Deacon Rick Lapierre
The story is told of a visiting missionary bishop who was asked by his host to preside at the Sacrament of Confirmation for a group of severely challenged children. They were all institutionalized with a variety of handicaps and were not able to do perform even the simplest academics. The priest in charge of the home warned the bishop not to talk for more than two or three minutes and to avoid using big words, as the children would not be able to understand. The bishop was quite nervous about what he would say and after prayer and reflection gave this homily: "Dear children, your parents and family love you and that's why they stroke your head and your hair and your face. And that's what happens when you are confirmed, God strokes your head and hair and face because He loves you so very much. So, when I make the sign of the cross on your head, it's really our Father in heaven who is stroking you."
As he walked among the children and anointed them with the sacred chrism, one young child with cerebral palsy mouthed back to him with great difficulty the word "stroke," and the bishop knew that the child had understood the meaning of the Sacrament of Confirmation. The bishop later remarked that historically this is what God has always done. He stroked the people of Israel in spite of their stubbornness, the father of the prodigal son stroked his wayward child, Jesus stroked the children who came to him and laid healing hands on those who were ill and afflicted. In brief, the bishop summed up the message of Christianity in the action of the sacraments: God is love and we need and depend on that love to be made whole.
The theme for this homily came to me as I prayed last Tuesday morning and has haunted me all week. As I journeyed through the week I found myself being challenged by this thought, "Do I see what God sees?" I found myself going back to the very beginning of the Bible, to the first story of Creation, where it says "God looked at everything He had made and He found it very good." The Bible does not give us an exception here. It does not say except for mosquitoes, or the neighbor whose dog barks all night, or the local gossip who spreads tales about me, or the one person I meet who causes me more work than all of the other people I meet during the week.
The fact of the matter, and the Scripture backs it up, is this: all Creation is made by God and He loves it all and He has found that it is all good. So, even though I may not like Brussels sprouts, God does. Where I see "yuck" God sees a beautiful vegetable He has given to us for our nourishment.
Further, all humanity is created by Him, and loved to the point where He sent His only Son to redeem all of us. Not just Catholics, or Americans or those who think like us, but everyone who resides on this planet. Even those we vilify are loved by God and are redeemed by the love of Jesus. Do we see why our God is the God of Peace and not the god of war? The killing and subjugation of anyone is not a cause for rejoicing, but for weeping. What does God see in this brutal act of killing each other? He sees the failure of humanity to love! He sees the failure of humanity to put on the eyes of its Creator and recognize that everything He has made is very, very good.
The reading from Deuteronomy in this morning's readings talks about the Law. It's interesting that this reading comes up this week, following the goings on in Alabama, where the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court was suspended for failing to remove a stone tablet of the Ten Commandments from in front of the courthouse after being ordered by the Federal Court to do so. I found it kind of interesting that in all of the yelling and screaming from both sides of this issue that no one is really looking at what these commandments say. The first three are really a challenge to love the God who has created us and the last seven are the challenge to love each other as much as God loves us.
It should not be about a stone monument, but about whether or not the words on that monument mean anything to us.
The refrain of the responsorial psalm says "the one who does justice will live in the presence of the Lord." Not the one who reads the commandments, or who puts them on a plaque in front of his house. Whether the commandments sit in front of the Mobile Alabama Court House or not is not really an issue. The issue is: Do I do what they say, or are they just some slogan we use for advertising.
What does Jesus say about all this anyway? It's all in the gospel reading this morning. He quotes from Isaiah, "this people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts." And then He points out, to the discomfort and anger of His listeners, "from within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly; all these evils come from within and they defile." Or in other words, Jesus asks us, "Do you see what God sees?"
The Lord Jesus, whom we have chosen to follow, points out to us exactly what His Father sees and what we do to ourselves to cloud that vision.
My brothers and sisters, every day, every action we take, is an opportunity to choose to see as God sees. The bishop in our opening story could have raced through that Confirmation and been back at the rectory in time for the baseball game, or, as he did, he could see what God sees when he looks down on His people, especially those who suffer the tragedies of life.
What does God see? In 1941, the great Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko went with his mother to Moscow. It was the first time he had an opportunity to see German soldiers close up as the defeated German army of 20,000 soldiers was marched through the streets. The crowd included mostly women and children. Almost every one of them had lost a husband or father or brother in the war. They clenched fists and screamed curses against these enemies who had caused them such suffering. As the German soldiers shuffled along, wounded, defeated, hungry, with dirty bandages and sticks as crutches, the crowd gradually became silent.
Then an amazing thing happened. An elderly woman pushed through the police line and took a piece of black bread from her jacket and pressed it into a German soldier's hands. Suddenly other women followed her example and began to share with the Germans anything they had: food, cigarettes, clothing. When the women saw the men hobbling through the streets, they no longer saw the enemy; they saw victims of war like themselves and responded with empathy and compassion.
The women of Moscow who had suffered so much saw their fellow travelers as God saw them, brothers and sons who were wounded and in need. "Whatever you do for one of these least brothers of mine, you do for me." Jesus would have approved.
