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Year C
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What follows
is cast as a homily for the Fourth Sunday
of Lent, Year C, March 21, 2004. As a homily
in a mystagogical mode, it draws on the
scriptures of this Sunday as well as other
words and gestures of the assembly’s
liturgy to unfold something of the gospel
sense for reconciliation.
Gabe Huck
Halfway through the forty
days of Lent and there is still time to start
if we haven’t yet been ready. Halfway
through, still time to find the ways that
we need to fast, the ways we best can pray,
the alms we most need to give. Halfway through
and the invitation, the call, the summons
is right there for all of us: Come and wrestle
with what the Gospel says to us, come and
know that our whole selves are caught up in
that baptism we received, drowned in those
waters but alive in Christ Jesus. Halfway
through the forty days of Lent and it is the
Lord’s Day today and so we are assembled
here and we have read the scriptures and we
have to talk about Lent’s hardest work.
What else can we talk about when we are confronted
with that parable of a parent’s outrageous
love for a selfish loser of a child who’s
coming home only out of desperation? Lent’s
hardest work, what is it? Paul gives it away
in the letter to the Corinthians: God in Christ
has done the reconciling and has made us reconcilers.
God was in Christ doing the reconciling of
the world. God was in Christ not counting
our sins against us but instead making us
be what Christ is, the gospel of reconciliation.
Many
who grew up Catholic have expressed dismay
at the understanding they remember from childhood
of what sin is, of what repentance means,
of what it is to be forgiven, of the reality
of reconciliation in human life. They express
dismay because — unlike many other things
we first began to grasp as children — we
probably still think about sin and repentance
and forgiveness the way we did as children.
These very real parts of human life — sin,
repentance, forgiveness, reconciliation —
came across as something totally private. “Sin” is
something I commit. It’s my business.
If I have done something sinful, well, then
I have to deal with it, perhaps confessing
my sin to God before the church’s
minister, and asking forgiveness. It is
thus not only personal but very, very private.
We may then go through life never thinking
how such things as sin and repentance, forgiveness
and reconciliation, have some relation to
how the society distributes wealth or education
or health care. Never thinking how sin and
repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation
have some relation to how a family or a
city or a corporation or a nation raises
and spends money. Never thinking how sin
and repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation
have some relation to why there are so few
in the world who are adequately cared for,
so many who are not. But listen to Paul
in the middle of this Lent: God was reconciling
the world and of that reconciliation we
have become the ministers, as strange in
the society’s eyes as that forgiving
parent, as hungry for peaceful ways on this
earth as that wayward child was hungry.
So we have to do some growing
up this Lent. We have to put aside those notions
of sin as private, notions of confession as
private, notions of forgiveness and reconciliation
as private. Lent’s fasting should so
clear our sight that we can see what sin is
and does day by day in this whole world. Our
prayer should find us practicing how to intercede
for all the sinners and the sinned against.
Our almsgiving should so turn our priorities
upside down that we can imagine what we are
meant to be — not some of us but this
whole baptized assembly — makers of
reconciliation, makers of peace, examples
of those who lay down the weapons of all kinds
to find a different way. The thing that makes
Lent vital to this church is that here in
Lent we do the training. We are again apprentice
Christians learning the trade of reconciliation.
Don’t think of Lent as forty days to
do something a little hard, then it’s
over. Think about Lent as the forty days each
year when we move on. In forty days we explore
the way we mean to be all the days after.
Some vital part of that we practice together
here every Sunday. At the threshold of the
liturgy, before the book is opened and we
begin to read, we repeat: “Lord, have
mercy. Christ, have mercy.” This is
the ancient Kyrie eleison in Greek,
a cry for mercy and a praise of God’s
mercy. Muslims begin their days and deeds
saying: “In the name of God, the All-merciful.” We
begin in a similar way, placing ourselves
within the Lord’s mercy, a mercy Jesus
was trying to understand and explain when
he told that story of the wayward child and
the ecstatic parent. That’s mercy. Preparing
for this liturgy, preparing for every day
of life, we clamor for that contagious mercy,
as contagious as sin is contagious. As the
poet Hoskins wrote,
“I say that we are wound / With mercy
round and round / As if with air.” How
deep is that in our Catholic hearts? How would
those around us know that we believe we are “wound
with mercy round and round”? What does
a church so wound in mercy look like? A household?
A person? Isn’t mercy some soft, sentimental
sort of thing, hardly what’s needed
to deal with real problems? Real problems
are dealt with through prisons and wars and
buyouts and layoffs. But is that the truth?
Or is that the cycle of violence and unforgiveness?
Sometimes we join this cry for mercy to the
confession of sin, another way of preparing
to do this liturgy. We have sinned in thoughts
and in words, we say, in what we have done — and
in what we have failed to do. Some Sundays
we rush through this, in common, and it is
lost unless in preparation we have looked
hard at what we have done and most especially
at what we have failed to do. The tradition
would have us rehearse this prayer every night
at bedside, the examination of our conscience
it has been called. Before we sleep, we recall
and place before the merciful Lord all that
went wrong today. This is the habit of living
in God’s mercy, the habit of calling
ourselves to account for what we have made
of the daily gifts of God. What we have done.
What we have failed to do. It isn’t
a tally: five wrong today down from eight
yesterday. It isn’t a tally. It is a
life on the way, a life slowly learning that
what I do and what I fail to do matters. It
matters before God and it matters before those
the Gospel says matter: the hungry, the prisoners,
the sick, those who are being left out of
all we think of as our rights. The mercy of
God, it turns out, is hard to bear, but we
come here to bear it together.
The liturgy of the Maronite church expands
on the Kyrie and Confession with words
like these: “Come, you who are angry,
and make peace with your enemies. Bow your
head before them and embrace them. Engrave
in yourself the sign of the Son of God as
he humbled himself before others. So humble
yourself!” Sounds fine, we think, but
let someone else go first. It won’t
work. Bow my head? Embrace my enemy? But such
is the way we rehearse life here together.
The story Jesus tells in this Gospel today
is told in response to some remarks made about
the way Jesus was conducting himself: “This
man,”
people were whispering, “welcomes sinners
and eats with them.” Yes, Jesus says,
I am practicing ways to act as God acts.
If Lent is for facing the hard stuff, then
Lent is for facing how hard it is to act as
God acts. How hard to take the prayer of confession
and the praise of God’s mercy and let
them shape what I will do tomorrow and how
I will do it. Martin Luther King Jr., like
anyone who has been treated with scorn, with
sneers, with brutal physical and psychological
weapons, had more reason than most of us to
put forgiveness off, but he read his Gospel
and he knew he couldn’t put it off.
Once he referred to the passage where Jesus
says to forgive seven times seventy times.
King said: “A man cannot forgive up
to four hundred and ninety times without forgiveness
becoming a part of the habit structure of
his being. Forgiveness is not an occasional
act; it is a permanent attitude.” And
that attitude is the gospel truth, and that
is the truth of what we are rehearsing here
every Sunday. To look to Martin Luther King
or to others like him is to know that to forgive
is not to shrug and say things will never
change. To forgive is to change things.
But these Sunday deeds are also about seeking
forgiveness, something a good deal harder
than forgiving. “Forgive us our trespasses,” we
say before we come to the holy table and make
the holy communion. Easily we say it to God,
though we should tremble at those words and
the words that follow. But how hard it is
to say to one another.
In some Christian churches at the beginning
of Lent, people come forward one by one. And
each one first kneels then is prostrate on
the floor and each says to the priest, “Forgive
me, a sinner.” But the priest also makes
this prostration before each one of the assembly
and says,
“Forgive me, a sinner.” We may
not have this beautiful gesture, but in the
Lord’s Prayer and the sign of peace,
we have something like it. And what are we
rehearsing here except a heart courageous
enough to ask forgiveness?
If we are baptized for the work of reconciling
the world to God, then we are baptized into
thinking about how the forgiveness we ask
of one another here and in our households
and places of work must be extended. More
than anywhere else today, that must be thought
about by us as citizens of the
United States
. That is hard. We have as a nation talked
as if we never have anything to apologize
for. It seems might makes us right. We sit
atop more than half the world’s wealth
with only one in twenty of the world’s
people. We spend more on preparations for
war than all the rest of the world together.
We loose sanctions and military strikes without
any concern for the lives destroyed. We refuse
our own children the education and health
care we could easily afford. In thousands
of ways we refuse to care for the earth and
so become agents of sickness and death into
the far future.
We must ponder how to ask forgiveness. But
to ask forgiveness of the poor, the earth,
our children, to bow our heads or bend our
knees and cry for our sins — we know
that such a thing would be so terrifying.
We would feel naked before the world. Besides,
aren’t we getting religion and politics
mixed up here? Yes, we are. So finally let
us listen to Archbishop Romero, twenty-four
years after his murder. He said this about
the work of the church: “[The church]
says to the rich: Do not sin by misusing your
money. It says to the powerful: Do not misuse
your political influence. Do not misuse your
weaponry. Do not misuse your power. It says
to sinful torturers: Do not torture. You are
sinning. You are doing wrong. You are establishing
the reign of hell on earth.”
We are the rich, the powerful. We here are
also the church. How then do we speak as church
to ourselves as nation? What does this eucharist
prepare us to do? What will this Lent prepare
us to 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).
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Year C
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What
follows is cast as a homily for Palm Sunday
of the Lord’s Passion, Year C,
April
4, 2004
. This is one of the days in our liturgical
round that shows how mistaken we have been
to presume that Sunday Mass is a one-hour
event. Sunday Mass is going to vary if the
people are celebrating their liturgy. On this
day, they need the time for a gathering and
procession and the time for the able proclamation
of the Passion according to Luke. Do we buy
that time from the homily? Wrong question.
Rather, the homilist and others who prepare
parish liturgy know what the rhythm of the
liturgy needs at the time of the homily. And
a good homily is prepared accordingly. If
all is done well and the assembly is doing
its liturgy, then people aren’t looking
at their watches. They know this day is different.
What follows might be the approach to the
Passion Sunday homily in parishes where real
efforts are made to keep Lent and the keep
the Triduum. It seeks to announce the end
of Lent and invite full participation in the
Triduum.
Gabe
Huck
For a last time in this Lent of 2004 we gather
in our Sunday assembly, the sixth Sunday since
we set off on Ash Wednesday. The books of
our scriptures have been opened for us here,
especially the Gospel of Luke, and we have
heard stories that only Luke tells us. When
we blessed palms we heard Jesus say that if
the Hosannas of the children are stifled,
well then the stones themselves will cry out!
And now we have heard the story of an angry
disciple of Jesus striking out with a sword
and cutting off the ear of one of the posse
that had come to arrest Jesus; and we heard
Jesus’ response:
“Stop! No more of this!” and he
healed the wound. When the Roman soldiers
are taking Jesus to his execution he tells
women who are lamenting: “Not for me
your crying and your weeping! If these things
are done when the wood is green, what will
happen when it is dry?”
Lent will end four days from now, this Holy
Thursday evening. The Forty Days that we,
the baptized and the catechumens, set aside
for penance and preparation and purification,
will quietly conclude. And ready or not, we
will enter the Three Days, the Triduum of
the Passover. Ready or not. Some of us may
only today, Palm Sunday, be getting serious
about Lent. That’s good and it is a
good to this whole assembly. Even those who
have earnestly tried all 40 days to keep this
Lent with prayer and almsgiving and fasting
will know they are not ready yet or ever.
The only way we can walk into the Three Days
is to walk in together, humbled by what has
become of us in our efforts to pray and read
scripture, our efforts to fast from all the
stuff in our lives that does no real good,
our efforts by alms to bring some tiny bit
of justice to the ailing world.
The song and scripture of this Sunday give
much to our hungry souls. Pondering some of
them in the days ahead will perhaps give our
hearts clarity about the tasks we have to
do beginning this Holy Thursday night in this
our gathering place. We can carry with us
those words from Luke’s Gospel:
“The stones will cry out!” And
to the person who has wielded the sword (and
we have all wielded the sword over and over
again): “Stop! No more of this!” And
that terrible question: “What will happen
when the wood is dry?”
Each of us must realize through these last
days of Lent how much we need one another
to be here, to be here together, on Thursday
night and on Friday and on Saturday night.
It isn’t a matter of something being
performed and the more who can show up the
better. No. Not that at all. What is to be
done is to be done by this church, this local
church that we all are. What is to be done
is hard work for all. We have to do those
deeds that bring into our hearts and souls,
our minds and our muscles, our eyes and our
ears, what it is to be a follower of Christ,
a keeper of the gospel, a church.
So when we meet here this Thursday, it is
not for some nostalgic thoughts about Jesus’ last
supper. Listen to the first words the church
proclaims when Lent is over and we are entering
the Triduum: “We should glory in the
cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, for he is
our salvation, our life and our resurrection;
through him we are saved and made free.” No
play-acting the last supper and passion of
Jesus here! If we call to mind the supper
and the arrest and the lash and the nails
and the tomb in these days, it is because
our glory — our glory! — is the
cross and here is salvation, here is life,
here is resurrection. If we tell again of
agony in the garden or the denial by Peter
or of Jesus stripped naked, it is because
for us these are part of how we have found
life to be.
On Thursday night we do a once-a-year deed
in this room. On the night before he died,
Jesus knelt on the floor and washed the feet
of the whole crew of disciples who had gathered
that night. And afterwards he told them, “I
have set you an example, that you also should
do as I have done to you.” And what
had he done? As we boldly enter the Three
Days, we try to discover this not only by
telling the story, but by doing the deed.
We put aside decorum and perhaps pious reflection
and we take out towels and basins and soap
and water. Shoes and stocking come off, and
we wash one another’s feet. It is an
unusual thing to do and to have done to you.
Across so many years and so much change, what
does it mean? John’s Gospel seems to
say that when the time of all Jesus’ preaching
and healing was over, when he sensed what
tomorrow would bring at the hands of the Roman
occupiers, he did this simple thing. He washed
all those feet. If we know how to do that,
we will begin to know how to hear the gospel
of Jesus, we will begin to know how to say
that we glory in the cross! This washing of
the feet, humbling for the one whose feet
are washed, humbling for the one who washes
and kisses another’s feet, that is our
entrance into the Passover of the Lord. Come
Thursday night so this whole church can do
these deeds together and so enter the Passover
together.
On the first full day of our Triduum, Good
Friday, the church will be assembled here
again and quietly we will read together from
the scriptures, especially the passion of
the Lord from John’s Gospel. John knows
what it means to say that the cross is our
glory. The prophet Isaiah wrote of something
like this and we read that also: about someone
despised, acquainted with suffering, a “no
account.” Only a church can bear these
Good Friday words. It is not a matter of making
more vivid the suffering of Jesus, it is how
we foot-washing people see what we are called
to be in today’s suffering world. For
that we need one another desperately. The
prophets and poets have grappled with what
it is to cling to the cross. Preaching to
the church in
El Salvador
twenty-five years ago, not long before the
Triduum, not long before he himself would
be murdered by agents of the state, Archbishop
Romero told it straight about the church and
the passion of Jesus. He said:
For the church, the many abuses of human life,
liberty, and dignity are a heartfelt suffering.
The church, entrusted with the earth’s
glory, believes that in each person is the
Creator’s image and that everyone who
tramples it offends God. As the holy defender
of God’s rights and of God’s images,
the church must cry out. [The church] takes
as spittle in its face, as lashes on its back,
as the cross in its passion, all that human
beings suffer, even though they be unbelievers.
They suffer as God’s images. There is
no dichotomy between humans and God’s
image. Whoever tortures a human being, whoever
abuses a human being, whoever outrages a human
being abuses God’s image, and the church
takes as its own that cross, that martyrdom.
If only it were as simple as telling a story
about what happened to a Jewish preacher in
Judea
those centuries ago! It is not. Here together
on Good Friday we lift up in prayer all the
world for it is our baptized job, as Romero
says, to take upon ourselves the suffering
humans inflict on one another. That is why
the prayer of intercession
— on Good Friday, every Sunday, every
day when we pray at our bedside —
is the work of the church. Loving the world
is what this church does. That’s too
hard to do alone. Good Friday we’re
together here, trying to get the gospel right.
It is good news, but good news only when we
stand here in solidarity. Alone we cannot
bear it.
When we have listened and prayed on Good Friday,
we come in a slow procession to venerate the
cross. For some that gesture of veneration
is a kiss, as we would kiss an infant, a child,
one we love. It is the tender kiss we give
here each Sunday to the altar and to the Gospel
book and to one another. For others, the gesture
is to kneel before the cross, or to embrace
it, or to lean our weary heads on it, or to
bow deeply before it. We have many gestures
of reverence and tender love for the cruel
instrument of capital punishment we call our
glory.
On Thursday night and again on Friday, we
leave here quietly, slowly, when we have done
our rites together. The Three Days aren’t
just the hours we spend here. They are all
the hours from Thursday night until Easter
Sunday evening. On Good Friday and again on
Holy Saturday the church is expected to be
doing these two things: First, we are to be
fasting from food and from entertainment and
from things like television and other distractions,
and if possible from our work. This is not
a fasting of penance but a fasting of anticipation
as we ready ourselves for what we do here
together on the night between Saturday and
Sunday. Second, we are to be keeping vigil,
staying alert, spending time with the scripture
reading and in prayer. We are approaching
the night of baptism, the night when we all,
no matter how many years ago we entered the
font, are to come again around the waters
where others will be baptized and we with
them will know what it is that we have renounced
and what it is that we cling to as the source
of life.
Copyright © Gabe Huck. Used by permission.
Originally written for Celebration,
the worship and preaching resource of the
National Catholic Reporter (visit their Web
site at www.celebrationpublications.org).
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These homilies
may be copied and adapted for your own use;
however, they may not be commercially published
without permission of the author.
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