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Year A
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What follows is cast
as a homily for October 6, 2002. That is
the Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time.
On that Sunday we have come to Matthew’s
telling of the parable of the wicked tenants
(
21:33
-43) and with it the first verses of Isaiah
5, also about a vineyard. The second reading
is from Philippians.
This homily, and similar efforts to follow,
is an exploration of how the rites we do,
as well as the scriptures we read, are integral
in preaching. This effort should be considered,
month by month, a work in progress that invites
your comments (gabeandtheresa@gmail.com).
In some congregations, these texts might make
useful discussions for those involved in preparing
the liturgy (the committee or board or whatever
entity or individual takes that responsibility).
Gabe
Huck
Every Sunday in this room we give God abundant
thanks as we surround a table that has but
two things placed on it, two foods from our
everyday life.
Bread is always on our altar table. Bread
is the name we give to a spectrum of shapes
and tastes: tortilla to Wonder, pita to pumpernickel.
What is bread? Grains of various kinds — wheat,
corn, rice —
cracked or ground into a flour, water added,
then heat to bake. We can get more or less
elaborate in the breads we prepare or buy,
but the basic stuff of them all is just this:
some crushed grains that grew and in a field
and were harvested, some water, a fire for
heat. Everywhere in the world where grains
can be grown, people have their versions of
bread; often it is the food that is on the
table whether rich or poor, festive time or
ordinary time. We talk about our daily bread,
about the breadwinner, about the staff of
life. So it is and so it is there on our table.
But next to this bread is something both similar
and very different. Wine and bread are both
gifts of the earth and both are the work of
human hands. The vine, rooted in the soil,
produces clusters of grapes year after year,
fragile fruit that is carefully harvested.
Then like the grains of wheat, these grapes
are crushed. As the grain disappears, ground
to flour, so the grapes disappear, flowing
now as juice. Sealed away, the chemistry does
its work and the natural sugars become alcohol
and what we called juice we now call wine.
But that working is in its own good time.
The word “wine” can be used also
for the fermented juice of various berries
and fruits; like bread then, wine has its
many identities for those people living where
the summers are long enough to bring forth
such fruits. Here on our table on Sundays
we have the fermented juice of grapes.
Grape wine was readily at hand in the culture
of Jesus and the Mediterranean cultures where
the church first took root. It was ordinary
but it was also valued. The composer of Psalm
104 praised God for bread by saying how bread
delivers. The psalmist says that God gives
us “bread for bodily strength.” But
of wine the praise was not for good health
or good nourishment or for thirst quenched.
Rather, the psalm gives God thanks for wine
saying, “Wine to warm the heart.” To
warm the heart. A different need, a different
delight. Both bread and wine taste of the
soil where wheat and vines are growing, and
both taste of the human work of milling, crushing,
and storing. But bread is about bodily strength,
the nourishment to live another day. Wine
is about warming the heart, about a bitter
or sour taste perhaps, but a warmth within.
Wine is addictive for some because of the
alcohol, but for those who can drink it, it
speaks of God’s good earth, ever lavish
in its blessings.
In Jesus’ day, some renounced wine because
they were waiting for the coming of the messiah’s
time; then and only then they would drink
deeply. They wanted no earthly wine to turn
them from their longing for God’s time.
Jesus himself was not to be found with these
folks. Far from it. “He eats and drinks
with sinners,” people said of him. And
so he did. But not just with big sinners like
the prostitutes and tax collectors. At
Cana
, the evangelist John tells us, Jesus was
responsible for letting the wine flow freely
at the wedding of family friends. Ordinary
people too, ordinary sinners.
For three weeks now the gospels have been
telling stories of vineyards. First there
were those laborers who came to work at all
different hours, harvesting the grapes, but
at the end of the day each was paid the same.
And last week the two sons, one promising
to go out and work in the vineyard, but not
doing so; the other refusing the father’s
request, but then going to work anyway. Now
today another vineyard, another story. To
prepare for it, we listened to Isaiah.
“My beloved,” Isaiah begins, “my
beloved had a vineyard on a fertile hill.” How
the beloved cleared the land, planted choice
vines, hewed a wine vat — but all for
naught. No good grapes would grow. In language
no one could miss, Isaiah laid it out: this
beloved, this hard-working farmer, is none
other than God, and we are God’s vineyard,
and much is at stake. The yield God intends
is justice, says Isaiah, but God looks at
this vineyard world and sees not justice but
bloodshed. Enough!
The story Jesus tells seems to be about this
same farmer God, but here it is the tenants
who are the culprits. Jesus asked: “What
will the owner do?” His listeners answer, “The
owner will put those wretches to a miserable
death,” but we never do hear what Jesus
thought about this solution. So we have Isaiah’s
story and Jesus’ story of vineyards
gone awry, and there is one more.
The psalm assigned for today is Psalm 80,
and here again comes God as planter of vines.
This is a song about a vine that once flourished.
Why then did the one who had planted and cared
for it leave it for thieves and wild animals?
Listen:
You brought a vine from
Egypt
,
cleared out nations to plant it;
you prepared the ground
and made it take root
to fill the land.
It overshadowed the mountains,
towered over the mighty cedars,
stretched its branches to the sea,
its roots to the distant river.
Why have you now torn down its walls?
All who pass by steal the grapes,
wild boars tear up its roots,
beasts devour its fruit. (Psalm 80:9–14,
ICEL translation)
The song ends with a plea to God that could
well be the church’s own: “Turn
our way, tend this vine you planted, cherish
it once more.”
The wine on our table comes with its stories
and they are not all gentle stories of happy
endings. We who share this cup so far away
and so long after are still telling the stories
of vineyards that went bad, tenants who murdered,
a grower of vines who abandoned those dear
vines. And all of these merge with other stories:
Think of Jesus saying that he was himself
a vine and we were branches (but ask: can
anyone tell a vine from its branches?). Think
of what Luke tells of the last supper: Jesus
says: “I tell you I will not drink of
the fruit of the vine until the
kingdom
of
God
comes.” Think of the Pentecost story
when some in the crowd sneered and said, “They
are full of new wine!”
Peter
responded that they had not been drinking.
But perhaps we can say still that they were
indeed full of the new wine.
The wine on our table tastes of all these
stories, and of that singular story we tell
around the table each Lord’s Day: “Take
this, all of you, drink it. This is my blood.
It will be shed for all so that sins may be
forgiven.” We tell this again and again
to remember this Jesus who had preached the
presence of God’s reign, who had healed
the sick and raised the dead to manifest God’s
reign, who had lived in God’s presence
loving the poor and the children. While we
pray in great thanksgiving each Sunday, we
tell of words about blood spoken over wine
because in drinking from the cup we submit
as Jesus did to our own transformation, our
own crushing and fermentation. We, all of
us, one body, we eat of the bread broken and
we drink of the life poured out. We proclaim
the mystery of faith. Christians knew this
well when they imagined that the cross on
which Jesus died was itself the wood of a
great grape vine, fruitful again, a tree of
life of which we are the branches.
The cup filled with wine does not remain on
the table. It is taken and shared among us.
The fruit of all those vineyards scripture
tells about with all the betrayal and anger,
the sorrow and neglect: it is the blood of
Christ for us to drink. The fruit of all those
vineyards joyfully sipped at the
Cana
wedding or the house of Levi the tax collector,
all the rejoicing and all the hilarity, the
new wine of Pentecost: it is the blood of
Christ for us to drink. Scripture says that
Noah was a man of the soil who had been away
from the soil sailing the flood waters; after
the flood, Noah planted the first vineyard,
and here we are all these generations later,
coming in procession to drink the fruit of
some descended vineyard.
There is bread on the table, there is wine
on the table. Bread sustains us, bread we
need. Wine warms and troubles our hearts,
a different sort of need. The blood of Christ.
Amen.
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 A
|
What follows is cast
as a homily for
November
3, 2002
, the Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time,
Year A, the day following the observance of
All Saints and All Souls.
This homily, and similar efforts to follow,
is an exploration of how the rites we do,
as well as the scriptures we read, are integral
in preaching. This effort should be considered,
month by month, a work in progress that invites
your comments (gabeandtheresa@gmail.com). In
some congregations, these texts might make
useful discussions for those involved in preparing
the liturgy (the committee or board or whatever
entity or individual takes that responsibility).
Gabe
Huck
Sunday by Sunday, after we have heard and
pondered the scriptures, we vigorously profess
our faith: We believe, we say, in God and
in Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Spirit. And,
so this assembly says, we believe in the communion
of saints, in resurrection of the dead and
the life of the world to come.
When we stand with those to be baptized, the
elect, at the great Easter vigil, we ask those
who are about to enter the font: Do you believe
in the communion of saints, the forgiveness
of sins, the resurrection of the body and
the life everlasting?
What are we talking about when we talk this
way?
A few moments after we profess our Creed in
the Sunday liturgy, we bring before God’s
mercy, often by name, those who are dying
and those who have recently died. And at the
very center of our Sunday assembly, standing
around the table, we again ask God to remember
our brothers and sisters who have gone to
their rest: “Bring them and all the
departed into the light of your presence.” Then
the bread is broken, and we do what Paul wrote
to the church at
Corinth
and that deed also is about a death: “Every
time, then, you eat this bread and drink this
cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until
he comes!”
What are we talking about when we talk this
way?
But there is more than happens in our assembly.
If we learned to pray as Catholics, we learned
something about praying at night before sleep.
We may have learned an ancient prayer: “May
God all-powerful give us a quiet night — and
a perfect death.” “A quiet night” is
one thing, “death”
is something else, but we pray for them in
the same breath. Every night we pray this
way, until there are no more nights. And we
may have learned some verses that come to
the same thing: “Now I lay me down to
sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If
I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord
my soul to take.”
Perhaps some hesitate to pray with little
children about “if I should die before
I wake.” Die? Why are we speaking of
such things?
What are we talking about when we talk this
way?
It is time to ask that question. It is November.
On Friday we celebrated the festival of All
Saints and yesterday we kept the day called
All Souls and remembered all those who have
died. When we talk about death, we are talking
about this communion of saints, about what
the song is asking in its stark way: “Will
the circle be unbroken?” Will it?
We speak and we act as if there is a bond
between us who live and those who have died,
a communion of saints. We stand now in that
communion. We may surround ourselves, in November
or all the year, with images of the saints — those
publicly recognized but also those of our
own families and of our own assembly here
who have fallen asleep in Christ. This is
some visible image of the communion of the
saints. Or we may do as many Spanish-speaking
communities do and make a place where the
images of the dead can be with us in November,
candles and marigolds and fruit to share:
the communion of the saints. Thus we learn
what it means to believe in this communion
of saints.
But All Saints and All Souls are not all there
is to our November. In the next weeks the
Sunday scriptures speak in various ways about
death and about the last times and about those
who sleep in death. We are told to be watchful
because we do not know the day, we do not
know the hour. We are told too how foolish
we are to think that slogans of “peace
and security” can have any meaning whatsoever.
Finally, on the last Sunday of November and
the last Sunday of this year’s lectionary,
we speak about Christ as the first-fruits
of the dead and we hear that gospel story
of an astounding judgment day, when neither
the saved nor the damned have any idea how
it happened.
What are we talking about when we talk this
way? We are talking first and last about the
life of the baptized in Christ, our life,
this assembly’s life in Christ. We are
talking about how through bedside prayer each
night and through the creed and eucharistic
prayer and even through the holy communion
itself, we baptized people are saying how
we mean to die, even rehearsing how we mean
to die. But that talk always comes with a
certain tension. In the hymn that’s
based on Saint Francis’ wonderful canticle,
we sing:
And
you, most kind and gentle death,
waiting to hush our final breath,
lead ever home the child of God,
and Christ our Lord the way has trod.
That is Francis talking about Sister Death,
simply another of God’s good creatures.
The other side of this tension is there when
we sing on Easter:
Death
and life fought bitterly
for this wondrous victory;
the Lord of life who died
reigns glorified!
So this is death also, our last and feared
enemy, from whom Christ in dying set us free.
Enemy or member of the family, which is death
for us? Is it both? Is it both when the one
who has died is old and ready? Is it both
when the one who has died is a child? Is it
both when the one dying is me, is you?
The poet e.e. cummings struggled with this
tension and got hold of it by thinking of
dying, the dying each of us does, as the member
of the family, and of death as that enemy
of all things created. The first line is
“dying is fine.” He writes:
. . . dying is
perfectly natural; perfectly
putting
it mildly lively(but
Death
is strictly
scientific
& artificial &
evil & legal)
we thank thee
god
almighty for dying
(forgive us, o life!the sin of Death
The tension is not resolved, not over. As
a church, as this particular church, we come
to November each year and we try to rehearse
dying a little more intensely — in our
songs here, in our prayer, in talking about
things like wills and powers of attorney and
life-support systems and when to say “Enough!”
and organ and body donation, in praying the
litany of the saints and in remembering those
of our community who are near death, remembering
them in our prayers each day.
But we do this rehearsal of dying in the presence
of the baptismal font — where we died.
We died so we live now in Christ. All our
baptized lives we are struggling to complete
in us that dying, that living. But it is not
the struggle just of each individual, each
on our own. It is the struggle we do as church,
none of us on our own.
And we do this November rehearsal of dying
in the presence of the table where we dine
each Sunday on the body and blood of the one
to whom we belong, whether we live or whether
we die. Dying, Christ destroyed our death.
So we proclaim and so we try to rehearse what
that would look like in this city.
In the presence of the font and the table,
we cannot close our eyes to what becomes so
urgent in these years: Our own peace with
dying is never to be peace with the way death
is dealt out today. Because it isn’t
even. One in seven babies born in many third-world
nations will die before their first birthday.
But in the
United States
, only one in 140 of those born will die in
its first year. Why will AIDS in
Africa
take millions and millions of lives, many
of them children, while here the epidemic
is under control? When did it become all right
with us that one life is worth so much more
than another? Why are murdered children on
side A mourned while those on side B had it
coming? We are not to make our peace with
death in November, we are to stand near the
font and the table and think: What must we
do because of our faith?
Nor are we here in November to speculate on
what follows death. We are not here to make
up cute images of a life after death that
is all too much like life before death. We
profess in the Creed: We believe in the resurrection
of the dead and the life of the world to come.
So be it. That’s enough. When it comes
to all that, we are here to throw up our hands
and say: What do we know? Paul once in a while
starts to wrestle with these questions about
life after death, but in the end he has just
one thing to say that all of us, who are all
dying, eagerly make our own. “We do
not live to ourselves, and we do not die to
ourselves,” Paul says. “If we
live, we live to the Lord, and if we die,
we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live
or whether we die, we are the Lord’s” (Romans
14:7–8).*
*This thought on Paul is from Joseph Sittler
in his essay
“Aging: A Summing Up and a Letting Go.” (Sittler,
Joseph [2005] Aging: A summing up and a letting
go. In Gravity and Grace: Reflections and
Provocations.
Minneapolis
:
Augsburg
Fortress, pp. 68–76.)
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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