Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 10:26 - 33

Today is the anniversary of my parent's wedding. I don’t know all the details, of course, but sometime in the fall of 1940 my mom, who was a nurse in training, met my dad, who was a patient recovering from removal of his appendix.  Sparks must have flown, because by June of 1941 they were married, and by December of 1942 they had me.  In between their marriage and me, the United States formally entered world war 2.  I’m told it was not my fault.  Nevertheless, my dad and many of his friends enlisted in the military, and before you know it, Dad was in Tennessee learning to fly fighter planes.  When I was just about 18 months old, my Mom and I traveled from Montana to Tennessee to be together again.  Dad had almost qualified as a fighter pilot when the war ended.  Fighter pilots who actually fight had a mortality rate of about 50%.  So I guess my two sisters were lucky.

Dad enlisted partly because the alternative would be to get drafted, and enlisted men had some choice in the direction of their military careers.  But what motivated most of the young men entering the military was a deep love of their country and a hatred for those who would harm it.  And I suspect that’s true of most successful armies -- at some level those soldiers are willing to put their lives on the line for their country.  That, apparently, is a big difference between the Ukrainian soldiers and the Russian ones.  

How can you put your life on the line?  Only by realizing that you are part of something greater than yourself.  Your mind and heart tell you that your cause will live on, your country will continue, in that sense you are immortal.

Today Jesus talks about the same thing, only far more real.  The reason we Christains can boldly proclaim the Gospel is because the Father loves us.  Jesus reminds us that God cares about even the birds of the air, and undoubtedly all creatures, from Blue Whales to bacteria -- they exist entirely because He loves them into existence.  And we are so much more than that. Jesus did not become a Blue Whale or a bacteria, he became a human being, making us part of something infinitely great -- we are part of God’s family and a Parent can never forget his or her child, and would do anything he could to keep them from harm and make them happy.  Our Father will never forget his children, and has the power and desire to keep them from harm and make them happy.  

This last week we celebrated the feast of Saint Thomas More  and Saint John Fisher.  We know something about the details of More’s death.  Before he was executed, we have his defense at his trial and two letters written to his daughter, a final letter smuggled out of the Tower of London, and the epitaph he wrote for himself.  We can see that this was a man who deeply loved his family, and insisted that he bore nothing but good will toward the King; he just couldn’t acknowledge the King as the head of Christ’s church on earth.  He was given several opportunities to compromise even in some small way.  He was finally sentenced to life in prison, and then told that despite that, he still had to acknowledge the King as head of the Church.  His failure to do so led to his sentence to death.  

As he was about to be decapitated, he forgave his executioner, asked that his beard be spared, since it had done no harm, and finally declared, “I die the King’s good servant, but God’s first.”  

Consider the complete trust More had in God.  Not just trust that he would live on, that he would be in paradise.  We all believe that or we wouldn’t be here.  But we can all sympathize with that line from a country song, “Lord I want to go to heaven, but I don’t want to go tonight.”  We’d all like one more day, at least, because life after death will be nothing like this life, and we prefer the familiar..  But More not only believed he would live on after death, but he trusted that God would look after his family and his country, for he was a patriot.  And putting everything you care about in God’s hands is never easy.  

But More took Jesus’ words to heart -- “do not be afraid of those who can kill the body, but not the soul.”  

Maybe being a Christian would be easier if we had to worry about martyrdom.  John Fisher and the other English martyrs all made the conscious choice to continue their efforts knowing that death was highly likely.  Nowadays, to stand up for Christ doesn’t mean we’ll be martyred.  But often it means we will be ridiculed -- maybe our jobs will be in jeopardy.  Maybe we will be canceled.  But we can still take comfort in the fact that we are part of something too big to kill, too good to destroy -- the family of Jesus Christ whose Father never forgets his children.  

Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 9:35 - 10:23

I think when we hear Jesus ask us to pray for laborers for the harvest, many of us believe we are praying for vocations to the priesthood and religious life.  But notice that the apostles who were sent out by Jesus were not yet by any measure, clergy.  They had not participated in the Last Supper, yet, and received the order to “Do this in memory of me.”  They had not had the risen Jesus breathe on them and give them the power to forgive sins.  They had not yet been ordered to baptize all nations , which would only come about at the time of Jesus’ ascension.  They weren’t priests or bishops.  They were laymen, and fairly uneducated as well.  You didn’t need to know how to read and write in those days.  There were scribes for that.  So Jesus sends out twelve uneducated laymen to proclaim the kingdom of heaven.  And they do, and look at us now, one fifth of the world’s population are at least nominally Christian.

One of the good things that seems to be happening in our time is the fact that lay poeo[ple are stepping up to the plate in terms of evangelization.  There are several prominent writers and apologists, andI’m sure you’ve heard of Scott Hahn, Edward Sri,Jimmy Akin, Karl Keating.  And lay evangelists aren’t limited to men; Theresa Tomeo, Sherry Weddell, and Lila Rose are just three names of women who are Catholic evangelists.  

But despite these signs of hope, we can’t escape the fact that parts of the world where Catholicism was once very strong now see a sad attrition of faithful Catholics -- Western Massachusetts, for example.  And I think today’s gospel should be a call to all of us to become laborers for the harvest.  

Jesus even tells us what to do.  We are to proclaim that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.  We do this by our deeds, we cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, and drive out demons.  He gave his disciples the power to do so, and Isuspect he gives us the power as well, if we want to use it.  There have been saints, even in fairly recent times, who have done deeds like these.  And when those deeds are witnessed, people come into the church, and people with lukewarm faith become more fervent.  

So where do we start?  We have to start from the beginning.  You can’t hope to cure the sick unless you go to the sick.  All of us know someone who is sick -- maybe chronically ill, maybe recovering from surgery.  But how do we bring the presence of Christ to them?  Christ lives in you and I and that’s what we have to remember.  We are all tabernacles and just as we come into the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, even though we know we can approach God from anywhere, I Can bring Christ to people by visiting them, by simply being present to them.  

Raising the dead is a bigger challenge.  Being dead means that you are no longer able to change without a seeming miracle.  People who are severe alcoholics or drug or gambling addicts, for example.  If we know people like this, sometimes all we can do is pray for them, but it doesn’t hurt to work on the bonds we have with them, to strengthen their reason to change.  

Cleansing lepers is also something we can do.  Lepers are people at the margins, people who are by reason of race or sexual orientation or challenged mentally or physically, or people who are bullied.  They are people who are rejected by society.  To cleanse these lepers means to invite them back into our circle, even if it means that we step outside of it to do so.  

Finally, driving out demons is something the Lord calls his disciples to do.  I don’t deny that there really are demons.  But most people affected by demons are not really possessed, but rather, they are oppressed.  I know a lady who is absolutely convinced that she can’t be forgiven her sins; She’s been to confession several times, has worked with a counselor on more than one occasion, and she can’t even name the sin she thinks she is guilty of.  She’s miserable.  It’s hard to tell if she is oppressed by a demonic force or if she has some mental illness.  But to have malignant obsessive thoughts ruining your life certainly seems demonic.  And Jesus gives his church  the power to drive out demons.  Maybe it is up to us disciples to try to get people like this at least evaluated.  

When I was growing up I knew a priest who taught at our local Catholic college.  Many evenings he would quietly disappear to sit in a bar and talk with the patrons.  We didn’t know this until his funeral, when the stories came out about the lives he changed by being present, by being non-judgemental, and simply by quietly being there to listen.  What he was doing, anyone could do, you don’t need Holy Orders.