September 17, 2023
Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 17, 2023 – Sirach 27:30-28:7; Romans 14:7-9; Matthew 18:21-35
I had planned this morning’s homily expecting to have the same large number of children in the congregation that we had last Sunday, so now I am going to have to pivot a little bit.
I asked you to pay close attention to the very first line of the first reading. I did that because you know what happens in the first reading, right? We sit down and we have to adjust and get ourselves settled. And the first line usually goes by before we’re focused in. But the first line is a key line. “Hatred and anger are terrible things, but the sinner holds them tight,” like wrapping something around you.
Probably, along with Peppermint Patty, the most well-adjusted of the children in the Peanuts comic strip is actually Linus despite the fact that he walks around with a security blanket. And the person who tries to get his security blanket away from him all the time, of course, is Snoopy. The question is whether Snoopy is a good dog or a bad dog. If Linus really needs his security blanket, then trying to snatch it away would not be a good thing. But if Linus has actually outgrown his security blanket, then Snoopy is very wise in trying to take it away so that Linus will realize he has moved on from needing that security blanket.
All of us tend to wrap ourselves in something. I am the angry one. I am the one who was betrayed. I am the bitter one. I am the jealous one. I am the one who is always picked on. I am the one who can’t do anything right. And there may very well have been a moment, a time in your life, when that happened to be true. But you moved on, others moved on, and time moved on. And that was no longer true. But we continue to think that way and to behave according to the way we feel.
What I am about to say now has nothing to do with politics at all. I’m using it as a metaphor or an image to understand something. During the early days of World War II, in one of his Fireside Chats, FDR talked about the Four Freedoms. The freedom of speech. The freedom of worship. The freedom from want. The freedom from fear. And I’m sure he meant very sincerely what he said. But, in doing so, he planted a seed in the modern consciousness that was different from the intention of the founding fathers in the First Amendment. They said, “Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion or the free exercise thereof.” They didn’t say worship; they said religion. And this is the difference. Worship is a private thing. Religion is a public thing. Something that controls or dominates or dictates the whole way in which you view reality.
Very often we are told by well-meaning religious teachers and priests that the Eucharist is the center of our religion. That is absolutely not true. The fathers of the Second Vatican Council, when talking about the Eucharist in the Mass, said, “The Eucharist is the source and the summit of our religion.” The source and the summit. They are bookends not the center. There have been many times in the life of the Church when very few people could get to Communion because of distance, because of war, because of population, because of the scarcity of priests. But the center of our faith is our baptism, which commissions us to look upon reality in a certain way and to behave accordingly. Both in our intellectual life and in our moral life. And baptism, the grace of Baptism, empowers us to do that.
When the Council fathers said that the Eucharist was the source and the summit, what they meant was this. That every other sacrament was created at Eucharist. That’s where the Bishop blesses the oil for the Anointing of the Sick and for the Ordination of priests and the Confirming of the congregation. That’s where the Eucharist is confected. That’s where, ideally, people get married, and so on and so forth. It’s the source of our Christian life. And it is the summit in the sense that, when we have lived out our week’s life doing whatever it is we do - teaching a classroom full of children or nursing the sick or waiting on customers or working in the fields or working construction or running a police force, whatever it happens to be - when we’re finished doing that for the week, we bring it back to the Eucharist to be blessed by God for what we have done well and forgiven by God for what we have not done well. That’s why we restored the offertory procession. Not to make sure that I got hold of the money right away but rather to make sure that you understand that it is you who are offering yourself to God at that moment through those gifts and your own gifts. To say that “This is what I have done during the past week. Please bless me, help me to do this well or better the next week.”
Linus once was asked what he was going to do with his blanket when he finally grew up. And he said, “I’m going to make a sports coat out of it.” But I wonder if you know the only time in the entire story of Peanuts when Linus let go of his blanket. It was during the first televised version of the Peanuts comic strip. The Peanuts Christmas story. The Charlie Brown Christmas. Remember what happens? Charlie Brown is assigned to go out and get the tree for the Christmas pageant. And he brings this bedraggled thing onto the stage, and everybody humiliates him. And then the stage goes dark. There’s just one spotlight on who? On Linus. And Linus begins to tell the Christmas story. And he gets to the part about the Christmas angels, and he says, “I bring you good news of great joy,” and he flings his arm up, and the blanket goes flying. He lets go at the moment of the good news of great joy.
Today’s second reading comes from the fourteenth chapter of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. In the same chapter, this is what he says. “Put on the Lord, Jesus Christ, and let go of everything else.”