Sunday, November 18, 2012

Doing Basic Things

33rd SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Fr. Pat Earl, SJ

 
Next Sunday we celebrate the feast of Christ the King.  It marks the end of the church’s liturgical year.  And so the liturgy today would have us reflect on basic things – on final and fundamental things – as we move toward the end of the year.

As a Jesuit, I also have a real need to remember that this past Friday marked the twenty-third anniversary of the Jesuit martyrs of El Salvador.  I hope they will help us reflect on basic things.

In today’s gospel Jesus talks about the coming of the Son of Man in great power and glory.  The coming is framed by turbulence and darkness.  Here Jesus wants to teach us what to look for – what signs to look for – that we may discern and recognize his coming among us.  It’s like recognizing summer’s coming, he says, when we see leaves beginning to sprout.  But at his coming – what begins to sprout in us and among us is a committed love for others.  When love enters alien territory, there’s upset and turbulence.  When we love in a world grown suspect of real love, then we will face opposition.

I want to offer the example of the Jesuit martyrs – their lives and their deaths – as a way to help us recognize and respond to the coming of Jesus into our lives and our world.

And so we remember that on November 16, 1989 elite troops of the Salvadoran army arrived on the campus of the Jesuit university in San Salvador.  It was night.  These troops had been trained here in the United States.  They headed directly to the Jesuit residence.  They shot six Jesuits through the brain – their protest to the kind of thinking these Jesuits had pursued.  Then they shot their cook and her daughter.

There was a member of the Jesuit community who was not killed.  Fr. Jon Sobrino, a theologian, had been away in Asia giving talks.  I know Jon.  We were students together in Germany.  He later reflected on the slaughter of his brother Jesuits.  Why?  Why kill these men?  His answer was simple.  They were killed because they had taken to heart Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan.  These parish priests and university professors were killed because their lives had been given over to mercy and compassion.  They had seen the obvious needs of the Salvadoran people – and they had responded.  And their response to real human needs called into question the basic power structure of Salvadoran society.  These Jesuits thought basic thoughts and asked basic questions about justice in their society.  They did basic things – like publicly protesting in their preaching and teaching the absence of justice.  They called the powerful into question and called them to accountability.

A year after their martyrdom Jon publicly prayed these words at their graves:  “rest in peace, my six Jesuit brothers.  May your peace give us hope, and may your memory never let us rest in peace.”  I think this kind of remembering should give us, the living, unsettling memories.  I don’t mean an unsettling that comes from guilt.  That takes us nowhere.  Today Jesus is telling us in the gospel we are to see in these martyrs – to recognize in their lives and deaths – the Son of Man returning in all his power and glory.  We are to see here in these men what real love can do, when lived utterly to the end.  What should unsettle us is what we can become – what God can actually make of us.  It is our hope that unsettles us.

As a parish we reflect on these final, fundamental things.  We reflect on what these martyrs have to say to us.  And they speak to us of living in bold hope – a hope that unsettles us.  May we be a parish of unsettling hope for ourselves and for Charlotte.  Come, Lord Jesus, renew the face of your church!

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Living in Fear or Living in Love

31st SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Fr. Pat Earl, SJ


Our readings today are saying two different things.  Especially our first reading – from the Book of Deuteronomy in the Hebrew Scriptures – tells us we should fear God and then it says we should love God.  Fear and love are difficult to reconcile as ways to approach God.  Yet this is what Moses says:  “Fear the Lord, your God, and keep all his statutes and commandments…”  But then he says: “The Lord is our God, the Lord alone!  Therefore, you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.”

I’d like to talk about fearing God.  The reason is that I think we have greatly misunderstood what the Bible means when it speaks of “fear of God”.  This misunderstanding has had tragic consequences for many who are trying to live life faithful to the Word of God.  They feel commanded to become fearful before God.  So, a sensed distance before God is good; an anxious distance is expected.  And correspondingly, the God who commands our fear also commends our cringing.  Being religious somehow translates, bottom-line, into becoming a fearful, anxious person.  That can get further translated into becoming fearful in the church before church authority.  Such fear in the church is never acceptable.

Unfortunately too many of us have learned fright, anxiety and dread at the very thought of coming into God’s presence, especially at the hour of our death.  With confidence I say that is not what God wants for us.  What God actually wants for us – Jesus tells us.  It is the Father’s pleasure to give us the kingdom – that and all things beside [Lk 12, 30-31].

It will help us to take a look at what the Bible means by “fear of God”.  The “fear of the Lord” spoken of in the Bible is a healthy sense of reverence, wonder and awe when coming into the presence of the divine.  And so it is called “the beginning of wisdom” as it opens us up to the presence of something larger and wiser than ourselves.  Fear of the Lord recognizes how utterly other God is but also allows us to recognize the holy in our midst.  And it also allows God to awaken in us larger and wiser desires and responsibilities that we have been afraid to contemplate for ourselves.

Fear of the Lord expands us.  It fills us with God’s own ambitions for us and our world – what Jesus calls “the kingdom of God”.  This fear of the Lord has quite the opposite affect than the kind of fear that shrinks us, making us too cautious to move beyond our own self-interest.  It is precisely this kind of shriveling fear that God through the prophets tells us we should not have. “Fear not!” is the Bible’s most repeated command.  That kind of fear only diminishes us.  And we should be very careful not to allow it to shape the way we see things nor the way we decide things.  Fear – in religion as well as in politics – is always a bad counselor.

Fear of the Lord, the beginning of wisdom, leads us into doing the love of the Lord.  I’d like to finish with a Jesuit thing.  It’s from Fr. Pedro Arrupe who was the leader or superior general of the Jesuits and for us quite a hero.  Listen to how he describes the kind of life we will lead if we let ourselves be led by fear of the Lord.

Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way.  What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.  It will decide… who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.  Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.