August 18, 2013

Bulletin August 18, 2013 20^th Sunday in Ordinary Time C

Jeremiah 38: 4-6, 8-10; Hebrews 12:1-4; Luke 12:49-53
“I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!” Jesus’ words today certainly are startling. But are they? So often in reading books about Jesus and in the Gospels themselves, ‘nice words’ are spoken by Jesus...over and over are examples of peace and love, compassion and forgiveness and vivid stories about the Father’s love for every single person. Today Jesus tells us some pretty unsettling things about severe clashes within families and individuals. So what is the lesson that we can reflect on?
Earlier in the passage, Jesus tells His disciples, “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!” Jesus is not taking about the kind of fire that ‘destroys’ but the fire that will transform and make new. I am fascinated when I hear of the annual fires out in the West which ravish thousands of acres of forests. In watching a documentary on this many years ago, I remember hearing that these fires are good because they clear out old growth and make room for the new. The fire that Jesus is talking about is the fire that transforms me from being a coach potato to being a person who is active in the continual discovery and sharing of God’s love. Jesus is setting a fire in my heart, in each person’s heart. It is easy for someone to say, ‘Just sit back and relax...let the younger ones be the ones to flame the Father’s love in people’s hearts. Yet Jesus constantly taught that if I sit, I stagnate.
Jesus’ life example to me was not one who sat and watched. He showed His disciples, me and each disciple that there is a cost to discipleship...there is a cost in being a person of love and a follower of Jesus. All I have to do is to look at the cross. What did Jesus teach me about His cross? That every person will have countless crosses in their lives...and these are not ‘nice and peachy’. The crosses involve sacrifice; the crosses involve pain: physical, emotional, psychological. The crosses involve me giving up what I want to do and to turn my plans and dreams aside so that I can respond in love to people who need God’s love. The crosses tell me that life is never easy, or simple or without difficulties.
Fr. Anthony Kadavil in Teaching & Preaching Resources talks about the hard life each person is called to. He said, “Jeremiah learned that first-hand, as we heard in the First Reading. His ‘reward’ for accepting the call of God and for ‘telling it like it is’ was to be thrown into a cistern to die. Think about that; it took real courage to speak out in the face of such danger. And in the Second Reading the author of the Letter to the Hebrews makes clear that if Jesus faced so much opposition and ridicule and suffering for carrying out His Father’s will, we should expect something similar---a sharing in that same struggle. In other words, it’s not IF we will suffer for what we believe, but THAT we will suffer. To put it in modern language---when we love every person and in every situation we must be prepared to not always have that same love returned.”
Christianity is a religion of action and pain and love and not knowing what the end product of my actions will be but to know that I am a Christian in living the life of one. That’s the challenge of being Jesus.
Msgr. Eugene Lauer in Sunday Morning Insights takes a different direction by emphasizing that there is nothing dull about being Jesus. His life wasn’t dull: He faced every kind of human problem imaginable. He liked banquets and fasted in the desert. He loved little kids coming to Him and He had royal battles with the Pharisees whom He called “hypocrites and whited sepulchers” ... real fighting words.
Then Fr. Lauer said, “Many of the saints (saint should be defined as a person who lived life to the brim) are excellent reflections of the spirit of this Sunday’s gospel. Dull is the last word that anyone could have used for Philip Neri, who ‘had them rolling in the aisles’ with his serendipitous sense of humor. Teresa of Avila kept even ships on their toes with her sudden and keen intervention into the practical life of the Church in her day. And, who could ever tell what young Francis Bernadone of Assisi was going to do next?”
How many of us have been fascinated with Pope Francis and devour his next ‘action or reaction’ in the newspapers. A month ago he was talking to some 6000 seminarians and men and women who were considering religious life from 66 nations who had come on a pilgrimage to Rome. He told them and all of us to be aware of materialism and a culture that believes nothing is forever. He said that true joy doesn’t come from things, from big cars and the best smart phone. He said “it springs from an encounter, a relation with others; it comes from feeling accepted, understood and loved, and from accepting, understanding and loving. ... Don’t be hypocrites and practice what is preached...effective evangelization (telling the world, my world about Jesus) can’t be measured by human notions of success and failure, but only by becoming conformed to the logic of the Cross of Jesus of giving oneself totally and completely with love.” AND MOST IMPORTANTLY: “What counts is to be permeated by the love of Christ, to let oneself be led by the Holy Spirit and to graft one’s own life onto the tree of life, the Lord’s cross.” I am called to be Jesus; each and every person is. There is no way I can ‘be Jesus’ if I don’t do it through picking up my cross of pain and suffering and helping others with their crosses. So I reflect on:

• What can I do? One said, ‘Reach out to others who appear to have lost their way. Offer to help them recover their faith. Pray for each person in your family who is resisting the love of Jesus.’
  
• Whatever obstacles I have in my life do I look at Jesus and see how He overcame His? Nikos Kazantzakis in the The Last Temptation of Christ. Wrote, “In order to mount to the Cross, the summit of sacrifice, and to God, the summit of immateriality, Christ passed through all the stages which the man who struggles passes through. That is why His suffering is so familiar to us; that is why we share it, and why His final victory seems to us so much our own future victory.”
  
• The great words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “The day will come, when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, human beings will have discovered fire.” (The Evolution of Chastity in Toward the Future 1974)
  

And you and I and every Christian have our own role to play...Am I doing this?