Homily for the Week of August 18, 2013

20th Sunday, Cycle C. 2013 Jeremiah 38:4-6, 8-10 Psalm 40:2, 3, 4, 18 Hebrews 12:1-4 Luke 12:49-53 Today we hear five of the toughest and possibly the most unsettling verses of Luke’s Gospel. Over the past weeks in our continuous reading of Luke, we have gotten used to a few different images of Jesus. Four chapters ago we heard of the kindly carpenter who healed a man possessed by many demons. Two chapters ago Jesus enjoyed a meal at the home of Martha and Mary. Three weeks ago Jesus taught his friends how to pray and taught us to ask and we shall receive. Last week Jesus assured us that faithful followers will be rewarded. Today, however, everything changes. Today we learn kindly Jesus has come to set the status quo on its ear and set the world on fire. Today we learn Jesus intends to destroy the world as people knew it. Today we are told that Jesus is not about bringing a peaceful life. His message instead will cause division. We learn today that Jesus did not come to endorse human institutions and their values. He did not endorse the values society taught in His own day, and by extension, He does not uphold or endorse the values of our institutions either. Jesus came to teach us that we must support His values, and His values are very different from what we might experience today. Listening to Jesus today may not be very appealing. Who would want to follow someone like him - unless we could imagine ourselves like an an old apple tree that needs a good pruning? Jesus and the writers of the holy books are telling us today that we too as human beings, as apple tress, do at times refuse to give up our dead branches or to let go of our excess baggage. Or as Jeremiah says in our first reading, we must try to get out of the cistern. We must not allow ourselves to sink deeper and deeper into the mud. All of us are weighted down by selfish habits which prevent us from being the person that God wants us to be, or even the person we may want to be. Like the apple tree we need pruning in our life. We must take time to take an inward look at ourselves. We refer to this type of pruning by name and action of discipline. Jesus mentions that discipline can be painful, but that if we are to honestly call ourselves His followers, then suffering is a necessary part. We must come to admit that by ourselves we are powerless over a bad habit, but we also believe that we can some day obtain power over it if we trust someone enough to talk about it, and that God can save. In so doing we allow the dead branches or the bad habits to become known, at least to us, and to another, and then be confident that we can change it. Why is this needed? Jesus answers: so that we can set the whole world on fire with the ways and teachings of God. At our Baptism, when we first became a Catholic, our parents and godparents promised for us that we would reject Satan, we would reject sin and the glamour of evil, and refuse to be mastered by sin. We were asked to chose between slavery to sin and the freedom of being a child of God. When we were created God placed in us the ability to reason and to make decisions. By the time we were a teenager we received enough information to good and bad decisions by ourselves from the limited information which we had stored in our memory and imagination. Our senses have taken in all kinds of information some of which we accept, some we throw away and much we are not aware of. Our reason then moves us to say yes or no to a particular action. Our spiritual and religious faith also help us to reason that a particular decision is good or bad. The words of Jesus which I read today can make it seem as if Jesus enjoys abusing us or taking away our pleasures. But the opposite is true. Pain and suffering, of course, comes to everyone, whether we are good, bad or indifferent. If we do not live good lives we often suffer, but at times even those who are perfectly faithful to the teachings of Jesus also suffer as we heard in our first reading today. Jesus knows what we know -- that unless we do live up to high expectations, we can never be happy. As human beings Jesus knows that we might not be perfect, but that we can never be truly happy unless we struggle to be perfect. Jesus also knew very well that his preaching would mean death to him. He had had a choice: stick to the truth and endure the cost, or abandon the truth and live. The last choice was the easiest, but to chose the easy path would make him untruthful. Those are facts, and we all know it. Jesus asks of us nothing that he himself did not do. At times it is not the difficulties of our life or situation that cause us pain and suffering but the attitude we take toward them. I once read the story of newspaper writer who interviewed two bricklayers working on a construction site. He asked one man: What are you doing? He replied: I’m just an underpaid and overworked bricklayer wasting my time piling bricks on top of one another. He asked the other worker what he was doing. He replied: I’m the luckiest person in the world. I get to be part of great and important projects. I help turn single bricks into beautiful buildings. They both were right. We see in life what we want to see. If we want to find ugliness, we will find plenty of it. If we want to find fault with life we can find lots of reasons to do so. But the opposite is true. At times we can be thankful for what we have or do, but at times we can feel like Jeremiah at the bottom of a cistern sinking in mud. We believe that God will never leave us if we are faithful to God.But God does not always make things happen the way that we think he should. When God does not make things go our way, we have to trust that he has a better plan -- a plan we do not yet see. Our second reading reminds us that we must keep alive day after day the hope of joy that God has promised to those who are faithful to him. When we take our last breath that is what is really going to count.