust when God truly calls you to something?  Can you trust your loving Father to care for you, no matter where He leads you?  Will you have enough faith for God to do great things for you?  
    Faith comes first.  But God strengthens our faith by signs of His love, be they miracles or simply little “God moments.”  And those signs of His love lead to more faith, which leads to more trust, and on and on.  May all of our names be written in the Book of Life, with Abel, Enoch, Noah, and Abraham, as those who had faith in God and received His gift of salvation. 

Concerning Hobbits

Third Sunday after Epiphany
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Over the last week or two I decided to rewatch the trilogy movies of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.”  I’ve watched them countless times, but I find them very enjoyable and they have many connections to Catholicism, since J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote the novels, practiced his Catholic faith devotedly.

    In “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” at the Council of Elrond in Rivendell (an elven oasis) representatives from the major races of beings–dwarves, elves, and men–argue over who will take the One Ring, an evil talisman connected to the evil spirit, Sauron, to Mordor to destroy it by casting it back in the volcanic Mount Doom, thus also destroying Sauron.  As they argue, Frodo, a hobbit, steps up and says that he will take the ring to Mordor, though he does not know the way.  Frodo had brought the ring from his house (since his uncle, Bilbo had found it years ago while on his own quest) to Rivendell.  So he agrees to carry it even farther to its destruction.  Elves were very wise, dwarves were very crafty, and men were very strong.  But it was a hobbit, a small humanoid, who probably stood no more than 4 feet tall, who volunteered to take the ring to its destruction.  Frodo wasn’t the wisest, the craftiest, and certainly not the strongest, but he was the right one for this quest.

    The centurion from our Gospel today was as unlikely for a healing from our Lord as Frodo was to carry the ring to its destruction.  As a soldier, he likely worshiped false gods, and maybe even worshiped the Emperor Tiberius Augustus.  He represented the entire occupying force of Rome in the Promised Land, which had come in 63 BC to make it a client kingdom of Rome, but who took it over around 6 BC as simply a province of Rome.  The centurion did not belong to the Chosen People awaiting a Messiah, and in fact, he was part of the military machine the people expected the Messiah to wipe out.  And yet, Christ says of the centurion that he had not found faith like his in all of Israel.  This centurion was the right one to receive a healing.
    And he was the right one because he believed Christ could heal his servant, even without being present.  No doubt, there were healers that would pop up from time to time in the Promised Land, but they almost always had to be present to heal the suffering person.  The centurion knew that this rabbi from Nazareth was different, and trusted that if He said it would be done, it would be done, just as when the centurion gave orders the soldiers did them.
    The centurion is a great reminder that God often works with the unexpected, perhaps the same message Tolkien tried to convey by choosing a hobbit to carry and destroy the One Ring.  But the common factor that unites the unexpected comes from their reliance on God and not on their own power.  Abraham and Sarah were well past the childbearing age, and yet God made Abraham the father of many nations.  Hannah was barren and put up with ridicule from Penninah, Hannah’s husband’s other wife (apparently the rule on marrying only one wife wasn’t always followed closely), until God granted her request and gave her a son, Samuel.  Ruth, the grandmother of David, was a foreigner, and David was not the son of Jesse that Samuel thought at first glance God would choose as king.  Anne and Joachim were childless until they conceived the Blessed Mother immaculately in Anne’s womb.  Elizabeth and Zechariah were also too old to be though to be able to conceive.  The Blessed Mother was a quiet, young virgin without any real importance from a worldly point of view.  The Apostles, our Lord’s closest followers and the foundations of His Church, did not have the greatest education and the Gospels make clear that, more often than not, they didn’t get what He taught.  All of these people, and more, would never have been expected to do great things for God, or have such a major role in salvation history.  But here we are.
    I could list hundreds of saints whom no one expected to amount to anything, and yet we recall them each year in the canon, or list, of saints.  And that should give us hope.  If a poor friar, working in Detroit without faculties to preach or hear confessions, can be beatified, then we can become a saint.  God can work with us, small as we are, un-spectacular as we are, to accomplish His grand plan of salvation.  We don’t have to be the most powerful, the wisest, or the craftiest.  We simply need to acknowledge our nothingness, and rely on God to carry us through whatever mission He has for us.  Because when we acknowledge our nothingness, that leaves all the room for God and His power.  When we think we are somebody, or have some grand power or prestige, we block God out of our lives and lessen the space that He requires to do truly great things in our lives.

    “Hobbits…are quite content to ignore and be ignored by the world of the big folk….Hobbits must seem of little importance, being neither known as great warriors nor counted among the very wise….In fact, it has been remarked by some that hobbits’ only real passion is for food, a rather unfair observation, as [they] have also developed a keen interest in the brewing of ales and the smoking of pipe weed.”  This is not the likely description of the race to whom the great king of men, King Aragorn of Gondor, would say: “My friends, you bow to no one” because of their role in destroying evil.  Just so, God uses the most unlikely to accomplish His plan of increasing grace and destroying evil, be they young virgin, fisherman, a poor friar, or a man or woman from Genesee County.  May we leave space for God to work great things through us, unexpected as it might be.