Worshipping Outside the Temple

Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Some homilies, or at least parts of them, stick in our mind.  Sometimes homilies greatly move us, and so we remember them.  Other times they greatly frustrate us, and so we remember them.  Sometimes we remember one part of a homily rather than the whole thing, and we might not even remember the point of the homily, though a part of it sticks out.
    Today’s Gospel exemplifies my point.  In major seminary we had a priest who preached on this Gospel passage and asked rhetorically: “What was Jesus’ problem?”  That phrase alone stands out as memorable.  He continued to preach that the nine other lepers had done exactly what our Lord told them to do: they went to the priests, at least we might presume this.  But the one, a Samaritan, returned to Christ to thank Him.  Christ had not asked them to come back and thank Him.  But He praises the faith of the Samaritan and questions why the other nine did not come back.  I honestly don’t remember where the homily went from there, nor the way that this priest resolved the issue.

    If we take seriously the Gospel, that question should bother us, even if maybe we ask it in a different way.  The nine whom our Lord healed did not disobey Him; in fact, they obeyed Him more directly.  To be fit for temple worship, one had to show oneself to the priests, to prove that the leprosy, whether what we call today Hansen’s disease or another skin ailment, had disappeared.  Christ was following the Law as given by Moses.
    The Samaritan did not follow the Law, nor would he have been expected to, as his people had broken away from Israel and worshipped false gods, which eventually led to their exile by the Assyrians and a syncretic new religion which mixed some of the Jewish practices with many of the pagan practices and beliefs.  Still, the Savior praises the Samaritan for returning and giving thanks.
    I would argue that Christ, in praising the Samaritan, affirmed His divinity, a divinity which the Samaritan seemed to recognize, while the other nine, ostensibly Jewish lepers, failed to recognize.  As I mentioned, leprosy made one unfit for worshipping in the Temple.  And the purpose of worshipping in the Temple was to give God His due.  The priests helped facilitate this, especially, but not only, for lepers, by bringing them back in.  But the lepers, all ten of them, didn’t need to go to the Temple to worship God; they had the opportunity to worship God by returning to the God-Man who had healed them.
    Now, there had been healings of leprosy in the Bible before Christ.  But only two.  The first happened when Moses pleaded for his sister, who contracted leprosy when she started to speak against Moses’ holiness and his marriage to a Cushite woman.  Miriam questioned why only Moses could speak for God.  So God afflicted her with leprosy.  Moses pleaded for her to receive healing, and God cured her after having her wait outside the camp for seven days (a kind of excommunication, as she was cast outside of God’s people until she learned the error of her ways).  The second healing happened when Elisha commanded Naaman, the commander of the army of Aram, to wash in the Jordan seven times.  After he had done this, Naaman received healing.  In both these instances, neither Moses nor Elisha did more than intercede for the lepers.  But in the Gospel we heard today, while our Lord told the lepers to show themselves to the priest, it was clear that He had healed them as they went on their way.  So our Lord did more than simply intercede: He cleansed them, a power which only belonged to God in the Old Testament.  
    So in order to return to worship God, the lepers didn’t need to be able to enter into the Temple precincts.  They simply needed to return to the one who had healed them: God-with-us, the Incarnate God and Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, Jesus Christ.  But the Jewish lepers didn’t realize this.  The Samaritan, who could not have gone beyond the Court of the Gentiles in the Temple, could not have encountered God in the holy place, which was open only to Jewish men, realizes he has encountered God in Jesus and returns to thank Him.  

    There was, of course, another Samaritan who had encountered the Incarnate God.  And while I don’t know where the seventeenth chapter of Luke, which we heard today, lines up in time with the fourth chapter of John, which is the passage about the Samaritan woman at the well, one can presume that the latter encounter was temporally the earlier encounter.  And perhaps the Samaritan man had even heard, from afar, about the woman who came to believe that Jesus was the Christ, the long-awaited Messiah, and then realized that the same Christ had healed him, just as the same Christ had told the Samaritan woman how to worship: neither on that mountain in Shechem nor in Jerusalem, but in spirit and truth.  And so the Samaritan man starts to do what Christ told the Samaritan woman to do: to worship in spirit and truth, no longer only in the Temple, but wherever the God-Man was.
    Do we worship God in spirit and truth?  Do we glorify God, not only in this temple, but everywhere we encounter Christ?  Certainly, God dwells here in a particular way, and we need to come to Mass, not merely pray at home, in nature, or through a screen.  But having fulfilled our Sunday and holyday obligations, do we also worship God for the wonders He does in our daily lives, no matter how big or how small?  Any work of God gives us reason for worshipping God, even if it’s simply providing us with enough money to buy a good meal, or giving us a green light when we’re in a hurry, or sensing the presence of God and an answer to a question that we have asked God.  Yes, certainly come back to this temple to worship God, but do not neglect to worship and thank God right where you are at then.  Otherwise, you’ll be like the nine lepers who were chastised by Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God, for ever and ever.  Amen.  

Kenny Chesney the Theologian

 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.