Fr. Rick Spicer

This weekend our country is celebrating its independence. We love America but the path our country is on is troubling, to say the least.  Many who have followed the Supreme Court, for example, have accepted its decision on abortion, arguing that it is a right to be defended, thus allowing the Supreme Court to decide whether a human being exists within a mother’s womb or not. Many people seem to think that the Supreme Court is superior to the law of God, ignoring the reality that what is legal isn’t always moral. 

It is as though the Supreme Court is correct if the majority of its justices agree on something.  People forget that four years before the Civil War the Supreme Court defined slaves as pieces of property rather than human beings.  That was the Dred Scott Decision.

We should be concerned not just for the institutions of our country, but for those who accept as true and good whatever path our nation chooses.  There appears to be no limit to the absurdity promoted by those in power at times. We need to pray for the leaders of our country, and at the same time, we need to pray for the courage to stand firm for God, to fight for morality, to fight for Jesus Christ and for His Way. Doing so is no easy task.

Jesus concluded the Beatitudes in the Gospel of Matthew with: “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you, and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.  Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”  Matthew 5:11-12.  

We live this beatitude every day when we stand up for what is right and moral. We stand up for all life from conception to natural death, speaking out against sins such as racial prejudice, capital punishment, and euthanasia along with abortion. We are reviled and insulted by those who don’t consider God’s presence in the world.  We stand up for charity to the poor and are mocked by those who claim that the Bible supports their perverse laws and tactics.  

This is nothing new.  2,500 years ago, God told Ezekiel to proclaim the truth to a rebellious people, even though they would reject him.  That was this Sunday’s first reading. 2,000 years ago, people refused to accept the Messiah of God when He stood before them in his hometown synagogue because Jesus did not fit their pre-conceived notion of what the Messiah should be like.  “He shouldn’t be one of us,” they argued, taking offense at what he said.

If the prophets were ignored and if Jesus was disregarded, then how can we expect people to listen to us when we proclaim God’s way?  We are certainly no better than Paul who tells us about his weakness in our second reading.  We are also weak.  And we do dumb things. We sin and yet we ask people to listen to us, turn away from sin and put Christ into the center of their lives. Do we really have a right to even attempt to do this?  Yes.  In fact, we have more than a right.  By virtue of our baptism, we are expected to lead others to God.  We need to call others to Christ knowing that if they hear our call and follow Christ it will because Jesus worked though us, despite our weakness.

We need to keep putting up the fight to follow Jesus and know that He will work through us, sometimes, despite our shortcomings.  “My grace is sufficient for you,” the Lord told St. Paul.  “My power is made perfect in your weakness.”   (2 Cor 12:9). He is saying that to us as well.

People with the will and power to protect their privileges will reject and silence their prophets. Just look at Ezekiel, Paul, Jesus, Martin Luther King and a host of others, including Archbishops Oscar Romero and Raymond Hunthausen. They all allowed the Spirit to work through them.

The work of God is accomplished not because of you or me with all our faults and shortcomings.  The work of God is accomplished because we allow God to use us to bring His blueprint for living to the world.

 If we want our country to survive, we must not allow anything to limit our battle for Christ.  That includes what others think about us and what we think about ourselves.  It does not matter if others think less of us because we reject the immorality of many elements of our society.  The society that matters to us is the Kingdom of God.  It does not matter if we appear to be a minority either.  Jesus never promised us that ours would be the majority opinion. He just promised us that He would be with us until the end of time. 

Today’s readings sum up what God expects of us. We are Americans but we are also Catholics, following Jesus Christ.

We love our country and we pray for our country. But what matters more in the long run is that we love and seek to build the Kingdom of God, our pathway to eternal life. It is our responsibility as committed Catholics and as patriotic Americans to lead the United States to be one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. 

Before Vatican II we sometimes heard a sermon instead of a homily.  A sermon could be whatever the preacher wanted to talk about while a homily has to be a reflection on the readings or the Mass. A sermon I recall from my childhood days was delivered one hot muggy Sunday morning.  After reading the gospel, the pastor simply said, “If you think it is hot in here, remember it is hotter in hell.”  

We have no clue what hell will be like. Many imagine hell to be a flaming inferno while others presume hell to be cold and barren like the surface of Mars.  Whatever hell is doesn’t matter. What matters is that God won’t be there but the devil will be, along with those who “belong to his company.”

Likewise, we don’t know what heaven will be like, yet we believe that in the end our destiny will be one of these two places. We ultimately decide where we will spend eternity. One moment we may very much want to be with God and our loved ones in heaven. The next moment, we could be lured by the devil to turn away from God and commit a grave sin.

The readings deal with death, sin and immortality. Hardly a day goes by without being reminded that death can come at any time. Because death is often dreaded, even Jesus sidesteps the matter when he insists that the girl was asleep, not dead.

When expressing their condolences, some people say that a person’s death must be God’s will. To say that suggests that God does evil things. As the Book of Wisdom tells us, God did not make death nor does God rejoice in the destruction of the living. Rather, God formed us to be imperishable; we have the capability to transcend mortality and live forever with God. As we heard, death entered the world by the envy of the devil. Consequently, all creatures do die. Yet God created us with the innate desire to live forever and ever.  Yes, life is precarious but we know that death is not the end but our transition to eternal life.

Being omnipotent, God knows everything, but obviously doesn’t control all things since we have free will. While God knows the moment of our death, God does not set its time or manner, fate does. Countless accidents and mass shootings convince me that God does not decide how we will die.

In the gospel we found a child grasping for life. We would do the same if we were in her situation. Who among us if seriously ill wouldn’t chase after every means, medically and spiritually, to be healed? Would we go the extra mile that Jairus, her father, did? He had faith that Jesus would heal his daughter. A faith that saves is based on the act of coming to Jesus even in the face of public ridicule. Faith in who Jesus is and what he can do prompted Jairus to act, giving him the courage to approach Jesus utterly convinced that he could indeed cure his daughter.

Jairus’ humble petition made visible the faith to which others, including us, are being called. Simply put, faith is the act of actively seeking Jesus. Faith is based on the Latin word for trust. Do we trust Jesus to be there in our time of need? Jairus did and that saved his daughter. So do many who seek to be anointed when they are ill or facing surgery.

Death, debilitating illnesses, and chronic medical conditions shatter any illusion of our control over life. The tenuousness and fragility of life prompts us to follow the example of Jairus to turn to Jesus with nothing but utter faith. Do we have the faith to touch and be touched by Jesus when the need arises?

When we turn to Jesus for healing, what he offers may not always be what we are seeking. Our illness may not be cured, but we receive the grace to live with it. Some day, we will take our last breath and cross the threshold of death. When we do, what lies ahead? If we are seeking Jesus, our faith teaches us that heaven awaits us and he will say to us, “I say to you, arise!” By seeking Jesus, we transcend our mortality to live forever in his presence.  When that happens, we will praise Jesus for rescuing us from the bleakness of hell.

On the other hand, if we aren’t consciously seeking Jesus, allowing our faith to become complacent, we might find ourselves numbered among those in the company of the devil. Before we give into the devil’s sly message that God doesn’t care, we must recall the assuring words of Jesus, “Do not be afraid, just have faith,” for he, not the devil, assures us we will live forever.

St. Ignatius provides us with useful advice: “We must work as if everything depends on us, but we must pray as if everything depends on God.”

An elderly woman named Maude had a window seat on a big 747 that had just taken off for Rome. She had been saving for years to fulfill her dream to visit the Eternal City. But this was her first flight and she was terrified. Even the stately presence of four bishops sitting behind her didn’t help. With fear and trembling, she peeked out the window just as one of the plane’s engines broke loose from the wing and disappeared into the clouds. “We’re going to die!” she cried out, “We’re going to die!”

The pilot then announced that everything was under control and that they could fly back to New York with three engines and land safely. But Maude continued to cry out, “We’re going to die!” A flight attendant finally said to her, “Don’t worry my dear. God is with us. We have only three engines, but look, we have four bishops.” Maude replied, “I’d rather have four engines and three bishops, thank you!”

Judging by the crowds at the airport on any given day, fear of flying isn’t common but fear itself is something we can all relate to. One of the most memorable lines ever spoken by President Franklin Roosevelt dealt with fear. In his first inaugural address on March 4, 1933, he said, “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, nameless, unreasoning terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

The gospel scene from Mark places us in the midst of a storm on the Sea of Galilee. The disciples were terrified and for good reason. These storms could come literally out of the blue with terrifying suddenness, much like tornados do in the Deep South and Midwest. You might have thought what fools these men were to go out but keep in mind that all was calm when they embarked to go to the other side.

In this short passage, Mark portrays them as being so afraid that they asked Jesus, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” Perhaps you have asked God the same question, when you were in a crisis situation, wondering if your misfortune is God’s will. God is omnipotent but God doesn’t decide the events of our lives. They are byproducts of free will, either the choices we make or others make.

After quieting the storm, Jesus asked them, “Why are you terrified? Do you not yet have faith?” What an interesting question. “Do you not yet have faith?” They had been with him for some time and seen some miracles, so we can assume that they had faith but perhaps their faith was tired.

The disciples were in danger but their most dangerous threat wasn’t the weather or a leaky boat. It was the temptation to give up and yield to fear. It was that “nameless, unreasoning terror which paralyzes” that FDR spoke of. Fear has the potential to incapacitate us. Unless something overrides it, fear can shut us down.

And what might that something be? As far as Mark is concerned, Jesus is that something that can free us from whatever fears we have, just as he did for the disciples in the midst of that storm “to convert retreat into advance.”

In the 35 years I have been a priest, I have weathered a fair number of storms and I imagine many couples have done the same in their marriages, be it dealing with the loss of job, the death of a loved one, a life-changing illness or injury, rejection of some kind, to name but a few. In any case, you can probably relate to Job in his despair or to the disciples in their fear. Each time, you somehow reacted to the situation. Did you panic? Or did you pray? And if you prayed, did you feel as though God was responding? More than once, people have lamented that praying seemed so useless. God isn’t answering me!

I would tell them that quite likely God is answering them but not in the way they want their prayers to be answered. Prayer is a conversation and if we are to hear God, then we need to be still long enough so that we can hear God. Recall that Jesus said, “Quiet! Be still!” Too often we do all the talking when we pray. In times of trouble, the best advice we have is this: be still and listen to God. With the TV blasting in the background or our ears linked to an iPod or Airpods, we aren’t giving ourselves much chance to hear what God has to say. The clatter of our noisy world drowns out God’s quiet whisper but when we take time to quiet down, we will discover for ourselves that God is truly there.

St. Theresa of Calcutta once said, “The fruit of silence is prayer, the fruit of prayer is faith” With faith, no trouble is too much for God to handle. That is the point Jesus and Job were both making in these readings. With faith, grounded in prayer, “no storm,” as the refrain to one song puts it, “can shake my inmost calm while to that rock I’m clinging.”

Fifty years ago, I was awakened by a fire while staying with a friend, so I can relate to the fear of a young boy trapped in his burning house. His father stood on the lawn with his outstretched arms, yelling, “Jump, son! I will catch you!” All the boy could see from the second floor was smoke, flames and blackness. Naturally, he was afraid. “Jump!” his father said again. “But, Daddy, I can’t see you!” His father replied, “But I can see you and that is all that matters.” God sees us and that is all that matters.

Just as a seed transforms into a mature plant, Jesus envisions us being transformed as one of his followers, recognizing the presence of God’s kingdom in our midst.

These readings aren’t intended to be a lesson in gardening.  They are about building up the kingdom of God. The seed planted in us at our baptism has the potential to transform us into seeing how we can do our part to bring about the kingdom of God. Like with any seed you plant, that takes patience. One doesn’t become a saint overnight any more than an infant can go from babbling “mama” to talking eloquently.

With parables, Jesus uses seeds to describe the kingdom of God that becomes visible when we realize our own potential to do what we are called to do as disciples of Jesus, namely living out our baptismal promises. So what are we to do? In a nutshell, we hear God’s word, nurture it in the fertile soil of our hearts, and then allow it to sprout forth as good works.

For God’s kingdom to come, a kingdom of justice, love, and peace, each of us has a role to play.  God gives us the grace to make a difference. We may feel inadequate for the task yet to plant even one seed of truth or justice can make a difference. Often times we act quietly in ways that will leave a lasting impression on others. If we think anything we can do is too insignificant to change people’s attitudes or if we think that anything we can do is too insignificant to bring some one closer to God, we are missing the practical message of today’s readings.

Let me tell you about Josephine. She was in third grade when her family moved to California. Everyday she rode the bus to school.  When the bus dropped her off at home, her brother would be waiting for her. Although he was older than her, Jimmy didn’t go to school.

The other kids on the bus would laugh when they saw him because they could see that he was different. He looked and acted differently from other kids. When Josephine got off the bus, he would jump up and run to meet her. Josephine didn’t seem at all embarrassed although she knew the kids on the bus were having a great time laughing at her. She would greet her brother and hug him. Hand in hand the two of them would march into the house.

Even as a little girl she had learned a very human lesson on love. It took time for the others on the bus to learn, but toward the end of the school year they no longer mocked Josephine and her brother. Eventually they began to show a little kindness and compassion, waving at them from the bus.

When anyone would ask Josephine about her brother, she would simply say that he was retarded and would never be like other kids, but he was her brother and she loved him. The daily image of Josephine embracing her brother and the evolving reaction of the kids on the bus remained a lasting impression on those students. Else you would not have heard this story, which was shared by one of them who is forty years later. I daresay that what Josephine did for her brother certainly influenced that woman.  Years earlier she received a tiny seed planted by Josephine that enabled her to become more caring and compassionate toward others.

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “No man has learned to live until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity…In order to love creatively and meaningfully, our self-concern must be wedded to other-concern.”

Jesus told us that the kingdom of God is like a seed. That seed is the kindness we do, the worship we share in, our conversations around the dinner table or over a cup of coffee, the soup taken to a sick neighbor, the decision to put the family first. The seed prompts us to be sensitive to minorities and those of different ethnic groups.  The seed is living out the commandments by what we say and do.

I doubt that I would be standing here a few weeks shy of celebrating my 35^thanniversary of ordination if some people, including my parents, had not impressed me by their example and their convictions. Nor would I be here if I did not believe that I could do the same for others, quietly inviting them to confront the evil and prejudice in our midst with deeds of love, respect and compassion.

The kingdom of God isn’t what many expected then nor was Jesus the messiah they expected. Today that reaction happens when the message of a homily isn’t what some expect even though its intent is to bring the kingdom of God one step closer to reality when evil is confronted.

Paul raised the point that we will all appear someday before the judgment seat of Christ and that each of us will receive recompense for what we have done, whether good or evil. What we do in this lifetime depends on how readily we love God, others and ourselves.

Think of those in your life who have contributed to your faith journey. They quietly impacted you just as Josephine did with her classmates. Commit yourself to being an agent of making God’s kingdom real, one small interaction, one small good deed, one act of forgiveness, one small seed at a time.