Thursday, January 12, 2012

1/22/2012 – Homily - Third Sunday in ordinary time – Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Mark 1:14-20 - Cycle B - prayer, penance, and mourning on the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade


         Sometimes the callings we get in life can be pretty surprising.  As most of you know, I did not become Catholic until I was an adult at the age of 29.  I entered the Church through the RCIA program during the Easter Vigil mass, just like most adults who come to the Catholic faith from Protestant backgrounds.  Immediately, I felt the calling to be a lay missionary, but finding a program that was the right match for me brought about a lot of different choices.  After looking around at many different programs, the place that intrigued me the most a soup kitchen and food bank up in Winnipeg, Canada.  A lot of my family and friends thought that I was crazy going up to Canada to work with street people, leaving my career as a CPA, but I knew in my heart that this was where God wanted me to go.   Perhaps when I was riding my bike to the soup kitchen in the middle of the Canadian winters when it was 30 or 40 degrees below zero, I wondered about my sanity as well.  But, if it wasn’t for that decision to become a missionary in Canada and my response to that calling, I probably wouldn’t be up here as a priest today.
         Not all of our responses to God’s call are so dramatic.  Many of us gathered here today for mass grew up in the Catholic Church.  Many of you in fact may have been baptized as infants right here in this very church building, when your parents and god parents made the promise on your behalf to bring you up in the faith and to teach you about God.  However, at one time or another, when we are teenagers or adults, all of us have to make the conscious decision about following in the footsteps of our faith or not.  It is often so easy to go down another road in life, to shut ourselves off from God, to choose another path that follows the callings that we hear from our secular world that are so different from the ways of our faith.  We have the freedom to follow our faith or not, and whether we consciously make that decision or not, we all make that choice some way or another.
         In our Gospel today, we hear about two brothers, Simon and Andrew, who are making their livelihood fishing, who are actually in the midst of casting their nets in the sea when they receive their calling from Jesus.  We don’t know if Simon and Andrew had previously known Jesus or had heard him preaching before this moment.  Some Scripture scholars speculate that these two brothers may have been friends of John the Baptist or members of his group of disciples.   But, the point is, Simon and Andrew were able to leave everything behind to follow Jesus.  What a radical change this was for them in their lives.  They realized who Jesus truly was, and this made all the difference in the world. 
         In our first reading this morning, we hear about another call, the call of Jonah to go to the city of Nineveh, telling them to repent and to change their ways.  The people of Nineveh believed in God’s message that Jonah brought to them, responding in a sign of repentance, symbolized by the sackcloth and ashes that they put on.  God saw how sorry the people were, and he did not carry out his promise to destroy their city.
         Today, we also are called to repentance in a special way.  Today, January 22, is the 39th anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in our country.  Today has been declared a day of prayer, penance, and mourning, as we mourn the existence of this law that so contradicts the Gospel of life that is an essential and foundational belief of our Catholic faith. Our faith teaches us about the value of every human person, recognizing that we are all made in God’s image and that we are all redeemed by our Savior, Jesus Christ.  We are all precious & unique as human beings.  Our value is rooted in who we are as human beings, not by what we do.  All of our Church’s social teaching begins with and builds upon the foundation of human dignity.
         As part of this holistic view of human dignity, our Church teaches the value of human life as a seamless garment from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death.  Our human dignity is threatened not only by legalized abortion and euthanasia, but also by such policies that allow cloning, embryonic stem cell research, genocide, torture, racism, the targeting of non-combatants in acts of war & terrorism, & the death penalty.   As Catholics, we cannot pick & choose what we believe in regard to the dignity of human life.  The Catholic Church teaches that which was echoed in the message of the prophets of the ancient Israel: that the measure of our society, the measure of any society, is whether it threatens or enhances the life & dignity of the human person, particularly the poor & the most vulnerable in society, including unborn human life. 
         We mourn today, we give penance today, but we also have hope in Jesus, we have hope in the future.  We heed his call to discipleship, the same call that Andrew and Simon received.  We should not fear the world, we should not fear professing to the world what we truly believe in the Gospel of Life. The Holy Spirit is with us to empower us, to give us the courage to stand up for what we believe, even if it seems so at odds with what is popular & acceptable in our secular society. Yes, we mourn today, but we also have hope in the Gospel of Life that our faith in Jesus proclaims.  

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