Would That All God's People Were Prophets

Solemnity of the Birth of John the Baptist

Cycle B

Jesus said to his disciples when questioned about John the Baptist, “I tell you, among those born of woman, no one is greater than John; yet the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.” John the Baptist is considered the greatest of all the prophets, the one who prepared the way for Jesus. Today we celebrate the solemnity of his birth. And therefore, I think it is a good time to talk about prophets, who they are and what they do.

When we think of prophets today, we usually talk not about the prophet himself or herself, but about their prophesy. Because it’s not supposed to be about the prophet but about what he says. We think a prophet foresees the future, that their prophesy is about predicting what will happen. But that’s not what a prophet is at all. Prophets tell universal truths in the name of God, because God is truth. Their prophesy seems to predict the future because God’s truth is true yesterday, today and tomorrow. What is true today will be true tomorrow. 

In the Old Testament, there were actually professional prophets. They were part of the royal court and their official job was to remind the king of God’s commandments and keep him on the right path. But most of the time the king did not want to hear the truth because he would have to radically change what he was doing, so being a prophet became a dangerous profession. All of the great prophets in the Old Testament ended up being killed. And eventually the court prophets became simply yes men to the king. They were afraid to speak the truth because they knew what would happen to them if they did.

But a prophet is one who is called to speak truth to power. A prophet is someone who stands up to injustice in the world, and speaks out about it. Most prophets do so reluctantly, and they suffer for it. The world and especially the political class do not want to hear and live by the truth. They want to run things to their own advantage, and they resist following the ways of God. It takes a lot of courage to be a prophet. It is tough being a prophet.

We also tend to think of prophets as only living in the past or as just those guys in the Bible. But we have had some great prophets during our lifetime, and prophets are not just Christians or Jews. Think of Martin Luther King or Mahatama Ghandi or Mother Teresa or Caesar Chavez. All of these came from modest backgrounds and felt compelled to speak the truth against oppression, violence and fear. All of them suffered greatly, and all of them changed the world. A prophet is proof that one person can change the world.

Now here is a scary thought – we are all called to be prophets. When you were baptized, you were anointed with sacred chrism and the priest or deacon said to you, “As Christ was anointed priest, prophet, and king, so may you live always as a member of his body, sharing everlasting life.” By virtue of your baptism you have been anointed a prophet. You will not be foretelling the future, you will be living the truth. It does not matter how old you are or how young. The prophet Jeremiah was only a teenager. God does not care if you are a good speaker. Moses stuttered. God does not care if you have power or influence. Amos was a shepherd. Chavez was a migrant worker. God calls each of us exactly where we are, and he makes us worthy through our baptism.

How are we called to be prophets today? There is no shortage of injustice in the world today. Every time you stand up for what is right and true you are a prophet. Every time you defend someone who is being discriminated against you are a prophet. Every time you vote your conscience you are a prophet. Every time you gently tell a friend he needs to change his life you are a prophet. Every time you stand up to a bully at school you are a prophet. Every time you do not laugh at a dirty joke you are a prophet. Every time you treat someone with compassion you are a prophet. Because the greatest prophet of all was Jesus, and Jesus treated people that way.

Last Thursday we entered into the Fortnight for Freedom, fourteen days from June 21^st to the Fourth of July during which our bishops have asked us to pray, study, and work to preserve religious freedom in this country and around the world. There is a systematic effort on the part of some to deny people of faith the right to live according to our religious principles in the public square. There are laws and mandates being passed that would force people to violate their consciences if they were to follow them. This is the time for prophets. These laws and mandates may seem to be no big deal, but all together they add up to one of the greatest threats we have ever seen in this country to our most basic freedom. 

Prophets are people who act on their convictions. They are people of courage. The Fortnight for Freedom began on the vigil of St. John Fisher and ends just before the feast of St. Thomas More. These were two men of conscience who were martyred during the reign of King Henry VIII of England. Many of you have heard about or seen the movie, For Greater Glory, which tells the story of the Cristeros war in Mexico during the 1920s. Those prophets actually went to war with their government when it tried to take away all religious freedom in Mexico. They were killed for standing up for religious freedom in their countries. They spoke truth to power and gave their lives for it. We are not called to give our lives, necessarily, but we are called to stand up for what is true and right. 

I urge you to go to the website of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops to read the entire position of your church on this issue. If you rely only on sensational headlines you are not living as a mature Christian. You must fully inform your conscience in this matter if you are to live your discipleship. And then you must act on it. Being a prophet is not an option for you and for me. We were called to it by our baptism, and it is our baptism that gives us the right and the authority to speak truth to the world. Remember, even the least in the kingdom of God is the greatest prophet of all.

The Constant Gardener

11^th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Father’s Day

Cycle B

Ez 17: 22-24

2 Cor 5: 6-10

Mk 4: 26-34

I’m not much of a gardener. In fact, I’m not a gardener at all. The house we bought five years ago in Oakley has wonderful landscaping. I bought it that way because if I had to put all that stuff in myself it would be a mess. I hardly know a flower from a weed. I don’t know what it all is, but I sure like looking at it.

One thing I can do, however, is tend the garden. Pulling weeds and planting flowers is Nancy’s job. I’ll whack off a branch here and there when she asks me to, but I don’t like to mess with the flowerbeds. I love taking care of the lawn. I even bought a book on how to care for it. I make sure it has plenty of water. I mow it twice a week, always to the proper height. I spray and pull the dandelions and clover. I give it regular fertilizer. I guess it’s because I’ve never had a nicely landscaped yard before, and I know how much time and money went into getting it to this point, so I want to keep it up. I like to walk around and admire it in the evening, a glass of wine in my hand.

Jesus used a lot of garden images in his parables. Vineyards and vines and fig trees and mustard bushes. Today he speaks of seeds. The seeds of faith. Every idea, every belief we have starts out as a single thought that we hadn’t had before. Sometimes it just pops into our heads seemingly out of nowhere, and oftentimes it’s put there by someone else. Sometimes someone says or does something that sparks that idea in us, sometimes it’s something we read, but these ideas come to us from somewhere outside of us. Even the ideas that just appear in our heads have their origin from other ideas that have been rattling around in our subconscious. Seeds are planted, and sometimes it takes a lot of time until they take root and sprout.

Faith is definitely like that. Where do we get faith? We believe that faith is a gift from God, and everyone has been given that gift to one degree or another. God has chosen to allow us to know him. We cannot know God on our own, God has to give us the ability to know him. He has to plant the seed in us to know him. Some of those seeds He has planted in us from the moment of our conception. There is an innate sense in everyone that there is a higher being, and as St. Augustine says, “Our hearts are restless, Lord, until we rest in you.” God wills that we know him. It takes an effort of our will to deny that sense.

But many times God chooses to use others to plant the seeds of faith in us. We are all both garden and gardener. We have those seeds of faith planted in us and we also plant those same seeds in others. It’s like my lawn. It creates its own seeds to start new shoots. The roots are always stretching out, seeking to make the lawn stronger and healthier and larger. Like faith, it builds upon itself to go out beyond itself.

Sometimes our planting is deliberate. We plant single seeds in others, especially in our children. Every month I prepare young couples who want to have their children baptized. And every month I ask them why they are there and why they want to baptize their children Catholic. Some of them come from strong Catholic families, some are not Catholic at all. Most of them, however, have a basic, rudimentary faith. Most of them don’t practice that faith much. But something has drawn them here at this time, for their children. 

Invariably someone says that early on in their lives their parents or grandparents got them started in the faith. They were baptized and then received their first communion and maybe confirmation and then they slowly stopped coming for whatever reason. But the seeds had been planted in their hearts and now they felt the need to come back and plant those seeds in their own children. And no matter what their children decide to do with their lives, maybe someday they will also choose to stay in or return to their faith. But if those seeds were never planted they will never make that choice. Some seeds need to die and lay dormant for awhile so that they can eventually take root. As long as the seed has been planted there is always hope.

Today is Father’s Day, and I think the most awesome responsibility a father has is to plant the seeds of faith in his children. Our children are not our own, they are given to us in stewardship to nurture and grow in body, mind and spirit. We wouldn’t dream of not feeding our children or educating them. Are we just as aware of our responsibility to feed their souls? When we stand before Jesus, will he ask us how athletic our children are or how successful? Or will he ask us what we have done to ensure they follow us to heaven?

The seeds we plant in our children are many varied. It begins with prayer, always with prayer. We pray for our children and then teach them to pray. We start small; prayers before meals and at bedtime. Then we take them to Mass and get them in religious education classes. We teach them that we grow our faith in community. We teach them that faith and reason go hand in hand. They watch us closely to see if we practice what we preach. Are we praying ourselves, do we go to Mass every week, do we pick up the Bible and read it sometimes? Do we do all the stuff we make them do? Nothing is more noxious to the garden than hypocrisy.

Or do we do nothing? Even doing nothing is doing something. Sometimes we plant weeds among the flowers, and those weeds can choke off the good seeds. If you do not actively plant faith seeds, you will be planting a weed of unbelief. 

Most of the time we do not dig a hole, place the seed in, cover it, water it and nurture it. We also plant seeds not one at a time but by scattering them. Most of the time we have no idea where the seed has landed, and we are not around to take care of it. We are there to sow it but not to reap. We have no idea who is affected by the seeds we sow, both the flowers and the weeds. As Jesus says today, “and through it all the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how.”

People are watching you all the time. They can tell if you are a person of faith. They want what you have. Do you give it to them through the way you live your life? Do people know you are Catholic by the way you live your life? Do you scatter the seeds of your faith by what you say and do in the workplace? By the positions you take, or don’t take, in the public square, by what you post on Facebook or Twitter? Fathers, do your children know they are Christians by the way you treat their mother? You will never know how the seeds you have planted, for good or for evil, have affected people you may never have even met.

We must never grow weary of tending the garden. We must always be planting little seeds in those around us. The seeds we plant in our children do not stop when they grow up. Our adult children not only need to have the seeds we’ve planted in the past cultivated, they constantly need new seeds planted. A small kindness here, a warm hug there, a prayer or meal over there. Always with the foreknowledge that everything we do is a reflection of our discipleship. It takes the patience of a lifetime. Some of the seeds we sow will produce fruit, and we have no idea just how momentous that fruit will be. The seeds we plant throughout our lives might not create the next Michael Phelps or Bill Gates, but they might help them get to heaven.

You know, a mature plant creates its own seeds. Only a healthy, mature plant produces seeds. You must not only cultivate the seeds you plant, you must also cultivate yourself. What do you do to grow your own faith? How do you pray, who do you associate with, what do you read? Are you growing flowers or weeds in your heart? Flowers create flowers, weeds create weeds.

We are all called by Jesus to be gardeners. And always, always, we must recognize and give glory to the one who owns the garden. We can do nothing outside of Him. Only by imitating the master gardener himself will we produce fruit ten, or a hundred, or a thousand fold.

Dedication

Pentecost

Cycle B

Deacon Aniceto Armendariz was a devoted husband and father, a strong leader in this community, and one of the holiest people I have ever known. He died a martyr to his faith. Most important to me, Cheto was my friend. This morning we celebrate Mass for his intention and will dedicate the fellowship room at St. Lawrence in Heber to his memory. It is truly fitting that we do so.

Nancy and I had met Aniceto and Alma when they first came to Park City, but we were not really friendly yet. We saw each other at meetings and parish activities, but at that time they did not speak much English and our Spanish was poor, so we rarely talked to each other. But even then we knew Aniceto and Alma were special, because we saw how dedicated they were to their people and to their church. There was a spark of fire in their eyes, the fire of the Holy Spirit.

It wasn’t until Aniceto and I were accepted into the diaconate formation program thirteen years ago that we really got to know each other. We would drive down to Salt Lake City to the classes together every week. At that time Aniceto could only speak a little English, and we would sit next to each other in class so I could help him understand or translate something that was said. We worked out a great language learning system. In the car on the way down he would speak to me in English and I would speak to him in Spanish and we would correct each other. By the end of the four years of classes, he was fluent in English and I was, well, still poor at Spanish.

We would talk about our lives and our families. We would discuss what we were learning in the classes. We would talk about what the future would bring after we were ordained. Somehow we were able to communicate with each other. The differences in our languages were not important, however, because we both knew the message we were hearing. That message was the word of God, the good news of Jesus, and even though we couldn’t understand all the words, we understood the message. That message was life changing for us. It transformed us from followers to true disciples. It formed us into servants. It formed us into friends. It formed us into brothers.

We heard today the great story of the first Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came so strongly upon the apostles that they were able to go out and preach the good news of Jesus Christ to people of all nations, and those people were able to understand the message. St. Luke says that the people in the crowd heard the apostles preach each in their own language, even though they were from all over the world. The miracle of Pentecost was not so much that the apostles spoke in foreign tongues, but that the people understood the universal message they were speaking. The gospel of Jesus was already within them. The apostles’ words just allowed them to recognize it.

The message of Jesus is universal. It knows no language, because it is the language of the heart. It does not need to be translated into any language, because we all already know the words. Those words were placed in us by God when we were formed in the womb and all it takes is the voice of God to set them free in our hearts. The gospel knows no limits. It cannot be put in a box or be the sole possession of this country or that. The gospel does not belong to any political party or race. It is not male or female, rich or poor, educated or ignorant. 

The gospel of Jesus is universal. It is catholic. The word catholic means universal. And just as the message of Jesus Christ is catholic – universal - the church he left behind is also catholic - universal.  The Catholic church is not contained in any single nation or race or political party. We are all called to the same mission by the same message. The message of Pentecost.  The mission of Pentecost. 

In today’s gospel we heard again the story of the first time Jesus appeared to his disciples in the upper room on Easter Sunday. It is not by accident that his first words to them were “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”  They were not to remain in that upper room, in safety, just praying and living together. Where would the Church be if they hadn’t left that room? How would the gospel be released in the hearts of millions and millions of people if the apostles had stayed in the comfort of that room? Jesus commanded them to go out and preach the good news to all people, to make disciples of all nations.

That has been the mission of the Church from the very beginning. We take the good news to everyone, no matter their race, creed, nationality or legal status. We feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, heal the sick, bring comfort to prisoners. Jesus said that that is how we will be judged, by how we treat the least of our brothers and sisters. 

You cannot take that mission away from the Church if it is to remain the Church. We are not called to simply worship in our church buildings and keep our faith amongst ourselves. We are called to carry that faith into the world. We cannot separate our faith from our daily lives and just be Sunday Catholics. Just as the apostles could not remain in the upper room, we must carry the good news to the world.

That is why the attacks on religious freedom that confront us today in this country are so important. We are all familiar with the HHS mandate. The issue is not contraception, as the media has tried to frame it. The Church is not asking that access to artificial contraception be denied or limited. The issue is much more important than that. The core question is who is going to determine what a church is and what they will be allowed to do. 

The core issue there is the narrowness of the exemption provided. Only those churches that employ and provide services for their own members are exempt from the mandate. Basically, it is saying that there is freedom of worship, but not freedom of religion. We can do what we like in the privacy of our own churches but if we do anything outside in the greater community the government can force us to do things that violate our mission and our consciences. 

Another attack on that mission is the Alabama immigration law, which is written so broadly that it can be interpreted to prohibit the Church from administering the sacraments and social services to anyone suspected of being in this country illegally. The Catholic Church does not and cannot limit our mission to Catholics only. We do not ask you for your Church ID when you check into a hospital or soup kitchen or food bank or adoption agency. We do not and cannot ask for your passport when you come to us to receive the sacraments. That’s not our job and it’s not our mission. This is not about politics. And it’s not just a Catholic Church issue. Jesus said to make disciples of all nations. He sent the apostles out of that upper room into the entire world. What would the world be like if the Church was not allowed to fulfill its mission?

There are many other attacks on the Church’s mission today. I urge you to go to the website of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops to read the entire position of your church on this issue. If you rely only on sensational headlines you are not living as a mature Christian. You must fully inform your conscience in this matter if you are to live your discipleship.

Tomorrow we will celebrate Memorial Day, when we remember and honor those men and women who have given the last full measure of devotion for our country and its guaranteed freedoms. Those freedoms are not granted us by government but by God. It says so in the Declaration of Independence. Those freedoms are protected by the Constitution, and our military and political leaders have taken an oath to defend that constitution. Religious freedom is in the First Amendment for a reason, because it has always been considered the most important freedom from which all other liberty derives.

But liberty is not just for Americans, just as the good news is not just for Catholics. Because when you get down to it, it is the same message. The good news of Jesus is all about freedom; freedom from sin, freedom from oppression, freedom to be fully human. To be all we were meant to be. On Easter Sunday Jesus gave the apostles his peace, told them to forgive sins, and sent them out into the world to spread that peace and forgiveness. That is the good news. That is our mission.

Many have died in defense of this country and the liberty it provides. Deacon Aniceto died in the service of his people and his church. It is truly fitting that we dedicate our fellowship room at St. Lawrence to his memory today. In doing so we honor him and dedicate ourselves to carry on his mission to the world. The entire world.