Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time - July 26, 2015

Homily for 17^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

July 26, 2015

American Poverty

 

            Over spring break in college, I had the privilege of doing a mission trip to the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota. It was a great week – we spent time doing everything from visiting prisons, door-to-door evangelization as we invited people to church, teaching in their Catholic school, and doing so much more. But one thing that struck me was that the poverty of the reservation was unlike what I had imagined poverty to be. All of the kids had Nike and Abercrombie & Fitch clothes on; every house had a satellite dish. No one was truly starving. But at the same time, there was a tremendous amount of alcohol abuse (over 5 times as much as the general population) and broken families on the reservation. There was a certain despair that I could sense among the people – maybe because there was still three feet of snow on the ground in late March – but also because of the broken homes, abuse, and alcoholism that was so prevalent on that reservation. All in all, that trip gave me a new and different understanding of poverty.

            Today’s Gospel shows Jesus reaching out to the poor in very practical ways – He multiplies bread to feed a hungry crowd. They had a physical need, and Jesus met it. But He didn’t stop there, because He knows that our needs go far beyond the physical. In the next couple weeks, we’ll be reading the rest of this Gospel passage, where Jesus begins to explain the teaching on the Eucharist. He met their physical needs only so that He could fulfill their deeper spiritual hungers. In fact, when the people in today’s Gospel try to make Jesus king, He runs away – because the people misunderstood the miracle. They looked at it as free food – Jesus wanted to satisfy their deeper hunger with His presence.

            Mother Teresa tells the story of when she came to visit an American nursing home. The directors of the nursing home showed her the televisions in every room, the good food, the activities that the residents did. But Mother Teresa was noticing the looks on everyone’s faces. Why did they not smile?, she asked the director. Why do they look towards the door? She realized that, although they had every physical comfort and amenity, they suffered from profound loneliness. No one came to visit them. And so they were miserable. And Mother Teresa concluded that there was a greater poverty in America than in Calcutta, India, because in India, people were hungry for food, but here in America, people were hungry for love.

            I truly believe that poverty looks different in America than it does in the rest of the world. Here, we do not have people literally starving on the streets. There are enough food pantries, free meals, soup kitchens, and charities, so that no one will ever starve. We don’t have that kind of third-world poverty that you sometimes see on television. Our poverty is different – and in some ways deeper.

            It seems to me that there are two main types of poverty in America. The first one is loneliness. Mother Teresa once said, “The most terrible poverty is loneliness and the feeling of being unloved.” We could be surrounded by everything that money could buy – but if we feel rejected, unloved, then all of the money is useless. Everyone can be susceptible to this loneliness – from the elderly in nursing homes who have been forgotten by their families, to the fifth-grade kid who feels like he doesn’t fit in, from the wife in a loveless marriage, to the single person who is struggling to find their place in life. Loneliness is an epidemic in America – and it isn’t helping that more and more people are addicted to technology, which further separates us from one another.

            Luckily, there is a simple antidote to loneliness – go out and meet someone. Put down the iPhone, walk away from the computer, and introduce yourself to the person sitting next to you in your morning train ride. Go knock on your neighbor’s door with a plate of cookies. After Mass today, don’t rush out the door – say hello to the person you’ve been sitting behind for fifteen years but you don’t know their name. This will feed the deep spiritual hunger that we all have – the hunger for society, for love.

            The other type of poverty in America is a lack of meaning in life. Many people go through the same routine every day – get up, drink your coffee, go to work or school, come home, eat dinner, veg out in front of the TV, go to bed, and do it all over again – and some people don’t ever bother to consider why they are alive or what the entire purpose of their life is. There’s a real spiritual poverty in not knowing the meaning of our lives, and so many people try to frantically feed their existential boredom with sex and new cars and fanatically rooting for sports teams.

            The antidote to this kind of boredom, this lack of meaning, is to introduce people to a relationship with Christ. Jesus is the meaning of our existence, and if we’re not seeking Him first, then we’re wasting our time. This world needs to know that – your friends and family members need to know that – perhaps YOU need to know that! The whole reason we are alive is to become saints, and with God’s grace it is possible! There is nothing more difficult, more challenging, more exhilarating, more joyful, more important, than becoming a saint!

            This past week, six young people from our parishes participated in a week-long Catholic summer camp called Camp Veritas – “Veritas” means truth, in Latin. Five hundred teens were there, giving their lives to Jesus and having a great time. The camp director was telling me that one kid came up to him and said, “My mom forced me to go to camp this year. I didn’t want to come. But now my whole life has changed because now I know what I’m living for – I’m living for Jesus and striving for holiness.” We all have that desire to know that our life isn’t meaningless, a random chance occurrence – no, our life has meaning because we were lovingly created by God and destined for eternity with Him.

            So this is what poverty looks like in America. Although there are certainly people who struggle to make ends meet, who have a hard time keeping a roof over their head or food on the table, I think the vast majority of people have a deeper poverty – the poverty of loneliness and the poverty of not knowing what their life means. But the good news is that Jesus is the answer to those deeper hungers of the human heart. Over the next couple of weeks in the Gospel, we will hear how Jesus feeds us through the gift of His Body and Blood.