June 21, 2020
12th Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 21 2020 - Jeremiah 20: 10-13; Romans 5: 12-15; Matthew 10: 26-33
Terror! Terror on every side. That pretty much sums up what we have seen over the last quarter of a year. The only thing that moved the Coronavirus story off the front pages of the newspapers and the lead story on the evening news was an equally important and frightful event – an eruption of demonstrations about racial justice the like of which we have not seen since the late 1960s.
I’d like to tell you two stories - the first is kind of innocent, the second maybe not so much. When I was in grammar school, our neighborhood was made up of all Caucasian people. There were Italians, Irish, Polish, Germans, a smattering of French and English, but we all looked somewhat alike. We kids called each other in conversation by those ugly names that each of those ethnic groups has in street slang. But we didn’t mean anything by it. We all got along well together.
And then, one day, in junior high school, the Sister Principal brought a new student into our class, and he was of a different color than us. Most of us had never interacted with a person of color in our lives. He was exotic to us. He wasn’t a dark-skinned black person, but rather a kind of deep tawny color, with blonde hair that wasn’t exactly nappy, but more wavy. And people were both put off by him and attracted to him. And then he joined our Boy Scout troop.
I don’t know if you know how the Boy Scouts work, but every week there’s a troop meeting, everybody together. Then, in the intervening time, if possible each of the patrols within the troop are supposed to have their own patrol meeting. So he volunteered his house for our patrol meeting. Sad to say, very few of us in that patrol – there must have been ten or twelve people in our patrol – showed up for the meeting. I have a suspicion that those who did, showed up just to get a look at what kind of house
those people lived in. So what is that, 65 years ago we’re talking about?
Flash forward another 18 years or so and I’m a young priest. I get a letter in the mail from someone who is not in the parish, but who knows me in some other connection, and has been following what I say from the pulpit. He’s writing about a problem. He wants to marry a young lady who is of a different race than himself. He wants to know what I think of it. So I tell him that, when it comes to the sacraments, the Catholic Church is colorblind. But he should think carefully before going forward. Because, suppose that the family had several children, and one child favors one set of genes, the other child favors the other set of genes, and the two children take it out on each other. Suppose that the children themselves are mocked, criticized, and belittled in school. Suppose that one or both branches of the family disown the two lovers because they’ve done this. Do they have the strength to go it alone? Can they be an island in the midst of people who have shunned them?
It seemed like reasonable advice at the time. Forty-five years later, I can understand how wrong-headed the advice was.
The thing is that, in both stories I told you, there is context. The context of growing up in a Bronx neighborhood in the 1950s. The context of what society saw and did in the early 1970s. The context does not travel well to 2020. But that’s one of the problems we face now with all of our big issues - that they’re issues devoid of context. The other side of the coin, however, that many people are saying, is context be damned. The issue is too important for us to make any allowance for history and context.
And just by a happy coincidence, all three of our readings this morning are about crisis. And each one of them has a context that’s not obvious from the reading that you heard.
The first on comes from the book of Jeremiah. And just before the words that we hear, Jeremiah begins an argument with God. He says, “You duped me! You duped me! And I let myself be duped. I told you when we started I wasn’t up for this. I was too young. You said do it anyway. I said I don’t want to do it. You said you have to do it. So I said ok, I’ll do it. And now look what’s happened. Everybody hates me. I told you this would happen.”
So what we hear in the reading as the simple fear of an individual person, actually is lodged in the context of a vocation to a nation that needs to be brought up short and is unwilling to listen to God’s word.
In the second reading there’s a context we would completely miss. St. Paul says, “Through one man, sin entered the world, and with sin, death. For us, the important thing is sin. That’s how we were raised. We talk about original sin – because of Adam, all human beings are fallen, and prone to do wrong things. And Jesus has come to save us from the futility of not being able to please God by our actions. But that’s not how St. Paul heard it.
I just finished reading a novel about the world in the first century A.D. And one of the most important thing that underlies the story I’m reading is the fact that, in the ancient world, nobody, except some of the Jews, believed in any afterlife at all. Hades was not a place where you either were rewarded or punished; it was just a place where there was nothing. And so people of good will were encouraged to live life to the full while they were alive. To do good, to do right, and to make something of yourself and perhaps, if possible, to become wealthier in order to leave wealth to your children, and to become famous in order to leave a name to your children. That’s all there was.
And so, when the first Christian preachers went out to preach, they were talking about something no one ever imagined before – eternal life. And death was the enemy in the first century A.D. Death brought an end to all of people’s hopes and Christianity was offering something beyond that hopelessness. That’s the context of what St. Paul says.
In today’s Gospel, we’re in the middle of a speech of Jesus. If there had been an 11
th Sunday in Ordinary Time this year, we would have read the first part of that speech last Sunday. But because last Sunday was Corpus Christi, we didn’t read it. Next Sunday we’re going to be still hearing the last part of the same speech. So what’s the context here?
Jesus is sending the twelve apostles out to preach. They’re sort of like advance men, going out before the big show comes to each town. He gives them a whole bunch of instructions about how to behave and what to expect. In this morning’s part of the instructions, He’s talking about what happens if you are rejected when you go out with My message. Now, these things were certainly said by Jesus in his lifetime, but the context for our Gospel is that we have reluctant Christians in the mid-80s who are afraid to go out and talk to their neighbor. Afraid to go out and witness what they believe about Jesus and eternal life and right living - morality … go out into a world that doesn’t want to hear that message.
That’s what we’re up against as human beings today. In the midst of this whiplash of crises, the Church has a message. That message is embedded in each one of you. Now, you don’t have to be an expert in the natural law in order to recognize what we’re called to do as citizens in a health crisis. You don’t have to have a doctorate in theology to recognize what we’re supposed to do in the face of the immense challenge of racial inequality in our country. As a matter of fact, if you don’t want to go through the Church’s teaching, so to speak, it’s embedded in the most basic of our moral law. Three commandments - Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness - sums it all up. But it is so difficult. It is so difficult to do the things that we’re asked to do. To not do the things we’re not supposed to do. It is so difficult to stand out from the rest of our society. And so we lift out of their context, one little sentence of Jesus in the midst of everything he said. “Do not be afraid.” Do
NOT be afraid.