Previous Weeks' Homilies
2002 2003
Talk about being as subtle as a sledge hammer!
D’ya think Jesus is trying to make a point here?
“Love your enemies!
Do good to those who hate you!
Bless those who curse you!
Pray for those who mistreat you!
Turn your cheek to the one who strikes you!
Give to everyone who asks of you!
Don’t ask the thief to return your stolen property!
Don’t expect the return of what you lend!
Stop judging, stop condemning, start forgiving!
Subtle - this is not!
This is tough love - demanding love - radical love,
love that gets at the root of something.
What Jesus is describing here is precisely the love God has for us!
There is nothing - got that? - NOTHING
that can come between us and the love God has for us.
Nothing!
Of course,
God finds loving this way pretty easy since God is God -
and God IS love!
We find it much more difficult.
Let’s skip over the easy cases of loving our enemies
and jump to the difficult ones.
Some find it difficult each week when we add to our prayer the words,
“and for our enemies, let us pray to the Lord...”
Can we pray for Osama bin Laden? Can we pray for Saddam Hussein?
Can we pray for Al Quaeda? Can we pray for terrorists?
Can we pray for those who have hurt us? betrayed us? abandoned us? abused
us?
It’s really not so much a question of “can we” or “should
we.”
It’s much more a matter of recognizing
that perhaps no one in the world needs our prayer more
than the “unforgivable enemies” I just mentioned.
To pray for our enemies is not to somehow reward them.
To pray for someone is to recognize a real need
and to lift that need up to God.
To pray for our enemies is to recognize fully
how much in need of God’s help they are
and to hand them over to God and say,
“Here you go, Lord! You made ‘em - you fix ‘em!
Because they are sick, nasty, hateful, selfish, violent and abusive people
and our hearts may have been too damaged by them
to know how to forgive them, how to love them."
Perhaps we could put it this way:
when it comes to our enemies,
the one thing the Lord asks us NOT to do is to abandon them.
Rather, the Lord asks us to stamp our enemies:
“Return to Sender” - to hand them back to their Creator.
In this wise, the greatest sin against love
is not that we forget the ones who have hurt us
but rather to wish that God would forget them,
to wish that God would abandon them.
The greatest revenge we might desire
is to wish that our enemy be abandoned by God.
The greatest love we might offer our enemies
is to entrust them to the arms of God.
Even the greatest of our enemies
is not beyond the embrace of God’s love
and acceptance of that,
acceptance of God’s capacity to forgive the unforgivable, to love the
unlovable,
may be the most radical act of love we can make,
the most loving thing we can do.
For now,
perhaps we should consider our own failings,
and the myriad ways in which God loves each of us
in spite of our sins, our selfishness,
in spite of our failure to love one another
as God has loved us.
And love us, God does!
How much? Enough to invite us to this table
and to share with us the forgiving, healing presence of his love
in the bread and cup of the eucharist:
his life, given for us, in love.
Rev. Austin Fleming
Homily for 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time - C February 15, 2004
Jeremiah 17:5-8 First Corinthians 15:12, 16-20 Luke 6:17, 20-26
I wonder...
Suppose we could line up everyone in the world in a straight line.
And suppose we then put the richest person in the world
at the head of the line,
and the poorest person in the world at the end of the line,
and then ordered the rest of the world’s population
between the richest and the poorest according to wealth.
I wonder:
where do you suppose you and I would stand in that line?
I don’t have an exact answer to my question but I have a hunch.
And my hunch is based on the reality that half the world,
nearly three billion people, live on less than two dollars a day,
and a little less than two dollars is what I pay
for an extra large coffee at Teacakes.
The United Nations calculates that
to satisfy all the world's sanitation and food requirements
it would cost about $13 billion, which is less
than what the people of the United States and the European Union
spend each year on - perfume.
My hunch is that we would be standing very near, uncomfortably near,
embarrassingly near the head of the line.
So, how are we understand these words of Jesus:
“Woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation.
Woe to you who are filled now,
for you will be hungry.”
The Lord’s words are uncomfortably clear, aren’t they.
They are words meant to be taken seriously.
This has been a week for quoting the bible.
I even heard Howie Carr quoting scripture on the radio!
And much of the scripture quoting this week
did not admit of any subtlety or interpretation:
this was a week for fundamentalism.
But I’ll bet we don’t want to let these words of Jesus
stand at face value.
I’ll bet we’d like to tweak them just a little
so that our place in line isn’t quite so uncomfortable.
Isn’t is strange that the matching “blessed are you” verses
are so much easier to hear than the “woe to you” verses.
Listen...
“Blessed are you who are poor,
for the kingdom of God is yours.
Blessed are you who are now hungry,
for you will be satisfied.”
These verses name the plight of the poor,
but also promise something more.
They end on a happy note.
But the “woe to you” verses name our present contentment
and promise a reversal of fortunes - ending in a minor key.
Perhaps the gospel is not so much interested in making a social statement
about the economically poor and hungry.
but rather, wants us to understand
that those who realize their need for God
are blessed
while those who feel themselves to be self-sufficient
are to be pitied.
But there’s still a catch:
it’s precisely our wealth,
even our comparative wealth;
it’s precisely our possessions;
it’s precisely our desire to be filled up
that tempts us to rely on ourselves, our efforts and our belongings
and tempers our need to rely on God.
It’s an old story, one that Jesus tells in many ways.
And while we may not need to take it literally,
we do need to take it seriously.
Let’s go back to our place in the line of all the world’s people.
Which way are we facing in that line?
Are we looking ahead,
wondering how we can get closer to the head of the line?
Or are we looking back
and seeing and coming to understand what we pray each week:
“that we have more than we need”
while others have so much less.
Perhaps if the Lord should come while we stand in line,
we might be saved simply because we were, if nothing else,
looking in the right direction.
Perhaps the Lord would come and find us passing down the line
some of what we have in abundance.
Perhaps the Lord might even find us moving down the line
to share what we have with those who have so little.
It’s very natural for us to “want to get ahead in life.”
The gospel, however, may call us in the opposite direction.
Lent is around the corner.
Already our parish bulletin carries news of programs
designed to help us find the place in line
where we might meet this Jesus for whom love is a law,
where we might be counted not among the woeful,
but among the blessed.
If it all seems too much,
then come to his table where there is no line, but only a circle -
large enough to include everyone:
rich and poor and everyone in between.
Blessed are we when we come to this table
and learn to hunger for what only God can give us.
Rev. Austin Fleming
If you were listening very carefully,
you might have noticed that there’s a theme of fear and reluctance
in today’s scriptures.
When Isaiah has his vision of God
he is overcome with a sense of unworthiness
as the Lord calls him to be a prophet.
“Woe is me!” cries Isaiah.
“I’m doomed. I’m a man of unclean lips.”
And then an angel comes, takes a burning ember from the altar
and prepares to touch Isaiah’s lips with the hot coal!
Like I said: a certain reluctance!
St. Paul, writing to the church at Corinth,
exhibits a similar self-deprecation when he says,
“The Lord appeared to me last of all.
I am the least of the apostles,
not even fit to be called an apostle.”
And finally Peter, afraid to go out into the deeper waters
and then embarrassed by the huge catch of fish
falls at the knees of Jesus and says,
“Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”
“I’m doomed!”
“I’m the least of all!”
“I’m a sinner - go away, Lord!”
And yet, in spite of the reluctance, the self-deprecation and the chagrin,
each of them ends up doing what the Lord asks.
Isaiah, who deemed his unclean lips unfit for speaking the Lord’s word
becomes one of the greatest prophets of history.
Paul, keenly aware of his past sins,
having been an early persecutor of Christians,
becomes the great apostle to the gentiles.
Peter, who swings so easily between honest self-assessment
and cowardly pride,
becomes the rock upon which Christ builds his church.
Clearly,
the Lord did not often pick the cream of the crop to do his work.
Rather,
he chose the ordinary, the weak, the fearful, the reluctant -
perhaps because he knew that such as these
would intuitively, even desperately rely on God
for their wisdom, strength and courage.
The Lord calls us to share in his work
not because he thinks we are uniquely suited to it,
but because he sees in each of us a brokenness to be healed,
an emptiness to be filled, a question to be answered,
a heart to be loved -
in such a way that our experience of how he moves in our lives
might reach and touch and heal the lives of others.
We are too often like Isaiah
who could not believe that his lips might speak for the Lord.
We are too often like Paul
who considered himself unworthy on account of his past sins.
We are too often like Peter,
who was afraid that the Lord was calling him to waters deeper
than he might successfully navigate.
If ever there was a time in the history of our church
for each of us to discern carefully
how the Lord might want to use us - that time is now.
There are so many issues and problems inside the church,
outside the church, and around the church
calling for us
to speak the truth, to lift a hand, to get involved,
to be generous with our time and our talent.
And we can be sure of this:
the Lord has some work for each of us to do,
no matter what our life’s circumstances might be.
Keeping our mouths closed, our hands in our pockets,
or chatting up our friends in the parking lot over these issues
is usually less than what the Lord asks and expects of us.
Isaiah, Paul and Peter seem to have stumbled into greatness
in spite of themselves.
They were afraid to speak and to act
until the Lord nudged them
out of their reluctant, fearful complacency.
It will probably be the same with each of us.
We come each week to this table to be fed,
to be nourished with the very life of the One who calls us.
The Lord feeds us that we might be strong for his work.
May the strength he offers us here not be wasted
in our fear, our pride, our reluctance -
but may it make us strong for the work
through which God saves his people.
Rev. Austin Fleming
Homily for Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time - C February 1, 2004
Jeremiah 1:4-5, 17-19 1 Corinthians 12:31 - 13:13 Luke 4:21-30
“Despicable, inexplicable and inexcusable!”
Do you know who used these words this past week?
Do you know what was being described?
These are the words of federal Judge Mark Wolf
describing the murders of Philip McCloskey and Jonathan Rizzo
at the hands of Gary Lee Sampson.
Sampson has confessed to these two murders and to a third,
that of Robert Whitney, a case which has not yet come to court.
“Despicable, inexplicable and inexcusable...”
I cannot even begin to imagine the pain, the grief, the depth of the loss
the families of these three men have experienced.
But while some may agree with Judge Wolf’s description
of Sampson’s crimes,
it is not so easy for us, as Christians,
to agree with the sentence imposed: death by lethal injection,
or if that’s “impractical,” as Judge Wolf put it -
then death by hanging.
(It’s hard to imagine that death by hanging
is somehow more “practical” than giving a lethal injection!)
Judge Wolf also rejected the request of prosecutors
that Sampson be executed in a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana,
where there is a federal death row.
The judge said that Indiana is too far away
for family members of the victims
who might want to attend the execution.
Victim Jonathan Rizzo’s father, Michael,
and victim Philip McCloskey’s son, Scott,
plan to attend the execution.
Scott McCloskey said,
“Sampson’s going to look up and see my face.
I want him to know I was there, for what he put us through.”
But Jonathan Rizzo’s mother, Mary,
does not plan to witness the execution.
At the sentencing,
she had her last chance to address Sampson face to face.
She spoke of the son she loved
and how she is tormented by the knowledge
that Sampson was the last person Jonathan saw
before he died so brutally.
She said she had no desire to watch Sampson’s execution
because, as she put it,
“People should be surrounded by loved ones when they die.”
- even though Sampson deprived her son of that.
At the sentencing, Gary Lee Sampson said,
“I’d like to apologize to the families
and say that I am sorry for the devastation I have caused them
and also to my family.”
Scott McCloskey called Sampson’s apology an
“insincere overture. It’s probably something he felt he had to
say
to make it seem like he was a human being.”
Sampson may be insincere and despicable in the eyes of those
who no longer count him as a human being,
but in God’s eyes, Gary Lee Sampson is not only a human being -
he is counted as a beloved son.
And only God can judge the sincerity
of this condemned man’s apology and contrition.
I understand that it’s difficult, even impossible for many
to know how we might possibly love Gary Lee Sampson.
But that is precisely what God calls us to do:
to love this man as he is loved by God.
That is not to excuse Sampson of his crimes,
but neither do Sampson’s crimes excuse us
from the commandment to love.
The sentencing of this man who has confessed his crimes
puts the test to our affection for St. Paul’s sweet words about love
as we heard them in the second lesson today:
If I speak like an angel, if I understand all mysteries,
if I have faith great enough to move mountains
but have not love for the least of God’s children:
I am nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind.
It is not jealous... it does not seek its own interests,
it is not quick tempered, it does not brood over injury...
Love bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.
How grateful we should be to know
that God’s love never fails us
even when our actions, or our failure to act might be:
despicable,
or inexplicable
or judged by others to be inexcusable -
even then, God’s love does not fail us.
And perhaps sometimes our contrition, our apology to God
may be self-serving, or self-preserving - or even insincere.
But God’s love does not fail even our insincere contrition,
for God never fails to hope that our hearts might follow
what our mouths are speaking.
At this table we celebrate the eucharist.
We remember here the pain of Christ,
his grief, and the depth of his loss
given so that we might live.
We eat at the table of the innocent One who was executed, brutally,
facing his mother and his beloved disciple
and a few others who were faithful to him to the end.
He gave his life
so that we might have life, and have it to the full.
May God have mercy on us who fail to love one another
as we have been loved by God.
- Rev. Austin Fleming
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