Keeping the Past in the Past

Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  In the spring of my senior year of high school, my friend group decided to go out to breakfast after our last final exam of high school.  The exam started at 8 or so, and finished by 10.  The restaurant we decided to frequent wasn’t far from the school.  We all got in our cars and drove there individually.  For whatever reason, even though I knew where I was going, I followed another car that did not.  It was able to get over into the far right lane of a four lane, one way highway and turn into a parking lot to go back on a perpendicular street.  I, however, was in the second lane from the right, and panicked a little.  So, without much thought and without looking, I just decided to make a right turn into a parking lot from my current lane.  I heard the screeching of tires, the honking of a horn, and my adrenaline rushed through my body.  Somehow, no doubt due to my guardian angel who was working extra that morning, the car I had just cut off did not hit me, and I was able to turn back towards the restaurant and arrive safely, albeit with a heart rate that was more congruent with sprinting a 200-meter race.

    We all have things we’re not proud of in our past, things that we would do differently if we could.  St. Paul was no exception.  He wrote to the Corinthians that he was the least of the Apostles and not even worthy to be called an Apostle because, before his conversion, he persecuted God’s holy Church.  If we think back, the Acts of the Apostles makes very clear that Saul of Tarsus–who started going by Paul after his conversion, especially with his work among the Greeks, since Saul was a very Jewish name and Paul was more Gentile–consented to the stoning of St. Stephen, and had been arresting Jews for proclaiming that Jesus was the Messiah, the Christ.  He was, to use a mafia term, the enforcer for the Pharisees, and was a Pharisee himself.
    But, St. Paul, whom St. Thomas Aquinas does and we can refer to as the Apostle, continued: “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me has not been ineffective.”  Paul did not ignore his past, but neither did he let it define his present.  He acknowledged his past, but recognized that the grace of God had changed him, and he was no longer that man from his past.
    We all have a past.  Maybe it’s bad driving, like in my example from the beginning of this homily.  Maybe it’s something not that bad.  Maybe it’s something far worse.  We cannot change the past, but we shouldn’t live in the past, either.  God does not want us to allow our past sins to control our present and our future.  If we repent from them and convert, that is, turn towards God, our past can remain and education for us, rather than a life-sentence of guilt.  

Dr. Anthony Fauci at a Senate Hearing

    Of course, the first step is acknowledging our past sins.  Forgiveness and conversion only happen when we acknowledge that we have done wrong.  If we pretend like we’re perfect, God’s mercy finds no room in us, and so it cannot change us.  St. Paul, when writing to the people of Corinth didn’t say, “On the advice of council, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution,” like Dr. Fauci did at the Senate Hearing on 29 July.  Paul acknowledged that he persecuted God’s Church, God’s people, with whom God so identifies that Christ said to him on the road to Damascus, “‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’”  But Paul didn’t stay in his past.  He then also acknowledged that God’s grace had done a mighty work, which allowed Paul to preach the Gospel.
    So if we have acknowledged our sins and confessed them, we don’t forget them, but we don’t live in them, either.  The enemy often likes to remind us of our past sins.  But if our sins our forgiven, then in God’s eyes, the sins themselves are gone.  Might there be consequences for those sins that come with us into the present?  Sure.  But the sins are gone.  As King David sang in Psalm 102: “As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our sins from us.”  If we have made a good confession, God’s not coming back to us to remind us of all the bad things we have done.  We will have to deal with the temporal effects due to sin, either on this earth (which the saints say is much preferred and much easier) or in Purgatory (which is still not bad, because Purgatory always leads to heaven).  But the sins themselves are gone. 
    We, though, have to accept that forgiveness.  Some scholars say that the sin against the Holy Spirit is not being willing to accept God’s forgiveness, which is why it is the only unforgivable sin.  If we don’t accept God’s mercy, then God won’t force it on us, which leaves us in sin, rather than restoring us to grace, as God desires.  
    We cannot erase our past, much as we would like to at times.  We should learn from our past, especially when we have sinned and done wrong.  But we should not drag our past into the present, at least not when we’ve given those sins to God through sacramental confession.  That is a yoke too heavy to carry, a yoke the Lord does not desire for us.  He desires us to carry His yoke, which is mercy, a burden truly light and easy.  Open yourselves up to God’s mercy and live in the freedom of those forgiven by God: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

But That's None of My Business

Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Having spent four years working with high school students, I learned some interesting phrases and words, some that I can even say in church, but which will all sound rediculous, I’m sure, coming from my mouth: you don’t even know (sometimes abbreviated UOENO); but that’s none of my business (usually on a meme with Kermit the Frog sipping from a cup with Lipton tea); fo sho (which means for sure); bae (slang for a significant other; allegedly the abbreviation for before anyone else, as in, she comes before anyone else); and you don’t know me (which is usually used as a response when a person a being accused of something).  If Scripture was translated into slang of the new millennium (which I don’t advise), perhaps Jesus’ response to his neighbors asking, “‘Isn’t this the son of Joseph?’” would be “You don’t know me!”  Or maybe, after talking about how Elijah went to a foreigner, a Gentile, to provide bread during the famine, or how Elisha cured Naaman, who was not Jewish, of leprosy, Jesus would have said, “But that’s none of my business.”  Maybe He wouldn’t have.  

But the point is the same.  Last week we heard about how Jesus went back to His home town and read from the scroll of Isaiah about the Messiah, and said that the Scripture was fulfilled in the hearing of his neighbors.  This week, we hear their reaction, their disbelief.  And Jesus gets upset at their lack of faith, because they think they know who this guy is.  He’s just the neighbor boy from down the road, who was poor and seemed to be special in no way whatsoever.      So He needs to prove that He is special by doing some miracles, by putting on a show for His neighbors, so that they can believe.  But of course, we know human nature all too well, and Jesus knew it even better: even if he would have done a miracle, they would have found some excuse to not believe, because their minds were already made up that He was no one special.  And all of this, because He spoke God’s Word.

It can be tough to speak God’s Word, especially around the people we know.  That’s what it means to be a prophet, and we were all called to be prophets, to speak for God, when we were baptized.  But people know us.  They know our faults.  They know where we came from.  All too often they will not listen.  That is why God tells Jeremiah in the first reading, that he will have to gird his loins, a phrase which literally means, “make sure your underwear’s tight so you’re ready for combat or strenuous activity,” but which we could also say means “be prepared.”  God warns Jeremiah that the people to whom God is sending Jeremiah (the Chosen People) will try to crush him, and that Jeremiah will need to be “a fortified city, a pillar of iron, a wall of brass.”  He will have to be strong because his own people will reject what he says as he speaks on God’s behalf.

We have to be strong if we’re going to speak for God.  To speak out against the dirty joke or internet site that our friends are telling or viewing; to encourage a family member back into the Catholic faith who has been away for a while; to defend the Catholic faith when someone is mocking one of our beliefs; these are all difficult things to do, and we need to be strong like Jeremiah and especially like Jesus.  Neither of them backed off when others challenged them speaking for God.  In fact, they reiterated their message.

But, as St. Paul reminds us in the beautiful hymn of love in our second reading, we have to speak God’s Word with love.  “If I speak in human and angelic tongues, but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal.  And if I have the gift of prophecy, and comprehend all mysteries and knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”  If one temptation is to shrink back from speaking God’s word, the other temptation is to speak God’s Word in a sanctimonious and overbearing way.  Neither of these are the right approaches.  The virtuous middle is to speak God’s Word, but to do so out of love for the other.  

How do you know if you’re speaking with love?  Are you impatient in your speech?  Are you rude?  Are you seeking your own interests, quick-tempered, or brooding over an injury?  If so, St. Paul tells us that we’re not speaking with love.  Love, rather, “does not rejoice over wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.  It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”  

It is challenging to be a prophet, to speak God’s message.  If it were easy, everyone would do it.  But the Lord calls us to be strong and speak His message, His Word, to those we know and those we meet.  He calls us to spread His word, even when it calls for conversion and change of life, with love.  We don’t have to be perfect to speak for God.  Jeremiah wasn’t.  But if we are followers of Jesus, then we, too, are called “‘to bring glad tidings to the poor…to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.’”  That is fo sho what we are called to do.