Ordinary Time 23 - A Better Family

 

Homily for Ordinary Time 23

September 8, 2024

Welcome Home

 

            We have a young lady who comes to our youth group here who has a rather inspiring backstory. She was born in Waterbury to a broken home, and bounced around through foster homes for many years until she was finally adopted by a good Catholic family at ten years old. Four years later, she’s now a fervent, faithful follower of Jesus. Over the summer, I asked her how she came to really love the faith, when she grew up in such rough homes and was more-or-less forced to be baptized at ten. She told me, “I don’t know how I came to love Jesus, but when I was baptized, I felt like I was finally coming home.”

            What a beautiful description of a life with Christ – finally coming home. Did you catch the immense power of today’s Collect (Opening Prayer)? Here it is again: O God, by whom we are redeemed and receive adoption, look graciously upon your beloved sons and daughters, that those who believe in Christ may receive true freedom and an everlasting inheritance. Let’s unpack that for a minute.

            We are creatures – no better than servants, really. We don’t have the power to draw another breath if it’s not given to us from above. And worse than that – we were disobedient slaves, we had spat in His face, disobeyed His commands. But even though He knows our nothingness and our arrogant rebellion, He still decided to offer us something phenomenal: we have the chance to become, not servants and dust, but sons and daughters.

            To do that, He had to first pay back the consequences of our rebellion – which He paid on the Cross. Once cleansed, through baptism He raises us to a dignity we never deserved – to be His sons and daughters, to share in His very life, to open His home to us and to allow us to call Him Father.

            This is the radical uniqueness of Christianity! Our Muslim brothers and sisters call God “Allah” – Master – but we call God “Abba”, Father, which would be blasphemous to Muslims. Our Jewish brethren would never consider themselves children of God – they are His people, perhaps, but not His family – and the blessings of God were only for them, not for the world.

            It would be outrageous in the first century, then, to invite the entire world into this sonship. There was an important detail in the Gospel – where did Jesus do this miracle? In the land of Tyre and Sidon, which is about 22 miles north of the border of the Holy Land – pagan territory. Of course they were overjoyed – not only did Jesus do a remarkable miracle, but He did it for Gentiles – the blessings of sonship are now being extended to the ends of the earth!

            So what’s our takeaway? Three elements. First – do you ever feel like you don’t fit in? This message of adoptive sonship in Christ means that we now have a family, no matter what. The Catholic Church is sometimes called “Holy Mother Church” and if you ever look at the colonnade surrounding St. Peter’s Basilica, they were designed to resemble arms reaching out to embrace the world. So maybe we were always “on the outside” as a kid…maybe as a young adult we felt like we couldn’t find our friend-group…maybe as an adult we feel alone. In Christ, though, we are surrounded by a “great crowd of witnesses,” as St. Paul puts it in the Book of Hebrews. Our best friends can be Jesus and the saints – and what a friendship that can be!

            I went to seminary with a remarkable man named Fr. Chase Hilgenbrinck. Before seminary, he was a professional soccer player, playing on the New England Revolution. He was so good that he was invited to try out for the Chilean national team, and he made the team and moved to Chile to play. The only problem was that he didn’t speak Spanish, and his teammates didn’t speak English. So after practice, his teammates would all go out and party…and Chase would be completely left out. In his loneliness, he began to go to the local Catholic Church and just sit in the presence of Jesus – it was the only place he could feel at home in a foreign country. Through those long afternoons of silence, he began to discern God calling him to the priesthood – and now he serves as a priest in Illinois. But it was through the experience of loneliness that God revealed to him that he belonged to Christ in the Catholic Church.

            Second, there’s an awful lot of people who struggle with their family. No one has perfect parents; we’ve all got family issues. But it’s good to know that we have a better family, a better Father. Even if you have great parents, they can only take us so far. At a certain point, we all have to turn to God as our Father. I remember being faced with some difficulty in my life and thinking, “Man, I wish my dad had prepared me for this!” To which, God responded, “He couldn’t prepare you for everything – now turn to Me, and I will lead you.” Whether we have great parents or are dealing with wounds because of them, God wants to father us – and He does so through the joys and challenges of everyday life. We receive His Fathering by reading His Word (the Bible), spending time with Him in prayer, and having that spirit of docility which asks Him, “Father, how are You leading me through this joy or sorrow? What are You teaching me? How are You forming me through this?”

            Finally, being a child of God means living out of such a dignity. Imagine being the son of Michael Jordan or Martin Luther King Jr. – there is a certain expectation that you “live up to the family name,” that you succeed in life because of who you’re related to. In the same way, as Pope St. Leo put it, “Christian, remember your dignity, and now that you share in God’s own nature, do not return by sin to your former base condition.” If we are adopted into God’s family, we must make the family proud and glorify our Heavenly Father! No more living as if we’re the star of our own melodrama; we’re sons of a Father who we want to make proud.

            I close with a beautiful saint who found her family in Christ. In South Sudan in the late 1800s, a young girl was the daughter of the tribal chief. She grew up happy, but when she was only eight years old, Muslim slave traders raided her village, forced her to march 600 miles, and sold her into slavery. She was so traumatized by the experience of losing her entire family that she actually forgot her name, so the Muslims called her “Bakhita”, which means “fortunate or lucky” in Arabic. She was traded from one master to another, until she was finally sold to a wealthy businessman from Italy, who took her back home. For many years she served this wealthy Italian man until one time he had to go on a lengthy business trip to the Middle East. Rather than take Bakhita with him, he decided to entrust her to a local convent of nuns, to make sure she didn’t run away.

            Living with the nuns was such a blessing for Bakhita. For the first time since her capture, she felt like she was surrounded by love. The nuns treated her with dignity and respect, not like a slave, and taught her about the Lord Jesus. She received baptism, taking the name Josephine, and rejoiced at her newfound family in Christ.

            The businessman returned, and demanded that Bakhita be returned to him. But there was a law in Italy that forbade anyone from keeping a baptized person as a slave. The man appealed to a judge, but the judge ruled that due to Bakhita’s baptism, she was now free. When asked what she wished to do with her newfound freedom, she replied that she wanted to become a nun and join the convent, as it was the best family she had ever found. She became a nun and was well-known for her joy, her kindness, and her merciful nature. Later on in life she was asked, “What would you do if you met those men who sold you into slavery?” She replied, “I would kiss their hands, for if that had not happened, I would not have known Jesus Christ.” What beautiful forgiveness and mercy – all because she found a family in the Church and in the Lord, a family of grace even richer than her family of blood.

            We’ve probably all heard the term that “blood is thicker than water” – the idea that loyalty to our family is the highest value. But in Christ, we are adopted into a family more secure and more loving than even our biological brothers and sisters. Now we are sons and daughters of a Heavenly Father, with an eternal inheritance awaiting us. And as St. Aloysius Gonzaga once said, “It is better to be a child of God than king of the whole world.”