14th
Sunday OT
Fr. Philip Neri
Powell, OP
Our Lady of the
Rosary, NOLA
God
sends a prophet to His people, “rebels who have rebelled against
[Him].” These rebels – “hard of face and obstinate of heart”
– have turned away from their Father, shaming themselves in
disobedience and bringing upon themselves the inevitable consequences
of their sin. Ezekiel, the prophet God sends, knows that he will not
be welcomed among his kin. He knows that his proclamation to the
nation – “Return to the Lord!” – will not be well-received.
This is an old problem. Some six-hundred-plus years after Ezekiel's
death, Jesus will say, “A prophet is [honored] except in his native
place and among his own kin and in his own house.” Why is a prophet
sent by God honored everywhere except in his own native land? For a
prophet to speak with authority, for him to be heard by God's people,
he must be truly “other than” those to whom he preaches; that is,
a prophet must be “set aside” in his family; somehow an alien in
his own hometown; an odd sort of animal in the ambling herd.
Familiarity breeds contempt. Who listens to and believes a prophet
who grew up in the neighborhood just like everyone else? If you and
I, the Church, will be prophets/witnesses sent by the Father to
invite the world to return to the Father, we must be “set aside,”
“other than,” the odd animals in the ambling herd. But being the
ones set aside is dangerous business, even a deadly business.
I'll
just say it straight out: nobody likes a prophet. Think about what
prophets are sent to do. Basically, God looks at His people and sees
them being disobedient – they are stealing from the poor, cheating
on their spouses, killing one another, ignoring their religious
obligations, worshiping foreign gods, and just generally pretending
they do not have a covenant with the Lord. Seeing all this, the Lord
calls out a prophet, someone who is given a vision of the His plan
for humanity and sent to the people to tell them that they are on the
wrong path. Every prophet has an amazingly simple mission: go among
the sinners, call them sinners, and warn them that the clock on God's
wrath is ticking. Repent or face the consequences. Over and over
again, we know, that God's people (that us, too) have treated
prophets with contempt. When we aren't ignoring them, we kill them.
If we don't kill them, we dismiss them as religious-nuts. The reason
we do this is obvious. Where the prophet sees sin, we see personal
choice. Where he sees disobedience, we see liberty and license. Where
he sees injustice, we see opportunity. He says we're wicked; we say
we're just doing our own thing. He says we're had better repent or
else; we say, “Don't impose your religion on me, buddy!”
Scripture reveals that prophets are unpopular b/c they show us what
we could be with God while we are busy being nothing more than what
we want to be without God. Now, lest any of us here think that being
a prophet is optional for Christians, let's set the record straight:
it isn't.
If you are baptized, you are
a priest, a prophet, and a king. You offer sacrifice for others in
prayer; you hold yourself and others up to God's plan for humanity;
and you work in service for the cause of justice. Being a prophet is
not optional for us. It's who we are. And it means being the odd
animal out when the herd is heading toward the cliff. It means
standing up and yelling, “STOP! We are racing to our deaths! Turn
around before it's too late!” The men and women of Nineveh heard
Jonah and turned around in time. But Nineveh is the exception to the
rule. In every other case of prophetic intervention, the herd
stampeded on, ignoring the warning signs, and God allowed them to
suffer the consequences of their disobedience. Foreign invasion.
Exile. Enslavement. And death. Every time the nation turned its face
from God and worshiped its own will in violation of the covenant, God
gave them a warning and a way out. And every time – excepting
Nineveh – the nation chose to spit in God's face and do its own
thing. Decline and destruction followed.
We
are prophets. Not b/c we are especially moral. Not b/c we have some
special vision from God. Not b/c we are uniquely attuned to hear God
speak. We are prophets b/c we have directly experienced the power of
the Father's mercy to free us from sin and death. We are prophets b/c
we have directly experienced the divine love that binds all of
creation in being, and we have sworn to be witnesses to that love in
word and deed. We are prophets b/c we strive to be perfect as our
Father is perfect, to be righteous not self-righteous, to be bearers
of His invitation to the world so that no one is left out of the
heavenly party. And as prophets, we will not be particularly popular.
In 2015, not many already in the Church and many who are, not many
are eager to bend an ear to hear the truth of God's plan for
humanity, a plan for our eternal happiness. You don't have to search
long or hard to see or hear the depth and perversity of this nation's
disobedience. From abortion to Wall St greed; from racism to
consumerist waste; from lawless politicians to a scandalous Church;
from the desecration of marriage to murder, we are a nation in
rebellion against God. And He sends His prophets out into the nation
to bear witness. Not to His anger and wrath. But to His abiding love
and boundless mercy.
We
are prophets. What do we say? What do we do? Many Catholics believe
that last week's Supreme Court ruling imposing same-sex “marriage”
on the nation is just the first step along a long road of trouble for
Christians. That's not true. The Court's decision is actually one of
the last steps on that road. That decision was as inevitable as the
rising sun and long in coming. We can imagine the last few steps:
polygamy, incestuous marriages, and, finally, the elimination of
civil marriages altogether. Actually, we don't have to imagine them.
All three of these have already been proposed. What do we say? What
do we do? As witnesses to God's abiding love and boundless mercy, as
prophets, where do we go? We say what we have always said. We do what
we have always done. We go where we have always gone. We speak about
Christ and his sacrifice for sinners. We do the good work that God
has given us to do. We go to work, to school, to church, out in
public, anywhere we have ever been before. We are prophets, and
prophets bear witness. We cannot bear witness with our lips sealed
shut in fear. We cannot show others the miracles of faith while
hiding from uncomfortable confrontations. We cannot abandon our works
of mercy and at the same time claim to be witnesses to mercy. Nothing
has changed for the Church or her prophets. Nothing. Our Lord still
reigns. And our work remains unfinished.
There
is a dread temptation poking at us right now. I've heard it. I've
felt it. The spirit of despair is urging us to just surrender to the
inevitable victory of sin, and run off to a mountain somewhere. This
is not an option for us. Too many out there need us. Too many out
there have yet to experience all that Christ has freely died to give
us. Yes, get ready for some hatred, some foul language flung our way.
Get ready for some lawsuits and fines. Prepare yourself to lose some
friends. I've lost several already, including my two best friends of
25 yrs. We will not see the kind of persecution that our brothers and
sister are experiencing in Syria and Nigeria. Americans are too
well-armed! Perhaps you believe that none of this affects you. Well,
you don't have to join a side in this Culture War. You will be
drafted. The spirit of rebellion that pervades our nation will not
tolerate fence-sitting. There can be no neutrality. If you don't
care, you will be made to care. As a friend of mine says, “Acceptance
is no longer enough. You must approve and applaud. Anything less is
hatred.” As so many US bishops have made perfectly clear, Catholics
cannot and will not approve or applaud this latest step along the
road to national destruction.
To
prepare yourself as a witness to God's abiding love and boundless
mercy, remember Paul writing to Corinthians, “I am content with
weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for
the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong.”
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