You are a prophet of God!

14^th Sunday OT

Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP

St. Dominic/OLR, NOLA

Bakers bake cakes and pies. Florists arrange flowers. Firefighters fight fires. Doctors and nurses heal the sick. What do prophets do? If you had to write out a job description for a prophet, what would you say? “The prophet is primarily responsible for walking around the neighborhood, shouting 'Repent! The End is Near.' Must provide own animal-skin garments and locusts and honey. Good hygiene optional.” That's our image of the prophet, right? The lonely soul, wandering the streets, yelling at tourists and stinking up the place. We read about them in Scripture, of course. God calls them go out and warn people about their sin and their coming doom. Most of the time they are ignored and God punishes the wicked fair and square. They were warned after all. But here we are in 2018, and we're pretty sure that prophets are a thing of the past. God no longer calls out individuals to speak His word of truth, to foretell the destruction of a city or a nation b/c of sin. God no long uses a single human voice to put us back on the correct path. No, He doesn't use a single voice. He uses all our voices – the bold, prophetic voices of the baptized, the Church. You and me, generations of Christians past and those to come.

The singular purpose of the Church is to serve as the sacrament of salvation for all mankind – an outward sign, a visible manifestation of God's mercy to sinners. The Church is not – as Pope Francis has said – a religious non-governmental social service organization; the Church is not a social club or a business network or a non-profit political action committee. The Church is the Body of Christ on earth. And we – the baptized – are the Church's priests, prophets, and kings. As priests we meditate God's mercy, His grace. As Kings, we stand to inherit His kingdom, eternal life. And as prophets, we carry His saving Word into the world so that all those with ears to hear and eyes to see can hear and see His enduring love through our words and deeds. The prophets of the Old Testament served a specific purpose at a specific time. God chose them individually to say what needed to be said in order to bring sinners back to righteousness. Christ's death and resurrection and our baptism into his death and resurrection make each one of us carriers of his Word, his mission, and his ministry. You are a prophet of God. And you have work to do.

As men and women baptized into the life, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus, we have vowed to be faithful to God, just to our neighbors, hopeful in crisis, loving to all, joyful even as we mourn, and as eager to show mercy as we are to seek mercy for ourselves. The key to our lives as prophets is not moral do-goodism or institutional credentials. Our prophetic key is humility – the certain and daily-lived knowledge that we are creatures of a loving God, wholly dependent, utterly reliant on the Love that gave us and gives us life. There is no other source of identity for us. No other means of doing what we have vowed our lives to do. Ezekiel is consumed in the voice of God. Paul is plagued by a thorn in his flesh. Jesus himself is rejected by his hometown folks. Their humility fuels a righteous fire for God's justice not a self-righteous grudge against the status-quo, not a self-serving envy for what is not theirs. Self-anointed prophets in lab coats, expensive suits, or liturgical vestments might tempt us with a scientific or political or spiritual utopia, but we know that any prophet who will not and cannot say, “Thus says the Lord God...,” we know that they are false prophets. They are not of God; they do not speak His Word. 

 

If you will fulfill your vow to be a prophet of God, you will be faithful, just, hopeful, joyful, and loving. You will speak the Truth and do the Good. You will set aside self-righteous anger, envy, and pride. And most importantly, you will be the Father's mercy to sinners.

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Sin Makes You Stupid

13^th Sunday OT

Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP

OLR, NOLA

Paraphrasing Aquinas' moral theology: “Sin makes you stupid.” Quite literally – to deliberately violate right reason and God's law results in you becoming less rational and therefore less like God. A corollary to “sin makes you stupid” is “sin can kill you.” Death entered creation through human disobedience. As the Book of Wisdom tell us – we were made to be imperishable. We were made in the image of God's nature. God did not create us to die. He created us to live with Him forever. But death was born from the devil's envy and “they who belong to [the devil's] company experience it.” Not just mortal death but eternal death. Eternal separation from God the Father. Why such a profoundly dreary homily topic on this beautiful July evening? Because, as followers of Christ, we can speak about death – mortal death – as little more than “falling asleep.” 

 

We awake from sleep when we hear our Lord say, “I say to you, arise!” 

 

Paul tells the Corinthians how Christ accomplishes all this waking and rising among his people. He writes, “For you know the gracious act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.” The Son of God – from the richness of his divinity – became poor for us. He willingly took on the poverty of becoming man so that we might put on the richness of divinity. He could've simply restored us to our original imperishability. Instead, he raised us up to perfect union with the Father. While we are all subject to a mortal's death, none of us must remain dead. Like Jairus' daughter, Christ will say to us, “Arise!” and we will join him and the Father, sharing perfectly in the divine nature. That's our end. The means we use to reach this end is freely available to anyone and everyone who will receive it. Paul writes, “As you excel in every respect, in faith, discourse, knowledge, all earnestness, and in the love we have for you, may you excel in this gracious act also.” This gracious act. What gracious act? The gracious act of Christ becoming poor as that we might become rich. In other words, the means you need to reach your final end is total surrender to God's will so that His will and your will are indistinguishable from one another. As Christ willed to give himself freely on the cross out of his love for us, so we too must will to give ourselves out of love for one another. There is no greater means to eternal life. 

 

Think of it this way: sin is the refusal or the unwillingness to be like God in all things. You could say, “But Father! I'm not God!” You're right. You aren't God. But you are created in His image and likeness, and you are re-created in the image of the perfect God-Man, Jesus Christ. In the first century of the Church, St. Irenaeus writes, “. . .our Lord Jesus Christ, through His transcendent love, become what we are, [so] that He might bring us to be what He Himself is.”* No only did the Son become us so that we might become Sons, he makes it possible for us to be Sons – heirs – even now, gracing us extravagantly with every gift we need to surrender and love sacrificially. When Christ cries out – “I say to you, Arise!” – he is not merely urging us to rise from death and enter eternal life. He is also commanding us to lift up our broken wills, our torn bodies, and our distracted minds so that we can be revived, restored for the work ahead. Arise, brothers and sisters, this world needs its Christs.

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Do you fear a Savior?

The Nativity of John the Baptist

Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP

OLR, NOLA

As soon as Zechariah confirms his son's name, John. . .Luke reports an odd event. He writes, “Then fear came upon all their neighbors.” Fear? Why? Why are Elizabeth's and Zechariah's neighbors fearful at the naming of the couple's son? John isn't a family name. We know that much. We know that Zechariah had his tongue frozen b/c he questioned the angel who brought news of Elizabeth's pregnancy months earlier. What's so horrible about the name “John” that it causes the whole neighborhood to quake in fear? “John” simply means “God shows Himself to be gracious.” Hardly terrifying. Well, you see, it's not just the name that's got people worked up. It's the whole way in which an elderly Elizabeth becomes pregnant and how Zechariah is punished by an angel and how his punishment is publicly lifted when he obeys the Lord and allows John to be named “John.” There's something special, something extraordinary about this kid. That mystery – "What, then, will this child be?" – is what's got them all whispering in fear.

 

If they knew then what we know now, they would be rejoicing. John is the herald of the Christ, our liberator from sin and death. Well, some of them would be rejoicing – those who actually want to be freed from sin and death and don't much mind the upheaval that Christ's birth, death, and resurrection will cause to their everyday lives. We can imagine that back then – like right now – there are those in the neighborhood who either don't believe that sin is a thing or don't believe that they themselves are actually committing a sin when they sin. If sin isn't real, or my favorite sin isn't really a sin in my mind, then I'm not going to be all that thrilled to hear about the birth of a prophet who preaches the necessity of repentance and the coming of the Savior. In fact, the birth of a prophet is probably going to shake things up and cause me a lot of inconvenience. . .not the least of which is having to hear about how sinful I am! So, yeah, I'd be afraid. Especially if I know my people's prophetic history. What does Isaiah say, “The Lord called me from birth, from my mother's womb he gave me my name. He made of me a sharp-edged sword. . .He made me a polished arrow. . .” Sharp swords and polished arrows can only mean one thing: THAT kid is going to be a pain in the neck.

And indeed he was. John the Baptist didn't make a lot of friends. He had his disciples. His followers. Those he baptized in repentance. And we all know the story of his demise. Dancing girl. Foolish king. Severed head. Silver platter. What we might not know is why the Church celebrates John's birth. We celebrate Christ's birth and the BVM's birth and John's. No one else's. So, why John? We celebrate John's birth b/c it is all too easy for us to forget our prophetic heritage; to set aside the ancient voice of God and misremember the promises He made ages ago. If we forget, our tongues become stuck in ignorance and we cannot offer Him thanks and praise for His gifts. We cannot bear witness to His goodness in our lives. We cannot ask for what we need, nor receive what He has given us. If we forget John, we forget that God shows Himself to be gracious to us, and we cannot show His graciousness to others. If we forget John, we forget the price we might have to pay for standing on the Truth, and we may fall to laxity in telling the truth. We remember John – his birth and death – so that we may never forget that we ourselves are heralds of the Christ. We are not The Christ. But we are on our way to becoming Christs. . .prophets of the Father's mercy in this world.

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