The Incredible Power of Faith
The readings today are really quite simple. They stress the incredible power of faith. In our first reading, the prophet Jeremiah’s warnings to the Jewish people to turn toward God and away from earthly allurements has gotten on the nerves of the rich and powerful of the time. They get approval from a weak and wishy-washy king of Israel to put him into a muddy pit. Jeremiah refuses to relent in his faith in God, and it is the King instead who relents and releases Jeremiah.
In our second reading, the letter to the Hebrews, Paul urges his followers not to lose heart, to remember the suffering Jesus endured for all of us. He asks them in their everyday life to keep their fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith. Paul was to be vindicated, as were his followers. From the few in their ranks was to come a faith that today has a billion followers.
And finally, in our Gospel according to Luke, Jesus reminds us that following him will not be easy, but that the His message of loving God and loving others will be resisted, even cause human division. The peace on earth that Jesus was to establish was a peace first and foremost that begins with each one of us. It is a decision to live our lives in a certain way, forsaking all things if they get in the way of the joy and peace of service-based love.
Now these are all nice words Deacon, you might say. But what does it have to do with us? In our very secular world, do people really live like this? Does faith in God really produce anything?
We have already had our mission appeal so this is not a fundraising homily. But I do want to share with you a story about two humble priests, who answered the call of faith and show its incredible power everyday.
Sixteen years ago, the Soviet Union collapsed. The practice of religion in many forms was permitted once again. In a very distant city in Russia, Vladivostok, on the far southeastern end of a country which is so enormous that it encompasses eleven time zones, two priests from the Midwest, answered the call of an old Catholic woman who asked them to come to Vladivostok and open a cathedral there that had been closed during the Soviet period.
Vladivostok was settled by the Russian navy, which included in its ranks many Catholic seamen from the Catholic parts of the Russian Empire, notably Poland and Lithuania. Before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Catholic cathedral in Vladivostok was home to an archbishop and 15,000 Catholics. Fifteen years later, they were all gone, killed or exiled and the church closed. The last five active members of the parish were shot for conducting a prayer service in the closed cathedral. The brutal suppression of religion was going on throughout the Soviet Union. During the Soviet period, over 100,000 priests and religious were murdered, the greatest number of martyrs for the faith in the history of any country. Religious practice was practically annihilated.
When the two Catholic priests Father Myron and Father Daniel arrived in Russia in 1992, there were eight parishioners, people who were children when the parish was closed by Soviet authorities in the early 1930s. The two priests did not know Russian, and had borrowed $1,000 from Father Daniel’s mother to establish themselves in Russia. And because of the effects of Soviet anti-religious repression, a country that was once over 90% Christian has a population in which only one-half of one percent actively practices any religion, Christian or non-Christian. These two priests must have felt a little like Jeremiah in our first reading, being lowered into a pit of despair with little hope for success.
Now brothers and sisters, we can read about the power of faith as we have in today’s readings. Your humble deacon can stand up here and flap his jaws about it. But the faith of Father Myron and Father Daniel, these two Apostles to Russia, really is faith. From the humble mustard seed of faith these two priests planted sixteen years ago has come a budget of $800,000, a parish of 500, feeding programs for the homeless and poor elderly, youth instruction and ministry, crisis pregnancy centers, nursing home care, medicine deliveries for those who are too indigent or sick to leave their dilapidated hovels. Moreover, from a parish of 500 faithful Catholics have come nine vocations to the priesthood and religious life. If only every group of 500 Catholics around the world produced nine vocations to the priesthood and religious life.
As you many of you know, I perform mission work on behalf of the Mary Mother of God Mission in Vladivostok as it is called. I have helped out in the Mission’s social justice ministries and I do speaking on their behalf at parishes in the United States. I know Father Myron and Father Daniel pretty well. Once when I asked them what gave them the inspiration to build up the body of Christ in a most challenging environment, their response was the same. We believed that if Christ wanted us to be there, good things would happen.
Amazing. These two priests have indeed kept their eyes on the prize. And that prize is the loving example of Jesus, who faced similar long odds in trying to get people to change the way they lived, to reach the poor and repressed, to show love of God and others by the way He lived.
Now I don’t expect any of you to rush off to Russia this morning and pitch in. I am not even asking for money. Rather, I hope my message is this. It is the kind of faith that these two priests exhibited that unleashed its loving power. And we too can have this kind of faith in God. We need only ask God to help us share in the enormous force of faith that builds up slowly, one person at a time beginning with us, the Body of Christ. It is this kind of faith that helps us to believe that humanity, despite all the challenges and setbacks, really is moving closer to God.
And it is this kind of faith that leads us, in the ways Jesus asks of us, through prayer, Scripture, sacrament, and service to add our own efforts to the incredible power of faith by the way we live. Whatever our station in life, let us pray that we use the gifts we have received from God and pass on the love that has been given to us.