Homily: The Queenship of Mary - August 22

Readings: Is 9:1-6; • Ps 112 • Lk 1:26-38

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Today’s feast, this Memorial of the Queenship of Mary, is really fairly recent…at least in terms of the long life of the Church. It was established by Pope Pius XII back in August of 1954, and coincidentally my folks happened to be in Rome that very day.

I was just a lad of 10, but I remember how excited my mom was when she told me all about it after they returned home. She also said they should have taken me on their trip, and apologized for leaving me and my brother behind. Uh-huh, right, Mom.

But in truth they parked us with relatives, and I won the lottery because I got to stay with Uncle Billy and Aunt Lilly, two former Vaudeville entertainers. Billy played the piano and Lilly sang, and they were just about the coolest people I’d ever known. But I digress…

Mom also gave me a miraculous medal blessed by Pope Pius that day, a medal I still wear. And the readings the Church gives us today are the perfect readings for Mary, the Galilean teenaged girl who would become the Mother of God and the Queen of Heaven and Earth.

We get a first taste in the reading from Isaiah, when he reveals that God will “make glorious…Galilee of the nations.”  Really? Who would ever think of backward, rural Galilee in those terms? Nobody but a God who loves to surprise us by turning the less than ordinary to the extraordinary, the spectacular. And what exactly will happen?

“For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

Yes, this messianic prophecy gives the Jews of Isaiah’s day a first taste of the Savior who will set them free…set them free not from the slavery of Egyptians, or Assyrians, or Babylonians, or Persians, or Greeks, or Romans… No, this Savior will free them and all of humanity from the slavery of sin. He will open the very gates of heaven for us all.

But how does will this happen? How does the Savor come to us? Once again, God turns what the world sees as the ordinary into the extraordinary, and Luke tells us the story.

It’s the story of a young woman named Mary, a virgin in Nazareth, a small town in Galilee. And on this remarkable day she is visited by one of God’s mighty messengers, the Archangel Gabriel. Gabriel doesn’t waste words and he delivers his message to Mary.

Fear not…God is with you…has filled you with His grace…and you will bear a Son named Jesus, the Son of the Most High, and He will reign over the house of Jacob forever.

When young Mary hears this, she responds, more than a bit perplexed: “I’m a virgin. How can I bear a child?” A reasonable question, don’t you think? But Gabriel has an answer:

”The Holy Spirit will come upon you…and the child will be holy, the Son of God.”

And with that, this “handmade of the Lord”, this servant, says “let it be done” and in an instant she becomes the Mother of God.

It only took the Church about 400 years to confirm this. Back in the year 431, at the Council of Ephesus, the Church gave Mary the title “Theotokos” – the God Bearer, the Mother of God. Of course, the faithful had long believed and expressed this, but it still had to be affirmed at Ephesus since the Arians were going around at the time saying stupid things.

And then, just a mere 15 centuries later, in 1954, Pope Pius XII, speaking for the Church declared that Mary, the Mother of God, also deserved the title of Queen. This, too, was nothing new, and most often, on these occasions, the Church simply expresses what the Church already knows, what its people have long believed. After all, they’d been singing Marian hymns for ages, indeed since the Middle Ages…”Hail Holy Queen” and praying the fifth decade of the Glorius Mysteries.

Pope Pius actually gave three reasons:

1.    Mary’s close association with Jesus’ redemptive work;

2.    Her preeminent perfection of holiness;

3.    Her intercessory power on our behalf.

Good theological reasons with which all of us would agree. But for me, and for so many others, she’s simply the only Queen we’ve ever known.

And, believe me, she’s no “sit on the throne” and just look important kind of Queen. No, indeed, she loves to get right into the midst of the lives of her subjects, doing whatever is needed to help them out. For her, interceding is a full-time job.

And as I’m sure her Son will verify, she’s pulled me out of a lot of very difficult situations. And all I had to do was ask. Now that’s a Queen!

Mary, Queen of Heaven and Earth, Mother of God…Pray for us. Intercede for us.

Homily: Year A, 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Here's another unpreached homily...but I was ready, more or less, just in case. That's something I've learned to do over the years: always be ready to preach. Anyway, it focuses on one of my favorite healings, so well described by Matthew, so I decided to share my imperfect thoughts with you all.

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Readings: Is 56:1, 6-7; Ps 67; Rom 11:13-15, 29-32; Mt 15:21-28

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It would be easy to overlook this brief encounter depicted in today’s Gospel reading from Matthew. It would be easier still to discount its importance. After all, Jesus cured hundreds, probably thousands, during His public ministry. What makes this one so special?

But this encounter with the Lord was special because it was different…very different. First of all, it took place in the region of Tyre and Sidon, outside the land of Israel. And the woman he meets there is a Canaanite, a non-Jew, a pagan. Jesus, Matthew tells us, is withdrawing from Israel, and she is coming out of her own land, searching for what? It appears they are searching for each other, a meeting the Father has scheduled. And we know that Jesus never misses an encounter at the precise time and place arranged by the Father.

We can also see what the disciples thought of her: "Send her away, for she keeps calling out after us." Yes, the simple word, “Canaan,” evokes everything contrary to Jewish faith and tradition, everything they have been taught to despise.

And yet this pagan woman comes to Jesus, a Jew; and she comes to Him as her Lord and Savior: “Lord, Son of David…” Yes, each has left something behind to fulfill a deep yearning: Jesus yearning to save, and the woman’s to be saved. No power on earth can thwart this encounter.

Are our encounters with Jesus like this? For Jesus is seeking each one of us you just as He sought the Canaanite woman. He will gladly leave the holy places; He will enter into the unholy land of our sinfulness, in search of lost sheep.

But like the woman, we must turn to Him. And turn to Him she does. Yes, her only business that day was to find Him and to express her desperate need in the strongest possible terms. And in doing so she becomes the very embodiment of fervent intercessory prayer.

She screamed out her need, a parent agonizing over the suffering of her child, a daughter possessed by a demon. Without knowing it, this earthly mother appeals to the compassion of the heavenly Father, who understands well the agony of a child’s suffering. Her daughter’s distress is her distress: “Have pity on me,” she begs. “Lord, help me,” she pleads, as if she and her daughter are one, as if her daughter’s distress reverberates through her very being.

She is on a mission; one her daughter cannot complete. She must become her daughter’s voice, her daughter’s hands…just as Jesus became the Father, His hands, His feet, His voice, His Word. Does Jesus recognize in this woman and her attitude a mirror image of His own mission?

And yet, despite all this, Jesus responds with silence…the same silence that often greets our own prayer. Does this mean she should turn away, and just hope for the best? Does it mean she should address Jesus differently? Did she shout too loudly, or not loudly enough?

Should she have realized, as the disciples apparently thought, that Jesus was on a greater mission, a mission to save the world? That He really couldn’t be troubled with one woman’s problems? Was this saving, this healing of His strictly a Jewish thing? Did all this pass through her mind?

We can almost picture her, face flushed, eyes frantic, hands reaching out, pleading, as her mind jumps from one concern to the next…but she too says nothing, her pain muted by Jesus’ seeming indifference.

And yet, God’s silence, His silence in us is one of the choicest works of His grace. Her speculation and worry are no different from that which we experience when faced with God’s silence. But eventually, if we stop speculating, stop worrying, and become silent ourselves, we can come to hear God’s Word in the silence.

The disciples can’t stand it. In effect they tell Jesus, “For crying out loud. This woman’s driving us nuts. Do something, will you?”

But Jesus just says, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." He dismisses them just as He seems to have dismissed her. But this comment only causes her to plead once more, “Lord, help me.”

Her only solution is to throw herself at Jesus’ feet and cry for mercy. Although she’s probably never heard a single line of Scripture, her entire being is intuitively reduced to the cry of the psalmist: “Let thy mercy come to me and I will have life.” For she realized that day what St. Bernard realized a thousand years later, “The torrents of grace do not flow upward to the heights of pride…but downward into a humble, low-lying heart.”

Jesus now utters what to our ears seems a horrible insult: "It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs."

How can He say such a thing?” we ask. Where’s the voice of the Good Shepherd? Where’s the Jesus who consoled the woman of Samaria? Where’s the Savior who died to set all people free?

Well, he's right here, right here in this encounter. He's the teacher goading the student. He's the coach pushing the player to give his all. He's the debater throwing down the verbal gauntlet so the argument can begin, and the truth can be seen by all.

The woman is no fool. She seems to recognize this. She may have no claim on the inheritance of Israel, but she still needs God’s promises to be fulfilled in her. And so, she doesn’t disagree, but in effect declares that Jesus speaks the truth, that she is, indeed, among the least of His creatures, nothing more than a dog in search of its master.

We can almost hear her joy as she plays this trump card on Jesus and realizes what its effect will be. For in her deep faith, and filled with the Spirit, she knew all along that Jesus would answer her prayer. After all, how could the Son of God turn her down?

After all, had she wanted to risk sounding insolent, she could have asked Him what on earth He was doing in pagan territory to begin with if, as He claimed, He had come only to redeem Jews? Why indeed had He come to this place, to encounter those in need, if He intended to do nothing about it?

You see, brothers and sisters, it is this wonderful woman’s genus to have understood the truth, the divine secret, that in order truly to win – that is, to be overtaken and sheltered and saved – she must allow herself to be defeated by Jesus.

She and you and I win only by submitting to God, by adoring God, and by finding that adoration accepted. The whole drama is shot through with an indestructible passion of faith, with her inability to conceive of God in Jesus as anything but an inexhaustible fountain of mercy.

Yes, it’s all about faith. “Kyrie,” [Lord] she cries out four times in this brief encounter.

“If you’re indeed Lord,” she seems to say, “the all-powerful Lord, then you must be the loving Lord of all, of the high and the low, of the sheep of Israel and the dogs of the pagans. I don’t care which I am, only that I am with you. If you’re truly the One Son of the One God, then you’re the Lord of all, then you’re my personal Lord too, and my rejoicing over it will never end.”

Unlike so many who demand that God serve them at their table, she has no problem abiding on the floor under His table. She has no problem with crumbs, glorious crumbs from that table, heavenly crumbs falling from the hands of Jesus Himself.

For she knows that wherever Jesus is, there is abundance; that wherever sin is, God’s compassion ensures that grace is there too, superabundantly. Just as we know that here, at this very altar, at the Eucharistic table, Christ’s mercy will forever be raining those crumbs of life.

"You’ve got great faith, woman," he says, "You’ve got remarkable faith!"

Won't it be wonderful when he says the same thing to you and to me?

James L. Buckley -- R.I.P.

Yesterday, those of us who identify with the "permanent things" conservatism of Russell Kirk and others like him, lost one of our heroes, former U. S. Senator James L. Buckley. According to reports, Buckley died in a Washington D.C. hospital at the age of 100. 

A remarkable man, Buckley was the fourth of ten Buckley children, and the older brother of the more famous William F. Buckley who died in 2008. But James Buckley had his own claim to fame and served in all three branches of the federal government. In 1970 he won election to the U. S. Senate as a third party (conservative) candidate. He later served as an undersecretary of state in the Reagan administration, and also spent 15 years as a federal judge. 

Buckley was a strong and consistent advocate of less government, especially at the federal level, and frequently warned against government's desire to control all aspects of citizens' lives. He was also a solidly faithful Catholic. As Kathryn Jean Lopez tweeted (or Xed, or whatever it's now called) yesterday (link: Kathryn Lopez):

A most beautiful soul, James Buckley, died this morning. He was a senator and judge, but I will always remember him most fondly at the altar rail, where he said we are all equal and in need of our Savior. May he be in union with Him today and for eternity.

Can we say anything better or more fitting about this man? 

If you want to learn more about James Buckley as a senator, read his fascinating 1975 book, If Men Were Angels -- no longer in print, but still available. Buckley took his book's title from George Wahington, 

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

Rest in peace.

Homily, Monday 19th Week in Ordinary Time

Readings: Dt 10:12-22; • Ps 147 • Mt 17:22-27

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Because we have the gift of hindsight, thanks to the Gospel, you and I are often amazed at how clueless the apostles seem, as if somehow we would handle it all better.

Jesus spends so much time shaping their hearts, opening their eyes to the meaning of the Incarnation and the Cross, to the Paschal mystery, to the Passion, Death, and Resurrection that must occur. We see an example of that shaping in today’s Gospel passage from Matthew.

In the two chapters preceding today’s passage, Jesus on several occasions refers indirectly and directly to His death and resurrection. But this time, indeed, this time Jesus is blunt.

“The Son of Man is to be handed over to men, and they will kill him, and he will be raised on the third day.”

Remember all the drama unleashed in Peter when Jesus first announced His passion. Compare that with the apostles’ reaction now. There’s no argument…no, Matthew simply tells us they’re “overwhelmed with grief.”

Jesus’ words were plain, their meaning clear. They now know better than to argue with Him. But still, they don’t understand. How can Jesus let this horror, this evil, happen? I suppose they’ve kind of turned the corner. Perhaps in their confusion and grief, they recognize the Pascal mystery is still beyond them. They certainly don’t understand the “why” of it all. That the Son of Man, the flower of humanity, will be betrayed by men underscores the tragic self-deceit that so often hides the truth from us.

Years ago, I’d been ordained less than a year, in another diocese, I was making hospital visits. Looking at the list of new arrivals, I noticed one man’s last name was Murphy, and thought, Well, this one has to be Catholic. As I entered his room I could see he was quite ill, so I asked if he’d like me to pray with him.

He responded with, “No. I’m a Muslim. Unlike you, I don’t pray to a dead God, one who was nailed to a cross. What kind of God would allow that?”

Talk about a surprise! I wasn’t sure what to say, so I guess I went on the attack:

“What kind of God? Only a God, whose love for you and for me is so great, He humbled Himself, became one of us, sacrificed His life to redeem us from our sinfulness. That’s why I worship a God who died, then rose from the dead to give us hope.”

I thought I had done so well, but in response he just told me to leave. “Go on, get out! I really don’t want to talk with you.”

I learned a lesson that day. The sick want and need to meet a God Who heals; they don’t need an intellectual or theological argument.

Yes, indeed, our God doesn’t come to us as some omniscient, omnipotent being…no, He comes to us as one of us, as a friend, as a loving brother, as a healer, a forgiver. But everyone’s not happy with this. Some actually hate how God approaches us in Jesus. Jesus, by showing us how we can be, lets us see how we really are. This presents us with two choices:

We can listen to Him, do the Father’s will, change, repent, and be conformed to Jesus’ goodness…or we can try to destroy that goodness, in a feeble attempt to suppress its judgment of our sinfulness.

But God simply overcomes all our foolishness. He allows Himself to fall into the abuse and violence of men’s hands so that, when they wound Him, they will be covered by the tide of His Precious Healing Blood flowing from Calvary, from this very altar, and from thousands like it. And His blood can absorb into its love the very worst of what we are capable.

Today we recall the memory of St. Maxmillian Mary Kolbe, priest and martyr, who gave his life in the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. He followed Our Lord's example by sacrificing himself so another could live.

Victor Frankl, the Austrian Jewish psychotherapist who spent much of World War II as a prisoner in that same Auschwitz, wrote a remarkable book of his experiences called, Man's Search for Meaning. There Frankl describes how, amid unbelievable brutality and the most degrading conditions, he encountered so much remarkable faith and unselfish love. Again and again, he met people who achieved victory over the sinfulness surrounding them.

Out of this experience of suffering Frankl had a revelation. He wrote, “Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, ‘The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.’”

Most of us, haven’t known such suffering or come face to face with the kind of evil that surrounded St. Maximilian and Victor Frankl, the kind that Jesus encountered on that first Good Friday…most of us in our sufferings only argue and fight with God.

Perhaps, like the Israelites, we should listen to Moses, who in our reading from Deuteronomy said:

“He is your praise; he is your God, who has done for you those great and awesome things…”

Yes, like the Apostles, we too can grasp the great and awesome things our God has done, that He has died for us. 

Yes, as a 20^th-century Jew reminds us:

“The salvation of man is through love and in love.”