by Fr. Edward Foley, Capuchin
Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
To suggest that I am unenthusiastic
About being in the pulpit this morning
After such a shocking and chaotic week
Is an understatement
While I do love the spirit of this community
And the embrace of kinship that enfolds our Sunday gatherings
I feel stymied, perplexed and indeed a bit weary
Of attempting to reflect on what appears to be
Genuine chaos in our country and in the world
Especially as refracted through such foreboding readings
Quite frankly, I toyed with the idea of scheduling
An elective root canal this morning
Which I perceived would be more pleasant
Than slogging through apocalyptic texts
After this apocalyptic week.
On the other hand, like you,
I need make sense for myself what is happening in this country
And need to discover,
for my own sanity and salvation
what this faith we hold so dear
calls us to be in this present moment and in the days ahead
A few weeks ago, I finished a dark and brooding novel
The buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro (NY: Alfred Knopf, 2015)
Described by some reviewers as a “quest narrative”
Set in mythical Post-Arthurian England
Central to the narrative are an elderly couple
Axl and Beatrice
Long married and quite beloved of each other
But who seem to be suffering from some form of amnesia
An amnesia that has enveloped the British countryside
And all its inhabitants
Both Saxons and Britons
Who, like Axl and Beatrice
Live in a foggy peace with each other
Besides this elderly couple this is another paradoxical twosome
Wistan, a young Saxon warrior
And the Briton Gawain, an aging knight and nephew
Of the long dead Arthur
To explain these two requires a spoiler alert
So if you want to read this melancholy novel on your own
You might exercise your Catholic option
And tune out of the homily and into the bulletin now …
It seems that at the center of a ménage-a-trois
that reveals Wistan and Gawain as respectful yet mortal enemies
Is not a beautiful woman but the aging dragon Querig
Whom Merlin enchanted years ago
After Arthur’s bloody conquest of the Saxons
Querig’s breath is the fog that induces this societal amnesia
dampening the memories of hatred and slaughter
Rivalry and division
that grew out of Arthur’s bloody conquest of the Saxons
And so there was a Camelot of sorts
But more a camelotic mask
A camelotic ruse
And once the dragon is slain
Memory returns …
A memory that will once again feed a smoldering anger
Between Britons and Saxons
And a memory that will feed smoldering doubts
Between Axl and his beloved Beatrice
Memory is the buried giant here
And when it raises its fiendish head
Personal division and societal chaos ensue.
While significant sections of the U.S. population this past week
And apparently most representatives of the media
Misjudged the degree of unrest and anger
That pervades a large part of the electorate
The election did not create the unrest or division
Rather, like the slaying of Querig
The election erased some amnesiatic fog
a false camelotic veneer that
seemed to have settled over significant swaths of the country
And exposed us in stark but unmistaken ways
as anything but the “United States of America”
And what do believers do in the midst of such conflict and division
What direction do we get from this Sunday ritual
And the readings that punctuate it?
On the one hand, today’s readings
Could be interpreted to predict dark and gloomy days ahead
The Prophet Malachi predicts days blazing like an oven
A divine fire and people reduced to stubble
Luke is even cheerier, with Jesus announcing
That nations will rise against nation
Kingdom against king
Earthquakes, famines and plagues
On an individual level, there is the promise of persecution
Familial division
Hatred and even death …
Though at the end of the gospel there is that perplexing line
“not a hair on your head will be destroyed”
Which prompted one blogger to suggest that
Although you’ll be persecuted, imprisoned and put to death
To borrow a phrase from Billie Crystal
Your hair is going to look “marvelous”
Maybe, however, there is another way to look at these texts.
First Luke is not talking about the end of the world
Or the “last things”
But narrating a particular moment in Jesus’ life
It’s chapter 21 and Jesus has been traveling toward Jerusalem
since chapter 9, that we read on June 26th
the 13th Sunday in Ordinary time
today he seems to foretell the destruction of the Temple
which might suggest that Luke is including this pericope
to prove that Jesus was a prophet who could
see into the future
Yet Luke is writing 10 years after the temple’s destruction
So this is no prediction … but ancient history for Luke
And therefore something more is going on here
in this sequence of Jesus in the temple precincts
Luke reminds us that Jesus is not only predicting a new temple
But a different kind of temple
A vision of God’s reign built on mutuality, kinship and respect
And the Christ would be our cornerstone
While it is easy to read today’s texts
In the face of electoral debacles
And national divisions
War and terrorism in the Middle East
a growing nuclear threat from North Korea
and earthquakes in New Zealand
That these are signs that the end is near
If that was the case, my job as a preacher
the equivalent of my grade school teachers
Who in the 1950’s taught us, in case of a nuclear attack
get under our desks and put hands over our heads
Remember duck and cover?
Happily my job is not, however, to invite you
To the spiritual equivalent of “duck and cover”
Because the readings today are not a prediction
About the future or demise of earth
Or this fragile constitutional union
Rather, what the texts and the liturgy asks today
Is how are we going to live in these days
When catastrophes do happen, institutions do collapse
And life does seem fragile even threatened
That is why Jesus is no clairvoyant in today’s gospel
Rather he understands that
Every temple is a temporary structure
Every framework … ever cause
That promotes our vision of the world
Will fade, will disappoint, maybe even die
Except his
Yet in the midst of these apocalyptic texts
There is a promise … a light .. a hope
A divinely enchanted memory
that humankind too often forgets
The promise is found in the enduring memory of God
Who never forgets any child or any nation
Whose persistent spirit lingers in the world & in our lives
Even when it feels like those might be coming to an end
This liberating memory lifts the fog and recalibrates hearts
And enables us to recognize
that sometimes it is our experience of Golgotha
of loss, crucifixion and death of a person or a cause
That is most apt to draw back the veil
And exposes the very faithfulness of God
Thus the poet Rilke writes:
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand. (Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996. I:59).
A second divine antidote to our spiritual forgetfulness
Is the holy remembering that the promise of God’s steadfastness
Is more than a personal balm, or private analgesic
It’s much richer and more taxing than that
Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourner, tells the story from some years ago of volunteering in a church homeless shelter around Christmas time. The church basement was decorated with banners and Christmas decorations, “Good news! Christ is born!” “Glory to God in the Highest” and so on. One of the men who lived each day out on the streets looked around the room and asked, “What is the good news anyway?” Jim said there was a long pause; no one knew what to say. Finally someone spoke up from the back of the line, “The good news is that it doesn’t have to be like this.”
It doesn’t have to be this way
If we do what Paul requires of the Thessalonians in 2nd reading
And that is if we get to work
If we get to the work of kinship
Not only with North Lawndale
But promote the work the vision of kinship
In our families and our neighborhoods
our work places and across this deeply divided nation
Kinship is a particular strategy for remembering
That from the birth of mother earth
To the birth of each one of us
That we are in, and all interrelated
The Jesuit priest Gregory Boyle,
Who presentation at Old St. Patrick’s Church some years ago
Gave rise to the kinship initiative with North Lawndale
Defines kinship as inching ourselves closer to creating a community such that God might recognize it. Soon we imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away. (Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boudnless compassion. New York: Free Press, 2010)
In some ways this past election was about many folk
Who felt that they were being thrown away.
Jesus definitively announced his kinship with humanity
We are divinely cajoled to do the same
And to the extent that in God’s good spirit we achieve it
We will no longer, in Fr. Boyle’s words, be pursuing justice
But celebrating it … and authentic joy will abound
this election was not the political Grinch that stole kinship
It did not erase the promise of justice
Nor did it eradicate authentic and sustained joy
Rather, it has jogged our memories to the bone
So that we might recall with sacred clarity
what divisions must be addressed
On the path to kinship, and justice and joy.
Today’s appointed Psalm, number 98
the scriptural basis for Isaac Watt’s celebrated “Joy to the World”
While we usually think of it as a Christmas carol
[“Joy to the World”] was not originally composed as a carol
Celebrating Christ’s first coming in history
But rather celebrated
his apocalyptic return in glory at the end of time
Ps. 98 and Watts’ hymn remind us that God is active in the world now,
That there is evidence of God’s majesty and goodness around us
And that the proper response to the world we live in
The people we meet
The country we cherish even in its division
Is not fear or apprehension or dread
But Joy, wonder and gratitude
It is not a childish giddiness but a sober joy
A sober joy that our democracy works
That the election was not rigged
That a peaceful transition of power will take place
And that disparate voices of a diverse electorate have been heard
And will be heard again and again and again
In new constellations of every shifting demographics
And in the midst of it all, may the fog continue to clear
So that every American can remember
That kinship was written into our founding documents
That all are created equal
Endowed with inalienable rights that cannot be voted away
As is befitting true Children of God
Through Christ our Lord.
© 2016, Edward Foley. Fr. Edward Foley, Capuchin, is the Duns Scotus Professor of Spirituality and ordinary professor of liturgy and music at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.
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