Underdogs

Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
    There’s something about underdogs.  People love to see them succeed.  I’ll find myself watching a sports game between two teams that I really don’t care about, and I’m often drawn to the team that is ranked lower, especially if it’s a close game.  People generally like to see the little guy succeed, even against all odds.  And I’d like to think that it has to do with something God put into our hearts.

    Now, to be fair, sometimes people want to see the underdog succeed because they really want to see someone else fall.  There were a lot of Spartan fans cheering on unranked Appalachian State in 2007 when they blocked the game-winning field goal attempt by #5 ranked U of M in one of the biggest upsets in college football history.  Or, basically any time anybody plays Ohio State, you know Wolverines will be rooting for the other guy, who, in recent history, have generally been the underdog.
    But there can be more virtuous motives behind seeing the little guy succeed, and it connects us to God.  Think about David and Goliath.  David should have lost, and yet, God chose David and rewarded his courage and confidence in God’s ability to give David victory over the giant who cursed God.  In our first reading, we hear about the underdogs and little guys even before David: aliens (foreigners; not extra-terrestrials or the Swedish hard rock band); widows; orphans; the poor.  God tells the Israelites in the Book of Exodus that He has a special love for those groups of people.  And note that God points out that He loves them because Israel once was in those groups, or was like those groups.  The Israelites were foreigners among the Egyptians and the Egyptians oppressed the Israelites and made them slaves.  The Israelites were often poor, relying on God for their basic needs, and hoping others wouldn’t take advantage of them.  Widows and orphans had no one to rely on, as in that time there was no social security or welfare, so if you had no family to earn money for you or to farm for you, all you could do was beg.
    The call to love our neighbor, part of the great law that Jesus highlights in the Gospel today, was a call to be like God: to care for those who could not care for themselves.  And it was the consequence of the first part of the great law, love of God, because when one loves God, one therefore also loves those whom God loves.  St. John in a New Testament epistle reminds us that we cannot love the God we don’t see if we don’t love the brother we do see.  The two are really inseparable.

    But how easy it is to forget that we once relied on others as others now rely on us!  It’s like the movie “Trading Places,” where the fortunes of the rich man, Louis Winthorpe III (played by Dan Aykroyd), and a street beggar, Billy Ray Valentine (played by Eddie Murphy) are switched through the conniving machinations and wagers of Randolph and Mortimer Duke.  When Billy Ray is poor, he condemns Winthorpe for the way he treats the poor.  But when Billy Ray suddenly becomes rich and encounters Winthorpe as a poor beggar, he suddenly forgets how he wanted the poor to be treated and treats Winthorpe the way Winthope treated him when they were in each other’s shoes.  
    And so the Church regularly puts before us reminders about God’s love for the underdog, which should also stir our hearts.  The Church reminds us that in order to love God, we also have to be mindful of the opportunities we have to love those whom God loves.  Since the readings talk about aliens, we can look at the immigration debate.  Catholics can sometimes find themselves split.  Some prefer to focus on the legitimate right of countries to regulate immigration, and the responsibility of immigrants to follow the laws of their new country and seek to integrate themselves to their new homelands.  Others prefer to focus on what we heard today: that we cannot “molest or oppress an alien.”  In fact, both are true, and both deserve our focus.  Open borders include a host of problems that afflict every-day people–drugs; human trafficking; terrorism–even while some legitimately are trying to make a better life for themselves.  So while we seek justice and public safety, which are very important goods, we also don’t want to forget that God has a special love for those who are fleeing oppression and hardship in their native lands.  In the midst of legitimately enforcing immigration laws, we still have a responsibility to treat illegal immigrants as human beings, not like animals or sub-humans.  I think most Catholics can actually agree on those principles if we really stop and dialogue, though how those principles are instantiated certainly become more difficult to flesh out.
    But God wants us to remember our poverty, not so much economic, as spiritual.  God calls on us to rely on Him, because everything good we have came from the hand of God.  In some way, we are all aliens, widows, orphans, and poor, because we started with nothing other than what God allows us to have.  God loves us, and so, if we want to love God, He calls us to love those whom He loves, as well.  May our love for God find its expression not only in coming to Church and worshipping Him, as is right and just, but also in our love for our neighbors, especially the underdogs.

Right in front of our Face

Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

            Have you ever had a time when you really needed to get something done, or when you really wanted to get something, so much so that you miss a lot of the things that are right in front of you?  I know I have!  It’s so easy to become fixated on one thing or on a task to be done and to not be effected by anything else.  Sometimes it’s a positive: for example, most times when I’m celebrating Mass, I’m so focused that I don’t notice the babies screaming.  Many times parents come up to apologize for how loud they felt their child was, but it honestly didn’t bother me because I was focused on the celebration (and, for the record, screaming babies are a blessing to our church, because they remind us of new life, so don’t be giving dirty looks to parents who have screaming babies!!).  Sometimes it’s negative, like when we’re so focused on a task, we forget the people who are also involved.

            Perhaps the rich man from our Gospel today was such a person: determined, focused, wanting to get something done.  Maybe he was focused on nothing else but gaining more riches.  But what he missed was obvious: Lazarus, the poor man.  After all, Lazarus was at his doorstep, which means that every time the rich man left the house, he should have seen Lazarus.  And more than just seeing him, the rich man should have taken pity on him, and helped him out.  But he did not, and this neglect was to his own eternal peril.

            We’ve all heard this parable, probably countless times.  But who are the people who we don’t see because we’re so focused on something or someone else?  Who are the people that we step over, whether physically, emotionally, or spiritually, to get to our own goals?  The US Bishops have asked priests to talk a bit about the situation of immigrants in our country.  Now, let me preface this by saying that immigration policy is a complicated thing; if it weren’t we probably would have solved the problems already.  But what I can say with clarity is that we are obliged to treat immigrants with human dignity and respect, not step over them because they are nuisances.  When we think about how we think immigration should be handled, are we first and foremost thinking, “Is this they way I would treat Jesus?”  Because, especially the immigrants who come from Mexico, Central America, and Iraq, though not limited to them, are members of the household of faith!  Most of them are brother and sister Catholics!  And even those who are not still have human dignity and still are created in the image and likeness of God!

           

Our country has struggled with immigration for a long time because, while anyone who is not a Native American was an immigrant to these shores, after a few generations it can be hard to remember that.  On my mother’s side of the family, I only have to go back to my maternal grandmother to find a first generation American.  Many of us probably only have to go back 3 or 4 generations to find an immigrant in our family.  But we can forget that fact, and act like those, especially during the mid-nineteenth century from the Know Nothing party, or any of its variants, that wanted to make sure that the Catholics coming in droves, especially from Ireland and Germany, knew that they were not welcome here.  Again, the Church is not saying that we cannot have legal ways to enter the country, and penalties for doing so illegally, but as we form policy, as you write your Congressman and Senator, is your opinion formed by treating that person with the respect that comes simply from being a member of the human race?

            Even beyond the issue of immigration, the way we treat each other is part of the criteria upon which we will be judged.  The rich man suffers because he neglected Lazarus at his front door, while God noticed Lazarus, who suffered so greatly during his life, and rewarded him accordingly. 

And the best part of this whole story is the twist at the end.  The rich man begs Abraham to send Lazarus back from the dead to warn his brothers about what will happen if they neglect others.  Abraham tells them, “‘“They have Moses and the prophets.  Let them listen to them.” [The rich man] said, “Oh no, father Abraham, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.”  Then Abraham said, “If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead.”’”  For nearly 1500 years, the Jews had been told about the importance of caring for the widow, orphan, and poor.  But somehow, according to the rich man, that wasn’t enough.  Of course, standing from our perspective, we can see the humor and irony in Jesus telling this story, that some will not believe even when a person rises from the dead.  But then it begs a very sober question for us: does Jesus rising from the dead compel us to act differently?  Does it open our eyes and broaden our horizons so that we are not fixated in a negative way on just the things we want, or the tasks we are trying to accomplish, but sees those in need around us?  And we don’t have to look to Africa, Asia, or South America to find those in need; they are right here in East Lansing.

Sometimes we need to be focused on one thing alone.  But let’s not make that our rule of life, so we ignore and neglect Lazarus sitting at our front door, and risk eternal suffering because we did not help relieve that suffering in others right in front of us.