to celebrate today’s Feast of St. Lawrence, a deacon, here are 2 homilies:
Who Do You Say You Are? – John 12:24-26; The Feast of St. Lawrence
If President Obama summoned you to the White House and said, bring me all the riches of the Church, bring me all the Church’s wealth, what would you bring him?
Would you bring him all the art and all the stained glass?
Would you bring him the Catechism?
Would you bring him the Eucharist?
What do you think is most important about the Church, most defining?
We’re always talking about the Church. We’re always saying this about it or that. But what are we talking about really? What do we think the Church really is?
Here’s what St. Lawrence did in the fourth century—St. Lawrence, one of the early deacons–when the Emperor of Rome summoned him and demanded all the riches of the Church in Rome.
He went out and rounded up all the poor and the sick and the lame, and he took them and brought them to the palace, and he said to the Emperor, here, here is the wealth of the Church. And he meant it. He wasn’t joking. And for this he was martyred, roasted on a spit.
We’re always talking about the Church. We’re always saying this about it or that. But what are we talking about really? What do we think the Church really is?
Or say you’re at a dinner party with some people you don’t know very well and you’re making small talk the way we do. You’re telling each other what you do for a living and where you live and that kind of thing. There’s always a subtle element of competition in these moments. We’re always trying to assert ourselves, make ourselves look good.
So what do we talk about? Who do we say we are?
We can’t brag about our acts of charity, of course, or about our great spiritual poverty, because that would be an example of spiritual pride. Those things have to remain secret. But what are we feeling in that moment? What’s happening to us interiorly? Do we allow ourselves to be defined by our income or our possessions or our profession or our accomplishments? Do we subtly try to work into the conversation our latest triumphs? The important people we know? The important person we are?
What do we think deep down is our own true value? Our own true worth?
The pattern of the Christian life is the opposite of the pattern of the life of the world. What is up for others is down for us. What is down for others is up for us. What should define us is our hiddenness and our obscurity.
“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains a just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” Which is to say we have to fall to the ground. We have to die. It’s to say that the pattern of the Christian life is the opposite of the pattern of the life of the world. What is up for others is down for us. What is down for others is up for us. What should define us is our hiddenness and our obscurity. What should guide us is not ego and pride but listening and compassion.
Sitting at that dinner party we should be at peace inside. Because we know who we really are. We are the seed. We are the pearl beyond all price. We are loved by God, infinitely, as is everyone else around the table, everyone else. We are all the Church and we are all the riches of the Church.
God is in the Details – John 12:24-26; Feast of St. Lawrence, August 10th
I’ve been in a couple of situations lately—once with a couple getting married and once with the family of a man who had died and were planning his memorial—and in both these conversations people were telling me not to mention Jesus too much. They wanted a wedding, they wanted a memorial, but they didn’t want anything too Christian and they didn’t want anything that would offend other people.
They wanted the liturgy to be generic and inoffensive—as if Christ is offensive, as if Jesus Christ Our Lord and Master is somehow to be avoided and apologized for if mentioned at all.
And I don’t want to judge these people. They’re good people and they’re trying to do the right thing. They just don’t have enough experience with Christianity to really know what they’re talking about.
And of course I listened and tried to reassure them, and of course at both the wedding and the memorial I mentioned Jesus again and again, because Jesus is the way and the truth and the light, and there’s nothing generic or nonspecific about him, and without him I am nothing and we are nothing, and it was all fine anyway, as I knew it would be, no one objected, because at the mention of the name of Jesus what people actually end up feeling is a sense of his goodness and his rightness and his authority and his gentleness.
We can’t get to the summit if we don’t take a path, and there’s a fair amount of suffering involved in that, there’s some day-to-day dying, because we have to confront the mundane reality and everyday sinfulness of a church when we join it, churches being no better than we are, churches being human institutions whatever else they are.
I think people don’t want to die. I don’t want to. I think we don’t want to sacrifice ourselves and give up our freedom or take risks, and the problem with that is that if a seed doesn’t die and fall into the ground it remains just a seed. It has to be planted. It has to be committed, and it has to stay in one place—within a tradition, in a particular garden, a particular field—and people in that tradition have to stay in it for a long time and be nurtured and grow day in and day out before they can blossom and then bear fruit. We can’t grow if we’re not planted. We can’t get to the summit if we don’t take a path, and there’s a fair amount of suffering involved in that, there’s some day-to-day dying, because we have to confront the mundane reality and everyday sinfulness of a church when we join it, churches being no better than we are, churches being human institutions whatever else they are.
Which brings us to St. Lawrence, a saint I think a lot about and am challenged by and inspired by because he was a deacon in the ancient church, and a deacon who did sacrifice himself and did fall into the ground and did die, and then rose, in the spirit. He didn’t worry about offending anyone. He did offend someone, the emperor, and that got him killed, and he knew it would.
(Lawrence was roasted on a grill, slowly, over a fire–which is why—I’m not kidding—he is now the Patron Saint of Bakers.)
(At one point as he was being burned, according to tradition, he said, turn me over. I’m done on this side.)
St. Lawrence wasn’t dying for some general idea. He wasn’t dying for some vague feeling. He was dying for a specific man who himself died, and rose, and in his person and in his selfhood embodied the greatness of God in human, approachable terms—who was never too good for the ordinary, who came into the world through a specific tradition, a specific religion—I mean Jesus now—Jesus who wasn’t spiritual but not religious but was only spiritual through the Jewish religion, and who calls us to be both spiritual and religious, too: religious in the sense of committed to the real and ordinary world of people and details day-to-day, and spiritual in the sense of always seeing through those details the higher reality of God.
A God we can die for, a God we have to die for, a specific God, a particular God, because that God died for us.
St. Lawrence wasn’t dying for some general idea. He wasn’t dying for some vague feeling. He was dying for a specific man who himself died, and rose, and in his person and in his selfhood embodied the greatness of God in human, approachable terms.
Let us pray for the grace to be as clear as St. Lawrence and as free as St. Lawrence and as brave as St. Lawrence. Let us all pray to be good deacons, true servants, free of our self- consciousness and free of our fear. Let us be as fierce as Lawrence was. As confident. As unafraid.
Through Christ Our Lord, amen.