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Hearts of Prayer: Sacred Liturgy - Homilies |
Rest and Remember
Homily for Sunday, September 23, 2007- 25nd Sunday in
Ordinary Time, Yr C
Fr. Joseph Rogers
Read other homilies by Fr. Rogers>>>
Amos 8:4-7; Ps 113; 1
Tim 2:1-8; Lk 16:1-13
(Given at St. Anne’s Catholic Church, Houston, Texas)
My sisters and brothers, how wonderful it is to be with you! This is
such a special place, one of the most beautiful churches I know. How
I love to pray here. I’ve been coming to Houston for ten years now,
ever since my sister moved here to begin working for Channel 2. Most
of you know her, Roseann, as the Buzz Lady. Seven years ago Roseann
and I, along with friends and family from Houston, made a pilgrimage
to Rome for the Great Jubilee. One evening we went to St. Peter’s
together. We prayed in front of the life-size manger scene, asking
that the Lord to guide us on our vocations. We were both searching.
I was 29 years old. Roseann was . . . well, that’s top secret.
Within three years she was married, and I was in seminary. The Lord
hears our prayers. New Year’s Eve we brought in the New Millennium
with John Paul II. It was a prayerful, joyful time. We began walking
back to our hotel with my mom, but we couldn’t find a cab. We kept
walking . . . and walking . . . and walking . . . until finally,
after two hours (it was at least 2 AM) we saw a cab. I ran for the
cab and was sure I would get there before anyone else, but when I
got in the car there was already a man in the back seat. I pleaded
with him, “Please, sir, my mother can hardly walk, we have at least
two more hours to walk to make it to our hotel. Please, start the
New Year off right with a good deed. Help this woman and her
family!” No response from the passenger. The cab driver was silent.
Then my sister got in the front seat, looked at me, at the passenger
next to me, then to the driver and said, “We’ll pay you more money.”
With that the cab driver immediately became fluent in English and
threw the other guy out of the cab. My sister has street smarts. In
the Gospel today the Lord is challenging us to have faith smarts.
The Gospel of Luke recounts for us the parable of a corrupt steward.
In 1st century Palestine the steward of a wealthy person was like a
retailer. The steward bought and sold on the market, including a
mark up left to his discretion, but also realizing he had to be
competitive, like our markets today. The steward in the Gospel
realizes that he cannot do manual labor, he’s too proud to beg, so
he decides to ingratiate his customers to himself. He cuts himself
out of the deal, eliminating the mark up, and grants his customers
their previous contracts at the wholesale price. The master sees
that, although his steward is corrupt, he understands that his life
is more important than money. Material goods have a purpose. The
Church, in her wisdom, invites us to understand this purpose by
reflecting on the words of the Gospel in light of the Prophet Amos.
In the liturgy the Old and New Testaments inform one another, like
transparencies, one on top of the other. Amos helps us understand
Luke.
The Book of Amos is the oldest prophetic book in the Bible, the
first book we have in Scripture attributed to a prophet by title.
Amos, the prophet, lived in the mid-8th century BC. He was a
shepherd and a “dresser of sycamore trees.” He is sent from the
Kingdom of Judah in the south to the Kingdom of Israel in the north
to prophesy at the shrine of Bethel, the holiest shrine in the
northern kingdom. Amos has a mission: to remind Israel who she is.
Israel was not chosen by God because she was rich, because she was
powerful, because she was the greatest among the nations. Precisely
the opposite: God took a people to himself, a nation of slaves in
Egypt, bringing them through the desert to Sinai, and into the
Promised Land. The Land was God’s gift to Israel. All the produce of
the land were signs of God’s love for Israel. Israel was to be a
steward of those gifts, but the good gifts of God had become the
idols of the Chosen People. Wheat and oil were signs of the Giver,
of God who provides for his people, and they had become instruments
of exploitation. The people who were former slaves had become slave
owners. My sisters and brothers, prosperity was not the sin of
Israel. Success was not the sin of Israel. Israel had forgotten who
she was, where she came from, what her mission was, and, more
importantly, she had forgotten the God who had given her life, the
God who was the key to her destiny. Israel had attributed her
success to herself. She no longer remembered the God of the
Covenant. She had forgotten God.
In the Gospel today the Lord encourages us to be “friends” of
dishonest wealth – “mammon” – to be trustworthy in the smallest of
our duties so that we can be entrusted with greater, and ultimately
to realize that we cannot serve both God and Mammon. We will “love
one and hate the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other.”
We “cannot serve both God and mammon.” Mammon is the transliteration
in Greek of a Hebrew or Aramaic word. The word comes from the same
root where we get the word Amen, which means, roughly, I stand. When
we receive the Body and Blood of Christ we say, Amen. I stand here.
I base my entire life on Jesus Christ, on the Eucharist. Mammon
literally means “what stands with” – what we stand with. We can
stand with many things, we can stand with many people but when what
we stand with becomes what we stand on we have forgotten the
fundamental point: only God can fill our hearts. Amen. We stand
here, in the House of God. When mammon takes the place of our Amen
we have taken the same path as Israel. Amos comes to us. We have
forgotten that all creation stands with us so that we may stand firm
in God. Only God can quench the thirst of our hearts, for “our
hearts are restless until they rest in You, Oh Lord!” The road of
selfishness ends in self-destruction. God does not forbid us from
worshipping other things to make life difficult for us. God has
created us, God has redeemed us, and God has given us a personal
mission, identity and destiny: we must choose between Amen and
mammon – between life and death – God or idol-worship. My sisters
and brothers, what will we do? How do we remember God in a
mammon-filled world? How do we take our stand with all the good
created things while giving our Amen to God alone?
The First Letter to Timothy gives us the clear path: “There is One
God. There is also One mediator between God and men, the man Christ
Jesus, who gave himself as ransom for all.” The Lord knows we
forget. He knows that we experience the poverty and smallness of our
hearts, hearts that often times refuse to forgive, that seem to be
devoid of love, that rebel from forgiving others, that no longer
love the spouse entrusted to us, the children, our parents, brothers
and sisters, our colleagues at work. But God can change these hearts
of stone into hearts of flesh. Our God has a heart of flesh. It
beats for us. He became poor, small – a baby dependent on human
parents for everything! – so that we can hold him, so that we can
open our hearts to love Him. My brothers and sisters, God is smarter
than we are. He’s wiser. He knows we forget him easily. That’s why
he’s given us one day a week where all we have to do is remember:
remember that he is the source, the power, the origin, the purpose
and the destiny of our lives. And he’s given us the way to remember:
“This is my body given up for you. This is the . . . blood of the
New and Everlasting Covenant. Do this in memory of me.” Do this in
memory of me. The Eucharist is the meaning of the Sabbath – the day
of resting – and the Eucharist is the way we are to remember Him –
the day of remembering. The Lord Jesus is the mediator of the New
Covenant. He continues to give himself to us in the Eucharist so
that we may become him, so that we may worship God the Father.
Sunday is given to us as a day to rest and remember Him, to be
filled with Him, and we struggle running from this practice to that
practice, with meetings and so many other things. But Sunday has one
purpose: to rest and remember. When we allow the Lord’s Day to be
the day of the Lord, we move from the world of mammon to the
lasting, dependable life of Amen. Amen becomes the key to every day
of the week. We receive the Eucharist. We become the Amen of Christ
Jesus. What is given in memory of him, we become the living memory
of. By the Eucharist we become his living Amen in a world of mammon.
My sisters and brothers, this is our mission: to rest and remember
the Lord this Sabbath so that we become the Sabbath. AMEN!
Fr. Joseph Everett
Rogers resides at the Pontifical North American College
in Rome studying for the
Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. He is a Graduate of Notre Dame
University, with an MA from the John Paul Institute for Marriage and
Family. He was ordained a Priest on May 26, 2007.
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