Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 5, 2021 – Isaiah 35:4-7A; James 2:1-5; Mark 7:31-37

I was ordained to the diaconate in May of 1968, one year to go before being ordained a priest. And right after ordination, I went home for the summer with my parents, and the pastor of my parish invited me to preach at the 9:00 Mass on Sunday morning, which was the children’s Mass. However, it was a big urban parish, and what they did was the children would sit in the front in the middle with the religious sisters to control them, and their parents would sit on both side aisles and in back of the children. Unfortunately, that weekend, the country was in the midst of a great grief. Bobby Kennedy had just been shot. If you remember the political context of that time, the antiwar movement was growing rapidly. Lyndon Johnson had entered the presidency after another great tragedy, the assassination of John Kennedy. And he made a great deal of his presidency because he was very forward-looking, and he is the one responsible for the theme called “The Great Society,” which was the first great turning point in race relations in the twentieth century. The work he did in civil rights and social justice legislation was really remarkable, coming from a Southern democrat. But the escalating war in Vietnam finally did him in, and he announced that he was not going to run for a second term, which meant that the presumptive candidate should’ve been Hubert Humphrey. A great number of people in the Democratic Party were fearful that, if Hubert Humphrey ran, then Richard Nixon would beat him. And the younger people were demanding something more radical to deal with the war. And so, there was a movement to have Bobby Kennedy challenge Hubert Humphrey for the Democratic nomination. And then he was killed. 

So here I am in the North Bronx, which is a parish full of conservative banter, including my father and mother, and even myself. Many of them have a distinct dislike for poor Bobby Kennedy. And I have got to preach to a room full of children, from kindergarten to eighth grade, and try to explain to them what the national tragedy is, and what the Catholic response should be to tragedy without, at the same time, alienating or angering their parents. So it was a really challenging first homily. The very next weekend, all of the members of my class were sent to preach for the propagation of the faith all over the archdiocese, and I had to take the train from Grand Central up to Poughkeepsie. And I was housed overnight in a parishioner’s home, and I preached for the propagation of the faith at thirteen Masses. And I have never preached for the propagation since. So today, after fifty-three years, I’m going to do it again. 

If you were to look at the end of each gospel and the beginning of Acts, this is what you would find.  In Mark, “Go into the whole world and preach the good news.” In Matthew, “Full authority has been given to me. Therefore, go, make disciples of all nations, teaching, and baptizing.” Luke in his gospel, “You are my witnesses, I send down upon you the promise of my Father.” In Luke’s book of Acts, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes down upon you, then you will be my witnesses to the ends of the earth.” John’s gospel - two different things: in the upper room, “As the Father has sent me so I send you. Receive the Holy Spirit,” and to Peter, on the seashore, “Feed my lambs. Feed my sheep.” It is clear that Jesus intended his church to be a missionary church, for he is speaking there, in each of those passages, to all of the Christians that there were at the time - the small band that followed him right to Calvary. 

And yet, when I thought about becoming a priest, I didn’t think about missionary work. My first vocational choice in life was to be an American Indian. It took a couple of years for my parents to disabuse me of that notion. But all during grammar school, I was planning to be a commercial artist. Remember back in the 40s and 50s and early 60s, most commercial advertising in magazines and newspapers was not photographic, but lithographic, with artist’s drawings. That’s what I wanted to be until I won a scholarship to an academic Jesuit high school. In high school, my focus changed; I wanted to be a teacher of literature at the secondary or college level. Probably until sometime in the summer between junior and senior year where the first beginnings of an inkling about the possibilities of vocation invaded my consciousness. The very first decision I made about a possible vocation is that I would not be a Jesuit, although I did like them very much as teachers. My second decision is that I would not join any religious order, which meant I would not be a missionary. I saw no point in going thousands of miles away. And I saw no point in taking vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Secular priests like myself have no vows. We are bound by Canon Law not to marry and, because Catholic morality says that unmarried people may not engage in sexuality, I’m bound to be celibate. But I can own what I want, and my relationship with my bishop is not one directly of obedience, but rather a relationship governed by Canon Law. I have duties, I have rights as well. And he has rights and he has duties towards me, as well. That was the kind of priest that I wanted. 

If you think about what missionary life was like back in the 1950s - do you remember “mite boxes?” Until at least the early 1970s, we were all given “mite boxes” every Advent and every Lent. The sisters told us that that was to rescue babies by having them baptized. And to emphasize that, you always saw photographs of beautiful religious sisters, all dressed in white. Or photographs of priests working as missionaries; their jackets and pants were white, and the only thing black on them was a little rabat that held their collar in place. The reason why was because almost all of missionary work was done in tropic zones where white would be reflective of heat and black would hold the heat. So, that was our image of missionary work back in the 1950s. 

We have moved on from that view of missionary work, but not everybody has. I have some cousins, and they raised their three boys and their daughter in the Catholic faith. Baptism, Confirmation, First Communion, the whole thing. Catholic grammar school, Catholic high school. The boys left the Catholic Church, and somewhere in their early 20s, they found God again, through evangelical Protestantism. And one of them, with his wife, have become lay missionaries. They go all over the world. Right now they're on their way to Malawi, on the East Coast of Africa, right next to Madagascar. And they simply amaze me. The church pays their salary and pays their passage, and that sort of thing, but they live a life of poverty. They have nothing of their own. They don’t live like you and I do here in the United States, except when they're home, they have an apartment someplace. And they do that because they believe, just like the nuns taught us in grammar school, they had to go out and save the pagan babies. 

Right now that attitude is becoming a real problem. You may have seen in the newspaper in the last couple of weeks, stories about the Catholic orphanages and Indian schools in Canada, where they've discovered large, unmarked graves where native children were buried, presumably after epidemics of polio, measles and stuff like that, where they didn't survive. The same thing is going to happen here in the United States. The primary offender was the Carlisle Indian School in nearby Carlisle, Pennsylvania - you pass it on the way to Gettysburg. The person who founded the Carlisle School, his theory was, you had to kill the Indian in order to save the man. Which is a really ugly way of saying basically that people thought that the only way to allow Native Americans to enter into the mainstream of American life was to bring them up to speed by making them stop thinking about that Indian stuff. 

Now, this is how that happened. After the Civil War, President Grant discovered that Indian agents throughout the Southwest and the West were committing huge graft by stealing the allotments that were supposed to go to the Native Americans, and selling them on the black market. So he created something called the Indian Bureau. The Indian Bureau was tasked with filling all the posts for all reservations. So they parceled out the posts - Catholic, Protestant, Catholic, Protestant, Catholic, Protestant, willy-nilly. That's how the Catholic Church eventually got involved in ministering on Indian reservations. But it's interesting that the great Chief Sitting Bull, while he was already under semi-house arrest on the reservation, wrote to both the Indian Bureau and to the Jesuits, and begged them, begged them, to send Jesuit priests to his reservation because he and most other Western tribes had great admiration for Catholic missionaries, as opposed to the Protestant missionaries. So, how we got from that state to the opprobrium that hangs over our missions now is very difficult to understand. Especially because all of primary education back in the late 1800s, early 1900s was kind of draconian. But here we are. That's not the way we are anymore. 

And before we discuss how we are now, I wanted to point out to you that there’s a missionary concept in each of the three readings we had this morning. The one from Isaiah talks all about the rescue of God, where the blind will see, and the deaf will hear, and the dumb will speak, and so on, and so forth. That passage goes on and on, and ends with a prediction that all the nations of the world will stream toward the temple in Jerusalem. This is a kind of missionary work. Isaiah's words were radical for Jewish people, because they never saw themselves as opening up and inviting the rest of the world to worship their one God. But the missionary concept there was that everybody else would come to us, not that we would go to them. 

In the letter of James, in the second reading, he talks about inequality at the Eucharist. Giving special place of honor to rich people, important people, making the poor stand in the back. And that has been a constant theme throughout the history of Christianity - favoritism of various sorts. But the missionary message implied in Saint James' letter is sort of noblesse oblige - we owe it to the poor to be out and give them what we've got. 

Now, I asked you to listen carefully to where Jesus was and what he did in today's gospel, because we wouldn't care much about the fact that he was going from Tyre to Sidon on his way to the Decapolis, who cares? Well, this is what that was all about, Mark knew that his people would know that that whole area was completely pagan. Galilee was right on the border of present-day Lebanon. And the Jewish people who lived on the Sea of Galilee and all around it were surrounded by people who worshiped Pagan gods. Jesus deliberately goes into their territory to bring this word to them. And notice what He does when He’s asked to cure a deaf man. There are only two times in all the gospels where the gospel writer uses the original Aramaic words in the cure. Jesus says to the little girl, “Talitha koum.” Here, he says to the Pagan man, “Ephphatha,” because it was a magic word. The charlatans who pretended to cure people among the pagans used incantations of various sorts. And so, Jesus uses an incantation to make it seem like all the other kinds of healers that these people were used to. And He uses gestures. He sticks his fingers in the man's ears, and He spits on his tongue. Jesus usually does not behave like that. He does that in order to make his way into the Pagan culture. We call that enculturation. And that is the style of missionary work the Catholic Church engages in now; journeying with Native peoples, witnessing to the goodness of God present in the life of Jesus, and hoping that because of the way we witness among them, working with them, and caring for them simply as people, that some of them will be attracted to Jesus. That’s the way of missionary work today.

And to sum up, we got a little message on the internet that, this coming Thursday, Cardinal Dolan is gathering several of the African priests in the archdiocese, to celebrate mass with them, to pray for Catholic people and catechumens throughout Africa who are being persecuted for their faith, either by Boko Haram, or ISIS, or one of the other radical Muslim groups, or by dictatorships both right and left, that are busy arresting anyone who opposes their draconian policies. And so, even at the highest levels, there’s an attempt to show publicly that we walk with these people. 

That's what the propagation of the faith represents. It represents our current way of being missionary in the world. That we journey with people in order that they may see the goodness of God reflected in our lives. If you would like to help with that, you certainly would be most welcome doing that. If you need an envelope, there's some on the windows on the side. And now, after 53 years I've preached again for the propagation of the faith.