Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
Year B

The following is cast as a homily for February 23, 2003, Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B.

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

Sometimes to get your job done you have to go up on the roof and make an opening in it large enough to lower your friend down. Even then, you can’t be sure what will happen. It’s a deed not done before. Nobody was that desperate until now. Imagine being inside as pieces of the roof are pulled off or pushed in and suddenly, bigger than life, here’s a paralyzed man — a man who can’t move — being lowered down into the room right in front of you.

So it is. We are ten days from the beginning of our annual roof removal season. It is time to recognize where we are paralyzed and time to grasp at desperate measures for ridding ourselves of the paralysis. But not alone. The season for roof removal is called Lent and nobody ever goes into it alone. Who’ll pull off the roof tiles? Who’ll lower the mat down? Who’ll deal with the upset people inside?

The season we are talking about is Lent. We have now these ten days until Ash Wednesday. I’ll take that time to remember how much I need lowering through a roof into an amazed room. I need these ten days to get up the courage to do it. Each of us needs that time to ponder the paralysis that keeps us on the mat, stuck, getting nowhere. And worse, we have gotten so used to it. We always come to Lent in faith, only the slightest clues about what we need, about how paralyzed we are, about what might happen to us as we take the ride down from the roof into the presence of the Lord.

We may not be sure then how to welcome Isaiah’s telling this morning of God saying: “[S]ee, I am doing something new! . . . / In the desert I make a way, / in the wasteland, rivers” (Isaiah 43:19). What is this something new? What is this way in the desert or, in the wasteland, how can there be rivers? Wild promises? Yes, promises like these might lure us to the roof to do something unheard of, letting our paralyzed selves go public. But perhaps we have never been thirsty enough to rejoice in the promise of a river, or lost enough to grasp at the promise of a road.

Remember this: Though each of us must get ready, must prepare ourselves as best we can for the ashes that are coming, no one does Lent alone. We go together into the fray, sisters and brothers, or we do not go at all. The church does Lent. That’s us, this assembly, this parish. There is no Lent except the one we do. If you are thinking your part doesn’t matter, think again. I need you with me. So do we all. And you need me. Only holding to each other can we hear what is said over the smudge of the ashes: Remember that you are dust. Repent, believe the gospel. Who could bear that alone?

We have these ten days and we have work to do. How will we know among ourselves that we are dwelling in Lent? No alleluia? The ambiguity of the purple worn on Sundays here? The Sunday by Sunday presence of those preparing for baptism? Yes, all this and more. But there’s no Lent unless all these moments come to life within a parish that is eager to find how fasting and almsgiving and prayer can fill our households these forty days that begin on Ash Wednesday. This is the language we speak in Lent, the language that will get us unto the roof and so lowered down before the Lord, the language that will make us thirst for rivers in the wasteland and long for a road in the desert. The language of fasting, alms and prayer will do this: They will show us the desert and the wasteland so that we can hear God’s promise and rejoice in it.

From now to Ash Wednesday then are these days that are carnival, right up to Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday. Whatever the society does with these days, we the church will be coming to terms with the most unlikely promise: If we take on the ashes as sign of our church’s repentance, and if we then speak for forty days the language of fasting and almsgiving and prayer, the world will be changed! God will work the transformation as we lean on one another to get through. The one on the mat will leap up and grab the mat and run off shouting in joy, and all will be astounded. The secret will be out!

Consider then these three disciplines of Lent. Consider first the mystery of fasting that has so much more to it than what and how much is eaten. Fasting — in all sorts of ways — in our day is being rediscovered as solidarity with the poor. And fasting is being discovered as solidarity with the earth, with God’s good creation. What does that fasting look like? It can be different for various ones of us, but it is something that the adults of this community embrace. Fasting from food — just one kind of lenten fasting — may bring us down a notch or two on the food chain. We may explore the diet of the third world. We may explore a diet that abuses the earth less than our usual ways.

We all know some of the numbers. We Americans, six percent of the earth’s population, control half the world’s wealth. One of us uses up what fifty people in India use up. Thousands die each day from lack of enough nourishment. But for us, even a modest salary opens up what is impossible to billions. Lent’s question for those who believe the gospel is: What right have we? Maybe when we fast, we will come at last to believe the gospel. What right have we? and what are we to do? Lent’s fasting has us deal with these scary questions together, and not so much in our minds as in our stomachs. What right do we have?

If we are willing to be hungry — and in more ways than one — perhaps what will be revealed to us is our own emptiness. For what then shall we hunger? Lent’s first Sunday tells of Jesus’ fast of forty days and the temptations after: For what did he hunger? With Jesus, we people together may come to hunger for God, for God’s word. We aren’t used to hunger like this. We’re afraid of it. I am certainly afraid of it. But I want to trust the wisdom of the church and of the saints. And that wisdom is that what we shall find in this discipline of lenten fasting is not gloom but a loosening of the cultural chains. There’s a gospel freedom, we are told, on the far side of this Lent. Keep our eyes on the prize!

And think these ten days about how you will fast from more than food. Here’s one way to go at this. What have a million Iraqis died for these past twelve years of economic sanctions enforced by the United States? Most of the watching world believes it’s obvious: They died because our part of the world wants control of their oil. People who live there tell visitors: “If we had cabbages instead of oil, we’d all still be alive.” Fasting means confrontation with the demons of consuming, the demons of greed. What sort of world have we made in our land, in our own expectations of plentiful and cheap energy for every moment of our lives? What sort of fasting would be witness that another world is possible? That other possible world is the work of Lent. It isn’t about the temporary inconvenience of giving up candy or cigarettes or dessert. It is about getting the world right. Starting right here in this assembly.

And Lent is almsgiving. What the scriptures seem to tell us is this: Make a jubilee. That is, the goods of the earth must periodically be redistributed or the strong are going to take it all. If fasting is asking us: By what right? then almsgiving also has a three word meaning: It isn’t mine. It isn’t mine. It never was. I have to give it back. Almsgiving isn’t just writing a check or putting a dollar in someone’s cup. It is not about charity. It is about justice.

In Lent we look at what we have in our control, goods we own and savings and wealth of all kinds. We look at what we “own” and we listen to words like those Saint Basil told his congregation long ago: “The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money you put in the bank belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help, but fail to help.” That’s strong. He isn’t talking about what kindness we might do for the poor of the world, he’s talking about theft! Basil says we must do justice, not charity. We must return what is in our possession to the rightful holder. And Basil didn’t know how much worse it would get in our day, he didn’t know about all the ways of owning and controlling the wealth of the world. What would he preach to us on Ash Wednesday?

So we have ten days to ponder how we’ll take some baby steps with almsgiving during Lent, how we’ll go into training as almsgivers, finding the muscles we need to let jubilee loose in the world.

And Lent’s third discipline is prayer. Sometimes we think that means deciding to pray more during Lent: daily Mass, stations of the cross. That’s good. But the reality is this: Lent is the forty days when we give attention to the way we pray each day of the year, holding that up against the life we lead and discovering what it is that daily prayer could be for us. What is the prayer at the start of the day? We have a certain Christian vocabulary: the sign of the cross, the praise of God in various words from scripture, the Glory Be or Glory to God in one of its forms, that “Lord, open my lips” prayer where we remember who it is who unlocks our speech. We have a vocabulary of prayer for meals, for evening, for bedside. Lent is for getting some little daily habits into our lives — not to be given up at Easter but to live now with an Alleluia.

So, every one of us can take these ten days until the day of ashes and with joy and with great seriousness prepare for being lowered through the roof, prepare for whatever the rivers in the wasteland and the road in the desert might mean. Talk about how fasting and alms and prayer can change us and so change this world. Lent is about nothing else because it is, above all and before all, how we come each year to discover that we have died and our whole life now is in Christ. So hear what Paul wrote to the Corinthians in today’s reading: “Jesus Christ was not ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ but in Christ it is always – Yes!

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)

Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Year B

The following is an example of how catechesis from and for the liturgy may be done in the Sunday homily. This is written as a homily for July 6, 2003, Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B. This is the July 4 weekend. Thus this attempt at mystagogia draws on both the liturgy of the Christian assembly and that of the nation.

Gabe Huck

At the opening end of this weekend stood the Fourth of July, Independence Day, the birthday of the nation. Picnics. Flags. Fireworks. Parades. Speeches. And at this end of the weekend stands our assembly, the Lord’s Day gathering of the faithful. Gathering with the sign of the cross. Proclaiming God’s word. Thanksgiving over bread and wine. Holy Communion.

Thus within these few days we juxtapose two answers to the question: Who am I? On Friday, we probably answered easily: I am an American. And today the same “Who am I?” question brings the different answer: I am a Christian. Or: I am a Roman Catholic Christian.

What seems to go without saying is that we can also answer: I am a Christian by religion and an American by citizenship. And then one can add: I am a truck driver by profession, a mother, a member of this or that organization, a descendant of slaves or of immigrants or of natives to this land. And so we are. But the question wasn’t: What is my religion and what is my citizenship. The question was: Who am I? That is: What is the heart of the matter here, the core? Where and with whom do I find the meaning of life and of my own self? Do I judge a matter by all that makes me Christian or by all that makes me American? What’s the mix? Who am I — first and last?

The scriptures that happen to fall on this Sunday seem eager to contribute something to the answer. Ezekiel, the prophet of the dry bones, gets a rare chance to be heard in our assembly. Where is he? He’s in Mesopotamia, the land between two rivers, the land we call today Iraq. He and thousands of others were taken into exile when Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians. These exiles are facing the “Who am I/Who are we?” questions as they never have before. We know from where we stand that some of their children will go back to Jerusalem in a few decades, having decided that “who they are” means being there. And we know that the children of other exiles will stay in Babylon and be the beginning of a Jewish community that has endured and sometimes thrived these 2600 years.

But Ezekiel is speaking here at the very beginning of the exile time, when the community is just sorting out “Who am I?” questions. And little that Ezekiel has to say is going to give much comfort. Perhaps that is why Ezekiel is at pains to say: This is not what I say but what God says. He narrates how God told him: “[O]pen your mouth and eat what I shall give you.” Then Ezekiel tells us: “[A] hand stretched out to me, in which was a written scroll. It was covered with writing front and back, and written on it was: Lamentation and wailing and woe! . . . So I opened my mouth and [God] gave me the scroll to eat” (Ezekiel 2:9, 3:2). What is this about? Ezekiel wants it to be clear: If you don’t like what I have to say, if you don’t like these words of lamentation and wailing and woe, just know that they are not my words but the words God put into my mouth.

We heard today how God gave Ezekiel this commission: “I am sending you to the . . . rebels who have rebelled against me. . . . Hard of face and obstinate of heart are they . . . And whether they heed or resist . . . they shall know that a prophet has been among them” (Ezekiel 2:3–5).

The gospel tells a story that happens more than seven hundred years later. The prophet Jesus is teaching in the synagogue of his hometown. As in Ezekiel’s day, there are multiple answers to “Who am I?” and “Who are we?” Are we going to be people who recognize that the Romans are in charge now and our fortunes depend on theirs and so let’s get on with life? Or do we see the Romans as enemy occupiers of our land against whom we have to preserve our lives and identities? And what is that identity anyway? And if that isn’t enough, who is this Jesus to tell us anything at all, this fellow who grew up here, the carpenter for heaven’s sake, Mary’s boy? We can almost see the town’s people raising their eyebrows and nodding their heads slightly as they add: Yeah, we all know that family.

So we have these two prophets, Jesus and Ezekiel, these two persons who do what prophets do. Prophets do not foretell the future. Prophets tell God’s truth about the present. And telling that truth, whether we heed or whether we resist, is where the future comes into it.

The prophet is a problem. Anyone can claim to be one, claim to have God’s word, even the most unlikely suspects such as Ezekiel and Jesus. Most are on ego trips. A few are not. How to know the true prophet from the false prophet? The true prophets almost never say things we like to hear. They do offer us some help for answering “Who am I?” and “Who are we?” but they are unlikely to say: We’re God’s best, we’re the apple of God’s eye, and now have a nice day. More likely the real prophet will be as hard to take as Ezekiel or Jesus: Not a fun person at the party but someone consumed with getting us to see what God wants of us, hard stuff that God wants.

We come here Sunday by Sunday. Most of the time we have to work hard to hear the prophet’s voice here in our assembly. But if we are hungry for God’s truth about the present we should know that God’s truth is being told right here. What we do here, all of us together, are prophet-like deeds. They move us a little closer to seeing “Who am I?” and “Who are we?” We should know that in this assembly we are little by little able to know who we are meant to be. But we can miss God’s truth because our eyes aren’t focused, our ears not in tune, our hands in our pockets. All of us miss it most of the time, perhaps because we don’t come hungry but already satisfied. The prophetic things we do here often just sail right by.

What prophetic things? What do we do here that tells God’s truth about the present moment in the world’s life? What do we do here that brings us face to face with any ways we have been holding to some truth other than God’s about the world’s life in this summer of 2003? What do we do here over and over again on the Lord’s Day that is able to give us not words but deeds that will define who we are? What do we do that shapes in us a way to live and a way to see and a way to think and a way to act?

Consider just two tiny deeds of this sort. The first is this: We enter this room and we take water — water that reminds of our baptism — and we make on our bodies the sign of the cross. Then a few moments later, all together as an assembly, we again trace that cross on our bodies. What is this? What are we doing?

We have seen infants brought into this assembly by their parents. Those parents say they are here to ask for baptism. Then presider and parents and godparents all sign the infant with the sign of the cross and the presider says: “I claim you for Christ.” And it may be that child will come one day to stand among us and make the sign of the cross with us. It may be that child will learn from parents that the day begins with the sign of the cross, or that we end our prayers at bedside with the sign of the cross. “I claim you for Christ.” What does that cross we make so simply mean? Or rather: What does it mean to be a person who identifies myself with a cross traced on my body? How is this a prophetic gesture, telling God’s truth about this world and how we are to live?

There’s one response to that today from Paul in the second reading: “I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10). That sounds like someone who has made the cross his own, who lives as if claimed by Christ. Weakness and insult. Hardship and persecution and constraint. We make the sign of the cross and that’s what we’re signing on for.

Or think of another tiny prophetic deed we do here each Sunday. When the time comes, the bread is broken for holy communion and we come to the table to take the Body and Blood of Christ. The plate that the minister holds does not have large pieces of bread for some and small pieces for others. The thought is absurd! It does not have large pieces for the best donors, or the most active, or the seniors. It is the same for all. And exactly here is the prophetic deed, telling the truth about who we are. The prophetic deed is saying that before God these distinctions of ours don’t matter. In the world we would fashion, all would share and share alike as we do here at this table. And that is a part of this understanding of who I am and who you are and who we are.

Those willing to be so claimed will, like Paul, find ourselves in constant trouble, for there are other claims on us, claims that offer lots more than weakness and insult, hardship and persecution.

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)

Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Year B

The following is an example of how catechesis from and for the liturgy may be done in the Sunday homily. This is written as a homily for August 10, 2003, Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time. This attempt at mystagogical preaching invites the assembly into reflection and conversation on the presence of bread in our midst Sunday by Sunday.

Gabe Huck

Every third year when we are reading through the gospel of Mark Sunday by Sunday, we come to this stretch of five summer Sundays when we detour from Mark’s gospel to John’s gospel. Today we are on the middle Sunday of the five. This detour to John happens when we reach Mark’s telling of how Jesus fed the multitude with bread and fish. That seems to remind the church that John goes on at some length about this event, and so we go the sixth chapter of John and take these five Sundays to read through it.

Listening to the gospel today we may be thinking: Hey, that sounds like what we read last Sunday. It does! A week ago in the gospel Jesus says, “I am the bread of life.” He repeats that in today’s gospel and adds: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.” And next Sunday’s gospel will begin with Jesus repeating those same words. Two Sundays from now, Jesus admits: “This saying is hard!”

The problem for us may be not that “this saying is hard” but that this saying is no longer shocking, amazing, dreadful even. It may not even catch our attention.

Better at getting our attention are the characters we meet these Sundays in the first readings. Two Sundays ago we met Elisha who did his own multiplication of loaves. Last Sunday we had a story of Moses and the manna God provided in the wilderness when the hungry people were about ready to turn back toward Egypt: Better a good dinner as a slave, they said, than dying of hunger in this endless wasteland. Next Sunday the first reading will introduce a feminine image of God. This is Wisdom and she is calling throughout the city for all to come to the table, to eat and to drink what she will provide. Two weeks from now we meet Joshua, who took over leadership after Moses. Joshua confronts the whole assembly with a choice: Will they serve the Lord or serve the old gods of other times and nations? Joshua draws the line and concludes: “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).

Elisha, Moses, Wisdom, Joshua — and with them today’s appearance of Elijah. Here is possibly the most unpopular prophet of them all. Elijah has just been through the great contest where he took on the prophets of the other gods, prophets in the employ of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. Read about it in First Kings 17 and 18. God came through and Elijah won the contest, but also he won the wrath of Jezebel. Now he is on the run from assassins and he is weary in body and spirit and ready to die. Now! “This is enough, O Lord! Take my life!” Loneliness and fear and terror are what his faithful service to the Lord has brought him and he wants no more of it. He falls asleep under a tree, but twice he is awakened by an angel. “Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you!” And there by Elijah’s head is bread and water. So he eats and he drinks and this prophet who came from nowhere and has no following walks off, forty days and forty nights, fasting and alone, to the mountain of God.

Like the hungry people in the wilderness, like all those called to Wisdom’s feast, like the crowd that had come to hear Jesus, Elijah is fed, sustained. “Get up and eat,” the angel tells him. And likewise tells us. Coming every three years to this mix of stories about hunger and food, we can only wonder at our own assembly’s hunger and food. But there is even more to put into this wonder today.

By coincidence, we are here listening to these stories on August 10, the day when the church has for centuries kept the memory of St Lawrence. Who was Lawrence? A deacon in third-century Rome. Legends tell that during a persecution of Christians this Deacon Lawrence was summoned before the court and told to produce the riches of the church. Lawrence went out and returned to the court bringing with him the true riches of the church: the poor and the afflicted for whom he cared. Enraged, this official ordered Lawrence to be roasted to death. That roasting is what makes the good coincidence with our readings about food today. As Lawrence was being roasted alive in the presence of his friends, he tried to ease their grief by shouting out to the guards from the barbeque pit: “You can turn me over, I’m done on this side.” Remember Lawrence the martyr and the patron of cooks, especially when you are doing your grilling outside. And remember him with that last line from Paul’s letter today when Paul says that Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as an offering to God — for a fragrant aroma! There’s another place where Paul says that we are all the sweet aroma of Christ. It’s hard to keep Christians and cooking apart.

Now one text that our church has prayed on the feast of Lawrence puts these words on Lawrence’s lips: “When accused, I did not deny; when asked, I confessed Christ; when roasted, I was thankful.” Legends like this may not be eye-witness accounts, but they have a way of getting to the deepest reality. I did not deny, I confessed Christ, I was thankful. Thus did an obscure deacon for the little Christian community in Rome give us vivid language to talk about what we do here on Sundays.

It should be plain for all to see that when we have gathered and completed some time of listening to and pondering God’s word, we make prayers of intercession and then take up an offering for the poor and the church. Then we approach the table with bread and wine. It should also be plain for all to see that when the table is prepared, this whole assembly stands and with voices and hearts lifted up gives God thanks and praise. No matter what! “When roasted, I was thankful,” Lawrence said. Even then thankful! Lawrence didn’t learn this kind of gratitude, this thankfulness, in the barbeque pit. He learned it around a table like this table. He learned to be thankful in the midst of the assembly as they gave thanks every Lord’s Day and prayed over bread and wine. When we say that we lift our hearts to the Lord, when we say it is right to give God thanks and praise, when we give full attention to the prayer and to our acclamations right up to our Amen, we are rehearsing like Deacon Lawrence. We are understudies to the saints and martyrs, trying to become a people ever giving thanks to God.

Without the Sunday eucharist, how would Lawrence have known, in the face of death, to mock the powers of the earth — mock them! — by bringing forth what he and other Christians saw as true treasures — poor people, people who were nothing in the eyes of the powerful? Where else except at the table did he come to understand that his lot was cast with the Christ who “handed himself over,” who did not claim any privilege — none — but grasped instead at being with the poor and the criminal. And yet this Jesus is the one Paul says was a fragrant aroma. And this is the one who, in John’s gospel today, says: “I am the bread! I am the bread of life! I am the living bread!”

Where are Elijah and Moses and Wisdom, where are Lawrence and the “treasures of the church,” the poor, when we gather at this table Sunday by Sunday? They are right here beside us. And what then engages us all when we gather at this table? Don’t we make a prayer of thanks and praise over these gifts of earth and work of human hands, bread and wine? That prayer begins as we lift up our hearts and continues through to the final Amen before we pray the Our Father. All the stories about bread rattle around in our heads — the living bread, the Elijah loaf, the manna, the sweet table set by Wisdom, Jesus who calls himself living bread — and our own poor bread at this table partakes of all those stories. As Elijah, we take and eat this bread as food for the long journey, the journey of the week ahead, our own forty days and nights walking to Mount Horeb. “Food for the journey” is what the church calls viaticum, being “on the way with you,” when it is our final communion before death. But every time we eat together at this table, it is viaticum, food for the journey.

It is too miserly of us to treat the great thanksgiving prayer as some lengthy setting for the words of institution, “This is my Body . . . This is my blood.” And it is too dull of us to sit back and let the priest do what we may think of as the priest’s thing. Here at the table giving thanks is where Lawrence learned what matters. Here is the thanksgiving that shapes our lives into thanksgiving. Here is the wonder of Elijah’s bread that can sustain our lives on their way. Here is the whole assembly gathered around and partaking of the bread of the poor, getting it into our hearts and heads, our bones and our muscles that this kind of giving thanks, this kind of reverence, this kind of food shared and shared alike, this kind of communal doing and singing and processing, this is what a Christian community looks like — and if we look like it here and now, we can look like it out there and all week.

What we call eucharist is the true deed we do here together. We miss all the wonder when we settle for saying, “This bread is now the body of Christ. This wine is now the blood of Christ.” That is only the shorthand for what is intended, that we who here stand in for the whole world around us, that we are bit by bit becoming that which we here eat and drink, the body and blood of Christ. And if that is so, then we who here give thanks and eat and drink are ourselves taking on the aroma of Christ, which is not simply that of fresh baked bread or hearty wine, but is in fact the aroma — some would stay stench — of the poor like those whom Lawrence loved, the roasted prisoner Lawrence became, the crowded apartment of the barrio, the wasted industrial plants, the hospitals and homes for the aged, poor devastated Iraq. Such an aroma! The aroma of Christ before God.

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)

Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Year B

Our exploration of mystagogical preaching continues. What follows is a homily for September 7, 2003, Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time of Year B. It is also Labor Day weekend and the week of the second anniversary of September 11, 2001. The intent here has been to preach in a way that draws on the assembly’s (including the homilist’s) experience of hearing the Letter of James read through these Sundays, as well as the experiences of being a Sunday assembly and of Labor Day and of September 11.

Gabe Huck

For these several weeks as summer turns to autumn, we are hearing in the second readings the letter of James. Through the centuries many have argued that this piece of writing doesn’t belong in the Bible. Some Christian churches decided to exclude it. The letter itself is only three or four pages long. It is eloquent at times, but it is also harsh and hard to take. But every three years, we who take James’s letter as part of scripture, grit our teeth and open the letter and we read it aloud. We started last Sunday and will be continuing most of September.

We know we’re in trouble when the first line James writes to the church is: “My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy.” Joy? Joy, we might reply, may be what we expect after the trial, a reward for enduring the trial. But for James, joy is the trial itself — and by trials the author is talking about serious afflictions and persecutions. Our letter back to James that might begin: Speak for yourself.

Last week’s reading had James in one of the best known passages: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father,” James writes, “is this: to care for orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained by the world” (James 1:27). Period. James makes it clear: Show me what you do, and I’ll tell you if you are religious or not. Perhaps he had heard what Jesus says in Matthew 25: the judgment before God is going to be about the hungry fed and the prisoners visited and the sick cared for. Period.

Now immediately after telling us how to test true religion, James goes after the problem at hand. This is what we heard today. He writes (in the NRSV translation): “My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?” What a question! We tend to think that what I claim to believe I believe — no matter how I act. James will have none of this and he moves directly to confront us with a question just as valid now as all those centuries ago. What happens, he asks, when you gather on the Lord’s Day and there you all are, and just before the song begins, somebody you don’t know walks in. What if this person is wearing well-tailored, expensive clothing and some costly jewelry? What reaction do you have? Where do your thoughts go? What do you say and what do you expect to happen? So far so good.

Now, James says, what happens in the very same circumstances — the Lord’s Day, all together ready to pray and read scripture — and someone walks in wearing shabby, ill-fitting clothes that have not been washed in months. What reactions do you have? What do you say to this person? What is your instinctive reaction? What do you expect to happen?

Remember: James is trying to make a point about what religion is and is not. So he sets up this situation that anyone in the community might encounter on any given Sunday. We must answer the questions honestly. Do we react in one way to the person who is well dressed and in another way to the person who might have spent the night sleeping in a doorway? If so, says James, then we have made ourselves judges. James chose two persons at different ends of the economic spectrum. He could have used other measures than wealth and dress, but perhaps this difference is the most telling. Wealth and good clothing speak of being comfortable and secure and perhaps powerful. But the threadbare and bad smelling speak of one without comforts, without security, without power. Age to age and continent to continent, that difference persists.

By the accidents of the calendar, the questions James asks become more pointed in our gathering today. We are on the eve of Labor Day in the United States, a day that would never have been invented or needed had there not been haves and have nots. We are part of a society whose powerful media and advertising engines coax us to identify with the haves, with the well-dressed and the celebrities.

Labor Day wasn’t meant to be for saying sweet things about how work is meant to be fulfilling. Labor Day was meant to raise questions about whether we should stomach a lopsided economic system that gives as much to the richest one percent as to the poorest fifty percent — and leaves most of us closer to the poor but holding on to the coattails of the rich. James has a message for us this Labor Day about the rich and the poor and the in-between: “Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be heirs of the kingdom promised to those who love God? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court?” (James 2:6). With lines like these, it is easy to picture James with a bullhorn in his hand. He has some angry, tough questions. He wants us to look at the rich, perhaps including ourselves, and look at the poor, perhaps including ourselves, and get it straight once and for all. Neither rich nor poor are to be dishonored. And neither is one to be honored above the other. Is it possible?

Here are two of many things that this assembly, our whole roomful of baptized people, might try to deal with today and through September as we continue to read the letter of James.

First, we notice that both these characters — the poor person and the rich person — are welcome to walk through the doors in James’s church and in ours. Neither one stays away because of fear of being out of place. If the world outside has rich and poor, if it has men and women, old and young, educated and uneducated, healthy and sick, if it has a spectrum of skin colors, if it has abilities and disabilities — then all those kinds ought to be in our meeting place also. In fact, if this assembly has somehow learned to do without the spectrum of the world outside, then we have already done what James is so adamantly against: we have made distinctions, set ourselves apart. So first we examine ourselves on this: Do we who constitute this assembly look and speak and smell mostly alike? If so, then we’ve made ourselves in the mode of this society so segregated by race and money and age and sexual orientation and educational levels. Where else in our society if not here will all be welcomed alike, poor and rich and in between, old and young and in between, all the spectrum of ability and disability? We are to do something here that seldom gets done today, even in the schools and the jails. There is no more rich or poor, male or female, young or old in the reign of God and that’s what we are trying to gather here.

Second thing James brings home is: The way we act inside this place is like a rehearsal for the way we are going to act outside. Once in the early centuries of the church a teacher, no doubt one familiar with the letter of James, wrote this to the bishop about the gathering of the church on the Lord’s Day: “If the church is all assembled and the room is full and then a poor person arrives and there is no place left for this person, then you, Bishop, give this poor person your own chair even if you have to sit on the floor.” And how then do we think that this bishop is to act in the crowded waiting room of the doctor’s office, or when alerted to the asthma that is spreading among young children in the poor part of the city, or when considering the lopsided distribution of the earth’s resources? If the bishop learned in the house of the church on Sunday morning to give his chair, the very symbol of authority, to a poor person who can find no other place in the room, how will this bishop act all the rest of life?

And so it is with all of us. If when we come here we come wearing whatever we wear but somehow really wearing only the all-alike robe of our baptism, if somehow here we practice treating all alike, treating each one with great respect for each one’s humanity, treating all alike as child of God regardless of gifts and limitations, then what can we expect of ourselves when we are in the doctor’s waiting room, or when we learn about the asthma, or when we consider the horrors of wealth and poverty in the world?

Here we are putting on our baptism, putting on the Lord Jesus Christ. Here we are learning the reverence we are to have for every human being — learning it in how we support one another in song and attentive prayer, in how we walk together all alike in the communion procession, learning it in the way we lift up to the Lord the troubles of all and then together lift up to the Lord our hearts, learning it in the way we embrace one another or grasp hands and speak the word of peace, learning it in the way we eat from the same loaf and drink from a common cup — all alike, whatever our age, our wealth or poverty, our accomplishments or failures, our abilities or disabilities. And it isn’t easy here but we keep coming and we keep trying because most of us will never get it right out there in day-to-day life without the practice and the strength and the skill we gain here.

Now, expect to be put to the test this week. On Thursday, September 11, we will be told we are to leave this gospel stuff at home, told we are not before all else the baptized but the threatened, not the church but part of a fearful citizenry, not servants of all but masters of the world. We will be asked again to draw lines between ourselves and the outsiders, lines that turn into walls and fences. We will be told that indeed, contrary to what James may have ranted about, you can’t treat the rich and the poor the same. Expect to be put to the test. And when we are put to the test this week, together we can remember who we are most truly and finally. We are the people who do in our lives what we rehearse here every Sunday. Expect to be put to the test. Hold on to one another.

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)

Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
Year B

What follows is a homily for October 5, 2003, Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B. It is the day after the feast of Francis of Assisi. The intent is a mystagogical reflection on what it is to bless and to be blessed.

Gabe Huck

In a book about the words and gestures we Christians have to make our daily way from the waking hours to the time of rest, a Colorado mother wrote this about how she would sign each child at night with the sign of the cross on the forehead:

“I began, nearly twenty years ago now, to mark my children with the sign of the cross. Lying in bed, just before sleep, they can feel my thumb as it traces the strokes — now down, now across — of their true shape and rightful belonging. I sign them as I did on the day of their baptism, a first and final blessing.”

She writes also of the years when children begin to leave home for longer journeys, for school trips and summer trips. She would sign their foreheads just as she had done as a night time blessing, but:

“It is my experience that teenagers leaving for rafting trips or orchestra tours do not wish to be signed on the forehead with the cross. They do not wish it as they do not wish to have ‘geek’ printed across their foreheads in red permanent marker. There is a danger of smeared make-up, of oily thumbs on freshly de-oiled skin, of hooking a careful curl and messing up the mousse . . . I have persevered, and so have my teenage children. I have aimed and they have ducked, flinched, grimaced, bobbed and weaved. . . . I have had Mary Margaret close her fingers gently around my upraised wrist and assure me, as one assures those who need to find a hobby, get a job, get a life, put down the knife, ‘Mom, it’s all right.’

“When Abram left for college, the first of our five to leave, he came to me and solemnly, silently, inclined his head. . . . I realized what he was waiting for, what he was asking for: his blessing. And I was at last able to reach forward slowly and make that most graceful of Christian gestures with deliberation and care. ‘Abram,’ I said, ‘go with God. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’ It had been a long time coming, that bending of his stiff, adolescent neck, that inclining of his head toward my hand upraised in blessing. So slowly does the heart turn that we cannot detect the movement. And so little do we trust that we despair of what we cannot see. ‘Eighteen years,’ I lay in bed that night and thought, ‘eighteen years is almost half of my life, and he just now comes to ask for his blessing’ ” (Melissa Nussbaum, I Will Lie Down This Night, LTP, 1995, pages 121–25).

What is this thing we do called blessing? When we assemble here, most of us come into the room and take some water and “bless” ourselves. And before we take leave of one another, we hear: “May almighty God bless us . . .” or some similar words that invoke blessing. What is blessing? What do we mean when we “bless” ourselves or invoke the “blessing” of God in our assembly? What was the mother who told that story doing when she would sign her children at night with the cross, and what was happening when the boy leaving for college bent his head to receive her blessing? Why do some people respond to an “ACHOOO,” with a “God bless you”? What do we imagine when we say each Sunday at our table that Jesus “blessed” the bread, “blessed” the cup before saying, “Take this, all of you, eat. . . . Drink”?

Could one imagine Christianity — or Judaism or Islam — without the notion of blessing? It is fundamental in our scriptures. Think of Jacob wrestling all night with the angel. All night! And finally Jacob has the angel pinned and the angel begs, “Let me go!” But Jacob says, “I will not let you go unless you bless me” (Genesis 32:26). What is blessing? Think of old Moses near the end of the long wilderness time when he blesses the ragged, tired people: “Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the field. Blessed shall be the fruit of your womb, the fruit of your ground, and the fruit of your livestock. Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading-bowl. Blessed shall you be when you come in, and blessed shall you be when you go out” (Deuteronomy 28:3–6). Think of the hymn called Old Hundredth because it is really Psalm 100: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow!” All blessings! Our poetry and song echo this thousands of times as in “Joyful, joyful we adore thee.” There we begin a verse: “Always giving and forgiving, / Ever blessing, ever blest.”

Ever blessing, ever blest. We address this to God. Whatever it is, this blessing we speak of, whatever it means to bless and to be blessed, it seems it has to do always with the very self-giving of God, with peace inside and out that we could never find by ourselves, with the birth and growth of children that are always miracles to us, with the astounding beauty of night or of day, with the great goodness of food and drink. Ever blessing, but also “ever blest” for in the scripture and in our practices, the blessing God does, the blessing that God is, becomes the blessing that we do. We learn from God how to behave toward creation and toward one another. With blessing. Jesus leaves no doubt when he proposes the absurd idea: “Bless those who curse you!” (Luke 6:28). Ever blessing, ever blest. And long before Jesus the people began to speak as if all those who have God’s blessing can do something that seems impossible: They can bless God!

We don’t need a definition of blessing, we know what blessing is from years of living and years of the scripture stories and years of being loved or not, loving or not. Blessing is what God does and what a good parent does. It might be the shortest ever way of saying what you and I are trying to do in this world, this place where we are so often caught up in the opposite of blessing, the curse. Think of the saint the church remembered yesterday, October 4, Francis. As a teenager he got to know first-hand the way of cursing, the way of war, the way the rich have while the poor don’t. But he turned around, opened his eyes, saw that the work of God is blessing and made it his work also. He walked naked from his father’s house, he embraced the lepers and cared for their sores, he taught the killer wolf the way of peace, he went in peace to see the one person whom the whole Christian world called evil itself — the Sultan, and in the Sultan, leader of the Muslim people, he found a gentle and learned soul.

Francis died young, having taught the way of blessing to all who cared to pay attention. Near the end he wrote the canticle we try to make our own: “Be praised, my Lord, for brother sun, for sister moon, for brother wind and sister water.” Francis dared to bless God even for death, for “sister death” who once embraced our Lord Jesus. We may love to put little statues of this good person Francis in our gardens, but have we learned to bless as he blessed? Have we learned that God’s blessing frees us from grasping for more, God’s blessing allows us to abstain and shout “No” when everyone seems set for war, God’s blessing lets us turn away from paying for prisons, and indeed frees us from all anxiety? God’s blessing can make us bold and joyful as Francis.

Think of what we hear in scripture about blessing. Today Genesis has a poem on the lips of delighted Adam when at last, the old story tells it, God succeeds in fashioning a fitting companion. Is not this speech by Adam a blessing of God:

“This one, at last, is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23).

God is blessing Adam, God is blessed by Adam. Ever blessing, ever blest! It is the first love song in our scripture, but it follows the story of creating everything. This whole blessing business started when God blessed the swarms of living creatures and blessed the male and the female. Every day God saw that the creation was good and at the end God even blessed the seventh day and so holiness was in time as well as space.

Jesus does likewise. When his disciples would send the pesky children away, Jesus rebukes them, speaks sternly to them. They, like us, have not been paying attention or they would know better. “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the dominion of God — the kingdom of God, the reign of God — as a little child will never enter it.” That is: My friends, don’t you know this yet? Don’t you know that these children here aren’t a distraction to our lives and our work. They are our lives and our work. And don’t you know yet that we’re not here to dominate the children, but to imitate them? Don’t you see what they are?” And then Jesus showed what the children are, for he took them up in his arms, and he laid his hands on them, and he blessed them. And, almost certainly, they also blessed him.

There is something Jesus does here that we must not miss. He laid his hands on them. This was already for centuries the way human beings honor and bless one another. Not in the violent sense of laying hands on someone, but in the blessing sense. So we do when we anoint the sick, when we confirm, when we scrutinize the catechumens, when we come to the sacrament of penance, when we ordain. And even here, at this table, we have a laying on of hands as we pray for the Holy Spirit to come upon us and the gifts of bread and wine and make them for us the Body and Blood of Christ. It is the same as the mother who writes about the bedside prayer with her children, her blessing each one with the thumb making the sign of the cross on the child’s forehead. So might we do for our children, so might we do for one another in our homes at night and when we must separate for some time from those we love.

Here in the book of our scriptures, here at our table, here in the presence of one another we see that blessing is all around us; we, like God, are ever blessing, ever blest. So we are sent to live the life of the blessed, the life of blessing.

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)

These homilies may be copied and adapted for your own use;
however, they may not be commercially published without permission of the author.