Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 25, 2022 – Amos 6:1A,4-7; 1 Timothy 6:11-16; Luke 16:19-31

Show of hands, how many of you remember your Baptism? Yeah, I didn’t think so, but there could be some adult converts in our congregation. There were last night. How many of you remember the day of your Confirmation? A lot more. Now, those of you who are of a certain age, you were confirmed before the changes that were made in the sacramental liturgies of both Baptism and Confirmation. When you and I were baptized, and even when some of the younger people in the congregation were baptized, godparents came, and at a certain point in the Latin ceremony, the godparents recited the Apostle’s Creed in English at the prompting of the priest who was doing the Baptism. Now that is gone from the baptismal ceremony and, in its place, the priest asks the parents and the godparents six questions. The answer to each one is the same. I do.

The first three – “Do you renounce Satan?” [(This will be very familiar to those who like the movie, The Godfather.] “Do you renounce Satan?” “I do.” “And all his empty promises?” “I do.” “And all his pomps?” “I do.”

The next three questions break up the Apostle’s Creed. “Do you believe in God, the Father Almighty?” “I do.” “In his Son, Jesus Christ, Our Lord?” “I do.” “The communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, and so on?” “I do.”

In the new Rite of Confirmation, which has been ours probably since maybe the early 1980s, the Bishop asks the people being confirmed the same six questions. So, for all the kids that didn’t get to hear them when they were little tiny infants, they get to say them this time. Six I do’s. And that is our noble confession of faith. That’s the expression I wanted you to listen for in today’s second reading.

The writer of St. Paul’s Letter to Timothy says to Timothy, “You made your noble confession before many witnesses.” What does he mean by that? In the baptismal ceremony in the early church, almost everybody being baptized was an adult. And they were bought into a lake or a stream or a courtyard fountain and they were asked if they truly believed in Jesus and would follow His way. And, once they said aloud, in front of everybody watching, that they intended to do that, then the person baptizing dunked them under the water and baptized them. But he says, “You made your noble confession of faith before many witnesses and Jesus made his noble confession of faith before Pontius Pilate.”

Now you’d have to have your bible out to understand this. The gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke don’t have Jesus say much at all in front of Pilate. Pontius Pilate says to Him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” And Jesus says, “You’re the one who says so.” Not another word.

But, in John’s gospel, there’s a very long conversation between Jesus and Pilate in which Jesus challenges Pilate to realize that he’s come to a moment of decision. He says to him, Pilate says to Jesus, “Don’t you realize I have power to crucify you and power to set you free? Why won’t you speak to me?” And Jesus says to him, “You would have no power over me whatsoever, unless it were granted you from above.” And it’s at that moment that Pilate falters. Up until then, he’s more or less on Jesus’ side because he knew this was a trumped up charge. But Pilate cannot let go of the earthly power he possesses. And so he caves in to the demand of the crowd.

So that was Jesus’ noble confession. Timothy’s noble confession was very gentle. He just stood up in front of his friends and neighbors and said I am going to follow Jesus. Jesus’ noble confession was terrible because it led to His death.

We have people, all the time, making a noble confession. Right now, Archbishop Rolando Alvarez of the Archdiocese of Matagalpa in Nicaragua is under house arrest along with all his suffrage in bishops because they dared to oppose the regime of Manuel Ortega. And many other Catholics have been arrested and some of them executed by that dictator.

You know about thirty-five years ago the same thing happened in San Salvador with Bishop Oscar Romero, who challenged the leadership of his country because of their corrupt government. And he, he was shot, during the consecration of a Mass he was celebrating. Shot to death. 

This past Pentecost Sunday, so what, six months ago, the people of the town of Owo, in Nigeria, were attending Mass. As they came out of Mass they were mowed down by militant Muslims. Those people didn’t even get a chance to say anything. You kind of imagine them like you and I coming out of Church, right? So, some woman’s coming out of church, she’s digging in her purse to find a package of mints. Some guy is coming out of church and he’s reaching into his pocket to get a pack of cigarettes. All of a sudden, they are dead because of their belief in Jesus. The most noble, but the most terrible, confession of faith. 

There are a bunch of movies that like to capture that moment because it is a very dramatic moment.  In the 1950s, Richard Burton starred in a movie called The Robe, in which an up and coming Roman centurion defies the Emperor Caligula and declares his belief in this Nazorean, and is carted off to the Coliseum to die. A decade later, Richard Burton made another movie called Beckett, about the Bishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett, who defied King Henry IV, and when Henry would not back down, he excommunicated him. Henry sent several of his honor guard to slaughter Thomas Beckett as he was celebrating Mass in his cathedral. 

Recently there was a very benign movie called Father Stu. One of the Wahlberg brothers was the star of the movie. And it’s all about a real person. Stuart began his life in a dysfunctional home, where his father was an abusive alcoholic.  Needless to say, his early childhood and adolescent years were wild.  He himself was an alcoholic. He was also a motorcycle enthusiast. And, one drunken motorcycle ride, he injured himself very seriously and several other people and was charged with DWI. His recuperation was very, very slow. And, sometime during that recuperation, he claims to have had a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who said you can’t go on living like this. He went and he found AA and began to put his life together. He fell in love with somebody. Was not behaving the way a Catholic is supposed to behave in that love affair. But some of his friends in that group of buddies, for some reason or other, felt called to the priesthood, and after a while so did he. People laughed at him. He was actually refused the first time he tried to enter a seminary. Finally, he got permission to enter. And, on his way to priesthood, it turned out he had a very, very serious incurable disease, and it would prevent you from having good motor control. The Bishop told him, “You can’t be ordained because you can’t hold up the Host.” The people in his parish and his seminarian friends and his priest friends begged the Bishop to change his mind. He did.  He spent about the last two years of his life, that’s all he had left, working in a parish. His noble confession was spread out over almost fifteen years.

We just got a new Blessed in our Church. He’s a fifteen year old boy. He died in 2005. So he is very much a part of the twenty-first century. His name is Carlo Acutis. Carlo was born into a family of Italian people who did not go to Church. They had him baptized because that’s what you do in Italy. But after that, nothing. He began to listen to stories that his grandparents are telling. He begged his parents to let him make his First Holy Communion. From that day on he went to Mass almost every day.  But he wasn’t a Goody Two-Shoes either. He played Pokémon all the time, was a computer nerd, played soccer, hung out with his friends, played with his pets. And, when he was around thirteen, he got leukemia. He had said at one time to his friends, “To be always close to Jesus. That’s my life plan.” When he got so sick that he couldn’t play anymore, he said, “I offer my sufferings” and he listed a whole bunch of people and things he offered his sufferings for.  An ordinary teenager, just like so many of the teenagers in our Parish. And now at least one miracle has already been attributed to praying to him in heaven. He made his noble confession on the internet, on his website, among his friends, playing soccer, or just hanging out. He made his noble confession.

We, here in America, have a very easy life as Catholics. Nobody really bothers us. Our churches are open all the time. Yeah, there are fewer of them now. But our priests work hard to cover as many places as they can, to make sure that people have Mass at least on Sunday, at least on some weekdays. Nobody arrests us for being Catholic. Every now and then there’s a little dust up between people of different opinions. But so what? It passes. We get along, right? There’s no big deal.

Someone made our noble confession for us when we were little tiny babies. Some of us made it for ourselves at our Confirmation. But the question that hangs over us as a society of Catholics today is a very simple question. Two words. Do you? Do I? Do we?