NB. Finally! I get to preach this 2008 Roman homily. I knew that keeping up with my homily writing while in Rome would come in handy one day. . .
NB 2. So. . .I'm sitting there in the presider's chair, listening to the readings. . .when it hits me that the reader had just said: "A reading from the first letter of St. Paul to the Thessalonians." I almost stopped her. . .I checked the missalette. Yup. She's right. I wrote this homily in 2008. I've read it dozen of times since then. . .tho never preached it. Today is the first time that I noticed that I used Corinthians instead of Thessalonians in the homily. No idea why.
30th Sunday OT
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Anthony of Padua/Our Lady of the Rosary, NOLA
Audio File
St.
Paul, ever the romantic(!), writing in his first letter to the
Corinthians, insists that “love is patient, love is kind. Love is not
jealous, is not pompous; it is not inflated; it is not rude; it does not
seek its own interest [. . .] but rather rejoices with the truth”(1 Cor
13). He goes on to write that love bears, believes, hopes and endures
all things; and finally, he declares, as if he has never grieved a
betrayal or lost his heart to passion: “Love never fails.” The
romantic whispers, “Yes!” The cynic scoffs, “Bull.” The pragmatist
asks, “Really? Never?” The Catholic exclaims, “Deo gratis! Thanks be to
God!” Who needs for love to never fail more than he for whom Love is
God? This is why Jesus teaches the Pharisees that the spiritual heart
of the Law is: “You shall love the Lord, your God, will all your heart,
with all your soul, and with all your mind [. . .] You shall your
neighbor as yourself.” Listen to Paul again, “Our Lord is patient, He
is kind. He is not jealous, is not pompous; He is not inflated; He is
not rude; He does not seek His own interest [. . .] but rather Our Lord
rejoices with the truth.” Though Paul is writing to the Corinthians to
show them how we must love one another—patiently, kindly, selflessly—we
cannot, cannot love at all except that Love Himself loves us first.
Therefore, with the Lord and because of the Lord, we love Him, one
another; and we rejoice with His truth.
Now,
that we must be commanded to love says everything that needs to be said
about the weaknesses of the human heart, soul, and mind. That we must
be commanded to love tells us that we do not eagerly enthrone love in
the center of our being, making all we do the children of charity. That
we must be commanded to love tells us that we do not love as a way of
giving thanks for our very existence, for the gift of being alive. That
we must be commanded to love tells us that we do not reason with the
grace of God’s wisdom, with the deliberative power granted to us as
creatures created in His divine image. That we must be commanded to
love tells us that we are not God but rather creatures imperfect without
God, longing for God, grieving our loss yet yearning for the peace and
truth of His Being-with-us.
Think
for a moment of the ways we have struggled in our past to find some
small portion of peace and truth. Moses returns from Mt. Sinai to find
his people giving themselves over to the idols of their former masters
in slavery. Paul admonishes the Corinthians for turning to “worldly
philosophies” for their much-needed wisdom. He lashes them for rutting
indiscriminately in the flesh, surrendering body and soul to disordered
passion and vice. Jesus teaches against the legalistic blindness of the
Pharisees; he calls them “white washed tombs,” beautifully, lawfully
clean on the outside but stuffed with rotted meat on the inside. In our
long past we have turned to idols, pagan philosophies, debauchery and
license, and taken an easy refuge in the dots and tittles of the law.
Each of these reach for the peace and truth we long for, but none grasp
the love we need.
Think
for a moment of the ways you yourself have struggled in your past and
struggle even now to find some small portion of peace and truth. Do you
look to the idols of power, wealth, possessions, or Self to find your
purpose? Do you scratch your itchy ears with the wisdom of the world?
With the profound systems of material science, the occult mysteries of
New Age gurus, the glittering gospels of prosperity and celebrity?
Perhaps you search for and hope to find some peace in your body, your
flesh and bones. Do you worship at Gold’s Gym, Kroger and Target,
Blockbuster, or CVS, searching for peace in a perfectly sculpted body, a
full belly, a house full of things, a visual distraction, or
over-the-counter cures for the nausea and headache of a life that will
not love God? Or, perhaps in this election season, you look to parties
and politicians to give you hope and security. Do you look to the
Democrats to give you the ease of a well-funded government entitlement?
Or perhaps you look to the Republicans to secure your place near the
top of the economic food-chain? Do you think Obama will give you hope?
Or that McCain will give you security? When we reach down for higher
things, we grasp the lowest of the low and in our disappointment we name
the Lowest the Highest, and then, in our pride, we pretend to be at
peace. To do otherwise is to confess that we are fools fooled by
foolish hearts, that we are stubborn mules needing the bridle and bit.
And
perhaps we are fools. Perhaps this is why Jesus finds it necessary to
command us to love God and one another. Why command what we would and
could do willingly? In Exodus our Lord must command that we not molest
the foreigners among us. That we must care for the women who have lost
their husbands and children who have no family. He must command us not
to extort money from the poor or strip them of their modest possessions
for our profit. We must be commanded not to kill one another, not to
steal, not to violate our solemn oaths, not to worship alien gods. Why
doesn’t it occur to us naturally to care for the weakest, the least
among us? To help those who have little or nothing? Why must we be
commanded not to destroy the gift of life, not to lie or extort, not to
surrender our souls to the demonic and the dead? We must be commanded
to love God, to hope in His promises, to trust in His providential care
because in our foolish hearts we believe that we are God and that we
have no other gods but ourselves.
Are
we fools? Probably not entirely. But we are often foolish, often
believing and behaving in ways that give lie to Paul’s declaration,
“Love never fails.” God never fails, but we often do. When we make the
creature the Creator, giving thanks and praise to the bounty of our own
wisdom, we reach down for the higher things and convince ourselves that
we have grasped truth. We do this when we believe that it is not only
sometimes necessary but also good to murder the innocent; when we
believe that it is right to murder the inconveniently expensive, those
whom the Nazis called “useless eaters,” the sick, the elderly, the
disabled. We reach down for higher truths when we create markets for
housing in order to exploit for profit the homelessness of the poor.
We are foolish when we raise impregnable borders around the gifts we
have been given , gifts given to us so that we might witness freely to
God’s abundance. We do foolish things because we believe we are God,
and so, we must be commanded by Love Himself to love. But surely this
is no hardship. Difficult, yes. But not impossible. With Love all
things are possible.
What
must we do? To love well we must first come to know and give thanks to
Love Himself. He loved us first, so He must be our First Love.
Second, we must hold as inviolable the truth that we cannot love Love
Himself if we fail to love one another. Third, love must be the first
filter through which we see, hear, think, feel, speak, and act. No
other philosophy or ideology comes before Love Himself. This mean
obeying (listening to and complying with) His commandments and doing now
all the things that Christ did then. Fourth, after placing God as our
first filter, we must surrender to Love’s providential care, meaning we
must sacrifice (make holy by giving over) our prideful need to control,
direct, order our lives according to the world’s priorities. Wealth and
power do not mark success. Celebrity does not mark prestige. “Having
everything my way” does not mark freedom. Last, we must grow in
holiness by becoming Christ—frequent attention to the sacraments,
private prayer and fasting, lectio divina,
strengthening our hearts with charitable works, sharpening our minds
with beauty and truth in art, music, poetry, and while being painfully,
painfully aware of how far we can fall from the perfection of Christ,
knowing that we are absolutely free to try again and again and again.
Though we often fail love, Love never fails us. Remember: who needs for love to never fail more than he for whom Love is God?____________________
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