This is my homily for yesterday, which was the celebration of the Ascension of the Lord for the Chicago Archdiocese (and most US dioceses). The readings for the day are here. Sorry for being a day late; come to think of it, I'm usually a dollar short, too.
Yesterday/Friday, we entered the Bridge Phase here in Illinois! More people in stores, theaters, bars. More people can come to mass now, too, and we can sit closer together. As I'm fully vaccinated, I don’t have to wear a face shield anymore when giving communion. Here in Illinois, it seems we’re in transition.
The month of May always has been a big month for transitions. We’re having first communions at St. Edna this month, with children getting more deeply initiated into their discipleship. College students, including the ones in our household, are coming home this month, transitioning from school mode to summer mode. Another of our children, a recent college grad, just got his first job out of college. That’s a bigger transition: from student to working adult. All around us, people are completing one stage of their lives and moving on to another stage. Many transitions.
This weekend is an anniversary of a sort for me. Anniversaries are reminders of life’s transition points, those milestone occasions when we’ve moved from one stage of our lives to another. We commemorate anniversaries of our wedding days, the day when we move into a new way of living, when two of us are joined together and become one.
We also commemorate anniversaries of high school graduations, which mark our progression to a more adult stage in our lives. We celebrate those graduation anniversaries with reunions.
Many of us discover, after we first graduate from high school, that we’re expected to take on more adult responsibilities than we had in the past, whether as a college student or as a worker. For some of us, being a responsible adult can be quite a challenge at first. My freshman year of college was a little rocky, living away from home for the first time and figuring out things out like doing my own laundry and rolling myself out of bed to get to class every morning without being able to lean on my parents day-to-day. For some of us, that first year away from school and home is a difficult transition year. Some of us don't quite make it; we need to return home for a while, and then try again a bit later. But as we start to get the hang of it, this new, adult stage becomes more fulfilling and rewarding, too. Being an adult is what we’ve been prepared for, and when we’ve reached that stage of life, we must go off and try to be an adult.
I’ve been to four high school reunions now with my classmates; that means I’ve been out of high school for 40 years or more. A lot of time has passed, and I’ve changed considerably since that milestone day in 1979. It’s interesting when our class comes together every 10 years, because even though we’re the same persons, we’ve all changed so much - we've all been through so much in our lives. Even the people I didn’t like in high school have changed – it’s getting harder to hate them as much as I used to. They seem like nice, normal, friendly people now. We’re adults, and we’re able to handle our relationships as adults now.
We’re able to make this transition, in part because of high school itself – because high school prepared us for adulthood. High school was both a being and a becoming.
The anniversary I’m celebrating this weekend is sort of like a graduation. In my case, today/tomorrow, Sunday, is the 17th anniversary of my ordination to the diaconate. As a matter of fact, if I recall correctly, the same solemn feast we’re celebrating today, the Ascension of the Lord, happened to land on my ordination day, back in 2004. I think it’s fair to say I’ve changed over the last 17 years. Some of you have been watching and listening to me now for 17 years – I’d be curious to know whether you agree that I’ve changed, and maybe even have grown. You can let me know after mass.
Jesus’s Ascension is a big milestone day for his followers. Talk about a transition day! He ascends to heaven, to his father, but his followers don’t get to come with him. It’s a graduation day of sorts for his followers: it’s sort of like the day they got dropped off at college for the first time, and are watching their parent drive away. Now they’re seemingly by themselves, and have to get on with this new stage of their life’s journey. No longer will they be able to sit at his feet while he teaches them.
Just as high school prepared us for life after high school, Jesus has prepared his followers for the next stage of their lives, too. In Mark’s account of the Ascension which we’ve just heard, Jesus gives his disciples some final instructions – in fact, he gives them a mission. He tells them, “Go into the whole world, and proclaim the gospel to every creature”.
And with those instructions still sinking into their brains and hearts, he left them – up he went. Until then, they were disciples, a word which means “the pupil of a master”. Jesus was their master of wisdom and holiness and justice, and they were his pupils. It would not be wrong think of the disciples as students. But now their school days have ended, and they’ve been sent forth. “The one who is sent” is in fact the literal meaning of the word “apostle”. The pupils have been sent forth. The disciples have become apostles.
We’re both. We’re disciples who are still learning; and we’re apostles who have been sent forth to proclaim the Good News. For any of us here who aren’t adults yet, let me let you in on a little secret: that’s how adulthood works. We have a mission, a purpose in life, which we must do; but we also must continue to learn, or we’ll never grow. In fact, we won’t be able to complete our mission if we stop learning and growing.
On the day of his ordination, a deacon is sent forth with these simple but profound words:
Believe what you read
Teach what you believe
Practice what you teach
Those words aren’t just for deacons. They’re for all of us.
Read and believe – be a disciple. Teach and practice – be an apostle. Discipleship prepares us for our mission, and apostleship is our mission. That’s the anniversary we’re really celebrating today: the Ascension of the Lord: the day of transition when we received our mission, and began to fulfill it.
Jim, congratulations on your anniversary of ordination!
ReplyDeleteYes, this time of year is full of transitions.
K. also preached the homily for the feast of the Ascension, which for us was Thursday rather than Sunday. He had the school Mass in the morning and also the evening one. The other deacon took the Wednesday evening vigil one. Kind of challenging to compose a homily for kids who only go up to the 6th grade in our school, and have it work for the adults also.
Yes, I've never really had to preach to kids before. Well, I have once or twice; I've sort of done it like a classroom, with me posing questions and seeing if they can answer - the questions being directed to a particular point I'm trying to make. But when it comes to different ages, what they know, their stages of development - that's all foggy to me, even though all my kids progressed through all those stages, not really that long ago. So I think preaching to kids is kind of a "boutique skill".
DeleteBelieve what you read? EVERYTHING you read? Seems like bad advice. Surely that statement was qualified somehow, wasn’t it?
ReplyDeleteAnne, don't you believe everything you read on the Internet? :-)
DeleteIt's said in the context of being handed a Book of the Gospels. I guess I could have been a little clearer about that!
Those words, "Believe what you read, teach what you believe, practice what you teach" are part of the ordination ceremony for deacons.
DeleteOK, one assumes that those seeking to be deacons believe what they read in the gospels. But - I seriously doubt that every priest, every deacon interprets the gospels in identical ways. They read the same words, but understand them differently.
DeleteInterpretations can vary wildly. The second two phrases are fine - not so ambiguous. One priest might teach his understanding of a gospel one way, and a different priest or deacon might have a completely different take on it and teach something different from priest #1. Just one example since I also take away understandings from what I read that are often not at all close to what a male priest might say - my own take on Mary and Martha is quite different from any that I have ever heard from a male cleric. Our woman priest (a real mother) gave a homily on the gospel about Mary's visit to Elizabeth that I don't think many male clerics, especially priests, who are unmarried - would ever come up with. Hers was the best homily I ever heard on that passage of the gospel.
Yes - scripture is amenable to different interpretations, and I am glad you are able to hear insightful interpretations.
DeleteI think the key idea in that first line is that the reader *believe*. In a sense, belief precedes interpretation. There have been eminent scholars who don't believe - and their exegesis sometimes follows their unbelief.
A preacher must believe. He speaks for the church, not only himself, and he should, in a sense, speak with the church, i.e. proclaim the church's faith. If he can't do that in good conscience, then he shouldn't preach. At least not as a minister of the church.