Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Year B

The following is cast as a homily for the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B (January 22, 2006). Like a few other homilies in this series, this one takes time to retell a bit of scripture. This is done both because that scripture is worth exploring and because we need to be invited regularly to read our Bible apart from these few minutes on Sunday morning. Within the context of the whole story of Jonah, then, something can be said about ourselves, our rituals, and what is demanded of us.

Gabe Huck

Scrunched in among the very long books of the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, and the fairly short books of prophets such as Amos and Hosea, comes the book of Jonah. This little book can be read in about five minutes. It is the work of a storyteller who left us one well-remembered image: a man being swallowed by a whale, then living in the whale’s belly for three days, then being vomited onto some bit of shore.

Only once in every three-year cycle of Sunday scripture reading do we open the Bible to the book of Jonah. Only once — today — and notice that we didn’t hear a word about that whale. Instead, we were reading the last part of Jonah’s story, where we find Jonah in the city of Nineveh.

If the many books that make up this Bible of ours are worth carrying around century after century and continent after continent, then it must be that we’re intended sometimes to take the snippets of a Sunday morning and look beyond this one scene to the bigger story. If we do that with this book of Jonah, we find that the very first lines move quickly to the heart of things: “Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, ‘Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.’ ”

This Jonah is apparently not a well-known person in his town or time. Like most of us, he never expected to hear the word of the Lord quite so clearly, let alone be told to set out across mountains and deserts to find the city where powerful enemies of his own people live, and then tell them to repent. This first act of Jonah takes exactly two sentences.

Act 2 begins immediately as Jonah leaves home not for Nineveh but in the opposite direction, toward the seacoast. At Joppa he buys a ticket to Tarshish, probably a city at the far end of the Mediterranean, and boards the first ship out. God is not pleased and sends a mighty storm as soon as the ship is at sea. The crew is terrified. First they pray
to their various gods, then they lighten the ship by throwing their cargo overboard. It’s a frantic scene, but Jonah misses it because he’s down in the hold of the ship sleeping. The captain rouses him and tells him to pray to his god. Still the storm rages. The next strategy is to find out who caused this, to find out which person did some evil that brought on this storm that threatens all their lives. How to find out? They toss the dice and Jonah loses.

The crew and passengers interrogate Jonah: Who are you? What god do you worship? Why is your god doing this? What can we do to save ourselves? Jonah, and this may be something of a turning point, tells them who he is and why his God is angry. “Throw me into the sea,” he says, “and the ship will be saved.” But the others are reluctant to do such a thing and they try harder than ever to bring the ship to land. When they cannot manage it, they pray to Jonah’s God: “Do not make us guilty of innocent blood!” Only then do they do as Jonah himself had said. They throw him into the sea, and at once the sea is calm. Those on the ship offer sacrifice and prayer and make vows because of their gratitude and because they believe they have taken a human life. We hear nothing more of the ship’s crew, but all in all, the story treats them as a remarkable group of people.

Act 3, the one we know best, lasts three days and three nights and it happens in the belly of the huge fish that swallowed Jonah. The fish’s belly has become a sort of shrine where Jonah, still alive, makes a prayer to the Lord. Missing from Jonah’s prayer is any reference to doing what the Lord asked in the first place: that trip to Nineveh. When the fish finally vomits Jonah onto a beach, the Lord starts the whole drama over again: “Get up, Jonah, go to Nineveh and proclaim the message I will tell you.” This time Jonah does so.

And so we come to Act 4, part of which we heard this morning. So large is the city of Nineveh (which still exists, part of the city now called Mosal in northern Iraq) that it takes three days to walk across it. After he has been there a single day, Jonah calls out the one and only line of his preaching in this whole story: “Forty days more,” he shouts, “and Nineveh shall be destroyed.”

Think of all the prophets God sent to the people of Israel and the people didn’t listen. Think of the anguish of these prophets as the word goes unheeded. But one line from our reluctant Jonah and the citizens of Nineveh, high and low, rich and poor, proclaim a fast and put on sackcloth. The ruler of Nineveh decrees that all the people and all their animals shall fast, shall repent and shall call out to God for mercy. Even the cows and the cats are to fast and wear sackcloth! And this ruler strips off the royal robes and puts on scratchy burlap and calls out: “Let us turn from our evil ways and from the violence that is in our hands.” And the story says that God also turns around, that God has a change of mind and does not do to Nineveh what had been intended.

The next and last act could never be expected. Jonah, whose paltry preaching brought the great and powerful of Nineveh to their knees, is now furious at God, and the two finally have it out. Jonah speaks: “Lord! Didn’t I know this would happen? Didn’t I try to get away to Tarshish just to keep this from happening? Didn’t I know that you are so ridiculously merciful, always forgiving the evil done by people like these Ninevites when in fact they should have been punished? It doesn’t make any sense, and I wish I were dead.”

And with these words Jonah storms out of the city into the parched wilderness, where he sits down to brood and pout. It’s hot. God, ever merciful, has a plant come up to shade Jonah from the heat, then lets it die in the night. The following day God sends a scorching sun and a hot wind and Jonah has no shade, no protection.

And so we come to the last exchange between Jonah and the Lord. The Lord asks: “Jonah, are you angry about the shade plant that died in the night?” Jonah answers, “Yes I am, mad enough to die.” And God has this last word: “Jonah, that plant sprang up, lived and died without any work on your part and yet you are now furious because the plant died. Should I the Lord not be concerned for the good of the people of Nineveh? Are they not my people too?”

And so ends one of the Bible’s best, strangest and funniest short stories. So much for any of us who claim God’s exclusive love. So much for our great success at keeping our religion tame, well fed, private, something between me and God. So much for the ever alluring urge to think we can keep the old routines going, whatever the fate of the others on this earth.

For us Christians, the year turns, and in six weeks Lent will come round and we’ll be talking fasting and alms and prayer and even sackcloth right here. For us Christians, the week turns, and we find ourselves together here on every Sunday always getting our act together with words about God’s mercy and our sin and how the two meet: what I have
done and what I have failed to do, and may almighty God have mercy. The day turns and we go off to bed and to sleep, but perhaps not without some sense that we stand responsible for what the day has brought, and not just in our own home and workplace but beyond and beyond. This assembly is, like it or not, baptized into the mercy of God. Did God need Jonah? Does God need you or me? What do you think after hearing about Jonah? And why do we so often head west for Tarshish or east to pout under a shady plant when it isn’t all that hard to see, in the light of a merciful God, where the work is?

It is three years since we last listened together to the story of Jonah and it will be three years before we hear it again. In this year 2006, how can we not be struck by what the ruler of Nineveh does? The fasting and the sackcloth are there to make physical in every way what is the core of the conversion. Listen to what the text says: “All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands.” Where did that come from? Is violence the name of what must be put aside, left behind, renounced? How is it that the storyteller would weave a tale where God’s love for a violent people somehow takes hold and they turn from their violence?

Our other two readings echo here also. Paul is telling the church at Corinth to get about their work not as in previous times, for, so Paul believes, time is running out. What worked yesterday won’t work today. What was good enough yesterday is not going to be good enough today. Time is running out! And it is! This is no end-of-the-world scenario but a desperate sense for the mercy of God that would burst forth in our lives. And we heard Jesus proclaiming that right now — not tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow — now is the time of fulfillment. Look, he says, the reign of God is at hand. So, whether in Nineveh or here, repent and believe in the Gospel.

We are baptized Christians living in a sort of Nineveh, a place that exercises immense power and is no stranger to violence whether open or subtle. Sometimes we would rather not look, and various industries are only too happy to keep us entertained. Sometimes we do force ourselves to look at how we keep our power through violence, but we do not see alternatives. The lies that led to the invasion of Iraq, the deeds of torture condoned by those in power, the way we outspend the whole world together to make more weapons of shock and awe and to keep the human and natural resources of the whole world at our disposal, the refusal to join the world in doing whatever it takes to turn back global warming: All of this is violence beyond anything the world has known before.

The story of Jonah will not be found in the history books. It is gospel truth, not historical truth. The people of Nineveh never got a Jonah. The ruler never put on sackcloth and called for an end to violent ways. But the gospel truth of the story of Jonah is what gathers us once again on a January Sunday to remember God’s mercy as we have known it in Jesus and to know that we who are baptized into his death are ever in danger of being swallowed by that great whale as we try day by day to get to Tarshish, when at this time God’s mercy needs us in our own Nineveh.

Originally written for Celebration, the worship and preaching resource of the National Catholic Reporter (visit their Web site at www.celebrationpublications.org).

Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
Year B

The following is cast as a homily for February 23, 2003, Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B.

This homily, and similar efforts to follow, is an exploration of how the rites we do, as well as the scriptures we read, are integral in preaching. This effort should be considered, month by month, a work in progress that invites your comments (gabeandtheresa@gmail.com). In some congregations, these texts might make useful discussions for those involved in preparing the liturgy (the committee or board or whatever entity or individual takes that responsibility).

Gabe Huck

Sometimes to get your job done you have to go up on the roof and make an opening in it large enough to lower your friend down. Even then, you can’t be sure what will happen. It’s a deed not done before. Nobody was that desperate until now. Imagine being inside as pieces of the roof are pulled off or pushed in and suddenly, bigger than life, here’s a paralyzed man — a man who can’t move — being lowered down into the room right in front of you.

So it is. We are ten days from the beginning of our annual roof removal season. It is time to recognize where we are paralyzed and time to grasp at desperate measures for ridding ourselves of the paralysis. But not alone. The season for roof removal is called Lent and nobody ever goes into it alone. Who’ll pull off the roof tiles? Who’ll lower the mat down? Who’ll deal with the upset people inside?

The season we are talking about is Lent. We have now these ten days until Ash Wednesday. I’ll take that time to remember how much I need lowering through a roof into an amazed room. I need these ten days to get up the courage to do it. Each of us needs that time to ponder the paralysis that keeps us on the mat, stuck, getting nowhere. And worse, we have gotten so used to it. We always come to Lent in faith, only the slightest clues about what we need, about how paralyzed we are, about what might happen to us as we take the ride down from the roof into the presence of the Lord.

We may not be sure then how to welcome Isaiah’s telling this morning of God saying: “[S]ee, I am doing something new! . . . / In the desert I make a way, / in the wasteland, rivers” (Isaiah 43:19). What is this something new? What is this way in the desert or, in the wasteland, how can there be rivers? Wild promises? Yes, promises like these might lure us to the roof to do something unheard of, letting our paralyzed selves go public. But perhaps we have never been thirsty enough to rejoice in the promise of a river, or lost enough to grasp at the promise of a road.

Remember this: Though each of us must get ready, must prepare ourselves as best we can for the ashes that are coming, no one does Lent alone. We go together into the fray, sisters and brothers, or we do not go at all. The church does Lent. That’s us, this assembly, this parish. There is no Lent except the one we do. If you are thinking your part doesn’t matter, think again. I need you with me. So do we all. And you need me. Only holding to each other can we hear what is said over the smudge of the ashes: Remember that you are dust. Repent, believe the gospel. Who could bear that alone?

We have these ten days and we have work to do. How will we know among ourselves that we are dwelling in Lent? No alleluia? The ambiguity of the purple worn on Sundays here? The Sunday by Sunday presence of those preparing for baptism? Yes, all this and more. But there’s no Lent unless all these moments come to life within a parish that is eager to find how fasting and almsgiving and prayer can fill our households these forty days that begin on Ash Wednesday. This is the language we speak in Lent, the language that will get us unto the roof and so lowered down before the Lord, the language that will make us thirst for rivers in the wasteland and long for a road in the desert. The language of fasting, alms and prayer will do this: They will show us the desert and the wasteland so that we can hear God’s promise and rejoice in it.

From now to Ash Wednesday then are these days that are carnival, right up to Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday. Whatever the society does with these days, we the church will be coming to terms with the most unlikely promise: If we take on the ashes as sign of our church’s repentance, and if we then speak for forty days the language of fasting and almsgiving and prayer, the world will be changed! God will work the transformation as we lean on one another to get through. The one on the mat will leap up and grab the mat and run off shouting in joy, and all will be astounded. The secret will be out!

Consider then these three disciplines of Lent. Consider first the mystery of fasting that has so much more to it than what and how much is eaten. Fasting — in all sorts of ways — in our day is being rediscovered as solidarity with the poor. And fasting is being discovered as solidarity with the earth, with God’s good creation. What does that fasting look like? It can be different for various ones of us, but it is something that the adults of this community embrace. Fasting from food — just one kind of lenten fasting — may bring us down a notch or two on the food chain. We may explore the diet of the third world. We may explore a diet that abuses the earth less than our usual ways.

We all know some of the numbers. We Americans, six percent of the earth’s population, control half the world’s wealth. One of us uses up what fifty people in India use up. Thousands die each day from lack of enough nourishment. But for us, even a modest salary opens up what is impossible to billions. Lent’s question for those who believe the gospel is: What right have we? Maybe when we fast, we will come at last to believe the gospel. What right have we? and what are we to do? Lent’s fasting has us deal with these scary questions together, and not so much in our minds as in our stomachs. What right do we have?

If we are willing to be hungry — and in more ways than one — perhaps what will be revealed to us is our own emptiness. For what then shall we hunger? Lent’s first Sunday tells of Jesus’ fast of forty days and the temptations after: For what did he hunger? With Jesus, we people together may come to hunger for God, for God’s word. We aren’t used to hunger like this. We’re afraid of it. I am certainly afraid of it. But I want to trust the wisdom of the church and of the saints. And that wisdom is that what we shall find in this discipline of lenten fasting is not gloom but a loosening of the cultural chains. There’s a gospel freedom, we are told, on the far side of this Lent. Keep our eyes on the prize!

And think these ten days about how you will fast from more than food. Here’s one way to go at this. What have a million Iraqis died for these past twelve years of economic sanctions enforced by the United States? Most of the watching world believes it’s obvious: They died because our part of the world wants control of their oil. People who live there tell visitors: “If we had cabbages instead of oil, we’d all still be alive.” Fasting means confrontation with the demons of consuming, the demons of greed. What sort of world have we made in our land, in our own expectations of plentiful and cheap energy for every moment of our lives? What sort of fasting would be witness that another world is possible? That other possible world is the work of Lent. It isn’t about the temporary inconvenience of giving up candy or cigarettes or dessert. It is about getting the world right. Starting right here in this assembly.

And Lent is almsgiving. What the scriptures seem to tell us is this: Make a jubilee. That is, the goods of the earth must periodically be redistributed or the strong are going to take it all. If fasting is asking us: By what right? then almsgiving also has a three word meaning: It isn’t mine. It isn’t mine. It never was. I have to give it back. Almsgiving isn’t just writing a check or putting a dollar in someone’s cup. It is not about charity. It is about justice.

In Lent we look at what we have in our control, goods we own and savings and wealth of all kinds. We look at what we “own” and we listen to words like those Saint Basil told his congregation long ago: “The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money you put in the bank belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help, but fail to help.” That’s strong. He isn’t talking about what kindness we might do for the poor of the world, he’s talking about theft! Basil says we must do justice, not charity. We must return what is in our possession to the rightful holder. And Basil didn’t know how much worse it would get in our day, he didn’t know about all the ways of owning and controlling the wealth of the world. What would he preach to us on Ash Wednesday?

So we have ten days to ponder how we’ll take some baby steps with almsgiving during Lent, how we’ll go into training as almsgivers, finding the muscles we need to let jubilee loose in the world.

And Lent’s third discipline is prayer. Sometimes we think that means deciding to pray more during Lent: daily Mass, stations of the cross. That’s good. But the reality is this: Lent is the forty days when we give attention to the way we pray each day of the year, holding that up against the life we lead and discovering what it is that daily prayer could be for us. What is the prayer at the start of the day? We have a certain Christian vocabulary: the sign of the cross, the praise of God in various words from scripture, the Glory Be or Glory to God in one of its forms, that “Lord, open my lips” prayer where we remember who it is who unlocks our speech. We have a vocabulary of prayer for meals, for evening, for bedside. Lent is for getting some little daily habits into our lives — not to be given up at Easter but to live now with an Alleluia.

So, every one of us can take these ten days until the day of ashes and with joy and with great seriousness prepare for being lowered through the roof, prepare for whatever the rivers in the wasteland and the road in the desert might mean. Talk about how fasting and alms and prayer can change us and so change this world. Lent is about nothing else because it is, above all and before all, how we come each year to discover that we have died and our whole life now is in Christ. So hear what Paul wrote to the Corinthians in today’s reading: “Jesus Christ was not ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ but in Christ it is always – Yes!

Originally written for Celebration, the worship and preaching resource of the National Catholic Reporter (visit their Web site at www.celebrationpublications.org).

Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Year B

It would be difficult to imagine any set of readings better at preparing us for Lent than those the Lectionary brings before the assembly this February, the Fifth through the Eighth Sundays of Ordinary Time, Year B. The homily that follows is intended (as have others in February these past years) to be a mystagogy for the season of Lent. The season itself is a ritual we perform that is made up of many rituals and disciplines, and the preacher should attempt more than once in the Sundays of the season (and through Easter season until Pentecost) to explore these with the assembly. Sunday February 26, the Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B, is imagined here as the day of this preaching, but other scriptures of earlier Sundays are mentioned.

Gabe Huck

Today is our last assembly before this church enters Lent. What we hear and what we do together now make us ready or not for the ashes and the Forty Days. What is this Lent of the year 2006 to be for us, for this assembly, this parish, and for the little and big assemblies of the ecumenical church all over the earth? Of course, we don’t know yet. The pity would be if when Easter and then Pentecost come we still do not know. Our readiness for Lent is not a matter of deciding on some self-improvement exercise. That would reduce Lent to a private business intended to do something for me that I think I need. Nor is Lent some exercise in trivialities, doing for a few days without some
stuff I don’t need anyway.

What then is Lent for? Sometimes it helps to look beyond and see where it goes. At the far end of Lent we will gather in darkness to bless fire and to spend a good long time giving our hungry attention to stories and poems from our scriptures. On that night we’ll be a long time together in this room of ours until we are as ready as we can be to go to the waters for baptism. Then, with those newly baptized, we’ll go to the table for Eucharist. Lent is nothing more than a way that Christians devised to get themselves ready for that baptizing and that Eucharist, ready for that night’s scriptures, ready for the waters and ready for the table.

Over the centuries, those connections were lost and Lent was left as a time of penance, which it is, but without the direction that baptism and Eucharist give. Without that direction, Lent had less and less to do with the church, with all of us who are the church together. Instead, Lent had more and more to do with me and my sins and my little acts of penance and self-improvement. But the Second Vatican Council recognized what had been lost to us as baptism became a private ceremony instead of what it is, the deed that forever defines us. The council called loud and clear for a reform and renewal of these seasons and these deeds. Lent is to be the work of us all so that at its end we may baptize and discover more and more what it means to be a people defined by our baptism. Lent and Easter season are to create and strengthen this church, this body of Christ, this joyful servant of God in the world, this church that we are.

For about forty years we’ve been up and down, in and out, with how to bring about that renewal. It has been confusing and in some ways disappointing. Some have given it up and said it was better before, we never should have started all this work of reform. Others have found the reforms weak and without much significance for their everyday needs and they have gone off. Most of us who hang on have at times felt great discouragement as the institution and those who hold various offices in the church seem to lurch from one crisis to another. In our part of the world, the rich part, we often seem at a loss to make any sense out of what the Gospel we carry has to say about how baptized people are, to use the simple image Jesus gave us, to be down on our knees washing the feet of all, upsetting the powers that be and calling steadily and intelligently for justice and for love.

So we come today face-to-face with the ashes of this coming Wednesday and we ask what Lent is to be for us this year. The scriptures of these weeks leading to Lent can help us. Three weeks ago today we heard a short reading from the book of Job. You might remember it because the words were so striking and so unlike most of our readings.
We heard:

Do not human beings have a hard service on earth,
and are not their days like the days of a laborer?
Like a slave who longs for the shadow,
and like laborers who look for their wages,
so I am allotted months of emptiness,
and nights of misery are apportioned to me.
When I lie down I say, “When shall I rise?”
But the night is long,
and I am full of tossing until dawn.
My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle,
and come to their end without hope.
Remember that my life is a breath;
and my eye will never again see good.

Now that is far from the way our times and our commerce-filled world want us to think. Job would quickly find himself isolated in an institution or at least treated with some mind-altering drugs. So it is an amazing thing that Jews and Christians put such people as Job into the holy book where they have to be heard again and again. Job, no stranger to ashes and sackcloth and fasting, wants our attention as the day of ashes nears. But Job is no whiner. Job is one of the rare souls who call God to account for the injustice all around. And it is this Job who will perhaps accompany us into our Lent. What complaint,
what lament, what demand should be ours?

From the garbage dump, with his family and property gone, his health ruined, Job demands that God behold this injustice. Can we learn the way of Job this Lent? Can this church lift its voice before God and all the powers of earth to say there’s something terribly wrong? Can we name the wrongs and keep naming them in public places until, like the widow in that Gospel story, we get some attention and some change? For all that Lent is a time of reflection, it is in every way also a time to open our eyes to injustices of every kind — economic and educational and political and environmental and racial and gender-based — and, eyes wide open, to become loud advocates.

But who has the strength for such banging on the doors of heaven and the doors of all the powerful? Who has the strength to imagine how the world could be? Strength aside, who has the time? That, too, is our work in Lent: grappling with the ways we are using our strength and our time. We are, most of us, caught. Prisoners. We who have so many
choices in everything from soap to television channels seem to have no real choices about how to spend tomorrow. But here comes Lent, ready or not, and the first thing it wants to do is break us loose, ask why we’re prisoners and what the freedom of the Gospel is all about.

Little by little, we revive the imagination. Little by little, we begin to use our nerves and muscles to see the world God loves and to imagine what we baptized believers in the Gospel must be about.

A week ago today we heard of some folks who had a paralyzed friend and they couldn’t even get close to Jesus with their friend. They opened the roof of the house where Jesus was and from above they lowered the bed down in front of Jesus and that person ended up carrying that bed home. The Gospel says: “They were all astounded.” Indeed they were.

What made for this miracle? Friends, a little community that imagined doing things a different way, use the roof when you can’t get in the door. But isn’t this our community, the one assembled here right now? What can we do to free one another of our paralysis? Is that what it means to keep Lent together? Paul, writing to the church at Corinth,
knew that church isn’t something that’s going to happen in Rome or at the bishop’s office. Today Paul says: “Look, the best truth and the hardest one is that you are it. I don’t have some tablets inscribed by God. I have you! The writing is you and it is to be read by all.” True at Corinth a long time ago, true here today.

We have today another prophet’s word for imagining our Lent. “Thus says the Lord,” we read in Hosea, “I will lead her into the desert and speak to her heart.” Hosea imagines God as someone so in love that no matter what goes wrong, love can take hold again. And that is another way to think about this Lent that is before us. To go to the desert is to make room where there seems to be no room, to take away the clutter that keeps us from seeing what we’re baptized to see, from doing what we’re baptized to do. Of course this frightens us: Once the clutter is gone, when we’re in the desert with God, what if there’s
nothing left?

Jesus also had the desert and some kind of wedding in mind when he was asked why John’s disciples fast and his disciples don’t. It is a good question as we decide whether to embrace Lent or let it slide by. Jesus says: “Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day.” “That day” is here. If in Lent we are to discover the way the Gospel makes us a community of Job-like protesters, of lamenters and advocates of justice, then also we are to discover that we have gospel hungers and gospel thirsts. These are not satisfied by anything except earth and heaven wed, anything except being wedding-bound as we seek God in the works of justice and of beauty and of human kindness.

For at least a few minutes before Wednesday, think and talk about this Lent and the way we can embrace its disciplines and discover in us the gospel clamor for justice, the gospel eyes to see clearly what is what in this town and this world, the gospel strength to imagine how we together can loosen the blindfolds over our eyes and the gags that close our mouths and the chains that keep us forever too busy to be a Job or to be Paul’s letter to the world. Think and talk about the kind of fasting that will make us hunger and thirst for justice. We are baptized to do this great and hard thing called Lent together. Sunday
by Sunday we will be here in assembly to support one another, to bring our Lenten lives before the church and before the Lord, and to feast as we do each Lord’s Day on the body broken for us, the blood poured out for the life of the world.

Originally written for Celebration, the worship and preaching resource of the National Catholic Reporter (visit their Web site at www.celebrationpublications.org).

Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Year B

In 2006 it is the last Sunday in June before we hear that a Sunday is “in Ordinary Time.” That last June Sunday is the place for the homily below. As preparation, read again the book of Job and renew your wonder at its poetry.

Gabe Huck

This year all the Sundays of March, of April, of May, and of June until today have been called Sundays of Lent, or Sundays of Easter, or — most recently — Trinity Sunday and the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ. But from today until the end of November, five months of summer and autumn, we’ll be in the “counted” Sundays. We began these numbered Sundays early this year, after Epiphany and before Lent. Now we resume the counting and we call today the 12th Sunday of Ordinary — or “Counted” — Time. We’ll go from Sunday number 12 to Sunday number 34 before we enter Advent in early December. This year is the middle year of our three-year cycle of reading the scriptures. Always in this middle year we read the Gospel of Mark on nearly all of these counted Sundays, going from the fourth to the thirteenth chapter. But we make a detour for a few Sundays in late summer, a detour into John’s Gospel. We’re bound to notice this because the style and stories of Mark are so different from those of John. The communities where these two writers lived had different memories of Jesus and different ways of understanding.

In the second readings we now have some Sundays with Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth, then we come to many Sundays reading the letter to the church at Ephesus. Then on September’s Sundays the tone will change greatly as we read the letter of James. Later on, look for another change of tone as we read the letter to the Hebrews in October and November.

The first readings, as usual, will be jumping from here to there in the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures. When these first readings are juxtaposed with the others, with the Gospels especially, sometimes — like today — each one enriches the other.

One thing that the first people to call themselves followers of Jesus knew from their own Jewish tradition was this: When you come together, whether on the Sabbath or on the First Day, Sunday, you must always read together and listen together to the scriptures, to the word of God. Jews continue to do this on Sabbath. Christians continue to do this on Sunday. Back we come, back and back and back again, to this book. However much we may or may not read the scriptures at home, here we read it all together, one family, one tribe gathered around someone whose ministry it is to speak it out that all may hear. These scriptures are not the private property of the clergy or the scholars or of any elite. They are first and last the words that exist to be spoken in the Sunday assemblies of baptized people. Sunday by Sunday and year by year and century by century the assembly hears the scripture and tries to grapple with it, tries to weave into its life these parables and stories, these poems and letters.

In this year and this place, it is this assembly, you and I, who are to carry on this listening and this pondering. Each Sunday when the scriptures and the homily conclude, ready or not, we turn to the work of interceding and to the work of giving thanks to God at the table where we have placed bread and wine, and so to the holy Communion. Sunday by Sunday the work of reading and the work of listening and the work of preaching are going to shape how we intercede, how we give thanks, how we become a holy communion. And we hope there is more. We hope that Sunday by Sunday the work of reading and the work of listening and the work of preaching are making us a church where intercession and thanksgiving and communion become a way of life. Sunday’s deeds here are like a rehearsal for loving God’s world by endless hard work toward justice.

Enter Job in today’s first reading. Even people who never read their Bibles know Job. His name is synonymous with “troubles.” The book of the Bible that bears his name is a well-told story about a question that tormented people twenty-five centuries ago and still does today. Some would say that question is: Why do bad things happen to good people? But a better framing of this story’s plot might be: If God loves us, if God is merciful, how will we ever understand the suffering of children, the suffering of the innocent? Job was a good person, a husband and father, faithful to God. The drama comes when Satan challenges God to take away Job’s wealth, health, and family. Then we’ll see how virtuous this fellow is! God agrees to the contest, and soon Job’s wealth is gone, his children are dead, and his health is ruined. Various members of the community urge Job to beg God’s forgiveness. Job will have none of this. He knows this suffering is not punishment for any wrongs he has done and he will not grovel.

On a Sunday last February we read a short passage in which Job voices his grief and his weariness with himself, with the world, and with God. Job says: “I have been assigned months of misery, and troubled nights have been allotted to me. If in bed I say, ‘When shall I arise?’ then the night drags on. My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle; they come to an end without hope. Remember that my life is like the wind; I shall not see happiness again.” Job struggles not only with grief for his dead children and the agonies of his own body, but with those who tell him that all this happened because he offended God. Listen here, Job, even if you don’t know how you sinned, repent! But Job will not beg God’s forgiveness for wrongs he never did. What kind of god would demand that?

What kind of a god would on purpose or by neglect let awful suffering come to the good and bad alike? It is still a question. Some despair of an answer. Job’s wife tells him it was a fantasy to think God would reward good and punish evil. No such thing. So rise up in anger that all your efforts to be a good person were for nothing. “Curse God and die,” she says. It is an answer we can well understand. But more is at stake for Job than his own life, his own death. What is at stake is how people are to live with one another. When Job finally lifts his voice it is not to ask forgiveness but to demand some answer from God. Here we begin to see how flimsy are many of our own ways to deal with suffering and injustice in this world, our too-easy answers about rewards in heaven, our day-by-day excuses for living quietly and in comfort while we know full well the lot of — for starters — innocent people in prisons and children born with AIDS.

Job’s speech to God in Chapter 31 shows a down-to-earth understanding of how Job had always understood what God meant life to be in a harsh world. It seems an honest speech and a searing accusation. Job says: Look at my life. I wept for those whose day was hard. My soul grieved for the poor. I knew well that you, God, care as much about the poor and the slaves as you do about any of us, and so I reared the orphan like a father. If I saw a person without warm clothing, I gave of my own. I never made wealth or power my goal. I never took delight even in the sufferings of cruel people. I never failed to care well for the land itself. Job says: God, I did feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty and I clothed the naked and visited the prisoner and sat the poor down at my own table. Isn’t that what we are supposed to do?

What was read this morning was a tiny excerpt from God’s long answer to Job. That answer is at once a beautiful poem and a harsh disappointment. The core of God’s answer is simple: Who are you to question me? Instead, Job, I will question you. And so comes the refrain: Where were you, Job? Where were you when I fashioned the earth and when the morning stars sang together? Where were you when I put limits to the sea? Did you ever call for the sun to rise? What do you know of this world? Was it you, Job, who gave birth to the ice? Do you cause rain to fall? Job, do you even know what a wonder is a mountain goat or a horse or a hawk?

Perhaps this reminds some of us of a time that we challenged our mother or our father when we thought they were being unfair. And Mom or Dad gave a sharp answer that didn’t seem to have anything to do with our question. Like: “I suppose you know what it takes to keep food on our table, to keep the lights on? I suppose you know how we had to do without for years so that you children could look forward to a good education?” Maybe you’ve heard something like that. Maybe you’ve said something like that.

And though the story of Job adds a brief, happy, and very superficial ending, God’s poem is the story’s climax. Job, like us, wanted an answer. In the end, Job had to face the hard truth that neither God nor religion is about answers. Like the disciples in that Gospel boat today, we are terrified both of the storm and of the one whose word can calm the storm. We might be afraid that if we try to deal here in this assembly with God we’ll get a poem instead of an answer and we’ll have no idea what to do with that poem. We might on some Sundays have been thinking about the suffering of the innocent in this world, maybe we’ve been thinking — for it is much in the news these days — about what is almost certain to befall the poor of the world as global warming takes hold. We might be graced to wonder about the fairness of this. After all, those who will suffer and those who will die are very unlikely to be the ones who caused the problem. We might be toying with questions to put to God.

The truth is we do put this to God every Sunday, sometimes well, sometimes not, when we make those prayers of the faithful, those intercessions. It seems harmless enough to raise up the names of the sick, the condition of the homeless, the suffering of those who live with war, the loneliness of the old. It seems harmless but it isn’t supposed to be. In fact, when we do this we are Job-like, going before God and saying: This isn’t right! How can you let innocent people suffer? Do something about it. Such talking to God is something that comes with baptism.

What else can we do? We’re the descendents of Job and of the terrified disciples. It is our responsibility to bang on God’s door and demand justice for the innocent. But doing so, we know well the answer God gave Job. Where were you, Job? Where were you, where are you, church of _____?

We work with stories here. We work with hard questions. We work from that never comfortable deed we will together do in a few moments: giving thanks over bread and cup for the life and bloody execution of the one we call our Lord Jesus Christ who asked Job-like questions. Ponder now what hard questions we are going to put to God this day and what we will do when God answers with a poem.

Originally written forCelebration, the worship and preaching resource of the National Catholic Reporter (visit their Web site at www.celebrationpublications.org).

Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Year B

The following is an example of how catechesis from and for the liturgy may be done in the Sunday homily. This is written as a homily for July 6, 2003, Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B. This is the July 4 weekend. Thus this attempt at mystagogia draws on both the liturgy of the Christian assembly and that of the nation.

Gabe Huck

At the opening end of this weekend stood the Fourth of July, Independence Day, the birthday of the nation. Picnics. Flags. Fireworks. Parades. Speeches. And at this end of the weekend stands our assembly, the Lord’s Day gathering of the faithful. Gathering with the sign of the cross. Proclaiming God’s word. Thanksgiving over bread and wine. Holy Communion.

Thus within these few days we juxtapose two answers to the question: Who am I? On Friday, we probably answered easily: I am an American. And today the same “Who am I?” question brings the different answer: I am a Christian. Or: I am a Roman Catholic Christian.

What seems to go without saying is that we can also answer: I am a Christian by religion and an American by citizenship. And then one can add: I am a truck driver by profession, a mother, a member of this or that organization, a descendant of slaves or of immigrants or of natives to this land. And so we are. But the question wasn’t: What is my religion and what is my citizenship. The question was: Who am I? That is: What is the heart of the matter here, the core? Where and with whom do I find the meaning of life and of my own self? Do I judge a matter by all that makes me Christian or by all that makes me American? What’s the mix? Who am I — first and last?

The scriptures that happen to fall on this Sunday seem eager to contribute something to the answer. Ezekiel, the prophet of the dry bones, gets a rare chance to be heard in our assembly. Where is he? He’s in Mesopotamia, the land between two rivers, the land we call today Iraq. He and thousands of others were taken into exile when Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians. These exiles are facing the “Who am I/Who are we?” questions as they never have before. We know from where we stand that some of their children will go back to Jerusalem in a few decades, having decided that “who they are” means being there. And we know that the children of other exiles will stay in Babylon and be the beginning of a Jewish community that has endured and sometimes thrived these 2600 years.

But Ezekiel is speaking here at the very beginning of the exile time, when the community is just sorting out “Who am I?” questions. And little that Ezekiel has to say is going to give much comfort. Perhaps that is why Ezekiel is at pains to say: This is not what I say but what God says. He narrates how God told him: “[O]pen your mouth and eat what I shall give you.” Then Ezekiel tells us: “[A] hand stretched out to me, in which was a written scroll. It was covered with writing front and back, and written on it was: Lamentation and wailing and woe! . . . So I opened my mouth and [God] gave me the scroll to eat” (Ezekiel 2:9, 3:2). What is this about? Ezekiel wants it to be clear: If you don’t like what I have to say, if you don’t like these words of lamentation and wailing and woe, just know that they are not my words but the words God put into my mouth.

We heard today how God gave Ezekiel this commission: “I am sending you to the . . . rebels who have rebelled against me. . . . Hard of face and obstinate of heart are they . . . And whether they heed or resist . . . they shall know that a prophet has been among them” (Ezekiel 2:3–5).

The gospel tells a story that happens more than seven hundred years later. The prophet Jesus is teaching in the synagogue of his hometown. As in Ezekiel’s day, there are multiple answers to “Who am I?” and “Who are we?” Are we going to be people who recognize that the Romans are in charge now and our fortunes depend on theirs and so let’s get on with life? Or do we see the Romans as enemy occupiers of our land against whom we have to preserve our lives and identities? And what is that identity anyway? And if that isn’t enough, who is this Jesus to tell us anything at all, this fellow who grew up here, the carpenter for heaven’s sake, Mary’s boy? We can almost see the town’s people raising their eyebrows and nodding their heads slightly as they add: Yeah, we all know that family.

So we have these two prophets, Jesus and Ezekiel, these two persons who do what prophets do. Prophets do not foretell the future. Prophets tell God’s truth about the present. And telling that truth, whether we heed or whether we resist, is where the future comes into it.

The prophet is a problem. Anyone can claim to be one, claim to have God’s word, even the most unlikely suspects such as Ezekiel and Jesus. Most are on ego trips. A few are not. How to know the true prophet from the false prophet? The true prophets almost never say things we like to hear. They do offer us some help for answering “Who am I?” and “Who are we?” but they are unlikely to say: We’re God’s best, we’re the apple of God’s eye, and now have a nice day. More likely the real prophet will be as hard to take as Ezekiel or Jesus: Not a fun person at the party but someone consumed with getting us to see what God wants of us, hard stuff that God wants.

We come here Sunday by Sunday. Most of the time we have to work hard to hear the prophet’s voice here in our assembly. But if we are hungry for God’s truth about the present we should know that God’s truth is being told right here. What we do here, all of us together, are prophet-like deeds. They move us a little closer to seeing “Who am I?” and “Who are we?” We should know that in this assembly we are little by little able to know who we are meant to be. But we can miss God’s truth because our eyes aren’t focused, our ears not in tune, our hands in our pockets. All of us miss it most of the time, perhaps because we don’t come hungry but already satisfied. The prophetic things we do here often just sail right by.

What prophetic things? What do we do here that tells God’s truth about the present moment in the world’s life? What do we do here that brings us face to face with any ways we have been holding to some truth other than God’s about the world’s life in this summer of 2003? What do we do here over and over again on the Lord’s Day that is able to give us not words but deeds that will define who we are? What do we do that shapes in us a way to live and a way to see and a way to think and a way to act?

Consider just two tiny deeds of this sort. The first is this: We enter this room and we take water — water that reminds of our baptism — and we make on our bodies the sign of the cross. Then a few moments later, all together as an assembly, we again trace that cross on our bodies. What is this? What are we doing?

We have seen infants brought into this assembly by their parents. Those parents say they are here to ask for baptism. Then presider and parents and godparents all sign the infant with the sign of the cross and the presider says: “I claim you for Christ.” And it may be that child will come one day to stand among us and make the sign of the cross with us. It may be that child will learn from parents that the day begins with the sign of the cross, or that we end our prayers at bedside with the sign of the cross. “I claim you for Christ.” What does that cross we make so simply mean? Or rather: What does it mean to be a person who identifies myself with a cross traced on my body? How is this a prophetic gesture, telling God’s truth about this world and how we are to live?

There’s one response to that today from Paul in the second reading: “I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10). That sounds like someone who has made the cross his own, who lives as if claimed by Christ. Weakness and insult. Hardship and persecution and constraint. We make the sign of the cross and that’s what we’re signing on for.

Or think of another tiny prophetic deed we do here each Sunday. When the time comes, the bread is broken for holy communion and we come to the table to take the Body and Blood of Christ. The plate that the minister holds does not have large pieces of bread for some and small pieces for others. The thought is absurd! It does not have large pieces for the best donors, or the most active, or the seniors. It is the same for all. And exactly here is the prophetic deed, telling the truth about who we are. The prophetic deed is saying that before God these distinctions of ours don’t matter. In the world we would fashion, all would share and share alike as we do here at this table. And that is a part of this understanding of who I am and who you are and who we are.

Those willing to be so claimed will, like Paul, find ourselves in constant trouble, for there are other claims on us, claims that offer lots more than weakness and insult, hardship and persecution.

Originally written forCelebration, the worship and preaching resource of the National Catholic Reporter (visit their Web site at www.celebrationpublications.org).

Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Year B

The text below is for the Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 2, 2006. It is one exploration of how the liturgy the assembly is celebrating, the scriptures that have been listened to, and our lives in the present moment might come together. The quotation at the beginning is from “With Her,” a short poem that Czeslaw Milosz (pronounced CHESS-wah MEE-wash) wrote in 1985. If the homilist wants to use this poem, it should be well rehearsed. The four words, “This is for me,” seem especially important. The text also presumes that the full (longer) form of the Gospel reading will be heard.

Gabe Huck

We heard a rather startling assertion at the very beginning of the first reading. “God did not make death.” More than twenty years ago the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who was to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years later, wrote about being at Mass on this Sunday at a church in Berkeley, California. That Sunday was his seventy-fourth birthday and the poem tells us that his own advancing age brought thoughts of his mother. Milosz’s poem begins:

Those poor, arthritically swollen knees
Of my mother in an absent country.
I think of them on my seventy-fourth birthday
As I attend early Mass at St. Mary Magdalen in Berkeley.
A reading this Sunday from the Book of Wisdom
About how God has not made death
And does not rejoice in the annihilation of the living.
A reading from the Gospel according to Mark
About a little girl to whom He said: “Talitha, cum!”
This is for me. To make me rise from the dead
And repeat the hope of those who lived before me,
In a fearful unity with her, with her pain in dying . . .

Milosz heard the readings that we have listened to this morning. Think of how it began: “God did not make death, nor does God rejoice in the destruction of the living.” This reading is from the book of Wisdom, probably written about the time Jesus lived. The author is unashamed to celebrate and proclaim that there is wonder and truth not only in the tradition and learning of the Jews, but in other traditions. This writer knows also what harm and what tragedy come when such mutual respect is lacking. Then fear and hatred enter and there are persecutions and terrible clashes between peoples. If God did not make death and does not rejoice in the destruction of the living, neither does God prevent the destruction of the living. But if such destruction, age after age, brings sorrow to God, should not we share in God’s sorrow day after day, we who claim that human beings are made in the image of God?

The poet Milosz knew such violence from his early decades in Poland: the Nazi occupation, the war, the destruction of the Jewish community, the hard and oppressive years afterwards, the deportation of whole communities. Milosz heard today’s reading from Mark’s Gospel from that same history. He heard Mark’s two stories, one enfolding the other. The center story tells of a woman who for twelve years had suffered from bleeding and no physician had been able to help her. The outer story tells of a sick child, herself twelve years old, who dies even as Jesus, summoned by her father, is coming to their home.

In the inner story, the woman works her way through the crowd and touches Jesus’ clothes. When he asks who has done this, she steps forward “in fear and trembling” because of what she knows has happened to her. Listen to what Jesus says to her: “Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” There is no rebuke, and there is no demand.

The outer story of the dead child called back to life echoes two stories already ancient when Jesus lived. One of these told of the prophet Elijah who takes the dead body of a child from the grieving mother, carries the body to a small upper room and prays to God for the child. The other story is about the prophet Elisha, some years later, and here, too, a child has died. These children, like the twelve-year-old girl in the Gospel story, are raised to life when the prophets cry out to God. Such stories would have been well known to these grieving parents and their friends, but at the family’s home, Jesus finds that the people who have come to mourn the girl’s death clearly expect nothing. Instead, they laugh at Jesus and he tells them to leave the house. Then Jesus, the parents and three of Jesus’ disciples crowd into the little room where the child lies dead. Jesus — like Elijah and Elisha before him — touches the dead body and says the words that the poet Milosz heard with such gratitude centuries later: “Talitha cum,” “Little girl, get up.” Those present are “utterly astounded” and the story concludes when Jesus reminds them of practical things, telling them to give this child something to eat.

In the poem, Milosz has four simple words in response to “Talitha cum” and to what the Wisdom writer had said about God not rejoicing in the destruction of the living, and to what had happened to the woman who touched Jesus. Milosz says: “This is for me.” And he tells why:

This is for me. To make me rise from the dead
And repeat the hope of those who lived before me,
In a fearful unity with her, with her pain in dying . . .

He is speaking of his mother’s life and death and of others “who lived before me.” That is why we repeat these ancient stories here. We somehow know to say: “This is for me. This is to make me rise from the dead.” Or if we can’t say that yet, we want to say it, or we are learning to say: This is for me. This “Talitha cum,” this grasping by the hand, this concern that the child be given something to eat. “This is for me, to make me rise from the dead.” But even more, as we gather here in our assembly, this is for us, this is for the whole assembly here, the whole church. This is for us, to make us rise from the dead. “Little girl, get up.” Milosz hears his own name. We are to hear our names and we are to hear the name we are all called, “Church, get up.” “Assembly of ________, get up.”

We are always veering toward death, always playing loose with what the poet calls “the hope of those who lived before me.” We easily forget what the church hopes for, what baptized people hope for. We all so easily shrink this thing called hope and think of it only terms of the tiny world of self and of family. We seem often not to imagine that the hope we have as church grounds itself not in optimism but in looking straight on at what ails our times, what ails our town, what ails our world. In fact, we often avoid paying too much attention to all the sorrow and mayhem of the world or all the scary stuff about climate, because we don’t want to be gloomy. We figure: I’ll be good as I can be in my own little realm, good to my family, my neighbors, my coworkers. Leave the science and the politics and the economics to someone else.

What difference will it make to us that God does not rejoice in the destruction of the living? What difference will it make to us that a woman broke all the rules to touch Jesus’ garment? What difference will it make to us that Jesus takes the hand of a dead child and says simply: “Talitha cum”? Get up, little child. These stories, these words proclaimed in and by the church, these are for us, to make us