Homily: Thursday 25th Week in Ordinary Time

Yesterday afternoon, I was asked by St. Lawrence Parish in Bushnell, Florida if I would help them by conducting a Liturgy of the Word with Communion this morning. Their pastor apparently had a commitment, so they sought out a deacon to assist. St. Lawrence is only a 30-minute drive from my home, so I was happy to help out. My homily follows:

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Readings: Ecclesiastes 1:2-11; Psalm 90; Luke 9:7-9

First, believe me, it’s a joy to be here with you at St. Lawrence Parish. You might not know this, but 19 years ago, when I arrived here in the Orlando Diocese I was assigned to this parish. In those days St. Vincent de Paul was a mission church of St. Lawrence Parish, and I can remember coming here frequently to attend parish council and other meetings. But things have certainly changed, haven’t they?

I usually preach on or at least touch on the Gospel reading, but today I decided to offer a little change of pace. I decided instead to focus on our reading from the Book of Ecclesiastes, mainly because it’s a reading that’s too often avoided, and I thought you deserved better.

Let me set the stage with a little personal history.

I’ve always been interested in astronomy, and even studied it in college. I always saw it as a science where one comes closer to grasping the splendor of God’s creation as well as His awesome power.

I also spent many years as a Navy pilot, and when at sea would enjoy looking at the stars. In mid-ocean, away from the lights of civilization, the effect is remarkable. The stars are a hundred times brighter, the planets are clearly defined, and our galaxy, the Milky Way, lives up to its name. In near-total darkness you can see the entire sky from horizon to horizon, almost as if you’ve left the earth and are there in space in the midst of creation.

I recall one night particularly well. I tried to read a little Scripture each day, and I had just read the first two chapters of Ecclesiastes, which include today’s first reading. Those verses had disturbed me, as I suppose they have disturbed many people.

If we take it literally, Ecclesiastes is a depressing, almost fatalistic, book. Some call it the most depressing book in the bible, and even question why it was included in the first place. It seems to say that everything that will be has already been, that nothing is new, everything just repeats itself, again and again. Rain falls, making streams which flow into rivers and then to the ocean, only to be vaporized and return again as rain. On and on it goes. Life is just a vicious and frustrating circle. What goes around comes around.

And the author doesn’t just address nature. He also implies that human activity is equally futile, implying that working hard is a waste of time. Why bother? You’ll never really enjoy the fruits of your labor. Someone else will, someone who won’t appreciate you or your work.

The author, Qoheleth, shouts to the world: All that we do is vanity.

As I said, when we take this at face value, it can sound very depressing. And I’ll admit, it depressed me that night at sea 30 years ago.

Then I went up on deck and looked up at the stars. How long had they been there? Billions of years. The distances are so vast we can’t begin to comprehend them, except abstractly through mathematics. How powerful and eternal is the God who made it all! And how small and insignificant are we.

As all these thoughts went through my mind, I recalled the words I had just read moments before:

“What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun. Even the thing of which we say, “See, this is new!” has already existed in the ages that preceded us. There is no remembrance of the men of old; nor of those to come will there be any remembrance among those who come after them” [Eccl 1:9-11].

Suddenly I understood what Qoheleth meant by “All things are vanity” [Eccl 1:2] – or a more accurate translation of the Hebrew, “all things are mist (or breath).” In a sense, he meant the same thing that St. Thomas Aquinas meant when, near the end of his life, he looked back on his remarkable work and said, “It is all straw.”

Ecclesiastes is now among my favorite books of the Old Testament. It’s a very unique book, really the Bible’s only book of philosophy, for it is based solely on human reason. God is silent in the book, until the very end.

The author was obviously a man of position, highly regarded for his wisdom. Indeed, his name means “teacher.” And he’s telling us that time conditions life, so no human achievements – all those “under the sun” things -- have lasting value. In the overall scheme of things, he tells us, our seemingly important human work is really futile.

Qoheleth really asks the question that the rest of sacred Scripture was written to answer: What is the purpose of life? Is there a purpose? For what we need most of all – meaning and purpose and hope in our lives – is precisely what Qoheleth questions.

This is a dangerous question because if we can’t answer it, we are left with the world’s worst news, that life is meaningless. By including Ecclesiastes in Sacred Scripture first the Jewish rabbis and then the Church showed tremendous confidence in their ability to provide a real answer.

For the Jews, the answer was trust and hope, trust in God’s faithfulness to His Covenant and hope in the promise of a Messiah. For the Church, the answer isn’t the hope of a Messiah, but His reality in the person of Jesus Christ.

And so, instead of the worst news, we have the Good News; we have the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and what a positive answer this is!

Jesus, the eternal, creative Word of God, He who created this immeasurable, incomprehensible universe, actually became one of us to show His infinite love for us.  From Jesus we learn there actually is human work that’s not “under the sun” – human work that’s truly “out of this world” – the work of building the Kingdom of Heaven.

We’re not here just to live from day to day, filling our stomachs and our bank accounts, until we die and disappear from human memory. No, we’re here to build up the mystical Body of Christ, the kingdom of loving souls, and death is not the end, but just the beginning.

Secondly, vanity and despair are not the meaning of life. Love is the meaning of life. God created us out of love because love is His very nature. And He asks us to return that love to Him and share it with each other.

We discover later that Qoheleth recognizes this, because at the very end of his book, he tells us:

“The last word, when all is heard: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this concerns all humankind; because God will bring to judgment every work, with all its hidden qualities, whether good or bad" [Eccl 12:13-14].

Qoheleth exposes the God-shaped hole in the human heart. It’s a hole that can’t be filled by anything in the world, for nothing material is great enough to fill that emptiness. Only one thing can fill it, and it isn’t a thing; it’s a Person: Jesus Christ, who came to conquer death and evil. The Book of Ecclesiastes asks the question, and Jesus Christ is the answer.

In St. Augustine’s famous words, “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and therefore our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”

Major Astronomical Disappointment

Man, am I bummed! Betelgeuse isn’t going to explode…at least not real soon. If, like me, you’re an avid fan of things astronomical, you’ll know exactly what I mean. If not, let me explain what’s going on in the nearby (relatively speaking) heavens.

Betelgeuse is a star, a very large star, located in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Called a red super-giant, it’s a bright star, the 10th brightest star in the sky, and can be found in the constellation of Orion the Hunter. As a red super-giant, it’s both very red and very big. Betelgeuse is so big, if it replaced our sun it would probably extend to the orbit of Jupiter. In other words, the earth would be smack dab in the middle of it, not a good place to be. 

The below image depicts Orion the Hunter, showing the location of Betelgeuse in the constellation. In Orion only Rigel is brighter, but the red color of Betelgeuse makes it easy to spot. Betelgeuse is the reddish star, upper left, while Rigel is the bright star, lower right. In the center are the three stars that make up "Orion's Belt."

Betelgeuse’s distance from us has been estimated at 400-800 light years. The wide range of estimates results from the fact that Betelgeuse is a variable star, meaning it’s brightness can fluctuate significantly over time making it difficult to establish its distance with any accuracy. Some new (2017) technologies, however, using information from a number of ground-based radio telescopes, have concluded Betelgeuse is 724 light years from earth. This conclusion is based on a weighted average of a range between 613 and 881 light years. Using the 724 light years figure, the light we see when we observe Betelgeuse actually left the star in the year 1297 A.D. 

(Just to put things into perspective, on September 11 of that year, an army of Scots, led by William Wallace and Andrew Moray, defeated the English in the Battle of Stirling Bridge — a very different kind of 9/11. The 1995 movie “Braveheart” offered an historically inaccurate, but thrilling version of the battle .)

Because Betelgeuse is a red super-giant it’s also a relatively short-lived star. It’s already about 10 million years old, and is expected to live just an additional 100,000 years or so. That’s not long at all when it comes to the life of heavenly bodies. And when red super-giants die, they don’t just fade away quietly. They go out with a bang called a supernova. Indeed, when Betelgeuse finally explodes, the resulting blast will probably be brighter than the full moon. It should be quite a sight.

About two years ago, astronomers noticed a change in Betelgeuse’s brightness that didn’t coincide with its usual variance. Many astronomers thought this change might be a prelude to its ultimate collapse and subsequent supernova blast. Reading about this got me all excited, astronomically speaking, since I’ve long hoped to witness Betelgeuse’s departure. But then a team of astronomers, using the Hubble Space Telescope determined that the dimming of Betelgeuse was caused by an huge amount of hot material ejected into space by the star. It formed a dust cloud that blocked about 25% of the light from the star. The event, which began in late 2019, ceased by April 2020 and Betelgeuse returned to its usual brightness.

From the series of Hubble photos shown below you can observe the effects of the dust cloud. In the middle two photos the star’s brightness has clearly dimmed. The first and fourth photos were taken before the cloud formed and after it dissipated or moved on.

 

It seems, then, that the star’s temporary dimming had nothing to do with its ultimate demise. Although Dr. Andrea Dupree, who led the Hubble team of researchers, stated that “No one knows what a star does right before it goes supernova, because it’s never been observed. Astronomers have sampled stars maybe a year ahead of them going supernova, but not within days or weeks before it happened.” She then added, “But the chance of the star going supernova anytime soon is pretty small.” 

As I said, “Bummer!” I think I was about 10 years old when I first learned of the possibility of a Betelgeuse supernova, and I’ve been waiting patiently ever since. And the weird thing is, because the light from Betelgeuse takes about 700 years to reach us, it might already have happened. Just my luck, if it does happen during the few remaining years of my lifetime, it'll be in the winter months when Orion is less visible.

The Hand of God

As one who has studied and always enjoyed astronomy, I occasionally drop by some of the NASA and other related websites. This image (below) was posted on NASA's site about a week ago.

The image was released by the folks who operate NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. It's the image of the results of a pulsar's X-ray emissions. Pulsars are neutron stars that rotate very fast and have extremely strong magnetic fields. In a sense pulsars are a glimpse of the death throes of formerly large stars that expended their fuel and collapsed in on themselves. We can observe their emissions only during those brief periods of their rotation when they are pointed towards us, so they seem to "pulse" -- hence, the name "pulsar."

The particular pulsar in this image is only about 12 miles in diameter, but it's period of rotation is just 1/7 of a second. The emissions seen in the photograph extend out about 150 light years and seem to have taken the shape of a giant hand in space. It is located in our home galaxy, the Milky Way, and is approximately 17,000 light years from earth.

I just thought it was a neat image. To view a larger image, click on the photo.