My First Homily

Saint Paul Miki and Companions, pray for us

This morning, I led our men’s group that meets every first Friday at Saint Joseph’s in Lancaster. For the subject, I sent the men this excellent piece from Paul Fahey:

What Martin Luther King Jr. has to say to Bishop Robert Barron

Normally I don’t come in with much to say on my own, but instead invite discussion on the subject. As a boy, after falling in love with Jesus in that church and hearing the call to the priesthood, I used to dream of one day getting to preach there. This came to me again in my sleep last night, and the gentle voice of God awoke me: “So do it.” I awoke at 4:30, moved by the Spirit to write a homily.

I rose, fed the cats, prayed the morning office, prepared for the day, and sat down at 5:30 to start writing. I did not stop, I did not edit, I did not plan. And in that poverty, God showed me once again how His power is made perfect in weakness, and that you really don’t need to worry about what you’re going to say. The Spirit will give you the words.

Laity and gentium, I give you my first homily, brought to you by the Paraclete.

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Today we celebrate the Feast of Paul Miki and Companions, martyred on the 5^th of February, 1597, on the Feast of Saint Agatha. The Good News had been brought to Japan by Saint Francis Xavier in 1549, but the mission rapidly deteriorated when more foreign influences came to Japan, and as these things go, it would be the most innocent who would suffer for the sins of those who would come to conquer.

Two gorgeous pieces of media, both adapted from books, that I love in their exploration of this time in the history of salvation are Shogun, a mini-series from a couple years ago, and Silence, adapted into a film by Scorsese. Silence, written by Japanese Catholic Shusaku Endo, depicts the struggles of the missionary priests. It’s a good examination of the 17^th century persecutions, wrestling with questions of what is faith, and what is apostasy, refusing to give any easy answers.

But there’s another layer to this. The book expresses something more about its characters, and Endo himself spoke with something almost like cynicism about priests. Father Rodrigues’ choice toward the end of the story is framed for the audience as if it all rested on him, for his own pride has led him to believing he is essential for the salvation of the people of Japan. This is his true apostasy, beginning in the heart.

The final priest was killed in 1644, and the persecutions meant to rid Japan of Christianity appeared to have succeeded. The Japanese authorities understood that the people were sustained by the sacraments, by the Eucharist. Remove the priests, remove the sacramental life, cut off the Christian at the root. Because after all, the priests are the root of Christian faith, right? The fascinating thing about Christianity in Japan, however, isn’t that it was snuffed out after the Japanese succeeded in killing all the priests. It was that Christ remained.

The Kakure Kirishitan, the hidden Christians, continued to hand on the faith. Young boys who witnessed these martyrdoms became old men who told their grandchildren of Father Francis Xavier, who brought the Good News, of Brother Paul Miki and the rest who bore witness in their brutal deaths. They told them about the last priest, of men who could turn bread and wine into the Body & Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Those grandchildren then grew into old men and women themselves, who told these stories to their grandchildren. For over 200 years, no priest set foot in Japan. No sacraments administered. No Eucharist received. And when Japan opened up to the world again in the 1860’s, the Church was astonished to find Christ had not left.

What faith! We all are blessed who believe though we cannot see; but how many of us could endure in a faith in secret, one that was outlawed and had gotten your ancestors killed, with not even seeing one Mass in your entire lifetime, and knowing no one, old or young, dead or yet to be born, who had seen any of these miracles and signs of God’s love?

I became an altar server here when I was 9. They opened it up to 10 year olds, but I was very devout, and I pleaded to get to serve, memorizing all the things, and telling boys twice my size: “No, that’s a ciborium; that’s a chalice.” Monsignor Smith was impressed, but he cautioned me against pride, telling me: “Never forget, God doesn’t need you. It is always a privilege to serve.” It stuck with me, that God will carry out His Will with or without my cooperation. He does not require us, and He will never coerce us; He invites us, and asks us to exercise our freedom to respond in love.

This is true from the beginning at the Garden of Eden. God respects the freedom of his creatures so much that he allowed them to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, to allow them to choose for themselves what they deem good and evil, and thereby condemn themselves. But in his mercy, he would not leave us. He left us to face the consequences of this choice, for God, who is Love, cannot change who He is, and therefore cannot change the consequences of a world animated by Love that is violated by sin. Our afflictions are not visited upon us directly by God; He simply allows us to get exactly what we asked for.

But in this is the paradox of the Cross. Jesus comes to say some pretty wild things like it’s Opposite Day. Whoever loses his life will save it? If someone strikes you, invite them to do it again? How can this be? In our original sin, we offended the infinite Goodness. There is no justice we can ever make for it. Even if we give up all the good things we have and walk naked through the desert, we have still our own body and the earth to walk upon. And even if you could shun those things, those too were never really yours. How can we sacrifice what isn’t even ours? What sacrifice could we ever offer that wasn’t His gift to us first?

We can offer our suffering. In this world, the innocent suffer for the sins of others. It isn’t fair, but it allows all of us to take up our cross, to offer that up, the suffering that is uniquely ours. In this we come closer to Christ, uniting ourselves to His merciful passion, and we find expiation for our sins, as pure of a love that we can offer up.

The Japanese did not have priests, but Jesus did not leave them. They did not have the sacraments, but Jesus did not leave them. It was precisely in their suffering that He remained, and did not abandon them.

What does this have to do with the video that I shared? “To whom much is given, much is required.” God is most present in the poor, in the suffering. This isn’t just in union with Jesus’ passion, this is in union with the Father’s heart too, evident throughout the Old Testament. He will not be harsh to those who were betrayed by the men they called “Father”, but woe is the man who betrays those in his care.

This is the scandal of Bishop Barron, who, like so many in the world, empathizes first with those in power. The cult of Mammon has infiltrated the Church so deeply that we do not even see how much we tie our metrics of evangelization to algorithms, how much we tie our mission to retaining what we already have. This is why I told the bishop I want no settlement. I want radical Love.

Saint Óscar Romero, who began as quite a conservative priest, changed radically, alight with the fire of the Gospel. As Archbishop of San Salvador, he resisted the persecutions of his age and led his people with courage for 3 years, before being shot while saying Mass on March 24, 1980.

“That is what the church wants: to disturb people’s consciences and to provoke a crisis in their lives. A church that does not provoke crisis, a gospel that does not disturb, a word of God that does not rankle, a word of God that does not touch the concrete sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed—what kind of gospel is that?

Just nice, pious considerations that bother nobody—that’s the way many people would like our preaching to be. Those preachers who avoid every thorny subject so as not to bother anyone or cause conflict and difficulty shed no light on the reality in which they live.”

Saint John Paul II was not a fan, and had already started to work for Romero’s removal from the archdiocese until he heard news of the murder. We like our saints sanitized, but a prophet is not without honor except in his native land, and that includes our place in time. We owe our witness to those who have been put in our care, but we are also responsible for the witness we give those who will come into this world after we are gone.

I want to close with a prayer. I shared this once before in this group years ago, before I came out in this very room. This prayer was first presented by Cardinal Dearden in 1979, and was quoted by Pope Francis in 2015.

It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.

The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent
enterprise that is God’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of
saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the Church’s mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.

It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an
opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master
builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own.