Mass readings for the 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Isaiah 66.18-21 Psalm 117.1-2 Hebrews 12.5-7, 11-13 Luke 13.22-30
When I read the lines of the gospel, “we ate and drank with you, and you taught in our streets” I was saddened. Now in the gospel these are the words of those who find themselves perplexed because they are excluded from the Kingdom of God. They can’t understand it. Didn’t they know Jesus? Isn’t he the guy who was going to get them in? They had dined with him, partied with him; perhaps they were among the five thousand who had been miraculously fed by the three loaves and the two fishes. Surely, attendance at that great miracle should gain them admittance!
I can’t help but compare them to those many I know who come to mass only when absolutely obligated, eat the Eucharist, are present at the miracle that it is the sacrament, and yet carry on with lives that are largely indistinguishable from anyone else’s. Which is to say, I’m not accusing the lapsed Catholic of being a particularly notorious sinner. Indeed, I imagine there are regular mass-goers who are worse. I’m just dumbfounded by their indifference.
To be indifferent to Christ is to live in peril. To be so foolish as to presume one’s justification before God because, well, “I went to Catholic school, I’m a nice person—all my friends say so” is to risk being shut out that will be all the worse for it’s being unexpected.
Catholics, historically, have been much more mindful of this than our Protestant brethren. With their break from the Church, where the individual is left to rather subjectively assess his spiritual state, and evaluate the health of his relationship with God in Christ. That has led to an incredibly wide spectrum of faith practice, that a Catholic would see running from an overly strict piety to a complete absence of any discipline, and a disturbing relativism when it comes to morality.
The complaint of a lot of lapsed Catholics is that they got tired of the guilt. It’s really a modern phenomenon to describe this awareness of our sinfulness, our fallenness as just a lot of “Catholic guilt.” And I suppose in some sense it is guilt, but it’s not a culpability felt because of one’s sin, but rather it the anxiety that comes of knowing we have sinned, and doing nothing about it even as the remedy for sin is so available. It’s kind of like being overweight, and knowing I really need to get to the gym, to eat less, to walk more, and so on.
I also suppose that the guilt quickly mutates into resentment, and a sense of grievance against the Church that, as softly as it speaks these days about such things, will nonetheless not give up and shut up about its moral teaching and its call to live a holy life. Like a grumpy teenager pestered by her parents to do her homework, or finish her chores, they react with hostility toward those who are trying to make them responsible, spiritually healthy adults.
The added complication today is that we have a culture that allows, indeed, indulges people in a complete rejection of traditional standards; it tells people they can be their own church, their own pope, their own spiritual director, priest, confessor and theological adviser. It’s a secularized version of Protestantism. And so, what happens is that many of the things of life once judged to be of moral concern become (to use a theological term) adiaphora; matters indifferent, outside moral concern, not worth arguing about because it will have no bearing on our souls and our eternal destiny.
And among Catholics it is becoming much the same as we listen to the siren song of the culture, and as a community, statistically become indistinguishable from those around us in terms of how we live our lives.
Prominent Catholics, especially those in our political class in the West, contradict Church moral teaching openly, brazenly; and I’m sure we know fellow Catholics who deplore or ridicule those who decline to get with the times, and simply ignore Apostolic teaching. There are still others who either by word or example advocate that we not waste our valuable time attending Mass on a weekly basis; and that, if we do choose to waste our time here, we at least reject as superstition that Jesus Christ is truly present in the Eucharist.
Now, there are still those who come to mass at Christmas and Easter, have their children baptized, do try to be mindful of the moral teaching of the Church even as they pretty much go it alone in interpreting the Church’s teaching, in trying to understand what the faith is about.
I’m not talking about Catholics skipping church to do online bible study, or conducting the liturgy of the hours in their homes. No, they don’t pray with regularity, they don’t read the Bible, and they don’t read books about their faith either, they just wing it based on what is half-remembered from confirmation class. For example, when it comes to the number of books on faith that the average Catholic reads in a year, it is less than one. Our Protestant brothers and sisters, as one expects, are on a spectrum, but Evangelicals, for instance read on average about 3 and a half books on Christianity a year.
Considering that these are averages, and knowing that devout Catholics read as much or more than their evangelical counterparts, that means the majority of baptized Catholics have never studied their faith outside of a required class when they were at school.
Part of the blame for this indifference does rest with the Church that in recent decades failed to teach well or initiate effectively the young into its mysteries.
And the impulse that was followed when the falling away began was not to recover the tradition, teach what has been always taught more effectively, but to instead grow lax, lenient, to make it all easier for everyone by lessening the demands both in terms of our life of worship and in terms of our morality; to give too much the impression that the occasional Eucharistic meal, usually had in conjunction with the family Christmas and Easter feasts was sufficient as sacramental participation in the sacrifice of Christ; That niceness could be made equal to holiness; that occasional charity from one’s discretionary funds was a sufficient sacrifice as a follower of the one who gave up his life for us.
Can we really hold responsible these lost souls because they were so poorly taught, led, formed?
I really don’t know. I am puzzled by that.
Will God’s mercy be extended to them because of these failings? Or will that fragmentary learning, that partial knowledge of the gospel leave them condemned because they respond with indifference?
Well, you know what? That doesn’t matter. It can’t be my concern or yours. We are here and called to do the work, to make possible the salvation of souls through the grace and love or our Lord Jesus Christ. But that does mean work. The gospel tells us people will come from every direction in their search for the Kingdom of God; it is for us to be part of their journey, to be a rest stop, to be a refuge, to be a gateway, a ship upon which to embark on that journey.
And that needs to be our message.
You know, I spoke in recent weeks about the charge against the Church that it never taught anything but hellfire and damnation, tried to scare people into faith, that this was by all available evidence rarely if ever true. And I’m no advocate of making that our message, although we ought to be upfront with people about what the options are in terms of the ultimate disposition of their eternal souls.
As much as Jesus spoke of the threat of hell, we know the great theme of his teaching and preaching was this idea of the Kingdom of God, and the great banquet of the righteous, a wedding banquet held with the splendour of a royal affair but even grander. We need to make that the invitation, and to reflect the joyful anticipation of it in our lives together – to have what we might call the pre-party that is celebrated in anticipation of what will be a truly magnificent affair.
As our summer break draws to a close, as Labour Day looms and the pastoral year commences in its usual conjunction with the school year, I ask you all to reflect upon what we might do as a community and as individuals to make this invitation, to educate our children and our brothers and sisters in Christ who’ve grown distant, to break through the indifference and open their eyes to His presence among us in word, sacrament and community.
I know our different service groups and societies are gearing up for what we hope will be a more normal year, one where they can conduct their ministries properly. I know that, for instance, with our Knights of Columbus, as much as they are about service to others in Christ, they’ve been working to bolster their educational outreach to men, to make being a Knight as much about evangelization as it is about raising money for children’s winter coats. I look forward to their initiatives and hope these will spur others on.
In coming weeks, working with Karen Kiely our volunteer coordinator and other parish leaders, we will be asking for involvement in parish life in terms of taking on tasks, responsibilities, that we hope and trust you will receive as invitations to ministry and not summons to work.
If we are among the first who will be last, I would want to be last because I held the door for others, held open the gate into the Kingdom of God.
Amen.