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homily

Three Young Women

Fifth Sunday of Easter — Revelation 21:1-5; John 13:31-35

Behold, Jesus says, “I make all things new.”

Last weekend I was in Grand Rapids, Michigan for a conference, and on Saturday I was able to go downtown to the Cathedral, the Cathedral of Saint Andrew.

And I stumbled into a wedding: a handsome young Hispanic man, and a lovely young Hispanic woman, standing at the altar beneath the high, vaulted ceilings. The wedding was in Spanish, so I couldn’t understand what was being said, but to me there seemed to be something really beautiful and dignified about it, especially at the end, when the people gathered on the steps outside and waited for the bride and groom to come through the doors.

Marriage is a sacrament, as truly as ordination is a sacrament, which is to say that Christ is truly present in the love between a man and a woman, on their wedding day and every day.

And when they did, walking slowly down the steps, beaming, the woman in her flowing white dress with her flowing white veil, the crowd slowly parted for her, almost reverently, and then the people lined up to embrace her, one by one, as if they were receiving a blessing.

As they were. It was very like the tradition of people coming up for a blessing from a newly ordained priest. And that makes sense. That’s right. Marriage is a sacrament, as truly as ordination is a sacrament, which is to say that Christ is truly present in the love between a man and a woman, on their wedding day and every day.

April 24, 2016

Homily

Breakfast at Epiphany’s

Second Sunday of Lent; Luke :1-13

Lord of all ordinariness, Lord of all miracle, transform us, transfigure us, make us your own!

February is the shortest month of course but to me it always feels like the longest. It’s still winter but I can’t wait for spring. One gray day follows another. Everything is ragged and muddy and tired.

And my big temptation in moments like this is to start eating, especially sweet things, or to collapse on the couch and watch TV all day, especially something with spaceships, or to go online and start buying things, especially shiny things. I don’t want to face reality. I don’t want to face myself.

I don’t want to face reality. I don’t want to face myself.

I think what’s amazing about Jesus in the temptation in the wilderness in last week’s readings is how willing he is to accept how boring life can be. The devil is really saying, let’s do something exciting, let’s distract ourselves from this ordinary reality, and Jesus can, of course. He’s God himself, full of power and miraculous potential. Why not just go ahead and zap something, turn a rock into a loaf of bread, if only to relieve the tedium?

But Jesus knows that miracles are not the point. However many rocks get turned into loaves, you still have to face your own limitations and needs, you still have to act with compassion, you still have to get up in the morning and go to work.

February 20, 2016

Homily

What Words Are Worth

Third Sunday In Ordinary Time – Nehemiah 8:2-10; Luke 4:14-21

Every word was precious.

Imagine if every book in the world cost $50,000. A $100,000.

Imagine if every piece of paper cost $100—if every email and text cost a $100 to send, or to read.

Our behavior would change. We’d be a lot more careful with our words. We’d only write down what was really important and we’d pay a lot more attention to what other people write.

And this is the way it was in the ancient world. We think the people of the past were like us, and they were, fundamentally, but in some ways they were very different, and they were very different when it came to reading and writing.

Not only didn’t they have the internet, they didn’t have the printing press. The printing press wasn’t invented until the 15th century, and so books were not mass produced and were not affordable. It took a whole year to copy out a book onto a scroll like the scrolls Ezra reads from in the reading today and Jesus reads from in the synagogue–they were 30, sometimes 35 feet long–it took a whole year for someone to write out a scroll like that, by hand, and so a whole year’s wages.

Books were rare. You couldn’t own them yourself. You had to come to hear them read aloud, the way we come to a movie theatre—that’s what the word “read” means in Hebrew and in Greek: to proclaim aloud. Reading was centralized, it was a public event, and the texts being read aloud were of the greatest possible value because only what really mattered was committed to parchment. Every word was precious.

January 21, 2016

Homily

Ordinary Time

First Week in Ordinary Time – Mark 1:14-20

We are each given a mission, we are each given a task, and none is more important than any other.

I like it when Ordinary Time starts again. When we put away the Christmas things and the days slowly get longer and I go back to teaching and back into my routine. I like going back to my nets: sitting and mending them and then going out onto the water to fish and make a living. This is what I do, what we do.

I wonder about the fisherman Jesus didn’t call that day. Maybe they were paying attention and maybe they were ready to follow him. Maybe they heard the message, too, or felt the transforming power of this person as he went walking by, but they weren’t chosen to be disciples in that way. They were chosen to remain fishermen, to mend their nets and live their lives.

We are each given a mission, we are each given a task, and none is more important than any other. The fishermen who stayed behind were not less holy than Simon and Andrew and James and John. We know from the rest of the gospel how bumbling and uncertain and erratic those men could be, just as we can be bumbling and uncertain ourselves. We know how when we’re fishing or at night when we come home we have moments of joy and insight, and opportunities to act with kindness and justice, or not.

The fishermen who remained behind, if they were living their lives fully and honestly, and praying, and paying attention, they were following Jesus, too. We all have our nets, and we can get entangled in them or we can lower them for the catch and we can feed others.

We all have our nets, and we can get entangled in them or we can lower them for the catch and we can feed others.

Today, Lord, as we go about our work, as we go about our lives, may we do your will and follow where you lead and may we believe we are doing your will and we are following you, even in the most ordinary of our tasks, even in the most ordinary work we do. For you are with us always. You are always calling us: deeper and deeper into the ordinary mystery of things.

January 11, 2016

Homily

The Spiritual Success of the Universe

January 5, 2016 – Funeral homily for Janet Gihl

No one is more important than anyone else. Everyone is beloved.

Janet taught English, among the other things she did–she was a well-read, literate person– and though we never talked about it, I think she must have known George Eliot’s great nineteenth century novel, Middlemarch, and its famous last sentence, one of the great sentences in all of literature. It’s about the heroine of the novel:

“The effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.“

Janet could give the appearance of meekness, and she was a quiet woman, with a quiet, halting voice, and like George Eliot and her heroine she was a woman in a man’s world—George Eliot was the pseudonym of a woman named Mary Evans. But like Mary Evans Janet was fiercely intelligent, and she had a generosity of spirit, and an open-mindedness. She was deeply grounded in theology and in Vatican II especially, and she brought the spirit and the mission of Vatican II to all of her teaching and her ministry over the years, and in her work as the director of religious education at St. Mary’s and in her work with RCIA and in all her relationships with people, she had this diffusive effect on those around her.

January 5, 2016

Homily

Love Serves

Feast of the Holy Family – 1 John 3:1-24; Luke 2:41-52

There are two famous sinners whirling around in a whirlwind in Dante’s Inferno. Their names are Paolo and Francesca. Francesca was married to Paolo’s brother, but she and Paolo had an affair, her husband caught them and killed them, and now they’re whirling around in hell together, on the level of the lustful.

And some readers over the years have condemned Dante for this, for putting lovers in hell. They’ve thought Dante is opposed to love and to spontaneity and to people being happy. But the thing about Francesca is that she only talks about herself. She’s beautiful, but she only talks about her own feelings, and she never mentions Paolo by name. She doesn’t even look at him, she’s looking away, and the eyes are key in Dante.

When in the beginning of the poem Dante’s beloved Beatrice looks down from heaven and sees he’s in trouble, wandering in the dark forest, she really sees him, really cares about him. Her eyes are focused on him. And then she sends the poet Virgil to guide Dante on this long journey and Virgil is always looking Dante in the eye and studying the expressions on his face, his eyes are always fixed on him, and that’s the image of what love really is.

Paolo and Francesca aren’t in hell because they loved each other. They’re in hell because they didn’t.

December 27, 2015

Homily

Trusting the Light and Facing the Darkness

Second Sunday of Advent – Zephaniah 3:14-18; Isaiah 12:6; Philippians 4:1-7; Luke 3:10-18

The readings today are full of commands. Do this, don’t do that. And one of them is really hard, I think, really unfair: “Shout for joy, O daughter Zion!” Zephaniah instructs us. “Sing joyfully.” And Isaiah: “sing praise, shout with exultation.” And Paul: “rejoice in the Lord always . . . Have no anxiety at all.”

What if I don’t feel like it?

And what about all the many reasons there are for anxiety in the world?

Can the people in Paris rejoice? In San Bernardino? In Roseburg?

John the Baptist is a lot more reasonable in what he tells us to do, because he tells us how to act, not how to feel. I like how specific he is, and how modest, how proportional: don’t give away all your clothes, just your extra cloak. Don’t give away all your food, just share what you have. Don’t quit your job and become a monk but do your job better and more fairly, not collecting more taxes than you should, not extorting or falsely accusing.

In a way the fact that these instructions are so doable makes them harder to dismiss. We don’t have to be spiritual heroes to do these things, just good people. So what’s our excuse?

But still: there’s nothing mystical here, and nothing abstract. These are things we can do.

December 13, 2015

Homily

What I’ve Learned from My Son, the Veteran

Veterans Day – Luke 17:11-19

I am not a veteran. I never served in the military. But I am the father of a veteran, of a combat veteran, and I think of him on this Veterans Day, which also happens to be the memorial of St. Martin of Tours, who was also a soldier.

Our oldest son, John, joined the Army National Guard and then was sent to Iraq and into combat. He and his unit were assigned to patrol the major supply route south of Baghdad, at night, getting shot at by Iraqis and returning fire and capturing those they could. Their base was repeatedly mortared. There were roadside bombs.

John came back more or less in one piece physically, though he has chronic problems with his shoulders and back, but he was a changed man interiorly, deeply changed, and this is what I want to praise today, this deep reorientation.

November 10, 2015

Homily

We Are One

Ordinary Time – Romans 8:12-17; Lk 13:10

Saturday Barb and I went up to the Cathedral for Deacon Michael’s ordination, which was really moving. It was especially moving to see his son, Monsignor Cihak, vesting his father in the deacon’s dalmatic.

And afterwards we walked about a mile to see an aunt I’ve not seen for many years. We’ve just fallen out of touch. But we’ve been corresponding lately, and it turns out she lives in a senior apartment house about a mile away, so Barb and I walked down the city streets, beneath the fall trees, on a lovely, cool, sunny afternoon. We stopped at a coffee shop along the way. We looked up at those narrow houses, like wooden brownstones. There was just this real Portland feeling, and seeing my aunt again was wonderful. She’s a lovely woman, very sharp and clear, as she always has been, and as we talked about my mother and father and my grandfather and grandmother, and my uncle and cousins, I could feel the spirit moving in me, as I could feel the spirit moving that whole afternoon.

I mean I could feel my own spirit moving, my own self, my own personality, but as it was moving I believe the Holy Spirit was moving, too, because the Holy Spirit, as St. Paul says today, “bears witness with our spirit,” it is one with us, with our best selves, and what it bears witness to is that we “are children of God,” and that if we suffer with him we will also be “glorified with him,” and in a way I could feel that glory that afternoon.

God is in us and in the world, and we know him in our joy.

As Paul says in the fifth chapter of Galatians, there are nine fruits of the spirit, “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control.” Feelings come and go, of course, and we don’t just know God in our feelings. We know him through our reasoning. We know him through scripture and through the Church and the sacraments. But when we feel love like this, and joy like this, and peace like this, that’s a sign, that’s a gift, that’s a call—not a call to anything in particular, necessarily, not an obvious voice, but a call to awareness, a call to just being, to being fully alive in the world. A call to faith.

This is Christ, this is Jesus, resurrected and ascended and infused now through everything that happens.

God is in us and in the world, in the city streets and the fall leaves and a visit to our aunt, in our present and our past, in the ordination of a good man and a conversation with a good woman, in you and in me and in all things, because we are not just the children of our parents, we are God’s children, and we are loved, we are cared for, and no one ever dies. We are one.

All praise.

October 26, 2015

Homily

Joy and Death: A Memorial Homily

Memorial Service, Jerry Liddell

Sometimes in the midst of our sadness and our busyness there are quiet moments of joy. We wake up early and walk outside and the stars are shining in the morning sky. We hear the voice of someone we love, calling from another room.

Or maybe like Jerry we’re helping someone with a computer or we’re taking care of our daughter or we’re just staying home and going about our routines and for a moment we feel happy and free. We feel like ourselves. We are fully alive.

This is what heaven is like and in fact this is why we believe in heaven. Because we’ve glimpsed it, here and now. We believe in the afterlife because we believe in this life.

When we get to heaven we will recognize it.

October 12, 2015

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