I saw a cartoon recently. The picture is of Noah’s Ark drifting off from the shore. And all the animals on the ark are looking back toward the shore with distressed looks upon their faces. They’re looking at two dinosaurs who are left on the shore. And one dinosaur is saying to the other, “Oh rats! Was that today?” (They didn’t actually say, “Oh, rats,” but that’s the only word I can use here in church.)
We all know what the scientists say about how the first dinosaurs were destroyed. A huge meteor struck the earth and destroyed them. But it didn’t destroy all living things. By a process of evolution, a whole new type of living beings emerged after that destruction. But the cartoon is based on the popular belief that the world will be destroyed by fire. There was a very important book that came out in the 1950s by James Baldwin called “The Fire Next Time.” It was basically two long letters that he wrote about the legacy of slavery and segregation, and the challenges of integration at his moment in time. But the title he chose came from an old gospel hymn – a black gospel hymn – called “Oh Mary, Don’t You Weep. Don’t You Moan.” And, in the gospel song, the singer contrasts the flood that killed Pharaoh’s army and saved the Israelites with - not another flood, ‘cause God promised, after the Noah’s Ark thing, He’d never destroy the world by water again - but the next time, by fire.
Those of you who grew up in my generation and the generation just after mine, probably were prejudiced in our lives and experienced prejudice in our lives. We referred to other people with expressions that are no longer acceptable in public discourse, and we were called those kinds of names ourselves. And, to a certain extent, those things rolled off our back and nobody took all that much umbrage in what was being said by us or to us. But now we live in a binary culture. Partly because of the wonderful gift of computers and infinite technology, we tend to think in on/off, yes/no, good/bad, white/black. And the spaces in between are beginning to disappear from our public discourse.
If you paid close attention to the second reading, it sounded very much like Paul was trying to convince the people of Colossae not to be prejudiced. But is that really what was going on? First of all, you have to understand the context of much of the New Testament writing. Both the gospel of Luke, which we just heard, and most of the letters of St. Paul, the writer’s presumption is that the world is going to end. Jesus is coming back in their lifetime. And those who are baptized are an exclusive group, the ones who will be saved. The rest of the world is going to hell in a handbag. And so it was very much a binary attitude toward the world. It’s us and all those other people. So, when St. Paul talks to the Colossians, he’s talking about people within the Christian group who are very disparate, one from another. That’s why I asked you to pay close attention to the dichotomies he expresses - Jew/Greek, circumcised/uncircumcised, slave/free, Barbarian/Scythian. In another letter he says exactly the same thing, including in those dichotomies male/female. He’s saying all of us are one because we all follow Christ.
You know this is not the first summer heat wave we’ve ever had in Wurtsboro. I said Mass here in the summertime for almost all of my 50 years as a priest before I came to live here as your pastor. And, back then, there was no air conditioning in this building. Up there, where that beautiful stained-glass window of Joseph and the boy, Jesus, is now, there used to be an exhaust fan. The theory was that the exhaust fan would suck out the hot air because hot air rises. Nah, not so much. No. And each one of those pillars had a little oscillating fan that went back and forth and just blew the hot air around. The windows, back then, used to open, but they opened from the bottom. They just pushed out a little bit, and a little bit of air could rush in through those openings.
And, on a very hot weekend, I remember that by the time I began the 9 o’clock Mass it was already beginning to swelter in here. It was in the high 80s, maybe the low 90s outside. It was beginning to percolate up into the 80s in here. People were sitting here going like this [fanning] with their missalettes and so on. And I got up to preach and I said, “You think it’s hot in here? There’s someplace else a lot hotter. Stay out of it. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.”
Upgrades. The commercials nowadays are always telling us how we can get an upgrade. And it makes people want to buy more because they’re going to be able to buy better if they buy more now. When we travel, we hope for an upgrade to first class because a seat has become available in first class. Well, Pope Francis recently did an upgrade for two of our saints. Later in this month, exactly a week apart, on July 22nd and July 29th, we celebrate the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene and the Feast of St. Martha. But you wouldn’t really understand this unless you were able to look in our instruction books, but there are different kind of feasts. Most feasts are just memorials and, if the priest doesn’t feel like celebrating that memorial, he doesn’t have to. But if something’s labeled a Feast, then every priest has to celebrate that Mass on that day. So the Pope just upgraded Mary Magdalene from a mere old memorial to a Feast day. He did that to make sure that everybody understands how important this woman was to the foundation of the faith. That she was the first witness of the empty tomb. For too long she’s been relegated to those women who weren’t quite virgins before they became saints. The week after that, he changed the Feast of St. Martha to the Feast of St. Martha, Mary and Lazarus. How come?
Well, we’re reading this morning from St. Luke’s gospel. St. Luke has just this story about Martha and Mary, and it’s very vague. “Jesus entered a village.” The village has no name. When St. John gets ahold of the story, 20 years later, he tells us where Martha and Mary lived. They lived in Bethany. They had a brother named Lazarus. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead and, after the resurrection of Lazarus, the family threw a big resurrection party. And, at that party, Martha served like she usually does. Mary washed Jesus’ feet with perfume, which caused Judas to have a hissy fit and ask why didn’t they sell the perfume and give the money to the poor, and then I can get my cut as well. And Lazarus was there presiding at table. How come this big upgrade in John’s gospel.
On a beautiful summer Sunday morning, just like this one, back in the 1950s – I don’t remember if it was ‘55, ‘56 or ‘57 – there was a horrific auto accident right out here on the hill going up toward Wurtsboro Hills. If you’re coming down, there’s a big curve in the road and, just beyond that curve, an oil tanker flipped over on its side and burst into flames. Behind it, twelve more cars collided, one after another. The car right behind it had six passengers, all of whom were killed. And there were another three or four people in addition to them who lost their lives in that accident. The accident was so terrible that, for a dozen years, nothing grew on the shoulder of the road right by where Valentine Dam Rd is today.
There used to be a sign at the top of the long hill, right by Sarine Rd in Masten Lake, that said, “Steep hill. Truckers use low gear.” And it had a little picture of a line like this, with a truck going downhill. That’s how dangerous that road was. And this dreadful accident, which made the front page of the New York Daily News the following day, that’s how dangerous that was.
A lone rider on horseback travels through a chilly and damp October day. It’s near evening. His horse has carried him more than ten miles, from Lockport to the little village of Cayuga Creek, New York. It took him only three days to get from Rochester to Lockport on that marvel of modern travel, the Erie Canal, stopping along the way each evening to take whatever comfort there might be at a local tavern or farmhouse. As he rides along, the wind whips up and a light rain begins to blow in the wind with some icy needles of snow, the harbinger of a long, hard winter to come. Off in the distance he sees the glow from a lamplight in a window and knows he is nearing his destination. Dismounts his horse. Knocks on the door. The farmer opens the door and says, “Fr. Neumann it is so good to see you. Come in.”
That night, over a simple farmer’s dinner, they make plans for the next day. The older children will be sent to the outlying farms and, by horse, a little bit further on, to let everyone know that the priest is here. The day will be spent hearing confessions, anointing the sick, baptizing any babies that have been born in his absence, and planning with young couples for weddings to take place the next time he comes through. The farmers have been building a small stone church with the little money they’re able to collect and their own hard work. The wall’s about halfway built, about four feet high, and there is as yet no roof on the church. But, counting on good weather the next day, Fr. Neumann will celebrate Mass inside that little square, in the open air.
Little Jimmy Dickens. Hardly a household name. Little Jimmy Dickens. But he was a fixture at the Grand Old Opry for at least a half a century. And once or twice a record that he made just creeped into the top 100. But he’s best know – his signature song – is something called “Take an Old Cold Tater and Wait.” The song was about country people getting unexpected company and having to stretch their meal, and telling the kids, “You just take a potato, get over in the corner, wait till everyone else has eaten, then you can have something to eat.” I think all of us can resonate with that a little bit. I know that my family had a summer bungalow here for years and, back in the 1950s hardly anybody in Wurtsboro Hills had a telephone. You relied on people calling the tavern, and then they’d get somebody off a barstool to run to your house and tell you that you had a phone call at the tavern, and then you’d come down to the tavern.
Well, my Italian grandmother used to come up for only one weekend of the summer with my mom and dad, Irene and Pete. But, very often, other members of my father’s family would say to my grandmother, “You know, we’re thinking of taking a ride up to see Irene and Pete, but we don’t know how to get in touch with them.” And my grandmother would say, “Oh, just go. Irene always has enough for everybody.” Which wasn’t really true, but all of a sudden people would show up in the driveway and my mother would stretch Sunday dinner to make sure everybody had enough to eat. And that’s the context of our gospel story this morning. But first I want to talk about the first reading.
Pretty much everything you need to know doctrinally about the Blessed Trinity is stated in the two quotes on the front of our bulletin this weekend and anything else we might try to say in a 10- or 15-minute homily is really beside the point. And so, we’ll leave the mystery as the mystery that it is and try to look at it from a different point of view this morning.
That’s why I asked you to pay close attention to the image that’s used by the writer of the Book of Proverbs. It’s one of the Wisdom books of the Old Testament. And this character that’s a metaphor appears several times across the pages of the several books. Today it’s a little child - sounds like a little girl - playing at God’s feet as He creates the world. If we allow ourselves the beauty of that myth of creation just for a moment, then the image is striking. Because all of us have had that experience in our lives of having a little child playing with us as we are working. A child in a garage with daddy, picking up one tool after another, and imitating him as he tightens a bolt or sands a piece of wood. A child in the kitchen, asking to help with the cooking, and imitating. And that’s the image that’s there. It’s a very important image and I want to explore it by telling you something that you may or may not know.
So, who do you pray to? I’ll bet a lot of us, when we kneel down to pray, say, “Dear God,” sort of generically. “Dear God,” by whom we usually mean God the Father, but not necessarily. Lots of people pray to Jesus. “Dear Jesus this,” “Dear Jesus that.” “Lord Jesus this,” “Lord Jesus that.” But I’ll bet very few people here in the congregation have ever prayed directly to God the Holy Spirit. I have one friend who is deeply devoted to the third person of the Blessed Trinity. She’s the only Catholic I’ve met in 52 years who prays regularly to the Holy Spirit. I wonder why that is. But, in theological circles, the joke is that the Holy Spirit is the forgotten God.
There’s a big history to coming to understanding that the Holy Spirit is one of the three persons in God. Last night we read a prophesy from the Book of Job, and there’s a big reference to some sort of spirit, but the Jewish people could not possibly have imagined that there was more than one person in God because the foundation of their faith was “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is Lord alone.” And so, praying to some other God by some other name would have been abhorrent to them. And yet, in the books of Wisdom – there are four or five of them – this mysterious figure appears. A woman, no less, in a patriarchal society, who was called Lady Wisdom. And she has all the same attributes and gives all the same gifts that we now say the Holy Spirit provides. But it wasn’t until Jesus began to speak about His Father and about His relation to the Father and about the Holy Spirit that our minds and hearts were open to the idea of three persons in one God.
When I was 16 years old and a senior in high school, one of my classmates died. Our school didn’t have much in the way of a science program. In senior year you got to pick between physics and chemistry. And, apparently, my classmate, who sat next to me in several of my classes, was a science buff, and set up his own little chemistry lab in the basement of his parents’ home. And, on a Friday afternoon, after he got home from school and his parents were out, he was tinkering with something in the basement and accidentally created a noxious gas. Recognizing that he was in trouble, he lurched toward the basement window to open the window and didn’t get there in time. His parents found him dead in the basement when they got home. At least that’s the story we were told. Now, as an older man, I’m more cynical. I think perhaps my classmate may have taken his own life deliberately.
Nonetheless, we did not find out until Monday morning, when the principal made the announcements over the loudspeaker. And then we were expected to get on with our day. You know, most of us growing up in those big Catholic households in the 1950s and 60s were no stranger to wakes. But death happened to old people. And we couldn’t wrap our minds around it. The next morning, one of our teachers, a nice young Jesuit - probably a kid himself, 22 years old maybe, just out of college and one year of novitiate before going out to teach – sat down at his teacher’s desk and talked to us, in that intellectual way Jesuits have, about how to respond to this tragedy and what we should think as Catholic young men. And I sat there hating him. Absolutely despising him. Because me and my friends could not deal with this loss, and there he was, blathering on about stuff in Catholic religion. And, to the end of my graduation year, I still hated that poor young Jesuit, who thought he was doing the right thing. I was just too young to understand.
Those of you who are at least 60 years old remember a time in Catholicism when we did some things that we don’t do now and didn’t do some things that we do do now. But, if you remember having conversations with your parents and grandparents, they would have told you that there’s some stuff we do as Catholics now that they didn’t do when they were growing up and some stuff that we don’t do now that they did do when they were growing up. And so, it’s fair to say that, when our children and grandchildren are our age, they will be able to say the same thing. There are things that we do as Catholics now that we didn’t do back then and things we don’t do anymore that we used to do back then. The church has allowed itself to obtain the image of being rigid and unchangeable. The fact is that the church is always in the process of changing. It is an evolutionary change in the sense that each new idea or movement grows organically out of some thing or some doctrine in the church’s past. So there’s never a time when there’s a complete and irrevocable break from one thing to the other.
That’s why I asked you to listen carefully to the issue that sent Barnabas and Paul to Jerusalem to see the apostles and to the solution the apostles came up with. The issue was circumcision. Not much of a deal for us, but for the Jews of Jesus time it was a make-it-or-break-it deal. Circumcision existed among the Hebrews probably from before the time of Abraham, certainly since the time of the patriarchs. But it became a critical issue in their faith only about a hundred years before Jesus was born.
So, did you find what it was? The phrase was, “God will wipe every tear from their eyes.” It appears twice in the Book of Revelation or the Book of Apocalypse, if you prefer. Once near the beginning, once near the end. And between those brackets comes a whole bunch of stuff that people are very confused about.
I don't know if you noticed, on the way into the parking lot, we have our flag at half-mast. The president requested that we do that to honor the million dead from Covid. I looked it up. That’s just under twice the number of people, Americans, who died in WWI, WWII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. We lost just under 700,000 people in four wars. We lost over a million people to a disease that could have been handled better. The thing of it is that we are not grieving about all of this. Now, everybody knows those Kübler-Ross steps of grief. First comes the denial, then the anger and the bargaining, and then they enter into depression and then, at the other end, something called closure. We’re all stuck on go. We’re all still in denial about the extent of this tragedy. And, until we begin to grieve, we will not be able to move forward.
How can you tell that there’s a gang of really faithful Catholics here? No one’s sitting in the front. I often dreamt of building a church that had only one pew, then one day I found one. I was visiting a Byzantine rite church in Ulster County. The church is built as a circle and there were benches all around three-quarters of the walls, and the last quarter of the wall was where the altar was hidden behind an iconostasis. But everybody got to sit up front and in the back at the same time.
1959 was a banner year for an otherwise obscure country western singer named Stonewall Jackson, named after the great Confederate general. At the beginning of the year he had a number one hit called “The Battle of New Orleans,” but later on in the year he made it into the top five, which means he sold several million copies of a song called “Waterloo.” And, if you remember the song, as maybe two or three people in the congregation might, the first verse went like this.
So, I asked you, before the first reading, “Do you love God?” It’s a difficult question because we can’t see or feel or touch God. He’s an intellectual concept. How do we love an intellectual concept? Even if we talk about loving Jesus, the stories we know about Jesus took place 2,000 years ago. And we’re told that He’s with us in the Church and in the Eucharist but, aside from that little piece of bread, we can’t see Him or feel Him or touch Him, so it’s hard to love Him.
Today’s gospel provides one avenue through this puzzle. But, before we talk about it, we have to talk about today’s gospel. Because last Sunday, at the end of the gospel, John, the writer, told us that, “… there were many other things that were not written down in this book, but these are written so you may believe and, believing, have life in His name.” End of story! He just finished writing his gospel, then this morning we read the next chapter of the gospel. It’s got two endings. And the two endings are very different.
We must not mistake the title, Divine Mercy Sunday, to have an exclusively individual or personal meaning. It has a much broader meaning than that. In order to understand today’s gospel, a couple of things we need to keep in mind. The first is that scripture scholars caution us not to read modern psychological motivations into the scriptures. That doesn’t mean that the ancients didn’t understand human psychology much the same as we do, but they didn’t have the same analytical approach to human emotions and human intentions. And so, they would not be thinking in the same framework that we think. So, what I’m about to do, I say with a caution.
The other thing to realize is that there are not 1, but 3 elephants in this upper room and each of them is huge. The first elephant is denial. Peter, one of the disciples in that room, had denied knowing Jesus, not once, but three times. The second is abandonment. The other ten, along with Peter, had run away at the crisis hour. They ran and hid in the very room they’re hiding in now, with the doors locked. The third is, for want of a better word, withdrawal from the community. Thomas, who is another of the ten, refuses to enter into the community’s newfound faith. Although he’s still a member of the community, and sitting there with the rest of them, he has shut himself off from their view of reality. And so, as Jesus enters the room, He has to deal with all 3 elephants. And he does it in the simplest way. All He says, as He enters the room, is, “Shalom.” “Peace be with you” in English. And that one word contains so many meanings it’s just incredible.
It’s like a very serious game of “Where’s Waldo Now?” Who’s missing from the story? This is the great feast of Easter, the Lord’s Resurrection, and He’s the only one that doesn’t show up in the gospel story.
There are four gospels. Each one tells a different story of the Crucifixion, the Death, the Empty Tomb, and the Resurrection. But all of them have the three elements that we heard in today’s story. The women go at dawn. The tomb is empty. Strange messengers tell them, “He is not here. He is risen. Go tell.” Go tell. The story ends there in two of our three Easter celebrations. This is Year C, the year of Luke. In Year A, the year of Matthew, Jesus does show up in the last line of the story. In Year B, the year of Mark, Jesus isn’t there. This is not the gospel. This is the liturgy, the church’s use of the gospel to make a point.
Pilate’s renown line, “What is truth,” is found exactly in the middle of St. John’s Passion gospel. There are just about 40 lines leading up to it, and just about 40 lines leading away from it. Which meant that, when this gospel was composed, its writer meant it to be the high point of the story. As though Jesus and Pilate are standing on a stage that represents the whole world, and they are looking backwards and they are looking forward.
How can we preach on today’s gospel and on what we celebrate these four days without further dividing humanity into “them” and “us?” That’s the real problem. We don’t live in Christendom anymore. We live in a secular society where we have been taught, since we were little children, that all religions are of equal value. And, yes, they are, in the public arena. But, no, they are not from the point of view of truth. And that is why Pilate’s question is extremely important. Because it represents the rest of the world, asking the one person who represents all of Christianity, “What exactly is truth?”
Some years ago, there was a book written, called “You Are What You Eat,” by a woman named Gillian McKeith. But she borrowed the expression from someone who wrote something similar about a century and a half before that, a French philosopher and doctor named Jean Savarin. And what he wrote was just a little bit different. He said, “Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you what you are.” Slightly different. He was also a medical professional, so he was interested in good nutrition, the same way that Gillian was, but his words bear a broader interpretation.
For us Catholics who believe that Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist, bodily present - body and blood, soul and divinity – we have, each time we receive Holy Communion, a moment when Christ’s body is part of our body, and we carry that with us throughout our lives. Each time we receive Holy Communion we renew that intimate earthly and divine contact with Christ. Which means that we carry within ourselves all the time the scene that St. Luke portrays in today’s gospel - the part we didn’t read, the longer form – where, right in the middle of the Last Supper, Jesus’ closest friends are continuing to argue over which one He loves best, who’s the greatest. And Jesus, in the midst of that squabble, takes bread and says, “This is my body, broken for you.” And then He takes the chalice on the table from Passover and says, “This cup is filled with my blood, just about to be poured out for everybody for the forgiveness of sins, so you can forgive one another’s sins.”
Many contemporary scripture scholars refer to this story as ‘a gospel without a home,’ an orphan story, because they’re almost certain that it didn’t begin where we now find it in the bible, in the beginning of chapter 8 of John’s gospel. And they think that the story was in written form by the mid-80s, but finally it found a home when John composed his gospel. Because it’s a very gentle beginning to an ongoing controversy between Jesus and the Pharisees and doctors of the law. This chapter ends, after several more bitter disputes, with Jesus finally saying something and the scribes and Pharisees picking up stones to throw at Him. And it says He simply disappeared from their sight and slipped away.
I was going to put a stone on each of your chairs, but it really was too hard to do, so I just brought three of them in from outside. Stoning is a terrible form of execution which we still see today in some places in the Mideast. It begins with little, tiny stones like this. If I hit you with this, unless I hit you right between the eyes, it wouldn’t even hurt much. Then the executioners slowly graduate to larger stones. If I hit you with this one, it would hurt. But it would go away.