November 2002
Homily for 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time - November 3, 2002
Malachi 1:14b--2:2b, 8-10 1 Thessalonians 2:7b-9, 13 Matthew 23:1-12
Malachi, the prophet, speaks for the Lord
and curses those whose failures in ministry
have abused and scandalized the people
and caused many to turn away from the faith.
In the gospel passage, Jesus comes down heavy on religious leaders
who do not practice what they preach;
who burden others without lifting a finger to help them;
and who enjoy exalting themselves,
taking places of honor and accepting signs of respect
of which they are no longer worthy.
Certainly these passages hit home for us in the fall of the year 2002.
These scriptures are a clear indictment of priests and religious leaders
who abuse their office, their people
and the sacred trust that is theirs as ministers of God’s grace.
But sandwiched between the condemnations in Malachi and Matthew,
we find St. Paul writing to the Thessalonians
and offering us respite, consolation, hope,
and a very different image for ministry.
Recall the soothing words that we just heard in the second reading:
“Brothers and sisters:
we were gentle among you,
as a nursing mother cares for her children.
With such affection for you,
we were determined to share with you... day and night...
not wanting to burden any of you...”
Perhaps if we more often imaged ministry in the terms Paul uses here,
we would be much better off in the life we share as God’s people.
“We were as gentle among you
as a nursing mother cares for her children...”
Imagine how it would be were this our primary image for ministry,
for priestly service...
“We were as gentle among you
as a nursing mother cares for her children...”
A nursing mother is the source of her child’s nourishment;
she is food for her child,
her breasts are the table at which her child feeds,
and she is the waiter who serves at that table.
A nursing mother must be available, round the clock.
A nursing mother must respond to insistent cries at inopportune times.
A nursing mother does for her child
what no one else can do in quite the same way.
A nursing mother gathers the one she serves to her breast
and knows an intimacy unlike any other in human experience.
Nursing is not always convenient, or comfortable, or easy or pleasant,
but in the giving and the taking there is, as St. Paul puts it,
an “affection” born of the determination
“to share oneself with another”
as only a mother can share with her child.
How very much the church, whom we often image as our mother,
how very much the church needs this maternal image of ministry
especially when the images of
paternity, power and position,
have been found so devastatingly wanting.
These ancient paternal images
need to be reinterpreted, reformed and redeemed
if they are to continue to serve us in any meaningful fashion.
And at the same time,
we must, as the church, find new ways
to lift up maternal images of ministry and of priestly service:
images of nourishment, intimacy, fidelity and vulnerability.
As a nursing mother is food, table and waiter for her child,
so is the priest called to be the same for God’s people.
This three-fold image of being food, table and waiter
is not my own invention.
It comes from the 14th century,
and as you might guess, it is the genius of a woman,
St. Catherine of Sienna, who wrote this prayer:
“I shall clothe myself in your eternal will,
and by this light I shall come to know
that you, eternal Trinity,
are table and food and waiter for us.
You, eternal Father, are the table
that offers us as food your only-begotten Son.
He is the most exquisite of foods for us,
both in his teaching, which nourishes us in your will,
and in the sacrament we receive in holy communion,
which feeds and strengthen us...
And the Holy Spirit is indeed a waiter for us,
for the Spirit serves us this teaching
by enlightening our mind’s eye with it
and inspiring us to follow it.
And the Spirit serves us charity for our neighbors
and hunger to have as our food.”
We go now, to share that meal where the Lord, like a nursing mother,
is food and table and waiter for us.
May the food we share at this table,
the food the Lord serves us which is his very self,
may this food nourish us to be more faithful ministers
of his teaching
and of that communion we are all called to live
“as gently as a nursing mother cares for her child...”
- Rev. Austin Fleming
Homily for 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A - November 10, 2002
Wisdom 6:12-16
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Matthew 25:1-13
This past week, President Bush said, I think a lot of people are saying, Gosh,
we hope we don't have war. I feel the same way. I
hope we don't have war.
I hope this can be done peacefully. It's up to Saddam Hussein, however, to
make that choice.
Today's scriptures provide a rich context in which we might consider just
who should make the choice about our having
a war with Iraq. Should it be Saddam Hussein? Should
it be President Bush?
Should it be the United States Congress? Should it be the Security Council
of the United Nations?
Indeed, should ANYONE be empowered to make a choice that we should have
a war?
We'll come back to this question in a few moments...
As the commercial world gears up for it's annual sales bonanza, (some
stores are already decorated for Christmas!) the church year is winding down
to its end with reminders of that time when everything will end
and Jesus, the bridegroom, will come to take us, his bride, home to that reign
of peace that has no end.
The scriptures today remind us that those best prepared for the time
when the Lord will return are those who have allowed Wisdom to embrace and
fill them, those who have truly asked to see life, humanity and the world
as God sees them.
In the scriptures, Wisdom is almost always imaged in the feminine and the
proof of having received her gift is that she gives us a vision of life as
God sees it, a vision unimpaired by the cataracts of our selfishness, our
arrogance, our pride and our greed.
Through God's eyes we see that the world belongs to God, it is on loan
to us, entrusted to our care and into our hands. And we will be held accountable
for what we have done with and to creation. In God's eyes love is a law, not
an option and that law of love makes demands on us, particularly when
we have more than we need while others go without even the most basic necessities
of human life.
This is how God sees things and wisdom is seeing things as God sees
them. Foolishness is pretending that our vision is 20/20 and that God needs
bifocals.
The first Christians believed that Jesus, the groom would return soon to meet
his bride, the church, and to take her home with him. As we saw in Paul's
letter today, the first believers saw that Jesus, like the groom in the parable,
was long delayed in his return: in fact, some 2000 year later, we still pray
at each Mass, deliver us from all anxiety as we wait in joyful hope for the
coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.
That leaves us in the position of the 10 wedding attendants the five wise
and the five foolish, in today's parable. While you and I wait for the Lord
to come, what are we doing?
Are we seeing things with Wisdom?
Are we looking at life through God's eyes?
Do we ask for, do we even want the wisdom to see as God sees?
Do we pray for the wisdom to see as God sees?
to judge
as God judges? to forgive as God forgives?
to love
as God loves? to live as God calls us to live?
... Back now to the question I raised at the beginning of my homily:
Who should be empowered to make a choice that we should have a war?
Is it not curious that as we debate this week the possibility of war in the
middle east, that the gospel of Jesus has, as its primary image,
a comparison of:
who has the OIL?
who needs OIL?
and the consequences of running out of OIL?
Indeed, some things just never change!
Who should be empowered to decide whether or not we have a war.
President Bush? Saddam Hussein?
Congress? the United Nations?
Certainly we must add Wisdom to that list of candidates. And what would Wisdom
tell us? How would she advise us on war in the middle east? How does she see
the nations of the world? What does she want for her children? What does she
ask OF her children? Will she come and find us with our oil lamps burning
brightly, rejoicing that the the Lord, our groom, has come for us,
his bride? Or will she find us in the dark, with blood on our hands and grief
in our hearts.
In the Hebrew scriptures we read that Wisdom builds a home for her children
and sets a table where she feeds them. In the Christian scriptures, the Jesus
is our wisdom, and like Wisdom, like a mother, he gathers us, the household
of his love, and feeds us from his breast, with the sacrament which
is his body, and with the milk which is his blood.
And let us pray, then, and hope that we don't have war, that this can
be done peacefully as it will be if we allow nothing less than the Wisdom
of God to be the one who makes the choice.
- Rev. Austin Fleming
Homily for 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A - November 17, 2002
Proverbs 31:10-13, 19-20, 30-31
1 Thessalonians 5:1-6
Matthew 25:14-30
A few weeks ago, a group of Canadian Catholics spoke in opposition to the
church’s rule about celibacy for priests. This group of Catholics is
concerned because in their part of Canada there are parishes where Mass is
only celebrated three of four times a year, and they claim that one very significant
reason for the drop in vocations is the celibacy requirement.
This vocal group of Catholic Canadians wants change in the system, and they
see the celibacy rule as one of the first things that needs to be changed.
Who are these Canadians?
The group I refer to consists entirely of the Roman Catholic bishops of the
seven dioceses comprising the northern two-thirds of Canada. They made their
case in October at the annual meeting of the Canadian Conference of Catholic
Bishops.
Unlike the third man in the parable in today’s gospel, these
bishops have not, out of fear, dug a hole in the ground, to bury, for
safe keeping, what was entrusted to them.
No, these are bishops who want, desperately, to take what they’ve
been given and to make it into something more than they originally received.
These are bishops who see that their people are hungry - hungry for
the eucharist - for the food of the Lord’s Supper which they are being
denied, in large measure, because the Roman Catholic church has chosen to
say that the question of a married clergyis simply not open to discussion.
In the meantime they, and we, are told to pray for vocations.
You know, I’ll bet that the third man in the parable who buried
his one talent in a hole in the ground actually did some praying about it
after he buried it.
He acknowledges that he knew his master was a demanding person,and that even
as he dug the hole he was afraid of what the master might think. I’ll
bet that as he dug he prayed, that something good might come of his fear.
But rather than do something fruitful and beneficial with what had been entrusted
to him, he BURIED it, for safe keeping, and prayed about it.
How much has the leadership of our church buried for safekeeping?
How much has our leadership failed to work with the realities of our time,
to trade, to invest, to bring to harvest the heritage entrusted to them? How
much of our heritage as Catholics is drying up in OUR hands, yours and mine,
because we have allowed it to be buried out of fear? How much does the silence
and the inaction of millions of Catholic people make them complicit in the
burial of spiritual treasures that we may one day find ourselves unable to
pass on future generations?
Last week our American bishops met in their annual fall session. The
news reports showed us a hotel ballroom filled with men seated at long conference
tables. All men - everyone in a Roman collar. No women at all were given a
voice or a vote. No lay men, either. Not a married person in the
bunch; not one parent among them.
The majority of the membership of the church in the United States, the
baptized, lay faithful, had no say in what was traded, what was invested,
what was preserved or what was buried at the bishops meeting this past week.
Unlike the Catholic people of northern Canada (and many other parts of the
world as well) we take it for granted that Mass is celebrated here, in this
church, not four times a year, but four times EVERY WEEKEND.
We take it for granted that the same thing happens just a few miles
away at St. Bridget’s in Maynard, at St. Elizabeth’s in Acton
and at St. Bernard’s in Concord center.
But the time will come, in our life time, when three priests will be
available to serve the five parishes of the Concord Cluster, and eventually
fewer than three for the five parishes. And then, because some things will
have been buried, out of fear, we, like our brothers and sisters to the north,
will no longer be able to take the frequency of Sunday Mass for granted.
Before the Master returns, before fear and a desire for safekeeping bury
the sacraments out of our reach, too, before we lose what has been entrusted
to our care, we need to let our voices be hear. In prayer? Yes!
But not just in prayer, in protest, too, speaking out like the Roman Catholic
bishops in Canada.
May the food of the Lord’s table which is readily available to
us now make us as wise and productive as the woman in the book of Proverbs
and may we, like her, be praised at the city gates because in our safekeeping
we did not allow anyone to bury our spiritual gifts but, like faithful, loyal
servants, we saw to it that they were traded and invested and nurtured to
a ripe harvest for the mission of the Catholic church which you and I love
and for the sake of the world our church is called to serve.
Rev. Austin Fleming
Homily for Solemnity of Christ the King - November 24, 2002
Ezekiel 34:11-12, 15-17
1 Corinthians 15:20-26, 28
Matthew 25:31-46
About once a month,
the company
that prints our Sunday bulletin
sends us
a sample copy of the bulletins
from another
dozen-or-so parishes
to provide
the parishes they serve with new ideas.
Our monthly sample arrived this week
and I was
taken by the letter one pastor wrote to his parish
in which
he roundly condemned two incidents of anti-Semitic graffiti
at a local
synagogue and a public school
in the
city his parish serves.
He wrote of his absolute horror and disgust
and condemned
these actions as
deplorable acts of hatred and bigotry.
He wrote that no follower of Jesus Christ could ever condone or excuse
this type of scandalous behavior.
I was less taken, however, by another paragraph in the same letter
in which
the same pastor wrote:
Thanksgiving is fast approaching
and it would be nice to remember those less fortunate than ourselves during
this time of celebration.
What’s wrong with that statement?
These words:
It would be nice..
In the Christian scheme of living,
remembering those who are less fortunate than we
is not a matter of being nice.
No.
As Jesus says so pointedly in the gospel today,
caring
for the poor, the sick and the marginalized
is much more than a matter of being nice.
But rather, caring for those in need
is the
work on which our eternal salvation hangs.
If we take this truth for granted,
we do so
at our own peril.
It was two weeks ago when I saw on television
the first
of the Christmas shopping ads for this approaching season.
I groaned out loud when I saw it.
And then, I thought,
How sad
that I should groan at the approach of Christmas!
But it’s not Christmas that I dread,
It’s
all the stuff AROUND Christmas
stuff that steals our time,
drains our emotions,
empties our checking accounts,
touches our most sensitive memories and hurts,
builds unattainable expectations,
and leaves many of us feeling, on December 26,
depleted, deflated and despondent.
I believe it would be fair to say that about 95% of what we identify
as Christmas
and Christmas spirit has little to do with Christ whose birthday we celebrate.
Do I sound like the Grinch?
I don’t mean to, honestly!
I have
no desire to take away whatever is good and joyous
about the
ways in which we celebrate this season.
My JOB, however,
is to take
us at least one step beyond believing
that we
can, as Christians, be satisfied with thinking that
it would be nice to remember the less fortunate
during the coming holidays.
My job is to remind us
that how
we respond to those in need
is the
ONLY standard Jesus proposes
as the measure against which he will judge us
as fit or unfit for eternal life.
This week we will celebrate Thanksgiving,
a day on
which our nation pauses
to be grateful
for what we have.
But will we even take a breath
between
the turkey and the pigskin
to sit and ponder, and to thank God for,
all that they have?
How will we call ourselves, our families and our friends,
this Thanksgiving,
to name what we are grateful for?
How might these coming weeks, the holidays
be a time
for us
to seek out the lost in our families and neighborhoods;
to reach out to those
who have strayed from our families and church;
to heal those whose feelings we have injured;
to feed the hungry;
to welcome the stranger and newcomer;
to clothe those who dress in rags;
to reach out to the sick and those in prison?
To ponder these needs and to respond to them
is more
than something nice to do.
is precisely what the Lord expects of us
who
bear his name as Christians.
The word eucharist actually means thanksgiving.
Our weekly table of eucharist, then,
is a weekly
thanksgiving celebration.
Here, in the bread and cup of the Lord’s supper,
the Lord
reaches out to us in our need
precisely
to heal us,
to be with us, satisfy our hunger and slake our thirst,
to comfort us,
and to
nourish us for doing the same for him
as he lives
among the least of our sisters and brothers.
Homily for Solemnity of Christ the King - November 24, 2002
Ezekiel 34:11-12, 15-17
1 Corinthians 15:20-26, 28
Matthew 25:31-46
About once a month, the company that prints our Sunday bulletin sends us a
sample copy of the bulletins from another dozen-or-so parish to provide the
parishes they serve with new ideas.
Our monthly sample arrived this week and I was taken by the letter one pastor
wrote to his parish in which he roundly condemned two incidents of anti-Semitic
graffiti at a local synagogue and a public school in the city his parish serves.
He wrote of his absolute horror and disgust and condemned these actions
as deplorable acts of hatred and bigotry. He wrote that no follower
of Jesus Christ could ever condone or excuse this type of scandalous behavior.
I was less taken, however, by another paragraph in the same letter in which
the same pastor wrote: Thanksgiving is fast approaching and it would be nice
to remember those less fortunate than ourselves during this time of
celebration.
What’s wrong with that statement?
These words:
It would be nice..
In the Christian scheme of living remembering those who are less fortunate
than we is not a matter of being nice. No.
As Jesus says so pointedly in the gospel today, caring for the poor, the sick
and the marginalized is much more than a matter of being nice. But rather,
caring for those in need is the work on which our eternal salvation
hangs. If we take this truth for granted, we do so at our own peril.
It was two weeks ago when I saw on television the first of the Christmas shopping
ads for this approaching season. I groaned out loud when I saw it.
And then, I thought, How sad that I should groan at the approach of Christmas!
But it’s not Christmas that I dread, It’s all the stuff
AROUND Christmas; stuff that steals our time, drains our emotions, empties
our checking accounts, touches our most sensitive memories and hurts,
builds unattainable expectations, and leaves many of us feeling, on
December 26, depleted, deflated and despondent.
I believe it would be fair to say that about 95% of what we identify as Christmas
and Christmas spirit has little to do with Christ whose birthday we celebrate.
Do I sound like the Grinch? I don’t mean to, honestly!
I have no desire to take away whatever is good and joyous about the ways
in which we celebrate this season.
My JOB, however, is to take us at least one step beyond believing that we
can, as Christians, be satisfied with thinking that it would be nice
to remember the less fortunate during the coming holidays.
My job is to remind us that how we respond to those in need is the
ONLY standard Jesus proposes as the measure against which he will judge us
as fit or unfit for eternal life.
This week we will celebrate Thanksgiving, a day on which our nation pauses
to be grateful for what we have. But will we even take a breath between
the turkey and the pigskin to sit and ponder, and to thank God for, all that
they have?
How will we call ourselves, our families and our friends, this Thanksgiving,
to name what we are grateful for?
How might these coming weeks, the holidays, be a time for us to seek out the
lost in our families and neighborhoods; to reach out to those who have
strayed from our families and church; to heal those whose feelings we have
injured; to feed the hungry; to welcome the stranger and newcomer; to clothe
those who dress in rags; to reach out to the sick and those in prison?
To ponder these needs and to respond to them is more than something nice to
do. It is precisely what the
Lord expects of us who bear his name as Christians.
The word eucharist actually means thanksgiving. Our weekly table of
eucharist, then, is a weekly thanksgiving celebration.
Here, in the bread and cup of the Lord’s supper, the Lord reaches out
to us in our need precisely to heal us, to be with us, satisfy
our hunger and slake our thirst, to comfort us, and to nourish us for doing
the same for him as he lives among the least of our sisters and brothers.
- Rev. Austin Fleming
