 |
| |
Year C
|
|
What
follows is a homily for January 18, 2004,
the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year
C. What might mystagogical preaching sound
like on this day when the lectionary, rather
than diving into Luke, gives us John’s
story of the wedding at Cana and, in doing
so, makes this Sunday not so much the start
of the Ordinary Time that follows but the
conclusion of the Christmas/Epiphany mystery
that we have been observing since December
25? Mystagogical preaching is a communal
exploration of the mysteries into which
we are initiated lifelong. As it happens
in 2004, in the United States this is the
day before the observance of the birthday
of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Gabe
Huck
On
the books we have returned to what is called
Ordinary Time, those counted Sundays between
Epiphany and Lent, between Pentecost and
Advent. On the books. But were we to judge
only by the readings, we would see that
on this Sunday — seemingly so far
from Christmas in our bodies and souls — we
are in fact still caught up in the Christmas/Epiphany
mystery. The same words from Isaiah that
we heard this morning were the words that
began the liturgy on the Vigil of Christmas — “No
more shall people call you ‘Forsaken,’ /
. . . but you shall be called ‘My
Delight,’ / . . . for the Lord delights
in you / . . . as a bridegroom rejoices
in his bride, / so shall your God rejoice
in you” (Isaiah 62:4, 5). That sounds
like a wedding, the clamorous celebration
of two persons casting their lives together.
That image of two lovers — even more
than the image of the Bethlehem manger — proclaims
the mystery that holds us through the season
of Christmas. The stories we tell of birth
giving, angels singing, shepherds and magi
processing, innocents slaughtered — all
these are part of a larger story, how God
weds this world of ours, despite everything.
In
some places Christians know Epiphany as
the celebration of three manifestations:
the Magi, the baptism of Jesus, the wedding
at Cana. Old songs of the church have taken
these stories and playfully brought them
together in chants like this one:
Today
the Bridegroom claims the bride, the church,
for Christ has washed our sins away in Jordan’s
waters;
the magi hasten with their gifts
to the royal wedding;
and the wedding guests rejoice,
for Christ has changed water into wine. Alleluia!
So
there is a wedding, and here come the Magi
with their wedding presents, and at that
wedding see what happens: Christ changes
water into wine! The stories run joyously
together, all of them being proclamations
of how God clasps the world in wild and
wide and tender love. When we spread out
the stories of Magi, baptism, and Cana’s
wedding, as we do this year, we are weeks
past December 25 before we tell this final
story of how the wine ran out! Never hear
this story as some flashy miracle. In fact
it wasn’t flashy at all: nobody except
Mary and Jesus, a few servants and few disciples
ever knew what was going on. The point is
not that somebody once got water to taste
like very good wine — more than a
hundred gallons at that. The point is the
wedding of God and us, the point is that
the good wine is in our midst, the point
is abundance, the point is — as we
heard in that second reading where Paul
is writing to the church at Corinth — God’s
lavish gifts of wisdom and healing and discernment.
And
where is all this happening? Let those with
eyes to see, see! What we do here Sunday
by Sunday around this table on which we
place our bread and our good wine, what
we do here is sing out this single word:
Today. Hodie was
the Latin word and it marked the great feasts
of the church because they were never about
the long ago and the far away. They were Hodie!
They were “Today!” We heard
this a moment ago:
“Today (!) the Bridegroom claims
the bride, the church!” Today. All
that is true in the stories of shepherds
and farm animals and crib, in the stories
of stars and magi, in the stories of John
the fierce baptizer of Jesus, and in the
strange story of that wedding at Cana,
all this is the stuff of our Hodie,
our “Today!” We the baptized
give thanks at the table that God has
clasped us in love, clasped the world
in love, and done this in Christ our Lord.
Done it when? Done it today! Today the
six stone jars of water are filled to
the brim. To the brim! Jars that big you’d
think would hold plenty if they were anywhere
near the top. But the point is: To the
brim! And then some. It is a story of
God’s way with us — forgiveness
to the brim, tender love to the brim,
peace to the brim. Today is the best wine.
So what if all the guests have used up
the wine supply? Here is wine in abundance
and not just any wine, but the finest
of all.
That’s
the cup that is set on our table, that’s
the cup that we are all (all!) called to
taste on this Lord’s Day, the love
of God poured out in abundance, intoxicating
and sobering all at once, sweet and bitter
all at once. That is Christmas and that
is Cana and that is this Lord’s Day
round this table and this mid-January week.
All at once. These stories haven’t
been told to make us think: Oh how pretty
Isaiah talks! How lucky for that couple
that Jesus was on the spot! What a guy to
come through for his mom that way! The literal
has nothing to do with why we are here this
morning with our book open and our table
about to be set. Let us together open our
eyes to the great hodie of
the church. See what glory is revealed here,
this parish, this Sunday.
How
else are we, all of us baptized into the
death and risen life of Jesus, to look at
the one we honor this weekend, Dr. Martin
Luther King? We don’t canonize, we
simply praise God that in the hardest of
places our God raises up such a person,
that manifestations of the Spirit abound
in tough times. We have eyes wide open then
to see this one time not so far away and
not so long ago when a man who never made
it to age forty — and pretty well
knew he wouldn’t because of what he
was doing — when this Martin Luther
King drank deeply of the new and fine wine
of God’s love for this world, and
then talked in a straightforward way to
the world and straightforwardly walked the
talk.
Now
as then the world is full of harshness,
of cruel deeds, of hunger and of sickness
in a time full of food and medicine, yet
even more full of racial hate, greed, and
discrimination. Now even more than in King’s
time the world’s rich are scrambling
to separate themselves from the world’s
poor. And now as then the world is full
of decent people like us who are sad about
all of this but are too busy or too rich
or too scared or too overstressed or too
discouraged or too plain selfish to open
their mouths or move their feet forward.
King opened his mouth. King moved his feet
forward. He didn’t say he had everything
figured out, he didn’t say he wasn’t
afraid, he didn’t say it was simple
or always clear. But he figured this much
out: the God we meet in Jesus is calling
us to the side of the poor, the hungry,
the old, the disabled, the prisoners, the
persecuted and humiliated, and all those
the powerful have left out. And he figured
out that the God we meet in Jesus wouldn’t
care much for the praise of folks who live
apart from all that harshness.
Now
many people get that far as they ponder
the scriptures and the gospels. Then a lot
of us shake our heads and say: It’s
too much and I’m just not up to it;
all I can do is not contribute to the hate.
I’ll raise good kids. I’ll be
a good neighbor. I’ll vote for decent
politicians. I’ll get on a committee
or two, write some letters to the editor
and the senator, pray for the poor and pray
for justice. For some of us some of the
time, that is the gospel. But maybe we have
to keep our eyes open and one day we’ll
see what King saw. He saw those big stone
jars that were brim-full and he saw that
this was the best wine and he saw that he
could talk and walk as if that’s what
we could expect of our God.
Sometime
this weekend we’ll probably all hear
King’s “I have a dream” speech
and that’s fine, but we can’t
take it as the whole of this servant of
God. Yes, he could speak of dreams but we
have to pay attention to how King figured
out, with help from some other just souls,
that the God we meet in Jesus’ gospel,
even the God who loved the innocents slaughtered
by Herod, wasn’t dreaming about revenge,
wasn’t dreaming about bringing down
punishment on those who had for centuries
loosed violence on the descendents of African
slaves. He figured out that this God loved
the soldiers who did the slaughter and loved
even the tyrant who sent them. That was
the hard part, but that is what we need
today to take hold of. What does it mean
to do these two things at once: to care
about justice and to renounce violence?
Is God’s abundance that abundant?
Is God’s way so unlike our way?
A
year to the day before he was assassinated
King took the pulpit at Riverside Church
in New York City and let flow what had been
in his heart a long time. If we would keep
his memory this weekend, then what he said
that day about his country and ours must
trouble and rouse us.
King
began by saying that the time comes when
silence is betrayal, that even when the
issues are complex and we are “on
the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty,” we
must move on. He said he was moving to “break
the betrayal of my own silences and to speak
from the burnings of my own heart.” He
spoke of his confrontations with angry young
people in the ghettos of the North, when
preaching nonviolence to them brought this
question: What about Vietnam? “They
asked if our own nation wasn’t using
massive doses of violence to solve its problems,
to bring about the changes it wanted. Their
questions hit home,” King said, “and
I knew that I could never again raise my
voice against the violence of the oppressed
in the ghettos without having first spoken
clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence
in the world today — my own government.” He
continued: “For the sake of those
boys, for the sake of this government, for
the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling
under our violence, I cannot be silent.”
King
said he came to speak out not only as a
civil rights leader but as a minister of
the gospel of Jesus Christ. “To me
the relationship of this ministry to the
making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes
marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking
against the war. . . . Have they forgotten
that my ministry is in obedience to the
one who loved his enemies so fully that
he died for them? What then can I say to
the ‘Vietcong’ or to Castro
or to Mao as a faithful minister of this
one? Can I threaten them with death or must
I not share with them my life? . . . We
are called to speak for the weak, for the
voiceless, for victims of our nation and
for those it calls enemy.”
King’s
judgments were severe. He said: “Increasingly,
by choice or by accident, this is the role
our nation has taken — the role of
those who make peaceful revolution impossible
by refusing to give up the privileges and
the pleasures that come from the immense
profits of overseas investment.” All
that, thirty-seven years ago. “Our
only hope today,” he said, “lies
in our ability to recapture the revolutionary
spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile
world declaring eternal hostility to poverty,
racism, and militarism.”
Such
is the abundance of God’s love, the
jars brim full, the wedding of earth and heaven
proclaimed, the finest wine come as grace.
It is not to a peaceful retirement home that
Jesus summons us, but always to the cross,
to a love like God’s own that knows
how outrageous we must be.
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).
|
|
|
Year C
|
This homily
is intended for the January 28, 2007, the
Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C. It
is about borders and how scriptures and liturgy
mean to shape a people to deal with the way
we love to draw lines, to wall in and to wall
out. The homily considers the reading of 1
Corinthians 12 and 13 that began two Sundays
before, as well as the story that Luke began
last week and continues this week. January
homilies in this column over the past four
years have also dealt with baptism (2003)
and with the light our scriptures throw on
the work and teaching of Martin Luther King,
Jr., as the United States marks his January
birthday (2004 and 2005). The January
2004 homily was for the Second Sunday
of Ordinary Time, also Year C, so with scriptures
the same as our current year.
Gabe Huck
Two weeks ago we began reading the concluding
pages of Paul’s first letter to the church
at Corinth. These intense passages will be our
second readings all the way to the beginning
of Lent, but today Paul is at his most eloquent.
When we read from this letter last week, Paul
was trying to work out a way to understand how
it is that some members of the church are good
at one thing and some at another, how to understand
that some members seem so important and others
so mediocre.
First, Paul went at this from the angle of where
our gifts and talents come from. “Look,” he
said, “it is a good but sometimes troublesome
thing that we have different gifts, different
abilities, different roles. But every single
role is just as much the work of the Spirit
as every other role. The one who sweeps the
floor is just as much doing the work of God
as the one who preaches. The one who is pastor
is meant to do this job in the Spirit and the
one who takes up the collection is meant to
do that job in the Spirit.”
But apparently Paul felt the need for stronger
images to express what he believed about how
all these different roles work in the church.
So he seized on the image of the human body.
Here’s something we all have: a body.
What then do we observe? Is the eye more important
than the hand? Can the ear go off on its own
without the rest of the body? Can the foot and
the nose tell the tongue it isn’t wanted
any longer? If the whole body were a knee, what
a catastrophe! If I stub my toe, do my eyes
go right on as if nothing had happened or is
every part of me not somehow affected by that
hurting toe?
So far, so good, but the same metaphor, the
body, could well be used for any community of
people: a town, an office, the staff of a hospital.
Paul knew this, of course, and he tried to make
clear that when it came to the church at Corinth
or the church at [this city or neighborhood],
this body metaphor is even more powerful because
of what happened to each one of us in baptism.
Into what, Paul asks, are we all baptized? We
are baptized into one body. We are all together
the body of Christ.
If Paul had stopped there, it would have been
enough to give the church, every church, everywhere,
in every age, an image for what life together
is to be for us who are the body of Christ.
As another preacher would put it a few hundred
years after Paul: When the minister says to
you “The body of Christ,” “The
blood of Christ,” then say Amen! Say Amen — to
what you are! You are the body of Christ!
But Paul didn’t stop there. He grasped
for more. Even if we succeed in thinking about
ourselves as members of one body, even if we
recognize the importance of each member, all
alike hurt by any evil done to or by any other
member, even if we do all this, Paul says, I’m
going to tell you that there is a yet more excellent
way to think about, and go about, our lives
as Christians.
And so he begins the poetry we heard this morning.
This is Paul at his most eloquent. “If
I speak in human and angelic tongues, but do
not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing
cymbal. . . . If I give away everything I own,
and if I hand my body over so that I may boast,
but do not have love, I gain nothing.”
Paul knows the Torah and the prophets, and he
knows this Jesus who was crucified. And he knows
the stories of women and men who have embraced
this way of life. And in these verses it all
seems to come together, an insight into God’s
love and our own. “Love is patient, love
is kind. It is not jealous, it is not pompous,
it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does
not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered,
it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice
over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth.
It bears all things, believes all things, hopes
all things, endures all things.”
Paul has two adjectives to describe what love
is. He has half a dozen to describe what love
is not. Are “patient” and “kind” the
first words most of us would have to describe
love? But pay attention because somehow for
Paul, as he grappled with God’s love for
creation as the Bible tells it, as he grappled
with the love that brought Jesus to suffering
and death, these two things, “patient” and “kind,” best
described the love that he found there. It was
easier to say what he did not find in such love.
Jealous? No. Pompous? Never. Inflated, rude,
self-seeking, quick-tempered, brooding over
injuries, rejoicing in anything that does harm?
No, no, no. And what is Paul’s alternative
to those all-so-natural ways to behave ourselves?
Just this: Practicing a love that bears all
things, believes and hopes all things, endures
all things.
We have today the story in the first reading
of the call of Jeremiah the prophet. Can we
hear it as Paul must have, part of the love
story of God and God’s people? Part of
the love story of the prophet and the people,
a story that seems more mutual antagonism than
love? The Lord tells the young Jeremiah that
this prophet will have to be like a pillar of
iron, a wall of brass because the rulers and
the owners and the police and the media aren’t
going to like what Jeremiah says. They’ll
bring in other prophets with sweet and encouraging
things to say. Jeremiah will be beaten, dumped
in a well, and worse: he will be laughed at.
Again, what is love? Patient, kind? Not inflated
or self-seeking? What does that mean?
The Jeremiah story is clearly to be juxtaposed
today with Luke’s telling of what happened
when Jesus came home to Nazareth. Last week
the visit there seemed to be going well. Jesus
came with everyone else to the synagogue, he
was handed the scroll of Isaiah, he read the
prophet’s words about bringing good news
to the poor, liberty to captives, sight to the
blind, freedom to the oppressed. Then he rolled
up the scroll and with all eyes on him said: “Today
this is fulfilled in your hearing.”
So far, so good, but when we pick up the story
today, it isn’t so good at all. Jesus
makes clear that he hasn’t come with a
bundle of miracles for his old home town. In
fact, he seems to say that the bonds of blood
and language and ancestry aren’t really
what matters when God’s love is what we’re
after. Jesus reminds the listeners, who are
getting very restless, of two stories they know
well. One is about the great prophet Elijah.
Elijah did what God told him and brought a drought
on the people who had grown careless of the
commandments of God. Then, when so many of his
own people were suffering from hunger, God sent
Elijah outside the borders, beyond those who
belonged to the in-group, sent Elijah into what
is now Lebanon to help a certain widow’s
family survive the drought.
Then Jesus reminds them how another prophet,
Elisha, healed a person with leprosy. But who
was this person? Not a member of the clan, not
one of the descendents of Abraham, but an outsider,
a foreigner, an alien. A Syrian, of all people!
Naaman the Syrian was the one Elijah healed.
Jesus’
listeners got the point and they were furious.
Most of us, like them, depend on some clear
borders. We need lines drawn so we can tell
who’s inside and who’s outside.
Love may be patient and kind, but it has its
limits. Otherwise who’s to know what’s
what or who’s who? We are constantly reminded
of this today. Some would have us draw lines
around the political entity called the United
States. Others would have us draw lines around
the institutional entity called the Roman Catholic
Church. Race, class, gender, sexual orientation,
income — there are so many lines to be
drawn! All these ways to make the world into “us” and
“them,” some of our lines are up
front and in your face, some are so subtle we
carry them inside and never notice.
We live in a time when it is possible to know
and even understand so much about those outside
our immediate circles. The love that Paul struggled
to describe (and struggled to practice) was
the love he found in the stories about Elijah
and the widow who was of another people and
about Elisha of Israel curing Naaman of Syria.
Paul himself got to know people who lived in
what are now Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Greece,
Italy, maybe even Spain. He was forever among
those outside the lines that everyone else was
trying to enforce. He was forever pondering
whether there were to be any lines. He told
and retold the story of Jesus and he must have
seen that if you take your baptism seriously,
the boundaries won’t hold. The walls are
coming down. The neat and safe categories are
falling apart. Maybe Paul meant to write: Love
is patient, love is kind, love is dangerous.
But we are endlessly inventive and endlessly
afraid. So have we Christians tried through
the centuries to draw new lines, make a safe
world of insiders. But so far, it never quite
works. The problem with it is exactly what is
happening here today. That is, when we get together,
we have this unbroken tradition of opening the
book and reading the stories and the stories
themselves undermine our diligent efforts to
proclaim ourselves the possessors of all truth,
the practitioners of all justice.
And the problem is also that when we get together,
we have to do this one simple thing that, if
we’re not careful, will give us the best
practice possible at living lives outside the
borders, beyond the walls built by humans. What
do we do that so shatters the walls, crosses
the borders? We take a loaf of bread, a loaf
made of many grains, and we break it and we
all eat, all alike, and the one loaf feeds us
all. We take a cup of wine, a wine made of many
grapes, and we all drink, all alike, the one
cup for the thirst of each one of us. And in
this way are we who make Eucharist at this table
made by the Eucharist. So are we through the
generations, through the years of each life,
practicing at dining at a common table, all
alike, no boundaries.
We have miles and miles to go. We have often
made even of this liturgy something that separates
one from another. Not only separates one Christian
church from another, but separates us from each
other, each of us being so private and removed
from one another. But this is a table here,
and there is bread and wine become for us the
very body and blood of Christ that we ourselves
are. Say Amen to what we are! At the gathering
at table for Eucharist and Holy Communion, we
rehearse the kind of love Paul was trying to
articulate when he wrote to the church at Corinth.
It is big and it is often frightening to us.
But we have these beautiful scriptures, we have
beside us Elijah and the widow, Naaman and Elisha.
So we come here Sunday by Sunday and we practice
how to love.
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).
|
|
Year C
|
|
What follows is a homily
for February 22, 2004, the Seventh Sunday
in Ordinary Time, Year C. The homily attempts
to unfold (to be mystagogy) not just this
Sunday’s particular scriptures, especially
the reading from the Hebrew Scriptures,
but the place of scripture in the assembly
and in the home. But this is also the Sunday
before Ash Wednesday, so the presumption
is that preaching about Lenten preparation
has already been done on previous Sundays.
In preparation for Lent last year, the February2003
issue of Celebration provided a homily
suitable for the Seventh Sunday in Year
B. Much of it dealt with the Lenten disciplines
of fasting, almsgiving, and prayer. The
homilist may wish to draw on that text for
one of the Sundays leading up to Lent 2004.
Gabe
Huck
No one in the Bible has
stories like those about David. In our Sunday
assemblies we read only a few of them, so
today is a chance to ask: Who is this David
and what’s he up to? And: Should we
care?
We are roughly three thousand
years ago, in the days when the various clans
who had escaped slavery were gradually figuring
out that survival meant putting aside differences
and forming a single nation. But being a nation
meant having a king or a queen, and Israel
had never had such a thing. This business
of monarchy got off to a rough start. The
prophet Samuel, following instructions from
the Lord, anointed a man named Saul to be
the first king. But while Saul was building
up the new nation, prophet Samuel got word
from the Lord that Saul is no longer pleasing
and so Samuel should go out to Bethlehem because
one of Jesse’s sons is the Lord’s
new choice for king. So now Samuel has anointed
two kings, but no one knows about young David.
Meanwhile Saul and his
forces on the battlefield meet the enemy’s
secret weapon, Goliath. Just then David shows
up with some food for his soldier brothers,
and soon young David is offering to accept
Goliath’s challenge and do battle one-on-one.
King Saul says, nonsense, “You are just
a boy!” David claims: “I have
killed lions and bears when they attacked
the family’s flocks. Besides, who else
have you got to fight Goliath?” Finally
Saul gives in and orders David clothed with
the king’s own armor. But David says: “I
cannot even walk with these on! Take it off!” With
only stones and a slingshot he goes out to
slay Goliath. David is an instant hero. Saul’s
son Jonathan becomes his best friend. The
people are wild about David and make up a
song that celebrates the boy who beat Goliath.
The song is not popular with King Saul.
Still, the king makes an
effort to get along with David, even invites
him to marry into the royal family. David
would come and play music for Saul—it
seems David could do everything well and this
of course didn’t help the relationship.
One day while David was playing, jealous Saul
throws a spear at David. David takes to the
hills with Saul and his troops in pursuit.
Soon Israel had a low intensity guerilla war.
In the midst of this, twice David has the
chance to kill King Saul.
The first time, David and
his gang are hiding in a deep cave and Saul
and his army pass by. Saul stops and goes
into the cave to relieve himself. David’s
followers, hiding in that very cave, see a
chance to kill the king, but David will only
creep forward and, without Saul noticing,
cut off the corner of Saul’s robe. After
Saul and his troops are some distance off
David comes out of the cave, holds up the
corner of Saul’s robe, and shouts: “King
Saul! Look what I’ve got! Some wanted
me to kill you, but I will not raise my hand
against the Lord’s anointed.”
Saul continues to hunt
David down and that’s when the story
we heard this morning happens. This time it
is night and there’s no guard awake
in Saul’s camp. David comes with one
other person, stands over the sleeping Saul,
but refuses to kill him. Instead, he takes
Saul’s spear, goes off a good distance
and shouts to awaken Saul and his army. David
doesn’t jeer at Saul, instead he pleads
with the king. “Why has the king come
out to seek a single flea?” Then David
goes into exile.
But wars continue and word
comes to David that the Philistine army has
defeated Israel’s army. King Saul and
his son Jonathan are dead. The Bible tells
how David laments over Saul, his king and
his enemy, and over his dear friend Jonathan.
David, ever the musician, composes a song
that we find in the first chapter of Second
Samuel.
Your glory, O Israel, lies
slain upon your high places!
How the mighty have fallen!
. . . Saul and Jonathan, beloved and lovely!
In life and in death they were not divided;
they were swifter than eagles,
they were stronger than lions.
. . . How the mighty have
fallen,
and the weapons of war perished!
(2 Samuel 1:19, 23, 27)
It is takes years before
David is recognized as the king, but when
he is, we still have stories upon stories.
David founds Jerusalem and brings the great
ark of God there—the ark that the tribes
had carried generations earlier during their
forty years of wandering in the desert. And
as the great ark is carried in procession,
King David leaps and dances before the ark
of the Lord.
David the King expands
his realm, but he stumbles also. He falls
in love with Bethsheba, the wife of Uriah.
David arranges to have Uriah placed in the
middle of a battle and Uriah is slain. When
Bathsheba has mourned for her husband, she
marries David and they have a child. Then
Nathan, the new prophet in town comes to David: “King
David, once upon a time there was a rich man
and a poor man. The rich man had flocks and
herds galore; the poor man had one lamb. One
day the rich man had a guest and he wanted
to give a fine meal, but he didn’t want
to slaughter a single one of his own sheep.
So he took the poor man’s lamb and made
a fine dinner for his guest. Now, King David,” says
prophet Nathan, “what do you think of
that?” When David rages against the
rich man’s greed, Nathan says: “King
David, you are that man! The Lord gave you
so much, but you have taken the life of Uriah
in order to marry his wife.”
And this is the turning
point. David, who had spared the life of Saul
twice, had sent Uriah to certain death. When
the child of Bathsheba and David becomes ill,
for seven days and nights David will not eat
and he sleeps on the ground beside his child.
At the end of the seven days, the child dies.
When David then washes and asks for food,
the servants do not understand and David tells
them: “I fasted and wept for I thought
perhaps the Lord may be gracious to me and
the child will live. But now the child is
dead and why should I fast? I will go one
day to be with this child, but the child will
not return to me.”
After three thousand years
with all their bloodshed and all their delights,
we gather here this morning and open our book
to read about this David who wouldn’t
take the life of the one who wanted David
dead.
Here on Sundays, when the
book of our scriptures is opened, we sit down.
But we don’t sit down to rest. We don’t
sit down to be passive and to look around
and to let our thoughts wander away. We sit
so we can listen to the story, listen to the
scripture, listen to God’s word speaking
to the church. We try to be the church attending
to what is said, pondering it, chewing it
over. We don’t try to find some moral
or some lesson for each of our lives. We try
to be the church that is ever in need of the
word, the church that loves God’s word.
This happens best when we keep our Bible open
at home and prepare for this liturgy by seeking
out its scriptures even before we come here.
Then we can do our best at giving attention,
at being alert, at seizing on some good or
troublesome word or phrase or sentence.
Each of us as part of this
assembly has to take responsibility. One person
distracted increases like ripples in a pond.
Children and parents can give good example
to one another of how to put your hands in
your lap and your eyes on the reader and be
the church listening hard to God’s word.
Whether it is David’s story or Paul’s
poetry or Jesus preaching, we are never to
be a passive audience. W are in dialogue with
our God here. These are various kinds of writing
that we proclaim here, but all of them are
part of our story. Out of our listening comes
our prayer of intercession and our thanksgiving
over bread and wine and our holy communion.
This confrontation with God’s word,
here and in our homes, is the solid foundation
for all else we do here and all the ways we
go out to love the world God loves.
Lent begins this Wednesday
when we are all marked with ashes. That day
and for all the days of Lent let us all renew
our bond with the Bible. Maybe it has been
neglected in our homes. Maybe it is time to
see if we have a translation that we can read
with understanding. During Lent, we can all
put the Bible in a place of honor in the home.
We can put a cross beside it, both on a lovely
piece of fabric. We can each make a time to
come and read every day of Lent, individually
or as a household. We can read the scriptures
from the daily Mass (published in the parish
bulletin each week). Or we can read through
Genesis, or through the Gospels. Or we can
read these David stories in Samuel and Kings.
If you feel ready, read Job or Jeremiah, read
Exodus and Paul’s letters. For our prayers,
we can open the book of Psalms.
This is not a burden, my friends, not some
weight to carry through the Forty Days. No,
this will be a joy, a delight to take up these
words of the scriptures that have carried
our ancestors and now carry us, to take up
these words that can be life for us and for
our children. Speak them aloud, speak them
with care. Let that be a Lenten work in our
lives and homes.
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).
|
|
|
Year C
|
These homilies
are intended as exploration of the mystagogical
dimension of preaching, the vital task of
the preacher: to unfold the mysteries that
we keep (the mysteries that keep us) in our
ritual. That ritual includes not only what
we generally call “liturgy,” but
also those habitual ways of marking days and
seasons and occasions that are necessary to
the full life we seek in community, the life
of a church. So most of the February homilies
in this column over the past four years have
explored the keeping of Lent and have invited
the assembly into a vigorous keeping of the
season. What else would we expect when the
paschal season, Ash Wednesday to Pentecost,
has been vital to the formation of Christians
since our early times? What follows departs
from the usual format of a single homily and
instead offers two shorter homilies, one that
could be used on Sunday, February 18, 2007,
the Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year
C, and the other for Ash Wednesday, four days
later. On both occasions, as on the First
Sunday of Lent, February 25, it is a good
thing when the homily sounds like exhortation,
the preacher’s urgent speech to self
and to assembly, to take this Lent with great
eagerness.
Gabe Huck
For
February 18, Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
In our tradition this community today will sing
its last Alleluia until the Forty Days of Lent
are done and we enter those Three Days that
are for us the center of the year, the days
that bring us to the darkness of the night between
Holy Saturday and Easter itself. Then we will
end our fasting from this ancient word Alleluia
and will put its wondrous combination of l’s
and vowels in our mouths again as we prepare
to approach the waters of baptism where we all
once died to live now in Christ.
We are coming to Lent. A few more days and Ash
Wednesday will be here. But where will we be?
What chance has Lent got in modern lives, busy
lives, lives with calendars set by our places
of work, by sports, by our organizations and
our government, by paychecks, by schools whose
various winter and spring breaks come regardless
of what this church is doing or not doing? Aside
from remnants of Mardi Gras and Carnival, Lent
is unknown to the larger society and that may
be just as well. But it is not just as well
if it isn’t known to us.
For Lent is so vital in a church like ours that
if we lost it, we would quite naturally have
to invent it all over again. But could we? Has
Lent slipped away from us so quietly that we
hardly noticed? In the early church Lent’s
forty days evolved as part of a late winter/early
spring cycle whose center became the baptism
of adults and children who were ready to embrace
life in the body of Christ, the church. Lent
was forty days for the newcomers and the veterans
to get the habits of life in Christ into our
bones and muscles, our words and deeds, our
waking and our sleeping. The keeping of Lent
was for all the church, for all the baptized
people a time to get down to the basics: to
repent, reform, and renew.
Whatever the century and whatever the year,
wherever any community of Christians has made
a home, like this one here, the announcement
of Lent should sound to all of us like both
good news and terrifying news. If Lent, like
the gospel itself, doesn’t have both these
aspects — the good news and the terrifying,
both, and all the tension between — then
all that’s left of Lent is just some private
project, a way for you or me in the privacy
of our lives to make modest efforts at a little
fasting, a little denial. But this isn’t
Lent. This doesn’t shake the church and
each of us from inside out and outside in.
The disciplines of Lent should be on our minds
a good deal between now and Wednesday. There
are three of these disciplines and each of them
has a spectrum of expressions. There is prayer,
there is fasting, and there is almsgiving. We
can search the scriptures and the day’s
headlines for ideas on how to let these three
find expression in our lives. Simply to hear
today’s Gospel gets the possibilities
going. What could you or I do for these forty
days that would somehow train us to live the
kind of life Jesus speaks about in this Gospel
today? Remember? Love your enemies. Do good
to those who hate you. Offer that other cheek.
Lend what you have and expect nothing back.
Stop judging. Stop condemning. Forgive. Give.
Forgive. Give. Forgive.
Did we all hear those words spoken by a Jesus
who was serious? Love enemies. Be really good
to people and nations who hate you. Be ever
ready with the other cheek. Give what you have
and expect no return. Stop judging and stop
condemning and just give and forgive and see
what happens.
But look, we say back to Jesus, we don’t
keep two million human beings in prison in this
country for nothing. And we don’t spend
half a billion dollars on weapons and wars each
year for the fun of it. We’d love to use
that money for a lot of good stuff, but it’s
a tough world out there and if we don’t
do it to them first, they’ll do it to
us. So the other cheek might work in some utopia
somewhere, but it won’t work here. And
as for lending and not getting anything back,
who are you kidding?
Church, this is what Lent might be for us this
year. It might be the once-a-year or even once-a-lifetime
summons we get to take Jesus, whom we purport
week by week to call our Savior, to take this
Jesus at his word. Lent might be the way this
church, all of us here in this assembly, can
discover just what it was we did when we passed
through those baptism waters.
So we should go home or go somewhere and between
now and Wednesday, as individuals and as households
and as small groups make bold plans. Sure, these
plans will go amuck, they always do. But did
you hear? Be merciful, just as your Father is
merciful. Be merciful to yourselves as to others.
But mercy isn’t some soft Easter bunny.
Mercy is how God would clothe us. Mercy is all
we can cling to. Mercy is what we learn or even
what we become through the prayer, the fasting,
the alms. So we go home and make bold plans
for how we will fast: fast with our mouths,
certainly, but fast with our eyes, our vocal
chords, our ears, our precious time. What must
we cut down or cut out in our lives if there’s
to be room for mercy to take root? How will
we fast?
And how will we give alms, Lent’s second
discipline? How will we explore some new ways
to be related to our stuff, our money, our incomes
and investments and such, and not only that
but the larger bundle that we as a nation hold
and withhold? How can the forty days, with some
imagination and work on our part, give us a
glimpse of a gospel way of life? Are we afraid
to face the truth about our use of the earth
and the burden our comforts place on other people
and on generations to come? Don’t be afraid.
Let’s do it together. Every bit of the
gospel we embraced at baptism’s waters
summons us.
And then we must reflect on how we will pray
in Lent, that’s the third discipline.
How we will use our wonderful vocabulary of
words and songs and keeping silence to train
ourselves in ways of morning and night prayer
that will carry us on through the year and daily
rehearse us in being baptized people.
We have these days to prepare. A week from now
we will be here again at the threshold of Lent,
inching our way in, together. Always, always
together.
For February
21, Ash
Wednesday
Ashes are not so much grim as they are true.
They are real. They tell an honest story, perhaps
more honest than any story about our human life
that we’re listening to anywhere else
in twenty-first century American life. The ashes
and the words “Remember that you are dust,
and to dust you will surely return” are
nothing if they are not the gospel summons to
enter into Lent as a church. Here we are, the
ones marked with ash, the ones told to remember
and to repent.
Let’s be clear about a few things that
Lent is not.
First, Lent is not a one day show. Lent is today
and every day until we are exhausted and ready
to enter that amazing grace of Three Days that
get us from Holy Thursday night to Easter Sunday.
Second, Lent is not some sort of churchy self-improvement
program that asks just a tiny bit of self-denial
and rewards us with lost pounds or saved money.
Third, Lent is not something I do by myself,
my own little good resolutions, my own little
prayers, my own little coins for the poor.
What is Lent? It is literally breath-taking
and life-giving. It is hard and deeply disturbing
because it is not about your piety or mine,
not about sins, not about earning grace or points
or anything else. It is the church becoming
the church. It is baptized people becoming baptized
people. It is good human beings like ourselves
trying to grapple with what the gospel asks
of good human beings now, here, the end of February
2007 and in our city, our nation, our world
that is so beaten down by greed gone wild, yet
remains the world that God so loved.
Ashes are honest, church, and today we wear
them to remind each other that they summon us
to take these forty days and get ourselves,
however young or old we are, into training to
do and be all that we promised and all that
we renounced at our baptism. By learning how
to pray, by learning to fast in some ways that
will tell us what we really hunger for, by learning
to give what we call “ours” without
counting on anything except the mercy of God:
that is what Lent will be for us.
No one does it alone. I don’t keep Lent.
You don’t keep Lent. The church keeps
Lent. And more than any other season, in Lent
we need to see each other here on the six Sundays
of Lent, we need to hear each other singing,
we need to join each other at the table and
in the procession that surrounds the table.
We need to bring here our best efforts and our
constant failures. We need to hear the stories
Sunday by Sunday, the crucial stories that will
unfold in us what our baptism means.
So, as the gospel has made urgent, let’s
make a Lent like we have never made a Lent before.
We will pray in many ways. We will fast and
discover what it is that we should be so hungry
and thirsty for. We will begin to let go of
our desperate hold on what we call “ours,” and
start working ourselves out of slavery and into
the freedom of God’s children. And doing
this, we’ll walk boldly and yet with trepidation
toward that font where on the night of the sacred
Easter Vigil we will dare to promise and renounce
anew and we will dare to baptize those newcomers
who want to drown all the works of sin and want
to live freely and as servants in Christ our
Lord.
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).
|
|
|
Year C
|
The lectionary
of this July is almost too much. We have Elijah
and Elisha, we have mother Jerusalem, we have
lovely poetry about God’s law, and we
have two of the best stories of Genesis: Abraham
the host and Abraham the relentless bargainer.
And that’s just the first readings.
Paul finishes his letter to the Galatian church
and begins the letter to the Colossian church,
both with images of the church we need to
hear and talk about. And Luke is building
the journey to Jerusalem with stories and
rhetoric. These should not be seen as a menu
from which to select something from here,
something from there for five Sundays of preaching.
First see it (and what comes as August begins)
as continuities of Gospel and epistle and
even this month in some of the first readings.
The quest in this column each month is to
explore the preacher’s responsibility
to “unfold the mysteries.” This
takes engagement with Bible (Lectionary) and
with rite, and with the world itself which
is in some way assembled in our ecclesial
house on Sunday. What follows this month is
not the usual homily for one Sunday but a
“starter” or a brief part of what
might be the homily on each of these Sundays.
Gabe Huck
July
1: Thirteenth Sunday
There is the old prophet and there is the young
prophet. Their names sound much alike to us:
Elijah and Elisha. Elijah is the prophet who
for years has been calling kings, queens, and
other powers-that-be to repent. Elijah has been
told to get ready to take his leave of earth.
But first, the nation must not be left without
a prophet, the rulers must not be left without
a troublesome conscience. Young Elisha is out
plowing the fields one day when old Elijah approaches
and, for no apparent reason, Elijah throws his
well-worn cloak over the young man’s shoulders.
Elisha becomes a sort of prophet-in-training
until the old man, as the story tells, is taken
up in a fiery chariot leaving behind that cloak
of his for Elisha, the prophet’s mantle.
Such were the stories about old Elijah among
the people that hundreds of years later when
another prophet named Jesus asks: Who do people
say that I am? One of the obvious answers is:
You are Elijah. They were still waiting for
that fiery chariot to return.
Perhaps Elijah’s fiery temper and fiery
chariot are behind what is happening in the
gospel story when the disciples James and John
plot the punishment of a Samaritan village that
wouldn’t welcome Jesus. Their idea is
to burn it down! Not very original. Were they
day by day in the presence of Jesus and still
not understanding?
But who does understand? The Christians in Galatia
had believed in Jesus and been baptized. But
here is Paul writing to them with an aching
heart. He has heard about troubles and divisions
in that church and we hear him put it to them
bluntly: “If you go on biting and devouring
one another, beware that you are not consumed
by one another.” Paul liked the language
of food and he uses it here: biting, devouring
one another, consumed by one another. In our
own time a German playwright would have a character
say these words: “What keeps a man alive?
He lives on others. He likes to taste them first,
then eat them whole if he can.”
Do we see this as we look at our world today?
Do we see a nation and all its wealth put to
uses of biting and devouring? We are not alone
in acting this way, but we have more of what
it takes to consume others, to bite and devour
them. We unleash violence, call down fire, but
never see or smell or feel the ashes we are
making of human lives, cities, towns, rivers,
farms. “You are called for freedom, brothers
and sisters,” Paul writes to the church.
That should trouble us deeply this week as we
mark the anniversary of our nation’s founding.
What has it come to that our freedom is the
freedom to lay waste without being called to
judgment?
Where is Elijah? Where are the ones who confront
the rulers and the people? This book of ours
and this table of ours are not some cozy escape
but are like Elijah’s cloak whereby we
in our time and our place wrap ourselves in
love and confront the evil done by powerful
people.
July
8: Fourteenth Sunday
Perhaps a church like ours must always renew
itself by taking to heart both of the conflicting
images that today’s first two scriptures
hold. The poetry of Isaiah soars when the prophet
speaks of the city Jerusalem, an image not only
of God’s care but truly an image of God.
Here is what we need so much: God as our mother. “Oh
that you may suck fully of the milk of her comfort,
that you may nurse with delight at her abundant
breasts!” It is hard, hard, hard to find
this feminine imagery in our tradition. It’s
there, but it’s often underground. Some
discover it, many do not.
But we take to heart also the seemingly contrasting
image Paul speaks at the end of his letter to
the church of Galatia. “May I never boast
except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,
through which the world has been crucified to
me, and I to the world.” What does that
mean, to boast of the cross of Jesus, and to
say the world has been crucified to me, I to
the world? How did Paul dare speak of himself
as crucified, of the world as crucified? What
is it about being Christian, being baptized
into Christ, that puts such tension into our
stance in the world? And we know that “the
world” is not something apart from us,
but it is us.
To speak of us as crucified to the world, the
world to us, seems a long way from Isaiah’s
image of the abundant breasts of God that nurse
us. And it is. Yet both matter. When we gather
here on the Lord’s Day week after week
of our lives we enact these images. For we set
this table with good bread and good wine, the
abundant breasts of our God in the form of life-giving
bread and wine. Here indeed we, like infants,
nurse with delight. And as we lift our hearts
and give God thanks and praise, we can do nothing
else but remember that this good bread is the
body given up for us, this good wine is the
blood poured out for us. At the heart of our
being nursed and fed by God is the cross of
Jesus.
July
15: Fifteenth Sunday
Think about the people who heard Jesus tell
the story about the traveler left half-dead
and the other travelers who passed by until
one didn’t pass by but was moved by compassion
and did everything possible to help. Undoubtedly
some who heard Jesus were thinking: “Oh
yeah? Well, I know for certain a Samaritan would
never do such a kind deed. I know it! It’s
just another story, another fairy tale.” But
the one who started this conversation, the “scholar
of the law” as Luke says, had to answer
a question: “In your opinion,” Jesus
says, “who was neighbor to the victim?” And
this scholar of the law replies: “The
one who treated him with mercy.”
Again and again, it comes back to mercy. To
justice, yes. But justice will never be enough.
It comes back to mercy. What have I to do with
the people who lie battered by the side of the
road? Whoever they are, however different they
are from me in sex, age, color, religion, moral
standards, economic status, ethnicity, citizenship
here or there, education, sexual orientation,
language, what have I to do with them?” This
isn’t a theoretical question. The roadsides
of the earth have more beaten up and beaten
down people in them now than ever before. What
have I to do with them? The resounding answer
most of us give day after day, as regular as
sunrise, is: nothing. I have nothing to do with
them. In fact, I seldom see them. And if twenty
or thirty thousand of them disappear every day,
dying of simple things like starvation and diarrhea,
I don’t notice that either. I don’t
have time. I don’t take chances. I pay
taxes so that such people keep their distance.
That’s all I can manage.
Paul’s passion, the passion that got him
into trouble so often, that sent him to so many
distant places, that made him confront the other
apostles, Paul’s passion was reconciliation.
He gave himself and the church around him eyes
to see and hearts to know that the work of God
in the world, to which we Christians are to
lend a hand, is reconciliation. It isn’t
cheap. We heard Paul today: “For in Christ
all the fullness was pleased to dwell, and through
him to reconcile all things, making peace by
the blood of his cross.” And right there
is that very mercy that would turn our world
inside-out. When we say “Amen” before
we take the cup and drink, we are saying amen
to what the minister has proclaimed:
“The blood of Christ.” “Amen.” And
we drink. Listen again: “To reconcile
all things, making peace by the blood of the
cross.” That is what we dare to drink,
what is what we thirst for.
And what does it make of us? Neighbors, reconcilers
and reconciled, people of justice, people of
mercy.
July
22: Sixteenth Sunday
Among the Orthodox Christians of Russia there
is no image more familiar than the one taken
from the first reading today: the hospitality
of Abraham and Sarah. We in the West may barely
find this story familiar, but for the Russian
church the three strangers at the table became
an image of the Holy Trinity. As we listen to
the story, we may think it strange that when
Abraham looks out from his tent and sees three
strangers, he asks them to be kind to him. How?
By letting him give them some rest and comfort
and a meal like a banquet while he, Abraham,
waits on them like a servant. He took it as
a kindness to himself that these strangers allowed
him to lavish his time and his possessions on
them. Jesus may have been remembering this story
when he told about the judgment: I was a stranger,
and you welcomed me. If you did this for the
least person in the world, you did it for me.
I was a stranger, and you welcomed me. That
is right there with feeding the hungry and clothing
the naked and caring for the sick. We know the
response: “Wait a minute! When did we
see you hungry, thirsty, a stranger?” “If
you did it for the least person, especially
for the least person, you did it for me.”
We have in the world now a multitude of such
strangers, people who have had to flee their
homes and seek refuge somewhere a little safer.
It is one of the constant refrains of the last
century, perhaps of many centuries. Large numbers
of people are on the move: Is it Darfur? Is
it ethnic cleansing somewhere we don’t
think about very often? People are made strangers,
an old story and we figure someone will put
up tents and send in bread and rice. But sometimes
the stranger is closer to us.
Right now more than two million of these strangers
are men and women and children from Iraq. One
in every ten Iraqis is no longer in Iraq. They
have fled their country in the horror that has
followed the U.S. invasion and occupation. Most
of them are living in the neighboring countries
of Syria and Jordan. These are poor countries,
but they took them in. What is that to us? Our
country broke all the dishes, but others must
pay for it? And where are we Christian Americans
who tell of the hospitality of Abraham and Sarah,
of Martha and Mary? Lord, when did we see you
a stranger?
Here on Sundays we rehearse this awareness of
the stranger, we rehearse the hospitality of
Abraham and Sarah, of Mary and Martha. We rehearse
it outside before and after our liturgy. We
rehearse it when we see friends and when we
see those whom we do not know. We rehearse it
when we extend the peace greeting to one and
all around us. Above all, we rehearse it at
this table where all eat and drink alike. But
then rehearsal ends. How will we live toward
these Iraqi strangers?
July
29: Seventeenth Sunday
Last Sunday Abraham was welcoming strangers,
now he is desperately bargaining with God as
he tries to save the city of Sodom. Such audacity
and such cleverness in a delightful story. God
reluctantly concedes to Abraham that if there
are fifty innocent people in Sodom, the whole
city will be spared. And that’s it. That’s
Abraham’s foot in God’s door. “If
you will spare it for fifty, what if there are
only forty-five? Will you destroy the whole
population because we could not find just five
people?” What God would do such a thing?
And so it goes. Abraham takes God down to ten
people, then figures he has saved the city.
Jesus might have been thinking of this story
when he offers the disciples a little story
from life: Someone knocking on the neighbor’s
door at midnight to borrow bread. If you keep
at it, Jesus says, you will get that bread.
We’ve all seen this. It sounds like Jesus
wants us to annoy each other, all be squeaky
wheels. Maybe. But the point is to be like Abraham.
Abraham kept coming back: “But if you
would spare the city for forty innocent people,
what if there are thirty? Twenty? Ten?”
So we do keep coming back. We prayed for the
sick last week. Most did not get better. We’ll
be naming them again in a few moments. We prayed
for an end to the violence in Iraq last week.
It didn’t end. We’ll be shouting
to God about it again in a few minutes. We prayed
last Sunday for daily bread, for forgiveness
of our sins, and we prayed for God to keep us
from evil. We will do it again today.
But will we do it with the passion of the church,
the passion for healing, for justice, for God’s
mercy? Will we make our intercessions and pray
the Lord’s Prayer, both here and in our
homes, with a sense that everything depends
on us, to keep on knocking, to keep on lifting
up the troubles of this world to God? This is
the task of baptized people: eyes open all week,
bedside prayers at night to ask God’s
care for all in need, Sunday intercession. This
is what we do, we baptized people, the church.
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).
|
|
Year C
|
What follows
is cast as a homily for July 25, 2004, the
Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year
C. On the previous Sunday and this Sunday
we have a rare occurrence: the first readings
on these two Sundays are from the same group
of stories in Genesis 18. Preaching both
weeks on Abraham and the Genesis stories
is one possibility. In addition, on the
last three Sundays of July we have second
readings from the beginning of Paul’s
letter to the Colossians, also texts with
much to offer the homilist, especially in
preaching consecutive Sundays with the second
reading as the central focus (rarely done).
But the text below attempts something else:
to provoke interest in the Genesis story
and from that a way to hear the Gospel parable
and Luke’s text of the Lord’s
Prayer in the context of the way our assembly
does its own | | | |
