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Year B
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In
2005 and 2004 the homilies given here for
late Lent were something of a summons to
the assembly to fulfill their right, duty,
and need to take part in the liturgies of
the Triduum, always hoping that those liturgies
would be done in their fullness, with the
full, conscious and very active participation
of the assembly. This year what is offered
below is a homily for the Vigil itself.
In a sense, this night is where we go to
discover what mystagogy is all about. It
is at the Vigil that the preacher, little
by little over the years, must unfold the
mysteries of the paschal season, of Lent
and of Easter and so of conversion and the
full process of initiation and reconciliation
which is nothing less than gospel service
in the world. This Vigil preaching is done
in a room now filled with the echoes of
many scriptures and many psalms, a room
that has just welcomed the Alleluia and
a room where the font is filled and waiting,
the table empty and waiting. A homily like
this is going to be partial, is going to
presume that it builds on previous years,
overlaps, prepares for future years. It
also presumes that this assembly has been
here for a long time, first lighting and
praising the great candle in whose light
the preacher now stands, then through the
telling of the stories (that is, ALL the
stories and maybe more). But all of that
should not be pressure to hurry. Time will
matter only if what should be liturgy has
become something for audiences to watch
and listen to. Don’t let that happen.
Gabe
Huck
What is all this about clogged chariot wheels?
What is all this about stony hearts? All this
about a covenant of peace and streets paved
with precious stones? All this about the stars
not just shining but rejoicing and answering “Here
we are”? What is all this about wine
and milk and bread given without charge, about
a father and his child and wild promises of
descendants countless as the stars, countless
as the grains of sand on the seashore? And
especially, what is all this about the first
day and the second day, about every one of
the days ending when God saw that it was good?
Finally, and only when all those stories were
told, what is this about three women on their
way to a tomb?
Yes, we have been here a long time already
tonight. And tonight we are simply ending
the time of vigiling, praying, fasting that
we began on Thursday night when we washed
each other’s feet here in this place,
the vigiling and praying and fasting that
continued through Good Friday when we came
forward one by one to kiss or embrace or bow
or kneel before the image of the cross. Through
Holy Saturday this vigiling continued, when
we gathered the elect and asked them to pray
with us and to pray especially the Lord’s
Prayer and to recite the Creed.
This
“long time” is even longer for
we entered these three days only after we
had observed the disciplines of Lent’s
forty days. Like athletes preparing for the
contest, like skilled musicians making ready
for a concert, we took on Lent this year.
With prayer and fasting of all kinds and the
sharing of whatever gifts we have, we determined
to become faithful to that baptism which made
us Christians. Of course and as always, we
failed to do what we might have done, we failed
to do even what we wanted to do. But by God’s
grace we all come to this night boldly, wrapped
in the love and forgiveness of God. We come
in the darkness, holy and powerful darkness,
not to await the sunrise of Sunday but to
await the risen Lord in those who are to be
baptized in our midst. We come to know the
risen Lord in one another and in the sacred
banquet where we shall dine on the body and
the blood of the one whose gospel is little
by little, Lent by Lent, Vigil by Vigil, shaping
this community, this church.
The stories we have heard in this blessed
night abound in the words and the images that
give foundation to the way we would see and
hear and be and do. We began as at every year’s
Vigil with the first words of the first page
of our scripture:
“In the beginning, when God created
the heavens and the earth, the earth was a
formless wasteland, and darkness covered the
abyss.” Over and over comes the lovely
refrain that wraps this story round: God saw
how good it was. To take this as a story about
history or science is to miss its power and
its purpose. God saw how good it was. Every
tribe, every religion, has a story for how
the world came to be, and each of these, like
our story, is trying to say how to be in this
world, how to live in this world. So with
our story: God saw how good it was. Only when
we know and believe this—that God’s
creation is good, all of it—will we
have ears to hear the scriptures that follow
and ears to hear the daily news.
In some churches the story of creation is
followed tonight by the story of the great
flood, a story of what became of those two
who were made in the image of God. God sweeps
away all that God had seen as good. But even
the flood story ends with a new creation:
a new covenant between God and humankind.
And so through all these stories are the ways
God and creation struggle with and against
one another. Violent images abound: Abraham’s
raised knife is unbearable to us but yet we
know it well. We are called to rejoice in
slaves escaping through the dried-up sea to
freedom, but are we not also to mourn the
dead conscripts drowned in the waters?
But we heard also an amazing array of images
beyond any violence. We heard that tonight
is, in Isaiah’s ancient poem, a wedding
night. “The one who has become your
husband is your maker.” And this wedding
is made, as is every wedding, with promises: “Though
the mountains leave their place, my love shall
never leave you.” And the promises are
for those who hunger, those who thirst, those
who know oppression: “You who have no
money, come, receive grain and eat; come,
without paying and without cost, drink wine
and milk.”
This night’s talk is about a very different
way of living in God’s creation than
the one most of us know day by day. Tonight’s
poetry comes as a very strange challenge to
those of us content with things as they are,
those who are content to leave the government
to the officials, the church to the bishops,
the wealth to the wealthy. For the scriptures
of this night are not pretty sentiments; they
are the means by which we attempt, year after
year on this one night of all nights, to face
up to what we are: the assembly of those who
have, as Paul told the church at Rome, been
baptized into the death of Christ Jesus. That’s
what matters. We are no longer slaves to sin.
We are no longer bound to violence. We are
no longer prisoners to some nationalism, some
economy, some security, some wild claims that
safety lies in more and better weapons, some
flimsy false promise of
“the good life.” All of this,
all these idols, we put to death once for
all in the waters of baptism. Yet year by
year by year we need Lent to come and this
Vigil to come so we can recover and strengthen
the death we died in baptism, strengthen the
shouts with which we renounce evil and sin
in all their faces and forms. Year by year
we need the fasting and prayer and good works
to make it clear to ourselves and perhaps
to others that we have died with Christ and
we are living now not as slaves to sin, but
as servants of God who loves this world so
dearly.
Think about this: Here we are tonight, a Saturday
night in the spring. Here we are spending
hours together to listen like children to
the old, old books and their wondrous tales.
Notice that the last of the stories is not
some description of a dead man bursting out
of a tomb, not at all—that may appeal
to some artists but it’s not the way
the Gospel tells it. Instead we have the tale
of those three called in tradition the “myrrh-bearing
women.” These are the three who came
when the Sabbath of God’s rest was over,
came more boldly to the tomb than any man
would do. There they find not the hastily
buried body of Jesus but someone who says
to them what is being said to the assembly
tonight:
“You seek Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified.” Yes,
the crucified. The washer of feet. The teller
of parables where the status quo is turned
upside down. The one who healed the sick,
took meals with sinners, challenged the powers-that-be
not with troops or terror but with truth.
The crucified. Of course.
When the stories have all been told, we rouse
ourselves to call on a long line of our brothers
and sisters who have died but who are bound
to us in the communion of saints. We name
a lot of them and as we do this we walk with
the elect to the font. Let its waters evoke
for us the waters at creation, the waters
that held the ark of Noah, the waters of the
sea that parted for Moses, the waters given
freely to those who thirst, the waters Ezekiel
saw, the waters that flowed with blood from
the side of the crucified one. Only a few
will enter those waters tonight, but know
that we all who are baptized are there.
These waters are death-dealing, a tomb. These
waters are life-giving, a womb’s waters.
Beside them the elect will be asked to promise
what each one of us knows is going to take
a lifetime: the day-by-day renunciation of
evil and the living of a life that believes
in God our creator, God our savior, God our
very breath and life. And when they have come
through the waters, there is the fragrant
oil, the very fragrance of Christ in our midst,
to be poured on them and to seal their baptism.
All of us are to take the water and make the
sign of the crucified on our bodies, to touch
the perfumed oil on the hair and faces of
the newly baptized, embracing them. And all
of us, this tired but beautiful assembly,
are then to come around the table where in
loud thanks for the tender mercies of God,
then we who are so hungry and so thirsty for
justice, are given the body and blood of the
one who is the mercy and the justice of God,
Jesus our Lord, to be our food and our drink.
So now, my sisters and my brothers, stand
and with the elect, come to the waters, invoking
all the saints to pray with us, to pray for
us.
Copyright © Gabe
Huck. Used by permission.
Originally written for
Celebration, the worship and preaching resource
of the National Catholic Reporter (visit
their Web site at www.celebrationpublications.org).
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Year C
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What
follows is cast as a homily for the Fourth
Sunday of Easter, Year C,
May
2, 2004
. It suggests that on at least one Sunday
in the eight Sundays of the Easter season,
the homilist should invite a mystagogy of
the season itself. What is the meaning of
the Fifty Days? How do these days come to
life in our own lives as an assembly, as
baptized persons newly come from the font,
as households —
all living in and being some sort of world?
If a homilist uses the quotes from
Hopkins
given here, much practice is needed for
the pace and the clarity that will bring
the full impact of the lines to the assembly.>
Gabe
Huck
How shall we measure the spring? Is it a series
of days, some of them named by the culture,
some by the church, some by the state? The
state tells us that April 15 is Income Tax
Day and that the last day of May this year
is Memorial Day. The culture tells us that
when Memorial Day comes we can have a three-day
weekend, but the culture also has some other
names for spring days: April 22 is called
Earth Day, and yesterday was May Day and next
Sunday is Mother’s Day. The culture
also crowds the spring season with graduation
days and wedding days.
Amidst all this, we who are the church seem
to have yet another day-naming going. Most
of the ninety-plus days of spring are our
fifty days of Easter. The Fifty Days begin
on Easter Sunday once we have kept our Easter
Vigil itself, the culmination of our Triduum,
once we have approached the font for baptism
and proclaimed the good news: Dying you destroyed
our death, rising you restored our life! And
at the end of the Fifty Days is the Pentecost
proclamation: “[I]n one Spirit we were
all baptized into one body, whether Jews or
Greeks, slaves or free persons, and we were
all given to drink of one Spirit” (1
Corinthians 12:13).
Behind this Christian calendar, as is often
the case, there is the Jewish calendar: the
fifty days that are counted one by one from
the festival of Passover to the festival of
Shavuot. Passover remembers the going out
from slavery to freedom, Shavuot remembers
the giving of the Law to Moses. These were
the days and the seasons that made the calendar
observed by Jesus and his family and his friends.
Behind that Jewish calendar for the spring
is yet another calendar, perhaps the most
vital of all: the harvest calendar of the
eastern Mediterranean lands where the winter
rains bring the spring crops, the barley first
and then the wheat. Such harvests have always
held the roots of human celebration, of festivals
and seasons, because they are the very promise
of life.
Sometimes these calendars get wonderfully
entangled. In some places the May weeks of
spring and of Easter season became days to
celebrate Mary, the mother of God. More than
a century ago the English Jesuit poet Gerard
Manley Hopkins asked why this should be so
when he began a poem this way: “May
is Mary’s month, and I / Muse at that
and wonder why.” The poet tells us how
to seek the answer to why May is Mary’s
month.
Hopkins
says: “Ask
of her, the mighty mother: / Her reply puts
this other / Question: What is Spring? — /
Growth in every thing — Flesh and fleece,
fur and feather, / Grass and greenworld all
together.” That’s the answer,
he says: May and all spring is just this:
growth — in everything.
Hopkins
looks at
spring and says: “All things rising,
/ All things sizing / Mary sees, sympathizing
/ With that world of good, / Nature’s
motherhood. / Their magnifying of each its
kind / With delight calls to mind / How she
did in her stored / Magnify the Lord.”
Well, there we have it. Life exploding out
of earth, “all things rising!” as
the poet says — even after we have done
earth so much damage — and this “all
things rising” is like Mary, this is
like Jesus. So the tangling of the calendars
of earth and church isn’t about some
sentimental far-off Mary, but it is about
the bold Mary whose motherhood she sang in
images of a mercy, God’s mercy, that
is out there raising up more than the daffodils
and tulips, a mercy that raises up the humble
and fills the starving and deposes not just
the cold and ice of winter but deposes the
tyrants and sends the powerful packing. Some
spring this!
Hopkins
saw it
in every weed breaking through the cracks
of a sidewalk. What else is it to see and
keep Easter?
Like the weeds, new life springs up all over
the church in the spring: we baptize with
flowing water and we confirm with chrism oil,
we bring children and adults to the table
to feast on Christ’s body and blood
for the first time, we anoint the sick and
visit the graves of the dead, we bring some
into marriage and some into various ministries
in this church. All things
rising! the poet says, and that’s who
we are and what we do — we who are a
community of Christians, a parish of baptized
people, an assembly of Catholics gathered
here today on one of the eight Sundays of
the Fifty Days of the Easter season. Of course
these days are no vacation from the woes of
our worlds. Sickness and death take no vacation,
AIDS kills its thousands every day in Africa,
third-world children and adults sit their
dozen hours a day for seven days a week making
the clothes we’re wearing this morning,
two million men and women — a vast city — in
this land of the free are wasting in prisons,
schools and health deteriorate as our wealth
is spent in spring as in every season on walls
and wars that intend to keep us isolated and
afraid. The Easter days are no different in
their sufferings throughout the world that
matters deeply to us, the world God so loved.
Except somehow they are different
days. How is this so? Think what the stories
are. Think about what we’re hearing
from the book of Acts: Peter last week telling
the authorities that disciples obey God and
not human authority: we will obey the God
of our ancestors, the God who raised Jesus,
he says; we will not obey you. And this week
Paul arrives in
Antioch
, in
Syria
, and next
week we’ll hear about how they visit
all these cities and their little Christian
communities around the eastern Mediterranean
rim: Lystra, Iconium, Pamphylia, Perga, Attalia,
and Antioch again.
Controversies abound — that’s
why Paul keeps moving. But there’s so
much going on, so much that’s breaking
loose, “all things rising!”
And all these Sundays we open the book of
Revelation to hear wild visions and maybe
some of them give us a way to see ourselves,
our world: just last week John heard every
creature in heaven and on earth and under
the earth cry out (do we remember what they
cried out?). And this week John sees a great
multitude of every nation, race, people, and
language and they are coming to the Lamb for
shelter, coming because they are hungry and
thirsty and they are crying from their hard
days. Next week John will see a city coming
down from heaven so glorious as to be a bride,
and a Sunday later John tells us how that
city has no need of sun or moon for the glory
of God is its light.
Where’s the sense of all that? The sounds
of the Easter stories go out from here into
the stubborn spring arriving and they go out
into the great crimes of our common world
and the suffering that has no time for spring
or Easter. But of course the Easter deeds
of new birth from water, sweet anointing with
oil, Mary songs and disciples on the move:
these things have no sound at all except the
sounds we make, no strength at all except
the strength we lend, no sense to them except
the sense that our lives might make. Easter
days are the days when the little Christian
communities dare to live as if that bride-like
city were our city. In some places and some
times, the communities said: For these fifty
days no one can fast and no one can kneel
for we live as if the reign of God had come
in our midst. We Christians are rehearsing
what so many of the poor and hard pressed
have proclaimed these past years: “Another
world is possible!”
Another world is possible and it is possible
right here. Each Sunday together we tell ourselves
that what we do and what we say and what we
hear and what we sing is one or a dozen little
glimpses of what makes it truer than the morning
paper: Another world is possible. We have
glimpsed it here as we dare to let the meal
we make here, the meal where all share and
share alike, let that meal be what we strive
for in the big world day by day. We will dare
to champion the prisoner and the occupied,
the disappeared and the AIDS orphan, those
poisoned by industrial and military chemicals,
the whistle blower and the union organizer.
We will champion them not with our charity
alone but with our intelligence, our wisdom,
our wills, our prayers, our time, our votes,
and our loud demands. We who live astride
the world’s present colossus will take
hold of ourselves, get a grip for once, and
whatever may be the consequences, discover
who it is that mother Mary and risen Jesus
would have us stand with.
When we live as if, as if this were it, this
were the vision, this were the time of “all
things rising,”
then in whose company would we be found? With
whose troubles will we mingle our own troubles?
Who are those in that multitude John saw if
not those that the powers of earth had scorned?
Easter is nothing if it is not our frightful
and delightful effort to face the gospel truth
that our lot lies with the weak and poor of
this world.
And the interesting part is this: It won’t
end on Pentecost. The season passes, but the
different people we have become, that doesn’t
pass. The community that walked into Ash Wednesday
will, ninety days later, walk out from Pentecost,
but further along, my friends, further along.
The ashes and harshness of Lent, the death-defying
deeds of Triduum, Easter’s fifty days
of “all things rising,” all things — rising! — we’ll
come through to Pentecost, but we’ll
never be the same. And if that’s true,
nor will the world.
We are today with just twenty-one of the
fifty days behind us and twenty-nine of
them ahead of us. Enough, more than enough
as always with God, to rise up and see and
hear and smell and touch what God so loved
about this dear world and there take our
Easter selves.
Copyright © Gabe
Huck. Used by permission.
Originally written for
Celebration, the worship and preaching resource
of the National Catholic Reporter (visit
their Web site at www.celebrationpublications.org
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Year A
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The
preaching on all the Sundays of Easter — even
more than the rest of the year — ought
to strive for that quality of mystagogy
that we are trying to explore in this series.
That is, the preaching of Easter season
should explode out of the deeds of the Triduum
as they unfold in the life of the community
and the reading of the Sunday scriptures.
The preaching of Easter season should be
in a different mode almost, a tone that
isn’t heard at any other time. That’s
more than the words and content, of course.
When April 24 arrives, we are already at
the Fifth Sunday of Easter. Pentecost is
just three weeks away. Momentum can be a
problem by this time. Our attention span
doesn’t quite register fifty days!
But the scriptures keep us in the season.
The homily below looks to the often neglected
second readings of Easter, 1 Peter in Year
A. It spends some time on two verses that
are not in fact in the reading, 1 Peter
2:2–3 (the reading begins with verse
4). In fact, 2:2–3 is never read on
a Sunday, but it ought to be!
Gabe
Huck
We are now closer to Pentecost than to Easter.
Twenty-eight of the Fifty Days of the Easter
Season are gone. We have had four Sundays
of spectacular gospel readings. Easter Sunday
itself told of the women who first proclaimed
the good news, Mary Magdalene especially.
Three Sundays ago we heard a gospel text that
is read every single year, so crucial is it
to our understanding of Jesus and the church:
the frightened followers of Jesus recognize
him because he shows them his wounds and even
says to Thomas: “Put your finger here,
bring your hand and put it into my side.” We
heard some echo of that just last Sunday in
the second reading: “By his wounds you
have been healed.” Two weeks ago we
heard the story of Jesus and the two disciples
walking to Emmaus, the two who “used
to hope,” something many of us can say
for ourselves. Jesus does some preaching to
them, talking about what was written in the
scriptures, and when it begins to get dark
he joins them at table to break the bread.
And last Sunday was that Sunday in Easter
season when the gospel is always about sheep
and a shepherd.
These gospels may have left us little chance
to ponder what was read just before them.
All these weeks we have the Sunday second
readings from the First Letter of Peter, itself
a very brief text in the New Testament. This
letter, written probably from Rome late in
the first century, is addressed to the Christian
church in parts of what is now the country
of Turkey. These communities, begun a few
decades earlier when Paul was preaching there,
seem to be struggling with what it means to
be what we’d call today “a minority
group” in their own towns and villages.
They could no longer just be like everybody
else — and everybody else didn’t
always take this too well. Early on (we read
this three weeks ago) the letter writer recognizes
that “you may have to suffer through
various trials.” How should they behave,
then? Behave, the letter says, like those
who have been delivered from old ways of life. “Conduct
yourselves with reverence during the time
of your sojourning.” Try to be patient
when you suffer for doing what is good, the
writer says, because that is just what Christ
did. However hard your lives may be because
you have renounced one way of life and chosen
instead to belong to the body of Christ, this
church of ours, remember that because of Christ’s
cross we are loved and we are healed. Follow
the example of Christ, “the shepherd
and guardian of your souls.”
That’s what the letter has said up to
today.
This letter doesn’t whine: “Oh,
golly, it’s tough to stand out, it’s
tough to be left out. I guess all we can do
is hang in there” and so on and so on.
Rather, the writer wants to tell these little
churches to live daily by what it is that
made them leave the old ways and accept baptism.
Seize this life, however out of the mainstream,
with great enthusiasm! Here is one image the
writer uses to get these Christians on track:
Like newborn infants,
long for the pure, spiritual milk,
so that by it you may grow into salvation —
if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is
good.
What is this about tasting that the Lord is
good? What is this about being like newborns
who want their mother’s milk? This letter
writer knows the scriptures and their down-to-earth
images. Here are words the last chapter of
Isaiah that our letter writer had in mind:
Rejoice with Jerusalem, and be glad for her,
all you who love her . . .
that you may nurse and be satisfied
from her consoling breast;
that you may drink deeply with delight
from her glorious bosom.
That is who we are, our letter writer says.
We are like infants! Have you seen babies
demanding to be nursed and then delighting
and content at the mother’s breast?
Just so do we long to be nursed by our God.
We want to taste that the Lord is good. The
letter writer got that from Psalm 34: “O
taste and see that the Lord is good!” Remember,
those churches reading this letter in the
year 90 or so had some of the same practices
we now have. They may have been singing in
Greek or Latin or Aramaic “Taste and
see, O taste and see” as they shared
the broken bread and cup of wine on the Lord’s
Day. Then or now, surrounding a table as we
do each Sunday, we are to Christ as a baby
at the mother’s breast: rejoicing, content,
drinking deeply and with delight.
What a wonderful way to understand what our
little church is and how we survive and hold
to Christ — if. If — in fact we
do drink with delight at this table. If — in
fact we do come to this meeting room of ours
on Sundays so very thirsty because we know
that in some ways we don’t fit at all
with the ways people treat each other in this
difficult world. If — in fact we are
each Sunday so thirsty for the companionship
of this church, for the word of God read in
our midst, for the prayer and the bread and
the wine of this table.
There are many ways to think about the holy
communion that we are and we do each Sunday
here, but this old image from Isaiah and Psalm
34 and the First Letter of Peter is surely
the most simple and most beautiful. “Now
drink your fill from her comforting breast.” “Taste
and see the goodness of the Lord.” “Like
newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual
milk so that you will grow into salvation.” How
can we ever act like we’re just lining
up for communion? How can we ever act like
we don’t need to drink from the cup?
Aren’t we thirsty? Don’t we delight
to be given food and drink by the Lord? How
can we not meet the eyes of the one who is
saying to us, “The body of Christ,” “The
blood of Christ” and respond with a
firm “Amen”? How can we hurry
through those moments? How can we not fill
this room with song from beginning to end
of that procession of holy communion? Of all
that we do as a church, this is where we most
discover what church is. Taste! And see! We
are newborn infants and we are thirsty!
Right after that image of the church, the
letter writer thinks of another wonderful
image and so the letter comes to today’s
text. What is that image?
Beloved, come to Christ, a living stone, rejected
by human beings
but chosen and precious in the sight of God.
So like living stones, let yourselves be built
into a spiritual house.
Here we are being told that Christ is a stone,
a stone judged of no value either for beauty
or for building, yet this stone was the one
God used to begin a building and we who have
come to Christ are like other stones, just
as worthless no doubt, but God’s building
a building with us. This was written generations
before the Christian communities had any thought
of or any need to construct buildings for
their meetings on the Lord’s Day. They
went wherever they could fit. Maybe that made
it simpler to understand what gets lost sometimes
now that churches own buildings and some people
even think churches are buildings. What we
need to understand is right there: We are
God’s building. So what about all the
bricks and tiles, the steel and glass, the
wood and cement? That’s our building.
But we ourselves are God’s building.
We’re God’s building — in
progress. It took generations to build some
of Europe’s great cathedrals. It is
taking thousands of years for God’s
building the church to get itself together.
Is there any sort of relationship between
the two buildings, between the church and
the church’s meeting place? Between
us and this room we’re in now? Clearly
there is. One way or another, the brick and
mortar churches resemble what we think God’s
flesh-and-blood church looks like. Do we think
our letter writer would ever have had a Gothic
cathedral in mind? Or any room where the benches
and the layout made it clear that ninety percent
of those present were presumed to be passive
onlookers at the other ten percent? Or any
room where people couldn’t hear one
another singing? Or any room where it looked
like some people were more important than
other people?
Listen to the rest of the sentence begun a
moment ago:
So like living stones, let yourselves be built
into a spiritual house
to be a holy priesthood to offer spiritual
sacrifices
acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
What does that tell us about the kind of a
building God’s building with us? All
the baptized are to be this house, this holy
priesthood offering spiritual sacrifices.
If our church’s meeting place is to
resemble what God is building with us, how
will such basic communion look? How will the
gospel’s radical equality look? For
some recent centuries many thought of God’s
building as a spiritual pyramid: pope, bishops,
clergy, and at the bottom everybody else.
And lots of brick and mortar churches were
made to look like that. Those who worshiped
there got the message.
But forty years ago the Second Vatican Council
dared to remember that it wasn’t always
so. This was like the top of the supposed
pyramid saying: “This isn’t supposed
to be a pyramid at all. Let us re-form ourselves.” That
too will take generations and centuries. But
in the meanwhile we have what we have in the
way of brick and mortar to be nudged and edged
toward a truer reflection of this truer building,
God’s building, the living stones that
we all are.
Copyright © Gabe
Huck. Used by permission.
Originally written for
Celebration, the worship and preaching resource
of the National Catholic Reporter (visit
their Web site at www.celebrationpublications.org).
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Year B
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We
resume this series that last appeared
in the February 2003 issue of Celebration.
The intent of the series is to explore
how catechesis from and for the
liturgy may be done as a form of
mystagogical preaching. This is
cast as a homily for May 18, 2003,
the Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year
B. For more on the mystagogy of
the wine, see Wine and Bread by
Photina Rech, published by LTP.
This homily takes up and builds,
as preaching should do, on the homily
given in the October 2002 issue
of Celebration for the Twenty-seventh
Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A.
Gabe
Huck
Four weeks and five Sundays into Easter
season it should be clear to all:
Eastertime isn’t prose, it’s
poetry. Eastertime isn’t a news
report, it’s a concert. Easter
isn’t a lesson in the catechism,
it’s a love song. By this fifth
Sunday in Easter we begin to see how
the Sunday readings are like a multi-layered
sound track. The first readings from
Acts tell the ways and words of the
tiny but exuberant Christian community.
The second readings chime in with
the first letter of John where, no
matter what the starting point, the
end point is love. Then the gospels,
most of them taken from John, draw
us into a great jumble of images,
all ways to grasp from one angle or
another that Easter is, like it or
not, the death of all the death we
deal out to one another. And that
is good news, painful good news. We
heard it last week in the image of
a shepherd, the week before it was
a hungry, wounded Jesus eating a fish
in the presence of the disciples.
On Easter Sunday and the following
Sunday the images were those of faithful
women and an empty tomb, of blood
and water. What is more basic to human
life — and human life together —
than water and blood?
With all that in our hearts we take
up today’s gospel. “I
am a vine,” says Jesus, “I
am a vine and you are my branches.” Branches
are for bearing fruit. Branches are
where the blossoms appear, then the
tiny grapes begin to grow. We may
not live ourselves among vineyards,
but we know about great clusters of
grapes and we know about the winepress
and the juice that comes from the
pressing of grapes and the wine that
this juice will become if time and
nature and human labor take their
course. We know from old and new images
how vines grow and reach out and out
and out.
Probably it happened this way. When
Jesus started talking about being
a vine, those who heard thought about
the vineyards they had known all their
lives. Maybe they then thought about
the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve.
Why? What’s the connection?
Genesis has God saying: “You
shall not eat of the fruit of the
tree that is in the middle of the
garden,” and “So when
the woman saw that the tree was good
for food, and that it was a delight
to the eyes . . . she took of its
fruit and ate; and she also gave some
to her husband . . . and he ate.” What,
no apple? The apple was probably how
the European Christians later envisioned
the tree and so every image most of
us have ever seen is of is a tree
with shiny apples. But the people
who heard the Genesis story in the
Middle East would never think apple,
they would think vine. They would
think grapes. They would think vine
as thick as any fruit tree, grapes
delicious and abundant and so inviting.
So in the early Christian writers
and artists, the forbidden tree of
Eden is a grape vine, and then — what
else? — the cross is also a
grape vine, the ancient tree of death
now become the tree of life.
These Christians knew a Bible full
of vines for the psalmists and prophets
used to speak of God as the farmer
and Israel as the vine God planted.
Psalm 80 says: “You brought
a vine out of Egypt . . . / you cleared
the ground; / it took root and filled
the land. / The mountains were covered
by its shadow” (Psalm 80:9–11).
But always there comes a time when
the vine is torn down, neglected.
Ezekiel says, “The east wind
dried her up, / her fruit was torn
off; / Then her strong branch withered
up, fire devoured it. / Now she is
planted in the desert, / in a dry
land and parched” (Ezekiel
19:12
–13).
With these images from Genesis and
from the prophets and psalms in his
mind and heart, is it any wonder that
Jesus says that he himself is the
vine? And is it so strange that he
cannot speak of the vine without speaking
of branches being broken off and burned,
of branches withering, of the painful
pruning that is the only way to bearing
fruit? Any wonder then that we could
think of the cross and of the one
who hangs on the cross as a great
vine, pruned and fruitful?
But if Jesus is the vine, he is also
the fruit of the vine: “Take
this, all of you, and drink; this
is the cup — of my blood.” He
said this, and he handed them a cup
of wine. When we bring wine to the
table here we speak of it as “fruit
of the vine and work of human hands,” for
this wine, like bread, is not simply
what nature gives but what we have
done with the gift of nature, the
fruit of the vine. Through the centuries,
our ancestors have brought to this
table not only bread but also wine.
One author writes:
Bread is an absolutely indispensable
part of life, while wine provides
that something “extra,” a
certain exuberance.
Bread is the strength of the earth,
and wine the fire of heaven.
Bread strengthens us for bearing the
burden of the earth; wine exhilarates
us and allows us to forget the grim
aspects of this earthly existence.
Wine
raises our awareness of being alive
and rouses us to song, to poetic enthusiasm,
fearless courage, lofty thoughts.
Wine empowers us in word and work.
(Rech, page 29)
Perhaps then we begin to grasp the
poetry of the eucharist, that bread
should be body and wine blood. When
those who heard the wild speech of
the disciples on Pentecost said, “They
have had too much new wine!” they
were close to the truth. The church
sings of a certain “sober drunkenness.” In
John’s gospel Jesus’ first
wonder is that of water become wine
at a wedding, the best wine saved
for last. So then what wonder is it
that at table Jesus took wine and
spoke of his blood? And why is it
that at table the church has always
taken wine, the fruit of the vine
and work of human hands, and then
has held up the cup to all in the
procession and said, “The blood
of Christ”? And why is it that
to that we each and all say firmly, “Amen”?
Why is it that we drink from a cup
filled with wine but the word on our
lips is “blood”? The image
of the grape crushed that its juice
may become the festive drink is joined
by the church to the image of the
savior of the world crushed that his
blood flow in saving waves over all
the earth. “Take this, take
this all of you! Take this and drink.
This is the cup of my blood.” Ambrose
of Milan, sixteen centuries ago, preached
it this way. He called Christ “that
strange grape which, like the grape
from the vine, was hanging incarnate
from the wood of the cross. From this
grape is made the wine that delights
the heart of humanity, intoxicates
sobriety, emits the mist of faith
and of true piety” (Rech, page
59).
Many of us grew up Catholics at a
time when only the priest drank from
the cup; and a few generations before
that it was unusual for any except
the priest to take the bread in holy
communion. But Pius V a hundred years
ago urged frequent communion, and
in six or seven decades that became
a reality. After Vatican II, the cup
also became part of holy communion,
offered to all. Yet the habits of
the past hold on. Trained to think
that receiving holy communion was
taking the bread only, so we continue.
The cup seems some sort of extra,
okay for some but not really that
important.
Yet remember who we are, we Catholics!
We are the ones who have sought the
grace and love and healing of God
in such things as water and oil, in
the sound of words and the laying
on of hands. We cling to the holiness
of creation and of our own bodies
and gestures. We hunger and we come
to eat the body of Christ. We thirst
also, and so we come to the cup and
say Amen to what we are, the blood
of Christ, and we drink the fruit
of the vine and the work of human
hands. And we do such things not in
some self-centered isolation but in
the ever-messy midst of a community,
most of whose members have failed
as often as we have to hold dear to
the gospel, yet all alike are joining
this grateful procession to eat the
one loaf broken for all, and to drink
from the fruit of the vine poured
out for all. Eat this, all of you!
Jesus said. Drink this cup, all of
you! Jesus said.
Come, then, to the cup, whether to
let a drop of the sacred wine touch
your lips, or to take a full sip of
the good wine become for us the blood
of Christ. Come in joyful peace to
hear the minister say to you, “The
blood of Christ.” Stand before
the cup and say Amen to what you are.
Then take that cup in your hands and
taste. Parents, help your children
to approach the cup with reverence,
to listen to the words of the minister
and to answer Amen, then to take the
cup firmly and drink a tiny sip. We
Catholics are the neediest of peoples.
We need the holiness of walking in
procession, of singing, of bread broken
and wine poured out. Despite all that
the marketplace would tell us, we
want to know here in this place, here
in the midst of this assembly, that
for which we truly hunger and thirst.
Our hunger and our thirst, though,
are not so much satisfied as intensified
at this table. For here as nowhere
else does it become clear that the
one whose body we eat and whose blood
we drink is the one who hungers and
thirsts for justice and that hunger
and thirst become our own, little
by little, in this holy communion.
Copyright © Gabe Huck. Used by
permission.
Originally written
for Celebration, the worship
and preaching resource of the National
Catholic Reporter (visit their Web
site at www.celebrationpublications.org).
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Year B
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Other
homilies in this series have dealt,
as this one does, with the Easter
season and may be helpful in mystagogical
preaching during Easter season in
2006. See the May
2004 homily on the Easter season
itself, Mary and May, and our commitment
to justice. In May 2003 the homily
spoke of the image of the vine and
branches and the sharing of the cup.
That 2003 homily (same
readings as 2006) was prepared for
the Fifth Sunday of Easter which falls
this year on May 14. The homily below
is for the Ascension of the Lord,
celebrated in most dioceses of the
United States on the Seventh Sunday
of Easter, May 28, 2006. Note that
the text presumes the assembly has
heard Ephesians 4, the reading for
Year B, and not the second reading
from Year A which the Lectionary allows
in any year of the cycle. The statistic
on life sentences is from Human Rights
Watch (NYC) and was given in the January
2006 issue of Harper’s
Magazine,
page 11.
Gabe
Huck
Years ago, but not all that long, there
were two church organists who loved
the feast of the Ascension of the Lord
for it brought a twinkle to their eyes.
One of them, playing during the collection,
would subtly work in just a little bit
of a then-popular song whose words included
“Up, up and away, in my beautiful
balloon.” The other, more of a
traditionalist perhaps, would play something
meditative after communion, but those
who listened closely on Ascension Day
would detect here and there the melody
of the old song, “Be it ever so
humble, there’s no place like
home.” One saw Jesus taking off
from the earth. The other saw Jesus
going home. Both made people smile as
did the homilist who would always bring
to this day’s sermon the wonderful
quote from the escaped slave named Sojourner
Truth. Once asked about death, she had
answered: “Die? I ain’t
gonna die! I’m going home like
a shooting star!”
“He ascended into heaven,” or
so we claim in our recitation of the
creed. We generally don’t let
it bother us that the different accounts
of Jesus’ ascension in our Bible
are not only quite different, but at
odds with one another. Yet the story
is the story and of course there will
be different ways to tell it after so
many years. And the geography? Sure
we modern people know that heaven isn’t “up”
and, what’s more, in a universe
of suns and planets and galaxies and
who-knows-what, even “up” isn’t
up and “down” isn’t
down. The Easter stories bring their
reminders of how little all this has
to do with physics: “Do not cling
to me,” Jesus tells Mary of Magdala. “Blessed
are those who have not seen but have
believed,” he says to doubting
Thomas. So while we may well begin the
scripture reading today with the very
first verses from the book of Acts,
even there the last words are a rebuke
to the literal-minded disciples: “Why
are you standing there looking at the
sky?” The poor disciples still
didn’t understand. And neither
do we most of the time.
All of Easter’s days and Sundays
with their scriptures and their songs,
their sprinkling of blessed water and
their honoring of the great candle lighted
at the Vigil liturgy, all of this has
brought us to these last days of Ascension
and then Pentecost. Stories of Jesus
talking with and eating with disciples—after
the crucifixion—fill the early
weeks of Easter season. Every Easter
we strive to know: What does it mean
that we have died and come to new life
in the waters of baptism, this year
or years ago the same? What does it
mean that we have put on Christ? What
does it mean that we have come through
those waters and now on the Lord’s
Day we seek out that conversation with
the Lord, that table companionship with
the Lord? What does it mean that we
do this not as individuals but only
as the church, this very assembly?
As the fifty days of Easter continued
we moved from those stories of meals
and conversations to some beloved texts
like the Good Shepherd and to puzzling,
hard texts—a little vague perhaps—about
vines and branches, about the commandment
to love one another as the sum and substance
of it all. And in the first readings
each Sunday we’ve been hearing
snippets from how the church remembers
its infancy and tells it in the book
of Acts. We never hide the fact that
even in the beginning it was a mess,
as it still is today. We heard, for
example, of Paul’s early days
as a Christian. Newly baptized in Damascus
and now come to Jerusalem, both cities
under the heel of the Romans, he gets
introduced to Peter and others who wonder
what this ball of fire and their former
enemy is up to. And we heard another
story about Peter and how his own views
had to change when he saw that God’s
Holy Spirit wasn’t bound by Peter’s
very convenient way of fencing in the
church. It is an old story but we need
to tell it again and again.
So we have come again into these final
days of the Easter season. A late Easter
this year puts us already at the end
of May, Memorial Day weekend, when we
finally tell of the Ascension. In the
second reading, we heard a paragraph
of Paul’s letter to the church
at Ephesus, a city in what is now the
nation of Turkey. That reading, the
one that had nothing to say about skies
and clouds and angels, is today sandwiched
between the stories of Jesus’
ascension. The writer of the letter
wasn’t expecting Jesus to come
back any time soon. The writer wanted
the church to come to grips with what
it might mean to live day by day and
year by year, a whole lifetime, as a
baptized person.
It isn’t clear whether Paul himself
wrote this letter or some disciple of
Paul’s. Today we heard this opening
line: “I, a prisoner for the Lord,
urge you to live in a manner worthy
of the call you have received.” A
prisoner for the Lord. Whether Paul
wrote the letter or not, the writer
almost casually indicates that being
held in prison by the powers-that-be,
as Paul was, is not unusual for a follower
of Jesus, but also not without importance.
Reminding the readers of the letter
that it comes from a prison cell should
have told them as it does us: There
should be nothing surprising to any
of us about a follower of Christ being
in jail. Nothing surprising, but still
something to be pondered. Fifty years
ago Christian preachers in America often
went on and on about how Christians
were being put in prison in communist
nations. Then one day the leaders of
America’s Christian churches were
forcefully addressed by a letter written
to them by Martin Luther King Jr. not
from a prison in Russia but from his
jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama. Don’t
you see, he was saying, that doing what
the gospel tells us right here will
likely get us locked up?
In the life’s work of a Christian,
one occupational hazard is being sent
off to prison. In this very year, in
this very nation, there are Christians
who are prisoners for the Lord, locked
up for months or years, like Paul and
like Martin. Some of these prisoners
for the Lord today are doing time for
trespassing. They walked across some
forbidden lines and denounced the deeds
that are being done there. Some have
trespassed where our government stores
our weapons of mass destruction, nuclear
or chemical. Some have trespassed where
our government teaches effective ways
of repression and even torture. These
prisoners for the Lord challenge the
rest of us as Paul challenged the early
churches and Martin challenged the church
in the l950s and l960s: What is your
baptism about? What are your Sunday
assemblies doing? Are we building up
the body of Christ when we close our
eyes and close our mouths and accept
so quietly the way the world is being
militarized and the very life of planet
earth threatened so that a tiny minority—ourselves
among them—can continue to live
in the present manner?
There is such irony in Easter. Will
we proclaim that Christ burst the bonds
of death and trampled on the powers
of evil? Will we then strive, as Paul
writes today, to ourselves achieve together
as church “the full stature of
Christ”? What is that stature?
What does that Christ look like? The
bonds of death are still pretty strong
around the world. The powers of evil
try to work out of sight, but really
it isn’t so hard to see what’s
going on if we tear away the distractions
they daily toss in our paths. What we
renounced at baptism is not the stuff
of fairy tales. We renounced, every
one of us, the everyday ways that evil
pokes through our lives, the everyday
ways we so easily get used to taking
care of our own agendas and comforts
and barely notice what violence has
to be done to keep the food on our shelves,
the gas in our cars, the electricity
in our appliances, the clothes on our
backs.
When this church assembles on the Lord’s
Day, what is to become of us as we do
our work here? What can hearing and
pondering the scripture week in and
week out make of us? What happens to
a church that pours its whole energy
into intercession? What becomes of a
church—that is, ourselves—that
gives loud and intense thanks to God
whose love was found in the crucified
Jesus, whose mercy is manifest in every
new morning? What sort of people are
we then when at last we eat and drink
at this table one cup and one bread,
this food and drink, this body broken
for us and this blood poured out for
us? Are we still standing here gazing
up into the heavens, without a clue?
Let us bring ourselves down to earth
and look at just one of so many needs
that summon us to get about the tasks
we accepted when we were baptized. We
heard today from Paul in his prison.
Have we thought about, prayed for, written
to, listened to, those in prison now,
not just those like Paul or Martin who
went there for the gospel, but those
who went there because our society has
made prison an industry, because we
have decided to keep two million people
there day after day and punish them?
Do we accept responsibility for being
the nation that keeps in prison a larger
part of the population by far than any
other nation in the world? Here is one
of many numbers we could ponder: In
the United States there are 2,225 persons
serving sentences of life in prison
for crimes committed while juveniles.
Live all your life in prison and then
die? In all the rest of the world, where
19 out of 20 people on earth live, there
are a total of 12 persons serving sentences
like this.
What is to become of us? We ask that
as we try to see what it would mean
to live in the Easter mercy of God.
What is to become of us? We ask that
as we open our eyes to see for ourselves
what deeds are being done around us
and even in our name. If this ascension
story has one simple meaning it must
be that Christ leaves us here to do
the gospel work. No wonder that the
church constantly cries out: Come, Holy
Spirit.
Copyright © Gabe Huck. Used by permission.
Originally written for Celebration, the worship and preaching resource
of the National Catholic Reporter (visit their Web site at www.celebrationpublications.org).
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Year C
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This
is a homily exploring what the church
imagines on Pentecost Sunday. Pentecost
is May 27, 2007. That is also the
Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. The
names for the Spirit from “Veni
Sancte Spiritus” should be read
with good pauses between.
Gabe
Huck
This day, Pentecost, is the last of
the fifty-day season that began on Easter
Sunday. These fifty days are called “the
Sunday of the year”
because fifty days is very nearly one-seventh
of the year’s total length. Easter’s
fifty days should be to the rest of
the year what Sunday is to the other
days of the week. Once this meant such
things as no fasting and no kneeling
during Easter’s fifty days, just
as no fasting and no kneeling on Sundays
all year round.
The story of the mighty wind and the
flames-like-tongues is presented in
art over and over as the core image
of this Pentecost Day. But that image
of wind and flame, whether presented
as calm or chaos, is but one in an amazing
chain of images and stories that converge
today.
Even our modest book of readings here
gives some taste of the broader stories
of Pentecost. It provides them as options
to be read at Vigil Masses last night.
If we wish to imagine | | | | |
