Today was Family Day at Saint John's Seminary and families and friends came from all around for Mass and Lunch and some time with our seminarians. Here's the homily I preached, followed by some photos of a great morning with those whom we love!
Welcome. Moms and dads, brothers, sisters and friends of this holy house.
This is always such a special day as each year we welcome our families and friends to Saint John’s Seminary. You are so special to us because you have known and nonetheless loved us with an unconditional love from the day we were conceived in our mother’s womb.
You were there when at three years old we enacted those lines from Sirach: “Wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight.”
Picture the three year old, filled to overflowing with rage. Hugging himself tightly as he simultaneously holds his breath, stamps his feet and practices the look that could kill. Whirling about in a distrophic fury, ready to strike out at anyone who would dare defy his infallible will, this Demi-God is all anger and hate and overflowing wrath.
But somehow, because of some of you, he learned the hard lesson that if he beats his sister about the head with his whiffle bat, returning to Sirach, “The vengeful will suffer the LORD's vengeance,” replete with a time out or similar horrors.
It's the first lesson we learn about loving like God, and many of you taught it, patiently, again and again. That, at the very least, we shouldn’t hurt each other lest we face “the loss of heaven and the pains of hell.”
And then there was a deeper learning about love, called mercy. Here I think of the teenager drowning in a sea of newfound emotions, temptations and unfulfilled possibilities. And you won't let him have the car because of that one little scratch which you wouldn't have even known about if he wasn't honest enough to tell you about it. “It's not fair,” he laments. “You’ve never loved me as much as my sister anyway and all you do is try to make my life miserable. I hate you.”
And he slams the door and your heart aches and you pray for the strength not to scream back at this ungrateful little wretch who used to be your cute little son. ‘Cause you suspect that another miracle is about to happen, and it does, as God embraces his adolescent pain and breathes upon the chaos until the beautiful human child you so love begins to fight his way out of the morass of his own emotions and comes to you with that quivering smile and the innocent glint in his eyes and says, “Hey, I’m Sorry. I know you love me and I love you, but sometimes…” and he catches himself and says it again: “I'm sorry.”
And at that moment, in your house with the scratched car in the garage, Christ is once again acting out his Gospel, for you and for this child struggling to grow into full manhood in Christ. Forgive. As I have forgiven you. Not seven times, but seventy times seven times: a new commandment of the Lord.
But God, our loving shepherd, doesn't stop there, but continues to form us in the image of his Son.
In the young man who gives up career, prosperity, fame and a family…leaves it all behind…to follow the one who has no place to rest his head.
The young man who can barely keep his eyes open in that class, the first of six more years of going to classes….
The young man whose first pastoral assignment is in a prison, talking to really scary people while he plays back in his head every scene from the Shawshank Redemption.
The young man who must face for the first time what he needs to change about himself in order to look more like Christ, his innards quivering and his eyes filled all too frequently with tears.
The young man whose very marrow rebels against all those rules and that punishing horarium (he sometimes uses a more colorful adverb than punishing) which never seems to let him catch his breath.
The young man who is so often taunted by what he has left behind and the fearsome challenges of what's to come.
That man sits here…from the early morning darkness to the gloaming of the light, sits in silence, sings a psalm, and listens for the still silent voice of Christ, digesting his sacramental presence and then listens again, to the God who says it's not enough just not to hurt people. It's not enough just to say you're sorry. It's not enough until you give like he gave, bled like he bled, giving all…Living not for myself, but for the Lord, unto death, just like he did, upon a cross.
For this is the great message, the great secret God has been trying to teach each pone of us since we were little kids: None of us lives for oneself, and none of us dies for oneself; whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's.
The young man whose very marrow rebels against all those rules and that punishing horarium (he sometimes uses a more colorful adverb than punishing) which never seems to let him catch his breath.
The young man who is so often taunted by what he has left behind and the fearsome challenges of what's to come.
That man sits here…from the early morning darkness to the gloaming of the light, sits in silence, sings a psalm, and listens for the still silent voice of Christ, digesting his sacramental presence and then listens again, to the God who says it's not enough just not to hurt people. It's not enough just to say you're sorry. It's not enough until you give like he gave, bled like he bled, giving all…Living not for myself, but for the Lord, unto death, just like he did, upon a cross.
For this is the great message, the great secret God has been trying to teach each pone of us since we were little kids: None of us lives for oneself, and none of us dies for oneself; whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's.
