This is my homily for today, the 3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A. The readings for today are here.
A brief note: a year or two ago, our church had video screens installed, primarily to display song lyrics and common prayers like the I Confess and the Nicene Creed. Today, for the first time, I integrated video into a homily, showing a 2-minute clip from Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. We (me plus a few folks from the parish who know a little more about audio/visual technology than me) weren't able to figure out how to produce a separate file of that 2-minute excerpt, so the person who "drives" the slideware during mass simply started the full video manually at the starting point I had requested, and stopped it manually at the end point. I'm explaining this so you understand why I don't include the video in this script of today's homily, even thought this blogging software has the ability to add video to a post: we weren't able to produce a separate, two-minute clip. Probably, there are people in the parish with those skills, but we haven't identified them yet. In the meantime, if you wish to watch Martin Luther King give the segment of the speech I played this morning (it's worthwhile to see and hear him deliver it), go to YouTube or another resource and find one of the videos of his speech. The portion I played ran from 5:05 through 7:27 on the version of the video I used today; the timing may vary a bit from one video to another.
Here is the text of the homily; here, I've pasted a transcript of the portion of King's speech which I played today.
Last Monday, I had a new experience: I didn’t go to work on Martin Luther King Day. It has been a federal holiday since 1986, but not until this year have I worked for an employer which gave its employees the day off for the holiday.
So when I woke up last Monday, I asked myself, What does one do to observe Martin Luther King Jr. Day? I thought I should find some way of acknowledging and celebrating the great pastor and martyr of the Civil Rights movement. So I did something: perhaps it wasn’t much, but it wasn’t nothing. That morning I launched YouTube and watched Dr. King’s 1963 speech, given from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, which we remember today as his, “I have a dream” speech.
Martin Luther King spoke for 17 minutes that day in 1963 – 17 riveting minutes. Of course, the passage of the speech which is most remembered is the section near the end in which he repeated the refrain, “I have a dream!”, as he painted his compelling vision of an America free of racial discrimination, racial mistreatment and racial animus. Dr. King was calling us all to something new – a new, better way of life, in which Black Americans would have full civil rights.
Martin Luther King was many things: a pastor, an activist, a husband, a father. Like all of us, he wasn't perfect, but like us, he tried to be a follower of Jesus: he was a disciple. When King marched, he was following Jesus’s footsteps, just as Peter, Andrew, James and John did in today's Gospel reading. In this passage we just heard proclaimed, Jesus calls his first followers to something new and better. Jesus invited them to follow him, not only to change their own lives, but to establish a new Kingdom: a Kingdom where God’s peace and God’s justice would prevail, in our society and in all societies.
Did you notice some key words in today’s Gospel passage? When Jesus called Peter and Andrew, and told them, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men”, the Gospel tells us that, “At once they left their nets and followed him.” At once! They didn’t wait until later; they followed him at once. Likewise, when Jesus called James and John, we’re told, “immediately they left their boat and their father and followed him.”
Immediately! At once! When Jesus calls us, the expectation seems to be, the time to respond is now. Not tomorrow, not five minutes from now, but now. Jesus’s call is urgent: the time for change, the time for action, the time to change our own lives, and transform our world into God’s kingdom of peace and justice, is now. Immediately! At once! The Lord Jesus is calling us; don’t let this graced moment pass by.
That responding Yes to Jesus’s call, that leaving the nets and boats behind, didn’t come out of nowhere. Fruit doesn’t ripen all at once; it takes time and growth – sometimes a long time and painful growth. We don’t know the specifics of what led up to that propitious moment for Peter, Andrew, James and John, but somehow, these men were prepared to hear Jesus’s call, walk away from their boats and nets, and chart a new course in their lives. Perhaps they already were attuned to God, through prayer and worship. Perhaps they had experienced disappointments and frustrations in their lives which had made them eager to respond to Jesus’s call. In our own lives, the decision to change things up, to try to make things better, doesn’t come out of nowhere; our lives, with our dreams, our hopes, our disappointments, our frustrations, prepare us to embrace the moment of change when it comes.
Jesus coming to these disciples along the seashore at that moment was like the point in time when the fruit had reached full ripeness. Now, at last, the time for harvest has come: the time to begin something fresh and new and better, the moment to begin to do what one has been prepared to do, has been called to do, all along.
There is a section of Dr. King’s famous 1963 speech which alludes to the propitious moment – the graced moment of Now! when we must walk away from the old and walk toward the new. Dr. King believed that the time for dramatic and beneficial change to American society had been reached during that summer of 1963. That moment didn’t arrive from nowhere. Years, decades and centuries of suffering and struggle had led up to that moment; but now the moment had arrived, and it was time to act. The iron was hot, the fruit was ripened, and it would be wrong – a sin of omission - to let that privileged moment pass without acting. In his speech, King used a striking phrase to describe that propitious moment: he called it, “The fierce urgency of now.” I want to share that passage from his famous speech:
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.
Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.
It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. 1963 is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual.
“The fierce urgency of now”. "Now is the time". Now is the moment; don’t let it pass. Do you hear the echo of Jesus’s call to his followers in that passage? Can you doubt that Martin Luther King was doing Jesus’s work, to build up the kingdom of God?
There is so much happening in our lives, so many places where Jesus’s presence could help. We need Jesus in our hearts, in our personal lives. We need him in our families. And our society needs Jesus. Our society is riven by division; could Jesus be calling us to be a healing, reconciling presence? Immigrants are arriving by the busload; could we be called to help in some way? People are dying deaths of despair, from opioids and suicide; could we be called to bring friendship and support?
Could this, right now, be one of those graced, propitious moments for us, a moment of full ripeness? Is this the time to harvest the ripened fruit, to strike the hot iron? Could it be that Jesus is calling us today to try something new, something radical, something risky? Could this be the day that Jesus is calling us to start something whose ending we may not live to see, but which may not start at all if we don’t act as his hands and feet, right now, to start it? What is it that Jesus is calling us to do, and who is Jesus calling us to be, right here and right now? And how will we respond?
Hodie, Christs natus est Today Christ is born Magnificat antiphon for Christmas.
ReplyDeleteToday the star leads the Magi to the infant Christ Today water is changed into wine for the wedding feast. Today Christ wills to be baptized by John in the river Jordan Magnificat antiphon for Epiphany.
The now (today) of the liturgy while grounded in historical reality is not simply a memory of historical events, rather the now (today) of the liturgy is the eternal presence of those mysteries right here, right now.
Today is the Day of the Lord, which we celebrate weekly on Sunday. The following is a summary of Dies Domini the Apostolic Letter of JP2, most likely ghost written by Robert Taft since it formed a major part of his course on the Liturgical Year.
The Lord's Day has always been accorded special attention in the history of the Church because of its close connection with the very core of the Christian mystery.
It is Easter which returns week by week, celebrating Christ's victory over sin and death, the fulfillment in him of the first creation and the dawn of "the new creation"
It recalls in grateful adoration the world's first day and looks forward in active hope to "the last day", when Christ will come in glory and all things will be made new
It is the festival of the "new creation". Yet, when understood in depth, this aspect is inseparable from what the first pages of Scripture tell us of the plan of God in the creation of the world.
The day of Pentecost — the first day of the eighth week after the Jewish Passover , when the promise made by Jesus to the Apostles after the Resurrection was fulfilled by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit also fell on a Sunday.
This was the day of the first proclamation and the first baptisms: Peter announced to the assembled crowd that Christ was risen and "those who received his word were baptized"
This was the epiphany of the Church, revealed as the people into which are gathered in unity, beyond all their differences, the scattered children of God. Christian thought spontaneously linked the Resurrection, which took place on "the first day of the week", with the first day of that cosmic week which shapes the creation story in the Book of Genesis:
the day of the creation of light . This link invited an understanding of the Resurrection as the beginning of a new creation, the first fruits of which is the glorious Christ, "the first born of all creation" and "the first born from the dead"
Sunday is not only the first day, it is also "the eighth day", set within the sevenfold succession of days in a unique and transcendent position which evokes not only the beginning of time but also its end in "the age to come"
Sunday, the day of light, could also be called the day of "fire", in reference to the Holy Spirit. The light of Christ is intimately linked to the "fire" of the Spirit, and the two images together reveal the meaning of the Christian Sunday.
Pentecost is not only the founding event of the Church, but is also the mystery which forever gives life to the Church. .
The "weekly Easter" thus becomes, in a sense, the "weekly Pentecost" Sunday appears as the supreme day of faith. This is stressed by the fact that the Sunday Eucharistic liturgy, like the liturgy of other solemnities, includes the Profession of Faith.
Therefore, the dies Domini(the Lord’s Day) is also the dies Ecclesiae(the day of the Church, the day of Gathering). ",
ReplyDeleteSunday is the day of joy in a very special way, indeed the day most suitable for learning how to rejoice and to rediscover the true nature and deep roots of joy. Sunday rest then becomes "prophetic", affirming not only the absolute primacy of God, but also the primacy and dignity of the person with respect to the demands of social and economic life, and anticipating in a certain sense the "new heavens" and the "new earth", in which liberation from slavery to needs will be final and complete.
In short, the Lord's Day thus becomes in the truest sense the day of man as well. As the day of solidarity, Sunday should also give the faithful an opportunity to devote themselves to works of mercy, charity and apostolate. To experience the joy of the Risen Lord deep within is to share fully the love which pulses in his heart: there is no joy without love.
Far from being an escape, the Christian Sunday is a "prophecy" inscribed on time itself, a prophecy obliging the faithful to follow in the footsteps of the One who came "to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to captives and new sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord" Sunday is the Day of Days, the Primordial Feast,
Revealing the Meaning of Time as Christ the Alpha and Omega.
Now if our bishops really wanted a vision to get people back to Church this would be a good starting point. Making the Lord's Day the primordial Christian feast. We could do that so much better than the evangelicals do it. We are not going to do that by having parish members who believe they understand the Eucharist show up at Benediction and exposition of the Blessed Sacrament.
This encyclical is fine presentation of the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist which is much more than transubstantiation. As Taft used to say, the important transformation which takes place is not that of bread and wine into Christ, but our transformation into Christ.
Jack, thanks for these quotes. They remind me of the idea that Christ's sacrifice isn't a time-bounded event that happened (only) in the remote past; somehow, at mass, it transcends the boundaries of time, and is happening in the present - the right here/right now.
ReplyDeleteAs are the Incarnation, Resurrection and Pentecost.
DeleteThat is made clear in the Apostolic Letter as it is in the Byzantine Liturgy, which argues for Taft as its primary ghost author.
The Roman Rite tends to analyze things by separating them out especially during the Liturgical Year so that it often seems like we are celebrating historical events that happened mainly in the past.
The Byzantine Rite always reminds us of all the mysteries of our redemption regardless of the season. In the local Orthodox parish, the mysteries of Christ's life literally surround the congregation on the huge (probably 8 ft high by 16 ft wide) icons of the wall of the church.
And, of course, during Ordinary time, we seem to be celebrating "ordinary time." The Byzantine liturgy knows that all time is really after Pentecost so after Christmas they still number the Sundays as after Pentecost until Lent begins. In order words they do not reset the clock.
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