Past Homilies 2008

There’s Hope for Us!

Homily for 2^nd Sunday of Easter (Cycle A)

by Deacon Rich Mueller

3/30/08

WOW!  He is Risen, Alleluia!!  There is so much meat in our readings today, it’s hard to know what to talk about first.  Short of a 30 minute homily, I don’t think we can cover more than a brief couple of points.  So, I’d like to focus on the personal growth of the disciples in the days and weeks immediately following the Resurrection; in the hope that this Easter season, we might have that same transformation for our own lives.

If we pay close attention to all three readings this week we can see a fascinating transformation in the disciples over time.  Although we hear the readings in the usual order: first, second, Gospel—chronologically speaking, the events actually occurred in this order: Gospel, first, second.  I think it’s helpful for us to consider the readings in this order.

The Gospel reading this week is the famous story of Doubting Thomas; a story we all know by heart I’m certain.  The story takes place one week after Jesus’ resurrection and all the other disciples except Thomas had seen Jesus alive.  Thomas replies to their amazing story by saying, in effect, “You guys are nuts!  I’m not gonna believe your crazy tales unless I stick my fingers in the nail holes in his hands!”

Although the other disciples had seen Jesus alive and believed that He definitely had risen from the dead, the Gospel tells us they were hiding behind locked doors, fearful that the authorities might come after them next; that they might be the next ones crucified.  We see a group of men who have had their “dream bubble” burst.  They are frightened, confused, maybe even a bit embarrassed.  They are wondering about how they can return to their old lives, get their old jobs back, resume their lives with their wives and children, all while suffering the abuse and ridicule of those who would be all too eager to tell them “I told you so!”  Not exactly bold witnesses spreading the Good News to the rest of the world, were they?

In fact, I think its safe to say that at that particular point in time, they had no intention of telling anyone else about Jesus’ resurrection.  As far as they were concerned, the Good News was going to be a private secret that eleven very fearful souls would take to their graves.  But then suddenly, their Messiah is in their midst; and its quickly like old times.  He tells them not to be afraid, but to go out and proclaim from the mountain tops – Jesus Christ has conquered death!  Even more amazingly, he says that they should do as he did – and he gives them the power to forgive sins and work miracles in His name.

        But Thomas isn’t there, and no matter how hard they try, they cannot convince him that Jesus has been there and given them this great command.  “I’ll believe it when I see it myself” he says to them.  You and I know exactly how Thomas felt, and no doubt would have done the same thing, had it been us in those sandals.  But Jesus humors him, and appears to Thomas and the others again, to restore Thomas’ faith.

        But how unfair is that, you might ask, and rightly so!  Because I have seen, I believe?  That’s not faith!  If something is proven beyond any doubts, it takes no faith at all to believe!  And you would be right!  I watched a special during Holy Week about the Shroud of Turin; and they showed how scientific tests were being used by both believers and unbelievers to prove or disprove one’s faith that this was the burial shroud of Christ.  Or do you remember 5 or 6 years ago, when scientists reconstructed a first century skull to “prove” to us what Jesus “really” looked like?  It made the cover of Popular Mechanics, which of course gave it all the more credibility; since this is the one resource we all should be consulting to strengthen our faith!  Fortunately, Jesus, even while allowing Thomas to see and touch him, blesses those who believe but have not seen – which is great, because that would be us!

Then we get to our first reading this week, which takes place just after Pentecost, about 6 weeks after Easter, when the Holy Spirit came to give the disciples a jump start of courage and conviction.  Peter had just finished proclaiming the Gospel in public for the first time, which resulted in 3,000 new converts putting their faith in Christ.  Not bad for a guy who six weeks earlier had denied he even knew Jesus, and then spent the days after the crucifixion hiding behind locked doors. 

Our reading from the Acts of the Apostles tells us the new believers “devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and to the communal life, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers.”  What an amazing turn-around.  In less than two months the apostles went from being confused cowards trying to figure out how to sneak out of Jerusalem and resume their former lives in anonymity, to boldly proclaiming a radical message of God’s great love in the heart of the city and shepherding thousands of new Christians.

These uneducated fishermen and farmers and businessmen were now the leaders and teachers of a new and growing church.  From what little we have learned about these guys in the Gospels, it’s pretty obvious they did not possess the skills needed to build such a vibrant community on their own.  Only by the power of the Holy Spirit working in them and through them did they achieve such stunning results.  Frankly, that does more to build up my faith than had it been the other way around – because clearly they accomplished what they did through the power of God, not through their own good work!

This brings us to our second reading—Peter’s first letter written probably decades later—and here the former fisherman reflects on the source of their stunning transformation: “God…gave us a new birth to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”  They were the first “born again” Christians!  They experienced a spiritual rebirth—as we all should—when they put their faith in Jesus.  This faith was the source of their hope of eternal life, which Peter described as “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.” 

And it all started with the Resurrection of Jesus.  What started out looking like a disaster for Jesus’ followers on Good Friday afternoon turned into the most incredible moments of joy on Easter morning.  The empty tomb, that central event in the history of the universe, turned everything upside down.  Death was no longer final.  Eternal life became a reality.  The power of the resurrection gave Peter and the other apostles the courage we need to forget about their own safety and to get out and do the will of God.  Hopefully, this same faith gives us the courage to overcome the obstacles and challenges in our lives to follow God’s will for our lives.

Personally, I’m thankful that Jesus picked fallible, inexperienced people to be His original apostles.  We can all probably relate to them a lot better; I know I sure can!  When we see over the course of this week’s readings how they were transformed, it’s clear that it was the power of God working in them rather than their own abilities.  This gives us hope that we, too, can grow in our walk with the Lord.  Even during those times when we have doubts and fears, we know that by focusing on the Resurrection, we will draw closer to Christ and, as Peter explained, “attain the goal of [our] faith, the salvation of [our] souls.”  Nothing else will matter!

        God is so good…..Amen?  AMEN, Alleluia!!

Past Homilies 2007

The Time is NOW!

Homily for 25^th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Cycle C)

by Deacon Rich Mueller 9/24/07

Last week, we read the parable of the Prodigal Son; and a couple of weeks earlier we heard the parable about the seating arrangements at the wedding banquet.  We all know that Jesus uses parables as a way to teach us lessons that He wants us to remember.  And most of the time, these parables, while they can be complicated, are usually pretty straight-forward in their meanings.  But this week, we have what is probably the most confusing parable in all of the Gospels.  

It almost seems as if Jesus is praising a crooked business manager for cheating.  Is this what Jesus is really doing?  In order to answer this question, we first have to better understand what was happening in the story; and then maybe we can better understand the point that Jesus is making to us today.

Let’s start with what’s happening in the story.  A manager (the steward) is getting fired; we don’t know for sure why, but presumably it’s because he was not properly taking care of the property of his master.  His master gives him his pink slip, but tells him to do an audit of the books prior to his departure.  So the steward called in those who owed his master money or property and reduced their debts considerably.  At first glance, this might seem like dishonesty, like he is stealing from his boss, but it’s really not.

In the ancient world, the way such business was conducted was that the manager (steward) would be paid by adding on something to what was owed the master.  Today, we would call that a commission.  So if someone borrowed 50 denarii or 100 sacks of flour or whatever, he would have to pay back the 50 to the master and then pay another 10 — or 30 or 50 — to the steward.  We can speculate that maybe this crooked steward was taking way too much of a commission.

Therefore, when the steward called in those who owed the master, for example, 100 containers of wheat, and reduced the amount to 80, what he was in effect doing was eliminating most or all of his commission.  Therefore, he wasn’t stealing; he was just eliminating his own take.  Faced with the decision of saving his future by making friends who would take care of him after he was fired or trying to hold onto the possibility of making money via these commissions, he chose to save his future.  

So how does this apply to us?  Well, each of us is that steward.  God has given each of us tremendous gifts; and we’ve used those gifts to make a profit, so to speak, by using those gifts for our own benefit.  He has given us our hands, which we use to work.  He has given us our brains, which we use to think.  Maybe we have some other special talent or gift that we have used successfully for our own good.

With each of these gifts, we have profited and we’ve made a commission — some of us quite a substantial one.  But none of these gifts were meant strictly for ourselves and our own profits, they were meant for the building up of God’s kingdom.  This is what we call stewardship.  But sometimes, rather than use our gifts for that purpose, we often use them only to enrich ourselves.

In our Gospel this morning, Jesus is reminding us that at some point, our Master will come and say, “You’ve been squandering my property, and your time is coming to an end.   You’re being “pink slipped”.  Like the steward, we’ll be asked to prepare an accounting of how we’ve used his gift of life and the talents that he’s given us. This will happen at the end of our lives, when our time here on this earth is up.  Each one of us has misused those gifts every time we’ve used them selfishly, every time we’ve put ourselves first and God second or even worse, every time we’ve misused those gifts for ends that are not compatible with the mission of Jesus.

What can we do about it? Jesus implies that one option for us to consider is what the steward in the story did: Take the profits we tried to gain selfishly from these gifts and give them away; to take care of others, so that we might be taken care of in return — so that these others may remember us, and then be our supporters and welcome us into, as Jesus says, “our eternal homes.” The implication here is that if we don’t want to do the right thing simply because it is the right thing to do, then at least we should do the right thing because it is in our best interest.  

We, like that steward, are faced with making the choice between trying to keep our profits and saving our future, our place in eternity.  We cannot take money or possessions with us as we go.  If we use whatever God has given us in this world to take care of others, then at our judgment and after it, they will be among those in heaven who welcome us into the eternal home of heaven.  Jesus will turn to us and tell us that whatever we did for them, he took personally: “Whatever you did for the least of my brothers and sisters, you did for me” (Mt 25:40).  

  But unlike in the story, where the steward had time to set things right for his master, who then praised him; when we meet our Lord face-to-face, we’ll have no time to return and try to fix things.  So we have to fix them NOW.  If we’ve been selfish with our gifts, if we haven’t been putting God first, then the time to fix that is now.  The time for our accounting will come — for some of us, sooner than we expect. The Lord calls us always to be ready to render an account. Today, we ask his help so that we might make those good choices now, so that the Lord will then praise us for acting shrewdly!

        God is so good……Amen?  AMEN!!

Go and Sin no More!!
Homily for the 5th Sunday of Lent (Cycle C)
by Deacon Rich Mueller
  
    Adultery.  Now there's a word you don't hear used very often in our society today.  Its one of those words that carries with it a built-in sense of moral righteousness and condemnation all at the same time; kind of like the word "murderer" or "criminal".  I remember in one of my high school English classes, we were asked to read Nathanial Hawthorne's masterpiece "The Scarlet Letter," which is the story of an adulterous woman set in Puritan New England in the 1600's; where instead of being stoned to death, she was forced to wear the red letter ‘A' as her punishment, so that all who saw her would know the nature of her sin.  The Puritan's were way bigger on judgment and punishment than they were on mercy and forgiveness!
    Since those Puritan days, we have found a lot of other ways of saying adultery, ways that are not quite as blunt or "direct" admittedly.  The new ways of saying it may sound nicer, but what it is is no less terrible, no less sinful than in Jesus' time.  In Jesus' time they felt sufficiently strong about adultery that their laws, taken from the Book of Deuteronomy allowed them to stone the women (and the men too, by the way) who were caught and judged guilty, as we heard in our Gospel reading this morning.   
    Did you know, our Gospel passage this morning notwithstanding, that this form of punishment is still practiced today?  According to Amnesty International, in mid-February and again in early March, two women from the Sudan have been convicted of adultery, and have been sentenced to die by stoning!  This is beyond incredible, it is simply incomprehensible that this sort of barbaric, stone age type "justice" is still being carried out in today's world.
    Anyway, as stories go, the one we just heard has more than a few holes in it, and leaves a lot of questions unanswered.   Where, you might have asked yourself, was the man?  Scripture says that the woman was "caught in the act".  How come the man, caught in the same act, was not brought to Jesus too?  And what about those adulterers who are never caught?  Are they just as guilty?  Do they ever face judgment?
    When I first encountered this story from Scripture back in my religion classes, I always felt that Jesus had really missed a golden opportunity here.  What more perfect time could he have had to teach about the evils of sexual immorality?  What a perfect time to affirm the sanctity of marriage, or to preach about the moral ills of society, or to make a statement about the unequal treatment of women.  But upon closer examination, this story isn't really about adultery, is it?  This woman could have been accused of camel stealing, or shoplifting, or jaywalking; and the story would have been exactly the same.  That's because the story is actually more about sin, and sinners.  It is also about who has the right to judge us, God or our accusers.  In short, like so many other stories in Sacred Scripture, this story is really about you and me and our relationship with God.
    As a society, we need a certain number of rules and regulations to make some sort of sense out of the chaos.  Some of these rules are of our own design and manufacture, and others are much bigger than that.  They are God's rules, based on God's Truths that will never change.  Sometimes these two worlds conflict, the secular and the religious; when our man made rules run counter to what Jesus teaches us.  We see this in our laws about abortion or capital punishment, for example.  In our Gospel this morning, we also have such an instance; the Law of Moses called for a certain punishment for a certain crime, but Jesus, in effect, says "No, wait a minute .... there is a higher truth at work here .... unless you are without sin you cannot impose the judgment", implying that judgment is reserved for God alone.
    In the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy, the Law of Moses said that if someone has been convicted of a crime such as adultery and is sentenced to death, then the one who has witnessed the crime is to throw the first stone.  But Jesus shows them how to see their old law in a new way.  He tells them: "Let the one among you who has no sin be the first to cast a stone at her." 
    Once again he has turned the tables on those who would try to trick him, helping them to see that God's truth is always superior to our human laws.  The elderly, presumably the wisest of those assembled, responded first. [By the way, the elderly people in those days were probably in their 40's or early 50's!  They didn't live a whole lot longer than that.] The elderly recognized that they are not without sin.  Scripture doesn't say what these elderly people did after wandering away, but it would be nice to think that Jesus' teachings may have caused some of them to re-think their values and to follow him.
    When you watch the evening news, or read the morning paper, do you ever find yourself saying things like this: Look at what they did!  They got what they deserved; or So and so deserves much more punishment than that.  There are many examples if this, but one I remember clearly was reading an editorial in one of the major US newspapers bemoaning the fact that Kenneth Lay, supposedly the architect behind the Enron accounting fraud that literally stole billions of dollars from unsuspecting investors, had died.  The writer was angry because he got off too easy by dying, and never faced the judgment that he deserved.  As if God didn't ask him to make an accounting of his life!!  You have to ask yourself, what level of human arrogance and self-righteousness is needed to publicly say that you're sorry someone died before they had the chance to be rendered our judgment and to endure our justice, before God has the same opportunity??!!
    Many who hear our Gospel this morning might say that this woman got off way too easy.  She committed a serious offense to the law, and all she got was the proverbial "slap on the wrist", with Jesus telling her to "go and sin no more".  By society's standards, it hardly seems fair, does it?   But God's standards are higher.  The words our Lord spoke to the Scribes and the Pharisees did not change the status of the woman in our story.  She was still guilty, but God's saving grace freed her.  We experience the same freedom when we receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and the prayer of absolution is prayed over us by a priest.  It's only when we leave the confessional that we truly begin to find out how hard it is to do what Jesus said: Go and sin no more!
    My friends, sometimes we are the scribes and pharisees of this story.  It is our self-righteous pride that Jesus is confronting.  But all too frequently, we are also the sinful woman, and we must try to keep our sinful nature in mind whenever we are tempted to pass judgment on someone else.  Does this mean that there is no room in our faith for our justice system?  Of course not.  But it does mean that our human justice must be tempered with God's mercy.  Jesus calls us to salvation, not condemnation.  Just as he offered salvation to the woman by not condemning her , we need to show others the merciful forgiveness and the saving grace of God, not his vengeful wrath or his eternal damnation.   That is reserved for God alone.  True change of heart, true conversion of spirit, true repentance, comes from a grateful heart, not a fearful one!
    Lent is that time of year when we are called to recognize that we are sinners, and we are also called to be truly repentant for those times when we have sinned.  To be truly repentant, we need to ask God for forgiveness.  We  Catholics are so very fortunate to have the Sacrament of Reconciliation to help us do that.  I would certainly encourage you, if you haven't already this Lent, to receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation before Easter.  There will be ample opportunities in the next two weeks, including a communal penance service tomorrow night at 7:30 p.m. here in the church.  The Sacrament of Reconciliation is a wonderful opportunity for us to experience the peace of mind and heart that can come from true repentance and forgiveness.  I'll be there and I hope you will be too.
    God is so good......Amen??  AMEN!!

Past Homilies 2006