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| Photo by NTC/Kevin Bartram |
Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
August 18, 2019
Grapevine, Texas
Jeremiah 38:4-6, 8-10
Psalm 40:2, 3, 4, 18
Hebrews 12:1-4
Luke 12:49-53
Family life is about conversion. Family life is about conversion within the family. Family life is about conversion of the family. I can remember being taught this lesson about conversion by my Lutheran father.
I was fourteen-years-old and I was a freshman in high school. It was about the middle of October when the weather begins to turn colder. The weather was becoming colder, as was the novelty of high school. It was a cold morning and I remembered that I had not completed an assignment for my first period Latin class. I remembered that I didn’t have the book with me for me to attempt to complete the assignment on the subway should I be lucky enough to find a seat for me to be able to write out the answers. As I thought about the day with increasing dread, I suddenly realized that I wasn’t feeling well. In fact, I suspected that I was not well enough to go to school. I got out of bed and went to the kitchen where my father was making coffee and getting ready for the day. I told my father that I didn’t feel well and couldn’t go to school that day. He looked at me, glanced at me diagnostically, and told me directly to sit down.
What happened next, I will always remember, and it is something for which I will always be grateful. My father spoke very directly to me in a conversational tone. “Look,” he explained, “I am not going to brow beat you into going to school. That’s your mother’s department. I am telling you that you help this family by going to school. That’s part of your job to help this family and do your part. Sick days are for when you are feeling sick and you run the risk of becoming sicker by traveling to school or when you are contagious and could spread the flu to other people. Sick days are not given for your convenience to slack off. Decide. Are you sick?” I listened. I relaxed. I nodded. I went to school that day and I never had that conversation again with my father or my mother.
Jeremiah is calling Israel to convert as a group in turning to the Lord to become one people, His people. He is not calling simply for the conversion of each individual. Jeremiah is calling for the conversion of God’s People, composed of different persons who relate to each other as one people made to be God’s People by the Covenant initiated by the one true God — their God. Jeremiah is rejected and resisted because he is faithful to God, the God of His People, and to the truth of the revelation of God’s desires for God’s People. Yet many of the people abandon the covenant and each prefer the easy narrative of the false prophets of comfort and self-identification.
The idolatrous message of the false prophets is a familiar narrative to our ears because it has been spoken throughout salvation history. It is a narrative of compromise and appeasement. It was spoken to the Maccabees, “What’s the big deal over a little ham? It’s just a little ham.” It has been spoken to the martyrs, “What’s the big deal over a little incense placed before the statue of the Emperor? It’s just a little incense.” It is spoken to us today, “What’s the big deal over fluidity of gender and the human right to marry? It’s just their private choice.” It is an easy narrative that is accompanied by hardship and assault upon the human person created as a unity of body and soul in the image and likeness of God, not fabricated by oneself as a ghost in a machine with interchangeable parts. Like Jeremiah before us, we must not capitulate to this seductive narrative; it is only with God’s grace that we won’t do so.
Jeremiah is faithful to the Lord even as he honestly complains to Him about his suffering — even when the Lord doesn’t do what Jeremiah wants Him to do in the way that Jeremiah wants Him to do it. The Lord listens to him patiently and compassionately because the Lord is pleased with him and loves him. Jeremiah is a true prophet. The true prophet, including the prophetic Church, is rejected not because the prophet speaks with the heat of anger but because the prophet speaks God’s desires for His people in the clear light of truth even when God’s desires are not preferable to the autonomy of selfish human beings. The prophet perseveres with God in the ongoing conversation of prayer that involves listening even more than it involves speaking.
Perseverance in prayer is described in our second reading from Hebrews. We are surrounded by the cloud of witnesses who have persevered in running the race before us; they have resisted sin by appeal to God’s mercy and forgiveness. This cloud of witnesses refers to the saints who surround us still and pray with us and for us. They are a sign of hope. Hope requires fortitude. Fortitude involves vulnerability, the willingness to be wounded for the sake of the truth. Without vulnerability there is no fortitude; without fortitude there is no hope. The cross is our only hope for salvation.
In fidelity to our vocations to family life we each are called to the willingness to be wounded for the truth in love and not simply being adherent to yet another concept. The truth for which we are wounded is relational not relativistic. The truth is Jesus Christ, the second person in the relation of the Holy Trinity and in the relation of the Holy Family of Nazareth; He is the Son of Mary and foster Son of Joseph; He is the grandson of Joachim and Anne; He is the cousin of John the Baptist and Elizabeth. The truth is as relational and dynamic as love itself in all its selflessness. The truth is revealed and experienced in the fragile vulnerability of the family —husbands laying down their lives for their wives; wives sacrificing for their husbands; fathers giving of their time for their sons and daughters, mothers giving of themselves for sons and daughters in the formation of a household that is governed in the right order of respect and forgiveness. In this regard, children are not simply beneficiaries of their parents’ good example. They are meant to be stewards of that good example contributing according to their ability to the culture of love being formed in the home that is eventually to be shared with neighbor and society.
This is one of the ways in which the family is a domestic church. The family is not an aggregate of individuals with private interests shared by contract for the time being for the sake of further acquisition of private goods for each individual. The family serves the common good not as a maker of productive individuals for the sake of the workforce but as a community dedicated to love of God and service of their neighbor, most especially the weakest among us. The family has a hierarchy of service established both in nature and in grace through a faithful and permanent marital covenant open to God’s gift of children.
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| Photo by NTC/Kevin Bartram |
It is the selflessness of marital and familial love that saves us from becoming lost in a culture war to overpower the enemy in a brawl of ideologies. Instead, we are called to engage reasonably the battle against the chaos of evil through the strategy of Christian discipleship established in charity and sustained by the gritty stamina of justice and the stable pliancy of mercy. The extreme individualism of today’s culture should not be met with an opposite and volatile extreme of rigid adherence to a code of one size fits all. The only answer is Christ Himself who calls each of us to a different share in His mission that is united only by Christ Himself in His Gospel authentically shared by the Church in His Spirit. We can become lost in the weeds over such subordinate and prudential issues as: family size discerned in accord with natural means, the selection of the appropriate means and method of education and formation of children, and the selection of devotional practices within the home.
The Gospel reading of today reveals that the family exists for Christ’s purposes in nature and in grace, not the other way around. The family itself (as well as its members) requires conversion. Conversion takes time and requires God’s grace and patience. Conversion is the “fire” of which Jesus speaks in today’s Gospel that purifies the wonderful gift of marriage and family life. Without Christ as its center for direction the family can be taken up with an ideology that soon employs Christian values but becomes devoid of Christ Himself, resulting not in patience and tolerant forbearance but in narcissistic introspection and indifferent apathy.
It is the cunning and subtlety of the devil to induce us to make room for Christ only in the most important part of our lives to serve our plans (even good plans) but not to see our lives as secondary to Christ’s plan of salvation for which He calls us to give of ourselves totally as belonging to Him by laying down our lives for our brothers and sisters both within our families and outward towards the peripheries of the larger society. “He must increase, and we must decrease.” This self-donation is demonstrated in the reciprocal love of husband and wife as well as in the pastoral vocation of a priest who must courageously lay down his life in protection of the sheep from the cunning of the wolf and the indolence of the hired hand.
The role of the Church is neither to hide within the home, nor is the role of the Church to be the only institution to offer guidance and direction in society. Rather, the Church must fulfill its divine mandate to proclaim the Gospel to everyone in the entire world, and in service of that proclamation the Church gladly gives to the world its treasures that reflect the truth about both God and the human person. These are treasures from which a culture is formed beginning with the integrity of marital and family life.
The responsibility of husbands to their wives and of wives to their husbands is to sanctify each other through prayer and living the Gospel of mercy in the practical order of the day that never goes as planned. The responsibility of fathers and mothers to their sons and daughters is to prepare them for heaven by teaching them to keep the commandments as Christ taught us by loving God and neighbor. The responsibility of sons and daughters to their mothers and fathers is to grow from mere compliance to an obedience rooted in respect and love of which the sweetest fruit is joy.
In a few moments we each will approach the altar again to be nourished by the Bread of Life, the Eucharist, by which Christ gives us Himself, forgives our sins, and converts us as His Church and as members of His Church, the New Israel and the People of God. The communion of the Eucharist reveals to us again the beautiful two-in-one flesh communion of married life; the sacrificial love of Christ for His Spouse, the Church, and our mission to be sent into the world to evangelize.
