NB. The deacons are preaching at St Dominic this weekend. I'm preaching at Our Lady Star of the Sea. That homily will be up later today. Below is a homily for Priesthood Sunday* from 2005. It's one of the first I posted on HancAquam.
31st Sunday OT (Priesthood Sunday)
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OPChurch of the Incarnation, Univ of Dallas
Wow.
I know of no other way of expressing my amazement at tonight’s
readings. Wow! On Priesthood Sunday we get these readings. One from the
prophet Malachi, delivering a dire warning from the Lord to his priests:
“If you do not listen, if you do not lay it to heart, to give glory to
my name…I will send a curse upon you and of your blessing I make a
curse. You have turned aside from the way, and have caused many to
falter by your instruction.” Again, I say, Wow! We have another from
Paul describing his apostolic work among the Thessolians: “We were
gentle among you…with such affection for you, we were determined to
share with you [the gospel and our every selves] so dearly beloved had
you become to us…Working night and day in order not to burden any of
you, we proclaimed to the gospel of God.” Wow. And then we have Jesus
denouncing the Scribes and Pharisees for their hypocrisy, their failure
to minister according to their own teaching, and an admonition to his
disciples to avoid the destructive example of these men in their own
ministry. Instead, Jesus teaches, “The greatest among you must be your
servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled; but whoever humbles
himself will be exalted.” Wow.
I can say without fear of
contradiction from any of my brother priests: these are not the readings
we would have chosen to preach on on this Priesthood Sunday! But I will
go out on a limb here too and say: these are the readings we—my brother
priests and I—most need to hear. We have an warning from the Lord that
our teaching, our manner of life, our public ministry, all bear on the
integrity and authenticity of the witness we claim to make to the world.
We
have a picture of selfless service to God’s people, a determination to
preach and teach the gospel, an affection for the brothers and sisters
given to us by God to care for—a striking image of the apostle caring
for his kin in Christ like a nursing mother cares for her children. And
we have the Lord Himself drawing a stark constrast btw the hypocrisy of
the Pharisees and Scribes and the necessary humility of his own
students.
What’s absolutely clear in this teaching is that the
Christian priest utterly fails in his ministry when he turns his
ministry into an opportunity to promote his ego, to glorify his
personality, to satisfiy his own needs, to celebrate with his cult of
fans, or to place himself as master above those he serves. This is a
failure to listen, a failure to take to heart the vocation of service, a
failure to give glory to God, to walk the narrow way, to preach and
teach what Jesus preached and taught, and a failure to honor his
ordination covenant, the covenant every Catholic priest makes when he
kneels before the bishop to receive the Holy Spirit: the covenant to be
for God’s people a man ordered to sacrifice and to serve in persona Christi Capitis—in the person of Christ the Head of his Body.
I
started my priesthood just five months ago. I started my life as a
Dominican five years ago at the beginning of the scandals. My brothers
and I sat at table every morning in the novitate and the studium and
read the headlines. I remember gathering for a meeting with our student
master in St Louis and talking frankly about the future of the
priesthood and our place in the Church as men ordained to be
servant-leaders. Our overwhelming sense of disgust, betrayal, dire
disappointment, and anger constantly threatened our vocations. We seemed
to teeter on the verge of an exodus. We waited, holding our breath, for
the tension to break and the departures to begin. No one left. We all
stayed. Scandal did not kill this harvest!
What does the Body of
Christ need from its priests in the 21st century? The Body needs now and
tomorrow what it needed yesterday, last year, and 2,000 years ago: men
ready, willing, and able to take on the person of Christ in priestly
ordination and lead His church by an exemplary life of selfless service
to others. More than ever the Church needs men who will put aside
private political agendas, personal philosophies and theologies,
idiosyncratic visions of ecclesial reform and revolution and take on the
yoke of Christ that has been handed down to us through twenty centuries
by men and women blessed of God with graces beyond measure.
We
need men unafraid of obedience, fearless in the face of growing secular
opposition and internal dissent, men deeply commited to prayer, who live
lives in humility (or who are eager to learn how!); we need men who can
say, “I don’t know it all, I can’t learn it all, I need as much help as
I can get, I need your help, and we all need the Lord’s help.” And we
need men who will preach and teach what Jesus preached and taught. If he
will stand in the pulpit to preach and stand at the altar of sacrifice
to pray, he must be a man ready to say, “Do not look at me to see
Christ, look through me.”
Jesus teaches us this evening that the
ministry of the Christian priest is founded on a life of integrity: a
seamless garment of thought and action given to the service of others
for the greater glory of God. He denounces the Pharisees and the scribes
for teaching one thing and doing another, for heaping onto their people
burdens that they themselves will not take on, for seeking honor,
prestige, and titles for the sake of ego and public display. Jesus
directs his disciples to watch these hypocrites carefully so that they
will learn how not to serve his Church, how not to lead in his name. The
call from Jesus to lead by service is the call to seek humility in the
face of the temptation to be lauded. It is the call to act in the full
knowledge that one does not serve out of acquired or practiced talents,
but out of the pure gift of love, the invitation to dwell in the divine
life. Paul writing to the Thessalonians describes perfectly the ministry
of the apostle sent out to be Christ for others. He tells his brothers
and sisters that they have received from him “not a human word but, as it
truly is, the word of God, which is now at work in you who believe.”
The
work of the priest, the work of all Christians priests, ordained and
royal, is to speak the word of God for others to hear, to bring that
word into their own lives so that there is no discrepancy, no hypocrisy
btw word and deed, and to toil with affection for one another.
On
this Priesthood Sunday, we have a warning, an example, and a lesson.
Listen, take them to heart, and give glory to God’s name.
* Priesthood Sunday was last Sunday, Oct 28th.
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