The Third Tower
Introduction
The homily that never was
The homily I started preparing last Monday for
today, Trinity Sunday, began this way:
The church’s liturgical cycle can be compressed into one sentence: The
Father sends the Son into the world (Advent-Christmas Season), and the Son
returns to the right hand of the Father (Lent-Easter Season), from where He now
sends the Holy Spirit (Pentecost). The
completed liturgical cycle gives us
“Trinity”: God is three (Father,
Son and Holy Spirit), and God is one.
So the Feast of the Trinity (today) is well positioned
here at the end of the cycle.
The liturgical cycle of
the church is very much like the liturgical cycle of the nation. Memorial Day starts off the cycle with its
summons to summer. The cycle explodes
and peaks into the Fourth of July. And
then it begins to wane with the falling leaves of Labor Day, and is finally put
to sleep after the nation has Given-Thanks for the apple and the pumpkin. That’s how the original homily began.
But then on Thursday, May 23, when I had the homily pretty well finished off with a perfectly clear explanation of the Holy Trinity that would solve forever absolutely every puzzlement that you might ever have again about the Blessed Trinity, bang! The homily was hijacked by an event which brought down a “Third Tower,” namely the Archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert Weakland.
May 23/Sept. 11
On the Sunday immediately
following that infamous day of 9/11 which brought down the Twin Towers in Lower
Manhattan, I remember saying that this is the moment not for preaching but for
praying. That’s what we did that day:
we prayed instead of preached. Today, with the crash of “Tower Three,” I feel
the same way. Today I don’t feel so much like preaching. I feel more like praying. Let’s do both
today. Let’s now have moments of verbal reflection followed by a brief verbal
prayer. We can all sit for this. I will end each prayer with: In peace, let us pray to the Lord.
And your response will be: Lord, have mercy.
First Reflection:
A wounded shepherd
In the gospel of St. Matthew, Jesus, the good shepherd, says to his disciples, “You will all fall away because of me this night; for it is written `I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be dispersed’” (Mt 26: 31). Rembert, the shepherd, has been stricken. In the gospel of St. Luke, Jesus tells the parable of a good shepherd who has a hundred sheep and one of them strays and gets lost. The shepherd goes in search of the one that’s lost and when found, he rejoices, he hoists the found sheep upon his shoulders and carries it home. Then he invites friends and neighbors to celebrate with him. Jesus ends that parable with these words, “I tell you there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine self-righteous and respectable people who have no need of repentance” (Lk 15: 4-7).
When a sheep gets lost and the shepherd finds it, he hoists it upon his shoulders and carries it back home. We now ask, when the shepherd gets lost, who shall hoist him on their shoulders and carry him home? How do we now respond? Do we let the media lead us by the nose and determine how we shall respond? Do let the whole legal system with its lawyers and plaintiffs determine how we shall respond? Do we let political correctness at this moment determine how we shall respond? Or do we respond with gospel correctness. Do we respond as a Christian community responds? Do we hoist the wounded shepherd on our backs and carry him home? Or do we throw him away?
Every day we get fed the press -- the New York Times or the Boston
Globe. But the press community is not a
religious community. Every day we get fed now the legal system. But the legal
system is not a religious community. At
the end of the day, and after all is said and done, for the most part they are financial
communities. It’s simply Capitalism
turning every thing it touches into gold.
That’s not a bid for Communism. That’s not even a criticism; it’s simply
the name of the game. Is there no one
these days to remind us that we are a religious community? Is there no
one these days to call us to respond as a religious community?
Prayer:
Father in Heaven, Shepherd of our souls, this is a moment
of truth for us, your flock. Give us the courage to rise up now to our identity
as a community of faith, love and forgiveness.
Give us strong shoulders at this moment to carry the weight of political
incorrectness, of being out of step.
Give us compassionate shoulders at this moment to bear the weight of a
wounded shepherd, for we are all well aware of our own wounded-ness. In peace, let us pray to the Lord. -- Lord
have mercy.
Second
Reflection:
Swift Justice
The news of the fall of the “Third Tower” broke on
the 23rd of May. With incredible speed, the very next day, Rome
(that is to say, the Pope) accepted the resignation of Rembert Weakland, simply
saying it was automatically the year for him to retire anyway. Rome is
notoriously infamous for moving slowly. It moves not by days, not even by years
but by centuries. (You slow up after 2000 years.) But because this was a matter of sex (!) and therefore a
matter of scandal (!) Rome, also media-driven and “enlightened” by
political correctness, gave the matter swift justice. And in the meanwhile, so much delayed
justice keeps hanging around in the church -- like the justice that
women in the church have been seeking for centuries. So much delayed justice
-- like the justice owed to the Catholic faithful who have very few
priests left to serve them -- the
justice of delivering to them even a married priesthood. Rembert was
famous and infamous for championing those two very delayed justices.
Prayer
Father in heaven, liberate us, your people, driven and
determined by the media and the political correctness of the day. Free us from
that sense of sin which makes sex the summit of all sin. There are, indeed, juicier sins than sex!
Father in heaven, kill in us our cultural sense of scandal which
attaches only to sex, and which raises everybody’s eyebrows at us, and
terrifies us all into covering up instead of confessing and coming clean. Confront us with our real scandal -- like the delayed justice that hangs
around in our churches and in our personal lives. In peace let us pray to the Lord. -- Lord have mercy.
Third
Reflection:
Letting good live on
I know very few lines from Shakespeare, and this is
one of them: “The good that men do is
interred with their bones. The evil they do lives after them.” Some hate the Archbishop; the word
isn’t too strong at all. Many love the
Archbishop for all the good he has done for the Church of Milwaukee. That good
now stands the danger of being interred with his bones, if we let that
happen. His scandal, and only that
alone, now stands the danger of living on after him, if we let that happen. But
at the end of the day, God’s word which promises “their works will follow them”
will not be thwarted (Rev 14:13).
Prayer:
Father in heaven, free us from the need to tear
down others so as to build ourselves up. Let the light of other people’s
goodness not threaten us. You created that goodness in them so that we might
see it and give you praise (Mt 5:16).
In peace, let us pray to the Lord.
--- Lord have mercy.
Fourth Reflection:
Crisis as opportunity
The word crisis comes from the Greek krisis meaning
“a turning point.” And its verb form krinein means, “to decide.”
So a crisis is a turning point that calls for a decision. The Chinese language
uses two characters to denote crisis. One means ”danger” and the other means
“opportunity.” So a crisis is a danger
which can be turned into an opportunity.
But when we are so busy with the scandal dimension of our crisis (which
is negative and goes nowhere) then we neglect its opportunity dimension (which
is positive and can go everywhere).
Listen to how remarkably positive is Betsy Conway,
a sister of St. Joseph, as she stands knee-deep in our crisis. She writes, “I
am as hopeful as I have ever been for the church. Something powerful is
happening. This is a new moment. It’s tragic what has brought us here, but we
are here and no one wants to go back. There is a lot of hope; there is a
feeling that we are on the brink of something, and we are just holding our
breaths.”
Prayer:
Father in heaven, free us from the prurient sense
of scandal in our present crisis. It
keeps our itching noses in other people’s bedrooms and it distracts our minds
from the opportunity that now beckons us. Fill us with a sense of premonition
and expectation that something powerful is happening; that we are standing on
the brink of something. Fill us with
the same sense of premonition and expectation which we experience standing at
early dawn these days on the shores of Lake Michigan, watching the sun rising
out of yesterday’s death, and announcing the birth of a new day. In peace,
let us pray to the Lord. --- Lord have
mercy.
Fifth
Reflection:
Hypocrisy
In the great crisis before us, hypocrisy has understandably become an underlying issue. The complaint is: “They tell us one thing, and there they are doing just the opposite.” Jesus had the same complaint in his day. We read in Matthew, “Then Jesus addressed the crowds and his disciples saying, “The Scribes and the Pharisees occupy the chair (the “cathedra” in Latin) of Moses. So do what they tell you but don’t do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach” (Mt 23: 1-2). Then for the rest of the chapter, Jesus launches off into a long tirade filled with a litany of “woes,” which runs from the 13th verse to the 36th verse.
He doesn’t cry out, “Woe to you adulteresses, prostitutes, robbers and thieves.” But he does cry out, “Woe to you hypocrites!” “Woe to you Scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You lock the doors of the kingdom of God in people’s faces, and you won’t let them in. Woe to you Scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You take advantage of widows and rob them of their homes. Woe to you Scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You scrupulously pay tithes on mint, cumin and dill, but all the while you neglect the weightier matters of the law, like justice, compassion, and honesty” (Mt 23:23-36).
In the midst of our present crisis, yes, indeed, Jesus cries out, “Woe to you hypocrites!” But this is the “woe” he flings at us: “Woe to you hypocrites! In your videos and audios you sell sex all day long in the market place. You make sex your chief entertainment and your favorite joke. From morning till night you wiggle sex all over our channels. And all the while you don’t bat an eyelash. But then let someone indulge in sex, not even flippantly but simply out of human frailty and indiscretion, and you lift your eyebrows to high heaven, and you pursue that person relentlessly, despite even your own flippant sexual escapades. You hypocrites!”
Again, he cries “hypocrites” at us. “You hypocrites! You traverse land and sea in pursuit of terrorists, and you condemn abusers with ever fiber of your being. And yet you make no `beans or bones’ about printing a letter so absolutely personal, so absolutely sacred in content, so absolutely private, so absolutely “none of my business” in its particularity, as that letter of the Archbishop which you hijacked. You got your hands on it by spying and prying, by using and abusing, by hook and by crook, and mostly by crook. You hypocrites! That's terrorism at its best. You hypocrites! That’s abuse at its best.” Hypocrites calling hypocrites hypocrites![1]
Prayer:
Father in heaven, your son Jesus has challenged the one
among us without sin to cast the first stone (Jn 8: 1-11). And he has shamed us
with the thought that the prostitutes and tax collector are preceding us, the
self-righteous and the respectable, into the kingdom of heaven. They precede us into the kingdom, because we
are scrupulous about paying tithes on mint, cumin and dill, but all the while
we neglect the weightier matters of the Law, like justice, compassion and
honesty (Mt 21:31 and Mt 23:23). Come, Father, deliver us from all our cultural
and personal hypocrisy. In peace, let us pray to the Lord. -- Lord have mercy.
Sixth
Reflection:
Shaken faith
In Chinese wisdom a crisis is a danger. In the
present crisis, the danger is this: our shaken faith. In Chinese wisdom a crisis is also an opportunity, and the
opportunity is this: shaken faith can become stronger faith. For shaken faith reveals to us where our
faith stands and upon what it stands.
Ann Steinbach of Saints Peter and Paul, at the request of Fr. Tom
Brundage to all his parishioners, writes the following concerning the present
crisis: ”As we uncover, discover, and
recover from these events, what feels like a shakeup or shakedown need not
shake our faith. Our faith is our
personal relationship to God. That relationship lives on regardless of the
foibles of human beings.”
Conclusion
Prayer:
Father in heaven, the storm clouds are gathering all around us,
and a roaring wind is blowing through the sanctuary. And there stands our
faith. Lord,
“make us candles burning in
the wind
never
fading with the sunset
when
the rain sets in."
In
peace, let us pray to the Lord. -- Lord
have mercy.