22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time 2005

[Fr.Paul Weinberger]

Homily by:
Fr. Paul Weinberger
St. William’s Roman Catholic Parish
Greenville, Texas
8 / 28 / 2005 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

“What profit would there be for a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? OR “What can a man give in exchange for his life?”

In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit

Amen

I remember this line from the Gospel,

“What profit would there be for a man to gain the whole world and lose his life (in the process)?”

In the late 60s there was a beautiful movie made on the life of St. Thomas More, a tremendous lawyer, judge and father. He rose to be the second only to King Henry VIII in England in the 1500s. And because he would not go along with King Henry’s agenda and desired to make himself pope of England and grant himself a divorce so he could remarry, St. Thomas more was imprisoned. They looked for a charge to trump up and use to keep St. Thomas in prison and possibly silence him forever by executing him. They could find not one charge because he kept his affairs so regular. “A Man For All Seasons”, that famous movie beautifully depicts this attempt by King Henry VIII. Since St. Thomas More was such a man of integrity there was nothing irregular about his life as a judge or a lawyer so they had to make something up.

If you can put these two together, there was a courtier, a weasel of a man named Richard Rich. What an appropriate name for this weasel! Richard Rich was the one chosen to trump up charges against St. Thomas More and swear to the false charge. A scene in the movie, “A Man For All Seasons” shows St. Thomas More being interrogated by Richard Rich, the weasel. St. Thomas asked him a question.

“I notice you have a “chain of office” around your neck. May I inquire what it is?”

Richard Rich told him that it pertained to the Kingdom of Wales. The British conquered the Welsh early on and the British looked upon the Welsh kind of like many people look on Aggies in Texas, right? They don’t find a lot of good things to say about the Welsh. St. Thomas asked another question.

“The Kingdom of Wales? Richard, what profit would it be for a man to gain the whole world but lose his life in the process?”

And this for Wales? Just throw your life away for a “happy meal” is essentially what St. Thomas was saying.

Richard Rich judged very poorly and our judgments can be as poor as the judgment of St. Peter in today's Gospel unless we prepare. If today were not a Sunday it would be the Feast of St. Augustine. St. Augustine is one of the most important Church Fathers. This source Father holds up a book- the Lives of the Saints would be exemplary ...


“ St. Augustine is generally held to be the greatest Doctor of Christianity. Of his ninety six works, the greater part are held as authoritative by all Christian Churches.”

He wrote hundreds and hundreds of sermons. The truth about St. Augustine is put forth in his autobiography, the first in Western civilization called “The Confession of St. Augustine”. We see that before St. Augustine became a saint he was very much a stinker. His poor mother had to put up with this. She was a very devout Christian and her husband and children were very devoted pagans. St. Monica had a very difficult job on her hands because wives have to get their husbands to Heaven. And, husbands have to turn around and get their wives to Heaven but we all know which spouse has the heavier lifting to do, right?

Jack Bowman passed away and these flowers in front of the Altar were brought over from the funeral home, where I did a service for him yesterday. Jack made sure he married very well, someone who would help him along the way. Jack was Christian but he wasn’t a Catholic Christian. Despite not being Catholic he came to St. Williams every Sunday with his wife, Helen. So wives really have a great challenge on their hands. Most of the time it is for the wife to tame her husband as though taming a big bear and this is what St. Monica’s husband, Patritius was like. He was a brute in many ways and she had to pray him into the Church. Of course he made her work easier because he waited until he was almost dead before he converted. This just made her life so much easier, right? She prayed and she cried, she cried and she prayed and of course her tears were distilled prayers. Kind of like our Lord in Gethsemane when His sweat fell like drops of blood upon the earth, St. Monica filled many a lake with her tears that she sent as prayers up to Heaven.

St. Monica prayed for her husband, who finally converted and died. She then turned her attention onto her son, St. Augustine. As a young man, St. Augustine had the world by the tail. Being young meant that he was bullet proof. He was also very intelligent and handsome and because of this he never wanted for money. People wanted him working for them so he found employment very easy. He had everything…everything but peace. He is known as “The Saint of the Restless Heart”. St. Augustine once wrote,

“Lord, You have made us for Yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”

He had everything! In Book 9 of his Confessions he talks about how he was finally converted. The Bishop of Milan, St. Ambrose, baptized him. In Book 9 it also shows how St. Monica had traveled from Northern Africa to Italy to be with her son during his conversion. She had prayed for this all her life. She and St. Augustine use to live in Northern Africa, where Africa juts up in the heel of the boot and where Italy comes down, or toward that general direction. When St. Monica and St. Augustine were returning from Italy to Northern Africa, they were at the mouth of the Tiber in Ostia. They were at an Inn with a second floor view overlooking the sea. There is a very beautiful depiction of this dialogue between St. Augustine and his mother. In fact, after being reborn in Baptism, St. Augustine was more intimately united with his mother than he was when he spent the first nine months of life in her womb because the Holy Spirit was in his body and soul and it was in her body and soul; a more intimate union after being reborn in Baptism than before his natural birth.

So there they are overlooking this great sea. They are talking about many things; not really dwelling on the past but looking toward the future. The sea can represent many things, such as the tears that St. Monica shed as prayers for her husband and son, or it could represent eternity apparently stretching endlessly out in front of them both. It appears that they were talking about life and the prospect of being in Heaven together for all eternity.

St. John Vianney, the holy Cure of Ars says that the eyes of the world see no further than this life but the eyes of the Christian see deep into eternity. So it was if mother and son were peering into eternity, contemplating the mystery of life with God forever in heaven. What a change from playboy pagan to Christian. It was magical…. oh wait a minute…it was prayer and a lot of sacrifice. St. Monica could hang out her shingle as a professional pray-er because she had stormed Heaven with prayers but now she was worn out.

As I said last week, parents and grandparents know what it means to be a slave because you are a slave to your children. There is no one who exerts more control over you than your children. This has been proved with every trip of the train. St. Monica just really wore herself out for her husband and children. Well, there she is at Ostia where she became ill. She took to her bed, lost consciousness and they thought they were going to lose her. St. Augustine was at her side along with his brother and they were talking and St. Monica came to. It was as if she had one foot on the other side and one foot here in the world. It was as if she woke up and wondered where she’d been. She heard her son, Augustine’s brother, say something like;

“Hey mom get better so we can take you back to North Africa and there you can die.”

Notice how men know just the right words to say at the bedside. St. Monica looked at him in a very cross manner and said to St. Augustine,

“Do you see what your brother is saying? As far as I am concerned you can bury this body wherever you wish. There is just one request that I have. Whenever you come to the Altar of the Lord, remember me there at that Altar.”

Whenever you come to Mass, because the Mass is the most perfect prayer of Christ, especially on Sunday, it is the perfect prayer of Christ offered on the day He rose from the dead. So, St. Monica could hear the cash register of God in Heaven, cha ching, cha ching. She knew that the greatest prayer that anyone could offer for another was the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass on Sunday, the day that Jesus rose from the dead. You may be thinking,

“St. Monica, why were you asking for prayers? Don’t be a prayer hog here. You are so holy!”

What was she asking for? She was asking for remembrance at Mass on Sunday. St. Augustine would learn from his mother about prayer because as a pagan his heart was so incredibly restless and the only thing that would slake his thirst and rest his heart was prayer.

Think of prayer according to the Responsorial Psalm.

“My soul is thirsting for You, O Lord my God.”

Now, is this Responsorial Psalm just fly over territory that we have to pass through to get to the second reading and then the Gospel and on to the most holy collection? I mean…uh…Eucharist. Right! There you go! We look at so many things as though they are just getting us to the next part. No! If we are not thirsting for God there is something wrong! The saints over the centuries have said that Christians are to be as absorbed in prayer as a fish is surrounded by water. For many of us, we would have to be one of those walking fish that ruin ponds and lakes because they can go from lake to lake.

If our souls are thirsting for God and we don’t pray, not only are we not satisfied and incredibly restless but we make the kind of decisions that St. Peter made in the Gospel today. He evidently thought he was the best salesman around and was going to talk the very Son of God out of all this "cross business". Now, he could really sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo, right?

“Excuse me Jesus but this part about crucifixion…could we skip that part?”

Jesus said the harshest words I could ever imagine in response to Peter.

“Get thee behind Me Satan! You are not judging as God judges but as man.”

You and I will judge according to the world unless we’re in constant conversation with God. Fathers, how do you like it when your children become teens, young adults and then older adults and every Friday night they come up to you and ask for gas money; another twenty and another twenty. Gas is expensive today right? But he only talks to you when he needs gas on Friday night. How tempting that is, your father is just the ATM machine who lives at home, right? You just go to him when you need money. So often is the case that we just go to God our Father when we need something. He doesn’t mind but that shouldn’t be the only time we go to Him. We should be in constant conversation with God; this is the definition of prayer. Prayer helps us to avoid being a stumbling block to God and to be able to judge as God sees and not as the world sees.

“But I want this!”

question:

“Is that what God wants?”

reply:

“Oh,what does He know!”

What terrible words for someone to utter; like you are taking Christianity seriously?

I was talking to a man recently who has a friend that is a non-Catholic Christian. He was telling me that his non-Catholic Christian friend asked him why he had to go to Mass every Sunday. This guy is a Christian? What about the Third Commandment to keep the Lord’s Day holy, and this guy is a Christian? He doesn't go to Church every Sunday. If you don't go to Church every Sunday...if you don't pray...which is conversation with God, then you will judge the world around you and see no further than this present life. Going to Church on Sunday and offering the Perfect Prayer of Jesus Christ which is the Mass on the day of the Lord's Resurrection, rather than being our duty or a mere obligation it's our greatest privilege, and we are peering deeply into eternity.

If you look in your bulletin when you get home, you can study the financial report for St. William’s Parish over the last three years. These numbers are an indication of your generosity and support. This Church has been here over one hundred years and is the only Catholic Church in Greenville and we want it to continue to be an active place of prayer for all of Greenville. The doors of this Church are open every morning, from very early morning until late in the evening. This has not always been possible or the case and yet your generosity makes possible, a safe, clean, beautiful and most especially an air-conditioned place for Catholics and non-Catholics to come and pray in this town.

There are people who would do absolutely anything rather than pray. They would clean out the “everything drawer”; you know, the drawer that you open just long enough to throw something in? They would stack all the poker chips and put them in order, put all the match boxes perpendicular to each other in a box just so they could avoid prayer. Think of this the next time you reach for the remote control. I know, I know, you are just going to watch Mother Angelica…right…uh-huh. The hardest thing that any of us can do is to put our hands together and kneel down in prayer. This is what we actually long for and what we have been recreated for in Baptism.

“Lord, You have made us for Yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”

How we flee from conversation with our God. People can always recall the times when those in the Church have abandoned prayer. When this happens there is only one option left…the world.

There was a guy in seminary with me hundreds of years ago when I was in seminary and he was from St. Mary’s Parish in Galveston where that beautiful, tall Basilica is in the Mother Parish of Texas. While this guy was studying to be a priest he once recalled an old Irish Monsignor, who was Pastor forever down at St. Mary’s in Galveston. The Msgr. was very proud of this and he rightly should have been, but he told the parishioners of St. Mary’s that he would expect much more of them. He had a rule which he told to the people.

“Listen, I don’t want any coins in the collection, I just want folding money. If I hear or see you putting in coins there will be consequences.”

So, the ushers would take up the collection. Can you imagine how afraid they were when visitors were there who might drop coins into the collection? When the ushers meekly brought the collection forward, the Msgr. would snatch the basket and the first thing he would do is shake it and if he heard the jingle of coins he would march down the isle to the front door, throw it open, and throw out the collection. Then they would start the collection again. I think we ought to start this here at St. William’s. [Laughter] We will start next week, hahaha. I would bet the Msgr. had someone stationed outside gathering up the big bills.

That had to have happened thirty or forty years ago. It is a good example of those in the Church abandoning prayer and approaching the tasks of the Church as if it were a business. As you look at the financial report I have provided for you, you can see that there has got to be a balance between prayer and providing for all of the different things we have to provide for. You can see that here at St. William’s there is definitely the overarching lean toward prayer and helping people to pray. It is the hardest thing we will ever do, but it is the greatest thing we will ever do although it is very difficult to engage people in prayer. To learn about, hear about, and experience prayer by ourselves or with others is that which will bring us happiness in this life and guide us to happiness in the life to come.

The world tells us of the other approach and that is, if you want happiness and you like something you just do it. St. Augustine tried that approach for quite a while and it helped him to be a great stinker. Happiness can only be obtained when we aim not for our happiness but the happiness of others and then a great happiness along with a great cross will be our lot. Our Lord tells of us of that in today’s Gospel. The temptation is to retain everything that God gives us on loan.

See these flowers here? They were from yesterday’s funeral. I have never been to a funeral yet where an armored car was in the procession, although I do know a couple of priests whose funeral I can’t wait to witness. I will probably see an armored car with a black bow on it. We have examples of people who try to take it with them. Consider the Pharaohs of Egypt who built large rock pyramids on top of their tombs and treasures and now we call these treasures and tombs museum pieces. People found them, dug them out, sold them, and now they are all over the world. The things that God gives us are ours on loan.

Look at the last lines of the Gospel. We actually see a repayment plan. For some it is a thirty-year repayment plan, for others a sixty-six year repayment and still others it is a seventy-seven year repayment plan. This all depends on how long you live but there is a repayment plan.

“For the Son of Man will come with His angels in His Father’s Glory and then He will repay each according to his conduct.”

The things that are given we are called to return a part of them back to God. This shows your generosity and that you have been listening to God because the hardest thing to do is to separate someone from their money, right? It is so dearly earned so it is hard to do that. The slickest talker can’t do that but those who peer deeply into eternity see that it is what God expects of us. This Church is here to be a beacon of prayer for the restless hearts who live in this world. It has been here over a hundred years as I have mentioned and hopefully it will endure for years and years to come.

Our Lord tells us that we can easily listen to the world, and as Christians, if we listen to the world we will listen one day to Our Lord repeating these words that He says to St. Peter. Instead of being a rock in the Church and part of the foundation of the Church, we have spent our lives as stumbling blocks instead of listening to God. He will refer to us as Satan. We cannot risk such wrong-headed thinking and waste our lives in this fashion. Our Lord tell us how easy it is to waste eternity by trading this life for eternity which would be no profit at all.

“What profit would there be for a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? OR “What can a man give in exchange for his life?”

In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit

Amen