Homily for August
18, 2019
Twentieth Sunday
of Ordinary Time
All In
There is
a town in Pennsylvania that is completely on fire…literally. The small town of
Centralia, PA sits on a giant deposit of coal, and in 1969 a fire broke out in
the coal mine. Despite efforts to put it out, the fire kept burning…and burning…and
burning. It is still burning today and geologists say that there is enough coal
for the fire to burn for another 250 years!
I don’t
think this is what Jesus meant when He said, “I have come to set the earth on fire!”
But there are some similarities between fire and the Gospel of Christ.
Fire
consumes completely. Centralia is now a ghost town; the toxic fumes and
dangerous sinkholes made it impossible to live there. The whole town is consumed
by this fire. Likewise, Jesus wants our entire lives to be consumed with the
Gospel, until there is nothing left but Him.
My
friends, this is not the age for lukewarm Catholicism! We have to live like
saints on-fire with love for Christ! Two weeks ago a Pew Research study was
released which showed that only 31 percent of Catholics believe in the Real
Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. My friends, the world has too many
mediocre Catholics, who don’t really believe and who don’t really live out
their faith. As St. Therese of Lisieux said, “You cannot be half a saint; you
must be a whole saint or no saint at all.”
Because
if all this is true – if God is real, and Jesus is really God, and Jesus really
died for our sins and rose on the third day, and if He really established His
Church and His Sacraments as His enduring presence on this earth – if all this is true, then it demands a
response of being on-fire with love for God! It would be crazy to say about the
Catholic faith, “Oh, that’s interesting. I guess it’s true, but I’m just not
really into it.” That’s like saying, “Yeah, that fire looks kinda warm.” Warm?
No, it’s burning hot, consuming its fuel. Our Catholic Faith? If we really
believe that it is true, then it’s not just an unimportant, tangential part of
our life, but must be the very heart.
Perhaps
we’ve heard it so much that it’s lost its impact. But consider - we believe
that God died for us! We believe that we get to eat God every Sunday! We
believe that the Creator of this vast universe has invited us into an intimate
and eternal friendship. How can we be lukewarm, mediocre, blasé when the Sacred
Heart is a raging inferno, burning with love for us!
Notice that Jesus immediately connects that
fire of love with suffering and rejection. Because to love Jesus completely, to
live our Catholic Faith, costs us. It is difficult, it is suffering – it is the
Cross.
There
are two ways we suffer when we go “all in” for Christ. First is the sufferings
caused by overcoming our vices and growing in virtue. Sin is pleasurable for
the moment, but later on it causes misery (much like eating too much Taco
Bell!). So as we seek to live a passionate life for Christ, we have to suffer
the difficulty of giving up the momentary pleasure of sin – holding back that
juicy gossip, denying ourselves our lustful desires, not indulging that temptation
to get revenge. In the long run a virtuous life is happiest – but it does take
self-denial.
The
second suffering that Jesus mentions is the suffering of being rejected. A
little over a week ago we celebrated the feast day of St. Teresa Benedicta of
the Cross. She was born Edith Stein to a devout Jewish family in Germany in the
1890s, but became an atheist as a teenager. She loved the academic life and
began to study philosophy under a Christian convert from Judaism, a philosopher
named Husserl. She became curious about Christianity due to virtuous friends,
and was given the autobiography of St. Theresa of Avila to read. After she had
read it, she closed the book and declared, “This…is…truth!” She entered the
Church and was baptized, much to the horror of her mother.
She and
her mother continued to be on good terms…until she said she wished to become a
nun. It used to be that every time Edith would go back to the university, as
the train would pass her mother’s house, her mother would wait by the window to
wave at her. But on the day her daughter entered the cloistered convent of the
Carmelites, Edith looked back at her house one final time – and her mother was
not in the window. She had disowned her own daughter completely, because of her
faithfulness to Christ. Edith Stein, now known as St. Theresa Benedicta, died
as a martyr in the Holocaust because of her Jewish background.
Some
people want to pretend that Jesus was just a “mild-mannered self-help guru” who
just went about spreading peace and love. But He also warned of the Cross – to follow
Him means we must deny ourselves and face rejection from others.
Yet,
despite the Cross, it is worth it to go “all in” because the reward is far
surpassing! Imagine that you were playing poker and you are dealt a royal flush
(for you non-poker players out there, royal flush is the best hand you can be
dealt). Would you just bet a little bit, saying, “Oh, well, maybe I’d better
hold back, just in case.” Or would you bet everything, with the certainty that
you are going to win? I’d throw all the chips on the table, knowing that
victory is guaranteed.
In the
same way, we know that victory is already won by Christ, Heaven is assured, and
God’s love is promised to us…if we go all in. I challenge all of us to ask
ourselves, what are we holding back? What parts of our life have not been
consumed by the fire of God’s love?
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